The Music Writers Poll 2015: Movie Of The Year

Mad Max: Fury Road

It's safe to say that people weren't necessarily expecting that much from Mad Max: Fury Road when it hit cinemas this year.

George Miller's cult dystopian franchise had laid dormant for decades, and there was little evidence, going in, that the movie — starring Tom Hardy in the role that made Mel Gibson a global force — would be anything more than a footnote-size addendum to a long-dead universe.

How wrong we were, and how joyous it is to be wrong in such circumstances. Far from a lacklustre follow-up, Fury Road was a cinematic tour de force, obliterating any middling expectations to easily come away as the #1 film of 2015 as voted by The Music's contributors, with nearly twice as many votes as its nearest competitor.

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From John Seale's stunning cinematography and Miller's bold directorial choices — there are minutes-long stretches without a word uttered by anyone — to Tom Hardy's nuanced facial expressions, Charlize Theron's unexpected, breakout feminist hero (Imperator Furiosa) and Aussie muso iOTA's star turn as a flame-spewing-guitar-wielding mute, Fury Road was a pulse-raising, heart-stopping, eminently watchable thrill ride, all the way to the explosives-laden finish line.

Fury Road's excellence is afforded even more credence when one considers the sheer quality of cinema in general this year: our writers were enamoured with (and got just a little emotional over) Pixar's Inside Out; Alex Garland's Ex Machina was a humanising look at artificial intelligence; sci-fi and the generally odd also got a nod via top-ten placings for the likes of Matt Damon's The Martian and Michael Keaton's acclaimed comeback flick Birdman; and music biopics and documentaries did the trick in 2015, with Straight Outta Compton, Amy and Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck all making their way onto our scribes' radars among the best cinema of the year.