Year in Review: Top 10 Films of 2016

Here we arrive, then, at the annual tradition of narrowing the hundreds of films released and seen in a year to 10 or so. I have never come up with a satisfactory answer for why this is done. The closest I can come is this: Only the crazed and obsessive among us will approach seeing even half the films released in a year, and providing a top 10 or 20 allows those burgeoning but busy cinephiles to focus on a well curated selection of the year’s best offerings. Why order the list – a practice against which no less an authority than Roger Ebert once tried to rebel? Simply, if one sees only one or two movies in a year, start at the top and move down.

Our basic purpose defined, then what does this specific list mean? Almost every one of these films could be found on other lists out there – and there are a few I turn to more often than others such as the BFI Sight and Sound poll and the National Board of Review. Left for me to consider, then, is what if anything this specific list in this specific order means about me. I do not know if I am the most easily knowable person, but were one to try, he could do no better than a list of films I think are important. So as much as I wish this to be a guide for you, dear reader, to the movies I hope you seek out, it is a guide to me as a person and what I feel about the world right here and right now.

Before we get to the list, five other films you could do worse than spending two or so hours with: Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, a glimpse of the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of a man who lived and breathed it; Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow, an anti-war protest film disguised as a horror movie set in 1980s Tehran after the revolution; Ava DuVernay’s 13th, a bracing, comprehensive study of black America’s struggle from its roots in slavery through the present; John Carney’s Sing Street, a beautiful ode to youthful rebellion and the uplifting power of music; and Jeff Nichols’ Loving, a quiet, meditative film that celebrates the strength of a single voice (or a pair of voices in unison) amid the din and clatter of hatred and bigotry.

10. I, Daniel Blake, directed by Ken Loach

What I, Daniel Blake comes down to is this: Systems will not help us; only people will help us. I am defining help broadly here as anything that improves our lives. No system ultimately can improve our lives as much or as efficiently as the people around us. Loach’s film, from a tremendous script by Paul Laverty (their second Palm d’Or winner together after The Wind That Shakes the Barley in 2006), is undeniably angry, fed up with austerity and bureaucracy and governments that care more about self-perpetuation than governing, but at its core, it is a deeply human story about small kindnesses.

Daniel (Dave Johns, a comedian in his film debut, though he has been on television and stage for years) is a widower with a heart problem. A carpenter by trade, his doctor tells him he cannot return to work as the strain on his heart would be too much. However, after a government physical, the state tells him he is fit to work and he will not receive his medical benefits. He goes on unemployment, but the strict rules for earning unemployment benefits – including using computer skills he does not possess – leave him without the means to support himself.

While he is in the employment office attempting to arrange his medical appeal, he overhears Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two forced from their residence in a homeless hostel in London due to squalid conditions. She is being railroaded by the same system as Daniel, and he has had enough. It is one thing to push him around, he determines, but he cannot sit by and watch it happen to someone else. He befriends her and her two children, and they form a makeshift family, out of necessity, yes, but primarily out of an innate desire to be kind to one another.

There are no easy resolutions in this film because the adversities experienced by these characters are real, and they are happening all over right now. People who want to work cannot for reasons medical, family, or elsewise, but the state does not see reasons, only statistics, only another jobless person to burden the government. This is what bureaucracies do – they reduce people to numbers in a formula, then remove humanity from the equation. Systems cannot tolerate humanity because they cannot understand it, so it falls to us, the people, to show to each other what no system can – compassion and kindness.

9. Jackie, directed by Pablo Larraín

The greatness of Jackie lies in a triptych of elements coming together to form a masterful portrait of perhaps the defining moment of the 20th century: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. No single moment provides as clear a schism in the American experience as that fateful split second Nov. 22, 1963, when a man pulled his trigger and shook the world. We have seen the assassination on screen before in countless ways from countless angles but never in this way from this angle with this director, this script, and this star.

It does not take long to realize you are in for a different experience. From the first moment Larraín and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine’s grainy footage washes across the screen, Jackie becomes an eerily subjective rendering of Jacqueline Kennedy’s life in the White House. Often shot in extreme close-ups, the visual language of the film suggests a woman who must suffer the constant bombardment and invasion of a nation’s interest but who is smart enough to use that to her advantage. At first, Jackie seems overwhelmed, but at last, she seems – and is – powerful.

The script by Noah Oppenheim smartly zeroes in on Jackie’s mental state in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death. This narrow focus gives Larraín the freedom to make the film about the first lady’s subjective experience. Oppenheim takes this historical figure and finds what made her relatable and beloved while showing the calculation that went into establishing the Jackie O aura. Her concern for her husband’s legacy – at one point, she asks her driver his knowledge of another president who died in office; he has none – gives her a goal to focus on amid her grief. In so doing, she helps define one of the most enduring legacies in modern history.

Through it all, there is Natalie Portman as Jackie. I discussed her performance in depth yesterday in my Top 10 Performances column, so I will only briefly touch on it here, but suffice it to say, the film would not succeed without Portman’s stunning work at its center. Most great performances are like wonderfully written prose – precise, detailed, and nuanced. Portman’s Jackie, while full of precision, detail, and nuance, is closer to poetry, flowing seamlessly in and out of ideas and drifting along a rhythm of her own making. It carries us along, and by the end, we are thankful for the ride.

8. Moana, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker

Little in this life makes me as happy as being surprised at the movies. It does not happen often anymore. I am too inquisitive about films. I want to know what they are about, how they are regarded, what went into their development, all before I see them. So, even with great films, every other film on this list in fact, I had some idea going in they would be great, that I would appreciate them. Moana hit me like an arrow from Cupid’s bow. I had no idea it was coming, but I fell in love.

In every department, this is the best non-Pixar film Disney has produced in a long time. Beginning with the absolutely stunning animation, Moana pulls you in via a wordless opening sequence in which we meet the title character and learn her relationship to the ocean. The water effects alone impress, but the character designs, the small, in-world details, and the wonderful depth of explorable space all add up to the kind of rich experience rarely found in children’s movies.

The soundtrack, composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foa’i, and Mark Mancina, is gloriously realized and endlessly hummable. Songs like the opening number “Where You Are,” “We Know the Way,” and “You’re Welcome” demonstrate a fluidity with verse, daringness with style, and facility for arrangement lacking in lesser animated musicals. The show-stopper, “How Far I’ll Go,” a solo effort by Miranda as performed by Moana voice actor Auli’i Cravalho, belongs in the pantheon of great Disney songs with “Bare Necessities,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” and “Let It Go.”

Finally, it is a winning story about a young girl with drive, ambition, courage, and talent, the kind of character rarer at the cinema than she ought to be. At every turn, the film is charming, exciting, and simply delightful, but its ending, which I will not reveal, is its true masterstroke. Where nearly every film of this kind before it took one path, Moana takes another, and rather than celebrate the destruction of something evil, it embraces and revels in the creation of something good.

7. The Handmaiden, directed by Chan-wook Park

This film is why words like “sumptuous” were invented. Adapted by Park and Seo-kyeong Jeong from Sarah Waters’ novel “Fingersmith,” The Handmaiden is a twisting, twisted tale of love, passion, deceit, and betrayal told against the backdrop of the Japanese occupation of Korea in the 1930s. If I told you everything contained within this film, you would not believe me. There is even a chance you will see the film and not believe what you saw.

Con artists, double-crosses, triple-crosses, lesbian love affairs, insane asylums, and a library of every type of pornography imaginable – Park stuffs his film to bursting with so much lurid and illicit subject matter one could almost miss its studious formalism, its impressively byzantine narrative structure, and its outright beauty. Almost. For as much sex and sensuality as is trotted out, The Handmaiden is never prurient. The camera does not ogle these women, so neither do we.

Tae-ri Kim plays Korean con artist Sook-Hee, employed by “Count” Fujiwara (Jung-woo Ha) to insinuate herself into the life of heiress Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim) in order to steal her fortune. She becomes the wealthy woman’s handmaiden, and the deeper and more intimate their relationship grows, Sook-Hee becomes less able to discern whether she is still pulling a con, genuinely falling in love, or being conned herself. The performances by all three actors are brilliantly mannered and cleverly insane.

By the time Park pulls the rug out from under the audience at the end of the elongated first act, he has so thoroughly brought us into his world we would let him do anything. This is good because the rug will come out at least twice more. As reveal after reveal and false reveal after false reveal pile on top of one another, your jaw drops at the sheer audacity of the strategy, and you are ultimately thankful for a movie that treats you as smart enough to keep up.

6. Weiner, directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg

I saw this movie at the end of May, by which time we were all hopelessly enmeshed in the presidential election cycle and unbelievably had more than five months still to go. It still does not feel quite over, does it? My sneaking suspicion is it never will. It is a fine mess we made of democracy, a lovely theory but which has proved unsustainable. The writing was always on the wall, though, and in Kriegman and Steinberg’s probing (forgive me) political exposé, it is spelled out as clear as ever.

The First Fall of Anthony Weiner took place right around the time I began my journalism career. I had been told for years through school I should seek another profession, by friends, family, and well-meaning advisors. Journalism is dying, they said. There will be no jobs. Well, I have never had a problem finding work in the industry, but its death sure as hell came just the same. It is not a physical death or even a financial one – though that is occurring, too – but rather a spiritual rot at the core. The initial sexting scandal of the Democratic congressman from New York surely was not the first sign of a problem, but just look at its resonance now.

This documentary is a chronicle of the Second Fall of Anthony Weiner, when he ran for mayor of New York City and promptly got himself embroiled in another scandal. The film is a tale of hubris and dumbfounding illogic. Weiner is a deeply flawed man who could not get himself together for even a brief period, but as much as he may seem like a villain, particularly next to his long-suffering (now ex-) wife, Huma Abedin, he is no such thing. The villain, if there must be one, is us.

Who are we, so quick, so ready to judge? And what is it that we are judging exactly? Weiner was a hypocrite who was unfaithful to his wife. He was not the first to fit both those categories and will not be the last. His public profile made him a figure of ridicule and scorn, and ridicule and scorn him we did. Mercilessly. We chewed every bit of meat off the bone, and when there was none left, we ground the bones into dust. It was disgusting, every second of it. I do not defend the man’s actions, but I also refuse to point my finger and laugh. There is nothing funny about the end of civil public discourse, and it is not by chance the Third Fall of Anthony Weiner coincided with the rise of the current president-elect. It was not chance at all. It was a failure by all of us to recognize the design.

5. The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

The same themes explored by Loach and Laverty in I, Daniel Blake are taken here to their logical extreme by director-co-writer Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou. After we have removed humanity from our systems, what is there left but to remove it from ourselves? Lanthimos and Filippou craft a darkly funny satire that becomes less funny and less satirical the more you consider it until finally you are left with nothing but the dark.

In a world that is not too far in the future, the state determines humans belong in heterosexual pairs. Those who do not find a partner within a given set of time are transmogrified into the animal of their choosing. The metaphor is clear: The state defines humanity by couple-hood, without which we are simply beasts. It does not take long for us to meet a group of humans rebelling against the system, forced to live in the woods like … well, like the wild beasts they would otherwise become. They are militant in their singleness and fierce in their enforcement of individuality. Once again, the metaphor is clear: The rebellion becomes that against which it is rebelling.

If it were this simple and this clear cut, it would be entertaining and enlightening, but it would not be transcendent. The Lobster transcends because it introduces us to David (Colin Farrell) and the Short-Sighted Woman (Rachel  Weisz). They are good people trapped by their systems – he by the state and she by the rebels. Within all of this, they somehow find each other. Thus, the film ceases to be a battle between two diametrically opposed ideologies but a battle against ideology itself.

David and the Short-Sighted Woman, played to perfection by Farrell and Weisz, wage a private war against the world. Theirs is the kind of intense personal connection meant to be crushed by these systems because it is the ultimate expression of their humanity, for which as we discussed above, systems have no circuitry. The film’s ultimate question, and its darkest, becomes whether two people molded by the system have the strength and power to end it. The film may not provide a clear answer, but one need only look around in our world to intuit what it might be.

4. Fences, directed by Denzel Washington

Fences is a movie so good we almost do not deserve it. That it exists at all is a wonderful gift to the world. Whose gift, then? First and foremost, it is from playwright August Wilson, who adapted his script for the screen. Wilson uses the English language the way Renaissance masters used a canvas or, in the parlance of his characters, the way Hank Aaron used a bat – gracefully, elegantly, effortlessly. Fences is an invitation by Wilson to understand this country and its people a little better by sitting on the porch and chatting with them, by walking a mile in their well-worn shoes.

It is also the gift of its director, Washington, for being smart enough and talented enough to know when to stay out of the way of the material and what he can do to enhance it on the screen. Not every great actor can be a great director. Some may not even be good directors. It takes a certain skill, an ability to see the larger picture. Actors, so trained to focus on detail and nuance, can easily miss the greater themes calling out for exploration. Washington does not make this mistake, and in the film’s final resplendent moment, he reveals just what a talent he is behind the camera.

Washington the actor has also given us this gift, along with Viola Davis and co-signed by the rest of this superb cast, small enough I will list them all here – Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson, and Saniyya Sidney. Most of these actors had the benefit of appearing in the stage revival, including Washington and Davis, so familiarity and facility with the material is a given. However, to translate that familiarity from the stage to the screen takes a special talent, which is possessed by every one of these brilliant performers.

African-American life in this country has never been and will never be easy. Hell, life in this country is not easy, but to start from a place of systemic disadvantage makes it near impossible. The film’s main character, Troy Maxon, is not afraid to call out the systems that have held him and his family down for generations that have passed and generations still to come. Bigotry and racism must have a name to be fought, and we must be willing to call them by those names when we see them. This is Fences’ greatest gift, and we should cherish it, but we must also be willing to learn from it.

3. Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins

Some movies are about transformations. Others are transformative. Moonlight, inspired by the play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is both. It would seem impossible to walk out of Jenkins’ beautiful tone poem without thinking a different way about the world and our responsibility in it. The trick of the film is to bring the margins and its marginalized people to the foreground, to show you their lives as they experience them, and to force you to question everything you thought about what it means to grow up poor, black, gay, or all three.

When first we meet the 9-year-old Little (Alex R. Hibbert), he is precisely that, physically diminutive and small in the eyes of the world – his peers, his mother Paula (Naomi Harris). It takes a chance encounter with the local drug lord Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his wife, Teresa (Janelle Monáe), to give him even the first hint of self-worth. All of these people exist on the outskirts of a society that would rather they just disappear, but Moonlight serves as a reminder not just of their existence but their value.

In a remarkable narrative gambit, we jump forward seven years in Little’s life to when he becomes Chiron (Ashton Sanders), his teenage self, who is full of anger at the way the world has treated him and feeling the weight of a developing sexuality he does not understand. Kevin (played in the film’s first act by Jaden Piner, the second act by Jharrel Jerome, and the third act by André Holland) is Chiron’s closest friend along the way. With an abusive mother and a now-absent father figure, Chiron turns to Teresa and Kevin for comfort and compassion. When Kevin betrays him, it sets in motion the events that will lead to Chiron becoming the man we meet in the third act, Black (Trevante Rhodes).

Act III is Jenkins’ biggest gamble and greatest achievement. It is here where he diverges from the play, which featured only the first two acts, and forges his own path. It would be a disservice to the film to reveal any more, but in its final stretch, Moonlight overturns every preconceived notion we might still have had about Little, Chiron, and Black. It demonstrates humanity in ways rarely shared on screen, showing him to be flawed but worthy of love, guarded but open to connection, but most of all, like the rest of us, complex and real.

2. Silence, directed by Martin Scorsese

Every film takes a different path to the screen, and some are more harried than others, but for a film like Silence, it is a miracle it even exists. Scorsese spent decades trying to bring Shûsaku Endô’s novel to the big screen. Beset by production delays and embroiled in lawsuits, it seemed a longshot ever to come together, but Scorsese is no stranger to long-delayed passion projects. This is the director, after all, who spent nearly 30 years trying to make Gangs of New York. If anyone could put his vision down on film, it would be Scorsese.

So he has, and in such a way as to make every minute, every second spent fighting for its realization seem worth it. The evidence of the master filmmaker’s passion is in every frame of Silence – the moody, fog-filled photography of its early passages, the spare but evocative set design of later sequences, and the languid pace, not often associated with Scorsese’s films, that allows viewers to soak in every luscious moment. This is certainly the director’s most beautiful film since Raging Bull, which is not a fair comparison because their forms are dictated by their functions, which are so very different.

If Silence were only a magnificently mounted project, it would be worthy of Scorsese’s efforts and the nearly three hours of an audience’s time it demands. However, it is also the most richly layered and doggedly inquisitive film Scorsese has ever made. As a lapsed Catholic brought up in a devoutly religious home, Scorsese has wrestled with questions of god and faith his entire life, thus he is the perfect director to adapt Endô’s work.

The film follows a pair of Jesuit priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garrpe (Adam Driver), on a mission in 17th century Japan, where Christianity is outlawed and practitioners of the faith are hunted down and forced to deny their beliefs on pain of torture and death. The story allows Scorsese to explore questions such as what faith means, who is worthy of forgiveness, whether the eponymous silence is proof of god’s absence, and what right men have to speak on behalf of god. Silence is a film that must be viewed and viewed again and again even to scratch its surface. Its thematic depth and aesthetic pleasures, however, make a daunting endeavor an experience to treasure.

1. O.J.: Made in America, directed by Ezra Edelman

Take a good look at that picture above. There is a good chance you recognize it. Some of you just said to yourselves, “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.” You probably know a lot about that image and could tell tales of your life directly related to it. Contained within that moment, which is the culmination of many smaller moments, is everything about us, our society, and the world we have built. It is our cultural Waterloo, after which we could never engage with anything the same way again, much to our detriment.

Some will cry foul at the inclusion of O.J.: Made in America on this list, let alone at the top, suggesting that despite its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and its limited run in theaters, it is a television show. I might respond by saying with the proliferation of Netflix original movies, video-on-demand, day-and-date releases, and the like, what even constitutes a “proper film” anymore is up for debate. If such matters concern you, simply cross this film off the list and make due with a top nine.

However you wish to define it – TV show, miniseries, film – O.J.: Made in America is the defining chronicle of our times. It takes the landmark O.J. Simpson murder trial and expands its scope, extrapolates back through time until the portrait is not of a controversial football player but of the United States itself. And it is a damning portrait the film paints.

Nobody comes out clean in this. O.J. Simpson is no hero. The Los Angeles Police Department is criminally corrupt. The prosecution is laughably inept. The defense is brazenly manipulative. The jury is willfully dismissive. The media are cravenly pandering. The world is gleefully entertained. The Trial of the Century was a freak show in a hall of mirrors. We came to gawk and saw only ourselves, but with the image distorted, we could not recognize our own faces, so we laughed and pointed anyway.

Had O.J.: Made in America focused solely on the trial, it would have been an intriguing, entertaining document, a snapshot of a moment frozen in time. Instead, Edelman’s grander focus turns the trial into the denouement of a Greek tragedy set in motion long before any of the players could have known what was to come. Our world now is simply the epilogue of this story, and we are all scarcely more than bit players in the greater narrative.

Take a look around and see the evidence of this on every newsstand, on every television channel, in politics, in civic interactions, in the worsening hell of our social discourse. Yes, the culture died on that day in 1994 when a retired football player on trial for the brutal murder of two people failed to put on a pair of gloves. That much seems self-evident. Edelman takes on the noble task with his film of trying to explain why. I think the answer is right there in his title: This is who we are, made as we are, in America.

Year in Review: Top 10 Films of 2015

The best films tell us something about ourselves, something about what it means to be human. Sometimes, the picture is not so rosy, but look out the window. It is not so rosy out there either. The world is perched on a ledge, and it could tip at any moment. I do not mean to sound like a harbinger of doom here in my little movie column, but when we go to the cinema, it is because of what is going on in the world. Either we are seeking an escape from the darkness or a reflection of it.

Well, I have never been one for escape, so each of my top 10 films of the year is representative of the society we have built and the culture we have bred. If it sounds like a dour evening of programming, it is in some ways, but in these depictions of a world askew, I find hope. These are bleak films, yes, but this is because they dare to confront us with human truths, and if we are to find a way forward or some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, we must first open ourselves to honesty.

In one way or another, every film below is about people – or a dog or a machine – trying to take the next step toward a deeper understanding of themselves and the world they inhabit. Their circumstances may be dire, and they may not always succeed in their quests, but the search for truth and meaning is always worthwhile. These are the top 10 films of the year because for whatever else they are, they are celebrations of the search for truth.

Before we get to the list, here are five other fantastic films from 2015 that exemplify the perilous march forward, either for individuals or whole movements: The Second Mother; Everest; Room; Suffragette; Macbeth.

The Top 10 of 2015:

10. The Kindergarten Teacher, directed by Nadav Lapid

For Nira (Sarit Larry), the kindergarten teacher at the center of the story, beauty comes with a responsibility. If one is capable of recognizing something beautiful, it is incumbent upon that person to share it with the world. Nira would love to be that beautiful thing, but she knows she is not. Instead, she finds it in the poetry of a 5-year-old boy, Yoav (Avi Shnaidman). Once she finds it, she can think of nothing else but sharing this boy’s poems with an ungrateful world.

Lapid has called Nira a warrior for poetry, a warrior for beauty in a world that has neither the time nor inclination to enjoy it. Lapid creates a universe – not unlike our own – in which people would rather watch inane television shows, talk about their sex lives, and drink away their worries. That Yoav is destined to be unappreciated causes great pain in Nira, and she acts out. Perhaps her decisions are irrational or extreme but only in the world in which she and Yoav live. In a better place, where beauty and poetry meant more, Nira would be hailed as a righteous hero, and it is that world for which she fights.

9. Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland

All of Ex Machina is a test. We learn this almost from the beginning. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) brings Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to his secluded compound to test a new artificial intelligence program, Ava (Alicia Vikander). The goal is to see whether this machine can imitate humanity so well as to be indistinguishable from it. The obvious ethical question is if Ava is so human she fools Caleb, does she deserve to be treated like a human, or is she still simply a robot? Ava asks what will happen if she fails the test, and she is told her memory will be wiped and she will be broken down. At this point, Ava demonstrates the most human thing of all – the will to survive.

Isaac, Gleeson, and especially Vikander are tremendous as three characters who each represent a different path for humanity. Nathan is an innovator, but he is cruel. Caleb is kind but weak. Ava is strong but alien. Garland suggests only one of these will inherit the earth, and he forces the audience to choose an allegiance. We can create the future, fight the future, or be the future, but if we choose wrong, then we have failed the test, and the repercussions will be severe.

8. White God, directed by Kornél Mundruczó

Mundruczó set out to make an angry, unflinching film about his native Hungary and the growing inequities that have torn the country apart from within. He certainly has made that, but he has also made a beautiful fable about a girl and her dog. That two such disparate stories could be told not only parallel to each other but in concert is a testament to the remarkable filmmaking and storytelling on display in White God.

After Lili’s (Zsófia Psotta) father forces her to abandon her beloved dog, Hagen, the film charts the course of these two outsiders as they try to make their way back to each other. Both are abused and degraded by systems set up to keep them on the outside looking in. The wonder of Mundruczó’s story is that he makes Hagen the hero. Hagen is the one who finally cannot take it anymore and rises up with an army of the oppressed.

That they are dogs is what makes the story a fable, but in that fable, Mundruczó uncovers undeniable truths about the despicable ways we treat each other. He argues that if we cannot find some empathy inside ourselves, we are doomed to be destroyed, not by some outside force but from within.

7. 99 Homes, directed by Ramin Bahrani

Adam McKay’s The Big Short has received much acclaim and many accolades this year for the way it tackles the financial crisis and housing market meltdown of the mid-2000s. That film is a big, flashy, star-studded, smart-ass look at the world of Wall Street, but for me, it does not compare to 99 Homes. Bahrani’s film chooses substance over style and has the guts to examine the human toll of the crisis. While The Big Short laughs and jokes its way around big numbers and big ideas, 99 Homes goes for the throat, takes hold, and never lets go.

There are no winners in Bahrani’s film, only those who keep their dignity intact and their souls unstained – and there are not many of those either. Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a good man who wants to do right by his family, but the only way he can do that is to give up a piece of himself. Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) is a bad man who also wants to do right by his family. He has already given up every part of himself to the system he serves and spends his days collecting the broken pieces of others. Bahrani creates a dichotomy in which we can either give in and be destroyed or fight back and be crushed anyway. 99 Homes may be a dark statement on our time, but it never feels anything but true.

6. The Revenant, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

It would be hard right now to find another auteur operating at the consistently high level at which Iñárritu works. The Mexican-born director has made just six feature films, and each is a masterwork. In 2014, he gave us the acid-tongued satire Birdman, which amazed with its vibrancy and technical wizardry. In 2015, he returned with The Revenant, a stone-faced adventure epic set in the Old American West. The technical mastery remains – in particular, director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s lush cinematography – but this time, Iñárritu uses his storytelling gifts to far more humanist ends.

The story of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) dragging his broken body hundreds of miles through the snow to find those who left him for dead could easily be positioned as a revenge saga. In fact, the marketing would have you believe that is all it is. It is not. The Revenant is about grief and guilt, survival and strength, nature and progress. Against the vast expanse of frozen tundra, Glass is barely a speck on the horizon, and his personal tragedy is just one of many tragedies suffered every day on this land. As he wills himself back to civilization, he discovers his true home and his duty to the universe.

 

5. Mustang, directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven

 Complacency is a byproduct of a successful society. Certainly in the U.S., most of us have the luxury of being insulated from the truly terrible acts committed in this world. Even if we are not satisfied with what we have, we have the choice to go out and seek something more or something else, which is its own kind of privilege. Mustang is an important film because it has the ability to shock us out of complacency by showing us a world in which people do not have a choice.

Five sisters in a small Turkish village are held hostage by their family and forced to participate in a culture that has no place in a modern society. They fight back against their oppressors, but an entire system has been set in place to hold them down. However, Ergüven wisely does not fill her film with sorrow but rather rage. Mustang is an angry cry against inequality and an urgent call for justice. The subjugation and degradation of women is not a cultural issue but a human rights issue about which none of us can afford to be complacent.

4. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, directed by Roy Andersson

Every scene in A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is shrouded in death, but this is not a film about dying. It is a film about being alive. There is no more precious gift than life, and if it sometimes takes a morbid reminder of this fact, then so be it. Life is not always pretty or fun or sweet, as we are all well aware, but you know what – it sure as hell can be all those things, and when it is, the struggle and the pain seem worth it.

There is no story to speak of in Andersson’s film, just a few connecting threads here and there, loose tendrils of lives intersecting almost imperceptibly. In fact, the frame is filled constantly with life. People go about their business in the foreground, and the rest of the world goes about its day in the background. It quickly becomes clear that neither is more important as the next scene, or three scenes later, could focus on one of those background players, or we may never see any of these people again. Few films capture the simultaneous majesty and randomness of life as well as this, and as the film wanders, it pulls viewers along, making us a part of its wondrous tapestry.

3. 45 Years, directed by Andrew Haigh

Put next to films about the financial crisis, the systemic abuse of women, and rampant inequality, the small-scale marriage drama 45 Years may seem to involve fairly low stakes, but for its characters, the stakes could not be higher. Haigh’s film is a deeply penetrating look at the damage we inflict on each other when we refuse to be honest with ourselves. It concerns the way old wounds do not heal when left unattended but rot and infect everything they touch. The tragedy is that it could all be easily avoided if we were stronger, more open people. Instead, we become guarded, thinking we are protecting ourselves, but we are just causing further pain.

Kate and Geoff (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, who give two of the best performances of the year) have been married 45 years and still seem deeply in love, but when news from the past shakes the foundation of their bond, they realize the fragile nature of everything they have built. Bit by bit, Kate’s world crumbles around her, and all she can do is sift through the rubble, searching for a reason to carry on with life the way it was before. She wants to bury the past, discard the truth, and ignore all those old wounds, but she cannot. Everything is in the open now, and she must confront her new reality or be destroyed by it.

2. Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy

Spotlight is another film about people who would rather ignore the truth, and the film’s heroes are the Boston Globe reporters who refuse to remain silent. They uncover decades of abuse hidden by the Catholic Church, and everyone else would prefer to pretend the problem does not exist or will go away on its own. The Spotlight team, however, cannot abide the lie and goes to great lengths to ensure the truth will see the light of day.

McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer’s screenplay works as both a thrilling legal procedural and a moralistic drama. The film understands the mechanics of journalism and the lives of reporters like few others before it, but it never gets so bogged down in minutiae that it fails to tell a human story. The victims are the heart of Spotlight, and in his construction of the film, McCarthy guarantees we never forget the real people who suffered because of a corrupt system.

Finally, what Spotlight reminds us is that this work is never done. The Catholic Church still harbors and hides pedophile priests in cities around the world and places not fortunate enough to have teams of reporters, lawyers, and investigators dedicated to the truth. In the end, justice is our responsibility, and we must seek it everywhere, not just from the Catholic Church but from governments and Wall Street and schools and big business. Spotlight is a great film because it shows us how good people can change the world one truth at a time.

1. The Tribe, directed by Miroslav Slaboshpitsky

For sheer audacity, there is no film that could match Slaboshpitsky’s tale of humiliation, rage, and defiance set at a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf. Apart from being told entirely in Ukrainian sign language, the film is shot in a remarkable series of long takes that makes the audience complicit in the abuses and atrocities being perpetrated in this insular society. After a while, the silence becomes so unsettling it is almost unbearable. We want to scream for these kids and the suffering they endure, but we cannot. We remain quiet, passive observers, and in so being, it feels like we are allowing this to happen.

Sergei (Grigoriy Fesenko) is a new student at the school and quickly becomes embedded in the school’s ruling gang. The gang controls the student body through intimidation, fear, and brute strength. They sell drugs, deal in other contraband, and operate a prostitution ring. Anya (Yana Novikova) is one of the prostitutes. Sergei falls in love with her and wants to escape this life together, but she rebuffs him. This is the life she knows, and she refuses to give it up. From there, the story spirals into hate, madness, and violence so rapidly the audience is left gasping for air.

There was no other film this year that offered the mix of sensory overload and emotional devastation in The Tribe. It is not a fun night at the movies, but it is something more. Cinema is a beautiful medium because it inserts viewers directly into the lives of others. If those lives are not always pretty or happy, so much the better. In life, we shut ourselves off from the pain of other people, either because we wish not to feel pain or because we do not want to be reminded of our own. The Tribe is a daring, confrontational rebuke of that numbness. We want to hide, but The Tribe forces us to open ourselves to feeling.

Thank you for being a part of Last Cinema Standing's 2015 Year in Review. Be sure to check out the other installments in the series by clicking any of the links below, and keep coming back for continued coverage of this year's Oscar race and the year in cinema that will be 2016.

Top 10 Performances of 2015

Top 10 Quotes of 2015

Best & Worst of 2015

Year in Review: Top 10 Films

What we do and why we do it: In one way or another, every film on my Top 10 list deals with these preoccupations. Several concern artists who continue to practice their craft despite a world that has moved on or never had a need of them to start. Others are about faith and how we cling to it or deviate from it because of the circumstances we encounter. Still more are about love and how we are able to feel so deeply for those who have hurt us.

Almost none of the characters in the films on this list planned the events that happen to them. Instead, they are thrust into situations in which they must act. For some, their actions are calculated, while others may react without thinking, but all are defined by how they act and how the people around them cope with the ramifications.

With one exception, few of the characters chronicled in these films will change the world with their decisions, but all this proves is that the little moments can often be the most devastating. For most of us, the choices we make will affect only ourselves and those closest to us, but it is that proximity of heart and mind that makes those choices all the more important. My top 10 films this year are about how we act when it is not our lives hanging in the balance but our souls.

Five other films hovering just outside the top 10 that deserve a mention: A Most Wanted Man; Nymphomaniac; Citizenfour; We Are the Best!; Winter Sleep.

The top 10 of 2014:

10. Frank, directed by Lenny Abrahamson

 

If this were a list of my favorite films of the year, Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank would be right at the top. Somewhat divisive among audiences, the film has a rambunctious, carefree attitude that is simply infectious if you can get on its wavelength. Though its subject is an underground rock band led by an enigmatic genius, the film has the audacity to take as its main character a wannabe artist who lacks the inspiration or talent to create. Seen through this lens, the film becomes a sharper, more cutting indictment of the world of art, music, and mediocrity

This is not to say the film is not a tremendous amount of fun from minute one until its poignant closing moments. As I have mentioned before, Michael Fassbender is unparalleled as the titular Frank, but the rest of the ensemble is doing amazing work as well, in particular Maggie Gyllenhaal and Domnhall Gleeson. The music is great, and there simply was not a film that delighted me more this year or about which I have thought more often. It is arty, inventive, unassuming, and downright great.

9. Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

 

Paul Thomas Anderson has never failed to make an interesting film, and despite having nearly 20 years in the feature game, he has never made the same movie twice. Each film is its own distinct gem, and Inherent Vice is another. Sunny, breezy, smoked out, and paranoid, this is not only unlike anything Anderson has tried before – it is unlike anything nearly anyone has tried. Adapting a densely packed, digression-filled Thomas Pynchon novel, Anderson turns the story of a private detective in 1970s Southern California into a metaphor for the failures of the hippie movement to achieve lasting change.

A stellar Joaquin Phoenix leads a sprawling cast through a hazy story in which the laid-back attitude is all a put-on. Anxieties run deep in this film as mothers fear for their children, wives for their husbands, patriots for their country, and just about everyone for his safety. At the same time, it is an acid-trip love story, one last feel-good tale to mark the end of feel-good times. Everyone gliding through the plot seems to have the sense that the party is over, but rather than retreat, they throw one final rager with Anderson as the master of ceremonies.

8. A Most Violent Year, directed by JC Chandor

 

Abel, played by Oscar Isaac, is an honest man in a dishonest business. A heating-oil magnate in early 1980s New York, he is fighting to keep his company afloat without staining his soul. The slow-burn drama of writer-director JC Chandor’s latest plays out against the backdrop of a city that is descending into hell. Abel and his rivals are desperate to succeed, and we understand why. Success means escape. At the start, Abel has already moved his family to the suburbs, but the violence of the city and the corruption of his industry follow him. He soon realizes he must choose between his conscience and his company.

Chandor is a master at tightening the screws on his characters, forcing them deeper into the holes they have dug until they no longer know which way leads back to the light. This is only Chandor’s third feature, after Margin Call and last year’s stunning All Is Lost, but already, he has proved himself to be among the best of his generation. Though set in the ’80s, Chandor’s preoccupation with modern America shines through in this work as it has in his previous two films, and the point seems roughly the same: We have lost our way in the darkness, but hope exists if we are willing to struggle.

7. Goodbye to Language, directed by Jean-Luc Godard

 

Director Jean-Luc Godard is a giant of cinema. There has never been anyone like him, and there never will be. Along with his French contemporaries in the 1960s, Godard may as well have invented the art-house cinema, since if it did not exist before Godard, they would have had to build it. The most remarkable thing about him is that he is still innovating, still pushing the boundaries of what is possible in film, and still challenging audiences and critics to see the world through his eyes. At 84 years old, Godard has done it again with the equally baffling and enthralling Goodbye to Language.

I have never said this before and doubted I ever would, but if you see this film, see it in 3D. While most 3D plays as a gimmicky parlor trick, the third dimension is essential to the experience of Goodbye to Language. From his earliest days, Godard has always advanced a kind of pure cinema, experiential as well as experimental, and his latest film may be the pinnacle of both in his career.

A difficult sit technically with a complicated structure, confrontational imagery, and an assaultive soundtrack, the story may be his most relatable in years, if not entirely accessible or penetrable. It is enough to say the film is about living beyond expression and simply taking in the abundance of life while we are able. So, if the medium remains malleable in Godard’s hands, the message is timeless.

6. Mr. Turner, directed by Mike Leigh

 

Art goes in cycles. What is fashionable today will be gauche tomorrow, and next week, a whole other set of criteria will be used to judge our world. Depending on the era and the medium, these cycles have lasted decades or passed in the blink of an eye, but just as nothing stays popular forever, nothing once popular disappears for long. History now knows JMW Turner as probably the finest painter to come out of England, and he enjoyed unparalleled success in the art world for most of his life. His unfortunate circumstance was to live long enough to fall out of favor in his own time.

Mike Leigh’s gorgeous biopic of the notoriously prickly painter, played by a never-better Timothy Spall, cuts right to the heart of the matter, depicting a world transitioning from the old ways to the new. A man of the sea, whose paintings often depicted the coastlines and ships of the world, Turner lives to see trains barreling through the countryside, making sea travel just a little more irrelevant. Toward the end of his life, the camera comes along, and Turner’s fear is palpable.

No longer will his one-of-kind paintings be the only connection most have to other parts of the world. Instead, a highly reproducible medium has come to democratize art. At the same time, the style of painting he pioneered and perfected has fallen out of favor with the critics and the elites. Turner is a man who devoted his life to his work, and as his work means less and less to the world, he reflects on what this says about his life. Films about artists are rarely this honest, insightful, or downright lovely.

5. Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

 

 

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman is another story about an artist but one with much more modern preoccupations. The film will be remembered for many things, including the technical achievements of its cinematography, the welcome return of Michael Keaton to a starring role, and the takedown of the elitist critical culture, but its cumulative effect is greater than any individual achievement. As it shocks with its beauty, it cuts with its words and pleads for understanding from the depths of its thematic soul.

Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, a washed up actor famous for a superhero he played 20 years ago who wants to shed that skin and be appreciated as a true artist. To do so, he mounts his own Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel, hoping to earn critical credibility and revive his fading star. Everything in the deck is stacked against him, and no one around him believes he will succeed – or that he should succeed. After all, who is he to adapt Chandler? It is just possible he is trying to take a shortcut to merit, and the world will see him for the phony he is.

All the while, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shoots the film to appear as one unbroken take, meaning that while Thompson believes he is performing a high-wire act, we know he has already fallen and is spiraling into an abyss. The movie makes clear that Thompson is no longer a star. He is a meteor falling to Earth, and though his final descent is tragic, it is magic to behold on the big screen.

4. Force Majeure, directed by Ruben Ostlund

 

The first thing I picture when I think of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is its blinding white scenery. I see it when I close my eyes, and immediately, Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto No. 2 in G minor” begins to play. The stage is set for an Ingmar Bergman-esque marital drama that hides beneath a thin veneer of black comedy. The bleakness and the humor collide off each other at every twist and turn, and by the end, you cannot tell if you are shedding tears of relief or crying in a fit of hysterics.

An almost too-perfect family vacations in the French Alps. They take group photographs and eat pleasant lunches and play with new toys, but they stand behind a façade, hiding from the world and each other. In the most dramatic way possible – an avalanche – the façade is broken, and all hell breaks loose. They are forced to confront the lies their family is founded on and made to question whether the lies are preferable to the alternative.

Östlund’s screenplay systematically dismantles everything this family knows about its existence, from the roles of the husband and wife to their relationship with their children to the institution of marriage itself. They are broken down piece by piece until they are left with nothing but the shards of a past to which they wish they could return. Finally, we are back in the harsh cold of a white-out blizzard, and these people must either trek ceaselessly forward into the unknown or retreat into the comfort of a time before the darkness came.

3. Calvary, directed by John Michael McDonagh

 

The evolution of Brendan Gleeson’s work with the McDonagh brothers has been a marvel to behold. It began in Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter and transitioned into the pair’s dark hit-man comedy In Bruges. Gleeson then teamed up with John Michael McDonagh to make the underrated and under-seen The Guard. This year, Gleeson and John Michael McDonagh came together once again and produced the best of the lot, Calvary.

It has all the markings of a McDonagh film, from the uniquely Irish milieu to the pitch-black comedy to the meditation on faith in a seemingly godless world. However, Calvary stands out as being two shades darker than anything preceding it and twice as thoughtful in its spiritual inquest. Gleeson plays a Catholic priest preaching forgiveness to a world that has given up on the idea. His faithless parishioners have little practical use for this holy man’s philosophies, and they are more interested in their next drink at the bar than in drinking the blood of Christ.

Still, the priest carries on as a shepherd imparting wisdom and keeping faith amid a flock of lost sheep. There is no victory to be won. In fact, he has already lost at the beginning of the story, but his calling is to try, in the face of hate, sin, and tragedy, to shine light on a bitter, cynical world. Though his journey may be fruitless, every step of it makes for riveting cinema, the kind to which I hope Gleeson and the McDonagh brothers continue to devote themselves.

2. Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay

 

 

Sometimes, world events conspire to make a film mean more than it otherwise might. Even without this context, Selma would be a brilliant film, but for the times in which we live, it is vital. No other film this year cut deeper than Ava DuVernay’s politically charged Martin Luther King Jr. biopic. Bold, confrontational, and impressionistic, Selma would not fit anyone’s definition of a classic biographical picture. Instead, it is a snapshot of a movement, of a time in history when change was possible if the people demanded action.

David Oyelowo embodies the passion of King as he leads the effort to ensure voting rights for African Americans in the South in 1965. He is weary from the battles he has already won and lost, but the fire burns brightly in him, and he is ready for the next fight. This may not be the historical King, but the film is not a documentary, and DuVernay gives us the King we need right now. With protests and riots flaring up across the nation, DuVernay and Oyelowo give us the version of King who could step off the screen and lead us to a brighter future today – if only that were possible.

The juxtaposition of pain and hope in Selma is almost too much to bear. For every step it takes forward, the movement King leads is beaten two steps back. This is the reality of progress. There are no giant leaps and few world-changing moments, but there are small victories that illuminate our path just enough for us to know there is still a brighter light ahead. We must continue to fight and break down the walls put up before us. This is the lesson of Selma, as vital now as it ever was.

1. Leviathan, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

 

Few films are capable anymore of stunning me into silence. I have seen and experienced a lot at the cinema and generally am unflappable. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan stunned me. Taking the biblical book of Job as its inspiration, the film is a shot across the bow of modern and historical Russian politics, skewering everything from bureaucracy and power to family and faith. It is bleak, oppressive, and perfect.

Beginning with the simple story of a man whose home is being repossessed by the local mayor, Zvyagintsev layers slight upon slight and indignity upon indignity until the crushing weight of all we witness collapses and suffocates us. Relief does not come quickly, if at all, for most of the characters. Instead, they are subjected to a long, slow descent into madness. They are tunneling to hell, and the more they try to claw their way back out, the more earth they bring down around them, burying them and pushing them further into the darkness.

There are no heroes, only shades of villainy, and all innocence is quickly snuffed out by the ceaseless misery of circumstance. Zvyagintsev creates a world in which no structure is safe from corruption and no foundation, however sturdy, is safe from collapse. Those who fight are beaten back down, and those who do not are beaten down more quickly. At the end of the day, no one is coming to save you – not your leaders, not your church, not your family. If you are to survive, you must find the will to do so within yourself before it is too late and that too is pounded into oblivion.

Thank you for being a part of Last Cinema Standing’s 2014 Year in Review. Click below to check out any of our previous Year in Review coverage, and keep coming back as we discuss this year’s Oscar race and the year in cinema that will be 2015.

Year in Review – Top 10 Performances

Year in Review – Top 10 Quotes

Year in Review – Best & Worst