AV Clubs - The 20 best films of 2015

quote:

---

Every year is a good year for movies, provided you’re willing to wander a little off the beaten path. But in 2015, it was hard to go more than a few steps without hitting something major, something essential. More even than usual, the year’s best films took different shapes, sizes, and routes to eyeballs. Multiplexes were unusually rich with adventurous big-budget movies, as Hollywood handed the keys to the castle to real artists. At the same time, fine smaller films from all over the globe made their way from festivals to theaters and on to streaming platforms, where any viewer with a working web connection could get a taste of something different. What the 20 films below have in common, beyond the strong impression they made on our ballot-filing critics, is a general habit of saying something significant about the here and now, even when transporting audiences to a subatomic there; a fantastically reproduced then; and a lawless, post-apocalyptic later.

20. James White
19. Mustang
18. The Martian
17. Approaching The Elephant
16. The Forbidden Room
15. Crimson Peak
14. 45 Years
13. Hard To Be A God
12. Bridge Of Spies
11. Inside Out
10. Anomalisa
9. Brooklyn
8. Carol
7. The Assassin
6. Sicario
5. The Look Of Silence
4. The Duke Of Burgundy
3. It Follows
2. Phoenix


1. Mad Max: Fury Road
Have we all died and gone to Valhalla? This is a movie—a grand, impossible blockbuster—that shouldn’t even exist. George Miller, an Aussie genre veteran in his 70s, somehow shook $150 million from Hollywood’s pockets, then spent it crashing cars in the desert to realize the demolition derby of his wildest dreams, the Mad Max movie he’s been working toward since the very start. Fury Road bucks just about every trend in big-budget franchise filmmaking: It’s a self-contained joy ride through its creator’s limitless imagination, an art movie stretched across the canvas of an IMAX screen. And beneath its layers upon layers of awe-inspiring imagery—a blitzkrieg of practical effects, whipped up into a two-hour car chase—beats the heart of a surprisingly subversive entertainment, one that dares to put its mythic hero (Tom Hardy, a fine substitute for Mad Mel) into the passenger seat, while a metal-armed Charlize Theron leads the charge against misogyny incarnate. That this super-charged passion project made it to screens fully intact, like some spectacle from another universe, is cause to keep grinning, with or without a mouth sprayed in a glorious shade of chrome.

---