2015

2015

1. Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)
2. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)
3. Heaven Knows What (Safdie Brothers)
4. Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg)
5. Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont)
6. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
7. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
8. Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
9. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)
10. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson)

Honorable Mention:  Inside Out (Pete Docter), Carol (Todd Haynes), Sicario (Denis Villeneuve), The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu), When Marnie Was There (Hiromasa Yonebayashi), The Hallow (Corin Hardy)

No thx:  The Revenant, Spotlight, Room, The Assassin, Goodnight Mommy, Straight Outta Compton, Crimson Peak, Pitch Perfect 2, Love and Mercy, Beasts of No Nation, Ex Machina, The Gift, Spy

I don't have much to say about these films or this year other than I wish I had been writing about them as I saw them.  Hard to Be a God is the crown jewel for me.  It'll be very high up on my best films of the decade list.  It's about as ideally singular a film (and film watching experience) that I could dream of in this modern age of stagnant, rote filmmaking.  It reminds me a lot of Marketa Lazarova, a film that too few have seen but has steadily grown to be one of my all time essentials.  Both films elicit genuine awe from me.  They almost feel impossible, and I don't mean that hyperbolically.  I watch them each and honestly wonder, "how the fuck does this exist?"  It is as if relics excavated from ancient times were magically given motion or as if uncanny images were being transmitted from an alien world.  I respect more than love something like The Forbidden Room for having a distinctive vision that plays unlike most anything else around.  But you can see the brushstrokes and the artist tirelessly at work in something like The Forbidden Room; in Hard to be a God, you are swallowed by the majesty of the canvas.