Any movie with the word "American" in its title that opens with its teenage heroine (Sasha Lane) dumpster diving in order to feed her family can reasonably be counted on to offer a scathing commentary on the cultural and economic ills currently affecting the U.S. And on one level, British writer-director Andrea Arnold's singular, brilliantly immersive road movie American Honey functions as just such a critique.
Shortly after crawling out of the dumpster, Lane's character, Star, is drawn to a wild pack of misfit teens who ride around in a giant van and frighten the zombified masses shopping at a chain department store with an impromptu group dance to Rihanna's "We Found Love." Her flirtation with the group's smoothest talker, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who Star pointedly teases as appearing Trump-esque in his dark suit pants, is enough to convince Star to ditch the alcohol-soaked dysfunction of her home life in favor of taking a chance on this energetic crew's itinerant existence.
The teens get by financially via a carefully worked-out system of breaking off into pairs and going door-to-door pretending to sell magazine subscriptions. They then reunite and give their swindled earnings to Jake's girlfriend and the real power behind the throne, Krystal (Riley Keough, who nearly steals the movie with the specific, subtly damaged toughness that she grants the character). After Star tells Krystal that she disapproves of the lies Jake spins to snag money from suburbanites, Krystal coldly rationalizes to Star that Jake isn't lying--he's simply making money.
It's in this vision of marginalized, lower-class outcasts reaching for success by being just as shady and deceitful as those who occupy the top of the economic food chain that American Honey imparts its sharp take on state-of-the-nation inequality and scavenging. Thankfully, though, Arnold is hardly a didactic filmmaker, and she has fused the gritty realism of her coming-of-age chronicle Fish Tank with the nature-obsessed lyricism of her stunning adaptation of Wuthering Heights to create a primarily experiential film that just happens to have a sociopolitical sting to it. Arnold prefers observing people and places to pushily shouting out the movie's message.
Observation is the key manner in which Arnold and her ingenious director of photography Robbie Ryan (who also collaborated with Arnold on all three of her previous features) convey that America, for all its disillusioning troubles, is still a land of plentiful beauty and hope. This point is made most explicitly in a lovely, Springsteen-scored scene between Star and a sweet-natured truck driver, but it's made most seductively in the cascading flow of nearly tactile visual details that Arnold captures. Every patch of flyover-state land that Krystal's crew travels to offers a bevy of invigorating new sights--wide vistas glimpsed out the van window, beautiful dogs, creepy insects. Even the rot of the string of motels the gang resides in registers as gorgeously authentic. This is "America the beautiful" image-making at its most entrancingly alien.
Arnold's heart proves to be as wide-open as her camera eye. Even though she has moral points to make via her characters, she's too generous to ever veer into full-on "the kids today" moralism. There's a joyousness to the teens' spirited sing-alongs in the packed van, and even Jake, whose cockiness and philandering trysts with Star make him the most potentially repellant character, is ultimately hard not to like. (LaBeouf's charisma has always depended on a motor-mouthed, paradoxically insincere sincerity, which makes him perfectly cast and at his best here.) And most importantly, Arnold's most empathetic embrace is of Star, whose watchful intelligence, brashly tell-it-like-it-is honesty, and youthful impulsiveness is brought to life in a star-making (irresistible pun intended) performance by the assured Lane.
Some may leave American Honey feeling that Star's episodic journey doesn't warrant the film's nearly-three-hour runtime, and that's fine. The expression "not for everyone" certainly applies to Arnold's intentionally rambling, narratively loose approach. But if you find yourself attuned to the movie's exhilarating feast-for-the-senses wavelength, you may find it to be the rare epic that you wish would never end. Grade: A
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Saturday, February 27, 2016
The Best Films of 2015
Many critical discussions of the movie year 2015 have revolved around the word "diversity," and almost all of them situate that word within the same context: the lack of non-white artistic voices represented in this year's Oscar nominations, evident in the eight Best Picture nominees and the four Caucasian-dominated acting categories. Fixating on the Academy Awards as if it's the root of the movie industry's racial diversity issues rather than a symptom of them is problematic--shouldn't we be asking studios to commit to projects showcasing non-white talent rather than generating pissy clickbait thinkpieces about the uniformity of a popular awards-giving group's particular choices? More than that, though, it's frustrating that so many awards-season bloggers don't exhibit much imagination in their suggestions of which 2015 films featuring actors and filmmakers of color were snubbed by the Academy; they focus primarily on Straight Outta Compton, a quite good and refreshingly energetic if overstuffed biopic, merely because industry guilds viewed as influential Oscar precursors recognized the film. What about Creed, a more emotionally robust crowdpleaser than Straight Outta Compton and a sequel/reboot to 1976 Best Picture winner Rocky, or Chi-Raq, the latest cultural grenade from this year's recipient of a career-achievement Honorary Oscar, Spike Lee? To put it bluntly, why should any analysis of the Oscars' lack of diversity be let off the hook for being so stiflingly not diverse in and of itself?
Beyond the tribe of journalists dedicated to the movie awards circuit, critics with a wider range of focus did a fine job of celebrating performances left out of the conversation. To name a few examples, Rolling Stone and Slate contributor David Ehrlich and Screen Crush's Matt Singer have championed Samuel L. Jackson's characteristically fluent grasp of Tarantino-ese in The Hateful Eight; Movie Mezzanine and Spliced Personality writer Sean Burns supported Ben Vereen's startlingly deglamorized turn as a homeless man in Time Out of Mind in both his review of the film and his Boston Online Film Critics ballot; and on Twitter, film historian and Cinephiliacs podcaster Peter Labuza has frequently given well-deserved props to Viola Davis' effortless badassery in Blackhat.
Another kind of diversity that keeps moviegoing fresh and exciting is the diversity of genres, tones, and storytelling approaches out there, which is reflected in my list of the best films of 2015. Mother-and-child melodramas, sleek science-fiction, piercing documentaries, an uplifting sports movie, a bleak Western, a pair of Noah Baumbach comedies, and a healthy amount of globe-hopping espionage can all be found in this inventory of the year's cinematic highlights. And topping all other 2015 releases is an Aussie action juggernaut like no other:
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller). Tucking a rousing, unapologetically feminist rise-of-the-oppressed narrative within what is essentially a feature-length, multi-vehicle chase scene, Australian maverick Miller's continuation of his post-apocalyptic franchise has both passion and momentum to burn. A feverish, hallucinatory, kinetic genre masterwork that boasts a ferocious lead performance from Charlize Theron and some of the most dazzling action choreography ever captured on film, Mad Max: Fury Road is practically a living thing--a wild, untamed beast.
2. Mommy (Xavier Dolan). Twentysomething French-Canadian virtuoso Dolan reaches a new level of emotional maturity with this devastating portrait of a widow (Anne Dorval) struggling to raise her volatile teenage son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) with the help of a damaged but stronger-than-she-seems neighbor (Suzanne Clement). The warts-and-all complexity of these three characters mesh beautifully with Dolan's knack for grand stylistic gestures to create a melodrama that's at once proudly movie-ish and lifelike in its embrace of beautiful human messiness. Raw and powerfully acted, Mommy has the lingering effect of great tragedy.
3. The Martian (Ridley Scott). There was a lot of understandable eye-rolling in response to the studio behind The Martian's decision to submit it as a comedy for Golden Globes consideration; no one will mistake this high-stakes tale of the efforts to rescue a stranded-on-Mars astronaut (Matt Damon, as likable and nuanced as ever) for a Judd Apatow joint. But the film's delightful lightness of touch--evident in Damon's way with a tossed-off quip and in the expertly deployed soundtrack of disco hits--is a big part of what makes it such an unexpectedly brash treat. It's hugely stirring, as well as rewardingly cerebral in its space procedural problem-solving, but it's also just plain fun--the special kind of crowdpleaser that'll be worth rewatching over and over when it inevitably becomes a TNT staple.
4. Room (Lenny Abrahamson). The premise of Room--a young woman (Brie Larson) who's been imprisoned by a sexual assailant for years plans to escape with her born-in-captivity son (Jacob Tremblay) in tow--is so reminiscent of stomach-turning headlines that chief among the movie's most remarkable achievements is how it manages to sensitively put a human face on the kind of story the news media often paints in sensationalistic strokes. Larson and Tremblay forcefully convey how a parent/child relationship forged in the most dire of circumstances can be just as loving as a conventionally conceived one, and Abrahamson beautifully captures how the world looks to fresh eyes.
5. Brooklyn (John Crowley). Wearing its heart proudly on its sleeve and downright unfashionable in its quaint throwback appeal, Brooklyn is a gem of neo-classical storytelling, handsomely crafted by Crowley and infused with wit and stealthy structural genius by writer Nick Hornby. Young Irish-to-America transplant Eilis' (the luminously expressive Saoirse Ronan) journey is graced with a stranger-in-a-strange-land specificity, but is also profoundly universal in nailing the moment when everything that forms the nexus of identity--family, career, who we love, where we call home--clicks into concrete place.
6. The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer). A jolting glimpse into the horrific sight of evil trying to justify itself, this powerfully humane documentary gives an Indonesian optometrist the chance to confront and question the still-in-power soldiers who killed his brother in the genocide that scarred the nation in the '60s. With a stronger sense of moral purpose and a more hypnotic sense of place than The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer's previous documentary on the subject, The Look of Silence represents non-fiction filmmaking at its most courageously probing and aesthetically assured.
7. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach). Ever since Kicking and Screaming, his insanely quotable debut, writer-director Baumbach has been a master of off-kilter comedic dialogue. With its diamond-cut witticisms and collisions of characters whose hypocrisies are regarded with equal parts affection and satiric sharpness, Mistress America distills this gift of Baumbach's to its Oscar Wilde-esque essence--it's a drawing-room farce for the modern age. Greta Gerwig deserves credit not only for helping shape the non-stop zingers as co-writer, but also for being the perfect actress to bring Brooke, the film's most iconic dreamer/sellout combo, to such vividly funny and honest life.
8. About Elly (Asghar Farhadi). A group of friends gather at a seaside villa with the harmless ulterior motive of playing matchmaker for two members of their party--what could go wrong? Plenty, it turns out, especially in a nation as socially rigid as Iran. About Elly, even more than Farhadi's great A Separation, plays as a suspenseful model of narrative escalation while you watch it and as a multi-layered tragedy when you reflect on it later. This film's arrival on U.S. shores six years after it premiered overseas makes it a true gift from the movie gods.
9. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (Brett Morgen). Mixing animation, archival footage, and an enveloping musical soundscape, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is powered by the same inventiveness and dissonant beauty of its subject, the iconic, deceased frontman of pioneering grunge-rock band Nirvana. Rejecting talking-heads-driven Behind the Music formula, Morgen seems to tap into Cobain's psyche with his intuitive documentary-collage approach. And he knows when to let the songs speak for themselves--allowing Cobain's wrenching MTV Unplugged rendition of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" play out in its entirety is its own kind of mic drop.
10. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino). Whereas Tarantino's last film, Django Unchained, was a Western that filtered its take on the Civil War's effect on America's racial divide through a folk hero worth rooting for, The Hateful Eight covers similar terrain while offering no clear protagonist. True to the film's title, everyone onscreen is a despicable scoundrel. This gives the film a bracingly nasty charge. There's a resonant critique of the way prejudice can lead to resentment and violence to be found within the film's caustic bitterness, and Tarantino's visual mastery (in 70mm!) and flavorful dialogue remain viciously on-point.
And here are the next ten runners-up:
11. Creed (Ryan Coogler). The rise of Adonis Creed (a brooding yet accessible Michael B. Jordan), the son of the previous Rocky film's champ Apollo Creed, into a boxing force all his own is detailed by Coogler with so much grounded human nuance as to make the film's crowd-pleasing finish that much more rousing. Sylvester Stallone's return to the Rocky character is a remarkably touching and graceful career high point.
12. 45 Years (Andrew Haigh). As a woman who discovers her soulmate of the last four-plus decades (the great Tom Courtenay) may actually be something of a stranger to her, Charlotte Rampling gives arguably the year's most magnificently controlled and subtly powerful performance. Haigh writes and directs with impressive, unfussy precision, cementing his status as one of the more perceptive chroniclers of complicated romances to come around in a while.
13. Trainwreck (Judd Apatow). Writer and star Amy Schumer's TV-sketch-honed gift for crafting clever scenarios of cheeky sexual candor marries perfectly with Apatow's goofy/sweet humanism in creating a refreshingly sharp romantic comedy that's hilarious, affecting, and wise about navigating the treacherous waters of commitment.
14. Inside Out (Pete Docter). Pixar Animation Studios' ability to bring lovingly detailed worlds to eye-popping visual life is evident once again in Inside Out, which renders the mind of an 11-year-old girl in crisis as an imaginatively conceived environment populated by anthropomorphic emotions and personality-defining islands. With occasionally heart-stopping poignance and a bevy of ingenious throwaway gags, the film admirably argues for the necessity of both joy and sadness in life.
15. The Mend (John Magary). A portrait of fraternal dysfunction and drunken assholery graced with amusingly profane wit and vivid filmmaking that swings from the authentic to the operatic, The Mend is an audacious dark comedy that marks Magary as a talent to watch. As a mischievous fuck-up who takes up uninvited residence in his estranged brother's apartment, Josh Lucas is a wild, impish revelation; casting off the shackles of his bland-studio-romantic-comedy past works wonders for him.
16. Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie). Intrepid IMF-agent hero Ethan Hunt's ambiguous dance with Ilsa Faust (formidable series newcomer Rebecca Ferguson), an MI6 agent who may or may not be working with the evil Syndicate, gives this installment in the remarkably consistent Mission: Impossible franchise the same hesitant spy-world romanticism of Roger Moore's best James Bond outing, The Spy Who Loved Me. All the action sequences stun, with the standout being an elegant, Hitchcockian face-off at a Viennese opera house.
17. Chi-Raq (Spike Lee). Lee has never been a filmmaker interested in muting his anger, and the outrage that animates Chi-Raq, an alternately bawdy and mournful quasi-musical that tackles America's gun-violence epidemic with bold bluntness, has a blistering forcefulness. That fury lends coherence to the film's shifts from smutty sex gags to elaborate dance numbers to impassioned eulogies. As with much of Lee's best work, it brims over with emotion, ambition, and cinematic invention.
18. Sicario (Denis Villeneuve). A tightly coiled, moody thriller that smartly doubles as a cynical lament for the loss of ethics in the War on Drugs waged along the U.S./Mexico border, Sicario is the film that matches Villeneuve's well-honed stylistic control with the meaty substance that his earlier, good-but-flawed work has lacked to some degree. Emily Blunt is sympathetic yet unsentimental as the film's moral center, while Benicio Del Toro is rivetingly enigmatic as a more ruthless operative.
19. Call Me Lucky (Bobcat Goldthwait). I didn't really know anything about Barry Crimmins, the stand-up comedian at the center of this documentary, before seeing it, which turned out to be ideal. At a certain point, Call Me Lucky shifts from being a life-of-a-comic trifle to an incredibly moving testament to the human ability to productively transform trauma into the basis for comedy and social activism. A former stand-up himself, Goldthwait has become a unique, fascinating comedy auteur, and the emotional gut punch he delivers here makes it his best film yet.
20. Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg). 34 years after E.T., Spielberg is still making compassionate studies of protagonists adrift in far-from-home environments--even when they're in the guise of a Cold War moral thriller, as with Bridge of Spies. Paralleling a Russian spy's (the masterful Mark Rylance) imprisonment in the U.S. with an American negotiator's (Tom Hanks, a reliably sly Everyman) dislocation when he travels to Germany to hammer out a prisoner swap, the film is a rich, empathetic, gorgeously crafted adult entertainment.
And here are nine more great 2015 releases:
21. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams).
22. Mississippi Grind (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck).
23. Spy (Paul Feig).
24. Spectre (Sam Mendes).
25. Furious 7 (James Wan).
26. While We're Young (Noah Baumbach).
27. Blackhat (Michael Mann).
28. Love & Mercy (Bill Pohlad).
29. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Alex Gibney).
Beyond the tribe of journalists dedicated to the movie awards circuit, critics with a wider range of focus did a fine job of celebrating performances left out of the conversation. To name a few examples, Rolling Stone and Slate contributor David Ehrlich and Screen Crush's Matt Singer have championed Samuel L. Jackson's characteristically fluent grasp of Tarantino-ese in The Hateful Eight; Movie Mezzanine and Spliced Personality writer Sean Burns supported Ben Vereen's startlingly deglamorized turn as a homeless man in Time Out of Mind in both his review of the film and his Boston Online Film Critics ballot; and on Twitter, film historian and Cinephiliacs podcaster Peter Labuza has frequently given well-deserved props to Viola Davis' effortless badassery in Blackhat.
Another kind of diversity that keeps moviegoing fresh and exciting is the diversity of genres, tones, and storytelling approaches out there, which is reflected in my list of the best films of 2015. Mother-and-child melodramas, sleek science-fiction, piercing documentaries, an uplifting sports movie, a bleak Western, a pair of Noah Baumbach comedies, and a healthy amount of globe-hopping espionage can all be found in this inventory of the year's cinematic highlights. And topping all other 2015 releases is an Aussie action juggernaut like no other:
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller). Tucking a rousing, unapologetically feminist rise-of-the-oppressed narrative within what is essentially a feature-length, multi-vehicle chase scene, Australian maverick Miller's continuation of his post-apocalyptic franchise has both passion and momentum to burn. A feverish, hallucinatory, kinetic genre masterwork that boasts a ferocious lead performance from Charlize Theron and some of the most dazzling action choreography ever captured on film, Mad Max: Fury Road is practically a living thing--a wild, untamed beast.
2. Mommy (Xavier Dolan). Twentysomething French-Canadian virtuoso Dolan reaches a new level of emotional maturity with this devastating portrait of a widow (Anne Dorval) struggling to raise her volatile teenage son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) with the help of a damaged but stronger-than-she-seems neighbor (Suzanne Clement). The warts-and-all complexity of these three characters mesh beautifully with Dolan's knack for grand stylistic gestures to create a melodrama that's at once proudly movie-ish and lifelike in its embrace of beautiful human messiness. Raw and powerfully acted, Mommy has the lingering effect of great tragedy.
3. The Martian (Ridley Scott). There was a lot of understandable eye-rolling in response to the studio behind The Martian's decision to submit it as a comedy for Golden Globes consideration; no one will mistake this high-stakes tale of the efforts to rescue a stranded-on-Mars astronaut (Matt Damon, as likable and nuanced as ever) for a Judd Apatow joint. But the film's delightful lightness of touch--evident in Damon's way with a tossed-off quip and in the expertly deployed soundtrack of disco hits--is a big part of what makes it such an unexpectedly brash treat. It's hugely stirring, as well as rewardingly cerebral in its space procedural problem-solving, but it's also just plain fun--the special kind of crowdpleaser that'll be worth rewatching over and over when it inevitably becomes a TNT staple.
4. Room (Lenny Abrahamson). The premise of Room--a young woman (Brie Larson) who's been imprisoned by a sexual assailant for years plans to escape with her born-in-captivity son (Jacob Tremblay) in tow--is so reminiscent of stomach-turning headlines that chief among the movie's most remarkable achievements is how it manages to sensitively put a human face on the kind of story the news media often paints in sensationalistic strokes. Larson and Tremblay forcefully convey how a parent/child relationship forged in the most dire of circumstances can be just as loving as a conventionally conceived one, and Abrahamson beautifully captures how the world looks to fresh eyes.
5. Brooklyn (John Crowley). Wearing its heart proudly on its sleeve and downright unfashionable in its quaint throwback appeal, Brooklyn is a gem of neo-classical storytelling, handsomely crafted by Crowley and infused with wit and stealthy structural genius by writer Nick Hornby. Young Irish-to-America transplant Eilis' (the luminously expressive Saoirse Ronan) journey is graced with a stranger-in-a-strange-land specificity, but is also profoundly universal in nailing the moment when everything that forms the nexus of identity--family, career, who we love, where we call home--clicks into concrete place.
6. The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer). A jolting glimpse into the horrific sight of evil trying to justify itself, this powerfully humane documentary gives an Indonesian optometrist the chance to confront and question the still-in-power soldiers who killed his brother in the genocide that scarred the nation in the '60s. With a stronger sense of moral purpose and a more hypnotic sense of place than The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer's previous documentary on the subject, The Look of Silence represents non-fiction filmmaking at its most courageously probing and aesthetically assured.
7. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach). Ever since Kicking and Screaming, his insanely quotable debut, writer-director Baumbach has been a master of off-kilter comedic dialogue. With its diamond-cut witticisms and collisions of characters whose hypocrisies are regarded with equal parts affection and satiric sharpness, Mistress America distills this gift of Baumbach's to its Oscar Wilde-esque essence--it's a drawing-room farce for the modern age. Greta Gerwig deserves credit not only for helping shape the non-stop zingers as co-writer, but also for being the perfect actress to bring Brooke, the film's most iconic dreamer/sellout combo, to such vividly funny and honest life.
8. About Elly (Asghar Farhadi). A group of friends gather at a seaside villa with the harmless ulterior motive of playing matchmaker for two members of their party--what could go wrong? Plenty, it turns out, especially in a nation as socially rigid as Iran. About Elly, even more than Farhadi's great A Separation, plays as a suspenseful model of narrative escalation while you watch it and as a multi-layered tragedy when you reflect on it later. This film's arrival on U.S. shores six years after it premiered overseas makes it a true gift from the movie gods.
9. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (Brett Morgen). Mixing animation, archival footage, and an enveloping musical soundscape, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is powered by the same inventiveness and dissonant beauty of its subject, the iconic, deceased frontman of pioneering grunge-rock band Nirvana. Rejecting talking-heads-driven Behind the Music formula, Morgen seems to tap into Cobain's psyche with his intuitive documentary-collage approach. And he knows when to let the songs speak for themselves--allowing Cobain's wrenching MTV Unplugged rendition of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" play out in its entirety is its own kind of mic drop.
10. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino). Whereas Tarantino's last film, Django Unchained, was a Western that filtered its take on the Civil War's effect on America's racial divide through a folk hero worth rooting for, The Hateful Eight covers similar terrain while offering no clear protagonist. True to the film's title, everyone onscreen is a despicable scoundrel. This gives the film a bracingly nasty charge. There's a resonant critique of the way prejudice can lead to resentment and violence to be found within the film's caustic bitterness, and Tarantino's visual mastery (in 70mm!) and flavorful dialogue remain viciously on-point.
And here are the next ten runners-up:
11. Creed (Ryan Coogler). The rise of Adonis Creed (a brooding yet accessible Michael B. Jordan), the son of the previous Rocky film's champ Apollo Creed, into a boxing force all his own is detailed by Coogler with so much grounded human nuance as to make the film's crowd-pleasing finish that much more rousing. Sylvester Stallone's return to the Rocky character is a remarkably touching and graceful career high point.
12. 45 Years (Andrew Haigh). As a woman who discovers her soulmate of the last four-plus decades (the great Tom Courtenay) may actually be something of a stranger to her, Charlotte Rampling gives arguably the year's most magnificently controlled and subtly powerful performance. Haigh writes and directs with impressive, unfussy precision, cementing his status as one of the more perceptive chroniclers of complicated romances to come around in a while.
13. Trainwreck (Judd Apatow). Writer and star Amy Schumer's TV-sketch-honed gift for crafting clever scenarios of cheeky sexual candor marries perfectly with Apatow's goofy/sweet humanism in creating a refreshingly sharp romantic comedy that's hilarious, affecting, and wise about navigating the treacherous waters of commitment.
14. Inside Out (Pete Docter). Pixar Animation Studios' ability to bring lovingly detailed worlds to eye-popping visual life is evident once again in Inside Out, which renders the mind of an 11-year-old girl in crisis as an imaginatively conceived environment populated by anthropomorphic emotions and personality-defining islands. With occasionally heart-stopping poignance and a bevy of ingenious throwaway gags, the film admirably argues for the necessity of both joy and sadness in life.
15. The Mend (John Magary). A portrait of fraternal dysfunction and drunken assholery graced with amusingly profane wit and vivid filmmaking that swings from the authentic to the operatic, The Mend is an audacious dark comedy that marks Magary as a talent to watch. As a mischievous fuck-up who takes up uninvited residence in his estranged brother's apartment, Josh Lucas is a wild, impish revelation; casting off the shackles of his bland-studio-romantic-comedy past works wonders for him.
16. Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie). Intrepid IMF-agent hero Ethan Hunt's ambiguous dance with Ilsa Faust (formidable series newcomer Rebecca Ferguson), an MI6 agent who may or may not be working with the evil Syndicate, gives this installment in the remarkably consistent Mission: Impossible franchise the same hesitant spy-world romanticism of Roger Moore's best James Bond outing, The Spy Who Loved Me. All the action sequences stun, with the standout being an elegant, Hitchcockian face-off at a Viennese opera house.
17. Chi-Raq (Spike Lee). Lee has never been a filmmaker interested in muting his anger, and the outrage that animates Chi-Raq, an alternately bawdy and mournful quasi-musical that tackles America's gun-violence epidemic with bold bluntness, has a blistering forcefulness. That fury lends coherence to the film's shifts from smutty sex gags to elaborate dance numbers to impassioned eulogies. As with much of Lee's best work, it brims over with emotion, ambition, and cinematic invention.
18. Sicario (Denis Villeneuve). A tightly coiled, moody thriller that smartly doubles as a cynical lament for the loss of ethics in the War on Drugs waged along the U.S./Mexico border, Sicario is the film that matches Villeneuve's well-honed stylistic control with the meaty substance that his earlier, good-but-flawed work has lacked to some degree. Emily Blunt is sympathetic yet unsentimental as the film's moral center, while Benicio Del Toro is rivetingly enigmatic as a more ruthless operative.
19. Call Me Lucky (Bobcat Goldthwait). I didn't really know anything about Barry Crimmins, the stand-up comedian at the center of this documentary, before seeing it, which turned out to be ideal. At a certain point, Call Me Lucky shifts from being a life-of-a-comic trifle to an incredibly moving testament to the human ability to productively transform trauma into the basis for comedy and social activism. A former stand-up himself, Goldthwait has become a unique, fascinating comedy auteur, and the emotional gut punch he delivers here makes it his best film yet.
20. Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg). 34 years after E.T., Spielberg is still making compassionate studies of protagonists adrift in far-from-home environments--even when they're in the guise of a Cold War moral thriller, as with Bridge of Spies. Paralleling a Russian spy's (the masterful Mark Rylance) imprisonment in the U.S. with an American negotiator's (Tom Hanks, a reliably sly Everyman) dislocation when he travels to Germany to hammer out a prisoner swap, the film is a rich, empathetic, gorgeously crafted adult entertainment.
And here are nine more great 2015 releases:
21. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams).
22. Mississippi Grind (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck).
23. Spy (Paul Feig).
24. Spectre (Sam Mendes).
25. Furious 7 (James Wan).
26. While We're Young (Noah Baumbach).
27. Blackhat (Michael Mann).
28. Love & Mercy (Bill Pohlad).
29. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Alex Gibney).
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