If 2015 was anything, it was perhaps the year of “too much.” Everywhere we turned, there seemed to be a surplus of stimulation, some desired, most unnerving: too much TV, too much violence, too much of everything good and bad. But the films went somewhere far more interesting. More formally audacious, more intentionally inclusive, more interested than ever in redefining the qualifications. Todd Haynes gave us the most visually arresting drama of the year, but it was still no match for a film shot on an iPhone. What do we do with that?
If there is a single bit of connective tissue across all ten films, it’s surely that women were among some of the best served. The men get their piece of the pie too, as is their frequent demand, but the year’s best films yielded some of the best work for, by and about women. Whether chronicling the rise and fall of a gifted voice or the push and pull of a dangerous romance; the sexual awakening of a bohemian teen or the vengeful force of a new road warrior—there’s still more work to be done, until the inclusion of ‘a banner year’ seems oddly redundant—but it’s a worthy note in a year mired by tragedy. Everywhere in 2015, there seemed to be news that establishments once trusted no longer had our best interests in mind. If film can offer a bit of consistency, while still managing to surprise us, challenge us, meet our demands for changing tides, then there is perhaps still reason to sit in a dark room hoping to see the light.
- Carol (dir. Todd Haynes)
Todd Haynes’s soft melodrama owes more than simple debt to the ‘women’s films’ of post-war America: it wants to kneel at their alter and rewrite scripture at once. Where queerness was more of a retroactive sensibility, Carol’s fascination with feminine beauty pushes the film away from camp and into something more gracious. Haynes’s direction, sensitively captured with Ed Lachman’s exquisite cinematography, manages to write a love letter to an era that couldn’t give us a story quite this gentle. The furs, the focus, the women searching for themselves in each other—we’ve seen it before, but never quite like this. There’s no violence teeming around the corner, no secret to keep because its threat has been fully identified. Blanchett and Mara’s first meetings are a sport disguised as a dance. They’re women acting for everyone, including themselves, but not for each other. In Carol, the play’s the thing.
- Victoria (dir. Sebastian Schipper)
The film’s premise starts as a stunt that comes across more like a dare: a 140 min narrative feature filmed as one continuous, uninterrupted shot. But as Sebastian Schipper’s German-language heist drama comes into focus, the experiment begins to morph into style. The film starts with a thumping house base, with the titular character dancing freely in the sea of strobe, and a similar scene late in the film may have you thinking Victoria’s come full circle, using its aesthetic device to place us in a round. But the tension is still around the corner, and the story of how a single decision can lead you somewhere new begins to prove true for us too.
- Amy (dir. Asif Kapadia)
Aside from an apparent obsession with women’s names, Amy’s inclusion on this list feels a bit surprising to even me. In a year that saw Joshua Oppenheimer return to Indonesia in an effort to dig for closure in the soil of the country’s violent memory, it feels off to instead include a documentary about the demise of a famous jazz singer. But Kapadia’s intimate portrait of the late, great Amy Winehouse feels like a contemporary work of non-fiction and an examination of a bygone era. Kapadia doesn’t just point fingers; he uses it like a pestle. Everyone—her managers, her fans, most crucially her father—come under its weight. Yet it’s the camera that most acutely gets the blame. As Amy’s star rises and the film’s editing becomes more kinetic, matching the incessant flashing of paparazzi bulbs, the claustrophobia takes you to the heart of the matter, before cutting painfully back to black.
- The Diary of a Teenage Girl (dir. Marielle Heller)
Marielle Heller’s brilliant adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel, which chronicles the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old girl with the aid of her mother’s boyfriend, may place us firmly in the hazy years after the summer of love, but it couldn’t feel more on time. Bel Powley’s Minnie, with a face fit for silent film, taps into the era’s confusion over sexual mores in the hangover of free love, but they make us implicit in her homework too. You believe her confidence, even if as she knows she’s faking it. And Alexander Skarsgård’s Monroe captures the stunted adolescence of late-70s bohemia. As Minnie comes into her womanhood, documenting every step in her audio diary, the full picture of Monroe’s maturity comes into focus, and Heller’s there to capture it all with an expertly focused lens. The orange and browns of San Francisco in 1976 don’t just set the mood; they melt us.
- Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland)
Writer-directed Alex Garland is so far from treading new ground that Ex Machina feels like a Black Mirror episode by way of a TED Talk. But what it lacks in new ideas, it makes up for in dread. Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander (all of whom have seen their profiles rocket in the short months since the film’s release) are interchangeable as predator and prey, and that unreliability gets closer to the core of what seems to ail us about our growing reliance on and weariness of technology. The keystrokes are typically broad, but the reconstituting of the mad scientist as health-crazed tech bro feels unnervingly realistic, as do the parameters of a lush modern mansion when they begin to feel like a Hammer horror film. Ex Machina may not feel new, but it seems to be the first film to get the repetition right. If our paranoia is constantly taking similar shape, maybe we’re on to something.
- Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller)
Did any film this summer command our attention more fully than George Miller’s return to the dystopic outback? Released in May amongst a summer surprisingly light on superheroes but heavy on familiar territory, Miller’s dreamscape of a road movie became the shadow that everything else tried to navigate out of. It didn’t work. And now in the lead up to awards season, Mad Max: Fury Road is reigniting the seemingly endless debate between genre filmmaking and critical accolades. And in a year where feminism went from buzzword to mainstay, Charlize Theron’s one-armed avenger, Furiosa, became it’s pop culture’s proxy. Miller was smart to let the film’s real protagonist sneak up on us. Tom Hardy’s Max may have been the road warrior, but it’s Theorn who was driving the semi.
- The Revenant (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)
The project that a filmmaker chooses to follow their Oscar with is always a fascinating spectacle. Often it can feel like something of a purge. Iñárritu’s follow-up to Birdman more closely resembles an exorcism. If ever there was a year in which the violent roots of the American frontier felt particularly worthy of consideration, 2015 was surely it. Iñárritu is in familiar territory here: as always, fatherhood seems to mean martyrdom. But the natural world has a real presence, and it’s not supernatural or cosmic or theatrical. It’s cruel, yes, but it seems to have more to do with the people populating it than with any of the vagaries that haunted his previous works. His camera moves like Malick, but it ponders less. And Leonardo DiCaprio’s near wordless performance gets closer than we’ve ever gotten at getting to the actor beneath the celebrity; for a second, you may forget you’re watching a movie star. But if the film’s final shot is any indication, he’s most certainly watching you.
- Creed (dir. Ryan Coogler)
When Hollywood gets it right, you remember why it has the power to shrink oceans and continents, and find the frequency that makes most people tick. 1976’s Rocky was the antithesis of the era’s mood. It was a happy ending in a decade of disillusionment, a disrupter on par with Jaws or Star Wars. Ryan Coogler, who teams up again with Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan, subverts the film’s working class, underdog origins with the plight of black excellence. Creed owes something to its time and place; it always felt slightly off that Hollywood should go so white when depicting a sport most populated by poor people of color, demographics that see fighting as a way out, not steps to triumphantly climb. The film undoes some of that, thanks largely to hip-hop’s cultural influence over the last ten years. But its most expert gift is its ability to stick close to the formula of great Hollywood mythmaking, while consciously challenging it. When Cooger films Jordan jogging down a Philly street in a training montage, you feel like it covers the full breadth of American cinema in a manner of minutes, like Jordan could do backflips or break into song. Creed is a story about taking over a mantle, taking on a title, taking back a name, but it’s most powerful just seeing Jordan running along that street, his hoodie up; a black body taking up space.
- Heaven Knows What (dir. Ben & Joshua Safdie)
Depictions of drugs in film have such commonality that their tropes have come to constitute a genre. The Safdie Brothers have, with the help of the film’s writer and star, Arielle Holmes, crafted what may be the greatest film ever made about drugs and the people who surround them (the key is to never confuse it as being the other way around). In Heaven Knows What, the tragedy is best exemplified through the monotonous duties of daily life. Heroin is the first order of business, but life goes on: through parks, storage facilities, underpasses, corner stores, shelters, fast food bathrooms. And most fascinating of all, you begin to feed off of the transience, the appeal of a lifestyle on the fringe, where no one belongs anywhere. It’s hard to watch, and it borders on tragic, but that’s not just pity you feel. The kid’s aren’t alright, and it’s something of a natural high.
- Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker)
Nothing in 2015 got even close to orbiting the smoldering energy of Sean Baker’s Tangerine; none even entered its solar system. It managed to remind me in its first ten minutes alone why, against all odds, we stay steadfast in our commitment to the movies—and it was filmed entirely on an iPhone. But the mechanics inform the message; Tangerine gives us a literal new lends to watch trans narratives through. And in a year that saw radical progress in trans visibility, Baker proved that the most radical act was to swap Hollywood’s penchant for tragedy and pathos for something between joy and bawdiness. This is the story of girls behaving badly, and the shameless becomes a kind of revelation.
Cin-Dee and Alexandra (Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) are two trans prostitutes who spend Christmas Eve hightailing it around West Hollywood in search of a cis-gendered woman who did them dirty. Cin-Dee is coming off of a 28-day jail sentence; Alexandra is antsy for her musical debut at a bar that night. When Baker sets the two loose, first separately then together, you feel the film’s energy demanding your attention: look ma, no seams. There is a moment when Sin-Dee, after finally tracking down the woman in question and dragging her across town, brings her into a dimly lit bathroom. After a lengthy, profanity-laced diatribe, and a quick break to smoke a hit of meth, she suddenly begins to apply her make-up, gently tracing lipstick on her enemies peeling lips, prettying the face she’s spent nearly an hour accosting. It’s tender; it’s odd. It’s like nothing you’ve seen before; it looks just like Christmas.
