Sam Woolf’s Top 10 Films Of 2015

There are no bad years for film. Well, until the last strip of celluloid shrivels up within 12 months of the Internet being devoured by the mother of all computer worms, no year can go by without a title, a name, a performance, or a breakthrough that permanently reframes discussion of the artform. The proliferation of production tools combined with growing international distribution makes every year of movies harder to stay on top of than the one that came before it. The biggest movies of the year may be the ones with the flashiest effects, broadest marketing, and most teeth, but cinema, like life, finds a way. There are, however, years of film that are more exciting to remember, or more specifically personal to a viewer than others. It matters as much about where you are in your life as it does the industry’s output, so it’s no one’s fault that, when reflecting on 2015’s best films, my blood didn’t pump and my brain didn’t race the way it did last year. 2014 gave me more movies to marvel at, re-watch, and cherish than could fit into any list of 10. 2015, in comparison, did not lack for emotional highs as high, or images as indelible as those offered in years past. While putting this list together and looking at the year as a whole, however, admiration often trumped love. Perhaps this owes in part to the language barrier that came with half my favourite films being imports, or the often troubling, dense subject matter that made many entries on this list easier to appreciate at arm’s length, rather than fully embrace. Despite my second favourite film of the year being one of the loudest, most exhilarating celebrations of spectacle in recent memory (or was Jersey Boys a 2014 release?), an air of solemnity hung over the majority of this year’s best. Conspiracies of silence born in conflicts past and present, a speechless ache for personal connection, and vaudevillian displays of melancholy connect all my favourites from 2015; perhaps it would be poor form to feel like singing their praises from the rooftops. So before we get into all that, a reminder of just a few of the many, many things one could love about 2015 in film: Michael B. Jordan boxing with shadows in Creed; Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno boogying in Ex Machina; Jermaine Clement explaining why vampire’s prefer virgin blood in What We Do in the Shadows; Jennifer Jason Leigh strumming a tune for The Hateful Eight; Marielle Heller dancing across the tightest of tightropes while making The Diary of a Teenage Girl; the Kings of Tampa putting on a show for Magic Mike XXL; Bugles rolling down a treadmill in Buzzard; the pulse-pounding drama that is threading a needle in Heaven Knows What; doleful meditation on love and loss in Heart of a Dog; an endearing new generation of heroes brought to life by The Force Awakens. All of these were characters, moments, or expressions of being worth remembering, along with these ten features I consider to be the Top 10 Films of 2015. 10) A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence The final entry in Roy Andersson’s trilogy “about being a human being,” A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence finds the Swedish director in familiar territory. Pigeon’s two-dozen or so static tableauxs dedicated to life’s absurdity are of a feather with those seen in the “living” trilogy’s other entries. A debate is held over what should be done with a dead man’s last meal; a dance instructor lusts after her reluctant student; mopey salesmen struggle to hawk monster masks. Andersson’s well-established comic sensibilities and Pigeon’s zany, but scattered vignettes make most of your first viewing feel like an extended victory lap, rather than a corker finale. It’s in the closing segments, though, that a more despairing view of Andersson’s works makes itself known, infusing not just Pigeon, but the entire “living” trilogy with an added dose of self-doubt to embitter your laughter. 9) Keeper I’m bending the rules a bit here, as the French teen drama Keeper only played a handful of festivals in 2015, and doesn’t appear to have a distribution deal just yet. However, Guillaume Senez’s modest but lyrical debut is worth drawing the foul for. A teenage pregnancy story that treats all parties involved with understanding and gentle affection, Keeper’s tremendous young leads deftly carry the heavy subject matter with buoyant, believable naiveté. The slice-of-life humanism of Senez’s unvarnished characters, and Dardennian direction mask the precision of Keeper’s symmetries: moments echo each other so purposefully that you could bisect the film as neatly as a soccer pitch. Seek it out, should you get the chance. 8) Inside Out Sweetly candy-coloured but thoughtfully layered so as to break your heart instead of your jaw, Inside Out provided a much-needed reminder that, when on its game, Pixar is among the best storytellers in the world. Combining the imagination of Monsters Inc. with the adventurousness of Up, the latest foray into the mind of writer-director Pete Docter makes for Pixar’s most elaborate and technically accomplished film to date. Inside Out is so effortlessly charming, inventive, and entertaining that it’s easy to ignore the gamble all involved took with the project. The story of an 11-year-old’s competing emotions is the trickiest one the studio has ever told, but the care put into conceiving every character, beat, and idea that make up this animated tour-de-force is plain as the tears Inside Out will have rolling down your face. 7) Carol A tale as old as time – or, at least as old as Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel - Carol is melodrama as Fabergé egg, a precious, glimmering bauble of rich colour and detail that could only be made by the finest of craftspeople. Director Todd Haynes surfaces the simmering passion and anguish of a decorously presented ‘50s love story, where every thread of hair and frock is as precisely arranged as the words of Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay. Stars Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett comport themselves with emotive meticulousness and Golden Age glamour that most would kill for just a half-share in. Throw into the mix Carter Burwell’s spellbinding score, Edward Lachman’s splendid cinematography, and the indispensable costuming design of Sandy Powell, and you’ve got the ultimate sensory romance, a drama that looks and sounds as captivating as it feels. 6) Spotlight Serving up a meaty steak of a drama as compensation for the overcooked Cobbler, Tom McCarthy’s clear-headed account of the 2002 Catholic Church sex scandal exposé satisfies like few films do. Spotlight is a throwback in some ways, an intelligently scripted, measuredly performed story of moral-guided professionals fighting against sinister forces of corruption and exploitation. The hidebound properness of McCarthy’s production has led some to doubt Spotlight’s artistic merit, which ignores the incredible creativity it takes to turn voluminous data and ostensibly mundane work into propulsive, engaging drama. Sometimes it’s just a small look, a lingering shot, or a sign on the wall, but Spotlight’s commitment to journalistic detachment is not without sentiment or poetry. It’s there, in the silence between the lines. 5) Son Of Saul No film in 2015 comes close to matching Hungarian director László Nemes’ audacious, exhausting debut for sheer impact. A painstakingly intimate portrayal of one prisoner’s wretched existence during the final days of the Auschwitz death camp, Son of Saul’s formal rigour facilitates a sober consideration of dehumanization and genocide. Though not dispassionate, Nemes’ clinical direction and the almost impenetrable lead performance of Géza Röhrig make Son of Saul both bracingly urgent and deliberately opaque. Who Saul is as a man is only revealed by the actions he takes to stay alive, and what his story reflects about the greater crimes of the Nazi regime is very little. But it’s the immediacy and myopia of this one fixed perspective that allows Nemes to manifest the individual suffering that informs all cultural and historical tragedies. If Saul, and as a result, the viewer, doesn’t look at the horror all around, it’s not for lack of empathy; it’s because who could bear to? 4) Phoenix Demure but pulpy, fraught but subdued, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a tensely sustained identity crisis. Returning to post-war Berlin after dramatic facial reconstruction, Holocaust survivor Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss, in the year’s most heart-rending performance) comes home to a man and a city that want nothing more than to forget the recent past. Unrecognizable to the husband that may have betrayed her to the Nazis, Nelly’s desperate plan to reclaim what’s been lost mirrors an international reckoning with the aftermath of World War II. A noir melodrama that freely plays on each genre’s use of colour, costuming, lighting, and staging, Petzold’s latest is a handsome production where the baroque and the austere are unconventional bedfellows. But there’s sorrow and rage crying out beneath the stately put-on, a lowly resonating banshee’s wail that Phoenix carries all the way through to its breathtaking, haunting finale. 3) The Look Of Silence Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing endeavoured to expose the senility of evil by having mass murderers gleefully reenact their contributions to the Indonesian Communist purges of 1965. Sharpening focus to that of one victim as he grapples with the past, Oppenheimer’s follow-up, The Look of Silence, is more muted in its approach, but no less distressing. As Oppenheimer’s subject, Adi, continues to meet with the men responsible for government-sanctioned violence, a wider, willful cultural amnesia comes to light. The Look of Silence is a devastatingly frank investigation into how people and nations deal with self-inflicted trauma, and is presented by Oppenheimer with a historian’s remove, but a master filmmaker’s understanding of storytelling. 2) Mad Max: Fury Road We all eventually wander to the eye of the effusive maelstrom surrounding Fury Road. Was it really as great as all the frothing worshipers claimed, or are we just so thirsty for original, high-quality action filmmaking that we’ll drink the Kool-Aid for any ambitiously assembled and thunderously wrought blockbuster? The shock and awe of witnessing Mad Max the first time can hit you like a double-barrelled shotgun blast, but it’s when reflecting on Fury Road that it proves itself to be the real deal. You recall with clarity the quiet compassion and moments of grace found amidst George Miller’s rolling heavy metal opera. You hear the roar of the War Rig, and see the corroded beauty of a wasteland ruled by those who cheat death by becoming larger than life. Mad Max: Fury Road is joy and madness strapped to a 12-cylinder engine of cinematic stimulation. You watch, you love, you watch again. 1) The Duke Of Burgundy I prefer to think it an indication of how enchanting The Duke of Burgundy is, and not an indictment of 2015’s film slate, that the best movie I watched this year is still the one I first saw at a festival 15 months ago. Maybe it was unfair to the rest of this year’s crop for a picture to always loom in the back of my mind the way this one did, the standard against which all other films were inevitably measured. Could any other 2015 offering ensnare you with opulent eccentricities and psychosexual intrigue as completely as writer/director Peter Strickland’s third feature? Could it toy with your perception of a relationship as nimbly as Evelyn and Cynthia’s tantalizingly affected, but resonantly affecting love affair did? And was it anywhere near as singular of vision, sensuously conceived, or deviously funny as The Duke of Burgundy? The more the answer came back “no,” the clearer it became that The Duke of Burgundy was a rare specimen, one worth studying and adoring for years to come.