Nick's Favorites of 2015: 88 Lines About 44 Films
THE DOCUMENTARIES
5. Meru
Vertiginous first-person camerawork was an obvious selling point. What lingered, though, was not just a sense of adrenaline but of compassion and community.
4. Crocodile Gennadiy
The story of a Ukraine preacher / vigilante avoids easy lionization or chic miserablism. It dives full-bore into how outsized a man’s empathy, and ego, must be when so many lives hang in the balance.
3. Amy
Headlines about Amy Winehouse are easy to laugh at. The systematic, soulless erosion of her dignity, self-worth and prodigious talent by those purporting to love her? Less so.
2. Listen to Me, Marlon
With finesse and force, like “Song of Myself” in film form, Marlon Brando’s detached voice wrestles with his image. He reveals the craft of acting as an in-road for him to understand the human race.
1. The Look of Silence
“The wound has healed,” an Indonesian genocide survivor says. Like hell. This follow-up to “The Act of Killing" shows that distortions and delusions persist, leaving a window for atrocities to return.
THE FEATURE FILMS
39. Krampus
The ballsiest ending to a mainstream horror movie since “The Mist,” and it usurps “Gremlins” as the darkest Christmas movie kids may conceivably come across. Both are wonderful things.
38. 99 Homes
Put it on a double bill with “The Big Short." Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield skillfully, subtly explore the thorny morality of misery profiteering in the foreclosure industry.
37. What We Do in the Shadows
Proof there’s life (or afterlife) left yet in the mockumentary. Cheeky, punny and edited to a perfect length, it’s also a sweet story of friendship and families. Oh, and swearwolves. Don’t be a swearwolf.
36. The Gift
A thorny inversion of the sticks-and-stones platitude and a psychologically potent parable about victimization and vindication, keenly twisting our sympathies with three exceptional performances.
35. Mississippi Grind
Frail human hopes battle cards' cruel logic in this seriocomic, contemporary spin on the antebellum allure of a downriver gambling odyssey. It soars on unexpectedly excellent odd-couple casting.
34. Sleeping with Other People
Whither the witty, snappy, just-dark-enough romantic comedy? Here. Jason Sudeikis is a natural leading man, Alison Brie shines and writer-director Leslye Headland should be on your radar.
33. McFarland, USA
The best Disney sports film since “Miracle” thrives on a similarly charismatic lead turn from an elder statesman (Kevin Costner), cultural sensitivities and beautiful landscapes from director Niki Caro.
32. Straight Outta Compton
The second hour too often trades impact for incident, but the first is a flashpoint of ferocity with battering-ram close-ups, a tsunami of sound and a convincing cadence of catalyzed rage.
31. Ex Machina
Like Stanley Kubrick’s “Pygmalion,” a tumble of cerebral logic and carnal lust rife with playful imagination, juicy hypotheticals and funereal bleakness.
30. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Unable to sleep, I discovered this Swedish assembly of absurdist, alarming, affecting quasi-tableaux. A perfect sunrise chaser and a pocket meditation on the merits of human connection.
29. Chi-Raq
Spike Lee's best and worst in one incendiary device. Part polemic, part parody, the rhythm of its couplets and the rage of its conceit cut through: Gun violence is horrible. It must stop. Will we let it?
28. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation
You expect high-pedigree action. But what keeps this fifth installment fresh is that it’s both a raised first to the awesomeness of being The Guy and an examination of how exhausting that must feel.
27. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
J.J. Abrams takes a scenic route to your planned destination. But its exuberance for entertaining dichotomies is evident, and my estimation of its pledge may rise after the turn and prestige.
26. Avengers: Age of Ultron
Joss Whedon spins seeming second fiddles into secret weapons and puts his heroes on their heels with wearier, existential technophobic echoes of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Lonely and lively.
25. Mommy
This tale of a mother and her bipolar son crams us into tough-love reality with a 1:1 aspect ratio … and knocks us flat when it blows out into beautiful widescreen only for fantasies that will never be.
24. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Few films in 2015 so cleverly, and confidently, tinkered with expectations. On its surface, a quirky story of detached-outcast triumph. Its bold ending left you reeling about its plea to reach people.
23. Mistress America
Noah Baumbach's latest feels like what Preston Sturges may have made of millennial panic — a farce about the currency of cultural cache and the poignancy of perceiving you'll never have enough.
22. It Follows
An aggressively atmospheric and persuasive piece of paranoia about pushing the limits of sexuality, with a goosebump-raising score and one helluva beach scare.
21. Predestination
A mesmerizing, mind-melting two-hander (or is that a one-hander?) destined to someday be the source of a dozen before-she-was-a-star articles about Sarah Snook.
20. Beasts of No Nation
A Conradian journey into madness without the remove of trippy, hallucinogenic visuals. Idris Elba is at his best as the full embodiment of empowerment and exploitation.
19. Steve Jobs
A film so dissimilar from its source you suspect it was credited only because of its cost. Marvel at 2015's best short (Act I) and a finely calibrated Act III that, like Jobs, sizes you up and games you.
18. The Duke of Burgundy
An artful spin on same-sex BDSM love that blurs lines of resentment and retaliation. It’s about the hard work of making one another happy, and lovelier than a film with a human toilet would seem.
17. 45 Years
A riveting analysis of the swift annihilation when a couple lets the challenges of marriage calcify. Charlotte Rampling’s final scene will linger forever … and transform “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."
16. Love & Mercy
This Brian Wilson biopic transcends traditional pleasures to explore the sound of demons. Their persistence, lure and siren’s call … and deliverance from them that affection can provide.
15. Bone Tomahawk
Gutsy genre filmmaking with a kill you will forever remember and a harrowing meditation on Manifest Destiny that bottlenecks, like its landscapes, into an inescapably claustrophobic horror film.
14. Bridge of Spies
"Munich” crossed with “Michael Clayton" for an ethically engaging, appropriately ambiguous tale of civil liberty versus civic duty. Kafka meets Capra, with stellar work from Tom Hanks.
13. Magic Mike XXL
Yes. Hell yes. The fantasy females wanted the first one to be and an excavation of why emotional foreplay is important and an exploration of pursuing your purest creative impulses.
12. Kingsman: The Secret Service
A batshit, socially satirical action fantasy about walking back politicized perversions of patriarchy. The man-crush equivalent of Colin Firth emerging from the water in “Pride & Prejudice.”
11. Creed
In a year of rehashed nostalgia, a resurrection rooted in how past glories haunt in the here and now. A requisitely rousing sports drama and an affecting look at multigenerational pursuit of purpose.
10. Anomalisa
Using stop-motion puppetry in a tale of human sexual dissatisfaction, modern life’s malaise and (maybe) mental illness, Charlie Kaufman asks if oases of connection are but mirages.
9. The End of the Tour
Jason Segel is a revelation in a film about writerly insecurities. It suggests the byproduct of trying to get inside someone else’s head is a clearer understanding of the beauty and terror in your own.
8. Inside Out
Bing-Bong didn’t wind up my waterworks. What did? A beautiful dramatization of responding to challenges with emotional complexity and compromise. And the color of Joy’s hair.
7. Carol
An elegantly composed and impeccably acted work of gossamer beauty and gargantuan emotion. It envisions love as a reaction of incalculable power and inexplicable provenance.
6. The Hateful Eight
Tarantino’s purposefully off-putting, but outstanding, opus is unruly, untidy and unforgettable. Whether you see resigned heartbreak or resurgent optimism in its final scene, you’re right.
5. Son of Saul
This Hungarian film asks if merely striving to memorialize hope is enough to cleanse a soul. That it does so in a concentration camp never feels exploitative, and culminates in beautiful transfiguration.
4. The Big Short
Adam McKay’s film thrusts us into uproarious, infuriating insanity about how rickety our financial stilts are and how deep the swampland. Calling it cautionary suggests we’ll learn something from it.
3. Room
Jacob Tremblay carries a load of fear and wonder, Brie Larson complements with love, confusion and, most bravely, selfishness, and Room’s production design is a triumph of symbolic confinement.
2. Spotlight
Emotional, occupational and cultural suspense transcends social-issue drama by revealing a very human fallibility of memory in a job built on fumbling in the dark for truth.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
Precision, passion, and primal thrills to savor ad infinitum with new flourishes to enjoy in every round. Punkish pop-art poetry with spat stanzas of furious free verse and soft sonnets championing compassion. A plaintive wail for what its characters lose and fist-pumping optimism for what they may reclaim that thumbs its nose at pro forma expectation of nihilistic destruction. WITNESS! (OK, that's a couple extra lines, but it's my No. 1.)