2015: Favorite 30 Films

30

Field Niggas

Dir. Khalik Allah

[Khalik Allah]

With Field Niggas, director Khalik Allah made the bold choice of uncoupling the video from the soundtrack in this freeform portrait of people living on the streets of Harlem. By intuitively collaging sound and image, Allah created a sense of being in a kind of dream state that echoes the sense of fractured reality expressed by the characters. The streets felt like a kind of living hell fraught with mental illness, a place with no code of honor beyond survival. But from within the floating dialogue (in which you can only guess which of the onscreen people are speaking), thoughts of blinding clarity and insight also emerged. Allah’s jazzy, shallow focus cinematography beautifully captured both the romance and grit of the place, expressing the filmmaker’s heartfelt, personal connection with the location and the characters. It’s the rare documentary that successfully managed to look out at the surrounding world from inside its subjects’ psyche, a uniquely intense, intimate, frightening, and enlightening experience. –water

29

Chi-Raq

Dir. Spike Lee

[Amazon Films]

Like its name, Chi-Raq is composed of elements that do not, in good taste, go together: an adaptation of Aristophanes’s erotic comedy Lysistrata, performed primarily in rhyming verse, about the epidemic of gun violence in Chicago’s black community. Lee constantly shatters the 4th wall, via a Greek chorus transposed to (and infinitely improved upon by) Samuel L. Jackson (billed as “Dolmedes”), who is dressed as a high-fashion pimp. Just as kaleidoscopically, the fiery head of the black congregation is played by a pasty John Cusack. But somehow, the disparateness of Chi-Raq’s formal elements feels seamless, especially within the complex framework of its politics. The issue in Lee’s film is naively obvious: gun violence is a problem for African Americans. But its web of causality is more complex, putting the onus for change — or at least for steering the discussion — on the black community, even while acknowledging the nationwide systemic issues, like poverty and racism, that perpetuate the deadly status quo. Lee’s hyperactive direction — and the best ensemble cast of the year, led by Teyonah Parris, to whom, Dolmedes rightly says, even Queen Beyoncé bows down — miraculously saves Chi-Raq from being dismissed as a message movie. Even so, its message has angered everyone from feminist critics to Black Lives Matter activists. Lee’s grandiose jumble of elements seems to even encompass them: rather than offensive, Chi-Raq was big-hearted. –Benjamin Pearson

28

Crimson Peak

Dir. Guillermo Del Toro

[Legendary]

Crimson Peak was a peculiarly familiar story that seemed to almost take pleasure in telegraphing and exposition, but it was swift like the waltz “European style,” heavy with gleeful visual references and joyfully ominous symbolism: viscous red clay oozing up through the snow, seeping between floorboards and making taps run like blood; meaningful glances and lingering shots of insects consumed by other insects (not the only film this year — or ever — to indulge that fascination); a house with a hole in the roof and ornate chandeliers and candelabras, spikier than usually considered appropriate for human habitation, creaking and breathing as the wind howled inside and out, with leaves and snow falling inside the building. The cast knew their steps well; the candle never went out as they danced through it all; and there were a few moments just brutal enough to punctuate/puncture the haze of the (typically desexualized) romance and comfortingly low-level psychological “fear” with the ludicrous reality of flesh and bone. Because, as our protagonist says near the beginning of the tale she’s writing: it wasn’t a ghost story, “more a story with a ghost in it. The ghost is just a metaphor…” –Michael J

27

Creed

Dir. Ryan Coogler

[New Line]

On “Freedman’s Bureau,” billy woods raps, “Crackers still win when they lose, like Rocky.” Putting race aside, that line calls to mind one of the most memorable and defining aspects of the first installment of this 40-year-old boxing film series: that the titular protagonist does not prevail in the end, except in that he has made it to the end. Regardless of how the movie fares on this year’s awards circuit, Creed won by revisiting and moreover reinvigorating the core structure and themes of Rocky. Thanks to the talents of the director, screenwriters, cast, and crew, the revisited elements kept us on the edge of our seats, and the reinvigorated moments had us standing and cheering louder than we have for any spots drama or legacy title in ages (Fury Road notwithstanding). Whereas The Force Awakens took extra care to follow the formula of A New Hope, resulting in forces arguably neither awakening nor new nor hopeful, Creed seemed less concerned with fan service than telling a solid story that could hold up against the cynicism of 2015 filmgoers. As for the film’s Oscar chances, we defer to Clubber Lang: “I don’t need no has-beens in my corner. And you better wipe that look off your face before I knock it off. You wanna jump, JUMP! Come on, Creed!” –Samuel Diamond

26

Stinking Heaven

Dir. Nathan Silver

[Factory 25]

Stinking Heaven dwelled in the age-old tradition of no-budget direct cinema. Filmed with an Ikegami HL-79E Betacam video recorder, haunting washed-out colors denoted a quasi-documentary video of a bygone era, as the film portrayed a fictional commune for drug addicts in New Jersey, 1990. Nathan Silver has a penchant for outsiders and misfits, beyond the realm of the quirky and the adorkable. His world is constantly inhabited by deeply flawed maladroit characters, rarely presented with a chance of redemption and whose faults and ineptness lead them toward an eventual and inescapable downfall. Ruthless and unapologetic, Stinking Heaven depicted a move toward controlled chaos, a world where anti-heroes attempt a second chance at life amid their own through mutual aid and understanding. Silver is a breath of fresh air for the transgressive potential of naturalism and experimental improvisation within American cinema, and his latest output came as yet another confirmation of his talent. –Paulo Scarpa

25

A Pigeon Sat On Branch Reflecting On Existence

Dir. Roy Andersson

[Filmproduktion AB]

From a vivid depiction of human incineration to the warbling of a lonely barmaid named Limping Lotte, the short scenes that Roy Andersson portrayed in the final chapter of his Living Trilogy brought about a majestically lackluster tapestry of emotional response. Each of the slowly-spun scenes were bound together by two characters who underwent the despair of their own banality while trying to sell novelty items to a variety of disinterested, stone-faced personalities. To say that the film was “entertaining” or even “enjoyable” would go against the grain of the pitch-black humor lying at the underbelly of each story. And yet, through the humiliation, jealousy, conceit, and bitter envy that Andersson’s characters endured, we were permitted insight into the most erudite observations of our species’s recent evolution. Sure, it tested the limits of our patience and had us cringing at the edge of our seats, but we found ourselves mesmerized in the front row at one of the most groundbreakingly mundane social commentaries of the year. –Birkut

24

Timbuktu

Dir. Abderrahmane Sissako

[Arte France Cinéma]

Timbuktu could just as easily be an ode to Toulou Kiki, whose fearsome, transportingly beauteous performance as Satima (Tuareg wife and mother of two) nearly caved our shivering eyeballs in. But the movie was a stunner all around. Kettly Noël owned the screen as Zabou, laying out elaborate ritual curses on the occupying forces (who seemed wary enough to give her a wide berth). The film flashed a winningly muted, offbeat sense of humor, cresting with a sexually frustrated man stopping his pickup in the desert to machine-gun a stand of grass between two dunes. This man’s fumblingly threatening, improper, and artless advances on Satima came off like the machinations of lovesick dope. His forbidden desire for her wound up being the only point in the militant’s favor. But this was Satima’s story at heart. It was about those who stay, even when things get impossible, because the love they hold for their home and family is inextricable and ultimately larger than any sort of basic self-preservation. Satima’s love was a glorious irrational devotion built to rival that of the jihadists, even when the cost was the last thing staring us in the face. –Willcoma

23

Furious 7

Dir. James Wan

[Universal]

Sure, critics everywhere love to talk about “Magical Realism” when it’s coming out of hotshots like Iñárritu, but what was more truly fabulist in 2015 than Furious 7? Cars jumping through (multiple!) skyscrapers, a dying man being revived by the return of his amnesiac wife’s memory, The Rock flexing his way out of still-fresh arm casts, getting away with calling a speed competition “Race Wars” without setting off a thousand #problematic hot takes: this was a movie that made the impossible possible, consistently and thoroughly. It had the good sense to feature plenty of Kurt Russell just as the zeitgeist-at-large was keen on rediscovering The Grand Old Lion of Hollywood Trash, and (sorry) it even made paying tribute to the recently deceased hilarious. Basically, Furious 7 went down like an expertly formulated energy drink, the rush and saccharine blocking any parts of your brain that might otherwise be concerned about the complete lack of nutritional value. It was some of the purest, finest trash Hollywood had to offer last year, a designation that it owned with shamelessness, swagger, and a big stupid heart. –Dustin Krcatovich

22

Room

Dir. Lenny Abrahamson

[A24]

I don’t wish Room’s legacy to include its nutshell description as “the film about the rape-child,” as I’ve heard it hurriedly put. Then again, maybe I need to run into better people. Room’s central relationship was between Joy (Brie Larson) and her son (Jacob Tremblay), who, yes, was born of Joy’s rapist captor, and such a relationship is so rarely captured on film with poignancy and delicacy. The film did not simply entail the struggle of a single mother protecting her child from danger beyond Room — their name for the garden shed keeping them in and sunlight out — but about the walls that narrowly keep us in blissful, often willful, ignorance. There was the condescension of Larson’s interviewers following her rescue, her frustration at how everyone’s lives continued while she reconstructed hers, and how her son hardly realized how close they both came to total doom. That’s why his narration seemed so adorable on the surface and more troublesome underneath; the idea of thinking we “know everything” is a habit that often follows us at childhood and never lets go. –80s Tom Hanks

21

Heaven Knows What

Dir. Joshua Safdie & Ben Safdie

[RADiUS-TWC]

Heaven Knows What’s opening — a drawn-out, approximately 10-minute sequence of heroine Harley threatening to slash her wrists (out of love for her indifferent boyfriend Ilya) and then, finally, actually doing it — presents a good microcosm for the whole film. The homeless heroin addicts of Heaven Knows What loudly hurtled toward an inevitable destruction, only no one was listening. The film created an overwhelmingly lonely portrait of the lifestyle of a street junkie in the Upper West Side of New York City; Harley had friends, a caring dealer, and Ilya, among others, but we got the sense that she was awfully, cripplingly on her own. What we saw was more of a scene-by-scene crumbling than a conventional story (highlighted by Isao Tomita’s vibrant reinterpretations of Debussy), a structural choice that paralleled Harley’s and other addicts’ constant search for a fix that only burrowed them further into a self-inflicted decay. Heaven Knows What dispensed with all the romance that like-minded films might’ve provided, resulting in an electric watch that deployed the right formal touches to create an incredible sense of immersion. –Alec Lane

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

10

Buzzard

Dir. Joel Potrykus

[Oscilloscope]

Along with the normal slate of superhero movies and an Oscar season punctuated with a new Tarantino, we saw the triumphant return of several incredibly successful action-adventure franchises. If cinema this year was often about entertainment (and don’t get us wrong, we had a blast at the movies this year), then Buzzard found itself in a unique position. It wasn’t so much a “fun” movie (though it does have its comedic moments) as a movie that seems like it was fun to make (the treadmill scene, the Jedi/Freddy Krueger duel, the Mauvais Sang tribute). But just because it was evident how much fun the boys at Sob Noisse had making it doesn’t mean that Buzzard didn’t have plenty to say under its demonic, heavy metal façade. It was about people who are good at their jobs outwitting people who are bad at their jobs, about the hopelessness of a dead-end life, about the highs of eating a room-service spaghetti dinner one night but settling for a can of SpaghettiOs the next. It’s fitting that Buzzard arrived this year — the year the force awakened — because it was also about the little man surviving in the big man’s world. –Jeff Miller

09

Sicario

Dir. Denis Villeneuve

[Lions Gate]

Sicario was practical. Benicio del Toro packed light, rolling his sport coat into his duffel bag. Josh Brolin conserved energy, catching zzz’s in flip-flops, advising Emily Blunt that “You gotta learn to sleep on a plane.” Daniel Kayuula offered fashion tips: “Gotta get you a new bra.” And when it came to enhanced interrogation, Benicio demonstrated great resourcefulness, using what was on hand, in hand, or on his hand. Yes, Sicario was practical, told in the here-and-now, yet not quite down-to-earth, more of an outsider realist fantasy, a French-Canadian’s grim tale on the US-Mexico border, with a Spectre-worthy scheme — a covert operation to reinstate the Medellín cartel, dead and gone for some 20 years (although, to be fair, we will believe any sort of hare-brained scheme when the CIA’s involved). We lost our innocence through Little Red Riding Hood in the “land of wolves,” while the film battered its near-exclusive actress as a manifestation of its fatalism. Sicario’s chain-lift suspense and gloom was best captured by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s anxious score (pieces of which might have been recorded inside a stethoscope), oddly and incongruously paired with beautiful travelogue-worthy aerial shots of the desert. In spite of the lovely scenery, from the first frame to the last, we felt dread. –Rick Weaver

08

The Forbidden Room

Dir. Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson

[Kino Lorber]

Pop your hallucinogen of choice and go to as gargantuan an archeology/natural history/art museum as you can. Spin in circles a couple of times as it starts to hit you, then get inside. Now try to roam your way out through Edo woodprints, Assyrian tablets, soiled bathrooms, Expressionist paintings, strange-looking food in the foyer’s cafeteria, and perhaps even some dinosaur skeletons. What you see might resemble what Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson put on the screen in The Forbidden Room, a hallucinatory trip through the first decades of film history. Yet, with over 80% of silent-era film now lost, we might know less about the early years of cinema than we do about many ancient civilizations. Maddin and Johnson make an advantage of that, conjuring back from the filmic netherworld what they believe a Murnau-directed Dr. Jekyll, a roaring twenties musical, or a Lon Chaney murder mystery would be like. The result, as hard to describe as it is without invoking matryoshkas or fart jokes, is a true voyage of excess and visual delight, as gleefully ridiculous and over the top as the purest of Maddin’s work, honoring the vaudevillian roots of cinema in the most meta move short of shooting a camera shooting itself. A monument to the sparkling imagination that a love for cinematic storytelling can give you, with no need for chemical enhancements. –jrodriguez6

07

It Follows

Dir. David Robert Mitchell

[Dimension]

Discussion of David Robert Mitchell’s second feature mostly centered on “what” followed its teen protagonists. The curse, passed from carrier to carrier after sex, was described as a metaphor for STDs or AIDS, but that reduces one of the most unusual movies of 2015 to nothing more than a rote horror, where everything has to mean something. In a post-everything era, can our fears really be represented that easily? While It Follows was recognizably a horror movie, what it felt like more than anything was a feature-length distillation of eerily pleasant moments from past genre touchstones — the buildup to the final sting in Carrie, rather than the sting itself. From the muggy warmth of the color grading, to the pretty chiptune soundtrack, to Maika Monroe’s enigmatic lead performance, It Follows evaded pure horror and shook out as one of the great cinematic evocations of teenage life. Mitchell’s real interest was in the pleasures and limitations of adolescence, and he absolutely nailed it, leaving his protagonists and the rest of us to quibble over unimportant shit like “Why is that monster stalking us?” –Slouch

06

The Look of Silence

Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

[Drafthouse]

Most films about historical atrocities bear an insidious underlying message: that those of us who take it upon ourselves to watch such noble and socially-important films, who choose to be reminded of the ugliest human behaviors, would never be accomplices to, let alone perpetrators of, such terrible acts. The Look of Silence, on the other hand, offered no such comforts. Joshua Oppenheimer’s second film about the Indonesian genocide of the mid-1960s followed an optometrist as he attempts to elicit confessions from his brother’s killers, and in turn, the documentary confronted its viewers with a radical notion that we commit genocide each time we omit the worst of our own bloody history. The Look of Silence, like its protagonist, demanded nothing more than the truth, showing us that there can’t be justice without honesty, and honesty without bravery, and that often the bravest thing we can do is remember. –Embling

05

Queen of Earth

Dir. Alex Ross Perry

[IFC]

Our relationships with others help us define our own identities. But when these connections disintegrate, we can become unmoored — an island of one. Queen of Earth examined the process of one such unravelling through a series of vignettes that drifted outside of time, despite the chapters delineating the progressing days. Director Alex Ross Perry isolated his heroines in a vacation home, where the scenery was dominated by reflective surfaces: placid water and darkened windows. These images contrasted deep closeups of human faces, where the camera lingered over the fleshy imperfections of skin, the characters laid bare. And yet, despite these endless examinations, the women remained opaque, a theme emphasized by the superimpositions of watery surfaces over their features. Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) complained of pain in her face, as though it could not longer handle the camera’s presence or bear the burden of representing her emotional reality. The visual echoes of Bergman’s Persona seemed unavoidable, given the setting and the two women at the film’s center, but Queen of Earth transcended its reference points to become its own beast: a darkly comedic portrait of identity and madness for the 21st century. –Kate Blair

04

Ex Machina

Dir. Alex Garland

[Universal]

Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplays for Never Let Me Go and 28 Days Later, created an intensely thought-provoking work with his directorial debut, Ex Machina. In the film, Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson) is plucked from the tech company where he works, flown out to the secluded home of the company’s founder, and told to administer a Turing test to one of his reclusive boss’s creations. Oscar Isaac as the lecherous millionaire with a God-complex played well off Gleeson’s twitchy Caleb, but the stand-out performance came from Alicia Vikander. Vikander’s Ava, the movie’s apparent android-in-distress and subject of the Turing test, was coolly captivating and dangerously nuanced. Much like the eerie Black Mirror, the British television show on which Gleeson also made an appearance, Ex Machina took place in an uncomfortably close future, one near enough to feel entirely plausible. As increasingly smarter phones, smarter homes, and smarter wearables are created, could we be getting closer to the science-fictional transhumanist universe in which Ex Machina is set? The film’s haunting, horrifying ending might make you hope otherwise. –Lil’ Doe

03

The Hateful Eight

Dir. Quentin Tarantino

[The Weinstein Company]

While Quentin Tarantino has talked about one day retiring from films to write novels, The Hateful Eight adopted the structure and format of a theatrical play. Sure, Tarantino says he intended his take on paranoia and prejudices in the Old West as homage to the old movie palace epics of the past, complete with extended overture and intermission. Yet with the film’s minimal use of locations and character nuances, it’s as close as the cinema has come to mimicking the live theater experience as we may have yet seen — albeit in the Grand Guignol tradition. Although the cinematic scope may not have lived up to the sweeping landscapes of Shane, The Searchers, or even The Revenant, the camera’s effective use of interior spaces to create tension reflected Tarantino’s appreciation for claustrophobic Westerns like Stagecoach and Rio Bravo, which rely on character dynamics more than scale. Instead, Tarantino let his pen make gestures toward grander and more epic themes. As an apt companion piece to Django Unchained, the film sought to examine the lingering effects of racism, violence, and mistrust after the Civil War. –Jafarkas

02

Mad Max: Fury Road

Dir. George Miller

[Warner Bros.]

It’s difficult to enjoy a big-budget Hollywood film without awareness that what you’re investing in isn’t the journey of a character, but of a property. While it was undoubtedly shaped by the same market forces that revived other franchises, George Miller’s long-incubating fourth Mad Max demo-derby never felt like a mere sales pitch for the next sequel, spin-off, or crossover tie-in. Fury Road came out the gates with all its needles in the red, raising the series’s already high bar for mayhem and grotesquerie. We saw degenerating warlords and their mutant offspring, pallid kamikaze soldiers hopped up on silver spray paint, and fleets of the most outlandishly modified vehicles to ever grace the silver screen. Balancing anarchic set-pieces with economical character development, Miller gave us a tent-pole feature that was brutal, funny, spectacular, and timely, with a real human heart beating beneath its gallons of blood and guzzolene. And certainly studio heads are sitting around a conference table as you’re reading this, drawing up plans for how they can build an extended universe of feature films for every wizened extra lapping up the puddles in front of Immortan Joe’s palace, but no matter where the series goes from here, Mad Max: Fury Road will ride eternal, shiny and chrome. –Joe Hemmerling

01

Hard to Be a God

Dir. Aleksei German

[Kino Lorber]

A vision of history aborted, Hard to Be a God wandered, for three hours, through an endless purgatory. Watch 20 minutes, and you’ll get most of the idea: roving depravity, amorality, gallows humor, human bodies reduced to their own leaky scars, scabs, and cysts. This — the planet Arkanar, which evolved like Earth until it became trapped in an endless, pre-Renaissance squalor — was a society without art, knowledge, hope, or love. What remains when schools are destroyed, books and their scribes are burned, money is devalued, and politics has devolved into an ugly, apocalyptic stalemate?

Very little, but there’s so much of it. Hard to Be a God’s jaw-dropping excess was wrought from rudiments: bodily fluids, rotting food, and the ubiquitous implements and ornaments of war. They all found unusual uses. Intellectuals were buried in public toilets. Eyeballs were hawked by children on the streets. Hanging men were bedecked with lard and spangles. One man, referred to as Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), was meant to be our guide, a visitor from Earth on an anthropological sojourn. The citizens of Arkanar mistook him for a god, but one of the film’s jokes and tragedies was that he had no power. Forsworn from participating in or altering Arkanar’s history, Don Rumata was stuck as a passive observer to societal atrophy.

In the cinema of Aleksei German, which spanned over 40 years and resulted in half a dozen great films, civilization was history’s greatest lie, a promise approached but always, in the end, broken. His best films (1985’s My Friend Ivan Lapshin, 1998’s Khrustalyov, My Car!) were mostly set just before Stalin’s ascent and just after his death, in moments of chaos that yielded to devastating new orders. Amid national disarray, German’s films were chronically delayed and beset by governmental dictates, and those hurdles became one of his great subjects.

What do we do when we realize we have no sway and hold no power? German struggled to answer that question. Hard to Be a God couldn’t answer it affirmatively, but one of the sneaky inspirations of his final film — the film he spent 13 years making, before dying in 2013 — is its insistence that we keep living, and keep watching, and realize the vitality of art in our compromised and corrupted existence. Don Rumata found it in his jazz flute, which prompted bystanders to plug their ears. We found it in the utterly uncanny cinematography of Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenko, who gave stereoscopic dimensions to a godless hellhole. The camera became a portal to a parallel universe.

Hard to Be a God — in its monumental construction, in its astoundingly consistent and bedraggled performances, and in every grueling but relentlessly dynamic moment — was a triumph of will. It delineated the difference between a film about survival and a film about what it means to survive. It revealed The Revenant to be a mere saga of survival, similarly audacious but lacking in moral fortitude, spiritual curiosity, or simple personality. Hard to Be a God was just as ugly/beautiful, but every frame of the film quite literally bled with purpose. It was about what its characters have been robbed of: security, dignity, even sanity.

Perspective is difficult to come by in these circumstances, and Hard to Be a God’s camera, as if dizzied by the feudal fugue state of Arkanar, proved to be only loosely attached to Don Rumata. We grew familiar with the site of the world through his ornate, striated armor, but we sometimes came to realize the camera had strayed from him to walk with a stranger. Its perspective slowly democratized, as the figure behind it — an invisible documentarian, or maybe just an auteur at the height of his craft — proceeded through puddles and labyrinthine barracks. Passersby addressed it with pleas, doomsaying, or lunatic declarations. However grim their news and whatever sense they made, they spoke to the camera as it should be spoken to: as a mediator and a vessel for meaning. Roger Ebert called the movies “a machine that generates empathy,” but Hard to Be a God had little space for empathy. It couldn’t; it wouldn’t brook our good intentions. It didn’t ask us to consider how its characters survive. It asked us why we survive, and why we carry on. As such, it became a machine that generated and perpetuated existence. It’s tempting to call Hard to Be a God the film that killed Aleksei German, but we’d like to think it’s the film that kept him alive. –Christopher Gray