Best Films of 2015

10: They Look Like People

dir. Perry Blackshear

An everyman with a post-breakup inferiority complex reconnects with his long lost best friend whose mental health has deteriorated to the point of schizophrenia. The friend believes himself to be caught up in a global conspiracy in which aliens are covertly taking control of human bodies, leaving less and less people who he can trust. Tensions are stressed as the office worker struggles to put together why his friend is acting so strangely.

This indie horror film not only perfectly captures the dynamics of the two characters' male friendship, but it also expertly sets up a fascinating and terrifying situation. The film takes the idea of a trust-fall to a whole new level and deeply explores what it means to be in a committed friendship.

9: The Hateful Eight

dir. Quentin Tarantino

Although, I am traditionally pretty indifferent to Tarantino (he has never been a huge influence) it is easy to recognize the areas he excels at and to see why he is one of America’s greatest directors.

The Hateful Eight adapts King Hu’s ‘Dragon Inn’ to a post civil-war American setting and injects the story of bandits, bounty hunters, and lawmen stuck in a remote inn with relevant political subtext. The devolution into horrific and disgusting violence at the end of the film serves as a stark warning, however the message of forgiveness for the sake of forgiveness is a warm and vital element.

8: The Assassin

dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien

An assassin balances commitment to her order’s code and the commands of her master with a moral and emotional reluctance to carry out an assassination on someone from her past.

The plot of this film may seem straightforward, but the lack of clear narrative causality makes this film extremely difficult to follow. Thus, the film has a nostalgic and dream-like quality as the experience of watching it is very similar to the experience of walking downstairs as a child and coming into a room in which your parents are watching a movie, that seems to have causality but you do not understand. This may seem like an apologist’s reasoning, but I very much enjoyed this film and it is beautifully shot with many stunning landscapes of rural China.

7: Hampow93: My Brother, Which I Care For

dir. trappped

Two young adult brothers in the rural American South take videos of emergency vehicles in action and post their findings to Youtube. They go to junkyards to salvage car horns.

Trappped’s followup to Gothic King Cobra doesn’t quite hit that film’s existential and nightmarish heights, but this one does serve as a fascinating documentary character study of abandoned youth in a capitalist society that has no use for them. A crushing look at the societal abandonment of those who carry around the scars of abuse that is distinctly American in context.

6: No No Sleep

dir. Tsai Ming-Liang

A monk walks, very slowly, around Tokyo at night. A train blasts off across the night subverting visual expectations like no one has ever done before. Two men sit together in a hot bath. They desperately want to talk to each other.

Tsai Ming-Liang’s latest short film (its about 30 minutes) is one of his very best works. In a more concise format and with a more compelling visual pallet, this film perfectly captures the emotions of loneliness and isolation that he has built his career on. He remains one of the masters of contemporary slow cinema and one of the most interesting directors of all time.

5: Mad Max: Fury Road

dir. George Miller

A man reluctantly uses his skills as a driver to help a band of slave women escape the clutches of a tyrannical overlord in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The film essentially serves as a single extended chase sequence across the desert with little in terms of thematic or political content except for the overt themes of female empowerment. What truly sets this film apart, is the loving dedication to stunt work, practical effects, energetic yet precise camerawork, and Miller’s eye for capturing diverse action set-pieces. The film is a honed-to-perfection work of a man who understand the action-film inside and out.

4: Carol

dir. Todd Haynes

A working class young woman in the 1950s leaves her patronizing boyfriend to be in socially frowned-upon relationship with a wealthy socialite wife and mother named Carol. The two find their relationship to be impossible within the context of the patriarchy so they embark on a idealistic, although escapist, road trip where they hope no men can further come between them.

The greatness of this film lies in its restraint and in the commitment to small details. This film is built on side glances and reassuring pats on the shoulder. The expressive bodies of Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett tell a story of forbidden love and longing. In diegesis, it rejects politicization and commits to just being a love story between two people. However, this act of simple restraint is the precise element that makes it so moving and so politically effective.

3: Son of Saul

dir. László Nemes

A jewish prisoner in Auschwitz is cleaning a crematory and finds the body of a boy who he believes to be his son. While his fellow prisoners are planning a rebellion, he searches across the camp for a rabbi willing to give his son a traditional burial.

The film is almost entirely shot on a steads-cam following the main character. The depth of field is so shallow that only he remains in focus for much of the runtime. The horrors of the setting around him are seen in the distance, as blurred by the camera’s strained lens.

Such a strange technique serves to focus our attention on the man witnessing such atrocities as he literally carries around the burden of his son’s catastrophic death. In my view, the film is almost entirely successful at side-stepping the dangers of titillation and exploitation of the Holocaust for dramatic purposes. By keeping the depth of field so small, the filmmakers have altered the visuals to the point at which the film stops feeling “immersive”. This film’s aspiration is not to make you feel as if you were there (a fools errand and an ethically despicable one) but to articulate the burden that this man is carrying and that, in a sense, many Jews still carry to this day.

2: Cemetery of Splendour

dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Weerasethakul’s latest film does not cover entirely new rhetorical grounds. The main character is played by one of his regulars. It’s one downfall is that, for those familiar with his filmography, it does feel familiar.

However, this story of a hospital worker tending to soldiers afflicted with a mysterious sleeping sickness in a repurposed elementary classroom where she once attended school, is of no lesser quality than Weerasethakul’s other works. Even if it’s failure to break new ground does classify this as “minor-Weerasethakul”, his uncanny ability to craft magical and meditative works that defy categorization, assure that even this film warrants a top place on any best of 2015 list.

Cemetery of Splendour is an absolutely breathtaking and arresting work that could only be captured by the man himself. His restrained pace and use of impressionistic techniques make this an experience like no other director can give you.

1: The Sky Trembles and The Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers

dir. Ben Rivers

The first half is a documentary about a French director making an historical epic in rural Morocco. The second half is a narrative film in which this director is kidnapped by bandits and made to dance while wearing a suit made of tin can lids.

Ben Rivers has created his masterpiece of combining documentary with fiction. While his two previous features have demonstrated his fascination with combining the real with the staged, this film provides a clear linked progression. One character, the French director, connects both halves and provides both continuity and causality between them. The experimentation is fascinatingly playful and forward-thinking.

The content of this film completely backs up the ambitious structure. The post-colonial tale of a patronizing and exploitative European director going mad in the Moroccan desert as he succumbs to the mental anguish of enslavement is truly disturbing and compelling on many levels.

This is the story of the “civilized” man transforming into a literal monster. He becomes subhuman and more than human all at once. Even after he escapes the clutches of his bandit captors, he remains this dancing beast and runs off into a beautiful sunset. Such is life.