Review:
2015 Top 10 Favorite Films
1. Spotlight Hollywood has depicted the journalist as a crusader for justice many times--All the President’s Men remains the best example both in terms of content and execution. Spotlight takes its place alongside All the President’s Men as a gripping fact-based drama that places the journalist on a pedestal for all the right reasons. The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative team won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston’s decades-long cover up of the sexual abuse committed by many of its priests. Writer/director Tom McCarthy takes a slow and steady approach to his disturbing subject matter so that each discovery by the “Spotlight” teams carries the necessary weight. By the time the “Spotlight” team prints its stories, you’ll feel as much outrage and disgust at the actions of the Boston Archdiocese as those horrified Globe readers who read about it for the first time in 2002. During a year that features many fine ensemble performances, the cast of Spotlight –led by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Adams—stands head and shoulders above the rest because of their very human reaction to exposing a truth that is beyond impossible to reconcile. How can the very people we trust to help us live a good life betray us in such a sick and despicable way? Beyond the obvious repulsion Spotlight stirs in us, it also makes us appreciate what journalism once was and still could be despite the harm caused to the newspaper industry by the Internet. 2. The Big Short Most of us don’t speak or know the language that’s used on Wall Street. Don’t worry, The Big Short writer/director Adam McKay knows this. So his adaptation of Michael Lewis’ account of the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 simplifies things for those who don’t know a single thing about mortgage-backed securities—but McKay does so without speaking down to the mass audience he wants to reach. Yeah, he does have some celebrities break into the action to explain a specific term that not even some of The Big Short’s Wall Street insiders know, but that’s all part of the fun. McKay, after all, is the director of the Anchorman films, and the last thing he wants to do is to tackle a difficult subject matter without seeking out the humor in the tragedy. The Big Short takes us back to a recent past, one that so many are still touched by and will likely bring back some painful memories of struggling to make it through one of the worst financial crisis of our lifetime. McKay sheds light on how but a few traders, money managers, hedge fund managers, and quantitative analyst saw the 2007 housing bubble burst coming. This is a terrifying cautionary tale that speaks directly to our willingness to overspend in order to live a comfortable life as well as our blind trust in the people who manage our money. McKay’s superb ensemble cast—led by Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt—bring an urgency to the situation that seems dire in hindsight but never goes from bad to worst until the economy is on the verge of the collapse. The Big Short does the impossible: it makes us root for the men who would profit from a global financial disaster. 3. Mad Max: Fury Road I’m still not sold on Tom Hardy as our new Max Rockatansky—he seems a bit too uncomfortable walking in the boots he inherited from Mel Gibson. No matter. Mad Max: Fury Road belongs to Charlize Theron. Her Imperator Furiosa ranks among one of the best and fully realized action heroines we have had the pleasure watching save the day. She’s as tough and as resourceful as the Sarah Conner of Terminator 2: Judgment Day but also as human and vulnerable as the Ellen Ripley of Alien and Aliens. This is the greatest triumph of director George Miller’s revival of a highly influential franchise that’s been regrettably dormant for 30 years. Miller pours the frustration of failing to get his fourth Mad Max adventure off the ground for a decade by staging some of wildest and most ingenious action sequences ever seen on film. He rarely applies the brakes for most of Fury Road’s 120 minutes, and yet we remain fully invested in Furiosa’s efforts to free herself and four other women from the grasp of the nefarious Immortan Joe. Did we have a lovely day? Yes, George, we did. And we look forward to the next day we spend with Max Rockatansky. 4. Inside Out Pixar takes us inside the mind of an emotionally confused preteen girl—and the result is as revealing and insightful as it is imaginative and affecting. Inside Out treats its sad and dejected young protagonist Riley with warmth and respect as she loses control of her five basic emotions— Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—while under the duress of moving to a new city with her parents. The Amy Poehler-led voice cast alternates between hilarious and touching; the journey through Riley’s mind is executed in thrill-ride fashion; and the simple story of one girl’s response to the new complications in the life speaks to all of us no matter our age or gender. 5. Creed Just when you had thought we had seen the last of Rocky Balboa comes this poignant spin-off that reminds us why we hold Sylvester Stallone's good-natured pugilist so dear to our hearts. Fully realizing the potential that was squandered by Rocky V, Creed transforms Rocky into the mentor we all wish we had. And his pupil isn't just some scrub off the street. Writer/director Ryan Coogler makes the genius decision to focus on the son of Rocky's onetime opponent, Apollo Creed, bring the franchise full circle. Coogler brings an unexpected poignancy to the relationship between Rocky and Adonis "Donnie" Johnson. Stallone’s never been better as Rocky and Michael B. Jordan delivers a knockout performance as a rich kid out to prove he's so much more than his father's son. And he is. Just as Creed is more than just another Rocky sequel. 6. Steve Jobs We all knew that Steve Jobs was a nasty piece of work long before Aaron Sorkin began writing his screenplay for this biography that’s brilliantly told over the course of three product launches in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet Sorkin and director Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs never feels like a hatchet job. This is a searing, provocative examination of a flawed man who will rightfully go down in history as a genius and a visionary, one who changed our lives forever when it comes to how we work and how we play. But Sorkin skillfully juxtaposes Jobs’ professional triumphs with his personal failings through his relationship with the daughter he longed denied was his, the mother of his daughter, and the friends he treated as inferiors and the employees he abandoned. He’s depicted as a man so consumed with the future that he refuses to look to or acknowledge the good in his past. Michael Fassbender isn’t the splitting image of the Apple co-founder but he nails the ambition, arrogance, and contempt of a man who changed the world mostly for the better. Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine may offer a fuller look at Jobs but it is this intense portrait of the man, the myth and the legend that we will recall each time we use one of his indispensable Apple products. 7. Bone Tomahawk The best revisionist western this year to star Kurt Russell, and that's no mean feat. Director S. Craig Zahler takes a well-worn genre and gives it a fresh twist by pitting its heroes against a tribe of cannibals that’s kidnapped Patrick Wilson's wife. Bone Tomahawk is as violent and brutal as Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight but it also boasts an eloquent script that places as much emphasis on defining the men on this mission. It also results in a career-best performance by Matthew Fox and a sterling supporting turn by Richard Jenkins. Unlike Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno, Bone Tomahawk doesn’t dabble in shock value as it acts on its fascination for the horror that lies beyond our doorstep. 8. Anomalisa This unintentional companion piece to Pixar’s Inside Out taps into the frustrations, anxieties and disillusions of a self-loathing middle-aged white man who believes he’s trapped in a prison of conformity. With the aid of co-director Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman offers a disturbing psychological evaluation of an emotionally damaged man very much of his time, one who looks to his past to ensure his future without regard of the pain and suffering he inflicts on others. Told flawlessly through stop-motion animation, Anomalisa remains a grounded exercise in despair and self-loathing even when Kaufman allows his wounded protagonist Michael Stone to slip into fantasy. It also boasts stunning voice work by David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan, who is required to voice multiple characters to further reveal Stone’s dissociative state of mind. 9. Where to Invade Next Yes, America is great, but it can be greater. Want proof? The ever-divisive Michael Moore is happy to serve it in his own indomitable fashion, no doubt much to the joy of his fans and to the dismay of his distracters. Less a documentary than a working vacation, Where to Invade Next finds Moore crisscrossing the globe in search of how other countries have taken fundamentally American ideas and concepts about education, healthcare, civil rights, and law and punishment and perfected them in practice to the point of envy. Moore’s goal: to push the powers that be in the United States to consider whether some of the systems adopted and refined overseas could work here and improve life for every hard-working American. As expected from Moore, he finds the humor in a serious subject to make it easier to digest. He also takes plenty of potshots at the politicians and corporate bigwigs who don’t seem to have our best interests at heart. It would be foolish to walk away from Where to Invade Next without thinking that Moore occasionally oversimplifies things in order for him to hammer home his points. Or that what works in Europe would work just as easily over here. But this doesn’t matter. Moore wants to provoke discussion and inspire long-term change in the hope of making life better for many of the 99 Percent that struggles to make ends meet on a daily basis. Is there anything more American than that? 10. Son of Saul Director Laszlo Nemes imbues his horrifying Holocaust drama with a sense of honor and duty that can only be derived from the love that a parent harbors for his/her child. Battling time, friend, and foe, Géza Röhrig storms through Son of Saul with unparalleled urgency as a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz—one with the job of burning the bodies of murdered Jews—who who endeavors to give a dead child he believes to be his son the burial he deserves. The haunting Son of Saul manages to tell a tender tale about a father’s devotion to the memory of his child without making a single compromise in its depiction of the final days of the Holocaust. Honorable Mentions '71 99 Homes All Things Must Pass Amy Beasts of No Nation Best of Enemies Black Sea Bridge of Spies Brooklyn Cartel Land Carol Chi-Raq Clouds of Sils Maria The Connection The Diary of a Teenage Girl Dope The Duke of Burgundy Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films The End of the Tour Ex Machina Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief Grandma The Hateful Eight Hitchcock/Truffaut The Hunting Ground It Follows Jimmy's Hall Kingsman: The Secret Service Krampus Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter The Last Five Years The Look of Silence Lost River Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau Love & Mercy Maggie Magic Mike XXL The Martian Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation Mississippi Grind Mistress America Mr. Holmes Mustang The New Girlfriend The Overnight Paddington Pawn Sacrifice Peace Officer The Peanuts Movie Phoenix Results Room Shaun the Sheep Movie Sisters Spring Spy The Stanford Prison Experiment Star Wars: The Force Awakens Straight Outta Compton Trainwreck Trumbo Two Step The Walk What We Do in the Shadows While We’re Young Youth Robert Sims Aired: Dec. 24, 2015 |
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