It Was A Good Year For Film; Not So Much For Bradley Cooper

In honour of surviving another 12 months at the film-critic coalface, here’s the best part of the gig: making a list! And checking it twice!

We’ve left off the naughty (American Sniper, Burnt, Aloha… the year’s worst films sure had Bradley Cooper in common), and will instead concentrate on the nice. So, here you go, kids: Merry Christmas! It’s the gift that keeps on giving: Film Carew’s Top 30 Films Of 2015.

30. bang gang (a modern love story)

(france, eva husson)

An instant teens-gone-wild classic, Husson’s electric debut portrays a crew of French high-schoolers who stage —and video tape— regular orgies. Their group-sex soirées are part social club, part social media performance; their casual, up-for-anything approach to mass congress playing as both heartening and horrifying.

29. girlhood

(france, céline sciamma)

Cinema’s preeminent chronicler of adolescent gender-issues follows Water Lilies and Tomboy with a smart, tense, forceful portrait of a young French-African kid drawn into a local girl-gang. Adopting their uniform-like outfits, anti-social defiance, and near-masculine brashness, Sciamma shows how teenagers try on identities to help survive their hormonal environments.

28. amy

(uk, asif kapadia)

Kapadia’s effecting portrait of Amy Winehouse —soul-belter turned tragic 27 Club member— makes the audience complicit in her demise. The film’s vast reserves of unvarnished archival footage show us the human behind the beehive, but soon the camera itself becomes the villain; its omnipresence in Winehouse’s life leading to a downward spiral whose great cautionary tale isn’t re: the dangers of smoking crack, but being famous.

27. room

(canada, lenny abrahamson)

In this Oscar-season standout, Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay play a mother and son living locked-up lives imprisoned in a single shed, presided over by a Fritzlesque captor. Abrahamson manages to make the tiny space —the only place the boy’s ever known— feel like a world unto itself, and then pull off the difficult second-act transition into the world outside; aided, ably, by Tremblay’s all-time-great child-actor turn.

26. krisha

(usa, trey edward shults)

The 26-year-old Shults’ remarkable debut leverages reality (shooting in his parents’ house, cast filled with his family) in service of surrealism; this house turning nightmarish prison across one tense, torturous Thanksgiving. As its titular character (the director’s aunt, Krisha Fairchild) inches towards blow-up/breakdown, Shults shifts aspect ratio to convey the feeling of walls-closing-in; his camera —and the creepy, cacophonous sound-design— turning a familiar familial space into something unsettling, alien.

25. victoria

(germany, sebastian schipper)

Victoria has been duly hailed for pulling off its entire narrative in one 134-minute-long take. But it isn’t just a logistical marvel. The film plays so well because of how long it holds off on its heist-movie plot; its initial low-key domestic drunkenness creating a sense of vérité —and affection for its lead character— that pays off hugely once the genre machinations kick into gear. Oh, and the piano-playing scene is one of the year’s most random, unexpected delights; Victoria’s own dancing-Oscar-Isaac moment.

24. eva doesn’t sleep

(chile, pablo agüero)

When Eva Perón died —like Christ before her— at 33, the beautiful corpse she left behind carried hefty political weight; her spirit (and body!) resurrected, time and again, by Perónistas, dissidents, churches, and opportunists, the symbolism changing to suit the climate. Agüero’s dark, surreal, long-take-centric film chronicles episodes in Evita’s afterlife; its grim symbolism, gallows humour, and historical bloodletting reminiscent of Pablo Larraín’s great Post-Mortem.

23. the tribe

(ukraine, myroslav slaboshpytskiy)

Slaboshpytskiy’s amazing debut is a striking piece of modern-day silent cinema, its only dialogue delivered in unsubtitled sign language. With long takes, he creates a sense of mounting tension in a Kiev school-for-the-deaf turned expanding criminal enterprise. It’s a portrait of a corrosive society that heads, surely, inevitably, towards a grim, brutal conclusion.

22. angels of revolution

(russia, aleksei fedorchenko)

Fedorchenko’s obsession with droll comedy, conceptual gimmickry, and erased ethnic histories hits a high-water mark with this absurdist tragicomedy. At the dawning of Stalinist Russia, a troupe of idealist comrades is sent to remote Siberia, to proselytise the people’s revolution to local tribes. They do so by propaganda: making movies, staging plays, and enacting ridiculous rites of inculcation.

21. the russian woodpecker

(ukraine, chad gracia)

This wild documentary ride evolves, time-and-again, as it progresses. Beginning as personal portrait of an eccentric artist obsessed with the ghosts haunting Chernobyl’s reactor, it becomes a thorough examination of Russia’s Cold War program of weaponised radio-waves; then a bonkers, conspiracy-theorising paranoia-thriller about life in a surveillance state; and, finally, a sad chronicle of the epoch of contemporary Ukrainian unrest.

20. prophet’s prey

(usa, amy berg)

A portrait of Fundamentalist Mormon prophet Warren Jeffs, whose polygamist enclave fed him a steady diet of inbred 12-year-old brides, millions in cash, and Godlike reverence, Berg’s latest takedown of a sacred American cow is a searing study of religious indoctrination at its most sinister.

19. pervert park

(usa, frida & lasse barkfors)

This classic observationist doc takes us inside a Florida trailer-park that provides residence for registered sex-offenders, humanising the most despised members of society. In this ‘adult community’, they find the rehabilitation they never did inside America’s for-profit prisons. And Pervert Park is as much an indictment of the industrialisation of incarceration as a chronicle of the human capacity for abuse, atonement, and catharsis.

18. we come as friends

(austria/france, hubert sauper)

Alighting on remote Sudanese locales in a self-built light aircraft, Sauper plays an ‘alien’ interloper out to understand human behaviour, colonialism, globalisation, and geopolitics. With his faux-naïveté functioning as façade, he blithely blows into loaded situations —with angry locals, gormless politicians, celebrity ambassadors, American missionaries, Chinese oil-workers— and teases out both the quotidian comedy and thematic tragedy playing out on-the-ground in fought-over lands.

17. the assassin

(taiwan, hou hsiao-hsien)

Hou’s long-awaited wuxia movie goes light on the swordfights, big on the shots of leaves blowing in the breeze. Shu Qi may be a blade-wielding 9th-century assassin, but the human figures here are tiny players on the grand canvas of Hou’s widescreen, celluloid-rich, long-take long-shots; ephemeral figures floating through a story so disorienting, so beautiful, as to feel like a dream.

16. the witch

(usa, robert eggers)

An astonishing work of cinematic time-travel, Eggers’ bracing debut renders a 17th-century, Puritan New England all-encompassing in its verisimilitude. In authoring this portrait of the brewing religious hysteria that would beget the Salem witch trials, Eggers employs not just period-sourced language, era-appropriate buildings, and natural light, but audaciously embodies the era’s beliefs. There’s no historical revisionism here, just real evil.

15. the revenant

(usa, alejandro gonzález iñárritu)

Survival horror as frontier parable, Iñárritu’s gloriously-photographed epic sets the visual splendour of the New World wilderness against the savage bestiality of man’s wildness. Its tale of dastardly Tom Hardy meeting Leo’s driven-man revenge has its limits, but The Revenant’s bravura set-pieces —the opening battle-in-the-shallows, the bear mauling, the whitewater escape— are the stuff movie-makin’ myths’re made of.

14. mad max: fury road

(usa/australia, george miller)

A fabulous market-correction against MCU CGI and blockbuster bloat, Miller’s revitalisation of his 30-years-gone franchise was one of cinema’s great 2015 joys: eco-feminist themes and bugfuck auteurism driving a wild, breathless, ridiculous, across-a-real-desert car-chase that left you feeling delirious and dirty.

13. sicario

(usa, denis villeneuve)

The War On Drugs is, in Sicario, one more failed American conquest, another intractable quagmire from which escape —let alone victory— is impossible. This sharply-directed, smartly-written thriller finds the great Emily Blunt as an idealist in over her head when she disappears down a rabbit-hole (or mule’s tunnel) south of the border; Villeneuve managing to balance socio-political commentary with breathless tension.

12. wild

(usa, jean-marc vallée)

What looked like a piece of clichéd Oscarbait turned out to be one the year’s great surprises. As Reese Witherspoon walks 4000km of Pacific Crest Trail cum personal penance, Vallée uses cinema, that great artform of time, to stage an impressionist portrait of memory, artfully conveying how humans are constantly navigating the dual landscapes of the world outside and the world within.

11. me and earl and the dying girl

(usa, alfonso gómez-rejón)

Using smart-ass unreliable narration and meta-movie irony to allow a knowing audience an ‘in’ to one of cinema’s most detestable genres —the cancer movie— Gómez-Rejón’s film is a warm, wise study of the limits of masculine ‘cool’ and adolescent disaffection. And, eventually, despite its abundant irony, its final reel finds Me And Earl And The Dying Girl becoming what any film about terminal leukaemia should be: an unabashed weepie.

10. inside out

(usa, pete docter & ronnie del carmen)

For all Pixar’s legendary history, warming up the premise of Herman’s Head hardly promised wonders like this. As the principal emotions of an 11-year-old girl pilot her from inside, this profound picture becomes a study of temporality; about the beauty of childhood innocence and innocence lost. Even happy memories, when recalled years down the line, feel sad; and this all-timer family fable taps into the very real ache that comes with the passage of time.

9. anomalisa

(usa, charlie kaufman & duke johnson)

Kaufman’s latest story scans as his simplest: a sales-seminar guru has a one-night-stand with a star-struck office-worker, and it may be either a meaningless one-off or a life-changing moment, depending on how much you like off-key renditions of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Of course, Kaufman contrasts this realist premise with a surrealist cine-world —Stop-motion puppets! All voiced by Tom Noonan!— so as to explore the existential angst that arises due to the limits of human (or, y’know, puppet) perception.

8. the forbidden room

(canada, guy maddin & evan johnson)

Less than half-an-hour into this demented 130-minute fever-dream, a giddy ditty about contemporary pop’s favourite subject —asses— soon careens off into its own narrative. By that point, you’re already in a story within a song within a dream within a story within a story within a story within a mock-educational film, as Canadian cinema’s renegade loon takes the notion of nesting narratives past the point of demented absurdity.

7. the duke of burgundy

(uk/hungary, peter strickland)

Strickland’s films begin as homages to ’70s schlock, only to transcend into dazzling, dizzying, delirious auteurism. The immaculately wardrobed and wonderfully wallpapered The Duke Of Burgundy duly erects a psychedelic shrine to erotic Euro-pudding softcore. Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D’Anna play women-as-lovers ensconced in a relationship of elaborate role-play; this delightfully absurd film a droll comedy on the banality of domesticated fetishry.

6. magical girl

(spain, carlos vermut)

Vermut’s intricately plotted piece of cinematic deception understands the narrative trajectory of noir films: how seemingly minor decisions, often made out of emotional neediness or desperation, can have vast —and, yes, dire— repercussions. It’s also brilliantly photographed: all its stern frames and meticulous tableaux feeling like prisons from which its characters have no chance of escape.

5. the end of the tour

(usa, james ponsoldt)

One of the greatest films about writing ever written, Ponsoldt’s chronicle of Infinite Jest-era David Foster Wallace on a book tour is a magical conversation piece, in which Jason Segel (as let-it-trouble-you DFW) and Jesse Eisenberg bat ideas about art-making and the search for meaning back-and-forth. It’s a two-hander whose road-trip feels like a journey into the human condition.

4. clouds of sils maria

(france, olivier assayas)

There’s endless layers to Assayas’ portrait of life imitating art and history repeating: Juliette Binoche the aging starlet returning to the play that made her famous, only no longer the young firebrand, but the elder foil. But beyond its dense references, this brilliantly-written, fabulously-acted portrait of the creative process has great resonance because of how thoughtfully it discusses the very notions of making —and interpreting— art.

3. evolution

(france, lucile hadžihalilovic)

Evolution isn’t just the long-awaited follow-up to Hadžihalilovic’s transcendent 2004 debut Innocence, but a veritable companion-piece. It’s another surreal, dreamlike, minimalist fairy-tale, in which a group of children are groomed for suspicious, sinister purposes. Here, when the boys of a seaside enclave come of age, they’re sent away to a shadowy hospital, where astonishing body-horror imagery awaits.

2. chevalier

(greece, athina rachel tsangari)

Another glorious Greek-weird-wave wig-out from the Attenberg director, Chevalier finds a group of men on a boat staging an Alpha Male contest, which involves them literally measuring penises, baldness, and cholesterol levels. There’s wry mockery of the triviality of reality-TV gameshows, but the film has higher goals: authoring an absurdist satire of male vanity and the homoerotic rituals of arcane fraternities.

1. the lobster

(uk, yorgos lanthimos)

2015’s best film delivers, by far, its best premise: in an alternate cine-realm, single people are rounded up, sent to a seaside hotel, and given 45 days to find a mate, lest they be turned into an animal and set loose in the woods. Lanthimos’ English-language debut is every bit the equal of his 2009 masterpiece Dogtooth, mounting an incisive satire on not just the social stigma of being single, but the delusions and deceptions of coupledom.

Also Deserving Love: When Marnie Was There (Japan, Hiromasa Yonebayashi), Atomic Heart (Iran, Ali Ahmadzade), Wild Tales (Argentina, Damián Szifron), The Club (Chile, Pablo Larraín), Toto And His Sisters (Romania, Alexandre Nanău), The Look Of Silence (Denmark/Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer), Welcome To Leith (USA, Michael Beach Nichols & Christopher K. Walker), Dheepan (France, Jacques Audiard), Phoenix (Germany, Christian Petzold), Carol (USA, Todd Haynes), Murder In Pacot (Haiti, Raoul Peck), Citizenfour (USA, Laura Poitras), Louder Than Bombs (France/Norway, Joachim Trier), Eden (France, Mia Hansen-Løve), Vincent (France, Thomas Salvador), The New Girlfriend (France, François Ozon), In The Basement (Austria, Ulrich Seidl), The Wolfpack (USA, Crystal Moselle), The Nightmare (USA, Rodney Ascher), Green Room (USA, Jeremy Saulnier).