So now onto the top 10 and the films that really stood out
for me this year. It’s a great top 10 and reasonably diverse in terms of
genres. The top 3 will be close behind and you can probably take a good guess
at which films will make the cut, but I didn’t want any of these posts to stray
beyond the 3000 word mark. We’re all busy people and have a lot of drinking to
fit in over the next few weeks so I figured split the top 20 into three parts
so you can have a read while you hide from your relatives or wait for dinner to
be served.
10. Bridge of
Spies
To return to the theme of expectations, when I first got
wind of this film I assumed it would be a nailed on top 5 contender. Spielberg
directing Tom Hanks in a Cold War thriller, with a script pepped up by the Coen
Brothers, it sounded like a dream come true for me. Throw in a bittersweet
romance and they’d have nailed almost all of my “perfect film” criteria.
So it’s a little disappointing that I can’t put it higher
than 10th.
In a lot of ways the film is great. There is no one better
at keeping the focus on the individuals at the centre of massive events than
Spielberg and no one more suited to playing the honest, put upon everyman than
Tom Hanks. Both are on fine form here, as they tell the tale of James Donovan,
an insurance lawyer dragged into the uncertain world of the Cold War when he’s
“asked” to defend a captured Soviet spy.
Mark Rylance steals every scene he’s in as the man accused.
He plays Rudolf Abel as calm and intelligent but avoids making him seem too
calculating, doing an excellent job of clouding the audiences allegiances when
compared to a number of the representatives of the American justice and
security services. A wonderfully nonchalant response to Donovan’s confusion
about his calm might end up being overused but has the Coen Brother’s touch all
over it.
In the end though it is a film that feels like less than the
sum of its parts. The tension never really builds as it should and I kept
waiting for something truly unexpected to happen. It seems unfair to complain
that a film based on a true story plays it too safe with the way the plot
develops, but the film suffers from a predictability throughout.
It is probably also true that I take for granted Spielberg
and Hank’s excellence, so the bar is set a little higher for them than it might
be for most other people.
Bridge of Spies is an excellent film but I couldn’t put it
any higher than 10th because I walked out of that screening with an
unmistakable sense of disappointment. Fairly or not, I expected and hoped for
more given all the ingredients that went into making it.
9. The Theory of
Everything
I’d almost forgotten this was a 2015 release as, like
Birdman and Whiplash, the Oscar contenders always feel a long time ago when it’s
time to write these reviews, but once I’d confirmed it really did come out this
year it had to make the top 10.
It’s a subtle, loving biopic that resists the temptation to
treat one of the most respected figures in modern society with rose tinted
glasses. Every one of the central characters feels painfully but wonderfully
genuine, flawed to various degrees but complex and human.
Eddie Redmayne’s transformation throughout the film is one
of the most staggering physical performances I can think of. It’s a cliché of
reviewing biopics but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think exactly these
four words as I left the film: he becomes Stephen Hawking. He portrays the
character with a heart breaking combination of inner strength and physical
fragility, of someone fighting every day not to be limited by the circumstances
of his everyday life.
Rightly he won the Oscar for Best Actor but the film wouldn’t
work even half as effectively as it does without the performance of Felicity
Jones as his wife Jane Hawking. Jones doesn’t get a physical transformation to
showcase the characters arc; she communicates a lifetime of love, pain,
jealousy and insecurity through the subtlest of changes. She gives Jane a
stubborn strength, someone who deserves but would never ask for sympathy. Jones’ career so far has been a bit hit and
miss but I suspect there’s an Oscar win in her future and if you want to see
her at her best check out Like Crazy.
8. It Follows
As I touched upon in part one it’s rare I really love a
horror film, it’s a genre I enjoy but rarely adore. It Follows is a wonderful
exception to that trend.
Largely avoiding jump shocks in favour of a growing,
inescapable sense of dread it is the story of a girl, played by the brilliant
Maika Monroe, threatened by a STD (Sexually Transmitted Demon in this case).
From the moment she does the deed with a seemingly decent guy she is being
pursued, always at walking pace, by a creature determined to kill her.
The sexual element feels both relevant to modern concerns
over the dangers of promiscuity and the age old horror obsession with sex and
virginity. A part of the films brilliance is that despite the premise of the
threat it never feels preachy about sex. It manages to be a film about a girl
being haunted because she had sex without ever feeling judgemental towards her
for the fact she did and that’s a balancing act most horror films would utterly
fail to achieve.
Monroe was great in The Guest (check it out if you haven’t
yet, a fantastic thriller that feels simultaneously modern and a throwback to
80’s horror/thrillers) and she is superb throughout It Follows. The film
wouldn’t work without her ability to combine tough and terrified in almost
every scene. She’s certainly another actress destined for great things.
It’s also refreshing to watch a horror film where the
protagonist’s friends actually help rather than being utter twats, so it has
that going for it.
7. Me and Earl and
the Dying Girl
I’ve always been a sucker for American teen indie movies. At
least one makes it into my top 10 every year and 2015 is no different.
It isn’t a huge surprise in hindsight that this one stands
out. Greg is a self-conscious, overly analytical teen who is obsessed with film partly as
a way of hiding from real life, who is reluctant to truly trust anyone as a
friend and has an awkward relationship with a girl that toes the line between
platonic and romantic. Yeah can’t possibly think why I connected with this.
The film centres around Greg and his friend Earl, whose
superficially unlikely friendship is driven by a shared love for films,
producing their own wonderfully immaturely titled parody efforts (A Sockwork
Orange and Raging Bullshit being personal favourites). Greg’s world is
complicated by his mum’s insistence that he spends time with Rachel, a girl
diagnosed with Leukaemia.
What follows is a refreshingly honest, awkward exploration
of teenage relationships that largely manages to avoid the melodramatic
pitfalls that the film’s title might make many people think of. A healthy dose
of sarcasm and cynicism keeps the film just the right side of the emotionally manipulative
line and gives the moments of honest emotion real power because they feel
earned.
Funny and sweet in equal measure, if you want a subtler and
more emotional evening I can’t recommend this highly enough.
6. The Martian
This film was a glorious surprise (here we are again with
expectations, it’s almost like I planned it this way), delivering so far beyond
the level I thought it might when I saw the trailers.
Ridley Scott has directed enough truly great films that I
will watch anything he’s attached to at least once but there’s no point
pretending that it hasn’t been a while since he delivered something really
special (Black Hawk Down or Gladiator arguably, so nearly 15 years either way).
The Martian is a return to form for Scott, a film that
crosses genres freely as it combines comedy, thriller, sci-fi and drama with
real glee. I tend to love films that resist being pigeon holed and The Martian
is no exception. It had more moments that made me laugh out loud in the cinema
than the majority of outright comedy films in recent memory, had space travel
sequences as thrilling as anything Interstellar offered and delivered some
great sit and talk argument scenes where some of the best of the current
character actor crop (Daniels, Ejiofor, Wiig & Wong) argued about the next
move. Plus it’s great to see Sean Bean in a different type of role than I’ve
become used to but keeping his accent.
The characters stuck on earth are great and those travelling
between Mars and Earth do as much as they can with the arguably short end of
the stick they’re given (not that it stops Jessica Chastain from being one of
the best things about the movie because I’m starting to doubt there’s anything
that could) but the question of whether this film works or not hinges entirely
on Matt Damon’s Mark Watney.
The titular Martian, Damon spends the majority of the film
on his own and I’m not sure he’s ever been better. Bringing every bit of his
likable, homespun American charm to the role he provides the heart of the film.
He’s a winningly believable combination of stubbornly hopeful and brutally
realistic.
The other key strength of the film is that it manages to
capture some of the optimism about human exploration of space (we’ll find a way
to make it work against all the odds) without straying into Interstellar style
pseudo-intellectualism. In many ways The Martian works in the same way that a
film like Everest does in that it’s about human beings surviving somewhere they
have absolutely no right to do so, but unlike those films that are all about
individual human’s capabilities, The Martian offers a much more optimistic view
of what we as a species might be capable of if we came together.
Naïve and simplistic sure, but I’m all for more films trying
to remind us that we should aim to achieve more together rather than compete
against each other. Especially when the story is told this damn well.
5. Sicario
A crime thriller that delights in living in the grey areas
of morality, Sicario is a wonderfully tight action film, with several stand out
set pieces and excellent performances across the board.
Villeneuve’s films so far have been promising but mixed.
Prisoners is great but not quite as clever as I feel he wanted us to think.
Enemy is a glorious concept that comes too close to being swallowed by its own
ambition.
Sicario is all the promise of those films delivered without
the flaws. The pace is deliberately relentless as Emily Blunt’s FBI agent Kate
is thrown into a world where her certainty in the rule of law will be
constantly questioned.
The fact that the cinematographer is Roger Deakins plays a
big part in why this makes top 5. If you know me well I’ve probably rambled on
at some point about how Deakins is a guarantee of quality. The go to
cinematographer for the Coen brothers (and the advisor on the How to Train Your
Dragon franchise, which counts for a lot in my book), Deakins delivers yet
another gorgeous film here.
The composition and framing of shots is both beautiful and
pointed. Whether it is shots that take in both sides of the US/Mexico border or
ones that emphasise the increasing descent into darkness that the main
characters face, nothing is wasted or accidental.
Blunt is superb throughout as our way into the murky world
of the drugs trade, and she’s complimented throughout by the ridiculously good
performances of Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro. The latter two delight in
operating in the realm of moral ambiguity that dominates the “war on drugs” and
bring weight and subtlety to the roles.
Only It Follows eclipses it this year for the dread laden
tension that dominates the mood of the film as it becomes increasingly hard to
believe anyone will come out the other side of these events better off.
4. Ex Machina
Alex Garland had already established himself as a great
screenwriter (28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go, Dredd), but this is his
directorial debut and it’s one that should have everyone paying full attention.
Ex Machina is a brilliantly low key exploration of
consciousness and humanity. Played out as an extended take on the Turing test,
designed to test whether an A.I can pass for human, it’s a film that revels in
the subtleties of conversations and insecurities.
For the majority of the film there are only 3 characters.
Domhnall Gleeson is excellent as Caleb, the geeky office worker that wins an
employee lottery and gets to travel to reclusive billionaire Nathan’s woodland
home. Nathan is played by the consistently brilliant Oscar Isaac and the
interactions between him and Gleeson are showcases for two of the best actors
of the current generation. Questions of intelligence, trust and ambition drive
all their scenes, as both characters size each other up, machismo and
machinations go hand in hand.
But for all that I love both actors, they are working in the
shadows of one of my favourite performances of the year. I’d never heard of
Alicia Vikander before 2015, but she has arrived in a big way now and it’s hard
to see anything other than a long and successful career ahead of her. She is
utterly brilliant in Ex Machina, giving her character of Ava, the android being
tested by Nathan and Caleb, a wonderful complexity.
Given that the film is framed by an extended Turing test, it
is essential that the audience can’t easily make up their mind any more than
the characters can and Vikander plays the role with such subtlety and intelligence
that I was kept guessing throughout as to how developed her A.I was. The design
of the character, all plastic surfaces and whirling mechanics other than her
face, serves as a constant reminder of her robotic nature, so it’s a testament
to the expressive performance of Vikander that you keep being drawn in to such
a degree that it’s the more robotic moments that jar rather than the human
ones.
So that’s numbers 20 to 4, next up the top 3.
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