2015: Favorite 30 Films

Artwork: K.E.T.

Welcome to Screen Week! Join us as we explore the films and TV shows that kept us staring at screens. More from this series


10

Buzzard

Dir. Joel Potrykus

[Oscilloscope]

Along with the normal slate of superhero movies and an Oscar season punctuated with a new Tarantino, we saw the triumphant return of several incredibly successful action-adventure franchises. If cinema this year was often about entertainment (and don’t get us wrong, we had a blast at the movies this year), then Buzzard found itself in a unique position. It wasn’t so much a “fun” movie (though it does have its comedic moments) as a movie that seems like it was fun to make (the treadmill scene, the Jedi/Freddy Krueger duel, the Mauvais Sang tribute). But just because it was evident how much fun the boys at Sob Noisse had making it doesn’t mean that Buzzard didn’t have plenty to say under its demonic, heavy metal façade. It was about people who are good at their jobs outwitting people who are bad at their jobs, about the hopelessness of a dead-end life, about the highs of eating a room-service spaghetti dinner one night but settling for a can of SpaghettiOs the next. It’s fitting that Buzzard arrived this year — the year the force awakened — because it was also about the little man surviving in the big man’s world.

09

Sicario

Dir. Denis Villeneuve

[Lions Gate]

Sicario was practical. Benicio del Toro packed light, rolling his sport coat into his duffel bag. Josh Brolin conserved energy, catching zzz’s in flip-flops, advising Emily Blunt that “You gotta learn to sleep on a plane.” Daniel Kayuula offered fashion tips: “Gotta get you a new bra.” And when it came to enhanced interrogation, Benicio demonstrated great resourcefulness, using what was on hand, in hand, or on his hand. Yes, Sicario was practical, told in the here-and-now, yet not quite down-to-earth, more of an outsider realist fantasy, a French-Canadian’s grim tale on the US-Mexico border, with a Spectre-worthy scheme — a covert operation to reinstate the Medellín cartel, dead and gone for some 20 years (although, to be fair, we will believe any sort of hare-brained scheme when the CIA’s involved). We lost our innocence through Little Red Riding Hood in the “land of wolves,” while the film battered its near-exclusive actress as a manifestation of its fatalism. Sicario’s chain-lift suspense and gloom was best captured by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s anxious score (pieces of which might have been recorded inside a stethoscope), oddly and incongruously paired with beautiful travelogue-worthy aerial shots of the desert. In spite of the lovely scenery, from the first frame to the last, we felt dread.

08

The Forbidden Room

Dir. Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson

[Kino Lorber]

Pop your hallucinogen of choice and go to as gargantuan an archeology/natural history/art museum as you can. Spin in circles a couple of times as it starts to hit you, then get inside. Now try to roam your way out through Edo woodprints, Assyrian tablets, soiled bathrooms, Expressionist paintings, strange-looking food in the foyer’s cafeteria, and perhaps even some dinosaur skeletons. What you see might resemble what Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson put on the screen in The Forbidden Room, a hallucinatory trip through the first decades of film history. Yet, with over 80% of silent-era film now lost, we might know less about the early years of cinema than we do about many ancient civilizations. Maddin and Johnson make an advantage of that, conjuring back from the filmic netherworld what they believe a Murnau-directed Dr. Jekyll, a roaring twenties musical, or a Lon Chaney murder mystery would be like. The result, as hard to describe as it is without invoking matryoshkas or fart jokes, is a true voyage of excess and visual delight, as gleefully ridiculous and over the top as the purest of Maddin’s work, honoring the vaudevillian roots of cinema in the most meta move short of shooting a camera shooting itself. A monument to the sparkling imagination that a love for cinematic storytelling can give you, with no need for chemical enhancements.

07

It Follows

Dir. David Robert Mitchell

[Dimension]

Discussion of David Robert Mitchell’s second feature mostly centered on “what” followed its teen protagonists. The curse, passed from carrier to carrier after sex, was described as a metaphor for STDs or AIDS, but that reduces one of the most unusual movies of 2015 to nothing more than a rote horror, where everything has to mean something. In a post-everything era, can our fears really be represented that easily? While It Follows was recognizably a horror movie, what it felt like more than anything was a feature-length distillation of eerily pleasant moments from past genre touchstones — the buildup to the final sting in Carrie, rather than the sting itself. From the muggy warmth of the color grading, to the pretty chiptune soundtrack, to Maika Monroe’s enigmatic lead performance, It Follows evaded pure horror and shook out as one of the great cinematic evocations of teenage life. Mitchell’s real interest was in the pleasures and limitations of adolescence, and he absolutely nailed it, leaving his protagonists and the rest of us to quibble over unimportant shit like “Why is that monster stalking us?”

06

The Look of Silence

Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

[Drafthouse]

Most films about historical atrocities bear an insidious underlying message: that those of us who take it upon ourselves to watch such noble and socially-important films, who choose to be reminded of the ugliest human behaviors, would never be accomplices to, let alone perpetrators of, such terrible acts. The Look of Silence, on the other hand, offered no such comforts. Joshua Oppenheimer’s second film about the Indonesian genocide of the mid-1960s followed an optometrist as he attempts to elicit confessions from his brother’s killers, and in turn, the documentary confronted its viewers with a radical notion that we commit genocide each time we omit the worst of our own bloody history. The Look of Silence, like its protagonist, demanded nothing more than the truth, showing us that there can’t be justice without honesty, and honesty without bravery, and that often the bravest thing we can do is remember.

05

Queen of Earth

Dir. Alex Ross Perry

[IFC]

Our relationships with others help us define our own identities. But when these connections disintegrate, we can become unmoored — an island of one. Queen of Earth examined the process of one such unravelling through a series of vignettes that drifted outside of time, despite the chapters delineating the progressing days. Director Alex Ross Perry isolated his heroines in a vacation home, where the scenery was dominated by reflective surfaces: placid water and darkened windows. These images contrasted deep closeups of human faces, where the camera lingered over the fleshy imperfections of skin, the characters laid bare. And yet, despite these endless examinations, the women remained opaque, a theme emphasized by the superimpositions of watery surfaces over their features. Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) complained of pain in her face, as though it could not longer handle the camera’s presence or bear the burden of representing her emotional reality. The visual echoes of Bergman’s Persona seemed unavoidable, given the setting and the two women at the film’s center, but Queen of Earth transcended its reference points to become its own beast: a darkly comedic portrait of identity and madness for the 21st century.

04

Ex Machina

Dir. Alex Garland

[Universal]

Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplays for Never Let Me Go and 28 Days Later, created an intensely thought-provoking work with his directorial debut, Ex Machina. In the film, Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson) is plucked from the tech company where he works, flown out to the secluded home of the company’s founder, and told to administer a Turing test to one of his reclusive boss’s creations. Oscar Isaac as the lecherous millionaire with a God-complex played well off Gleeson’s twitchy Caleb, but the stand-out performance came from Alicia Vikander. Vikander’s Ava, the movie’s apparent android-in-distress and subject of the Turing test, was coolly captivating and dangerously nuanced. Much like the eerie Black Mirror, the British television show on which Gleeson also made an appearance, Ex Machina took place in an uncomfortably close future, one near enough to feel entirely plausible. As increasingly smarter phones, smarter homes, and smarter wearables are created, could we be getting closer to the science-fictional transhumanist universe in which Ex Machina is set? The film’s haunting, horrifying ending might make you hope otherwise.

03

The Hateful Eight

Dir. Quentin Tarantino

[The Weinstein Company]

While Quentin Tarantino has talked about one day retiring from films to write novels, The Hateful Eight adopted the structure and format of a theatrical play. Sure, Tarantino says he intended his take on paranoia and prejudices in the Old West as homage to the old movie palace epics of the past, complete with extended overture and intermission. Yet with the film’s minimal use of locations and character nuances, it’s as close as the cinema has come to mimicking the live theater experience as we may have yet seen — albeit in the Grand Guignol tradition. Although the cinematic scope may not have lived up to the sweeping landscapes of Shane, The Searchers, or even The Revenant, the camera’s effective use of interior spaces to create tension reflected Tarantino’s appreciation for claustrophobic Westerns like Stagecoach and Rio Bravo, which rely on character dynamics more than scale. Instead, Tarantino let his pen make gestures toward grander and more epic themes. As an apt companion piece to Django Unchained, the film sought to examine the lingering effects of racism, violence, and mistrust after the Civil War.

02

Mad Max: Fury Road

Dir. George Miller

[Warner Bros.]

It’s difficult to enjoy a big-budget Hollywood film without awareness that what you’re investing in isn’t the journey of a character, but of a property. While it was undoubtedly shaped by the same market forces that revived other franchises, George Miller’s long-incubating fourth Mad Max demo-derby never felt like a mere sales pitch for the next sequel, spin-off, or crossover tie-in. Fury Road came out the gates with all its needles in the red, raising the series’s already high bar for mayhem and grotesquerie. We saw degenerating warlords and their mutant offspring, pallid kamikaze soldiers hopped up on silver spray paint, and fleets of the most outlandishly modified vehicles to ever grace the silver screen. Balancing anarchic set-pieces with economical character development, Miller gave us a tent-pole feature that was brutal, funny, spectacular, and timely, with a real human heart beating beneath its gallons of blood and guzzolene. And certainly studio heads are sitting around a conference table as you’re reading this, drawing up plans for how they can build an extended universe of feature films for every wizened extra lapping up the puddles in front of Immortan Joe’s palace, but no matter where the series goes from here, Mad Max: Fury Road will ride eternal, shiny and chrome.

01

Hard to Be a God

Dir. Aleksei German

[Kino Lorber]

A vision of history aborted, Hard to Be a God wandered, for three hours, through an endless purgatory. Watch 20 minutes, and you’ll get most of the idea: roving depravity, amorality, gallows humor, human bodies reduced to their own leaky scars, scabs, and cysts. This — the planet Arkanar, which evolved like Earth until it became trapped in an endless, pre-Renaissance squalor — was a society without art, knowledge, hope, or love. What remains when schools are destroyed, books and their scribes are burned, money is devalued, and politics has devolved into an ugly, apocalyptic stalemate?

Very little, but there’s so much of it. Hard to Be a God’s jaw-dropping excess was wrought from rudiments: bodily fluids, rotting food, and the ubiquitous implements and ornaments of war. They all found unusual uses. Intellectuals were buried in public toilets. Eyeballs were hawked by children on the streets. Hanging men were bedecked with lard and spangles. One man, referred to as Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), was meant to be our guide, a visitor from Earth on an anthropological sojourn. The citizens of Arkanar mistook him for a god, but one of the film’s jokes and tragedies was that he had no power. Forsworn from participating in or altering Arkanar’s history, Don Rumata was stuck as a passive observer to societal atrophy.

In the cinema of Aleksei German, which spanned over 40 years and resulted in half a dozen great films, civilization was history’s greatest lie, a promise approached but always, in the end, broken. His best films (1985’s My Friend Ivan Lapshin, 1998’s Khrustalyov, My Car!) were mostly set just before Stalin’s ascent and just after his death, in moments of chaos that yielded to devastating new orders. Amid national disarray, German’s films were chronically delayed and beset by governmental dictates, and those hurdles became one of his great subjects.

What do we do when we realize we have no sway and hold no power? German struggled to answer that question. Hard to Be a God couldn’t answer it affirmatively, but one of the sneaky inspirations of his final film — the film he spent 13 years making, before dying in 2013 — is its insistence that we keep living, and keep watching, and realize the vitality of art in our compromised and corrupted existence. Don Rumata found it in his jazz flute, which prompted bystanders to plug their ears. We found it in the utterly uncanny cinematography of Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenko, who gave stereoscopic dimensions to a godless hellhole. The camera became a portal to a parallel universe.

Hard to Be a God — in its monumental construction, in its astoundingly consistent and bedraggled performances, and in every grueling but relentlessly dynamic moment — was a triumph of will. It delineated the difference between a film about survival and a film about what it means to survive. It revealed The Revenant to be a mere saga of survival, similarly audacious but lacking in moral fortitude, spiritual curiosity, or simple personality. Hard to Be a God was just as ugly/beautiful, but every frame of the film quite literally bled with purpose. It was about what its characters have been robbed of: security, dignity, even sanity.

Perspective is difficult to come by in these circumstances, and Hard to Be a God’s camera, as if dizzied by the feudal fugue state of Arkanar, proved to be only loosely attached to Don Rumata. We grew familiar with the site of the world through his ornate, striated armor, but we sometimes came to realize the camera had strayed from him to walk with a stranger. Its perspective slowly democratized, as the figure behind it — an invisible documentarian, or maybe just an auteur at the height of his craft — proceeded through puddles and labyrinthine barracks. Passersby addressed it with pleas, doomsaying, or lunatic declarations. However grim their news and whatever sense they made, they spoke to the camera as it should be spoken to: as a mediator and a vessel for meaning. Roger Ebert called the movies “a machine that generates empathy,” but Hard to Be a God had little space for empathy. It couldn’t; it wouldn’t brook our good intentions. It didn’t ask us to consider how its characters survive. It asked us why we survive, and why we carry on. As such, it became a machine that generated and perpetuated existence. It’s tempting to call Hard to Be a God the film that killed Aleksei German, but we’d like to think it’s the film that kept him alive.

Welcome to Screen Week! Join us as we explore the films and TV shows that kept us staring at screens. More from this series


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