Best Movies of 2015

I like to write about movies I like.

2015 was a pretty good, pretty turbulent year. A lot of high profile releases. A lot of disappointments. A lot of surprises. A strong year for female characters, I was surprised how many of my favourite films were about women. I always pick my movies based on gut-level reaction that changes over time, I like movies that challenge convention, are technically/visually interesting or meander and explore characters we usually don’t get to see. I’m not immune to great spectacle either. I try and confine my list to Toronto release dates but I cheat a bit because who cares. There are always movies I want to see but can’t get to in time to post this, this year I didn’t get to: Tangerine, Cartel Land, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, When Marnie Was There, The Tribe, Macbeth, Crimson Peak, Heart of a Dog. Everything else is fair game.

20 Tu Dors Nicole
dir. Stéphane Lafleur / Canada

Less the quintessential summer movie and more the lazy summer movie, Tu Dors Nicole deliberately sets out to tell a story where no lessons learned, no blossoming into adulthood, just nothing. Sounds like typical fodder for an insufferable no-budget indie but the deliberate style and hypnotic pace is either beautifully relaxing or unsettlingly Lynchian, sometimes both. Translated to “You’re Sleeping, Nicole” the entire film follows Nicole drifting through a summer of insomnia that feels like an extended lucid dream. Everything is muted and dulled, sometimes distractingly so like when a group of friends get together to drink but have little to say, while other times heightened and bizarre such as a driver who circles the block listening to whale calls. The casual black & white photography and the flat framing make everything feel especially static and Nicole’s evasion of anything dramatic leads her into what amounts to a series of mundane, yet oddly surreal vignettes. The perfect rainy day movie that almost passes as a reflection of yourself slouching across a couch too lazy and cozy to get up.

19Sicario
dir. Denis Villeneuve / United States

Sicario is a surprisingly prickly thriller defined by how it pushes buttons and challenges your expectations. Initially, it seems to be about Emily Blunt’s typically idealistic FBI agent enlisted to aid on special operations in Mexico in the ongoing, relentless drug war but it slowly creeps away from her, leaving her to whimper in the margins of the film. Sure, it makes all the points about the vicious cycle that is drug wars but its more compelling as a brutally cynical takedown of moral superiority. Blunt has some major reservations about the ethics and vagueness of this new operation, suspecting herself to be a pawn. But her protests fall on deaf ears and rather than overcoming adversity and prevailing through justice and due process, Blunt’s difficulty causes her to get walked over and ignored. A bold and anticlimactic direction for this type of narrative to take. The strength of her character is bound to be controversial, challenging the “strong female lead” tropes but putting it to the test: her strength comes through inaction rather than action and she isn’t able to physically or mentally overcome her assailants just because the audience wants it to be so. She, like everyone in this convoluted conflict, gets worn down and her resolve comes in her ability to cling on to a belief system that defies the reality of modern warfare. Sicario also is a great bureaucratic takedown, where the real threats can weave through the ranks and act recklessly, shielded by layers of protocol and miscommunication. Shot by Roger Deakins, Sicario has an ugly sheen that reflects this world; unlike many movies this year that mean to depict a hell on earth but do so through elegant cinematography, Deakins understands that a cesspool should actually look like one.

18Room
dir. Lenny Abrahamson / Canada, Ireland

For an uplifting and spirited movie, Room surprisingly doesn’t shy away from the horror and dehumanization that its two leads endure. A mother, abducted and imprisoned in a shed for years and her son, born in the shed by her abductor who doesn’t understand the concept of the outside world, live through a hell but also grow to understand it as a new normal. This is the story of their escape, but it deals with the shock and mixed feelings of what that entails, not just the success story the media plays out. Due to the extreme pressures of the real world versus the more immediate simplicity of their prison, they must seek refuge in a quiet house as the boy adjusts to the real reality. They essentially escape one room just to be locked into another. There are challenging politics at play, told largely from the boy’s perspective where the comfort of the room are his childhood memories and have a special meaning to him, despite the implications. Room challenges the ideal of sheer human willpower with the devastating reality of consequence of action.

17It Follows
dir. David Robert Mitchell / United States

The best John Carpenter film that John Carpenter didn’t direct. Horror always moves in cycles and it seems that the gross-out torture porn era is ending so long live the return of the boogeyman! Like The Babadook last year, It Follows is about an omnipresent threat doubling as a very overt metaphor. Set outside of time, this is an almost Elm St. like reality: parents are vacant, teenagers run amok. Perfect fodder for moral lessons via horrific death. It Follows is the best of its kind that deals with the fear of sex and all of its complications, primarily disease which is personified by relentless stalkers who switch targets based on who was most recently “infected” through sex. Shot almost exclusively with wide angles the movie keeps you incredibly tense, constantly scanning the frame for the could-be monster lurching towards us. It reminds me of what made monsters scary in the first place: not speed or blood or mania, but relentless pursuit and the complete inability to do anything about it. How do you want to die? Running forever and knowing its coming, or surrender willingly? Easier said than done.

16Ex Machina
dir. Alex Garland / United Kingdom

Finally, a movie about AI that goes deeper than just one dimension. This surprising chamber thriller isolates its small cast to a remote setting where a genius inventer challenges his guest to a strange deviation of the Turing Test against his secretive, highly sophisticated AI named “Ava”. Of course, details begin to trickle out about the situation leading to a pressure-cooker situation between the three. With Ava locked up and forced into “sessions” this is both a thoughtful examination of AI — a technology that is no longer on the horizon, it is here. Garland is just framing the question of how it will look and how we will manage it once it has eclipsed our own intelligence and ability by shaping the conversation around the philosophical rather than technical. But it also doubles as a commentary on “male gaze” in film and society with Oscar Isaac’s troubled genius revealing his sexual frustration and obsession with designing the seductive, feminine machine model. She sits behind glass and answers rather than asks and appeases the obvious test, however the roles of “test” and “tester” begin to shift and Ava’s subtle assertiveness begin to change the paradigm of power between characters and once again remind us the dangers of artificial intelligence: it’s the battle between logic and emotion, a battle that these two naive men initially perceive as being the wiring separating men from women but is really what separates man from machine.

15The Duke of Burgundy
dir. Peter Strickland / United Kingdom

Set in some sort of universe where men don’t exist and yet weird fetishes are as rampant as ever, The Duke of Burgundy explores the secretive relationship between two women and their increasingly bizarre role-playing. Styled after Euro-sleaze films of the 70s but only keeping the sensuality intact and discarding the exploitation it makes for an initially restrained relationship story with enough layers between these characters that the true dynamic of their relationship always seems elusive: how far does this act go? What is the real couple? Behind the pseudo-erotica is the reality that experimentation is indulged by one and tolerated by the other. Similar to Persona, the dynamics of give-and-take stress the story so greatly that it literally breaks the film, briefly escaping the world of characters and script.

14Timbuktu
dir. Abderrahmane Sissako / France, Mauritania

Set in Timbuktu, Mali after its occupation by a small Islamic extremist group, Timbuktu offers a refreshing take on the terrorist narrative thanks to its African perspective. Even those who preach for a world where everyone has to live the most dull existence possible are unable to truly abide by it. But even through its soft condemnation of extremism Timbuktu doesn’t snicker at its targets, it offers humanity. There is a central narrative here but the film’s best moments are when it casually jumps to random vignettes about local frustrations with the seemingly endless new, restrictive laws that range from trivial interruptions to barbaric punishment. Even as almost every small pleasure is denied, people manage to find a way to enjoy life and experience those pleasures — even if it means endure punishment under the pretense of religion. “There is no ‘yo, man’ anymore. We’re into religion, brother” one man tells another as they try to film a propaganda video posing as former rappers turned to God but they have trouble making the story convincing. Timbuktu shows us the human fallacy within radical faith, a perspective rarely explored but worth its weight in humility.

13Son of Saul
dir. László Nemes / Hungary

Directorial debuts don’t come more assured than this. Set in Auschwitz, Saul is a Sonderkommando: a prisoner who burns the corpses of the recently gassed. Shot in 4:3 to compress what we can see and almost always held in a close-up of Saul with a shallow focus to keep everything else literally out of focus. The effect allows you to feel Saul’s disconnection from horror, he’s grown so adjusted to this dehumanization he barely lets it register, instead quickly moving from one task to the next. His focus breaks when he discovers a young boy that briefly seems to have impossibly survived the gassing. Saul claims the boy is his son, an assertion that is questioned by his peers but regardless, he sets out on a mission to honour him with a proper Jewish burial in impossible conditions. Son of Saul shows the camps unlike any other Holocaust film: brutally unsentimental, despite his actions Saul isn’t made to be a martyr but more a victim of trauma, or at worst, a selfish renegade. The prisoners’ community isn’t one that necessarily works together but is full of characters so desperate they fight, hold grudges and compromise each other’s safety for their own survival. The action is shot in long single takes, only cutting when the drama settles leaving scenes feeling excruciatingly intense and evoking feelings of horror that, I can only assume, at least scratch the surface of what these camps may have been like.

12 The Assassin
dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien / China, Hong Kong, Taiwan

Like a real legend, The Assassin blends fact and fiction. Adapted from an old Chinese folk story set in 9th century China where the powerful province of Weibo is enduring a strained truce with the Court, the assassin, Yinniang, a girl destined for royalty but instead betrayed to the fringes of society to train as a killer is ordered to assassinate her cousin and would-be groom. It has this dark fairy tale angle but mostly operates like an intricate political drama which can be difficult to follow at times. Hou Hsiao-Hsien has a knack for movies that move people to tears, other to boredom, this is no different. The Assassin is largely observational. As Yinniang stalks her cousin she observes the regular going-on’s of his family and council. Although she is the title character, she exists on the margins of the film and we do with her, almost as if watching from a first person perspective. Hou depicts a society of power, ego, anxiety and expectation. Lore and history play a significant role in the lives of these people and their anxiety to live up to their expectation. Only Yinniang is truly free from obligation. She dictates the motions of her mission and decides her own fate where everyone else feels imprisoned by theirs. Furiosa is cool and all, but for a feminist statement, look no further.

11Winter Sleep
dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan / Turkey

In the Cappadocia region of Turkey, a wealthy, ambivalent land owner spends his luxury time writing to please himself and lounging while the people in the towns surrounding him all live in relative poverty, struggling to make ends meet; ends that return to this man. He isn’t cruel or harsh, but something maybe worse: apathetic. He doesn’t concern himself with the tribulations of his neighbours, but from a distance he offers condolence, charity, and tolerance. He is reasonable, articulate, loyal. He writes about things of importance, things that he values, and he shares his home with his sister and young wife. He is, by reasonable standards, a decent enough guy. But Winter Sleep is about this aging, decent, rich land owner and his slow discovery that everyone around him quietly loathes his existence. Running over an intimidating three hours, the length is important. Dialogue scenes sometimes run over twenty minutes individually and through these incredibly nuanced and rich glimpses into personality and past we slowly understand the aggravation to his seeming nobility. He’s arrogant, condescending, argumentative, full of false modesty highlighted in one cringe-worthy scene where he pretends he doesn’t care if a poor town boy kisses his hand as though he were a king sitting atop his castle. But it’s easy to be king when your castle is empty. What separates Winter Sleep from the usual moral revenge film is that is barely passes judgment. As arrogant as this man is, he is often right or at least can spin a good defense. He isn’t any less of an asshole, but he is at least a righteous one and the luxury and relaxation in his life divorced from direct human contact aside from gracious tourists never turns on him. Compared to the poverty of the rural Turks, he lives in privilege and he knows it. It’s a rich portrait of isolation and self-deception.

10Heaven Knows What
dir. Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie / United States

It’s easy and obvious to call an addiction movie “raw”, so when Heaven Knows What opens on a brutal suicide attempt shot in an informal docu-style featuring actual addicts including star Arielle Holmes telling a story from her own unpublished memoir, it almost feels like too much. But then the Safdie brothers also infuse it with a heavy synth score like out of an 80’s John Carpenter film turning this into some sort of vintage horror movie by way of Upper West Side pseudo-doc. Unlike tantalizingly stylized drug films like Requiem for a Dream, there is nothing appealing or even coherent about Arielle’s lifestyle. Her directionless activities are shot at a distance, keeping everything impartial; no patronizing of lifestyle or habits. Holmes’ story is very matter of fact, reflected in her character’s personal philosophy: nothing is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, things just ‘are’. Holmes’ and her friends live their lives in four-hour blocks: from one hit to the next. It creates a story that is refreshingly unpretentious and unsentimental. This is a life of right now. But without the context and meaning provided by the past and future, right now means nothing, is nothing. The film offers a lot of insight because of its refusal to follow a traditional plot. Near the end of the film, Holmes casually slumps down with a group of friends she hasn’t seen in an irregularly long amount of time (4+ hours) who fail to notice her but engage in the same incoherent bitching they’ve been doing the whole film. These kids live in a static purgatory, a world devoid of meaning.

09 The Forbidden Room
dir. Guy Maddin, co. Evan Johnson / Canada

Cinema’s own matryoshka doll. Inspired by early, lost silent films whose only living record is their title (one example: “How To Take a Bath”). Guy Maddin springboards into the wild and absurd possibilities of what these early experiments in the medium could have been. Lost to time, we’ll never know, but we can be sure they were unlike anything Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson cook up. It’s a remake of sorts, only one for movies that no one remembers. The film bounces freely and rapidly across ideas, sandwiching thoughts between thoughts combining so many stories within stories, fragmented and incomplete, deliberately obtuse like a patchwork of film strung together to make up for missing reels. As the stories associations grew increasingly thin they also grow stronger in more abstract ways becoming impossible to tell where one “films” stops and the next starts. Maddin and Johnson spectacularly unravel all those byzantine plots in a hilariously self-aware climax montage that constantly tries to up the ante on itself. This is an ornate movie mashup of genres, styles, eras and gimmicks. An salute to the early film experiments gone from this world and a celebration of how far we’ve come. The Forbidden Room is also an exhausting experience, but absolutely unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

08The Martian
dir. Ridley Scott / United States

For the grandness of its scale, it’s an extremely practical movie. A movie that makes you wish you could do more or hope that humanity can. Where Interstellar was an inspirational movie, a movie full of wonder about the cosmos and their infinite potential, The Martian is motivational rather than inspiring. About a single man rather than humanity’s collective. How solving minute, simple problems contribute to solve great ones and only through process, trial-and-error, deliberation and rational thought can we overcome problems and work as a collective. A movie that praises science and its complete disregard for us.

07 Mad Max: Fury Road
dir. George Miller / Australia, United States

I didn’t have quite the same religious experience as everyone else seemed to have but that doesn’t mean I didn’t drool for the relentless chaos of George Miller’s fully realized world on wheels. For a movie that acts as essentially two relentless chase sequences for almost its entire duration, it doesn’t develop the fatigue that most action movies do. The action choreography is almost beyond belief with increasingly ludicrous stunts, explosions and vehicular manslaughter expertly timed as the film carries on. Miller confounded the internet nerd world by nuking the notion of inter-film continuity. This is a cut and dry story, no nods, no set-ups, no post-credit stingers. In this iteration of the character, Max reluctantly aids a fierce woman named Furiosa transporting a group of enslaved women from a tyrannical ruler while Max’s twitchy scavenger nature has him only worried about getting his car back. And yet, within this simple plot and seemingly simple execution there are layers upon layers of details about the society in this world, its function, structure, religion, history and the politics and culture of what is valued amongst its people. Max comes and goes, barely a character but more of a vessel to let us see how a world gone mad reacts to a wild dog and what it takes to slowly let its guard down. Rich, saturated colours and ludicrous, cancer-ridden monsters create a comic book world of heightened everything. This is a world where war drums exist on the back of dune buggies led by a guitar spitting flames and no one bats an eye. And yet when a group of women fight for their right to freedom, we take it seriously.

06 Victoria
dir. Sebastian Schipper / Germany

Movies are dangerous again. Or at least Victoria makes them feel that way. A 2 1/2 hour movie shot in one single take is no small feat and some argue a meaningless showboat, but they’re wrong. Victoria could have staged its intense, nail-biting sequences traditionally by telling us where to look and for how long but instead we sit shotgun with Victoria, a young and lonely girl living in Berlin, driving her newfound club buddies (who turn out to be a group of bank robbers) through an underground garage riddled with armed guards. There is an anxiety in turning the corners with the crew, uncertain of what trap lay around the next corner that gives this movie a live-wire energy that filmmaking as we know it has grown stale trying to do. The relentlessness of the shot feels scrappy and at times sloppy, but its not meant to be slick, its meant to feel free and then claustrophobic just as the characters do, when they do. It’s rough and abrasive like these hooligans and it never stops, just like this night that constantly propels forward; the wheels of motion unable to undo or let us close our eyes and cut away to a moment of refuge. We live their consequences.

05Inside Out
dir. Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen / United States

A really creative and touching portrait of childhood anxiety. Riley, a girl living in Minnesota is thrust into a new life across the country, inside her head her emotions are personified by five characters. The constant drag of the group, Sadness, is kept away from important moments so Riley can live a life of happiness as everyone hopes children do. What is so great about Inside Out is it makes us truly despise Sadness before reminding us how important a role sadness plays in our lives and memories. The movie expresses complex emotions in a really straightforward, sincere and funny way while also giving some insight into the thoughts and challenges of parenting, but only via proxy of Riley’s perspective. It’s also an animation powerhouse with ingenious character design and one particular segment just for the animation nerds.

04Spotlight
dir. Thomas McCarthy / United States

Punchy and efficient, Thomas McCharthy’s no-flash drama follows the Boston Globe’s “spotlight” division as they follow leads over the course of what seems like forever to uncover the massive Catholic Church pedophilia scandal that helped cement the association we make with priests and alter boys today. These madcap journalists never seem to run out of fuel, mimicked by the film’s pace that forgets to tell us how much time seems to pass: days bleed into weeks into months and the chase continues. As scary as Scientology seemed after Going Clear, it still has nothing on the big one: Catholicism. Spotlight doesn’t look to condemn Catholicism outright and never gets on a soapbox, but it’s pretty tough to go easy on it by virtue of the topic and the nature of American politics. As reporters navigate downtown Boston chasing leads and interviews, many shots are through long lenses, capturing domineering churches that lurk over nearly every neighbourhood creeping over houses and between yards. Their investigation hits snags because even police and political events are hosted or partnered with the Church. It has infiltrated its way into every sector of the country under the guise of doing good — to which it may very well do, but after the case is closed and the film cuts to chilling wall after wall of text listing cities where priests were outed is a sobering reminder how much wrong can, and is, done too.

03The Hateful Eight
dir. Quentin Tarantino / United States

They don’t make ’em like they used to. The maxim that Quentin Tarantino lives by with zealot-like devotion. Once again, Tarantino does what he always does: captures a bygone era of film without it feeling campy or tacky. He’s about the only filmmaker able to do this it seems. Best seen in its epic 70mm roadshow theatrical presentation, this movie is our yearly reminder of the value of the big screen. For a director who constantly swaps genres his trademarks are always on display and The Hateful Eight turns each of them up to 11: longer, tenser dialogue, more brutally violent, more provocative language, and this is one of his funniest films. Where his previous movies were set during WWII and just before the Civil War where racial tensions were at their height, this is set shortly after the Civil War with good reason: this is a time that is particularly tumultuous despite our romanticized belief it was a period of unity. Tarantino depicts post-Civil War America full of unresolved stress and hatred with wounds of the battlefield still open. It is a time where racism is at its peak just before its slow decline, bitter defeat and old west notions of justice still alive but slowly, stubbornly conforming to the “Washington D.C.” federal standards of social order. Tarantino uses this period and these people as catalysts for a society at large in an identity conflict and the movie-magic way that they overcome abstract racial and social prejudices for the far more primal hatred: liars and cheats. In Tarantino’s world, that’s what really unites us all.

02 Anomalisa
dir. Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson / United States

A movie with puppets and sex instantly makes you go to Team America. So now takes Team America and apply it to Charlie Kaufman, the man behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. What you get is something funnier than Kaufman’s earlier work, slightly less bizarre but as touching and human as ever. A travelling salesman stops in at a hotel and has a brief, intense encounter with a woman who had been regarded to the sidelines her entire life. The rest of the story should remain a mystery since the nature of how it unfolds is half the fun. Why puppets though? Like everything in a Kaufman film, its mysterious and yet fits like sophisticated clockwork. Thematically aligned with yet another downer meditation on love and existence these puppets emote more than the majority of try-hard Oscar bait performances this year. That’s a combination of talent at work: a small but extremely brilliant cast reading the sharp-as-ever writing of Kaufman whose ability to capture awkward, stilted conversation and missed beats between flowing dialogue makes him one of the best writers out there today. It’s sad it takes him so long to string together the funding for his projects, but when he does (this was a Kickstarter!) it’s always worth celebrating.

01The Look of Silence
dir. Joshua Oppenheimer / Denmark, Finland, Indonesia, Norway, United Kingdom

The burden of time weighs heavy on everyone, but some more so than others. In the case of The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenhemier’s companion film to The Act of Killing, the friendly old lady seen above lives an almost stereotypically simple life in Indonesia with simple concerns, simple routines, simple goals. But she carries with her a past that is nothing short of devastating and yet she carries on because she, and many people of her generation in Indonesia, don’t like to talk or think about it. Her son, Adi, born after the genocide that claimed his brother, does not have this weight. The Indonesian massacres in 1956 are, like all events of older generations, stuff of legend and story to him and his peers. The nature of his birth and family history tie him to that history: he is probably the result of parents who want to start over — he’s a replacement for his brother. With the anger and boldness that comes with youth, he sets out to use Oppenheimer’s decades worth of research into the killers in Indonesia, still in power and at large, to find those responsible for terrorizing his community and killing his brother. Now, like his parents, these men are all faded versions of themselves, trying prescription eyeglasses while being questioned about their massacre methodologies. Their interviews shed predictably little shame, but their ways of shutting Adi down says just as much. While there is a shaky truce in the country, no mass killings happen because their victory has created intimidation by presence. But they are fading out, like Adi’s father who Oppenheimer observes as helpless and fetal, unable to find the exit to a room let alone speak was once traumatized by this regime, once political engaged, but no more. The Look of Silence is a painfully personal story that connects to the larger tragedy of Indonesia much more directly and emotionally than The Act of Killing but it also exists at a critical time for this piece of history and sheds light onto humanity’s attitude towards past atrocities in general. The past is the past, unchangeable, and to those who lived it once was enough, but karma comes in the form of the next generation, whose curiosity digs up and sorts out the dirt, for better or for worse. Power, like age, fades and shifts and yet these old monsters still cling to it desperately even as Adi, along with a crew that is almost entirely credited as “Anonymous”, sit across from the people in power in this country today, threatening to execute them, and show no fear. These killers had the past, but the future belongs to Adi.

As for other movies this year: The worst film of the year goes to The Green Inferno (dir. Eli Roth, USA) which I saw years ago at TIFF but was languished in legal hell before being unceremoniously dumped into theatres this year. It should have stayed buried. Somehow, Roth seems to have become a worse director over time with this movie feeling like some amateurish, slapped-together jokey nonsense. I don’t dig cannibal movies in general and while this one could have been, I don’t know, a neo-cannibal movie it’s just really lame instead. My biggest disappointment was Steve Jobs (dir. Danny Boyle, USA) which should have swept the floor with the Ashton Kutcher movie but instead got swept up with it. An utterly pointless attempt to boil down the life and legacy of Steve Jobs into three days only mythologizes him further as “nerd Jesus”, as Bill Burr puts it, running him through a series of Scrooge-like trials against key people in his life, again and again. Everyone in this movie is a wrong fit: Sorkin’s dialogue is too abrasive, Boyle’s direction is too desperately flashy, Fassbender’s jawline is too strong for the scrawny yet imposing Jobs. It’s all wrong. And finally, my favourite hate-watch continues with Terminator: Genysis (dir. Alan Taylor, USA). This franchise has been in a state of self-parody for decades now so it’s only purpose for me is to be the most consistent dumb-idea generator to laugh through. The previous film, Terminator Salvation, is one of the worst movies ever, if you ask me, and Genysis at least has some cool effects but its hilariously dumb sci-fi is still a riot. Apparently aimed at the baby-boomer generation this movie redefines SkyNet as essentially evil Facebook and our zombie-like devotion to phones and tablets. Arnold shows up for no reason and everyone’s acting is stiff enough to build a deck out of. It’s “awesome”.

That’s it for me. Haters gon hate. See you next year.