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The 25 Best Films of 2015

At a time when so many certainties are slipping away, the cream of the theatrical crop is concerned with collapsing established boundaries.

The 25 Best Films of 2015
Photo: Drafthouse Films

The wonderful thing about cinema is how it resists easy ordering principles. Once you start thinking about the movies you’ve seen, they automatically blur into one, a glorious procession of images, sensations, and recollections that is itself like escaping into the darkness of the auditorium. Yet this quality becomes a hindrance as soon as you need to pick out individual films from the flow: Which film did I see at which time and how did it make me feel both now and then? How we consume films today makes things even harder, as both the proliferation of film festivals, themed programs, and retrospectives in New York and beyond and the wealth of Blu-ray editions and streaming options actively encourage us to think boundless.

But if compiling a list of the best films of 2015 means imposing a structure on film watching to which it often no longer conforms, we can at least be grateful that the films we return to as such exhibit the same disdain for limits as cinema itself. At a time when so many certainties seem to be slipping away, the cream of the New York theatrical release crop is equally concerned with the collapse of established boundaries.

And these collapsing boundaries took many forms. One lifelong marriage needed just a single week to quietly crumble away, exactly the same timeframe necessary for a friendship to curdle from passive-aggression into outright hostility. But relationships themselves were equally adept at casting off constraints this year, whether in the form of the two women who shrug off the limits imposed on their love or the grieving narrator who finds peace by refusing to distinguish between the loss of a dog, a parent, and a husband.

Storytelling itself proved blithely disdainful of restriction, not least in a bath-time daydream that descends into a veritable cascade of interlinked stories and a buttoned-up costume drama that blossoms into a western before twisting itself further into a post-colonial mindfuck. Spaces, too, were joyfully robbed of their standard demarcations, as the partitions between the different communities of a New York neighborhood were suspended to get to the heart of the very concept of community.

And unbounded invention was on display in creating whole worlds of the imaginary: riots of sand and flaming guitars or shit-spattered medieval realms from an unlikely future. Whether in 19th-century Patagonia, the Norfolk Broads of today, a post-apocalyptic desert, or a tub full of too much hot water—the only thing you could be sure of in 2015 was that nothing is certain. James Lattimer

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Editor’s Note: Click here for individual ballots and list of the films that came in 26–50.


The 25 Best Films of 2015

25. 45 Years

In this greatest film about domesticity since Scenes from a Marriage, intimacy is hideously close to strangeness, and a painstakingly built household is just one sentence away from collapsing. Or, at least, from a reminder that it has in fact been built on its own wreckage: “There’s something I want to tell you.” The revelation of a secret leads to a series of quiet horrors, mostly played out with magnificent diligence in Charlotte Rampling’s face. As her husband (played masterfully by Tom Courtenay) recoils toward remembrances that precede their own togetherness, she feels secondary, as if their history were a mere afterthought to some truly valuable treasure buried before she came along. Monogamy, no matter how beautifully propped by countryside languor and Kierkegaard, is exposed as always besieged, incomplete, and in the vicinity of its own undoing. Suffocatingly precise, Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years is like the marriage it portrays: an engraved ballet of sorts. Or perhaps it’s a tango where the woman leads, managing everything, including her husband’s failures and memories. He’s left with only the attic to tend to the totems of his past, which she promptly invades when she sees fit. How quickly lovers turn to cats and mice. And yet, when they literally dance to a song by the Platters, it’s he who leads, she having a hard time going along with the sham of unscathed bliss with a straight face. Knowing that any love story, any story, is a lie. Diego Costa


The 25 Best Films of 2015

24. Eastern Boys

Soldiers wielding AK-47s patrol Paris’s Gare du Nord train station as a marauding band of young, undocumented émigrés disperse through the complex, searching for tricks to exploit. The pop of fireworks startles a young boy, haunted by wars we’ll never understand, out of bed. A man seems to stand beside himself as his house is robbed, unsure if he should protest or join the party. In a year that has found numerous ways to devastate the city of Paris and the European Union’s debates over refugee status, Robin Campillo’s shapeshifting gay romance offers a penetrating interrogation of human nature, belonging, and the social structures that shape and constrain us. The bracing formalism of the film’s long, masterful opening scenes establish the complex transactional relationships at the film’s core, before Eastern Boys gradually yields to an impeccably shaded brand of humanism. It’s a film of unclear motives and ever-shifting boundaries, but Campillo continues to grasp toward comprehension even as answers become more elusive. Eastern Boys finds the personal and the political helplessly bound together, caught in a morally fraught tangle that neither well-intentioned authorities nor mere human compassion can straighten out. Christopher Gray


The 25 Best Films of 2015

23. Of Men and War

The unending series of wars in the Middle East have become so impenetrably politicized as to effectively numb the domestic populace to their dimensions of human annihilation. Filming in a potentially revolutionary PTSD treatment center over a period of several years, director Laurent Bécue-Renard follows several male American soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, allowing their misery to speak for itself. Moments of veterans confessing to the atrocities they witnessed or committed, which haunt them despite whatever lofty platitudes a detached senator might strategically utter, are alternated with scenes in which the men attempt to re-acclimate to their family lives. Something empathetically extraordinary emerges from this straightforward structure. Next to the poetic war-time orations overheard at the treatment center, the home-bound moments seem so banal, so puny, effectively placing us in the shoes of men who’re unable to decompress from a life of profoundly adrenalized stress. Until one discerns the heartbreaking gestures of the people trying to reclaim their lost loved ones. Throughout Of Men and War, Bécue-Renard allows the audience to feel the soldiers’ alienation from society—the divorce they feel between the profession that’s potentially ruined them and the personal lives that helped them survive war only to subsequently fail to match the fantasies that sustained them for so long. Chuck Bowen

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The 25 Best Films of 2015

22. Son of Saul

Son of Saul has been accused of turning unspeakable violence into a theme park-like sensorial experience, but to rationally defend László Nemes’s masterpiece is to deny what the body actually tells us about this merciless experience. To witness the attempts of the titular Sonderkommando, played by Géza Röhrig, to psychically survive is to be overcome by incredulity, tears, and a desperate need to vomit all at the same time. Although it’s easy to think of the way that Son of Saul constrains the frame to the main actor’s face for almost the entirety of the film as a gimmick instead of an audacious conceptual choice, there’s nothing gratuitous about Son of Saul. The nausea it provokes is political. The perpetual close-up evokes the simultaneous partiality and absoluteness of any point of view, a perverse closeness between the viewer’s masochist and sadistic gaze. The human face that obscures the frame, refusing to make room for the mise-en-scène that physically traps it, is the face that appears in German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s work—its too-many muscles, too-many nuances making it the last, and ultimate, weapon against fascism. Diego Costa


The 25 Best Films of 2015

21. Mistress America

Mistress America suggests a screwball version of The Great Gatsby in so much as Noah Baumbach’s verbally witty, visually nimble, and robustly edited tour de force focuses on a self-invented socialite, Brooke Cardenas (Greta Gerwig). Prone toward self-regarding romanticizing rather than self-actualizing, she’s seen here through the eyes of Tracy (Lola Kirke), her future sister-in-law and aspiring writer, whom Brooke essentially adopts as her understudy to the manifestation of the American dream. That ideal is one Baumbach gleefully deconstructs, exhibiting its illusory nature in the willful fantasies of Brooke even as Mistress America’s multitudinous moments of joy render the dubious myth irresistible. It’s a paradox that Baumbach and Gerwig, who co-wrote the script, are content to serve as the film’s ultimate truth, one embodied in Gerwig’s incredible livewire performance. If her character is often unlikable, Gerwig herself is not, employing a fount of bullish charisma that barrels past its foundation of lies to make us believe, as she does, and against all the odds, that some orgiastic future still beckons. As caustic as she is charming as she is clueless, Gerwig earns the title of Mistress America. Nick Prigge


The 25 Best Films of 2015

20. Creed

If the modern franchise product is Lebron James, pummeling opponents and raking in billions through sheer might, then Creed is its Steph Curry, infusing a familiar formula with an uncanny and seemingly effortless grace. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti has been rightly hailed for Creed’s mid-film, single-take fight scene, but hasn’t received enough credit for realizing one of the year’s most complex and indelible shots, literally projecting the legacy of deceased fighter Apollo Creed onto his illegitimate son, Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan). As Adonis shadowboxes with the ghost of his father, Alberti, Johnson, and director Ryan Coogler set up both the film’s primary plot and its meta-textual thesis: A legacy is both a burden and a privilege. This is one of many clichés that Creed infuses with an earnest, timeworn vibrancy. Bolstered by charismatic performers and a patient sensibility that allows dramatic scenes to last a few self-questioning beats longer than expected, Coogler has transformed a very white franchise into one pointedly concerned with black lives and traditions. The triumphant result is, like Adonis running through the streets of Philadelphia with a crew of dirt bikers and updated version of Bill Conti’s iconic score, at once unapologetically schmaltzy, supremely self-conscious, and resoundingly progressive. Gray


The 25 Best Films of 2015

19. Carol

Whereas Far from Heaven felt slightly calcified by its devotion to Douglas Sirk’s signature aesthetic, Carol seems to at once acknowledge its influences—Sirk, Robert Altman, Vincente Minnelli—and push beyond them to get at Haynes’s personal artistic perspective. There are images in this tale of two women in love that seethe with desire in ways that the filmmaker has only hinted at before, from a flexing, bare back to the titular housewife eating forkfuls of creamed spinach with impossible poise. Both Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara summon an immediate sense of kinship, empathy, and hunger for each other’s characters, communicated through practiced, graceful deliveries, eloquent gestures, and glances and gazes that seem to be understood as code. Haynes, working from Phyllis Nagy’s measured, evocative script, cloaks this timely, angry, and melancholic tale in exquisite production design and period detail, which has caused some to accuse the film of favoring style over substance. On the contrary, Haynes’s luminous aesthetic both suggests the old-fashioned nature of the romance that’s portrayed here, and a modern world stuck in the past, still unable to fully accept passions as simultaneously unique and familiar as those felt, and shared intimately, by Carol and Therese. Chris Cabin

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The 25 Best Films of 2015

18. Phoenix

Christian Petzold’s seductively allusive Phoenix shuttles its heroine, a concentration camp survivor named Nelly (Nina Hoss), through a series of feminine representations from the history of postwar art cinema—first the bandaged blank slate of Eyes Without a Face, then the Madeleine of Vertigo, and finally Fassbinder’s headstrong Maria Braun. That each version of Nelly is more human, more whole, and more infused with agency than the former points to the deeply sympathetic perspective of Petzold’s pulpy historical essay, which pinpoints in its iridescent lead character a potent allegory for Germany’s perennial push-pull between collective repression and self-reckoning. If Beats Being Dead and Barbara navigated other national maladies with a distance that bordered on the academic, Phoenix wraps its insights in the tantalizing shape of a romantic suspense thriller, one lent a lushness redolent of Hollywood’s Golden Age via the voluptuous cinematography of Hans Fromm, an elegantly uncluttered Stefan Will score, and the screen-filling fluctuations of Hoss’s battered, then reconstructed, then renewed face. The film’s queasy exploration of role-playing and self-delusion recalls Hitchcock, even as the understated visual schemas—here addressing the question of personal dignity in terms of positioning within the expansive widescreen frame—are pure Petzold, and it’s hard to imagine any director even marginally less tactful than him pulling off the stabbing parting note. Carson Lund


The 25 Best Films of 2015

17. The Forbidden Room

Somewhere within The Forbidden Room’s exhaustive nesting-doll narrative(s), a character states, in what may be taken as a sly, paradoxical bit of meta-commentary, that “nothing is ever the past.” Though it may characteristically look like a battered century-old film reel found amid relics in an attic, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s masterpiece of digressive cinema uses this aesthetic to test, for two blissfully anarchic hours, the limitless possibilities of the medium today. Through a visual and aural frenzy in an outré style of old (that also, oddly, appears to have never been), the filmmakers sublimely convey a journey through the maze-like contours of the id. The characters, whose identities are constantly being reinvented, are gripped by transgressive dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams that always seem to be on the cusp of burning along with the film’s faux-nitrate stock. With hilarity to match its bat-shit eccentricity, The Forbidden Room feels like a metaphoric place where few filmmakers would dare enter. Thank heavens Maddin and Johnson were willing to open the door. Wes Greene


The 25 Best Films of 2015

16. Jauja

Lisandro Alonso’s first feature in six years is a lesson in how to make the perfect comeback. It’s only the middle section of Jauja that bears even the slightest resemblance to the filmmaker’s previous work, as Viggo Mortensen’s Danish captain traverses an empty landscape that transitions from swaying reeds via sodden grass to a limitless expanse of bare rock. Beforehand, a pared-down costume drama plays out on the beach, as numerous furtive glances are exchanged between the captain’s men and his bodice-wearing teenage daughter, Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), who eventually elopes with one of their number, thus triggering the captain’s wanderings. Once free of her father, Ingeborg feels a peculiar sense of déjà vu that can only stem from the future, as the desert she finds herself in devours everything, even time itself. In a film that evokes the dead ends of colonialism via the dreams of the present, it’s the images themselves that form an impeccable bridging mechanism, the rounded edges of a daguerreotype playing host to bright, unearthly hues of an irrepressible modernity. Jauja is an entirely singular journey into the strangest of new pastures, whether for its ambitious director, its endlessly versatile star, or indeed for cinema itself. James Lattimer


The 25 Best Films of 2015

15. Heaven Knows What

Restlessly curious portraitists Josh and Benny Safdie spotted homeless addict Arielle Holmes in a subway terminal in New York’s Diamond District, and a year later had a lightly fictionalized film about her life in the can. Shrewdly, urgently, and furiously, Heaven Knows What transcends the potential ethical landmines inherent in its production, even registering its outside-in viewpoint as a philosophical distance that amplifies the film’s small-scale but high-stakes tragedy. Holmes’s memoir, Mad Love in New York City, forms the basis of a narrative that finds Harley (Holmes) panhandling through midwinter Manhattan while binging on heroin and longing for the toxic Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones, whose anomalous professionalism melds with the remarkable ensemble of real-life castaways without a hitch). Despite its spiraling trajectory, however, Heaven Knows What cultivates an undiscriminating humility throughout, thanks in large part to the Safdies’ and cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s inspired use of specialized safari lenses whose extreme telephoto capabilities would, under most circumstances, be unsuited for narrative productions. Here, though, volatile street drama plays out as if through the appalled gaze of a distant onlooker, a reflexive dismissal we’re forced to confront over 94 minutes, only to be spit back out into harsh, unforgiving reality at precisely the moment when empathy is most needed. Lund

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The 25 Best Films of 2015

14. The Look of Silence

Director Joshua Oppenheimer’s films emphatically suggest that all of humankind’s troubles begin and end with the body. With The Act of Killing and its companion piece, The Look of Silence, the filmmaker offers startling concentration on how numerous Indonesian men stridently murdered hundreds of thousands of citizens who were deemed communists, carrying out such operations with a smiling, almost carefree abandon suggestive of innocuous deeds from their years in elementary school. Unlike The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence is directly concerned with generational lore. Oppenheimer furthers his ongoing interest in the complex ways that cultural taboos, sometimes cute and innocent in childhood, as evidenced by a young girl’s delight in smelling her own farts, become destructive and psychopathic when allowed to stay intact and subsequently merged with unruly political power. Finally, The Look of Silence refuses to relinquish an interrogation that, if unable to restore the lives taken, provides a formally rigorous and carefully considered plea to potentially stopping the currently unceasing forms of violence carried out under lies fortified by decades of mythical, masculine chest-thumping. Clayton Dillard


The 25 Best Films of 2015

13. Queen of Earth

Queen of Earth, or, the real Best of Enemies, and easily as bitchy as anything that went down between Gore Vidal and William Buckley Jr. As a fresh director, Alex Ross Perry has already played around remarkably from an arsenal of stylistic options, and utilized offbeat comedy like some generic form of Bondo, filling out the unexpected spaces and cracks of his movies. And crack is what Elisabeth Moss does spectacularly in his newest chamber piece, in which two women suffer each other’s love and friendship on two consecutive summer retreats to an isolated lakeside chalet. In the “present” trip, Catherine (Moss) is reeling from the loss of her father and fresh from a breakup. But it’s a stasis regularly interrupted by flashbacks to Virginia (Katherine Waterston, easily Moss’s equal). The volley of their strategic psychological gamesmanship is, in every sense of the word, hysterical, a confused cross between Roman Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Sweet Dee telling the Waitress: “I know, I hate you too! But that’s how girls are. We’re catty and back stab.” Which would be enough in itself, but is elevated further through Perry’s open-source relationship with his influences (The Shining, Persona, and so on) aligning symmetrically with Catherine’s dissociation. Eric Henderson


The 25 Best Films of 2015

12. Taxi

Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, wherein Iran’s most prominent dissident tries his hand at cab-driving sousveillance, only to find nothing less than the raw material of—what else?—cinema. Being the third film—or non-film, if you like—made by Panahi since his 20-year ban on filmmaking was placed by the Islamic Republic, Taxi is as outward-thinking as This Is Not a Film or Closed Curtain were claustrophobic, less another denunciation of Panahi’s situation than a freewheeling interrogation of the modes of control and spectatorship that have been at play in every last frame of his career. That said, given the twinned HD cameras on the cab’s dashboard and the preponderance of iPhone footage shot by both Panahi and his fares, this is a work that can only, time and again, collapse the boundaries between “the movies” and “real life” (to quote a binary taken for granted by the filmmaker’s 11-year-old niece), and not without a rickety sense of humor at that. Lest Western progressives get too comfortable with Panahi’s inspired circumnavigations of the ban, it’s a blessing to cruise at his speed nonetheless. Steve Macfarlane


The 25 Best Films of 2015

11. Li’l Quinquin

When human body parts start turning up inside dead cows in a rural French village, the subsequent police investigation reveals the nation’s countryside to be populated by inept cops, racist children, reactionary farmers, and harmless imbeciles. Bruno Dumont’s blackest of anti-comedies uses the metaphysical murder mystery at the center of its plot to explore the economic malaise, terror, xenophobia, and cretinous culture of globalism submerging Europe today. Released in America just before the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Li’l Quinquin seemed to foreshadow the ensuing year’s wave of terrorism and right-wing populism, albeit reflected in a funhouse mirror where physically and psychologically malformed preteens, clueless bureaucrats, and rural simpletons struggle with the moral darkness and ethical chaos unleashed by these phenomena. Immersing its characters in “the heart of evil,” as the head investigator calls the murders, the film walks a fine line between tragedy and parody that ultimately gets closer to conveying the grief and despair precipitated by unspeakable acts of violence than would a more conventional drama. Largely employing actors with real-life physical and mental handicaps unleashing their characters’ unfiltered thoughts with the irrepressible mania of patients suffering from Tourette syndrome, this uncomfortable comedy was one of the year’s uncanniest and most cathartic viewing experiences, proof that laughter is the strongest antidote to fear and sorrow. Oleg Ivanov

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The 25 Best Films of 2015

10. Chi-Raq

Chi-raq appears to have gurgled up out of the deepest recesses of an American culture in the midst of a death rattle. In the beautifully blunt and incisive opening, the lyrics to Nick Cannon’s haunting “Pray 4 My City” fade in and out over a black screen that subsequently blares with the message “This is an Emergency” in red block letters. The emergency in question is the unending wave of death spurred by the United States’s addiction to guns, and the insidiously cultivated institutions of disenfranchisement that incite it. The film takes pop culture’s instruments of mass distraction by the reins—namely its obsessions with sex and money—and repurposes them for agitprop that transcends preachiness by the sheer force of its figurative power. Chi-raq is willing to try anything, reaping astonishing emotional returns on director Spike Lee’s daring and empathy. Musical numbers, ancient Greek theater, oration, rhyming verse, documentary, dance, farce, lewd, lurid hijinks, and high tragedy are all fused together by a sensual formalism that’s commanding even by Lee’s considerable standards. There’s never been anything quite like this film, which always appears to be on the verge of collapsing in on itself, under the weight of its vast ambition and scope. It’s this sense of risk and tension that ultimately render Chi-raq so scalding and unforgettable. Bowen


The 25 Best Films of 2015

9. The Assassin

Just as Millennium Mambo’s prologue teases momentous turn-of-the-century events that conspicuously fail to materialize, so, too, is The Assassin’s opening a misnomer of sorts, a lengthy text on the 9th-century power struggle between the imperial court of China and the renegade province of Weibo. Although Hou Hsiao-hsien thrusts his titular assassin straight into the swirling vortex of this rivalry, he shows little interest in disentangling its intricacies, as consequence doesn’t necessarily follow cause, proverbs and recollections trump exposition, and the ellipse is everything. The focus is placed instead on something far more radical, the sensation of following discussions conducted in candlelight behind fluttering curtains, of passing through vast landscapes in the hope of finding direction, of having to land blows your mind is no longer behind. The Assassin is a ravishing repository of ever-shifting colors, textures, and shadows, a piercing assertion that recreating a historical era must take into consideration how differently said era might have grasped time, space, and narration. And Hou remains just as capable of conjuring forth islands of pure emotion without any recourse to standard identification: the story of a bluebird only induced to sing by the sight of its sad reflection, a body racked by sobs, its face entirely covered, a golden mask in pieces on the forest floor. James Lattimer


The 25 Best Films of 2015

8. Blackhat

As the camera tracks through the cell of a studly computer hacker in an early scene from Blackhat, director Michael Mann pulls focus to reveal the spines of two books: Jean-Françoise Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. The camera subsequently locates the hacker, played by Chris Hemsworth as a shell of masculinity, whose hulking physicality and baritone voice are all the characterization needed to commence Mann’s anti-blockbuster, filled with so-ugly-they’re-pretty extreme close-ups within vast urban spaces to communicate stripped-down human feeling. If Miami Vice rejects the ’80s television show’s materialism by turning the city into a digital jungle of irreconcilable loss for its characters, Blackhat goes further by relegating its players to the machinations of narrative device, where storytelling, as a viable medium for philosophical or cultural edification, is as dead as “grand narratives”—a concept enunciated by Lyotard in the aforementioned book. But Blackhat is no mere aesthetics lesson either. In probing the logic of cinematic coherence and using genre as a precept for its treatise on the divide between human, animal, and computer, Mann has made a 21st-century Touch of Evil or Tokyo Drifter—would-be genre films consumed by historically specific efforts to reconfigure on which side of the line, whether geographic or existential, its breathing beings’ desire lies. Dillard


The 25 Best Films of 2015

7. Heart of a Dog

There is, according to a recent New York Times article, an empathy gap in all of our brains. Empathy is a choice, and scientists are trying to map out its pathways in hopes of helping us build a bridge toward a greater capacity for compassion. But if only an expert can deal with a problem, then these scientists have nothing on Laurie Anderson. A less scathing kissing cousin of her great 2010 album Homeland, an amalgamation of observations about climate change, the shithole of war, and our pop-culture obsessions, Heart of Dog provides another resplendent scan of this great artist’s kooky dream body and the rabbit hole of philosophical reverie through which it drifts in search of meaning. Throughout this free-associative mind melt, Anderson connects her memories of her rat terrier Lolabelle—and by extension that of her late husband, Lou Reed—to ruminations on everything from the panic that gripped the world after 9/11 to our oppressive surveillance state, arriving at the realization that the purpose of death is the release of love. The work of a profoundly benevolent artist, Heart of Dog announces itself first as an emotionally coherent testament to its maker’s method of self-healing before offering itself to us as a means of rooting out all our failures of empathy so we can, at the very least, stay sane in a world full of so much pain. Ed Gonzalez

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The 25 Best Films of 2015

6. Hard to Be a God

Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God proceeds from an immediately incongruous setup: a science-fiction film set in the murky recesses of a Dark Ages nightmare, its apocalyptic vision of the future looking backward instead of forward. It’s within this seemingly counterintuitive concept that German, whose death toward the end of the film’s production confirms this as his capstone opus, finds the most perfect expression of a career-long fascination with the contact points between civilization and chaos. The film’s imperious protagonist is an astronaut with an unorthodox mission, sent to a planet on the cusp of a renaissance to nurture the growth of a more equitable world. But as so many leaders embarking on the forcible democratization of unprepared societies have recently learned, the conceit that guidance from one advanced culture will foster another easily falls apart under scrutiny. Our sophisticated hero is thus reduced to one warlord among many, his habitual bloody noses tapping him into the collective stream of nasty fluids that flows throughout this amazingly grotesque film, cementing him as just another corrupt figure in the pitch-black Rabelaisian saturnalia that results. Jesse Cataldo


The 25 Best Films of 2015

5. Magic Mike XXL

The difference between Magic Mike and its sequel calls to mind how Robert Christgau described the difference between listening to janet. on a junk radio box versus a hi-fi stereo system as “the difference between daydreaming about sex and having somebody’s crack in your face.” In jettisoning the original film’s three-faced Cerebrus standing sourly at the gates of Good Time Island (bad boss, inapt pupil, and prude love interest), Magic Mike XXL cashes the check the original only postdated. It frees its mind, lets its ass follow, and invites you to do the same, making it one of the only truly transgressive Hollywood franchise installments in recent memory, and a gender-corrective summer movie bookend with Mad Max: Fury Road. Its endorsement of the male form and breezy, optimistic depiction of an America unshackled from mansplaining releases Hollywood’s dogged “no homo” insistence on militarizing engorged mams and cakes. It makes love with its USDA Prime, not war. (That benevolent progressive attitude even carried over into breathtaking promotional pushes.) Few films depicting the pleasures of getting the job done have so gleefully wolf-whistled while they worked, and the only appropriate response is to put your lips together and blow. Henderson


The 25 Best Films of 2015

4. Horse Money

Pedro Costa’s films have always been referential, but Horse Money may be the first film of his career to feel wholly his own. The nocturnal flipside to the harsh, documentarian light shone on Colossal Youth, the oneiric, abstract structure of this film places the camera in a dreamscape in the mind of Ventura, Costa’s muse du jour and a living reminder that the same cultural revolution that gave the director and his comrades liberty made life even more terrifying and uncertain for Portugal’s post-colonial immigrants. The political message is distorted by abstract imagery that reduces remembered and imagined foes as nameless apparitions of fear, but the film occasionally pulls into sharp focus to deliver its most devastating commentary. One scene, of Ventura’s widowed friend reading her identification documents and crying to see her life laid out on a few pieces of paper she can only hope will satisfy officials, summarizes the callous bureaucracy that oppresses immigrants in only a few minutes. Another sequence, of Ventura riding an elevator bound, perhaps, for hell, evokes PTSD in the guise of a living soldier statue, though the traumas dredged up are as much social as militaristic, suggesting that, for some groups in society, peacetime can feel as hostile and dangerous as a war zone. Jake Cole


The 25 Best Films of 2015

3. Timbuktu

In Timbuktu’s opening sequence, a line of ancient African figurines and masks torn apart by jihadi bullets lie in the sand like so many mutilated bodies, a foreshadowing of killings to come. But writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako, who grew up in Mali and Mauritania, is less interested in the terrible violence jihadists have inflicted on his people than in the many smaller humiliations and restrictions the jihadists impose and the heroic acts of defiance that often greet them. As he did in Bamako, Sissako illustrates the damage done by a ruthless institution (in this case, fundamentalists bent on establishing a new caliphate) by focusing on its effect on one formerly happy family. Professional and non-professional actors alike—including singer Fatoumata Diawara, whose improvised song of mourning provides the film with one of its most terrible and beautiful scenes—contribute to the film’s realism by inhabiting their characters with un-self-conscious ease. At the same time, Sissako ramps up the underlying sense of dread. Unfolding his story of occupation, resistance, and collateral damage at a stately yet relentless pace, and often either cutting just before a moment of high drama or filming it from a distance, he maintains a powerful thrum of tragic inevitability while avoiding any hint of propagandistic exploitation. Elise Nakhnikian

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The 25 Best Films of 2015

2. In Jackson Heights

Though the common line on Frederick Wiseman is that he dissects institutions, In Jackson Heights suggests an even broader general through line for his career: a chronicler of no less grand a subject as American society as a whole, and in all its facets. What better canvas for this great filmmaker, then, than the titular neighborhood in Queens, New York, one of the most culturally diverse communities in all of the United States? Per usual, Wiseman shows utmost patience and curiosity in exploring seemingly all of Jackson Heights’s various nooks and crannies. From the most mundane nail salons to the highest reaches of local government, In Jackson Heights checks in on them all, in a film that’s heartening for its inclusiveness—ethnic, institutional, and otherwise. Not that this is merely a 190-minute all-over-the-place hang-out movie. Encroaching gentrification, for instance, is a frequent concern among some of the ethnic groups, threatening to erase Jackson Heights’s melting pot of an identity. Such is the way of America, Wiseman implicitly concludes. But rather than dwell on such unfortunate inevitabilities, he prefers to bask in the here and now—local color, joyous music, jubilant fireworks and all. Kenji Fujishima


The 25 Best Films of 2015

1. Mad Max: Fury Road

In yet another year loaded with unmerited reboots and superfluous sequels, as the seemingly endless extension of retreads, reimaginings, and expanded universes continues to pummel viewers into submission, it’s almost unbelievable to find a mass-market movie that makes good on the hype. Pulling off a genuine Trojan-horse maneuver of cinematic subversion within the cloak of a beloved franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road stands as a statement on how even the most stringently managed of studio properties can be massaged to produce miraculous results. It also proves that poetry and pandemonium, not to mention inventive filmmaking and healthy box office, don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Moving up from the unfocused weirdness of Beyond Thunderdome into new heights of inspired madness, this innovative vision from a familiar apocalyptic wasteland retains the series’s general outlines while also further reducing its titular hero to a mythical supporting character. Yet for all the implicit progressive politics and outsized metaphoric constructions, the film is most successful as a blunt expression of impassioned force, its strident stands on a variety of hot-button issues used as fuel to stoke a cacophonous combustion of energy and noise. Structured around the spectacle of a single extended chase sequence, it spins out a Keaton-esque carnival of dodgy practical effects, ingeniously tactile set pieces, and equivalently creative CG. Subtlety and contemplation have their place, but Fury Road scratches a different sort of atavistic itch, satisfying the compulsion for genuine awe and amazement so often neglected by modern tent poles, exhibiting its ultimate allegiance toward the viewer rather than the monolithic dictates of the brand. Cataldo

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