2015 in film. • Page 2

Yeah it’s upper Spielberg, especially for the 2010s

 

1. Mad Max: Fury Road
2. Sicario
3. The Lobster

 

1. Carol
2. Mad Max
3. The Lobster

 

1. Embrace of the Serpent
2. The Lobster
3. Sicario

Watching Fury Road high with my brother in cinema was the point I realised I don't like marijuana anymore. I was only ever really a social smoker, I used to like getting high and doing fun things with my friends, then they stopped doing fun things and kept the weed. On the actual film or my recollection of it, it peaked early with flame thrower guitar, Witness me! and the big dessert chases, then halfway through they just announce they're going to do the same thing back to the start. You already did that! I already saw it! ok another 40mins of car crashes in the desert.

The Witch was style over substance, but I liked it, very cool style, great ending, fantastic goat casting.

Sicario needs to try harder if it gunna ruin cocaine.

 

1. Anomalisa
2. Mad Max
3. The Final Girls

The VVitch, Tangerine and Green Room are all also good

 

1. Mad Max
2. Room
3. Green Room
4. H8ful Eight
5. Spotlight
6. SW: Force Awakens
7. Sisters
8. Revenant
9. VVitch
10. The Intern

Couple nights ago nothing was on TV but Room had recently started and I had already seen it but my girlfriend hadn’t and she was instantly drawn in. We were both an emotional wreck after it.

 

Surprised Room isn’t getting more love tbh. It’s a hard watch, but it’s also incredible.

 

Room, Sicario, and The Lobster are getting too many votes.

 

1. Inside Out
2. Trainwreck
3. The Night Before

I’m sure there are better movies than those last two, but they were enjoyable comedies. The Night Before has become an essential Christmas movie for me now, which I think is the first Christmas holiday movie to become essential viewing since Elf IIRC.

Inside Out I fucking loved and Bing Bong still gets me to this day. It’s regularly up there in my top 5 Pixar movies and probably occupies the #1 spot on many days.

 

1. Inside Out
2. Embrace of the Serpent
3. Right Now, Wrong Then

I absolutely adored Inside Out, by far my favourite Pixar film, and one that really affected me. It's cleverly constructed, with some really simple metaphors, and some great moments to tug at your heart string. It doesn't forget to be very funny too.

Embrace of the Serpent is a great and righteously angry film about post-colonialism and capitalism. We see culture stolen and eroded at every turn, with nature and communities being ruthlessly exploited. The examples in the film are endless, but the one that that stood out for me, and stuck with me, as the perfect example of "benevolent dictatorship", was the fury Theodor von Martius had when his compass was stolen, because "it's important the tribe don't need to rely on it".

Right Now, Wrong Then is Hong Sang Soo's great film, that begins as most Hong films do, with a film director on a date with an actress, and it goes badly. The film then restarts and we see the day again, with a different outcome, and almost has a Mullholland Drive feel to it.

Honourable mentions;

Son of Saul is a horrible, claustrophobic film from Hungary about Auschwitz. It's chaotic, and doesn't aim for big cathartic emotional climaxes like other films about the Holocaust might do. The dead and the bodies here are all unknown and nameless, which makes it even more harrowing in it's own way, as the chaos and the unfeeling randomness and brutality is the point.

Quite a lot of good American cinema this year. Bone Tomahawk is a fantastic western archetype that turns into absolute horror and terror by the end. Green Room is a great tense thriller, that uses extreme violence extremely carefully and well. Eye in the Sky I don't think anybody has thought about it since, but I thought that was pretty great (albeit a bit formulaic) thriller about drones.

The Witch is a good folk horror, and always a pleasure to see Ralph Ineson in anything. Chloe Zhao's debut feature, Songs My Brother Taught Me, is a great little coming of age story about life on a Native American reservation. It's a shame to see she's directing a Marvel film, but I hope that's just a one-off, and she can continue with the interesting stuff she's been doing so far in her career.

From elsewhere, almost certainly the only film from Kyrgyzstan that I've seen (Edit: No it's not, actually) is Heavenly Nomadic, a lovely gentle docu-drama about the life of nomads in the mountains.

Our Little Sister is a lovely and gentle Kore-Eda film about three sisters and their teenage half-sister who comes to stay with them. As always with Kore-Eda, there's not a huge amount of plot, but he finds moments of authenticity and warmth in little moments. It's also one of the very few films I've seen involving football (soccer) where it looks like the actors can actually play.

The Club is a great Pablo Larrain film about a remote house containing a group of ex-communicated priests, who are there to atone for their (obvious) sins.

Finally, 45 Years is a great little British film about a husband and wife celebrating their 45th Wedding Anniversary, when something long buried in the past resurfaces. It's subtle and restrained, with two incredible central performances.

Looking through the films I've seen this year - there was a lot of shite released this year, more than previous years, at least for me. Or maybe I just chose films poorly.

 

aside from your hatred of Denis V, what's wrong with Sicario? it's actually probably his most thematically coherent movie (even if that is Sheridan's doing)

 

I saw Eye in the Sky in theaters and also thought it was solid, but a guy two rows in front of me answered his phone during the climax and had a conversation for the rest of the movie

 

what is wrong with the lobster lol

 

I've never met the man personally. Sicario is a bad after school special and a little racist too.

 

if someone watches Sicario and comes away with "the CIA is cool and the good guys got the bad drug dealers" then that is a fundamental misreading on their part, not the movie's fault

 

They definitely did the "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown ending, but pretty much every film or show at least admits some level of moral relativity or mild criticism of the system. It's still right wing, and coming from Americans and a Canadian it feels especially exploitative.

 

what on earth

 

1. The Witch
2. Mad Max: Fury Road
3. The Lobster

 

Mad Max: Fury Road wins it with 32 votes. Inside Out was in second place with 12 votes. Mad Max: Fury Road will move on to the bracket.

 

Expected but still a worthy winner.