2015 Film Rankings

I was fortunate enough to see twenty-six films that were released in 2015, and I was doubly fortunate in that I did not hate any of them, which was not generally the case in prior years.  In reverse order:

26. Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh - This version of the familiar fairy tale isn't bad per se, just very, very conservative in its storytelling, aesthetic choices, and gender politics.  Odd in this day and age, when we teach girls to take charge of their own futures, that we get a Cinderella who basically sits around being nice and waiting to be rescued.  But there's a richness to Cate Blanchett's portrayal of the wicked stepmother as a woman of the world who realizes that her and her daughters' destinies are limited without the financial stability of a wealthy husband, and who will take whatever steps necessary to secure it.

25. The Revenant, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu - So beautifully shot, but to what end?  If anything, it made me appreciate the brilliance of Terrence Malick all the more, as a filmmaker whose themes and ideas are worthy of Chivo Lubezki's camerawork.  Iñárritu instead wastes it on an ode to toxic masculinity at its worst.  And after the film telegraphs heavy-handed religious themes for two hours, what happens to snap Hugh Glass out of a potential moment of Christian mercy?  John Fitzgerald accuses him of raising his murdered son as a "girly little bitch."  Luckily the Judeo-Christian God sends a bunch of pagan savages to handle the dirty work of finishing off Fitzgerald and letting Iñárritu have it both ways.  Regarding DiCaprio, I am not a fan of the survivor school of acting.  Good acting should convey a range of emotions via conversation, not simply one amplified emotion via bodily suffering.

24. Anomalisa, dirs Duke Johnson & Charlie Kaufman - The most intentionally solipsistic film I've ever seen.  The main character literally doesn't believe other people exist, aside from the titular Lisa, who is admittedly a delight in all of her scenes.  I get the sense that Charlie Kaufman believes the alienation experienced by Michael Stone, the feeling that only you yourself are a real person, is a lot more universal than it is.

23. Magic Mike XXL, dir. Gregory Jacobs - To paraphrase Ricky Jay in Boogie Nights, the first Magic Mike is a real film. This one is more of a shameless audience approval panderization machine.  None of the most interesting characters from the first film are still around, so the minor characters have to shoulder the load, and consequently the film is mostly dancing scenes.  But what dancing scenes they are.

22. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon - I don't share in the predominant negative critique here, namely that Earl and the Dying Girl are nothing more than mechanisms to allow Greg to achieve some personal growth.  I think the film is upfront about Greg's narcissism (duh, it's right there in the title) and does the difficult tightrope walk of making him a likable character while never letting him off the hook for said narcissism.  Not a perfect tightrope walk by any means, but better than it's been accused. 

21. The End of the Tour, dir. James Ponsoldt - Movies about writers are kind of odd; it's hard to think of anything less cinematic than the process of writing.  They get around that a bit by making this a road movie, but there's nothing here that you wouldn't get from watching David Foster Wallace's Charlie Rose appearances, or you know, reading his incredible writing.

20. Spectre, dir. Sam Mendes - A pretty good Bond film, and a good capstone to the Daniel Craig run.  He's been a great Bond, and I think we're gonna miss him when he's gone.  Not nearly as hamfisted in its take on government electronic surveillance as, say, any of the Christopher Nolan Batman flicks.

19. Love & Mercy, dir. Bill Pohlad - A tale of two films.  The Paul Dano sections are outstanding, especially the soundscapes used to convey Brian Wilson's scary genius at it's apex.  The John Cusack sections are eminently forgettable.

18. Inside Out, dirs. Pete Docter & Ronnie del Carmen - Another winner from Pixar, though not quite at the level of WALL-E, Ratatouille, or all three Toy Story films.  Similar message to Inside Llewyn Davis: It's important to let yourself be sad.

17. Spotlight, dir. Tom McCarthy - A good procedural placing worthy emphasis on the importance of good journalism.  Oddly, Tom McCarthy kind of hits the mark here that the fifth season of The Wire missed, in which he was part of the cast.  Nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary here though.  For a great film that upends everything it means to be a procedural, see David Fincher's Zodiac.

16. Room, dir. Lenny Abrahamson - Brie Larson is very very good in a film that made a couple choices that I didn't care for, like the boy's voiceover.  But considering the subject matter, the film could have been an incredible difficult watch.  Instead the film emphasizes the shared love between mother and child, despite the horrors that surround them.

15. Amy, dir. Asif Kapadia - A ton of great archival material here, fashioned into a very absorbing and sad documentary.  I was never really fully aware of just how hard Amy Winehouse worked on her songwriting before she spiraled into drug addiction, so that was new for me.  Every time an Adele song bores the shit out of me, I miss Amy Winehouse anew.

14. Ex Machina, dir. Alex Garland - I didn't care much for it when I saw it, but it's grown on me.  I still think it's a tad heavy handed with the "men just want something to fuck, and women will use that to kill men" messaging.  But Oscar Isaac is great as the world's douchiest techbro, and Alicia Vikander is outstanding.  You know she'll do whatever she must to escape, but you can see her balance vulnerability, cunning, and sex in every interaction to keep that hidden from the men.  Plus this film has the year's best dance scene.

13. Clouds of Sils Maria, dir. Olivier Assayas - An odd if engaging film that never fully came together for me.  The subject matter is as drama-nerdy as it gets, with Juliette Binoche as an aging movie star deciding to return to a play that skyrocketed her to fame, but this time as the submissive older character, not the dominant youth she played years earlier.  A lot of scenes of Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart rehearsing line readings outdoors in the Alps, which you'd think would get tiresome, but c'mon, it's Juliette Binoche and the rapidly-coming-into-her-own Kristen Stewart we're talking about.  

12. Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, dir. J.J. Abrams - A return to form for the blockbuster series.  The main complaint is that Abrams has basically made a cover version, or at best a remix, of the original trilogy instead of doing anything actually original.  I don't entirely agree, I think the presence of female and person-of-color protagonists is an important change in and of itself.  And also, didn't George Lucas's prequel trilogy represent totally original and different vision of Star Wars?  Tell me, how did those turn out?

11. The Hateful Eight, dir. Quentin Tarantino - Tarantino continues to state his case for being our strongest chronicler of America's violent past.  Not necessarily a historically precise or measured version of the past, but instead our mythic and messy past, the rough, difficult, and bloody past from which our society's current nightmares still arise.  Great performances abound, especially from Samuel L. Jackson, doing his usual great work for Tarantino, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as an absolute force of nature, the howling, cussing, and spitting embodiment of America's gendered history of violence.

10. About Elly, dir. Asghar Farhadi - Not quite as stunning as A Separation, but another sharp dissection of the tragic absurdities of contemporary Iranian life.

9. Bridge of Spies, dir. Steven Spielberg - In which Spielberg carefully withholds from us the Spielberg Face until the last possible moment.  Instead we're privileged to watch Mark Rylance and Tom Hanks' incredibly calibrated performances as the most decent Soviet spy and insurance attorney, respectfully, as can possibly be imagined, which is no small feat. 

8. Creed, dir. Ryan Coogler - In which Coogler and Jordan inject much-needed vitality into a tired franchise simply by being themselves, which is to say America's most promising mainstream directing and acting talents.  Doubly fun for me as a boxing fan and Philadelphia resident.  If you enjoyed it, please see Fruitvale Station, one of my favorite films of 2013.

7. Phoenix, dir. Christian Petzold - Yes, a Holocaust film, a genre which I think yields diminishing returns at this point, but also a fascinating Hitchcock pastiche with all that that entails -- femmes fatales, false identity schemes, and obsessions which the protagonist can't fully understand in herself.  A truly stunning final scene that I will say nothing about.

6. 45 Years, dir. Andrew Haigh - Also climaxing in a stunning final scene, this film grew on me like none other this year.  The more I've digested it, the closer it gets to being a perfectly realized portrait of how even the strongest marriage involves two individuals who will always be in some way strangers.  The tragedy is that Kate realizes it too late, and Geoff not at all.

5. It Follows, dir. David Robert Mitchell - A superb horror film that reflects the full gamut of sexual anxieties of our age, touching on reputational harm, slut shaming, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, sexually transmitted infections, and plain old emotionally empty sex.  Great imagery, atmosphere, music, and sound design. 

4. Brooklyn, dir. John Crowley - If you're sensing a trend, it becomes obvious here: this year's best films are focused on women's stories.  Saoirse Ronan is a revelation as an Irish immigrant who finds herself torn between a new life and an old life.  I can't say anything about it better than Bridget Read does here, please read.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road, dir. George Miller - Even if it were a dumb action film, Mad Max: Fury Road would be amazing by dint of its production aesthetic and practical effects alone.  But astoundingly, it isn't dumb at all.  It's the rare action film with an intelligent point of view, namely the sadly-still-necessary instructive that women are not things.  And the film puts its narrative money where its mouth is, continually introducing strong female characters, while mostly muzzling and restraining the titular Max. 

2. Carol, dir. Todd Haynes - Perhaps an entirely perfect film, with writing, acting, cinematography, costuming, music, and editing all perfectly in concert and unison.  Cate Blanchett, who has never done much for me before, is utterly astounding as a woman who wears her overlapping identities (upperclass housewife, loving mother, lesbian) as so much costuming. It's also as much the story of the personal development of Rooney Mara's Therese, from a person who has things decided for her to a person who decides what she wants for herself.  In a year of great final scenes, this film may have the most thrilling.

1. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, dir. Marielle Heller - Sometimes a film will just throb with life from beginning to end; this is one of those.  A first feature for Heller, it deals with potentially devastating events with a warmth and humor that emphasize Minnie's desire to fully experience the totality of it all, to throw herself entirely into the messiness of life and love and sex and art.  It returns you to the time of sexual discovery, when you learned that your mind, your body, another's mind, another's body, all joined, were more than simply physical, more than simply spiritual, but all-encompassing in their capacity for human connection.  And it just as strongly deals with the comedown from that high, and the impossible necessity of growing as a person afterwards.  My favorite film of 2015.

The Return of Friday Night Links

Gone Guy - Drake gets the N+1 treatment.

Short Cuts - Christine Smallwood on the recent short story anthologies.  See Friday Night Links of 1/15/16 for Christian Lorentzen on the same.

Proposals Toward the End of Writing - The future's gonna be weird.

Expanded Ways of Listening - Alex Ross talks to Ben Ratliff.

When the Lights Shut Off - Kendrick get the LA Review of Books treatment.

Chicago Review of Books - Chicago gets into the whole review of books thing.

Harper's Editor-in-Chief Suddenly Fired - Grand opening, grand closing.

Leon Wieseltier on A.O. Scott - Critic fight!!

The Uncomfortable Power of Pop-Music Cruelty - The Weeknd gets the New York Mag treatment.

Death Valley Superbloom - The most alien landscape in America gets even more beautiful.