Riding in on the hype of its good but overrated predecessor, SKYFALL, SPECTRE snuffed out the reinvigorated promise of the Bond series in a bloated and embarrassingly contrived behemoth. But in the trend of the "legacyquel", MAD MAX: FURY ROAD and CREED breathed new life into their dormant series.
A few years ago, it looked like 2015 would be the biggest year for movies we'd ever seen; the culmination of the absurdly escalating race for studio film franchises, with new installments of Jurassic Park, James Bond, the Avengers, the Hunger Games, Fast & Furious, Mission: Impossible and a meet-up of Batman and Superman (later moved to 2016, and what's more, we didn't know how dumb the trailer would look), and all of it overshadowed by nothing less than a new Star Wars movie. Well, it wasn't small.
The Best
There were a lot of good movies in 2015, movies that were a lot of fun, movies that were unexpectedly pleasant, and exciting and insightful gems, but these are the cream of the crop. These are the movies that thrilled and delighted me in the theater, then stuck with me well after; the movies that had an impact on a real gut level and that earned a place in my heart. A couple of them are mainstream masterpieces that have extremely strong cases to last through the years as classics, and a couple of them are smaller, but immensely gripping and smart adult fare. A great movie should excel in at least two of the following three categories: emotional stimulation, intellectual stimulation and visceral thrills. These movies excel in all three departments.
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (ACTION)
Starring: Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Nicholas Hoult, Josh Helman, Nathan Jones, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Richard Carter
Rated R for intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images.
Three decades since the last installment in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max franchise with which he made his name, decades in which he largely occupied with family entertainment like BABE and HAPPY FEET and their sequels, Australian director George Miller returned with a masterpiece of action filmmaking. The fruits of a difficult and densely planned shoot in Namibia, FURY ROAD is in part a heart-pounding two-hour car chase in the best way, comprised of beautifully unique and wild vehicles roaring through a stark desert landscape which Max aptly sums up as a world of "fire and blood", with dazzling Cirque du Soleil-style stunts such as "polecats" who swing from one vehicle to the next on giant pendulums, and the "Doof Wagon", a whole vehicle devoted to carrying a rock band, including a mutated guitar player on the front with a flame-throwing instrument. And yet, FURY ROAD is hardly limited to its exceptional style, but is also a powerful feminist neo-western about women reclaiming their identities from a brutal patriarchal warlord and a war-mongering civilization. The whole cast, including a surprisingly low-key titular character played by Tom Hardy, and mad dog warrior "War Boy" Nicholas Hoult, Abbey Lee as a feisty young runaway "breeder" referred to as "The Dag", and model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (whose previously starred in the dreadful TRANSFORMERS: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON) as a very pregnant but defiant breeder, is all excellent, plus there are characters with awesome names like the Organic Mechanic (a doctor). At the center of it all, however, is the story of Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, a lieutenant of the cruel warlord Immortan Joe, who betrays her master to free his "wives", or breeders, and one of the great movie characters of 2015. FURY ROAD, the movie, is also the best action scene of the year.
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| Image via Warner Brothers |
INSIDE OUT (ANIMATION/FAMILY)
Featuring the Voices of: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Mindy Kaling, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan
Rated PG for mild thematic elements and some action.
After the severely misguided CARS 2, the disappointing and impersonal BRAVE, and the hopelessly vanilla MONSTERS UNIVERSITY, Pixar finally delivered something on par with their initial streak of classic films with INSIDE OUT, an innovative and emotional tour de force on a level that is unfortunately unlikely to be matched by Pixar anytime soon as their next two scheduled features are FINDING DORY, an unnecessary sequel (for lack of a better term) that might be good but has the stink of a cash-grab about it (and how often does turning the focus on the comic sidekick really work out?), and CARS 3, the Pixar sequel that no one wanted. But I digress. From longtime Pixar "braintrust" member Pete Docter, in his followup to 2009's UP, one of the best of the studio's best, INSIDE OUT explores the emotional psyche of an 11-year-old girl in a colorful vision that is funny, complex and accessible, forming deeply empathetic film that in turn encourages and provides the tools to its audience to be more empathetic themselves. The often hilarious interplay between the perfectly-cast personified emotions Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black) and Fear (Bill Hader), contrasted with their counterparts occasionally shown inside other human minds, provokes lots of thought and conversation about the dominating emotional influences in ourselves and the people we interact with, essentially helping the viewer to in fact be a 'better person'. With something as little and yet something so significant as the emotional well-being of an 11-year old girl on the line, it succeeds in the old cliche of a movie that will make you laugh, make you cry, and have you on the edge of your seat. It's an emotional wallop and an intellectual delight that can stand alongside Pixar's other classics.
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| Image via Disney |
SPOTLIGHT (DRAMA)
Starring: Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Liev Schreiber, Brian D'Arcy James, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup, Len Cariou
Rated R for some language including sexual references.
Some critics have compared Tom McCarthy's drama about a team of investigative journalists who uncovered the immense breadth of a cover-up by the Catholic Church in Boston to hide an epidemic of child sex abuse by priests to the 1976 classic ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. Those comparisons are not at all unfounded. Based on the true story of The Boston Globe's special investigative team "Spotlight", which began, somewhat reluctantly, to look into the church's systematic protection of child sex predators within their ranks from the law in 2001, SPOTLIGHT stars Michael Keaton as team leader Walter Robinson, with fellow journalists Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams). With incredible sensitivity and aplomb, the film, written and directed by McCarthy, provides a personal and comprehensive picture of a fight against the powers-that-be, the ways in which such a system of corruption operates with the unconscious complicity of many, and the crises of faith faced by people bringing down the facade of an institution that speaks so much to how they see themselves. It's a powerful testament in favor of the free press, free to question and report and an integral part of a democratic society to hold power accountable while independent news media languishes in the shadow of big corporate media beholden to moneyed interests and sensationalist 24-hour cable news. It an important film, no doubt, and it is a deeply engaging procedural dramatic-thriller with an exceptional cast that brings tons of flavor as their characters are forced to overcome tremendous obstacles in the ever-present shadow of the Church and the society it permeates, acting as a shield, in order to uncover the truth. It's a triumph and a tragedy, with deeply flawed human persons who must deal with their own sense of faith as lapsed Catholics and lifelong Bostonians, as well as their devotion to devout family members, and the conflict between the tremendous good that an institution provides and the evil rot that subsists on the same. It's both sobering and rousing, a precise and gripping experience.
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| Image via Open Road Films |
SICARIO (ACTION-THRILLER/DRAMA)
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, Daniel Kaluuya, Maximiliano Hernandez, Victor Garber, Jon Bernthal, Raoul Trujillo, Jeffrey Donovan
Rated R for strong violence, grisly images, and language.
Grimly insightful into an unwinnable conflict around which a cycle of ever-escalating violence has grown around it, Denis Villeneuve's drug war drama SICARIO is one of the year's most exciting and thought-provoking films, one that is above all an experience, dropping the viewer on the ground in the midst of the thoroughly ambiguous "War on Drugs" through the eyes of Emily Blunt's straight-arrow new recruit to a CIA Special Activities Division squad fighting the Mexican drug cartels at the border. Shot by the frequently hailed Roger Deakins, it's a gorgeous film about ugly deeds, with some of the most thrilling set-pieces of any movie this year, such as a searingly intense sequence where U.S. agents become trapped with cartel thugs in a traffic jam while attempting to cross over the border with a valuable prisoner extraction. The three leads of Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin are each exceptional and share riveting interplay, and the movie hits hardest when it shows the intimate cost of war on not only its participants, but also its bystanders. It's a nerve-wracking visceral experience with a lot of substance to it, a ruthless, heart-pounding examination of not only the War on Drugs, but the nature of war itself, and an indictment of our often too-comfortable perspective on it as Americans.
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| Image via Lionsgate |
The Worst
I don't actively seek out new bad movies generally. If I've already seen the movie or otherwise have a pretty strong idea that a particular movie is bad in that oh-so-special way, I might indulge myself, but I want to give products newly on the market as much of a chance as I can muster. It's rare to go in blindly about a movie, and based on the previous work of the persons involved, the material, marketing and earlier audience reactions, I usually have some idea of what I'm getting into, which I hope gives the movie an advantage, avoiding unpleasant surprises that I might perceive more harshly otherwise. I have notions going into a movie that are similar to most people considering whether or not to see a movie, but these will rarely influence (consciously, at least) my decision to see a movie, and I do not go to a movie with a desire to dislike it. I want to see as many movies as I can, and though I may prioritize, I don't think there are movies that should not be seen. These movies sucked as far as I'm concerned, but do not take that to mean in any way that I'm advising you to not see them. If you want to see a movie, go see it. If you like it, and I don't, then I'd love to have a hopefully not too heated discussion about it with you, because that's all part of connecting through and better understanding film. You can't have the good without the bad, and there's always a minority opinion. You can always find someone who likes what everyone else loathes, and you can always find someone who loathes what everyone else loves. So I'm not saying you shouldn't see these movies. In fact, I hope you have, so you'll either find feelings you share, or feelings to challenge your own. For me, it's a little bit cathartic.
PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2 (COMEDY)
Directed by Andy Fickman
Starring: Kevin James, Raini Rodriguez, Neal McDonough, Daniella Alonso, David Henrie, Loni Love, D.B. Woodside
Rated PG for some violence.
Just consider for a moment that there is an actual movie called PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2. That is the actual title of an actual movie that was shown in as many as 3,633 theaters nationwide. It was a movie that a company spent $30 million to make. Consider that there were enough human beings in the world that this movie, once again, called PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2, grossed $107 million worldwide. Now cry yourself to sleep. Okay, just kidding (sort of), there's simply no accounting for taste, but as yet another insult to their paying public from Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, the sequel to the 2009 surprise hit is lazy even by their standards. It's not as obnoxious or tasteless as Happy Madison's usual fare, but everyone is going through the motions on this dreadfully dumb slog that doubles as a less than enticing advertisement for the Wynn Las Vegas Hotel, in which the entire movie takes place. The jokes are surprisingly few and far in between, and not a one lands (particularly sleep-deprived or inebriated viewings may be slightly enhanced), and the whole production as an amateur, made-up-on-the-fly air about it, as if the filmmakers doubted anyone would see the movie anyway.
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| Image via Sony Pictures |
Directed by Paul McGuigan
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, James McAvoy, Jessica Brown Findlay, Andrew Scott, Charles Dance, Freddie Fox, Mark Gatiss
Rated PG-13 for macabre images, violence and a sequences of destruction.
Taken in small doses, VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN fits very well into the "so-bad-it's-good" category, but taken in all 110 minutes at once, it's simply too much. In a brainless "reimagining" of Mary Shelley's classic novel scripted by John Landis' son Max Landis, Daniel Radcliffe does his best as mild-mannered hunchback Igor saved from a cruel life as a circus freak by brash and ambitious medical student named Victor Frankenstein, played at an 11 by James McAvoy. There are plenty of ridiculous conveniences like Victor's relatively easy (and incredibly homoerotic) fix of Igor's hump by siphoning pus out of a gigantic cyst on his back and giving him a back brace so the character can walk upright for most of the film, deeply upsetting visuals like Radcliffe done up like a dirty old-timey clown, and an abundance of homoerotic notes that may or may not be intentional but are always ridiculous. Radcliffe tries, while McAvoy just seems to be making fun of the movie he's in, and Andrew Scott, as a devout Catholic police inspector, seems forever bound to the ghosts of his role as Moriarty in BBC's Sherlock. Director Paul McGuigan (also a veteran of Sherlock), working from Landis' script, seems unable to settle on a genre and switches it around without rhyme or reason between inept, speed-ramped action, manic horror, comedy (may or may not be intentional) and gooey romance, and at the end of the wreckage, it has the audacity to suggest a sequel. It had one of the worst box office openings of all time, so that's not happening.
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ty Simpkins, Vincent D'Onofrio, Nick Robinson, Irrfan Khan, Jake Johnson, Omar Sy, BD Wong, Judy Greer, Lauren Lapkus, Katie McGrath
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of science-fiction violence and peril.
Like the result of a worldwide gas leak, JURASSIC WORLD broke numerous box office records and became the third-highest-grossing movie of all time (records surpassed substantially by STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS six months later, which will almost definitely knock JURASSIC WORLD down a peg in the all-time rankings eventually, too), and now nobody has anything to say about it. Colin Trevorrow's long-gestating sequel/reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise could have merely been an idiotic, pointless monster movie, but that wasn't enough. JURASSIC WORLD is fully aware of and acknowledges its inherent cynicism, and what's more, it's startlingly mean-spirited (surpassing Spielberg's own unexpectedly nasty THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK) and misogynistic, in its most sickening moment delivering what may be the series' most gratuitous and cruel death (a more brief but similarly sick death was dealt to Richard Schiff in LOST WORLD) to an established but minor character loosely defined as a "bridezilla". The hugely charismatic Chris Pratt is drained of all charisma is a role more befitting the talents of a Jai Courtney or Sam Worthington, a horrible human being named Owen Grady who sexually harasses his embarrassingly incompetent boss played by Bryce Dallas Howard, whose character is a bit of real retrograde "career woman" shaming, but who we're supposed to root for. It's a big, CGI-laden box office movie that makes all the wrong choices with uncanny consistency, carelessly ignoring or eliminating anything about itself that might work and embracing all its worst potential.
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| Image via Universal Pictures |
Directed by Josh Trank
Starring: Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, Tim Blake Nelson, Dan Castellaneta
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and language.
The fact that a movie like Fox's disastrous Fantastic Four reboot exists in this age of overly manicured, assembly line-style studio franchises is a minor miracle that nobody can use. It's only partially formed and feels as though the people involved realized too soon where the film was headed, and unable to simply jump ship went through the rushed motions of getting it over with rather than bother with any attempts at salvaging. It's a movie truly dead on arrival, dumped out of obligation, mangled by fiercely conflicting interests on the parts of the young director handed the reins to a $120M franchise picture on his second film and the studio with no faith in a product they nonetheless wanted to join the ranks of A-list superhero film properties. The result is an incoherent, completely detached mess of a movie that builds to a comically nothing finale, wasting an abundance of onscreen talent that seems as dissatisfied as we are.
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| Image via 20th Century Fox |
AMERICAN SNIPER (WAR/DRAMA)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Max Charles, Luke Grimes, Kyle Gallner, Sam Jaeger, Navid Negahban, Sammy Sheik
Rated R for strong and disturbing war violence, and language throughout including some sexual references.
AMERICAN SNIPER opened in limited release on Christmas 2014, but didn't open nationwide until January 2015, so while it's technically a 2014 film, I didn't see it until this year, and it's too contemptible and inept a movie to escape notice, especially in light of its success. Based on the memoir of U.S. Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, director Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper, who produced the film and portrays Kyle, described in interviews an project I can get on board with, a film that shows the toll of war on the people fighting in it and their families on the home front, a film that raises awareness of the plight faced by veterans transplanted from the trauma of combat back into 'normal life' with post-traumatic stress disorder. That is not the film they made, not by a long-shot. The movie AMERICAN SNIPER is morally and artistically bankrupt with only the minor grace of a solid Bradley Cooper performance. The script is clunky and confused, attempting to apply an old-style western template of 'white hats' and 'black hats' to the deeply ambiguous Iraq War, resulting in a lot of uncomfortably racist tones and hokey false moralizing and hero worship. Eastwood's direction is dull and impersonal, while the washed-out look of the film and occasionally cheap-looking production are ugly (the widely noted "fake baby" scene feels both farcical and disturbing as Kyle and his wife Taya (played by Sienna Miller) argue while he cradles the transparently fake doll that looks dead). Put aside the dubious depiction of controversial Iraq War (well, more controversial than the average war), put aside the alleged politicking and jingoism, the movie's most egregious failure is in what should have been, and what Cooper and Eastwood claimed, was its priority to highlight the issues facing traumatized veterans who return from war. PTSD is summed up in the film as Kyle momentarily threatening a dog with a barbecue fork, solved simply through a bit of therapy and hanging out with fellow veterans, with a cured Kyle going off to die off-screen for a sudden and unjustified sucker punch ending. Kyle was killed by a veteran suffering from PTSD! That's integral to what they claim this film is meant to be addressing! How can they make that claim and completely ignore its culmination? Why do we sympathize with Kyle's plight, and not with that of the man he was trying to help when he was fatally shot at a firing range? In the end, it's a distasteful and exploitative sap piece that does disservice to our veterans by attempting to romanticize their suffering and sanitize the nature of war.
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| Image via Warner Brothers |
The Overlooked
I don't see enough movies to have the knowledge preferred to draw the best gems from the vast pool of independent and insufficiently distributed films that most people of never heard of at all like some sort of NPR critic, but I've seen a few more than the average person, including a couple that failed to connect with the audience they deserved.
LOVE & MERCY (DRAMA/ROMANCE)
Starring: John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Giamatti, Jake Abel, Kenny Wormald, Brett Davern, Graham Rogers, Erin Darke, Joanna Going
Rated PG13 for thematic elements, drug content and language.
The story of the Beach Boys' creative leader, Brian Wilson, portrayed in youth by Paul Dano and in his middle age by John Cusack, is told through two chapters of his life; at the peak of his artistic powers as he crafts the revolutionary avant-garde album Pet Sounds in the 1960s and deals with the onset of psychotic hallucinations, and in the 1980s when he finds new love, played by Elizabeth Banks, who struggles to free him from an abusive relationship with his therapist, played by Paul Giamatti. I don't know much about the artistic side of music or what makes Pet Sounds so great, but LOVE & MERCY gives me some idea. The performances are all stellar and Michael Lerner's and Oren Moverman's script avoids the well-known cliches of music bipoics while delivering on real emotional weight.
SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE (ANIMATION/FAMILY-COMEDY)
Rated PG for rude humor.
The clumsily titled SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE admittedly didn't look that promising, despite coming from Aardman Animation, the studio behind delightful gems like CHICKEN RUN and WALLACE & GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT, as well as hilariously cruder fare like FLUSHED AWAY. Based a ho-hum television series and not offering much to go on from the marketing, it appeared surprisingly lackluster, but the movie itself is surprisingly brilliant. It's simple and more rough around the edges than Aardman's previous features, but it's overflowing with moment after moment of clever hilarity, and pleasurably simplistic.
CHI-RAQ (DRAMA/COMEDY) Directed by Spike Lee
Starring: Teyonah Parris, Nick Cannon, Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Samuel L. Jackson, John Cusack, Jennifer Hudson, David Patrick Kelly, D.B. Sweeney, Dave Chapelle
Rated R for strong sexual content including dialogue, nudity, language, some violence and drug use.
127 minutes
If I'd seen CHI-RAQ sooner, it might have eventually made its way to a spot on the "Best" list, but for now, I'll at least include it here, because it deserves to be seen. It opened in a limited release of 305 theaters on December 4 before arriving on Amazon Video for rental and purchase a few weeks later, so you can watch it from the comfort of your own home. The latest and best film in a long while from controversy-meister Spike Lee, the title is a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, denoting a war zone nature to the city's Southside. It's a modernized and ultra-timely adaptation of Aristophanes' ancient Greek play Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece withheld physical affection from their men in protest of the Peloponnesian War, translated to present-day Chicago, where women do the same in demands that their men give up their violent ways and firearm fetishism, in a movement organized by a gang banger's girlfriend, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris). With an illustrious cast including Samuel L. Jackson as the Greek chorus-style narrator, the dialogue is primarily in rhyming verse, contributing to a heightened reality, that occasionally gets very weird, but kind of fun and brings a quasi-musical feel. The emotional beats hit their mark too, though, and Lee's passion, about things that were going on all throughout 2015 and continue today, is unmistakable and contagious.
Movies in Consideration
Although I watch more new movies than the "average person", and for my own small part in the business, many of these I watch free of cost, I'm very much an amateur reviewer/critic/writer and must seek movies out rather than a professional who may be sought out by the movies. As such, please note that while I watch the most movies that I am able, I still have a lot of catching up to do for movies in 2015, and for the sake of clarity and context, the following is a comprehensive list of the new released films of 2015 that I've watched as of this writing.
TAKEN 3
PADDINGTON
JUPITER ASCENDING
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE
THE DUFF
MCFARLAND, USA
FOCUS
CINDERELLA
THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT
HOME
IT FOLLOWS
FURIOUS 7
THE LONGEST RIDE
FREETOWN
PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2
THE AGE OF ADALINE
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
I AM BIG BIRD: THE CAROLL SPINNEY STORY
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
PITCH PERFECT 2
TOMORROWLAND
SAN ANDREAS
THE COKEVILLE MIRACLE
LOVE & MERCY
JURASSIC WORLD
ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
MAX
INSIDE OUT
MINIONS
ANT-MAN
PIXELS
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION
FANTASTIC FOUR
SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.
NO ESCAPE
MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS
HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2
THE INTERN
SICARIO
THE MARTIAN
THE WALK
PAN
BRIDGE OF SPIES
CRIMSON PEAK
GOOSEBUMPS
STEVE JOBS
THE PEANUTS MOVIE
SPECTRE
SPOTLIGHT
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 2
THE NIGHT BEFORE
CREED
THE GOOD DINOSAUR
VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN
KRAMPUS
IN THE HEART OF THE SEA
STAR WARS: EPISODE VII - THE FORCE AWAKENS
TANGERINE
THE BIG SHORT
THE HATEFUL EIGHT
CHI-RAQ
THE REVENANT
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