2015: Favorite 30 Films

20

The Duke of Burgundy

Dir. Peter Stickland

[Artificial Eye]

We think of film primarily as a visual medium, but Peter Strickland does not. In his incredible breakout film Berberian Sound Studio, Strickland focused on a prim Foley artist who is driven mad by the sounds he creates, and Strickland’s 2015 film, The Duke of Burgundy, deepened his commitment to sensory overload. Recalling art-house fare from the 1970s — the sort of stuff that Roman Polanski would direct at the height of his career — the film was primarily about a power struggle between two women in a romantic relationship. Still, that description only skims the surface. Through impeccable imagery and sound design, The Duke of Burgundy engaged all of our senses — yes, even taste and smell — so that we could understand the full depth of the impasse between the two lovers. The opening titles for Strickland’s film included a credit for the perfumer. That was a provocation, sure, yet Strickland delivered on it. No film in 2015 was more sumptuous or erotic. –Alan Zilberman

19

Spring

Dir. Justin Benson & Aaron Scott Moorhead

[Drafthouse]

Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead’s film was one of the most exhilarating films we watched last year. A horror/romance that managed to completely transcend both of those labels, Spring was a film that cut to the heart of human longing and mortality, a beautifully rendered supernatural tale that left us speechless. From its very first shot — of an uncomfortable and inescapable slow death of the main character’s mother — the directors set death front and center. And yet the bulk of the film was filled with out-of-control growth and new life. The effect of this juxtaposition was smart and emotionally fulfilling without being cloying in the way that a sad majority of romance films are. Featuring nuanced and fully realized performances from Lou Taylor Pucci and the relatively unknown German actress Nadia Hilker, Spring excelled in marrying its weighty concepts with intimate and spontaneous moments between the two leads. Of course, the directors’ decision to shoot the thing around the picturesque Bari region in coastal Italy went a long way in solidifying the film’s brooding, beautiful, and somehow ancient feel. Spring was a refreshing take on two of the most well-worn genres in cinema, a deeply human and lovingly crafted homage to the indelibility of love contrasted with the vagaries of nature. It was also one of the most lovely things we’d seen. –Paul Bower

18

Spotlight

Dir. Tom McCarthy

[Open Road]

There’s a scene about halfway through Spotlight in which investigators meet with a man who leads a support group for victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. He explains how terrible this kind of abuse is when you still trust in God’s inherent goodness. It’s this moment that transformed “True Story About Investigative Journalism Team Uncovering Major Priest Sex Scandal” into a much more harrowing indictment of spiritual abuse. Before this scene, Spotlight was stylish and droning, slickly paced and captivatingly acted, its exposition conventional without being cliché. This could’ve been enough for the film, but after the meeting, its focus became less about shaking our trust as consumers of information and more about wondering how one can ever recover their faith after it’s robbed from on high. As more and more damning evidence is uncovered, clapping for our “good guy” journalists feels more and more inappropriate (like applauding after a touching speech at a funeral), but when everything is finally wrapped up and in full circulation and those phones start ringing incessantly, something odd happens that prompts a slow glance upward, above their cassocked necks: “Thank. God.” And it doesn’t matter what kind of man he is or if he even exists. What matters is that his children are guilty of extremely heinous acts, and now everyone knows. –Jackson Scott

17

R100

Dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto

[Drafthouse]

Following our rave review of Fifty Shades of Grey and the ensuing craze, I began seeking out other films that held, in a similar, delicate balance, kink and high drama. Per Benjamin Pearson’s recommendation, I decided to watch R100. This film is, at heart, a story about businessman Takafumi Katayama in search of fulfillment. With his needs not met at home or in the workplace, Takafumi finds meaning elsewhere: in the hands and toys and humiliation of a highly specialized, elite, and mysterious BDSM club. The club requires a one-year commitment, and Takafumi signs on the line. It would be cruel (perhaps enticing but humiliating) to leave you here, at this point, without further elaboration. And yet. Whereas Fifty Shades took a more predictable direction throughout, R100 was, curiously, not so vanilla. The former focused on sexuality (and non-disclosure agreements) as a means to transgression (which will, let’s be honest, always be a letdown), but the latter got transgression out of the way, quickly, slapped a rating on it, and then bottomed out entirely. When, at the end, Takafumi is lobbing grenades out of a window, you, like the character, no longer know how you got there and what you signed up for. That is “kink” in its truest definition. –Max Power

16

The End of the Tour

Dir. James Ponsoldt

[A24]

All you adaptation nerds out there, this one’s for you! At the end of David Foster Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest, journalist David Lipsky followed him around for a weekend and interviewed the writer. The End of the Tour turned that interview into a movie. In a year of blockbuster franchise bombast (Mad Max! Star Wars!), this quiet, emotional movie stunned us in an entirely different way. Director James Ponsoldt put care into every aspect of a film that was much more than the sum of its parts, which consisted of Jason Segel’s surprisingly great performance as Wallace, the 90s alt-rock soundtrack, and the wintry palette of cinematographer Jakob Ihre (Oslo, August 31st, Reprise). We traveled along with Lipsky as he got to live a dream, meeting an iconic artist at a seminal time in his life, and as he ruined it by being a jealous, snarky New York asshole. He wanted answers; what he got instead was “the best conversation of his life.” Critics can carp over the portrayal of Wallace; we called it fan fiction, sat back, and enjoyed the ride. –Susanna Locascio

15

The Revenant

Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu

[20th Century Fox]

We didn’t so much root for Hugh Glass to achieve his single-minded goal of avenging his son’s death in The Revenant as we spent two-and-a-half hours marveling at how someone could survive all the metaphorical slings and literal arrows of the natural and man-made world. Through the dreamlike cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki and the animalistic performance of Leonardo DiCaprio, we experienced every shiver, every moment of searing pain, every small moment of peace, every prolonged feeling of agony as if it were our bodies being tossed about like a salmon by a grizzly or our neck wounds being roughly cauterized with gunpowder. We walked out of the theater (or away from our couches) wobbly and slightly dazed, eyeing our creature comforts with suspicion, even as we willingly embraced them. Like Iñárritu’s previous triumph with Birdman, The Revenant pushed hard against a cinematic universe that seemed hellbent on numbing our senses and forcing us to feel in a way that few other films in 2015 dared attempt. –Robert Ham

14

Tangerine

Dir. Sean Baker

[Magnolia Pictures]

Much of the discussion around Sean Baker’s Tangerine had focused on the film’s production. Filming with iPhone cameras on the streets of Los Angeles, Baker created a subversive, professional feature that appeared to sacrifice little in the way of technical or artistic quality. As revolutionary as this process could be for micro-budget, guerrilla filmmaking, the film itself was also damn good. With its frenetic pace, pulsating soundtrack, and saturated colors, Tangerine whirled along Santa Monica Boulevard, bringing a street that’s mostly seen by those of us sitting in traffic to vivid life. From a character standpoint, Baker allowed the normal cheap comic relief in mainstream films to take over the narrative. Transgender working girls like Kitana Kiki Rodriguez’s Sin-Dee and Mya Taylor’s Alexandra, foreign cab drivers like Karran Karagulian’s Razmik: in Baker’s hands, these characters transcended their nominal status for cheap laughs to become un-romanticized yet sympathetic human beings. Tangerine is as true a celebration of a city’s outsiders as any we’ve seen in a long time, ranking up there alongside the best work of Cassavetes, Altman, Charles Burnett, and Paul Thomas Anderson. –Jafarkas

13

The Tribe

Dir. Miroslav Slaboshpitsky

[Drafthouse]

A brilliant and beautiful film that I could easily never watch again, The Tribe was the shocking tale of unchecked youth devolving into crime, violence, and despair amidst the backdrop of a boarding school. What made the film stand out on first appearance was that the whole story was told through Ukrainian sign language (with some minor exceptions), without captions or subtitles. But writer/director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky proved that he didn’t need them to convey the madness of being a marginalized teenager, using excellent acting, framing, and superb direction in his storytelling. The film was a brutal gut-punch look at an oft-unseen populace that expertly told the story of confusion, loss, dreams, and pain of growing up in the margins of society. Complete with a truly cacophonous crescendo of an ending, The Tribe was not a conventionally pleasurable experience, but it was a vital one that also allowed audiences to witness the singular and unique voice of an incomparable talent. –Neurotic Monkey

12

Carol

Dir. Todd Haynes

[The Weinstein Company]

“We’re not ugly people,” Carol reminds her husband at one point in Todd Haynes’s brilliant, beautiful, aching adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt. It’s not simply that Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and the rest of Carol’s phenomenal cast are as gorgeous as they are talented, but rather that the boxes in which we are placed — and in which we often place ourselves — can sometimes make us act against our better nature. Carol was a film of quiet repression, of longings sublimated before fully comprehended, of the struggle to find, if not acceptance, then at least understanding. We’re all selling something, even if it’s an image of ourselves untenable under prolonged scrutiny. Mara and Blanchett were every bit as astounding as we heard. Ditto Ed Lachman’s 16mm photography, which beautifully evoked that particular winter warmth that feels bundled and stolen. Haynes’s restraint was perfectly calibrated to the material, allowing tensions to release rather than explode, and his attention to detail made every frame, every prop, and every gesture feel authentic, lived in, and taken for granted in the way that accoutrements of the present day generally are. As devastating as it was hopeful, Carol is an understated masterpiece. –Christopher Bruno

11

The Lobster

Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

[Alchemy]

Taking the outlandish and idiosyncratic environment of the family’s property in Dogtooth and expanding them to a universal level, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster dropped all hints of a human-imposed control upon his world, removing itself even further from reality yet crystallizing his understanding of it on a social, behavioral, and metaphysical level. Lucidly conveying many hard yet hilarious truths about humanity’s innate need for love, acceptance, and the ways we define ourselves either in search of or diametrically opposed to filling those needs, Lanthimos crafted a profoundly sad, outrageously surreal, and savagely entertaining romantic comedy that stripped off all the superficialities of romance to reveal the melancholy and absurd impulses that drive us. Its premise was as rigidly surreal as Luis Buñuel’s finest films, playing with a similarly dry humor and acerbic wit. But there was a tenderness to Lanthimos’s approach that he’d never before revealed, which etched a bittersweetness throughout the film that made it as emotionally gratifying as it was intellectually stimulating. –Derek Smith