My Top 25 Movies of 2015
It’s that time of year again - This year is going to be a little different though. There will be no epic write-up like the previous years.
There’ll be no 50 to 26 countdown etc. I’m a new dad now with commitments all over the place nowadays so I’m posting this so my list gets to stand alongside and be compared against the other lists from previous years - but time is not on my side for me to go into that level of detail.
What I’m going to do is blast through a few films that deserve ‘special mention’, then cover the films that fell just outside the list and then just lay my Top 25 of 2015 out in list form and let it speak for itself. Reviews by me for the films themselves within the final list should be easy enough to find.
So, ‘Special Mentions’?
Well, it goes without saying that we have to give a shout out to the really rather brilliant Bone Tomahawk which is still unreleased here in the UK but which I saw via a friends’ review-screener. It really is as excellent as you’ve heard - but also as brutal and as hard-going in its final stretch. Borgman, which also hasn’t been released outside of the festival circuit but which I imported on DVD, is a creepy and uncomfortable but fascinating watch which I’ve returned to twice more in the last year. Virunga set the stage early for a banner year for documentaries and is available now on Netflix. A Teacher was dumped to iTunes here in the UK but has a tremendously well realised lead performance and plays its salacious subject matter to quite a tender effect. I adored Welcome To Me, doubly so Kristen Wiig’s performance in it, and don’t understand why it has still not been released here outside of the Edinburgh Film festival. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is a fascinating watch for film fans. It’s now available on Netflix. And finally, Faults landed unceremoniously on iTunes (and later DVD) here without much fanfare and yet, based off the lead performances alone, it deserved better as it is a darkly funny and engrossing character play.
Onto the films that didn’t make the cut but were strong enough to have been given serious consideration:
In terms of horror movies, the werewolf movies Late Phases and Howl were both highly enjoyable watches. The former for doing a ‘creature feature’ by way of a laconic 70s movie. The latter for evoking the go-for-broke British Dog Soldiers esque thrills and chills B-movie mentality. Cub was an excellent spin on the slasher movie. Cooties, driven by terrific casting, was delightfully demented zombie mayhem. And Krampus ended the year very, very nearly taking a slot on my eventual Top 25 as a straight-out-the-gate Christmas mini-classic.
There was some genuinely great indie movies too. The Overnight was engaging and sexy and uncomfortable and fun in just about equal measures. Turbo Kid was a really nice love letter to anyone who grew up in the 80s obsessing over worn-down VHS copies of post-apocalyptic Mad Max rip-offs. And White God was an enthralling allegory with some animal choreography I’m in awe that they pulled off seeing as I can’t even get my dog to not eat the post.
Comedy wise, both Top Five gets an honourable mentions for being considerably better than I ever thought either would be. The majority of Chris Rock’s cinematic output has been uniformly mediocre and downright awful so a ‘vanity project’ like Top Five did not hold much appeal. And yet it ended up as one of the warmest, industry-poking, well-cast comedies of the year… that unfortunately lets itself down by adhering to stale third act rom-com conventions.
Across the board elsewhere, Everest was stunning and gripping but let down by a typically shoddy Keira Knightley performance that thankfully wasn’t big enough to derail the film but still stood out like a sore-thumb in a sea of brilliant performances from the rest of the cast. The little British movie, Still Life, deserves highlighting because it was lovely AND heartbreaking AND it lays down in concrete what we have all secretly suspected for a while - Eddie Marsan is incapable of giving a bad performance. Marshland was a terrific police procedural that more people needed to see but was hindered by the True Detective comparisons at a time when the True Detective: Season 2 backlash was starting to gather heat. I genuinely loved Southpaw in all its cliche-soaked glory and thought very highly of Jake Gyllenhaal’s lead performance in it. I certainly didn’t and don’t understand the criticisms against it playing too safely to sports-movie beats when we’re not so judgemental of comic book movies for doing the same thing. I adore Paul Thomas Anderson movies and wanted to love Inherent Vice more than I did. I really liked it a lot. But I fell short of loving it. Which is the first Anderson movie I can say that about - though I grow colder towards The Master with each revisit. Then there was Foxcatcher which I liked a great deal and thought Steve Carell was revelatory in but, having read the true facts of this real life case, I was turned off towards the longer the movie played and the more it veered into salacious subjectiveness and away from its original ‘true crime’ angle.
In terms of action movies, I thought Fast & Furious 7 was a better blockbuster than it had any right to be given the circumstances of its production, but the messiah like finale for Vin Diesel's character indicates this franchise will now be driven off a cliff by his ego. Whilst we’re talking about underrated, under-seen and under-appreciated action movies from this last year we have to give a shout out to both Guy Richie’s The Man From UNCLE (which was the superior spy movie to Spectre) and Joe Lynch’s Everly, a “Die Hard in an apartment with a sex slave as John McClane” slice of bonkers B-movie excess. The Hunger Games: Mockingly - Part 2 was dependably enjoyable and a suitably solid conclusion to a surprisingly gripping franchise, hurt by the greed of unnecessarily carving the final film into two parts. Jurassic World was a surprising joy with blockbuster excess on show for all to see and delivered so assuredly that not even an awful Blyth Dallas-Howard could ruin it. Avengers: Age of Ultron was a mess but a goddamn glorious one with the Seoul chase sequence proving to be one of the year’s most enjoyable action set-pieces.
Finally, in terms of ‘also-rans’, we have got to give specific mention to this smorgasbord of documentaries. This has been one of the best years for documentary features in quite some time. Call Me Lucky, now available on Netflix, is a deeply, deeply moving documentation of abuse, recovery and effecting change. Misery Loves Comedy was funny, fascinating and full of great comedians… and Jimmy Fallon. Amy was a monumental surprise considering I never liked the woman, her music or her father and yet I found myself broken-hearted and mourning her by the film’s end. Listen To Me Marlon was a gift to movie lovers. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King was equal parts quirky and sad. The Nightmare was an uncomfortable and unsettling watch that didn’t fully commit to its own subject unfortunately. Tyke - Elephant Outlaw was this year’s Blackfish (both now available on Netflix) and served as a further rallying cry to why using animals as live entertainment needs to be banned once and for all. 3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets was an extremely pertinent, enthralling watch that landed at the very time that this worrying spike in the murder of unarmed black men in America is occurring. It builds and builds to a hell of a conclusion. And finally there was Palio which ended up being one of the biggest delights of the year in terms of documentaries that I would never have normally had any interest in seeing at face value - a sporting underdog story about a centuries-old foreign horse race!
And onto my Top 25 movies of 2015 which, for anyone who follows me on social media, will offer zero surprises in terms of the Top 5 itself:
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