It’s not that there aren’t problems with cinema right now, but anyone who says that there aren’t enough good movies didn’t see enough movies or was seeing the wrong ones. From the multiplex to the arthouse, from hugely expensive blockbusters to micro-budget indies shot with tools you probably have in your pocket, there’s an enormous breadth and depth of great film in 2015.
We’ve been celebrating the year in film for a few weeks now, and as we reach the midpoint, it felt like the right time to unveil our list of the Greatest Films Of 2015. Last year, for the first time, we conducted a poll of Playlist writers and staffers, collating their top tens (10 points for first place, 9 for second etc, plus a bonus point for every list a film was on) into a grand group Top 20.
Last year saw “Under The Skin” as our runaway winner, with “Birdman,” “Gone Girl,” “Foxcatcher” and “Nightcrawler” also making the Top 10. This year, we’d wager that our final list is a more interesting, surprising and, frankly, better line-up. How did it unfold? Take a look below.
A quick note about our year-end coverage: We, like you and everyone else, haven’t seen “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” yet. J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Box remains firmly closed until the week of release. As such, like the National Board of Review or the New York Film Critics Circle or any number of voting groups that are forced to make their decisions without seeing it, ‘The Force Awakens’ won’t be appearing on the bulk of these lists for now. Once it’s been reviewed, we’ll be discussing in the film full and will indicate where it would have featured on these best-of lists retroactively. Other late December releases such as “Joy,” “The Revenant” and “The Hateful Eight,” have already been seen by at least one staffer, and though they aren’t featured here, those films will likely pop up in individual staff lists we’ll be running later this month.
Click here for our complete coverage of the Greatest of 2015
20. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”
Coming-of-sexual-age stories in cinema are usually reserved for boys becoming men, but when such films focus on young women, there’s often either a fuzzy haze of romance or the harsh glare of judgment on its protagonist. Marielle Heller’s 1970s-set “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is the rare film that deals frankly with its heroine’s experience of and appreciation for sex while never condemning her for her choices. At the film’s bursting heart is Minnie, played with wide eyes and a heady combination of maturity and naivete by Bel Powley. Despite being in her early 20s and British, Powley so perfectly captures Minnie’s San Francisco adolescent artist spirit that we’re eager to doubt the actress’s own biographical details. In addition to Powley’s breakout performance, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” marks a bold entry into filmmaking for writer-director Heller. Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel, the adaptation handles the book’s challenging subject matter —Minnie’s affair with much-older Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), her mother’s boyfriend— with apparent ease. Beyond the strong screenplay, the film also incorporates animation from Sara Gunnarsdóttir throughout, a nod to both Minnie’s own cartoons and the original novel’s art. In other hands, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” could feel like a standard period film about a young woman’s sexual and artistic awakening, but Heller and Powley have made this a vital experience filled with creativity and wonder.
19. “Creed”
It was perhaps inevitable that the seventh installment of a long-dormant franchise would end up making our top 20. The surprise, with “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” still under wraps, is that it turned out to be “Creed.” But if J.J. Abrams’ movie is even half as successful as reviving the ‘Star Wars’ milieu as Ryan Coogler’s was at giving new life to “Rocky,” we’ll be very lucky indeed. Focusing on Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), the son of Rocky Balboa’s former opponent and pal Apollo Creed, with Stallone’s veteran boxer moving into a role as the younger man’s mentor, the film delivers on the promise of Coogler’s debut “Fruitvale Station” and then some. It’s not that it reinvents the boxing genre —it’s hitting many of the same beats as many boxing movies since “Rocky” and beyond. But Coogler has such specificity in his writing (teamed with Aaron Covington) and such a clear idea of these characters and their journeys that it feels utterly fresh. And he shoots with a vitality (the one-shot boxing match has already passed into legend) that you need if you’re going to resurrect a dusty old war-horse like this. Not to rest on the kind of cliches that Coogler mostly avoids, but “Creed” packed an emotional punch like few other movies this year.
18. “The Assassin”
It’s been a long time coming for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s new full-length feature film —over 7 years in fact, with the collective film world speculating each year whether that would be the one we see “The Assassin” grace screens. After 2014, hopes dwindled and it became an inside joke amongst the director’s fans. “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Not Hou.” But once it finally premiered in Cannes earlier in the year, the jokes quickly switched to chastened murmurs. The legendary Taiwanese master’s new martial arts film befits his reputation for meticulous mise-en-scene, methodical pace and liquid camera movement. Running just under two hours, the film tells the story of Nie Yinniang (the mesmerizing Hou regular Qi Shu) and her internal struggle between following her assassin’s instincts and following her heart. There’s no space to write about the narrative in the detail it warrants here, but Hou’s methods —synced with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing and production designer Wen-Ying Huang— turn the aesthetics into the story. Even while working within the confines of the traditional wuxia genre, “The Assassin” stands apart as wholly transcendental. No book, painting, or piece of music can truly replicate the kind of purity this film manages to miraculously achieve. The hazy narrative is very much part of the film’s philosophy; it is as liberated from convention as nature itself. Through phenomenal craftsmanship, scenes melt into one another and transport us in a trance to another time and another place, dissolving humanity and the natural world into a singular condition. This is cinema, folks: pure and anything but simple.
17. “Mustang”
“Mustang” is one of those little miracles: a film from a first time feature director that arrives fully-formed, distinct of style and vision and utterly fearless. It’s a lot like its protagonist, Lale —unwavering, clear-eyed, determined. Loving the film is easy if you already agree with co-writer/director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s argument against the repression and control of women and their sexuality. But she and co-writer Alice Winocur skillfully lay out the ridiculousness of the situation—namely, the frantic, grasping attempts at control, starting with the inciting incident that snowballs into paranoia and destruction. As a story, “Mustang” is really more of a fable, one not just for women but for any kind of extreme control or repression. Ergüven places the audience in the girls’ perspective, thus making us one of the sisters, with the camera following the herd, peering out of windows and doors. We’re on the same level, draped in the piles of lanky limbs and manes of hair. It makes it that much harder when one by one, the sisters are systematically ripped away, married off, their vibrant girlish spirits squashed into wifely duties. The youngest, Lale, observes everything as she clings to the window bars, wriggles out of the windows, fanning her own spark of defiance. In a year when some of the ideal movies demonstrated the hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of the last gasps of ruling patriarchy, little Lale is right up there with Imperator Furiosa as a badass feminist heroine. Vive la resistance.
16. “Tangerine”
If you’re an aspiring filmmaker, sitting around on your ass waiting for someone to hand you money to make your feature is no longer good enough: Sean Baker took a hundred grand and a couple of iPhones and made one of the finest movies of the year. The film received much of its acclaim thanks to its legitimately beautiful iPhone 5s photography, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the movie’s virtues, which back up what we suspected after “Starlet” —Baker’s one of the most interesting indie filmmakers working. Set over one long Christmas Eve night in L.A. (it’s a holiday classic in the making), the movie tracks Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), as they set out to find Sin-Dee’s boyfriend (James Ransone), who’s allegedly been cheating on her while she was in prison. Given that both the central characters are trans women and sex workers, Baker makes them three dimensional while also not ignoring their identities, and the film feels far more progressive than, say, the leaden “The Danish Girl.” But more than that, it’s a raucuous, restless blast, feeling closer to a sort of’ 70s sex farce, the spirit of Hal Ashby and Peter Bogdanovich running through it, than anything else. After a lean 88 minutes, you emerge rejuvenated and with a renewed hope for the future of film.
15. “The Tribe”
We need more bold, purely cinematic movies like “The Tribe,” in which a shy boy arrives at a boarding school for the deaf and tries to find his place in the hierarchy of the school’s insular criminal community. Working in the mold of “difficult” Eastern European arthouse cinema, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, in his debut feature, may give in to a certain level of monotone miserablism common in many films of its ilk, but it functions so well as a deeply allegorical, original piece of crime fiction that the overwhelming dread and grisly violence are simply inevitable, not forced or intended only to shock. Nothing can undo the intensely rigorous and stylish filmmaking on display in “The Tribe,” which plays like an even more disturbing combination of “City of God” and “Lord of the Flies.” The potentially gimmicky conceit —all dialogue is spoken through sign language with no subtitles— creates a unique, wholly cinematic world where the viewer’s perception of cinema is radically altered. Nearly all scenes play out in impeccably choreographed long takes, via a camera that rarely stops moving —its style is akin to Michael Haneke’s “Code Unknown” and features a similar foreboding, disquieting sense that things are going to end badly. Although its formalism is rigid, the film rises well above gimmickry to become a truly great, unique piece of cinema (and a very fine crime movie to boot), conjuring its own world, commenting on our own and giving the audience something that’s palpably new.
14. “The End Of The Tour”
To be perfectly frank, it sounded like a joke, a sketch on “Portlandia” or something: a movie about beloved ’90s literary idol David Foster Wallace, starring Judd Apatow favorite Jason Segel. It’s kind of amazing that it even got financed. And yet “The End Of The Tour” turned out not be a joke: it turned out to be a smart, beautifully acted film that did justice to its subject, even if some believe that its subject would have been horrified that it existed. Based on David Lipsky’s memoirs of his time spent interviewing the writer for a Rolling Stone article, adapted by playwright Donald Marguiles and directed by James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now”), the film works precisely because it never really sets out to be ‘a David Foster Wallace movie.’ You get real insight into the man, his work and his views on life, but Marguiles and Ponsoldt have used the source material (the dialogue is overwhelmingly from Lipsky’s transcripts) to make a great conversation movie, in the mold of Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ films, that happens to feature the acclaimed novelist. It’s really a movie about jealousy, about male competitiveness and friendship and about the mind of an artist and the loneliness common to such pursuits. And thanks to Ponsoldt’s typically sensitive, finely honed direction and excellent performances from both Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, it works beautifully even if you’ve never heard of “Infinite Jest.”
13. “Anomalisa”
In a great interview recently, Charlie Kaufman expressed the problems he experiences getting his stories made. His latest film, co-directed by Duke Johnson, was famously co-funded through Kickstarter, and is the first Kaufman theatrical release in seven years. Once you see how brilliant it is, “Anomalisa” makes that disheartening question of “why can’t we have more Kaufman movies!?” sink that much deeper into melancholia. As his first foray into stop motion animation, the film plays in an even more creatively stimulating sandbox than the writer-director’s previous projects; the kind that allows for Tom Noonan’s half-soothing-half-creepy vocal timbre to represent the collective banality that surrounds us. Featuring stellar voice work from David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh (what a great year for her) and Noonan, the story is an existential crisis by way of puppets, and it’s just as hilarious, depressing, stunning, emotionally intelligent and intellectually emotional as it sounds. Immaculately handcrafted and wholly immersive, the film turns Cincinnati into a vortex of mediocrity that sucks Thewlis’ Michael Stone in, until, in the midst of a rapid succession of crises, a beautiful anomaly emerges in Leigh’s Lisa. Scored with Carter Burwell’s trademark poignant soundtrack and boasting one of the year’s greatest screenplays (where are all the screenplay nods, people?), “Anomalisa” would justify a bottomless well of funds for Kaufman’s next project in a perfect world. But as the film so resonantly explains, this is an imperfect world we live in, one full of trivial shit. At least we can count our lucky stars that these imperfections can at times get the creative cogs turning to produce an unforgettable film.
12. “Steve Jobs”
An inspired, risky and unconventional biopic, “Steve Jobs” finds the unlikely team of author Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle convene on a story of the late Apple impresario, and channeling the most effective of their abilities in symphonic unison to create dynamic electricity in a three act neo-Shakespearean drama. Through an 1984 ascension, a 1988 falter and a 1998-set reclamation, Boyle and Sorkin chart the imperiousness, arrogance and genius of this tech trailblazer. Arguably the true auteur of the movie, Sorkin’s witty, rapid-fire dialogue crackles and is made human by the herculean acting of Michael Fassbender —one gets the sense he had to wrestle the script into a chokehold and consume it. The terrific supporting cast of Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg and Katherine Waterston, all working at the top of their game, make the movie radiate that much more. But perhaps the movie’s secret weapon is Boyle, who has spent a lifetime impelling visual propulsion, but instead here expertly channels the kineticism already on the page —an insightful and counter-intuitive move if there ever was one. An exhilarating and orchestrally-pitched drama about the cost of brilliance and an emotionally trenchant look at legacy and parenthood, “Steve Jobs” is an engrossing portrait of a relentlessly determined and dysfunctionally complicated tech titan.
11. “Ex Machina”
“The first great film of 2015,” we wrote in our review of “Ex Machina” back in January, when the film opened in the U.K. and that’s a risky claim. With literally hundreds of movies still to open, you can look like a fool if December rolls around and everyone’s pretty much forgotten it. Fortunately, that’s not been the case with “Ex Machina,” the directorial debut of “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine” scribe Alex Garland, as taut, inventive and heady a sci-fi chamber piece as we’ve seen since “Moon.” Following a reclusive computer-genius billionaire (Oscar Isaac) enlisting the help of an employee (Domhnall Gleeson) to see if his new humanoid A.I. (Alicia Vikander) can pass for human, the film finds new life in the often-tired robot/singularity theme, thanks to airtight writing, three terrific performances (Isaac in particular stands out) and direction marked by a craft and confidence that belies Garland’s first-timer status. This film keeps you guessing as to exactly what it’s up to with every scene (no film was more carefully plotted this year), and reveals its true intentions only very late in the game. We can’t wait to see what Garland does for his next trick. click here for more
10. “Son Of Saul”
The list of first-time filmmakers who’ve played in competition at Cannes is a short one, and the list of those that won prizes is even smaller. That László Nemes’ debut “Son Of Saul” won the Grand Prize on the Croisette certainly marks it out for attention, but those who haven’t seen it yet (it opens finally in the U.S. next week) probably aren’t yet prepared for the gut-punch power and masterful filmmaking on display from the Hungarian director (a former assistant to Bela Tarr). The tremendous Geza Rohrig plays an Auschwitz Sonderkommando, a Jewish prisoner forced into aiding the Nazis in the concentration camps, who discovers what he believes is the body of his estranged child in the gas chambers and sets out to give him a proper burial. Filmmakers have been grappling with the horrors of the Holocaust for 70 years now, but few such films have been as powerful as Nemes’, who uses long, Lubezkian takes and astonishing sound design to throw you into a vision of the camps that take on an almost heightened level of nightmarishness, while never letting you forget that there is nothing even remotely heightened about it. Even if you’ve seen “Schindler’s List” or “Shoah,” this filmmaker makes you feel as if you’re bearing witness to those unprecedented atrocities, and thus makes sure that you’ll never, ever forget what happened.
