Top 10 Week... The Runners Up

Every year it's inevitable that some great films, performances, and scenes will end up cut from the final list of the year's best, and choosing the #10 entry in any list is always the hardest. I won't name everything from my long lists, but here are the choices that just missed out on taking those #10 spots, listed alphabetically.

Scenes

"Ask me things. Please." Carol
Carol is a film that possesses a number of great scenes (including, of course, the one that made my Best Scenes list), but there's something particularly haunting about this one, in which Rooney Mara's Therese tells Cate Blanchett's Carol that she wants to ask her things. It's a scene which underscores how much of Carol's life is a performance to mask her real self, how desperate she feels to be seen for who she really is, and how difficult it would be for two people to find each other when they have no language to describe who they are and how they feel. It's a profoundly moving scene.

Top 10 Week... Films of 2015

#10: Brooklyn
There were more challenging movies to be found in 2015, but I'm not sure there were movies with more heart than Brooklyn. An old fashioned, heartwarming tearjerker in many ways, this story of a young woman who leaves her life in Ireland behind in order to seize opportunities available to her in America, only to return for what's supposed to be a brief visit and find herself torn between the life she has started to plan in America and the life which is suddenly offered to her in Ireland, was one of the year's big surprises for me at the movies. It's a simple story but it's so expertly crafted and executed, and carried so masterfully by the performance of star Saorise Ronan, that I couldn't deny it's power. Brooklyn may be nothing more than a nice movie about nice people, but that doesn't preclude it from being a great one.

Top 10 Week... Performances by Women in 2015

#10: Rachel McAdams, Spotlight
Rachel McAdams makes no big speeches in Spotlight. She has no emotional outbursts, no romantic complications, no moment of self-doubt. She's just a woman who is dedicated to her job and whose ability to draw people out makes her an indispensable member of her team. It's a quiet performance, with the character's role largely to create a space for revelations from others, but that's why what McAdams does is so crucial. The quiet competence with which she instills the character makes her a natural for people to open up to, whether it's the victims of abuse that she's interviewing, a perpetrator who shocks her by openly admitting to what he did, or a fellow reporter who turns to her to talk through his anger at the situation, she makes for a natural confidante. McAdam's best moments in the film occur when she's simply watching someone, her performance built on small, subtle gestures. It's a performance so relaxed and unaffected that you might not even notice it - which is exactly what makes it so great.

Top 10 Week... Performances by Men in 2015

#10: Kyle Chandler, Carol
In a lesser film, Kyle Chandler's role as the husband of the eponymous character in Carol would be a thankless one, the heavy hovering indistinct on the edges of the story. Instead, in adapting it from page to screen, the film gives more breadth to the character and Chandler's performance allows him to be at least somewhat sympathetic. Played by Chandler, the character isn't the "bad guy," per se, but rather a man frustrated by the fact that life hasn't fully delivered on the promise of the American dream, complete with a loving wife by his side, and who just can't understand why it is that Carol doesn't want to be with him and that things just aren't going to be the way he was always told they were supposed to be. Stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara have received the most notice for their performances, but Chandler deserves some recognition, too, because what he brings to the film is invaluable.

Top 10 Week... Scenes of 2015

#10: Chinese restaurant scene, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is the story of a troubled Japanese woman who believes that the movie Fargo tells a true story and that if she follows the clues laid out in it, she can find the money that Steve Buscemi's character leaves buried in the middle of nowhere. It's a film that aims for the same dark humor as its inspiration and no scene in it hits that note stronger than the one in which the befuddled police officer who finds Kumiko wandering the highway decides that, since they can't effectively communicate with each other because he speaks no Japanese and her English is limited, he'll take her to a Chinese buffet, reasoning that someone there must be able to speak Japanese because... well, needless to say he didn't really think that through, but the exchange between him, Kumiko, and the woman who runs the buffet is worth every second.

Top 10 Week... Posters of 2015

#10: Crimson Peak
One thing that Guillermo del Toro's haunted house movie Crimson Peak got absolutely right was the look. It had some of the best production design and costuming of the year and, despite the horror unfolding on screen, it was always a beautiful movie to look at. The poster, with Mia Wasikowska's ghostly image floating in front of the mansion known as Crimson Peak in a striking black, blue, and red color scheme is pitch perfect.

Review: Carol (2015)

* * * *
Director: Todd Haynes
Starring: Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett

It isn't until Carol's final, breathtaking scene that you can appreciate just how masterfully director Todd Haynes has controlled the film's tone. For most of its 118 minute running time, it's a tightly contained piece that holds a lot back, but in that final moment the dam finally breaks and it becomes clear that the degree of restraint Haynes has demonstrated in unfolding the story up to that point has been very much a deliberate choice. In terms of the story, it's also a wholly appropriate one, given that the narrative turns on something which must remain hidden due to circumstance, but which ultimately can't be denied. While Carol might seem at first to be too cold and closed off to connect with, it tells such an inherently simple and human story, and is so profoundly moving, that in the end connection becomes easy.

Review: Brooklyn (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: John Crowley
Starring: Saoirse Ronan

In less volatile times, a film like John Crowley's Brooklyn, adapted from the novel by Colm Toibin, might seem too gentle to be really important in the wider social context of our day-to-day lives. Right now, released in theaters at a time when politicians are competing with each other to see who can take the most vile and closed-minded position about people who didn't have the good fortune to be born in a place of democracy and/or opportunity, it's a film that touches a nerve and is a reminder that the vast majority of those people who have in the past and are right now undertaking the long journey away from everything that they have ever known and starting over in some place where everything is entirely foreign to them are doing so not to hurt anyone or destroy anything, but to try to have a better life. Brooklyn is, at its core, a love story, but it's also an immigrant story about the bravery it takes to pick up and move into the unknown half a world away, and the opportunities for kindness available to be taken by those who already happen to be there.

Review: Spotlight (2015)

* * * *
Director: Tom McCarthy
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber

In a perfect world, we could all at least agree that children are deserving of protection and that their safety should take priority over everything else. That we don't live in that kind of a world, that we live in one where people who exploit and abuse children can be not just shielded from prosecution but given multiple opportunities to perpetuate abuse, proves that we still have some evolving left to do. The story told by Tom McCarthy's Spotlight is not surprising - the specific story on which the film is based was well-publicized and there have been so many other stories of systematic sexual abuse by priests that that's now the first thing many of us think of with respect to the Catholic Church - but it's nevertheless shocking to see in action the workings of a conspiracy of silence and the abuse of institutional power undertaken to keep the ugly truth hidden. Yet Spotlight is no David and Goliath tale of taking on a massive, powerful entity and defeating it; rather, it presents itself as a story in which there is a lot of complicity to go around and even the protagonists aren't necessarily without some guilt in helping to perpetuate the silence and, by extension, the abuse.

Review: The Duke of Burgundy (2015)

* * * *
Director: Peter Strickland
Starring: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Chiara D'Anna

Although it has a premise that sounds lurid, and is styled to resemble European softcore from the 1970s, Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy isn't an exercise in titillation. All things considered, it's actually pretty tame in its sexual content, trading more on eroticism than sex or nudity, and when you get beyond the superficial aspects of its kink, it's a thoughtful and nuanced story not just about a relationship, but about relationships generally. Built around solid performances from Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D'Anna which root the story to a core of truth even as the film itself throws out touches of unreality, The Duke of Burgundy is a fascinating and engrossing viewing experience. Gorgeous, hypnotic, and ultimately quite moving, this is surely one of the year's best films.

Review: Phoenix (2015)

* * * *
Director: Christian Petzold
Starring: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld

The doctor tries to put an optimistic spin on it, telling her that she can have a new face that will allow her to reinvent herself for the post-war world, get a fresh start, leave the horrors of the past behind. But she doesn't want a new face or a new identity or a new life. She wants to look like herself and resume the life she was living before. After an experience that has stripped her of everything - her freedom, her family, her dignity, her face and nearly her life - illusion will be the last thing to go. But as she moves through the physical and social ruins of post-war Berlin, her need to remember is at odds with a nation already in the process of trying to forget. The sixth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and actress Nina Hoss, Phoenix may be their greatest and most deeply felt film yet.

Review: Mistress America (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke

For a filmmaker who built a name for himself through razor sharp dissections of the anxieties, pretensions, and preoccupations of his own generation, Noah Baumbach has proved in his last couple of films that he has a keen eye for the next one, too. In fairness, in the case of Frances Ha and his latest, Mistress America, some of the credit for that must go to star Greta Gerwig, who also serves as co-writer of both, and whose presence on screen helps to soften some of Baumbach's naturally barbed edges so that the films seem more like rueful observations rather than the cinematic equivalent of an annoyed man muttering about the kids on his lawn. Mistress America isn't quite on the same level as Frances Ha, but it's a really good, really funny film with two fantastic performances at its center.

Review: Inside Out (2015)

* * * *
Director: Pete Docter
Starring: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Kaitlyn Dias, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Bill Hader

For a film about the psyche of an 11 year old girl, Pixar's Inside Out tells an awfully mature story. Not content to be merely a farce about personified emotions run amok inside someone's head, Pete Doctor's film has greater ambitions than that. Inside Out tells a story about the sometimes painful process of growing up, about the things that have to be left behind in order to make way for the things to come, and the ways that you have to change the person you were for the sake of the person you're going to become. As a result it's a film that is sad as often as it is funny, and one which is profoundly thoughtful and moving. Pixar has no shortage of great movies to its credit, and Inside Out is surely one of its very best.

Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: George Miller
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron

The summer movie season has only just started, but honestly it might as well be over now because I doubt it's going to get much better than Mad Max: Fury Road. Writer/director George Miller's triumphant return to the franchise which started his career 36 years ago (and which he last revisited 30 years ago - yes, it's been that long since Thunderdome) is a work of great vision and incredible execution. It is loaded to the brim with ridiculous, amazing action, grounded by rich thematic concerns (its success in this regard is all the more impressive for how little dialogue the film contains), and augmented by some incredible world building (which, again, is impressive given how little is said throughout). It is a relentless thrill ride that barely stops to take a breath for 120 minutes and when it's over you feel like you've just been repeatedly punched in the face - but in a good way.

Review: Clouds of Sils Maria (2015)

* * * *
Director: Olivier Assayas
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloe Grace Moretz

The key is that the older woman and the younger one are, in fact, one and the same, just at different ages. So argues the younger woman, at any rate, as she tries to help the older one figure out how to play her character. Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria is a story about two women working at unraveling a story about two women and like 2011's Certified Copy, another recent and excellent film starring Juliette Binoche, this is one in which the lines between "fact" and "fiction" blur often, sometimes even from one sentence to the next within a scene. It's a film that you really need to pay attention to, and perhaps even watch multiple times, in order to get its full effect as it is so rich in meaning. It is also beautifully, artfully made, full of shots and moments which stun you with how aesthetically entrancing they are. Clouds of Sils Maria is a film that can leave you feeling unbalanced from time to time, but it's also one that your mind will keep turning back to long after the fact.

Review: The Look of Silence (2015)

* * * *
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

"You can't imagine what would have happened." That's the response given to the interviewer when he asks what would have happened to him if he were asking the questions he's asking during the period of the "Communist" purge. It's a chilling thing to read in print, but it's even more so to see and hear it said, its impact in no way dulled by the fact that it's surrounded by other deeply disturbing moments. The Look of Silence is director Joshua Oppenheimer's companion piece to his 2013 documentary The Act of Killing, and tackles the same subject as that previous film (the Indonesian killings of 1965-66) but from the perspective of the family of one of the victims, and in the absence of the overt stylization of the first film. Though it would hardly seem possible, The Look of Silence is somehow even more powerful and harrowing than the previous film.