Rocky, Robots, Spies And Scottish Kings: The 15 Best Films of 2015

Going back through the films I’ve reviewed at Junkee, you’d think 2015 was a pretty terrible year in cinema: I was mainly dissecting terrible films, or defending films other critics dismissed. But almost all the films I’ve loved this year pushed back against the culture of toxic masculinity that still rules cinema.

The studly strippers of Magic Mike XXL discovered their own true desires. The Duke of Burgundy immersed viewers in an all-female S&M fantasyland that dissected the complexities of long-term relationships – unlike the capitalist domination in Fifty Shades of Grey. Amy packed an emotional punch, bearing witness to the squandering of a stupendous talent. Phoenix turned female self-determination into a slow-burning noir thriller. Even Disney’s gloriously unironic Cinderella breathed a third dimension into its charming prince and wicked stepmother.

Those were my honourable mentions. But here are my favourite 15 films of the year.

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Birdman and Clouds of Sils Maria

The more I thought about these two films, the more I saw them as companion pieces. Both Sils Maria (directed by Olivier Assayas) and Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu) follow ageing actors (played, respectively, by Juliette Binoche and Michael Keaton) thrown into existential crisis by staking their reputations on stage roles.

Both films’ protagonists find themselves challenged by younger characters, and fear their best days are behind them. Both films observe a tension between intellectually rigorous art and dumb populism, and both introduce a young woman (Emma Stone in Birdman; Kristen Stewart in Sils Maria) as a moral foil.

But where Birdman has masculinity in its sights, Clouds of Sils Maria is about a particularly female struggle for dignity and professional respect. It powerfully critiques the assumptions about womanhood that circumscribe female actors’ careers, and ageist competition between women lies at the heart of the film.

What I appreciate most about both films is the knowingness with which they embrace unreality. Birdman toys with the metaphor of Chekhov’s gun – is it a real gun, a stage prop, or even an aggressively pointed finger? But the film’s most striking achievement remains its one-take cinematography conceit. It’s like a theme park ride or magic show ­– obviously artificial, revelling in its constructedness, yet nonetheless exhilarating.

Clouds of Sils Maria also blurs the line between life and art, performance and experience; yet it’s made of the stuff of nature. Watching this elliptical, diffuse movie is like being enveloped in its titular weather phenomenon, the Maloja Snake. Film nerds delighted in pondering metatextual connections and plot twists. But Clouds of Sils Maria only masquerades as intellectual fodder; it’s really a film for the heart, and one of my most intensely emotional watches this year.

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The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Sometimes we’re blindsided by a film that gets us right in the feels.  It wasn’t that director Phoebe Gloeckner’s impressionistic vision of groovy, morally adrift ‘70s San Francisco made me nostalgic for my own remembered, nascent sexuality, but that Minnie (the luminous Bel Powley) seemed so much wiser and more poised at fifteen than I am now. As I watched, I grieved my hopelessly squandered youth.

Gloeckner steers a sure course between all the worst cinematic coming-of-age clichés. Minnie’s sexual appetites and education are treated neither as titillation nor as trauma, neither pathological nor bawdy. And one of the loveliest things in the film is the way Minnie adopts Aline Kominsky-Crumb as her cartooning mentor.

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It Follows

As a longtime horror wussbag, I was afraid to see It Follows. But it’s original and brilliant: sincerely scary without feeling sadistic or brutal. Conceptually simple yet rich with subtext – to say it’s ‘about sexually transmitted diseases’ is so reductive! – it’s unsettling, dreamlike, and screws with your perceptions of reality. Adding to its off-kilter feel is the deliberately timeless production and costume design.

Like the fearful characters, I found my eyes roaming over David Robert Mitchell’s beautifully composed widescreen shots, searching for the monster. Long, languid bouts of teenage hanging out only build the tension – as does the ’80s-style synth score. I walked home very quickly from the cinema!

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Youth

Nothing much happens in Paolo Sorrentino’s second English-language film, which makes this list by sneaking into cinemas on Boxing Day. But it’s exquisite to look at and listen to: a mood piece that left me feeling I’d witnessed something true and beautiful about the human condition at every age of life. Sorrentino excels at locating the sublime in the banal or grotesque, and he crafts gorgeous montage effects using music played onscreen.

Michael Caine shines as a retired composer and conductor who seems to have given up on life; Rachel Weisz sizzles as his resentful daughter. Other plot strands, involving Harvey Keitel as a veteran director workshopping his new film, and Paul Dano as an actor struggling to evade typecasting, riff on Federico Fellini’s 8½.

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Joy

It’s such a shame that David O Russell’s delightful, droll Christmas bonbon of a film is coming out on Boxing Day, because it lives up to its very seasonal title. Its capable, resourceful inventor heroine (Jennifer Lawrence) is surrounded by ding-dongs and bananas who tell her she’ll never succeed. But dammit, it’s Christmas, and dreams come true!

Russell’s strength lies in locating emotional authenticity within extremely busy, confected scenarios. With production design by Judy Becker and costumes by Michael Wilkinson (both Russell regulars), Joy looks as gorgeously artificial as a snowdome or a Nativity tableau. But it taps into a real sense of humiliation and rage, with which many female viewers can wholeheartedly identify.

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’71

2015 was a great year for action films. And the gritty, atmospheric yet oddly overlooked period thriller ’71 is excellent popcorn fodder. British soldier Gary Hook (junior Michael Fassbender Jack O’Connell, last seen in Christ-like pose in Unbroken) is left behind in Belfast by his squad and must survive a night of cat-and-mouse chasing in enemy territory, caught between warring factions.

’71 grips tight and never lets go, and it’s also surprisingly humanist and politically nuanced. French-born director Yann Demange reminds us that the Troubles wasn’t just a period of vague unrest, but a bloody guerrilla war that pitted ordinary people against one another. It’s also scarily relevant to the current debates surrounding police brutality and foreign military interventions.

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Spy

I simply adored this Melissa McCarthy vehicle and recommended it to all my friends! It’s gut-bustingly funny, without the kidulthood fetish or the mean-spirited undertone of racism and sexism found in so many modern comedies. This is about a woman who’s really good at her job, and seizes her chance to prove it. McCarthy has a really endearing honesty and gusto, and the rest of the cast are up for anything, especially Jason Statham (a comic revelation!), Rose Byrne, Peter Serafinowicz and Miranda Hart.

It works well as a spy movie too. It gets what we love about the genre – the gadgets, the fights, the car chases and black-tie casino scenes – but unlike the grim, weary Spectre or the cheeky Kingsman: The Secret Service, this film offers women a chance to identify with a female protagonist who’s much more intelligent than her fellow intelligence agents.

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Creed

Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Creed is pleasurable because it’s sodden with self-reflexivity. And like Star Wars, it’s fixated on underdog heroes, mentorship, alienated sons and the passing of generational torches – including from former writer-director Sylvester Stallone to Fruitvale Station’s Ryan Coogler. But Creed’s baked-in nostalgia never feels like pandering. It’s a graceful, bittersweet homecoming.

The fight scenes here are thrillingly visceral, but what makes Creed feel fresh and hopeful in a sea of dull reboots is its deft, rhythmic interplay of the key Rocky elements: montage, action setpieces and subdued reflection. Coogler intuitively gets the striving at the heart of a Rocky film. Michael B Jordan is magnetic in the title role, while Stallone’s wry, moving performance is his best in years.

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Inside Out

The most abstract expression to date of Pixar’s “What if [thing] had feelings?” philosophy, Inside Out is that rare thing – a completely satisfying film on both an intellectual and an emotional level. Indeed, it’s the film’s careful conceptualisation of emotions – and other thought processes – that makes it so smart. Containing both witty jokes for adults and slapstick for kids, it offers funny and moving metaphorical explanations for the mercurial nature of memory and mental connections.

I especially liked that Inside Out ventures into a girl’s head. Its central conceit that every person has a ‘Headquarters’ ruled by five emotions, which work together in different ways for different people, is a great way to teach empathy. Not only for those on the autism spectrum, but for kids who will grow up to tell stories in which women are people, with complex interior lives.

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99 Homes

There’s a lot of buzz right now about Adam McKay’s GFC insider story The Big Short (in cinemas January 14). In one sequence, a rage-fuelled hedge fund manager played by Steve Carell brings his team down to Florida and is appalled to learn what’s driving its subprime housing boom. Basically, they walk into the world of 99 Homes – of rotten real-estate cowboys and the strivers getting evicted.

Ramin Bahrani’s deceptively simple foreclosure polemic uses its thriller genre as a Trojan horse for a brutal indictment of how cynically the capitalist system exploits our Maslovian needs for security and shelter. 99 Homes is filled with incendiary rage, but refuses to comfort us with a triumphant story of redemption. Rather, it’s a powerfully affecting modern tragedy.

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Macbeth

Justin Kurzel’s expressionistic ‘Scottish film’ is explicitly about parents’ loss of children, and the future they represent. One of the witches is a child; the film opens with the funeral of the Macbeths’ child; and both Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his wife (Marion Cotillard) address their key monologues to the ghosts of innocents. This isn’t a story about “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself”, but about a dead family line seeking to reanimate its power by snuffing out other families, including those of King Duncan (David Thewlis), Banquo (Paddy Considine) and Macduff (Sean Harris).

Performances are uniformly excellent, especially from Cotillard, who plays Lady Macbeth as an alienated foreigner sleepwalking through a nightmare. The stark, inhospitable production design reaches a climax in an innovative take on the coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane – rather than the traditional leafy ambush, it’s a bushfire that fills the screen with smoke and blood-red light.

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The Dressmaker

Jocelyn Moorhouse’s triumphant directorial comeback is like a victory lap around everything Australians do brilliantly onscreen. It’s a rural melodrama; it’s a gorgeously art-directed and costumed period piece; it’s got broad, bone-dry Aussie comedy and surprisingly grim moments of trauma and tragedy. It’s about exploring memory and belonging, but it’s also about going “Fuck this shit!” and then throwing that fateful match.

As a smalltown black sheep and couture seamstress, Kate Winslet holds her own with just about every currently working Australian actor – indeed, The Dressmaker also embodies a generational shift from virtuosos like Judy Davis to rising stars such as Sarah Snook. Even Liam Hemsworth, who’s usually so wooden, is relaxed and adorable here.

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Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s coldly elegant directorial debut is a robo-feminist film. It’s not just about artificial intelligence, but also the artificiality of gender, and the tensions between embodiment and objectification. Robots force us to confront what a human body is and does. Likewise, women are culturally defined by their bodies, and conditioned to scrutinise, display and improve them. And as a meditation on trans identity, Ex Machina offers a more sophisticated narrative of becoming than the stodgy melodrama The Danish Girl, in which its star Alicia Vikander also appears.

The film’s richly evocative title – derived from the stage cranes and trapdoors that delivered god characters into ancient Greek dramas to magically resolve the plot – riffs on ideas of creation, hubris, mechanism, performance, and escape. Its robot protagonist Ava is most confronting because she drives the story, choosing what to embody, and to what purpose. Both god and machine, she creates herself, and engineers her own escape.

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The Lobster

Yorgos Lanthimos’ English-language debut is 2015’s best romcom, colliding the violent, the risibly banal, and the swooningly tender. It’s possible to read The Lobster both earnestly and cynically: it depicts monogamous love as a sham in which the callous prey on the weak; yet it’s intensely romantic in exploring the things we’ll do in pursuit of ‘the one’.

The Lobster is darkly, cruelly hilarious, satirising the murky terrain of lust, intimacy and commitment, and the impossibility of trying to simplify things. It shows us how ridiculous the rituals of courtship really are, and how strange are our decisions to compromise our essential selves to please others. And it insists, heroically, that whatever we desire, we will always need other people.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at@incrediblemelk.