BEST MOVIES: Cary Darling’s top movies of 2015

The year 2015 will go down as one of the best in recent memory for films.

And that’s not just because the national box-office is up 4 percent over 2014 with a chance that the figures might exceed $11 billion for the first time in the movie industry’s history. Star Wars: The Force Awakens alone might generate as much as $400 million by the end of the year.

It’s also been a strong year for cinematic quality. Even many of the sequels were worth watching, a sentiment that would usually fall into the realm of fantasy.

There are so many strong films, in fact, that it’s tough to narrow my list to just 10. In any other year, some of the also-rans would have been definite contenders.

But those that did make the cut are especially noteworthy, representing a singular sense of vision, talent and a flair for storytelling.

1 Spotlight

The child sex-abuse scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church in the early 2000s began with a crusading investigation by reporters and editors at The Boston Globe.

This totally engrossing procedural with an ensemble cast that includes Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Liev Schreiber is a fascinating shout-out to the glory days of ’70s cinema and such films as All the President’s Men.

Not only are the performances all first-rate but director Tom McCarthy manages to make journalistic shoe-leather engaging and inspiring. (Original review).

2 Ex Machina

So much cinematic science-fiction these days revolves around special effects and superheroes that it’s easy to forget that the genre can also convey ideas. That is the beauty of the chilling, haunting and thought-provoking Ex Machina, “a chamber piece” for three actors as co-star Oscar Isaac described it.

Set in a near-future compound where a tech pioneer (Isaac), a young programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) and a female robot (the ubiquitous Alicia Vikander) wrestle with issues of intelligence, consciousness, morality, sexuality, power and control, it’s at once smart and suspenseful.

Just as Spotlight recalls some of the best films of the ’70s, Ex Machina — the feature debut from director Alex Garland — echoes some of the best science fiction from generations ago including the works of writers Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison and the best episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. (Original review)

3 Sicario

There have been so many movies and TV series about cartels, drugs, and the violence of life along the border that it’s almost become cliché. Yet few are as gripping as Sicario, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s powerful exploration of the gray area between good and evil, right and wrong.

Emily Blunt is FBI agent Kate Macer, who finds herself part of an off-the-books mission with shady agent (Josh Brolin) and a strange accomplice (Benicio del Toro) to take out a Mexican drug lord. As Kate sinks deeper into moral quicksand, she finds a world that is a lot less certain than what she had thought and that there may be no good guys after all.

(For anyone who likes Sicario, the 2015 documentary Cartel Land, a trip into the world of real-life cartels and those who fight them, is a must as well.) (Original review)

4 The Revenant

Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu won Oscar glory for his 2014 film Birdman but his follow-up couldn’t be more different.

Whereas that film was contemporary, talky and takes place almost entirely inside a theater, the explosively violent The Revenant is set mostly under the wild, wide skies of the American West of the 1800s and there are long stretches without words. But this story of a wounded tracker (Leonardo DiCaprio) seeking revenge on those who left him to die is what might happen if legendary directors John Ford (The Searchers, Rio Grande) and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, the original Straw Dogs) collaborated.

Tom Hardy, as DiCaprio’s nemesis, matches the actor in ruthless intensity. Contrasting beauty with brutality, The Revenant is unforgettable. (It opens in North Texas on Jan. 8).

5 Love & Mercy

Beach Boy Brian Wilson is the focus of producer-turned-director Bill Pohlad’s often moving biopic that not only paints a picture of a troubled life but of a long-gone pop-music era.

Splitting Wilson’s role between Paul Dano (terrific as the younger Wilson) and John Cusack (the older Wilson) is a stroke of creative genius while all of the supporting cast — Paul Giamatti as the controlling Dr. Eugene Landy, Jake Abel as bandmate Mike Love, Elizabeth Banks as Brian’s love interest, Melinda Ledbetter — is fantastic.

Wilson’s chaotic relationships with others fuels much of the conflict, but it’s his relationship with music — and its creation — that gives the movie its soul. (Original review)

6 Mad Max: Fury Road

It had been 30 years since moviegoers had visited George Miller’s futuristic dystopia set in the sun-scorched Australian Outback. But the director’s vision of a world collapsed into ruin over gasoline proved as vital as ever in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth film in the franchise.

With only the skeletal outline of a story, it’s nevertheless a wild, surreal, operatic ride across what’s left of civilization with Charlize Theron’s Furiosa giving Tom Hardy’s stoic Max a run for his heroic money.

Love it or hate it, there’s no movie that looks or moves like Fury Road. (Original review)

7 About Elly

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi won the foreign-language-film Oscar for his 2011 movie A Separation and this 2009 project, just released in the U.S. this year, is similar in terms of its quiet, unsettling power.

When a group of middle-class Tehran couples and some of their children head out of town for a what is supposed to be a relaxing weekend, things take a dark turn when one of them goes missing.

Farhadi’s portait of these characters’ relationships set against the backdrop of a conservative Islamic society is illuminating and electrifying. (Original review)

8 Carol

Cate Blanchett is bracingly memorable in the title role of this film that’s based on a novel by Fort Worth-born Patricia Highsmith.

Set in 1950s New York City, Carol — about a married woman who falls head over heels for another woman (Rooney Mara) — is a story of love smothered and punished by society at large.

Not only is it impeccably acted but director Todd Haynes, who has traveled this thematic territory before with the 2002 film Far From Heaven, conjures up a gorgeous sense of time and place.

9 Straight Outta Compton

The life story of one of hip-hop’s most influential and controversial groups, N.W.A., makes for a fascinating film about the incendiary racial climate of L.A. in the late ’80s/early ’90s as well as climbing the ladder of success in the music business.

Not only are O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube’s son), Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell remarkable as the main members of the band, but Straight Outta Compton also is an irresistible musical time capsule. Director F. Gary Gray does a wily job of bringing the story’s various strands together. (Original review)

10 The Big Short

The inner workings of the American financial system have provided the basis for several strong films in recent years — from Margin Call in 2011 to The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013 and 99 Homes earlier this year — but The Big Short is one of the best.

An ensemble drama starring Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt as a group of financial renegades who predicted the crash of 2007-2008 and the Great Recession, it’s at once dispiriting and alarming about the state of the economy.

Yet director Adam McKay leavens what could be a finger-wagging lecture on “the dismal science” with humor and an unpredictable, break-the-fourth-wall storytelling style. (Original review)

Beyond the ten

There are certainly many other worthy films this year. Here are a few more of my favorites:

▪ The Martian blends humor, science and Matt Damon into something indelible.

▪ Creed, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and even Furious 7 — along with Mad Max: Fury Road — show that sequels don’t have to be just hasty afterthoughts.

▪ Director Spike Lee returns to form with his wildly provocative Chi-Raq.

▪ Room, the story of a woman and her young son locked in a room for several years, features two of the year’s best performances from Brie Larson and especially Jacob Tremblay.

▪ Inside Out stands out in the world of animated films.

▪ Jack O’Connell is masterful as a British soldier on the run behind enemy lines in a Catholic part of Northern Ireland in the nail-biting ’71, a film that reminds us that sectarian religious violence and hatred is not ancient history in Europe.

▪ The beautiful Timbuktu, about a town in Mali taken over by jihadists, is moving and remarkably timely.

▪ The Ukrainian The Tribe, concerning a group of thugs at a school for the deaf and told entirely in sign language with no subtitles, stands out as perhaps the year’s most disturbing film.

That’s not even mentioning the smart horror of It Follows; the refreshingly uncynical romance of Brooklyn; the canines-are-taking-over dread of White God; the intense drama of Beasts of No Nation with Idris Elba as a vicious African commandant; the charm of Paolo Sorrentino’s exquisitely shot Youth, starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as aging friends; the ensemble electricity of The Stanford Prison Experiment; and the low-budget thrills of the suspenseful contemporary noir of The Gift and The Suicide Theory.

Let’s hope that 2016 is anywhere near as good.

This story was originally published December 22, 2015 at 1:17 AM with the headline "BEST MOVIES: Cary Darling’s top movies of 2015."