A Return To Form: My Favorite Movies of 2015

Last year, I didn't do any "Best Of" lists, I think in large part because a lot of the critics I read and follow were all complaining about doing them. So I announced I wouldn't be doing any "Best Of" lists because I "didn't feel like it."

Someone immediately called me out on this. "That's ridiculous," they said. "You LOVE lists."

It's true. I really do.

So, without further ado, here's the first of a number of lists of my favorite things from this past year.

Favorite Movies of 2015

25. Paper Towns
24. The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
23. Ted 2
22. The Intern
21. Furious 7
20. Spy 
19. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
18. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
17. Dope
16. Sisters
15. Ant-Man
14. Jurassic World
13. Spectre
12. Avengers: Age of Ultron
11. Straight Outta Compton
10. Trainwreck
9. The Martian
8. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
7. Kingsman: The Secret Service
6. The Big Short
5. Spotlight
4. Inside Out
3. Mad Max: Fury Road
2. Ex Machina
1. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens

The Blockbuster That's Going Up On The Wall in 2014: Edge of Tomorrow

I don’t know if I liked this more than Guardians of the Galaxy or X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it’s very close, and since everybody saw Guardians and X-Men nobody saw this, this is the pick.

Which makes sense, since I spent a lot of time this year trying to get people to go and watch this movie. It didn’t work* - Edge of Tomorrow finished 29th in the box office this year, behind such memorable films as Ride Along, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, 300: Rise of An Empire, and The Equalizer. Don’t cry for Warner Brothers, though - the movie finished with $370 million worldwide, so they’re not hurting.

*To be fair, even if everyone I’d told to go see it had listened to me, I don’t think it would have made much of a difference on its domestic grosses.

A lot of people came up with theories for why the movie didn’t work here (Confusing Advertising! Complicated Premise! Strange Title! Tom Cruise Fatigue*!). I don’t care about any of those things. I just want you to watch it. Because it’s great.

*This sounds like a thing I made up. It’s not! It’s a real thing people wrote articles about!

It’s a smart, funny action thriller that handles the intricacies of its difficult premise perfectly. It’s paced in such a rapid-fire fashion that the possibilities for “Oh, this again?” dullness of its Groundhog Day plot are kept entirely at bay, even upon multiple viewings. It’s the rare science fiction movie that’s as interested in both keeping the plot sharp and taut as it is blowing things up in a gloriously exciting fashion. Most sci-fi opts for one or the other (and usually fails at both).

Its Metacritc score lists it at “Universal Acclaim” among movie goers, with a score that’s even slightly higher than likely Oscar winner Boyhood’s.

The people who saw thing movie loved it. Make yourself one of them.

The Indie Movie That's Going Up On The Wall In 2014: Boyhood

You’ll hear a lot about Boyhood in the next month as the Oscars approach, though I don’t think I would have expected that this summer when I walked out of the theater after seeing the film. Not as a slight on the movie, but I knew that Oscar Movie Season was coming in December, what with its long establishing shots and silent, taut pauses and Meryl Streeps and what have you.

But now that January has arrived, all of the Oscar contenders have arrived and most of them have landed with a bit of a thud. Not that this has prevented them from getting Oscar nominations anyway. In the Battle of the Misunderstood British Geniuses, the The Imitation Game proved to be a better and more insightful film than The Theory of Everything, though one would assume Eddie Redmayne’s physically demanding Stephen Hawking imitation is more likely to land voters in the Academy than Benedict Cumberbatch's troubled, Asberger-y Alan Turning.* Either way, both landed Best Picture nominations and neither have a chance of winning.

*Though, while we’re on the subject: props to Cumberbatch for playing a role written so similarly to his oddball Sherlock Holmes performance without using a trace of his former character. That’s a difficult thing to do, and I feel like it’s been going unmentioned.

Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper had a massively successful opening  weekend, which oddly, I would assume doomed it in the Oscar race. Mark Harris pointed out this morning that the last movie to win Best Picture while also being its highest grosser was 2006’s The Departed, and he didn’t even mention that that award was seen, even at the time, as a “thanks for all you’ve done” to Martin Scorcese.

However, it’s not the box office numbers that’ll doom Sniper, it’s that too many of what my dad always refers to as the Wrong Sort Of People saw and enjoyed the movie. You know, people who like war movies and deer stands and George Bush and God knows what, thank God I don’t know any of those people, they might get camo on me. Its chances of winning Best Picture are completely dead, and allow me to be the first person writing about this subject to not make the truly tasteless joke that the film’s title sets up.

That leaves five Best Picture nominees: Wes Anderson’s quirky, surprisingly dark The Grand Budapest Hotel (the very definition of an “it’s an honor just to be nominated” selection), tiny jazz drumming indie Whiplash (which is seen as more of an acting film, which is why its young upstart director, Damien Chizelle - he turns 30 today! - didn’t land a directing nomination), and the three actual contenders: Birdman, Selma, and Boyhood.

I won’t spend any time breaking down the merits of the other two films - I have strong affections for all three, and if I’d actually seen Selma in 2014 and not a few days ago, it might have landed this spot. But I suspect not. When I look back on 2014, the movie I’m going to remember most is Boyhood.

For the uninitiated: director Richard Linklater - a Texas director best known for critically-beloved talkers like his Before series and getting surprisingly excellent performances out of Jack Black - filmed a movie over the course of 12 years, casting his lead as a young boy and intermittently shooting the film throughout the child’s growing years. Nothing major happens - his mother stumbles in and out of a series of bad relationships, his father keeps showing up and making promises he can’t keep, he finds a girlfriend and loses her. It’s a few brief glimpses into a life, organic and meandering and surprisingly captivating. When his mother finally breaks down as he disappears off to college, trying to make sense of what she’d built with the scaffolding of her life (“I just thought there would be more,” she gently cries, as her son stands there awkwardly in the doorway, unsure of how to comfort her), the films finally puts into words the lesson its subject had been learning his whole life: you can’t trust someone else to build your life for you.

Boyhood is moving in a way that can’t be forced - there’s something magnetic and sincere about knowing the age lines the actors grow are real - and while it lacks the bombast one would expect of a Best Picture winner, there’s a very good chance that in a little over a month, that’s just what it’ll be.