{"id":4498,"date":"2015-12-31T16:22:09","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T16:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/home\/?p=4498"},"modified":"2018-11-01T02:35:18","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T02:35:18","slug":"top-ten-films-of-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/top-ten-films-of-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Top Ten Films of 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

If 2015 was anything, it was perhaps the year of \u201ctoo much.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

If there is a single bit of connective tissue across all ten films, it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014there\u2019s still more work to be done, until the inclusion of \u2018a banner year\u2019 seems oddly redundant\u2014but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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  1. Carol<\/em> (dir. Todd Haynes)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"carol\"<\/p>\n

    Todd Haynes\u2019s soft melodrama owes more than simple debt to the \u2018women\u2019s films\u2019 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<\/em>\u2019s fascination with feminine beauty pushes the film away from camp and into something more gracious. Haynes\u2019s direction, sensitively captured with Ed Lachman\u2019s exquisite cinematography, manages to write a love letter to an era that couldn\u2019t give us a story quite this gentle. The furs, the focus, the women searching for themselves in each other\u2014we\u2019ve seen it before, but never quite like this. There\u2019s no violence teeming around the corner, no secret to keep because its threat has been fully identified. Blanchett and Mara\u2019s first meetings are a sport disguised as a dance. They\u2019re women acting for everyone, including themselves, but not for each other. In Carol<\/em>, the play\u2019s the thing.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

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    1. Victoria<\/em> (dir. Sebastian Schipper)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      \"maxresdefault\"<\/p>\n

      The film\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/em>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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      1. Amy<\/em> (dir. Asif Kapadia)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        \"download\"<\/p>\n

        Aside from an apparent obsession with women\u2019s names, Amy<\/em>\u2019s 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\u2019s violent memory, it feels off to instead include a documentary about the demise of a famous jazz singer. But Kapadia\u2019s 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\u2019t just point fingers; he uses it like a pestle. Everyone\u2014her managers, her fans, most crucially her father\u2014come under its weight. Yet it\u2019s the camera that most acutely gets the blame. As Amy\u2019s star rises and the film\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. The Diary of a Teenage Girl <\/em>(dir. Marielle Heller)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          \"Diary-of-a-Teenage-Girl\"<\/p>\n

          Marielle Heller\u2019s brilliant adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner\u2019s graphic novel, which chronicles the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old girl with the aid of her mother\u2019s boyfriend, may place us firmly in the hazy years after the summer of love, but it couldn\u2019t feel more on time. Bel Powley\u2019s Minnie, with a face fit for silent film, taps into the era\u2019s 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\u2019s faking it. And Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd\u2019s 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\u2019s maturity comes into focus, and Heller\u2019s there to capture it all with an expertly focused lens. The orange and browns of San Francisco in 1976 don\u2019t just set the mood; they melt us.<\/p>\n

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          1. Ex Machina<\/em> (dir. Alex Garland)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            \"exmachina-2\"<\/p>\n

            Writer-directed Alex Garland is so far from treading new ground that Ex Machina<\/em> feels like a Black Mirror<\/em> 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\u2019s 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<\/em> 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\u2019re on to something.<\/p>\n

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            1. Mad Max: Fury Road<\/em> (dir. George Miller)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              \"Khan_Mad_Max_whiteness\"<\/p>\n

              Did any film this summer command our attention more fully than George Miller\u2019s return to the dystopic outback? Released in May amongst a summer surprisingly light on superheroes but heavy on familiar territory, Miller\u2019s dreamscape of a road movie became the shadow that everything else tried to navigate out of. It didn\u2019t work. And now in the lead up to awards season, Mad Max: Fury Road<\/em> 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\u2019s one-armed avenger, Furiosa, became it\u2019s pop culture\u2019s proxy. Miller was smart to let the film\u2019s real protagonist sneak up on us. Tom Hardy\u2019s Max may have been the road warrior, but it\u2019s Theorn who was driving the semi.<\/p>\n

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              1. The Revenant<\/em> (dir. Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu)<\/strong><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                \"the-revenant_still_1_-_h_2015\"<\/p>\n

                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. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s follow-up to Birdman<\/em> 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. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu is in familiar territory here: as always, fatherhood seems to mean martyrdom. But the natural world has a real presence, and it\u2019s not supernatural or cosmic or theatrical. It\u2019s 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\u2019s near wordless performance gets closer than we\u2019ve ever gotten at getting to the actor beneath the celebrity; for a second, you may forget you\u2019re watching a movie star. But if the film\u2019s final shot is any indication, he\u2019s most certainly watching you.<\/p>\n

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                1. Creed<\/em> (dir. Ryan Coogler)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                  \"creed-sylvester-stallone-sneakpeek-mov02-dcb-74168496\"<\/p>\n

                  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\u2019s Rocky<\/em> was the antithesis of the era\u2019s mood. It was a happy ending in a decade of disillusionment, a disrupter on par with Jaws<\/em> or Star Wars<\/em>. Ryan Coogler, who teams up again with Fruitvale Station<\/em> star Michael B. Jordan, subverts the film\u2019s working class, underdog origins with the plight of black excellence. Creed<\/em> 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\u2019s 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<\/em> is a story about taking over a mantle, taking on a title, taking back a name, but it\u2019s most powerful just seeing Jordan running along that street, his hoodie up; a black body taking up space.<\/p>\n

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                  1. Heaven Knows What<\/em> (dir. Ben & Joshua Safdie)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                    \"High-Def_Digest_Blu-ray_Review_Heaven_Knows_What_Arielle_Holmes_2\"<\/p>\n

                    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\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s hard to watch, and it borders on tragic, but that\u2019s not just pity you feel. The kid\u2019s aren\u2019t alright, and it\u2019s something of a natural high.<\/p>\n

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                    1. Tangerine <\/em>(dir. Sean Baker)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                      \"15470-1-1100.0\"<\/p>\n

                      Nothing in 2015 got even close to orbiting the smoldering energy of Sean Baker\u2019s Tangerine<\/em>; 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\u2014and it was filmed entirely on an iPhone<\/em>. But the mechanics inform the message; Tangerine<\/em> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

                      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\u2019s 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\u2019s spent nearly an hour accosting. It\u2019s tender; it\u2019s odd. It\u2019s like nothing you\u2019ve seen before; it looks just like Christmas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                      If 2015 was anything, it was perhaps the year of \u201ctoo much.\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":4495,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25],"tags":[267,330,270,331],"class_list":["post-4498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-amy-winehouse","tag-asif-kapadia","tag-tangerine","tag-todd-haynes"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paoQFa-1ay","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5221,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4498\/revisions\/5221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}