The Top 15 Films of 2015: Transverso's 2016 Oscars Best Picture Picks

With the Oscars finally arriving tonight, it’s time to take a look back at the incredible year of film that was 2015. For every superhero sequel there were plenty of indie smashes, and it was easy to find art at the multiplex as easily as it was in your local arthouse cinema. So let’s look back at the movies that will shape the film world for the next few years.

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15. Phoenix

A riveting psychological thriller set in the ruins of postwar Germany, Phoenix is a hypnotic slow-burn that builds its tension deliberately and devastatingly. Nelly is a Holocaust survivor who had her face disfigured in a concentration camp and when she returns to her hometown to find her lost love, she finds he may nothing may ever be the same. It takes cues from Rainer Fassbinder and Alfred Hitchcock, but manages to morph into its own cerebral mystery that results in an absolutely stunning final scene that’s among the year’s best.

14. Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg may be the closest thing our generation has to Frank Capra, a filmmaker who tries to unearth what it really means to be an American while not shying away from the darker underbelly of our culture. So while it might be interpreted at first as simplistic or unsubtle, Bridge of Spies is an intricate deconstruction of the peril that Cold War attitudes placed our world into. Given a biting wit by writers Joel and Ethan Coen, Spielberg uses America’s sweetheart Tom Hanks to craft a beautiful slice of Americana, bolstered by his confident direction and an excellent and understated Mark Rylance performance.

13. Sicario

Timely, nail-biting and cerebral, Sicario is yet another masterpiece of unbridled, heart-stopping tension from director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Enemy). An unflinching look into the heart of darkness at the center of the Mexican drug war, Sicario keeps the audience in the dark just long enough until its razor wire tension explodes in a third-act confrontation that will leave your jaw on the floor. The Oscars should be ashamed for not nominating Brolin or Blunt but especially Benicio del Toro in one of the highlights of his career.

12. The Big Short

Propelled by one of this year’s sharpest and most inventive screenplays, The Big Short proves director Adam McKay’s talents lie beyond just Will Ferrell vehicles like Anchorman. The financial collapse of 2008 is a subject of fascination for McKay (touched upon in his underrated The Other Guys) and takes full advantage of the big budget and star-studded cast of The Big Short to tell this story in its entire tragic fullness. While some of the explanation may feel like condescension, the directorial flair that McKay presents his story with keeps things fresh and funny but with the dramatic weight the subject deserves.

11. Tangerine

As much as Tangerine could’ve just been “the movie shot on an iPhone,” it manages to transcend and become so much more. It’s an epic exploration of the Los Angeles underbelly on Christmas Eve, told through the eyes of two lovably rambunctious transgender prostitutes. The iPhone cinematography gives it a wonderful kineticism of life and verve, but its two leads give it a warm heart at the center. It’s hilariously madcap with just a hint of melancholy about finding your place in this world, but Tangerine is a sweet portrait of an unusual friendship told with some awesome filmmaking technique.

10. Love & Mercy

One of the best biopics in recent memory, Love & Mercy is a stunning recreation of the dizzying highs of creating one of pop music’s greatest records ever in Pet Sounds and the soul-crushing lows of Brian Wilson’s subsequent mental dissolution. By intertwining the two award-caliber performances of Paul Dano and John Cusack as two eras of Wilson, Love & Mercy crafts a heartbreaking arc of redemption through the power of love and music. recording sequences alone are worth the price of admission (supplanted by a great electronic Atticus Ross score) and it’s a career high for every actor involved, especially Dano and Cusack.

9. Crimson Peak

All of director Guillermo del Toro’s finest films are about the relationship of innocence vs. brutality, and Crimson Peak is indeed another visual masterpiece from one of the few living visionaries left in genre filmmaking. Moreso a Victorian melodrama than a straightforward horror film, Crimson Peak is a testament to Del Toro’s intricate craft, building another terrifying world within Allerdale Hall, full of shadows and ghosts. It's an old school kind of horror told with unapologetic camp and nobody is better at crafting atmosphere or creatures than Del Toro. Hail to the king, baby.

8. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

While it may have been impossible to top the heights of the Burj Khalifa from Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is a roundly satisfying addition to one of the greatest modern action franchises. Mission Impossible is a series that understands scale more than any other and once again crafts some of the year’s most awe-inspiring action setpieces that simply suck the breath right out of you. Tom Cruise once again throws himself in the jaws of death for our amusement and Rogue Nation takes the best elements from all four of its previous installments to form a supremely entertaining summer blockbuster and one of the year’s best action films.

7. Inside Out

Just when it seemed PIXAR might be in a creative lull, a film as fresh, funny and inventive as Inside Out comes along. The concept of one’s emotions personified as little people inside your head is already quite a clever idea, but Inside Out’s screenplay grows this concept into one of PIXAR’s funniest and most moving films ever. It never offers easy answers to some of life’s toughest problems but is still a valuable portrait of how to deal with the combating emotions within ourselves. And with a cast this perfect, it’s no wonder it brings you to tears of both laughter and sadness.

6. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

It is a small miracle that The Force Awakens manages to feel so organic, natural and so thoroughly a part of the Star Wars canon so instantly. Yes it’s great to see more practical effects, location shooting and overall more competent direction, but the characters are what make us truly love Star Wars and The Force Awakens creates them with marvelous aplomb. It’s the most solid foundation fans could’ve hoped for and a cast and crew of marvelous talent did what most thought was impossible: make the entire world love Star Wars again.

5. The Hateful Eight

After a few false starts and script leaks, it seemed unlikely that Quentin Tarantino was ever going to get around to making his next Western, but somehow it arrived and was bigger and badder than anything we could’ve hoped for. Shot “In GLORIOUS 70mm” as the posters loved to proclaim, The Hateful Eight was incredibly heartening to see so many turn out for the roadshow 70mm film screenings, a cinematic event unlike anything seen in America for the last 40 years. Not to mention that the film itself is one of the director’s finest, assembling some familiar faces from the Tarantino oeuvre and shoving them in a snowbound cabin as their wits slowly whittle into blasts of blood-soaked brutality. Beautifully shot by Robert Richardson and given the year’s best score by the maestro Ennio Morricone, the elegance is contrasted by one of Tarantino’s screenplay, one of his most black-hearted treatises on the nature of humans. Three hours simply whizz by and we’re left with a landmark for Westerns, Tarantino and the medium of film itself.

4. The Look of Silence

Documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to 2012’s groundbreaking The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence somehow manages to eclipse and become an even more important piece of cinema than its predecessor. The Act of Killing was a sickening snapshot of how people who committed some unforgivable atrocities manage to live with themselves, but The Look of Silence manages to make that pain even more immediate and disturbing by having a survivor of the massacre face his persecutors in front of the cameras. The interviews are pulse-pounding, cringe-inducing, absolutely revelatory bits of cinema and once again Oppenheimer has crafted a gorgeous, gut-wrenching document that is both important and artful. If you only watch one documentary from last year, make it this one.

3. Carol

Few movies are ever as gorgeously photographed as Carol but even fewer manage to pack such a devastating emotional punch. The forbideen romance between Therese (Rooney Mara) and Carol (Cate Blanchett) sounds like the stuff of pure melodrama, but becomes the most purely affecting relationship depicted onscreen this year. The breathtakingly composed shots are given the dreamlike qualities of memory, as if groggily recalling the nostalgic minutia of romance: the lingering gaze of a lover, the offhand smile, the squeeze of a shoulder. Not since Her has a film managed to capture the thrill of falling in love but also the heartbreak of separation. It's a gorgeously orchestrated piece of filmmaking, one that plants a tender ache in the heart that doesn't fade quickly.

2. Ex Machina

With all of the recent success of sci-fi on the blockbuster scale, Ex Machina is a refreshing reminder that the best science fiction stories are based in exploring big ideas and not necessarily on visual spectacle. First time director Alex Garland, screenwriter of such recent sci-fi classics as Sunshine, Dredd, and 28 Days Later, is certainly no slouch in the visual department, but Ex Machina is more interested in exploring the dynamics between its three main characters. It’s an absolute delight to watch its intricate plot unfold, throwing twist after turn up to one of the year’s most shocking endings. It’s heady science fiction at its finest and it rewards rewatch after rewatch. Drop everything and watch it as soon as possible.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road is a once in a generation event. A movie so pure in its unbridled creativity and filmmaking boldness deserves every amount of praise one can muster. At its core just a chase film with a feminist bent, it manages to transcend and become so much more. Director George Miller takes his incredible apocalyptic fairy tale begun over thirty years ago and creates even more dazzling mythmaking out of the nuclear wasteland. Visual storytelling is rarely this simple and coherent in a modern action film, but it’s also hardly ever this fun. No film was as viscerally exciting, visually bold and unabashedly badass as Mad Max: Fury Road.  It set the film world on fire and will probably dominate the conversation on action cinema for decades to come. Perfectly paced, perfectly shot, perfectly edited and bathed in sound and fury, Mad Max: Fury Road is one of this decade’s absolute finest.

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Honorable Mentions:

Steve Jobs

The Martian

Spotlight

Amy

The Wolfpack

Bone Tomahawk

Krampus

The Assassin

World of Tomorrow

The End of the Tour

[Spoilers] 'The Force Awakens' Is Worthy Rebirth of Beloved Star Wars Universe

[This review contains spoilers]

From the moment the opening crawl began there was a palpable, tingling excitement permeating the theater, as only the most cold-hearted can avoid at least a small burst of childlike wonder at the sight of those golden letters that signal the beginning of a new Star Wars film hurtling across space. This one, the JJ Abrams-directed Episode VII: The Force Awakens, did not disappoint.

Introducing the Rebellion-turned-Resistance's golden-hearted flyboy Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) as well as new droid friend BB-8 (Bill Hader & Ben Schwartz), we’re quickly connected with an instantly likable young cast capable of moving the now open-ended series forward. The real stars, though, are Empire splinter group First Order's determined yet often unsure (importantly non-clone) ex-Stormtrooper turncoat, FN-2187 (a reference to Princess Leia’s A New Hope cell number), better known as Finn (John Boyega), and the plucky and self-sufficient Rey (Daisy Ridley), a lone scavenger of unclear heritage on the desert world of Jakku. 

Despite how tiring it must be still fighting a somehow larger power three decades years later, the original cast members have aged well. Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) is a general in the New Republic now, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is just as charming and fun a scoundrel as before, and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) still doesn't show a single grey hair. C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) now has a (mysterious or mundane?) red arm, and R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) comes around eventually. Even Admiral Ackbar (Tim Rose) remains at the helm of the navy’s controls.

A big fear leading up to Awakens was that the new and old characters would not mesh well as the two worlds collide, or that Abrams would struggle to utilize the returnees without making it too much about them or kick them aside almost entirely, though this concern abated almost as soon as Rey and Finn seamlessly banded together with Han and Chewie after being captured by the latter. It never feels like an outdated babysitting even when Rey displays round-eyed admiration upon meeting them, much like the fans themselves sitting beyond the fourth wall.

The looming foil to these heroes, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), is soon revealed to be Leia and Han’s son Ben, an official canon replacement of the expanded universe’s Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo, as well as a nice nod to EU's Ben Skywalker, son of Luke (both, of course, named in memory of Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi). Beginning as one of Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) protégés, he derailed his former master’s attempt at regrowing the Jedi by turning to the Dark Side. It is this background that sets the scene for Luke’s disappearance, as our protagonists spend the most of the film in search of him.

Overall, the plot line runs largely like glorified reboot of A New Hope with strong parallels throughout: a young, apparently orphaned and force sensitive individual escapes their desolate desert home planet (Jakku serving as Tatooine II) before being thrust far out of their depth and into intergalactic conflict. But many of these parallels are turned on their heads, such as the father-son dynamic; just as Luke once dangled over a bottomless pit at the mercy of his Dark Side dad, Kylo Ren flips the script and ushers in the end of an era by throwing his own benevolent parent Han into the abyss with a ruthless - and heartbreaking - fatal stab. One can argue it was predictable, but you’d be lying (or quite cold) if you didn’t feel at least a twinge of hope as the lovable hero tried to save his own son face to face at his own peril.

Sporting the much discussed lightsaber with twin exhaust ports near the hilt, Kylo Ren’s unstable but powerful blade is of course a symbolic representation of the anger and erraticism associated with the Dark Side itself. (It is also, interestingly, the first uniquely built lightsaber we see since Darth Maul and Count Dooku’s modified weapons in the prequels.) Not quite the archetypical ne’er-do-well, Kylo Ren exhibits emotional complexity the absence of which was often bemoaned in the prequels. It’s clear he has raw talent and certainly the pedigree, but he needs training, and it's interesting to see a Star Wars villain not fully formed and brooding over a storied past for once, but rather vulnerable, raw, and growing. Despite his cocksureness he even admits to Han he is struggling with the pressure before killing him, and it's a key facet to Kylo Ren’s character that we observe his insecurity and volatility.

Kylo Ren aspires to emulate his grandfather, Darth Vader, even wearing a mask in the same style and praying to his idol’s damaged helmet at one point. It’s here when one can’t help but recall how Anakin, Yoda, Ben, and even Qui-Gon Jinn were able to communicate with their followers from the afterlife through the force, and wonder if - and if not, why not - Kylo Ren has done so with his inspiration. And would there not be a disconnect as Anakin had turned back to the light at his latest living point? (It also begs the question if this what Luke has been up to in his exile, though with Alec Guinness unfortunately passing away in 2000 it raises the issue of who would play Ben’s ghost.)

And who is this mysterious larger-than-life hologram of Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) that he reports to? His ancient appearance implies he is new only to us, but where would that place him during the events transpiring only 30 years before? With the Banite Line of Sith finally dying out with Vader's last breath, neither Snoke nor Kylo Ren hold the Sith title of Darth, so what are they really? Is it possible that Snoke is somehow a return of Darth Plagueis, Darth Sidious’ immortality obsessed late master? We have until May 2017 to speculate.

Throughout Awakens, many of the same classic Star Wars motifs are expanded upon, like the vaguely UK-accented bad guys parading around, now even more overtly fascist than ever before with Nazi-reminiscent rallies in front of their new genocidal super weapon. Despite being only a rogue faction of the disbanded Empire, their technological ability appears even more powerful with a Death Star-esque sun-sucking death ray (of questionable physics) embedded in a planet called Starkiller Base, which is capable of evaporating multiple worlds at once. That’s no moon, it is literally an entire planet this time, and the classic mission impossible to lower shields and destroy it from the inside repeats for the third, somewhat self-aggrandizing but still nevertheless wholly enjoyable, time. Combined with subtle expansions on the awe-inspiring little things, like Darth Vader’s force pull on Han's blaster evolving into Kylo Ren's force freeze of a blaster bolt itself, Abrams furthers the narrative as sort of a love letter to the original trilogy.

Despite these developments the militaries of both sides seemed to have changed little over the elapsed time (X-Wings and TIE Fighters are still not obsolete, apparently, despite the stark changes in weaponry between the first two trilogies and the archaic appearance of dead vessels on Jakku), though there is the small but notable addition of some sort of sword capable of sparring with a lightsaber, brandished by a Stormtrooper against Finn in his first lightsaber battle on the luscious Takodan. It’s the only time we see our galactic enemies smart enough to invest in lightsaber-resistant melee weapons besides General Grevious’ electrostaff-wielding MagnaGuards in Revenge of the Sith; for all their ineptitude at firing and seemingly little tactical or uniform changes, at least they now have enough sense to realize maybe they should designate at least one individual capable of countering their main threat. Still, in a series always revered for amazing us by introducing us to something new every episode, it did seem the growth in that area was a bit stunted.

Staying true to the original vision, The Force Awakens employs puppets over CGI whenever possible, and, barring the ravenous tentacle monsters on Han’s other ship, everything seems real enough to make you forget about fantastical digital editing. The 3D showings added depth without being overbearing exaggerations, and the overall visual representations ranging from lightsaber duels in the snow to riveting dogfights over gorgeous planetary displays were stimulating feats of beauty.

This is not to say there are still scenes which require at least some suspension of disbelief, such as, how did Rey and Finn find the Millennium Falcon unlocked, why do evil bases still not install security cameras in their hallways to better find escaped prisoners, why was there only one guard left with a force sensitive prisoner, and why was it one so susceptible that even a completely untrained Rey could seduce him? Not to mention the subtly strange implications of R2-D2 conveniently powering on with the rest of the map when the plot needed to advance, and Rey and Finn overpowering a trained and experienced Kylo Ren with little more than heart. But Abrams keeps things moving along at such pace and with such coursing excitement it’s impossible to linger on these detractions.

The film is also not without playful moments, though they’re thankfully created without a character anywhere near the often hilariously maligned and dreaded Jar Jar Binks, which seems especially pandering and silly in the light of our two new main characters' effortless chemistry and natural comic relief intertwined with real human emotion and dialogue.

Even at its most self-indulgent, The Force Awakens earns the hype by being a genuinely enthralling experience built through deft character development and plot drive mixed with authentic nostalgia derived simply through the Star Wars brand. Moving forward it is perhaps best to think of this as the first of three as opposed to the latest of the OT, though Abrams’ intent in crafting a beginning, middle, and end does make it a satisfying film in its own right, despite the near-literal cliff hanger of Rey handing a lightsaber (that chose her over Kylo Ren) back to Luke (who could potentially turn out to be her father or uncle) on a mountaintop, with Kylo Ren’s life status unknown.

From the quintessential opening scene in the dark of space to the ending that felt too soon despite a 136 minute runtime, The Force Awakens was one of the rare films for which the theater applause didn’t seem tacky, as it truly brought us at least a few parsecs closer to the beloved magical home we left a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.