Finally time to put 2015 to bed – a hugely rewarding one for me personally, and a pretty terrific one at the movies, too. Here follows my favorite bits and pieces of all the movies I saw. My apologies for going into much, much less detail than I have in years past: it was write a little or write nothing at all, and it’s already so close to May that putting it off even one more weekend seemed inexcusable.
[Editor’s note: After some deliberation, I decided to disqualify The Forbidden Room from awards consideration, as very nearly every aspect of its production is in such a foreign idiom from the vast majority of narrative films that comparing it to all of them was meaningless. And yes, I will get around to reviewing it one of these days]
BEST FEATURE
Mad Max: Fury Road
For redeeming popcorn cinema as a visual art; for combining mythic characters, physical movement, and narrative momentum into the most quietly deep and rich action movie in a generation
1st Runner-Up: Boy and the World
For fearlessly relying on childish animation, wordless characters, and peppy music to explore complex, difficult, and wholly adult concerns
Honorable Mentions:
The Assassin
-For diving into a long-dead past and treating it and the characters there with dignified, painterly detachment
Li’l Quinquin
-For the vividness of its warped characters and the steeliness of its moral spine
Timbuktu
-For passionate political and theological engagement, presenting the world around us in sharply cinematic terms
BEST DIRECTOR
George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road
For the years of dedication to a film in which every camera movement and every cut is pieced together like a master symphony with not one note out of place
1st Runner-Up: Alê Abreu, Boy and the World
For being almost solely responsible for animating the year’s most unexpected message movie, and its most visually delightful eye candy.
Honorable Mentions:
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, The Assassin
-For transferring his aesthetic of urban stillness to fields, mountains, and palaces and for the amazing things he found there
Joshua Oppenheimer, The Look of Silence
-For the intense moral commitment of helping the voiceless tell their stories no matter the personal risk
Jafar Panahi, Taxi
-For finding new ways to turn limitations into art, making a political statement out of form
BEST ACTRESS
Emily Blunt, Sicario
For playing the moral center of an immoral world, and for building a deeply character where the script only provides survivalist reactions
1st Runner-Up: Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
For portraying what a lifetime of contentment looks like in behavior and tone, and making us feel the jagged shift when that contentment is replaced by doubt
Honorable Mentions:
Cate Blanchett, Carol
-For playing a tragic lover without sanding the edges off of an icy member of the upper class
Sidse Babbett Knudsen, The Duke of Burgundy
-For silently expressing the fear of simply being incompatible with one’s partner despite every effort to keep them close
Sarah Snook, Predestination
-For playing a character who transforms more than most in the history of drama, and making the continuities always as clear as the differences
BEST ACTOR
Tom Courtenay, 45 Years
For playing a thorny, ambiguous investigation into the apparent contentment of old age, providing a rich sense of regretting and not-regretting the roads not taken, and doing it with a script that never actually aligns to his POV
1st Runner-Up: Michael B. Jordan, Creed
For re-conceiving one of cinema’s hoariest plot arcs as a validation of personal will, an expression of identity, and for letting his character stand in for social forces without ceasing to be an individual
Honorable Mentions:
Christopher Abbott, James White
-For coming out of nowhere with a tetchy and sympathetic character who constantly works against himself, to our sorrow and his
Tom Hanks, Bridge of Spies
-For redeeming the generic “Tom Hanks, All-American” figure as a prickly idealist and romantic pragmatist
Samuel L. Jackson, The Hateful Eight
-For indulging in the self-righteous nastiness of a morally grey character and lingering on Tarantino’s dialogue like a fine dinner
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria
For proving all of us spectacularly wrong, in her creation of an intelligent, put-upon young woman who has to act as den-mother, best friend, soul mate, and nurse all at once, all the time, and still emerge as her own person.
1st Runner-Up: Sarah Paulson, Carol
For imbuing her handful of scenes with the kind of fully worked-out behaviors and attitudes that make it clear that she’s the protagonist in her own movie; for the perfection of “I can’t help you with that”
Honorable Mentions:
Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight
-For playing a cartoon villain as a thoroughly worked out series of motivations, line readings, and reactions, but not sacrificing the cartooniness
Cynthia Nixon, James White
-For playing a concept of Worrying Mom and weaving it together with the gutwrenching sight of specific, individual mortality
Tessa Thompson, Creed
-For taking cinema’s most thankless role – the Girlfriend in a sports film – and making it entirely about her dreams, ambitions, and needs
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Bernard Pruvost, Li’l Quinquin
For being at once the most baffling, quirky character in an ensemble full of grotesques, but also the most thoughtful, grounded, and penetrating in his sad humanism
1st Runner-Up: Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
For underplaying a melodramatic role that gets all the best lines, and making fervent political activism and idealism seem like quiet pragmatism
Honorable Mentions:
Harrison Ford, The Age of Adaline
-For waking up for the first time since the 1990s to play the rich emotional core of a florid fantasy
Nicholas Hoult, Mad Max: Fury Road
-For pathetically and sweetly inhabiting the year’s most unexpectedly twisty and complex character arc
Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina
-For making a thuggish, self-indulgent bully seem shaded and realistic without lapsing into a plea for sympathy
BEST CAST
Brooklyn
For presenting all aspects of immigrant life, from shaken fear to bold self-reliance; for mixing fascination with the future and reverence for the past; for showcasing all the things women can be that movies don’t typically look at
1st Runner-Up:Girlhood
For portraying the tight-knit bonds of a very specific, insulated in-group with such verve and precision that it makes those characters seem totally universal and relatable
Honorable Mentions:
Inside Out
-For playing to type in such hilariously on-point ways that it makes the against-type shifts cut like a knife
Taxi
-For the bravery to put themselves on the vanguard of politically transgressive art, while having a sense of humor about it
What We Do in the Shadows
-For the best overall collection of note-perfect improv and total comfort with each other of any film comedy in years
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Timbuktu, by Abderrahmane Sissako & Kessen Tall
For examining the places where the political and personal intersect, but also where they are intractably different; for making it clear to all the rest of history just what happened in one place at one time, and why that is tremendously important
1st Runner-Up: Li’l Quinquin, by Bruno Dumont
For engaging with two tapped-out genres (police procedural; quirky townsfolk) and making them seem urgent and new and important, using warped anti-comedy to paint a vivid portrait of human behavior
Honorable Mentions:
Creed, by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
-For revising one of cinema’s most well-established myths with sharp new social awareness and insight into character behavior
Inside Out, by Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen and Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley
-For fully exploring the ramifications of a splendidly fantasic premise, and making a hilarious comedy gutwrenchingly sad
Mad Max: Fury Road, by George Miller and Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris
-For providing a classically elegant framework for all that follows, and making perfection look so easy that you don’t notice it’s there
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Carol, by Phyllis Nagy
For evoking the spirit of a very specific type of relationship at a very specific moment in history, paying homage the kinds of people who lived then, and scaling back so that we can all take part in the struggles and joys we find there
1st Runner-Up: 45 Years, by Andrew Haigh
For sketching out in heart-stopping detail what love looks like over a lifetime, how people behave when they’re trying not to behave like anything, and asking magnificently uncomfortable questions about who is in control of relationships
Honorable Mentions:
Hard to Be a God, by Aleksei German and Svetlana Karmalita
-For building a concrete sense of present out of slippery philosophical digressions
Phoenix, by Christian Petzold and Harun Farocki
-For hiding aggressive observations about guilt, gender, and identity in the guise of a torrid thriller
When Marnie Was There, by Niwa Keiko & Ando Masashi & Yonebayashi Hiromasa
-For gently peeling apart the way childhood depression feels, and how we read ourselves into relationship with others
BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FEATURE not cited under Best Feature
Taxi
For challenging the politics of a repressive regime with a sense of tense momentum, and for finding a way to make a parade of interesting, funny characters bring life to a single claustrophobic set
1st Runner-Up: Hard to Be a God
For the gorgeous imagery that brings to life a world at once miserably physical and completely abstract, and for asking enough taunting questions that three hours of nothing happening flies by
Honorable Mentions:
Girlhood
-For painting an invisible culture with sympathy but without forgiving its sins, and for piercing character studies
Of Horses and Men
-For finding the relentless comedy in stark morbidity, and gentle insight in bilious farce
Phoenix
-For the discovery that there are still new and excitingly insightful ways to engage with the Holocaust
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Boy and the World
For the singularity of vision, and the fearless combination of juvenile cartoon scribbling with sophisticated visual storytelling and world creation
Honorable Mentions:
Inside Out
-For creating a truly new world out of intuition, emotion, and imagination, and bringing it to life with exquisite technique
Shaun the Sheep Movie
-For its abiding simplicity and charm, concerned only with humane decency and not with clever flair
BEST DOCUMENTARY
The Look of Silence
For returning to the site of the director’s last film and finding new ways to examine a painfully under-explored segment of human history, this time by attending to the dignity of the survivors rather than the madness of the villains
1st Runner-Up: Democrats
For the keen observation of watching a process happen without comment, and letting us see the wretchedness of the participants play out as it will
Honorable Mentions:
3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets
-For mounting a fierce argument against the sins of modern society in a wholly artful way
In Jackson Heights
-For presenting the year’s richest pageant of human diversity
The Pearl Button
-For diving deep into history and culture, playfully challenging us to confront what those words mean
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Timbuktu (Sofiane El Fani)
For the harsh contrast of the desert and the sky, that gives way to the blending of those things into one wide swath of orange and gold; for being beautiful without aestheticising human suffering
1st Runner-Up: The Assassin (Mark Lee Ping Bin)
For capturing the sensibility of fine arts without lazily being “painterly”, and for framing human action with a fascinated objectivity
Honorable Mentions:
Carol (Ed Lachman)
-For the soft colors of the 1950s, blurring people and their spaces into one span of light and dark
Hard to Be a God (Vladimir Ilin, Yuri Klimenko)
-For the striking realistic textures of black and white; for the dreamy unreality of black and white
Mad Max: Fury Road (John Seale)
-For the bluest blue; for the yellowest yellow; for keeping ahead of the action always, so we can fully understand it
BEST EDITING
Mad Max: Fury Road (Margaret Sixel)
For combining all of the madness of a tortuous shoot into a powerfully clear, but also profoundly chaotic mix of motion, both of the camera and the objects onscreen; for making the experience of watching as breathtaking as the experience of being a character
1st Runner-Up: Sicario (Joe Walker)
For never letting up, always forcing us to confront the same endless tensions as the protagonist in the same order, until the whole thing feels like a quivering wire about to snap
Honorable Mentions:
The Assassin (Liao Ching-Sung)
-For letting the long moments stretch as much as they must, and making the flurry of the short moments feel earned
Blackhat (Mako Kamitsuna, Jeremiah O’Driscoll, Stephen E. Rivkin, Joe Walker)
-For breaking apart continuity in ways that still feel intuitively right, putting us in the moment without knowing how we got there
The Duke of Burgundy (Nic Knowland)
-For colliding moments in unexpected angles, for not showing us what we expect to see and making us linger on what we don’t
BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Crimson Peak (Thomas E. Sanders)
For devising a comically overwrought haunted house that still feels like every corner tells a singular, coherent story, and for the shocking imagery that gives the film its title
1st Runner-Up: The Assassin (Huang Wen-Ying)
For the precision and intentionality with which it restores a long-dead world to life, making it a museum piece when it should and a living place when it can
Honorable Mentions:
Fifty Shades of Grey (David Wasco)
-For capturing the sleek modernist edges that define the character’s lives and giving them more style than they maybe deserve
Hard to Be a God (Sergei Kokovin, Georgi Kropachyov, Elena Zhukova)
-For the damp, rotting, lived-in sense of space, one that always feels contiguous and real
Mad Max: Fury Road (Colin Gibson)
-For the generations of backstory that we learn just from the details of how spaces are laid out
BEST COSTUMING
Crimson Peak (Kate Hawley)
For telling an entire narrative through color and shape, embodying and parodying traditional notions of femininity, and managing to pull some amount of attention from those astonishing sets
1st Runner-Up: Carol (Sandy Powell)
For letting us know all we could possibly want to about who these characters are, and how they fit into their world, through color, line, and flexibility
Honorable Mentions:
The Assassin (Huang Wen-Ying)
-For showing how people fit themselves into a visually formalised world, or cut against it
The Age of Adaline (Angus Strathie)
-For helping to keep us grounded in the human details of a decade-spanning fantasy epic
Jupiter Ascending (Kym Barrett)
-For indulging in the mad space operatics of it all, concocting outfits that would be right at home on the cover of a pulp novel
BEST HAIR & MAKEUP
The Revenant
For letting us feel every last molecule of suffering that attends to being trapped in the frozen woods of the American West, and implying more physical human truth than anything else in the film
1st Runner-Up: Mad Max: Fury Road
For the accumulations of violence and filth; for demonstrating how people use their bodies as palettes to define their place in the world
Honorable Mentions:
The Hateful Eight
-For the bedraggled, unshowered truth of the 19th Century, and for showcasing just what all that much blood looks like
Jupiter Ascending
-For committing to the idea of Channing Tatum as a dog-man, and making him the most convincing dog-man possible
Predestination
-For perfectly disguising its main character at multiple stages in life, but also guessing at how people inhabit different periods of an alternate world
BEST SCORE
It Follows (Disasterpeace)
For its brilliant aping of John Carpenter’s iconic run of scores that finds its own voice and purpose, providing a nervous, threateninhttps://www.alternateending.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=feed-them-settings-pageg drone that deepens the adolescent horror of the year’s most intellectually scary film
1st Runner-Up: Boy and the World (Ruben Feffer & Gustavo Kurlat)
For a polyglot of international influences that neatly mirror the story’s critical take on globalism, while joyfully underscoring the child’s perspective underneath it all
Honorable Mentions:
The Good Dinosaur (Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna)
-For being the year’s most tender, tearjerking score, adding a layer of melancholy that slices against the toyetic animation
Love & Mercy (Atticus Ross)
-For revising and remixing Beach Boys classics into a haunting montage that sounds like the inside of Brian Wilson’s nightmares
Mad Max: Fury Road (Junkie XL)
-For the unrelenting rush of constant movement, loud and angry and violent, and for giving the Doof Warrior his voice
BEST SOUND MIXING
Sicario
For the constant sense of danger, far enough away that it’s not an immediate concern, close enough that you can’t trust it; for creating three-dimensional space that surrounds us with immensity and gravity
1st Runner-Up: Love & Mercy
For capturing, in sometimes silly extremes, what it must be like to only think of the world in terms of music and the way noise can create art
Honorable Mentions:
The Duke of Burgundy
-For the way that we’re always keenly aware of what’s going on behind and beside us
Mad Max: Fury Road
-For placing us in the middle of screaming metal death, but also knowing when to keep our distance
The Revenant
-For the forest all around and above us, full of life that we can perceive but not access
BEST SOUND EDITING
Mad Max: Fury Road
For roaring cars, orchestrated explosions, earth-shaking sandstorms; for creating an assemblage of assaultive violence that also fleshes out the world and tells us what to feel about it
1st Runner-Up: Ex Machina
For building an entire character out of the tiny whirs of unseen robotic parts, and an entire space out of the unusual noises behind walls and above perception
Honorable Mentions:
The Assassin
-For the violent interruptions of stillness by sounds much too sharp and present to be comfortable
The Duke of Burgundy
-For the hollowed-out dusty interiors, and the excellence of the one freaked-out rejection of same
Hard to Be a God
-For the heightened artifice of a place that seems realer-than-real, where every noise is there because it means something
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Mad Max: Fury Road
For mixing practical work with CGI with a keen sense of what each of those technologies are best at, not what is easiest or most efficient, and as a result showcasing the most physically aggressive car chases in screen history
1st Runner-Up: Jupiter Ascending
For wasting a gigantic sum of Warner Bros. money in the noblest way, making sure that we see all of it onscreen in some of the most photorealistic batshit crazy CGI ever
Honorable Mentions:
Ex Machina
-For recognizing the value of subtlety and the importance of using tiny details to create a persuasive world
Pixels
-For being soft, neon, nostalgic beauty in the midst of one of the year’s most nauseating misfires
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
-For paying tribute to the groundbreaking works of its predecessors while also expanding its ambitions as far as modern tech can take them
The Altie Awards for Filmmaking Excellence
2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016
Their predecessor, the Antagonist Awards for Excellence in Filmmaking
2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008