On Film

The best of 2015: Our lists continue

As is our January tradition, we're continuing our annual roundup of the past year's best movies as received by notable cinephiles, critics and filmmakers. This is part two, and we'll have a third and final installment next week.

Joe Riddle, copy desk chief, maven, mensch:

In no particular order: Spotlight, Carol, The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Love & Mercy, Sleeping With Other People, Inside Out, Ex Machina, Trumbo, Chappie

Honorable mention: The End of the Tour; Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens; I'll See You in My Dreams; Mr. Holmes; Trainwreck; Spy; Ant-Man; The Martian; The Gift; The Intern.

Jay Russell, director (My Dog Skip, Ladder 49, The Waterhorse), screenwriter and producer of the stage version of Rear Window:

  1. The Revenant 2. Spotlight 3. Room 4. The Danish Girl 5. Straight Outta Compton 6. Mad Max: Fury Road 7. Love & Mercy 8. The Big Short 9. The Martian 10. Mr. Holmes

Honorable mentions: Creed; Ex Machina; Irrational Man; Joy; Kingsman: The Secret Service; Legend; McFarland, USA; Me, Earl and the Dying Girl; Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation; Brooklyn; Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Trumbo; What We Do in the Dark; Amy.

Have yet to see: 99 Homes; Beasts of No Nation; Bridge of Spies; Carol; Diary of a Teenage Girl; Grandma; The Hateful Eight; Sicario; Son of Saul; Suffragette; Truth; Youth. And a whole slew of docs.

Danny Joe Crofford, bon vivant, husband, father, state employee, fill-in movie critic and concert reviewer, commonly referred to as DJC:

  1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens 2. The Hateful Eight 3. Spotlight 4. Inside Out 5. Straight Outta Compton 6. The Martian 7. Creed 8. Sicario 9. Steve Jobs 10. The Big Short

Blake Rutherford, Movies in the Park founder, lives in Philadelphia:

  1. Spotlight 2. Mad Max: Fury Road 3. Carol 4. Clouds of Sils Maria 5. 45 Years 6. The Revenant 7. The Big Short 8. Youth 9. Sicario 10. Phoenix

Honorable mentions: Beasts of No Nation; Bridge of Spies; Brooklyn; Creed; The End of the Tour; Ex Machina; The Gift; Grandma; Love & Mercy; The Martian; Mississippi Grin; Mistress America; Results; Room; Spy; Steve Jobs; Trainwreck; Truth; Welcome to Me; Z for Zachariah.

Piers Marchant, critic, frequent contributor, also lives in Philadelphia (for the full text, see blooddirtangels.com):

The 15 best films of 2015.

  1. Sicario -- Politically twisty, Denis Villeneuve's FBI thriller earned cheers and gripes from critics in about equal numbers. True, its main protagonist -- played by the estimable Emily Blunt -- is left hanging by the film, put into untenable situations that she just doesn't understand, but as the audience touchstone she perfectly captures our own confusion.

  2. Far From Men -- Viggo Mortensen is exactly the kind of actor you could imagine starring in a film based on a Camus short story.

13. Diary of a Teenage Girl -- Each year, it seems as if some filmmaker and/or actor comes out of relative obscurity to produce something memorable, in this case, both come out of the same film. Writer/Director Marielle Heller, working from an excellent graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, has created a fascinating coming-of-age film set in mid-'70s San Francisco, and star Bel Powley, who plays the young woman who steps into an affair with her single mother's boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard, don't hold True Blood against him), is absolutely ripping in the lead.

  1. Meru -- When a film is made about a group of adventurers setting off to accomplish something thought impossible, the results are often as gripping as they are predictable. Not so for Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's riveting documentary about a trio of alpinists who dare to challenge Mount Meru, one of the most imposing and near impossible climbs on Earth.

  2. Phoenix -- Christian Petzold's post-WWII drama, about a Jewish concentration camp survivor and singer (Nina Hoss) who returns to her native Berlin in order to track down her beloved husband (Ronald Zehrfeld), the man who may or may not have sold her out to the Nazis, builds slowly but leads to one of the most shattering climaxes of the year.

  3. The Lobster --Here's what I wrote right after I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival: "If Kafka had been born later and become a filmmaker rather than a writer, this is the kind of thing he would have enjoyed making. Yorgos Lanthimos continues to explore his peculiarly captivating vision here with a wild-eyed conceit played as drolly deadpan as a staid chamber comedy. At a special hotel somewhere outside a large city, single people are given 45 days to find a partner to share their lives with, or be turned into the animal of their choice and set free in the nearby woods. Lanthimos' film is ostensibly a comedy, but because of his visceral acuity, and penchant for disturbing violence, the whole enterprise has a gritty edginess to it. He doesn't want you comfortable; he wants you transfixed."

  4. Inside Out -- One of the rarest of modern children's films, as it involves the revolutionary notion that sadness is absolutely as important and essential as joy to a child's healthy development.

  5. Anomalisa -- Here's my immediate reaction at the Toronto festival: "Very adult stop-motion animation story from Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, and I designate it that not just because of a surprisingly graphic sex scene, but because the emotionally sophisticated story -- an older customer service expert spends a night in Cincinnati to speak at a convention, and tries to assuage his perpetual loneliness -- would absolutely bore the pants off of anyone under 10. For the rest of us, it's a hauntingly sharp observation on the suffering human condition. "

7. Spotlight -- A powerful paean to the importance of watchdog journalism, Tom McCarthy's masterful journo-procedural follows the very real story of the Boston Globe investigative team who broke open the Catholic Church sexual misconduct story, after decades of having it swept under the rug by sympathetic Church power brokers.

  1. 45 Years -- Toronto festival reaction: "Andrew Haigh (Weekend) has made a luminescent and powerful film about marriage and the passing of time. ... Quietly reverberating, the film shimmers with life, and the performances are nothing short of thrilling. It might sound staid, but as with the aging couple themselves, there is a lot of daring vitality in its ancient bones."

  2. Mad Max: Fury Road --Easily the best action movie of the year, largely because its numerous insane set-pieces and wild stunts had the edge of verisimilitude.

  3. James White -- My reaction at Sundance: "When Christopher Abbott left Girls in a seeming huff about the triviality of his character a couple of years ago, most of us shrugged and assumed he was just another kid who was too late to recognize what kind of a break he had just gotten, that is if we thought about him much at all. Turns out, he was absolutely right to leave the show and move on to more serious work."

  4. The Look of Silence -- My reaction at True/False: "Joshua Oppenheimer's companion film to his Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing returns us to the uneasy tension in Indonesia, a country still under martial rule in the wake of the brutal regime crackdown by a military coup in the '60s. ... Each film standing on its own is brilliant; together it's a stunning achievement, one of the more important visual documents of the last couple of decades."

  5. Brooklyn -- My reaction at Sundance: "It's a masterful, sweeping drama about a young Irish woman (Saoirse Ronan), who travels alone to America in the early '50s in order to make a better life for herself, even as she desperately misses her mother and older sister. "

  6. The Witch -- My Sundance reaction: "Robert Eggers' 16th-century horror story takes place in the wilds of New England, with a pilgrim family led by a proud, God-fearing patriarch (Ralph Ineson) getting banished from their small village to forage on their own. They settle down on a clearing right on the edge of a great and malevolent forest. After their small baby is suddenly whisked away from under the gaze of their oldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), things turn worse and worse for the family: The crops grow fallow, the goats start milking blood, and the rest of the children are in constant peril, until the family begins to turn on itself and the accusations of witchcraft readily fly. Expertly constructed, with a startling use of both growing, incessant sound and eerie silence, Eggers' terrifying folk-tale captures a lot of the angst we feel confronting a natural world that we can't bend to our force of will. This is one ghoulish story you most definitely do not want to tell your kids around the campfire, unless you want them huddled around you shaking and sobbing all night."

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MovieStyle on 01/15/2016

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