My Top Ten Movies of 2015

1. Room There were a lot of good movies this year, and though I may have had more fun watching some of the big, exciting adventure stories, this quiet drama remains in a special place. For one thing, it has one of the end-all best performances by a child ever filmed. Since the story is seen through the eyes of a small boy and all the information we receive is through this scared, awe-filled, little-understanding filter, it is vital that that child be someone capable of conveying all this information without revealing the movie artifice of it. 10-year-old Jacob Tremblay is asked to hold this whole very emotionally complex movie on his shoulders and it is astonishing to watch him so easily capture all the various mature nuances required of him. That's not to undermine how equally powerful star Brie Larson is as the mother of this boy, kidnapped as a teenager and forced to make the best of raising her son in her sick captor's backyard shed. Larson is a more tragic figure in the story, and she has to do some heavy-lifting with her character in moments that risk losing the audience's sympathy, something that never happens. It helps that the movie is such a joy to watch, taking this incredibly disturbing situation and somehow turning it into an experience that is inspiring, moving, and very special. Just see it.

2. Spotlight One of my favorite movies is All the President's Men, which concerned the newspaper team that uncovered the Watergate scandal through sheer journalistic brilliance. It was a movie about a story that most Americans already know inside and out, and yet it works almost on the level of a thriller, because of how it used common knowledge sparingly, focusing on the intricate details of the investigation and saving the big discoveries for moments that manage to surprise because of their delivery. Spotlight is equally powerful, and one of the great journalism movies, this time using a talented ensemble cast to tell the lesser-known story of how the Catholic church did their best to hide the fact that their priests were molesting children, and how the Boston Globe uncovered it. It's a wild ride of a movie, even without the benefit of "moments" that stand out individually, something it doesn't need anyway. Again, like Room, it's crazy how a movie can be about a subject so disturbing and yet manage to completely avoid undertones of despair. I think in this case that's accomplished by keeping the scandal itself offscreen (and even mostly undiscussed), forcing us to identify with the reporters, with their bittersweet excitement at their discoveries driving the movie to its foregone conclusion. It's a solid, wholly satisfying experience, unique in the fact that the goal of its story and characters (revealing the cover-up) is achieved in the movie itself.

3. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Watching a movie can be something very personal. It is easy to attach oneself to the movies that are the most emotionally involving, which is why there's so much hateful debate in the world of film critics, because when you get attached to a movie, it's hard to imagine why anyone else wouldn't feel the same way. I unwittingly made that kind of attachment to this indie comedy, which is about a young man named Greg who works through his angsty teenage struggles during a friendship with a cancer-ridden schoolmate. I have heard many complaints about the artificiality of the movie, which operates on a very wink-wink, intentionally quirky level, using the main character's love of great films as an excuse for endless homages and parodies. Some dislike the overall whiny nature of the protagonist and how thoughtless he, and therefore the movie, are in regards to the girl who has far more significant problems. These detractors make a fair point, but they nevertheless miss the fact that the story kind of needs to be egotistical; that it's about a guy who thinks in terms of 'Me' being in the foreground. I find the movie relatable because we all think and act like this selfish guy (Think about how many times a day you say 'I'), we all have our quirks and obsessions (For me, it's also movies), and we all need those wake-up moments that change the way we see things (For Greg, it was a friendship with a dying girl). It's rare for a movie to be this silly and thought-provoking at the same time.

4. Inside Out It's even more rare when that movie is a bouncy, animated cartoon for kids! It really is a shame that The Good Dinosaur was such a meh thing (Although, it did look really amazing visually; one of the best-looking animated movies ever) because it mars Pixar's otherwise superb track record that has brought us a whopping ten masterpieces, one of which is this story about a girl's emotions, which take the form of goofy little people who have adventures inside her head. That plot sounds so silly, and the adventures really aren't that original, I confess, with most of the movie involving the emotions Joy and Sadness getting lost in the "Memory Banks" and trying to find their way back home (It's a little alarming how many Pixar movies are also about somebody getting lost and trying to find their way home). What's novel is how genuinely funny and moving it all is, and how it works on a surprisingly universal level that will make total sense to anyone who sees it. After I saw it with my family, we had a lively discussion about which primary emotion we each had, with the consensus being that mine was Disgust. I guess that's fair, but Joy definitely takes over when I'm watching movies like this.

5. It Follows Good friends know that I have something of a weakness for horror movies, a genre that consistently proves itself unworthy of my affections, but which I'm always too willing to give another chance. The reason being that it can be difficult to find the great horror movies because it's a genre so niche that even the best entries don't get much publicity. But discovering the truly great horror movies, like last year's The Babadook and this year's It Follows, is all the more rewarding for having found it under all the other found-footage/haunted house garbage. There are so many wonderful things about this movie, beginning with the unique, mysterious, and downright terrifying monster at its center: a creature that you catch like a disease, which will undoubtedly kill you, and which you have little way of recognizing because it can look like anybody. So, the idea is creepy and the execution all the creepier. This is not a movie that relies on jolts or onscreen violence as the sole source of its terror. There's actually a fairly quiet, dreamlike quality to it and its scares are, more often than not, underplayed. I've seen it three times now and each re-viewing reveals some chilling detail I had previously missed, and I'll be revisiting it again.

6. Mad Max: Fury Road Good friends also know that the genre I'm most hard on as a critic is action, because an upsetting majority of action movies are redundant, unexciting, uninteresting bores. That being said, between Mad Max: Fury Road, Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation, Star Wars: Episode VII-The Force Awakens, and even Furious Seven and Jurassic World, this has been a really fun year for action. But the best of the pack is undeniably Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the smartest, coolest, most all-around exciting movies of the year, standing up as possibly the best of the four-movie franchise created by George Miller back in 1979. There have been some murmurings that Max himself isn't as big a character this time around as he should be, and indeed, Charlize Theron gets top billing as Imperator Furiosa, frankly the more interesting character, but that hardly makes Tom Hardy as Max impotent or underused. The movie does well in allowing ALL of its characters time to kick butt while also having realistic depth. Not that the movie has time to linger on character dimensions for too long, because for almost the entirety of its two-hour runtime it is a breathless barrage of creative action sequences that are spectacular without ever sacrificing the underlying meaning of what's actually going on. Not that it has to spell anything out either. It takes the shocking view that you can be a fun movie without also being braindead.

7. The Hateful Eight A truly last-minute inclusion on this list, but also one that shouldn't have come as a surprise, is Quentin Tarantino's eighth effort as a writer/director, a three-hour western. Is it indulgent? Yes. Does it follow the same basic structure of all of Tarantino's other movies? Yup. Does it have a profound message to relay or unique story to tell? No, not really. It's a very curious movie in how it manages to be fascinating even when nothing's going on, fun despite being depraved, and long-winded while also not being quite long enough. It is essentially an Agatha Christie style murder mystery, with Samuel L. Jackson as Inspector Poirot, solving a crime we as an audience aren't even made aware of until the last third. So the movie's brilliance isn't altogether clear until you've already seen the whole thing, since most of it is characters sitting in a cabin and chatting about things we don't yet know are significant. But what characters and chatter they are! If there's one thing I don't mind Tarantino indulging in, it's play-like banter between loud, grimy characters who are funny because they don't realize how repulsive they are. My favorite performance in this movie is the usually gentile Jennifer Jason Leigh as a cackling, perpetually blood-drenched murderess, and she's just one of several terrifically weird roles. There aren't that many movies of this size and length that have the potential to hold up after repeat viewings, but I suspect this is an exception. As long as they stay on the screen, these are characters I don't mind spending a few hours with.

8. The Martian I didn't include this sci-fi tale on that earlier list of the year's best action movies because I don't think it technically qualifies (I think it's more of a dramatic thriller. Ignore the Golden Globes' bizarre classification of comedy). Nevertheless, it has all of the elements that make not just a great thriller, but a great movie, period. For starters, there's the already immensely likable Matt Damon in a role perfectly suited for someone with his kind of star power. Since half the movie is a guy sitting on Mars alone and talking to himself, I'm so grateful they picked someone actually charismatic to play the part. Then there's the other half of the movie, populated by dozens of characters noisily scurrying around trying to solve problems.The screenplay by Drew Goddard is a perfect balance of the loneliness and hysteria that the movie has to flip-flop between, ultimately building to moments of genuine inspiration. It also does a great job of explaining the science of the movie without making us feel like morons. I have been informed that some of the scientific stuff, especially most of what happens in the very exciting climax, isn't altogether accurate, but whatever! Everything that happens in the movie, even the stuff that seems technologically or thematically unbelievable, is made believable because it's one of the most competent and satisfying thrillers you could watch.

9. Creed I now offer you full disclosure. I don't like sports, or many sports movies, nor do I usually like movies that use obvious methods of manipulation to force the viewer into caring about a story they would be indifferent towards if witnessed outside of the bubble of sweeping cinematic sensationalism. All that being said, I loved Creed, even while recognizing that I pretty much loved it precisely because of that sensationalistic manipulation I claim to usually dislike. This is a movie that tells a very familiar story, checking off all the boxes required of inspirational sports drama (Quite frankly, it's similarities to the original Rocky are rampant), but doing so in a way so sincere and personal that it's forgivable to be swept away in it. Rocky is an American classic and there are moments in Creed that are just as great as the iconic scenes in the original. The boxing scenes are appropriately enormous with fight choreography so well-executed I would believe you if you told me the actors were really fighting, and then there's the quiet moments like the entire subplot in which Sylvester Stallone's Rocky goes through hard-hitting real-life tragedy. The most baffling surprise of the movie is not just that Stallone gives a good performance compared to his past work, but that he gives a good performance compared to many other respected actors this year. There are multiple scenes in which Stallone had me tearing up, and that's because the movie did for Rocky what Skyfall did for James Bond: it took a distant, immortal figure and made him human. Heroes are a lot better when they make heroic status seem attainable.

10. Brooklyn I had a truly hard time determining just which one movie would be occupying this final spot, and there were a lot of strong contenders, but this is a movie that really stuck with me. It's a story that walks a very fine line between heart-tugging drama and nonsensical mush. I've heard it described as one-half pure joy and one-half total head scratcher. The trouble is that Brooklyn is a story that not only goes against the expected norms of romantic tales (Young couples who love each other are supposed to stay together or be forced apart, not be separated by vague cultural order), but involves situations we as 2015 moviegoers have no way of understanding. It's awfully easy to watch a character like the one played so beautifully by Saoirse Ronan and scoff at her actions, which is why the movie makes for such an interesting character study. We have all the information we need to accurately evaluate why this girl does what she does, which is more rewarding than writing off the movie because we think the situation is impossible. So, yeah, there's an hour or so of the movie that is hard to swallow, but it only makes the other hour, the one made up of pure joy, all the sweeter. This really is a lovely movie.

Honorable Mentions-99 Homes, The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Ex Machina, Goodnight Mommy, I'll See You in My Dreams, Phoenix, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Steve Jobs, The Voices

Top 5 Documentaries-Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, The Look of Silence, Listen to Me Marlon, Call Me Lucky, Amy

Top 10 TV Shows-Fargo, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Veep, Better Call Saul, Bojack Horseman, Mr. Robot, Inside Amy Schumer, Master of None, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, House of Cards