The annual Top 10 list is a vainglorious exercise where film critics show off how many movies they’ve seen and distill down what they believe are the best ten. If you’re just looking to see how your personal top ten compares to a critic’s, then it’s a waste of everyone’s time. There is no objective list or metric for art. There is no formula. The closest you can reach is a consensus, and you can go get that right now over on Rotten Tomatoes.
A good Top 10 list shouldn’t be about which film ranked higher or lower, or what made the cut. It should be about guiding you to see movies you wouldn’t think to see otherwise or making a case about why a particular film stuck with the author more than other movies seen that year. It’s not a competition, it’s a celebration, and I’m happy to celebrate the following ten films I saw in 2015.
Full disclaimer: I could have had a much better 2015 with regards to film. I still feel like I only scratched the surface and while my count on Letterboxd says I ended up seeing about 260 films this year, too many of those were movies I had already seen (that’s partly from the demands of doing retrospectives) and not enough indies. I didn’t make time for films like The Voices, The Duke of Burgundy, Tangerine, The Wolfpack, Cartel Land, Queen of Earth, and many more that should be in my schedule. That’s not to mention older films that are still massive blind spots in my filmography (one of my New Year’s resolutions is to see every single Spielberg and possibly every Scorsese). I’m going to do better by my own viewing habits and by you in the New Year.
All that being said, I’m more than confident in my picks for 2015; if you haven’t seen these films, I strongly encourage you to seek them out.
Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order): The Big Short, Carol, The Hateful Eight, Listen to Me Marlon, Z for Zachariah
10. Finders Keepers
When I first saw the synopsis for Finders Keepers at Sundance, I joked that a better title might be “The Adventures of Grillfoot”. It’s easy to poke fun at such a macabre tale, but after seeing the movie, I was deeply moved by the true stories of John Wood and Shannon Whisnant, two men embroiled in a battle over custody of John’s lost leg, which Shannon found in a smoker grill at a storage auction.
That’s not to say the film wasn’t also deeply amusing and darkly funny, but directors Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel pushed beyond the headlines and local news reports to find the broken hearts at the center of the story. There was John, looking at the leg as a way to cope with survivor’s guilt and there’s Shannon, who deeply wants to be famous on an almost pathological level. It’s not a story of “good guys and bad guys” or even weirdoes even if this story is beyond strange. It’s about investing in something, and while a mummified leg may seem like too much of a gimmick, Finders Keepers used it as a hook for a deeply satisfying documentary.
9. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Much like with star Tom Cruise, the Mission: Impossible franchise continues to get better with age. The actor is showing no signs of slowing down with his signature franchise, and while the plane stunt got all of the attention from the promotional material, it’s almost a blessing in disguise that the movie quickly gets the set piece out of the way so that you can get to all of the other goodness Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation has to offer.
Brad Bird set a Burj Khalifa-high bar with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, but rather than try to compete on scale, director Christopher McQuarrie brought his own attitude to the franchise, turning it into some more bare-knuckle and classic in its orchestrations. The playful timing at the opera house is something no other spy film would attempt, and Rogue Nation absolutely owned it. And I would need a separate list to talk about the non-stop greatness that is Isla Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). While other franchises start to burn out by their third entry, I can’t wait to see what we get with Mission: Impossible 6.
8. Creed
Speaking of franchises that shouldn’t work by this point, an attempt to cash-in on a Rocky spinoff seems crass until you put it in the hands of Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan. Rocky is a classic, but Creed is absolutely worthy of continuing the series. Rather than rely on the beats established by the classic 1976 film, Coogler carves out a unique space for Apollo Creed’s son, Adonis “Donny” Johnson (Jordan) and then puts him in a moving story alongside a repositioned Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone).
With this new relationship at the heart of the film, Coogler takes us to a moving story of friendship and repositioned legacies and identities. This is so far from a Rocky imitation and yet when it does take on a Rocky moment like playing the theme, you can’t help but cheer because we’re so invested in all of the characters. It’s a film that feels both immediate but also steeped in Rocky’s history. It’s a showcase for an emerging young talent in Jordan as well as a Hollywood veteran in Stallone, who gives one of the best performances of his career. Creed is a champ.
7. Son of Saul
When I first started to hear buzz on Son of Saul, I rejected it because I don’t like Holocaust films. I usually find them exploitative, but I’m glad that other people kept championing the film because when I finally forced myself to sit down and watch it, I was absolutely riveted despite the gut-wrenching experience of watching Sonderkommando lead Jews into gas chambers and pull their bodies into ovens.
What stops László Nemes’ film from being exploitative is how he finds specificity in the darkness, and that it isn’t about capturing the totality of the Holocaust or shining a light on its worst and well-documented horrors, but trying to show one man who’s struggling to do one human, decent thing before he’s inevitably killed by the Nazis. Géza Röhrig’s lead performance is haunting and the brilliant cinematography by Mátyás Erdély keeps us shackled to Saul and his tragic mission.
6. Inside Out
This is the Pixar we love to see—a studio of boundless creativity and a deep well of emotions. Even if it sticks to the buddy-picture mold of other Pixar films, that doesn’t change the fact that director Pete Docter got to something unique with how a family film could explore an individual’s psyche, and took us on a wild ride through personalities, imagination, dreams, and more to show what makes up not only a person, but an adolescent going through a tumultuous time in her life.
It hits all of the right emotional buttons, but never does so in a brazenly manipulative way. Even if the film’s internal logic can be a bit scrappy, that’s such a minor nitpick when you look at the grand ideas Inside Out reaches for and how it achieves such a moving and thoughtful crescendo. Yes, it’s a movie that’s going to make you cry, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that when those tears are earned.
5. Brooklyn
2015 didn’t start off great for me when it came to movies because when it came to Sundance, it always seemed like I was ending up in okay movies while everyone else was ending up in great films like Brooklyn. But after about ten months of waiting, I finally got to see John Crowley’s wonderful immigrant tale and it absolutely lived up to the hype.
The movie is achingly earnest in all the best ways because you invest fully in Irish immigrant Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), her struggle, and her relationships. The film is a huge step forward for Ronan, who finally breaks free of her “Little Girl Lost” characters and steps into maturity with a well-rounded woman who has to find her way as both an individual and in love. Buoyed by tremendous supporting performances from co-stars Domhnall Gleeson and Emory Cohen, Brooklyn is totally charming from start to finish.
4. Ex Machina
What an absolutely delightful head-trip. With his directorial debut, screenwriter Alex Garland made the year’s best sci-fi, a movie that constantly cuts to the heart of not only what it means to be human, but also meshed in gender politics, sexual power, and some of the sweetest dance moves you’ll ever see. It’s a film that’s unabashedly weird and unnervingly dark in equal measure, and yet in remains a joy to watch from start to finish thanks to Garland’s excellent direction and his top-notch cast.
When you watch a movie like Ex Machina, you see the heir to stories like Frankenstein and how the best storytellers re-appropriate classic tales and inject them with modern verve and excitement. Ex Machina sent my head spinning in a million different directions, and I loved every second of it.
3. Anomalisa
Leave it to Charlie Kaufman to make a film that’s absolutely heartbreaking and painfully funny in equal measure. While his previous film, Synecdoche, New York was too dense for me to appreciate (I need to revisit in the near future), Anomalisa is more accessible and yet still reaches the same difficult emotions even though it’s done entirely with puppets whose design is meant to remind you of their artificiality.
The movie is a rare gift where you can feel flung between longing and laughter in the span of a few moments and not feel a hint of whiplash. The overarching strangeness and artifice would be a constant distraction in less confident hands, but Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson know just how to position their movie for maximum effect. So many human actors failed to achieve the emotional impact I received from the stop-motion puppet Lisa as she tried to hide her scarred face, and I still can’t get over “It’s a normal-sized zoo,” as one of the year’s best jokes. Kaufman builds a world unto himself, and as melancholy as it can be, I can’t wait to revisit it.
2. Mad Max: Fury Road
I suppose there’s no reason this couldn’t be #1 on my year-end list. It’s just about perfect in every conceivable way, and it’s everything we could ask for from a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s as thoughtful as it is explosive; it’s innovative, it’s inspirational, it’s aspirational, and it’s just too much damn fun. And I’m not going to split hairs about the order of why this isn’t #1 because that’s not the point.
Mad Max: Fury Road will hopefully move the needle on depictions of women in movies, how female and male characters interact, and how directors helm action. The movie is everything we thought we couldn’t get and instead director George Miller showed we could have everything we wanted and more when the right vision came from the right director. The film shall ride eternal, shiny and chrome.
1. Spotlight
So why does my “coveted” (like any filmmaker cares where their movie lands on one of countless Top 10 lists) #1 spot go to Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight? It’s a film that couldn’t be any more different than Mad Max: Fury Road and yet both movies could have gone so wrong in so many ways that it’s a miracle they ended up being as magnificent as they turned out to be. Neither one plays it safe, but Spotlight gets my #1 because of how deeply it impressed me with its lack of cynicism.
It could have been so easy to turn this into a “journalists against the system” story, but that’s not what Spotlight does. It shows that journalists, like all of us, are participants in a system. The line that sticks with me the most in 2015 is, “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse them. That's the truth of it.” We have to acknowledge our complicity, and that leads to emotional complexity on the part of the viewer. While there’s certainly evil in the world, Spotlight is more of an examination of the shades of grey, and the evil we either ignore or overlook because it’s inconvenient. But if we’re persistent, patient, and smart, then maybe we can do some good.
Spotlight delivered this message without any pontificating, big speeches, and almost no yelling. It played to the honesty of the facts and the people involved, and did so with remarkable restraint and thoughtfulness. It’s a movie that breaks my heart and yet gives me hope in some odd way. And that’s why it’s my favorite film of 2015.
For much more of Collider’s Best of 2015 content, click here, and peruse our other editor’s Top 10 lists below: