Shoutout to the sexually transmitted ghosts, chrome-huffing death cultists, and baby boxers that made this such an excellent year for film.
This year wasn't a year for consensus in anything, movies included. The Oscar race is up in the air, no one knows what a lead role is anymore, and most of the entries below could be moved around and swapped out for multiple runners-up. Some that almost made the cut: The Hateful Eight, Inside Out, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Room, Magic Mike XXL, Steve Jobs, Amour Fou, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Look of Silence, Bridge of Spies, and About Elly.
One thing that everyone might be able to agree on is that in 2015, sequels fully, thoroughly come into their own as more than just opportunistic attempts to recapture the magic of better originals. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, with its elegant opera set piece and its long-limbed Tom Cruise female equivalent in Rebecca Ferguson, was a more coherent and confident movie than the first Mission: Impossible film, made almost 20 years earlier. The Force Awakens remedied a lot of the sourness left over from the Star Wars prequels. Sure, there was Ted 2 and Hot Tub Time Machine 2, and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay didn't need to be two parts, but there was also Creed and Mad Max: Fury Road, movies that didn't just continue an existing series but pushed off of and subverted it. They made our franchise-heavy future look a lot less grim.
19. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Sony Pictures Classics
This adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic novel is gutsy in a way that could only be pulled off by someone who'd been a teenage girl herself. So thank the gods for Marielle Heller, whose directorial debut allows 15-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley, one of the year's best discoveries) to lose her virginity to and get her heart broken by her mom's flaky boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård) without reducing her narrative to simple victimhood. It's a terrible, not to mention illegal, relationship, but Minnie's sexual and creative awakening run in parallel to it. And, because it's her story, not his, we see her grow past him, emerging stronger and wiser and more ferocious.
18. Wild Tales
Juan Salvarredy / Sony Classics
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