If it was not previously obvious to filmgoers, 2015 made it abundantly clear that discipline, daring, and dazzle are the reliable paths to cinematic greatness. The past 12 months were characterized by several sterling, imaginative works of feature animation, resulting in the most exciting year for the medium since 2010. Delightfully, 2015 was also a fantastically fertile period for genre filmmaking, quite apart the long-awaited return of a formerly flailing space opera franchise. Science fiction, horror, Western, detective, and post-apocalyptic stories were all represented among this year’s best films. Meanwhile, the cream of 2015’s period and contemporary dramas favored enigmatic narratives and small-scale struggles rather than mighty clashes. Even that mustiest of awards-bait subgenres—the Holocaust Film—demonstrated that it could still be bold and harrowing. It was, in short, a fine year to be a cinephile in St. Louis.
For the purposes of this list, a film qualifies as a “Film of 2015” if it could be viewed theatrically by the ticketed general public in the St. Louis metropolitan area between January 1 and December 31, 2015.
10. The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer; Denmark / Indonesia)
In a year of modest documentary achievement, director Joshua Oppenheimer’s riveting companion piece to The Act of Killing stands defiantly alone, a work of awe-inspiring moral and mortal courage. Although the film is dense with lingering images both exquisite and disquieting, The Look of Silence’s placid surface is deceptive. Beneath it lies a throat-clenching real-world thriller about wickedness, suffering, and the past’s stubborn disinclination to remain dead and buried. Reviewed here. [Now available for digital rental and purchase. Available on DVD/Blu-ray on January 16.]
9. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Thailand)
Evincing unassuming warmth and grace, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s sublime new film reveals itself as the most magical, humane, and drollest feature of his career. As numinous as the director’s Uncle Boonmee was eerie—yet equally absorbed with the messages that bridge disparate times and lives—Cemetery of Splendour positively thrums with artistic energy, like an entranced oracle on the verge of revelation. Equal parts lovely and absurd, it’s is as addictively mysterious as contemporary filmmaking gets. Reviewed here. [Limited theatrical release planned for 2016.]
8. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (David Zellner; USA)
Most films about quixotic journeys permit a dollop of gloom, but David Zellner’s striking, ominous fairy tale daringly plunges headfirst into obsession’s murkiest waters. Ushering the viewer effortlessly into the dazed, fearful world of Rinko Kikuchi’s shuffling heroine, the morally knotted Kumiko unfolds on the razor’s edge between cherished escapism and perilous mirage. It is the rare work that miraculously balances the unsettling, the uplifting, and the heartbreaking. Reviewed here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]
7. Son of Saul (László Nemes; Hungary)
László Nemes’ spellbinding feature delivers a needed jolt to the moribund Holocaust Film. Collapsing the world’s horror into a tight, squat frame around the mica-bright countenance of Géza Röhrig, the director achieves the remarkable: transforming history and statistics into something personal, immediate, and wholly shattering. Regardless of whether Son of Saul is a story of devotion or of self-delusion, Nemes’ extraordinary film is ultimately about the human hunger for purpose amid the world’s howling chaos. [Limited theatrical release planned for 2016.]
6. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell; USA)
From a simple premise—a bogeyman that plods inexorably towards its victim—director David Robert Mitchell crafts a haunting, cerebral vision in which sex and death are stickily entwined. It Follows mashes up subgenres, manipulates tropes, and weaves together themes with such fleet sophistication, it’s devilishly easy to forget one is watching a monster movie. With arresting compositions, evocative design, and a pitiless synth score, Mitchell gives birth to the horror film of the year. Reviewed here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]
5. Ex Machina (Alex Garland; UK)
Two men and a (sort of) woman are confined together in a house: It’s as pure as drama gets. And yet from that minimalist scenario, Alex Garland’s masterful science fiction fable Ex Machina conjures a chillingly resonant, perpetually unfolding labyrinth of ruses and themes. Just when its shape seems apparent, the film twists away, like a mutinous creation flexing its will. Assembling one impossibly fetching shot after the other, the film delves into the fuzziest questions of consciousness and thorniest corners of gender politics without ever losing its essential aura of lethal menace. Reviewed here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]
4. Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen; USA)
It begins with an ingenious, ambitious concept, executed with peerless Pixar artistry: The inner life of an eleven-year old girl realized as a fantastical realm of thought, all overseen by squabbling anthropomorphic emotions. In the hands of directors Docter and Del Carmen, a fit of prepubescent homesickness and self-loathing becomes a rousing, wisecracking adventure through an enchanted world. Then, in an abyss filled with eroding memories, the child awakens to the intricacies of adult feelings. And, just like that, we’re crying: mourning the children we once were, and rejoicing that the world is not as simple as yellow and blue. Reviewed here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]
3. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson; USA)
It’s 1970 in the scruffy South Bay beach town of Gordita Beach, and America’s hangover is about to begin. Paul Thomas Anderson affirms his status as America’s most unfailingly outstanding cinematic auteur with this charmingly mad, deliriously sexy, resolutely mellow detective tale set at the twilight of the Age of Aquarius. Joaquin Phoenix and a game, sprawling cast create black comic gold out of pot-fogged absurdity, while novelist Thomas Pynchon’s poetic, gonzo musings hold court over the daftness. Not since its spiritual cousin The Big Lebowski has there been a film so insouciantly hilarious—and the Coens never gave us a sex scene as erotically scorching as the one that crowns Inherent Vice. However, amidst the unforgettable characters, convoluted conspiracies, and impish genre subversions, Anderson smuggles a melancholy rumination on the passage of time. Like everyone in every decade, Phoenix’s hippie private eye is just searching for a balm for change’s sting. Reviewed here and further considered here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]
2. Anomalisa (Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman; USA)
With age comes dreary familiarity: Life devolves into a loop of the same wearying conversations, the same banal rituals, the same regrets welling up over and over. Misery master Charlie Kaufman and stop-motion animator Duke Johnson give miniature life to this dismal truth in their devastating triumph Anomalisa. In a world populated by identical androgynous faces—all voiced without variation by Tom Noonan—a man plods torpidly through an existence of soul-crushing sameness. Suddenly, an unlikely beam of sunlight shines through the gray: a perfectly ordinary woman whose voice nonetheless resembles an angel’s song to the flabbergasted protagonist. What follows is a dizzying, blissful, confusing, and ultimately terrifying day in which the world is remade not once but twice. Anomalisa is, quite simply, the most emotionally overwhelming film of the year, a work which evinces a deeper understanding of the human condition than any feature with flesh-and-blood actors. [Opening in limited theatrical release in St. Louis in January.]
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller; Australia / USA)
In the end, it is a chase. Strip away the painstaking, stunningly realized apocalyptic vision of humanity’s dismal past and unthinkable future. Set aside the vitalizing jolts of unapologetic feminism, as well as the impressively subversive fake-out of transforming the title character into the Real Hero’s taciturn right-hand-man. Leave behind the unparalleled, infectious intensity of the Warboys’ punk glee at all that beauteous automotive mayhem, and the designed discomfort that oozes forth when that same nihilistic delight roars between the viewer’s ears. Walk away from any behind-the-scenes knowledge of the jaw-dropping, instantly iconic visual effects and stunt work. Disregard the delicious thrill of a septuagenarian artist returning to his formative genre to create a demented masterpiece, incidentally making every other action filmmaker of the past three decades look like a pretender milksop. Forget it all, and you still have a chase; a perfect chase to there and back again, one that sometimes slows and idles but never stops its hellish momentum for 120 blistering minutes. Mad Max: Fury Road is ballet written in blood, flame, and twisted steel. It is an exemplar of cinema at its most intoxicating, executed with the brazen confidence of a Greek hero with the gods at their back. What a lovely day indeed. Reviewed here. [Now available on DVD/Blu-ray and for digital rental and purchase.]
The Next Best
11. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
13. Goodnight Mommy
16. Song of the Sea
17. Güeros
19. Leviathan
20. Brooklyn
Honorable Mentions: Art and Craft, Carol, Creed, Crimson Peak, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Far From the Madding Crowd, Macbeth, Mr. Holmes, My Friend Victoria, The Salt of the Earth, Selma, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Sicario, Time Out of Mind
Overrated, Slightly or Highly: ‘71, The Assassin, Bridge of Spies, The Martian, Room, Spotlight, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Steve Jobs, White God
Underrated: Focus, The Keeping Room, Maggie, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Tomorrowland, Unfriended, The Visit
Worst Offender: The Lazarus Effect
Best Trend: Diabolically over-the-top villainesses. (Jessica Chastain, Crimson Peak; Elizabeth Debicki, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight; Tuppence Middleton, Jupiter Ascending; Helen Mirren, Trumbo)
Best Overlooked Performance: Tobey Maguire, Pawn Sacrifice.
Best Action in a Film Not Starring Charlize Theron: Ant-Man
Notable Films I Missed: Amy, The Big Short, Court, Heart of a Dog, Iris, Listen to Me Marlon, Mustang, Phoenix, Tangerine, Timbuktu
Films We’re Still Waiting for in St. Louis: 45 Years, Approaching the Elephant, The Duke of Burgundy, The Forbidden Room, Hard to Be a God, Heaven Knows What, Horse Money, James White, Queen of Earth, The Revenant
