JANUARY 2 ― Another fulfilling year of watching films has gone by, and 2015’s output has not been bad at all. From great festival hits like Phoenix, The Tribe and Son Of Saul to well-executed blockbusters like Mad Max: Fury Road, Inside Out and Ant Man, 2015’s list of cinematic achievements are quite a colourful and varied one.
Even the usually spotty wilderness that we call horror films have churned out stellar titles like It Follows, Krampus and We Are Still Here, so whittling it all down to a list of my favourite films has been quite a tough task this year.
Heck, I even loved the one bomb that everyone seems to be making fun of this year, the Wachowskis’ latest (and quite charming) entry into their brand of earnest yarn-spinning, Jupiter Ascending. And I haven’t even gotten the chance to see potential Oscar baits like Spotlight, Carol, The Revenant, The Hateful Eight, and many others, but there are only so many words that I can fit into this article, so in no particular order, here they are, my favourite films of 2015.
Jauja
There’s probably something to be said about foreign eyes seeing something new in a place you’re very familiar with. Wim Wenders and Robby Muller, both Germans, brought out something totally different in Paris Texas and Nicholas Winding Refn, a Dane, did the same thing to Los Angeles in Drive. And even though director Lisandro Alonso is Argentine, there’s no doubt that Finnish cinematographer Timo Salminen (a regular with Aki Kaurismaki) brought his own magical eyes into the drop dead gorgeous frames of Jauja. Hands down the most visually sumptuous movie experience I’ve had this year, this tale of a dad looking for his runaway daughter somewhere in the 1800s also sees Alonso confidently expand his observational style by sprinkling in touches of surrealism into the mix, making for a captivatingly playful narrative experiment. My favourite film of the year, no contest.
The Kindergarten Teacher
Israeli director Nadav Lapid has proved with his debut feature Policeman how singular his style and voice is, and he proves it again with this follow-up, which tells of a kindergarten teacher who’s at first enchanted, and then ultimately consumed by the poetic genius of a five-year-old student under her charge. Elegant and sometimes unexplained POV camera movements will probably be the first striking thing that you notice in a film full of striking things, but it’s the film’s rich exploration of the value and meaning of art, and its almost militant attitude about the value of poetry (clearly a metaphor for art) in a world that hates poetry, that will stay with you and haunt your thoughts afterwards.
Spring
A beautiful blend of the intelligent and chatty romance of Before Sunset with the allegorical moral dilemma usually at play in monster movies, the prodigious film-making team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead has produced something truly unique and original, especially in the usually not so original world of genre movies. “Love is a monster,” the film’s tagline goes, and it gloriously fulfils everything that the tagline promises with its very simple story of boy meets girl, girl turns out to be a monster.
Brooklyn
Going toe to toe with Spring as the most beautiful romance captured on film this year, not only is Brooklyn a film set in the 1950s, but it also plays like a great little romantic film from the 1950s, complete with all the aesthetic trappings of the era. Saoirse Ronan is mesmerising as a young Irish immigrant making her first few steps towards a new life in America. Along the way we get not one, but two great romances in her life, but more than anything the film plays like a beautiful song being sung by people in exile. And what’s more achingly gorgeous than that longing?
Buzzard
In a year chock full of fascinatingly unpleasant characters, from Listen Up Philip to While We’re Young, Entertainment, Queen Of Earth and even 7 Chinese Brothers, the most incendiary American indie film of the year is undoubtedly Joel Potrykus’ second film, Buzzard. Chronicling the life of a small-time con artist named Marty whose latest ruse went belly up so bad that he has to skip town, Buzzard is alternately hilarious, sobering and yes, fascinatingly unpleasant. Remember when Todd Solondz, Neil Labute and Gregg Araki used to make angry movies about unpleasant people in working class America? Well, this Potrykus guy’s even angrier.
Kingsman
If Kickass was Matthew Vaughn’s way of showing how superhero blockbusters should be done, then Kingsman is his rebuke, riposte and love letter, all rolled into one, to spy movies. So entertaining, so cheeky and so professionally well mounted, Vaughn as usual embraces the cartoon violence that Hollywood tries to pass off as real, and comes up with plenty of set-pieces here that will leave you gobsmacked or laughing on the floor, from the incredibly violent church fight scene to the colourful exploding heads near the end, Vaughn again schools Hollywood on how to properly do an action blockbuster.
The Wonders
A quiet and unassuming film about a family of beekeepers in rural Italy does not promise much in the way of excitement, does it? If we’re talking about your standard narrative expectations, maybe it doesn’t. But in terms of poetry, not just visual poetry but also in using the grammar of film to what basically amounts to writing and reading poetry through the medium of film, there are really very few rivals to Alice Rohrwacher’s remarkable second feature film, The Wonders, this year. It’s downright scary to see how effortlessly she conveys things just through images, or a simple camera movement, where many lesser film-makers would have used dialogue, narration or even title cards to do so. At this rate she’ll be one of the great masters of the medium in no time.
Li’l Quinquin
Shot for and released in France as a TV mini-series (where it reportedly attracted a record number of viewers), but played at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight as one long 206-minute film, it’s quite shocking how funny the whole thing is, considering how austere and uncompromising Bruno Dumont’s previous films have been. An absurdist murder mystery wherein two bumbling inspectors try to solve a growing number of murders in a small French town, Li’l Quinquin is blessed with a dizzying amount of unique and memorable characters, and delightfully deadpan sense of humour, all while making seemingly casual yet spot-on observations about French life.
What We Do In The Shadows
If absurdist is the proper word to describe Li’l Quinquin, then only ridiculous can properly describe the wondrously hilarious What We Do In The Shadows, a New Zealand import that is for my money the funniest mockumentary to grace our presence since This Is Spinal Tap. Purportedly a documentary following the lives of three European vampires living together in a small town in New Zealand, the movie (improvised by its cast and reportedly edited from almost 150 hours of footage), the antics, petty squabbles and vampire problems faced by the trio (and will soon include a new vampire and his best buddy Stu) will leave you absolutely howling with laughter.
The Measure Of A Man
A quiet and low key triumph from this year’s Cannes, lead actor Vincent Lindon won the Best Actor prize with his heartbreaking performance here. It’s a simple and very relatable narrative about the most basic of things ― a recently unemployed middle aged man tries desperately to secure a new job in order to survive and support his family, and the film brutally observes the gradual stripping away of his dignity as he’s made to jump through all sorts of hoops during interviews and training. The latter part of the film then puts him in the opposite position, as he now works as a security officer in a supermarket and has to interrogate people who are caught stealing, which somehow resembles the humiliating interviews he was subjected to earlier. Playing very much like a great Dardenne brothers film, The Measure Of A Man will destroy you, making an unforgettable case against the ways the capitalist system is set up against small people like you and me.
Honorable mentions: Entertainment, Heaven Knows What, Results, Tangerine, Phoenix.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
