Top 10 of 2015

So many great films this year. It seems unfair to single 10 out, but here they are. If I could add a couple more I would easily add Pixar’s neuro-comedy Inside Out and moody cartel thriller Sicario. Performances I liked in moves that aren’t listed below include Idris Elba’s terrifying commander in Beasts of No Nation, Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslett’s terrific roles in Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s imp in Hateful Eight, and Michael Shannon’s savagery in 99 Homes.

This is also my last year with the Phoenix Critics Circle. I won’t be attending screenings anymore, so my membership there will come to an end today, the last day of 2015. It was pleasure being with the group during its first two years. My reviews will taper off slightly, but I plan to continue writing here so stay tuned.

10. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Not only did J.J. Abrams right the ship that is Star Wars, he found himself on par with the original trilogy thanks to careful writing, exceptional special effects and new, interesting layers to the Star Wars mythology. I never knew I needed a Finn, Rey, Poe Dameron or Kylo Ren in place of Han, Luke and Leia — who return anyway — but here they after one movie and I can’t imagine the franchise without them anymore. Yes, there was a lot of hype on this one, but meeting the hype and even surpassing it at this level is really a rare feat. This isn’t my top movie, but it was the most exhilarating experience I had in a movie theater this year. 

9. Slow West

John Maclean’s wacky western Slow West has imagery that is borderline surreal, but it’s deadly serious with bounty hunters, conniving killers and eccentric pioneers. About a Scottish teen (Kody Smit-McPhee) sent scurrying into the American wilderness to chase after his love, Slow West drops this stranger-in-a-strange-land into a variety of western scenes, from flooded riverbanks to burning Native American villages to deadly shootouts on the prairies. Michael Fassbender as bounty hunter is a nice touch, as is Ben Mendelsohn as his counterpart. Mostly, though, the film is a wonderful visual feast, one filled with imagery we’ve yet seen in a 115-year-old genre.

8. The Revenant

This movie should come with a blanket, one skinned from the carcass of a great beast of the American frontier. It takes place in blizzard conditions, in icy forest landscapes, barren tundras of snow and in frigid rivers. Theaters are missing out on a unique theater experience by kicking on their air conditioning and watching teeth rattle. In the early 1800s, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Native American son are leading a group of trappers through hostile country. After a murder, a double-cross, a bear attack and a shallow grave, Hugh Glass claws from the soil with only an ounce of life still in him. As he crawls, hobbles and swims to safety he has his sights set on John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), a trapper with a colorful dialect who left Hugh for dead. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s survival film is a long slog out of hell for Glass, and his journey contains an incredible cross section of early-American life with warring Native American tribes, French and American trappers, settlers, explorers and adventurers. It was a violent time, and nowhere is it better captured than in the violent and epic The Revenant. 

7. Carol

Todd Haynes’ Carol is beautiful love story, made ugly by the era that it takes place in. In 1952, Carol (Cate Blanchett) is quite obviously a lesbian, a fact that humiliates her husband. While buying a toy for her child at a department store, Carol is smitten by Therese (said like ‘terr-rez,’ and played by Rooney Mara), who is enchanted by Carol’s deliberate demeanor and sure footing. She’s glamorous, like a movie star. What follows is a series of lunches, dates and a road trip that will expose Therese to Carol’s adoration. It’s a lovely courtship, one that is interrupted by the bigotry of the time period. As Carol disappears to court-ordered therapy to cure her “unsuitable attractions,” the film focuses on Therese, a budding photographer who is so unfamiliar with her attraction to Carol that she questions everything she once knew. This is a lovely movie with two radiant stars.

6. Room

Featuring two of the most inspiring performances of the year, Room is ripped from the headlines in the most compassionate way possible. It begins with a teenage girl (Brie Larson) who is kidnapped and held in seclusion in her rapist’s backyard shed that has been converted into her soundproof prison. Room picks up six years into her ordeal, and she now has 5-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), whose entire world in contained in the four walls, floor and ceiling of the cell, which he refers to as “room” the way we refer to the planet as Earth. Although the product of a rape, and confined to one room for his whole life, Jack has been taught about the wonder of the world by his mother, whose innocence was stolen so long ago. What could be a grim drama, and it certainly has those moments, Room is largely about the good that a mother can inspire in her child and the love that brings them together to conquer their prison. 

5. Spotlight

In 2001, the Boston Globe’s investigative team turned its unblinking eye, or spotlight, on the Roman Catholic Church and its handling of child abuse by priests. Viewers expecting to see a bang-bang investigation with news van chases, mysterious tipsters in parking garages and “stop the presses” revelations were likely caught very off guard to find the exact kind of methodical, slow-moving investigative reporting that actually transpired at the Globe. The film coils together from a variety of different threads, all of which are researched, fact checked, confirmed and analyzed, because that’s how journalism actually happens. It’s this adherence to authenticity that makes Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight so mesmerizing. How do you make a gripping drama out of court records, grand jury testimony, phone conversations and old archdiocese yearbooks? Spotlight has found a way. The movie’s stars — including Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams — hold it all together with thorough and convincing portrayals that move this delicate subject matter forward. 

4. The Martian

Ridley Scott’s fantastic space flick The Martian is a story about small victories and small defeats, and how they add up to tell a story about science. We tend to forget that science got us up there in the cosmos, and science will bring us down, so to see science and engineering given such a starring role is a powerful reminder of what, and who, NASA is. When Matt Damon’s botanist is marooned on Mars, he does what any astronaut would do: “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.” What follows is a thrill-ride involving radiation, poopy soil, ASCII translation, solar panels and hydrogen-burning water factories. Scott is no stranger to space having made Alien and Prometheus — not to mention Blade Runner — but The Martian is a wholly unique endeavor for Scott and his gifted eye. It’s hopeful and upbeat, and even though millions of miles separate the astronaut from earth’s victorious embrace this film has a sense of humor that never falters.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road

Fury Road didn’t just reboot the Mad Max franchise — it rebooted the action movie. Without a cape, Marvel logo or hovercopter in sight George Miller single-handedly brought an entirely new level to the spectacle that has become action extravaganzas. With practical effects, bonkers interpretations of the post-apocalypse, a badass female hero, wild character and car creations, and a bona fide car religion to boot (“I am awaited in Valhalla!”), Mad Max: Fury Road took bigger movies with younger directors and showed them the door. If there was a ever a movie that deserved the adjective “high octane,” then here it is. 

2. Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s smoldering burn of science fiction could easily be the spiritual sequel to Spike Jonze’s Her, in which an arty schlub falls in love with his AI personal assistant, manifested as a lovely voice that whispers to him from his electronic devices. Here, though, technology has advanced to include skin, movement and a perk only a male designer would consider, sexual organs. Oscar Isaac is a billionaire inventor who invites one of his employees, played by Domhnall Gleeson, to his isolated compound, where they bro out with weights, tech and beer. Isaac plays a man wound so tight that every scene with him feels threatening and on the verge of a violent outburst. The employee musters along as best he can as he’s introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), an AI creation that is the most human part of the film. Between the three explosive lead performances, and the effectively claustrophobic sets, Ex Machina churns out one of the most subdued robot movies ever made, one that ends on a perfect note that is equally haunting and existentially enlightening. 

1. The Big Short

It’s remarkable that Americans lost their jobs, kicked out of their homes, were uprooted from their lives and scattered to the wind and many still don’t know what caused the recession, and why. The Big Short is the blueprint for the whole damn thing: the housing bubble, the sub-prime mortgage calamity, the collapse of Wall Street, the imploding bond market … all of it, every ugly derivative and security swap from day traders right on up to CEOs. The fact that Adam McKay’s movie, based on Michael Lewis’s book, is both informative and devilishly funny is the film’s saving grace. It’s also supremely well acted, it routinely breaks the fourth wall to address us directly, is edited with style and purpose, and paced so viewers can laugh and learn at the same time. There’s a lot going on here, but The Big Short succeeds in holding it all together with a vengeance.

This is the song of angry (rich) men

In 2007 I lived in a suburb of Phoenix, way out in the far West Valley where homes sprung up like weeds in the desert sand. Mortgage brokers couldn’t give homes away. Bad job? Poor credit? No savings? Here’s a house. It was harder to stand on a busy street corner and give out $10 bills. And then one day it all ended. 

The newspaper I was with at the time covered those terrible years, back when people used air quotes around the word “recession” and then when they dropped the air quotes entirely as they drove off in a moving van, their belongings hanging out the back like the Beverly Hillbillies. The sub-prime mortgages, the interest-only loans, the house flippers who extended themselves one house too many. It was like a huge game of musical chairs, but instead of 100 people and 99 chairs, it was 100 people and one chair — lots of people had nothing when the music stopped.

The Big Short is the story of how and why the recession happened. How American banks were dragged to their knees by hubris, and why they sold the American people down the river to save their own skins. It’s a powerful indictment of greed, capitalism, and the “American way,” which in this context is golden parachutes, profit and satisfying shareholders. If this film doesn’t make you frothing mad, then you’re still not paying attention.

The movie, directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman) and based on a book by Michael Lewis, begins with Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an eccentric trader who stares at market prices the way Rain Man counts toothpicks. From amid vast spreadsheets of information he notices a pattern in how mortgage defaults are creeping upward. Never one to miss an opportunity, he bets against the house market — he shorts it — something that is never done, because the housing market is a constant, it’s like betting against gravity. When he shows up at all the investment banks to place these bets, they almost feel sorry taking his money.

It’s abundantly clear very early that McKay is going to work with all the market jargon and banking terms, and do so with reckless abandon. So he enlists help, including Margot Robbie, playing herself naked in a bathtub with bubbles up to her chin. She lifts a champagne flute and promises to teach us about collateralized debt obligation, credit default swaps and “shorting” the market. It’s sexy and effective, and I promise it actually teaches you about CDOs and the other dirty bombs that sunk the housing market. In other sequences characters address the camera directly and explain to the audience what’s happening and why it’s important. Anthony Bourdain teaches us about junk bonds and how they’re rated while filleting fish, and Selena Gomez explains betting against the market at a Vegas blackjack table. It’s the best economics class you’ll ever take. 

Meanwhile, we also drop in on money manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell), hedge fund manager Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) and on two young up-and-coming analysts who want a seat at the big boy table. All of these characters eventually find what Burry finds, what is essentially a doomsday machine built into the housing market. And one by one, they all start to plot how to make money on what they know. 

Now, I don’t know if these men (and their composites) are villains in this story, but The Big Short portrays them as innocent financial geeks who discover the terrible secret of the economy and do what they can to profit off it. They don’t keep it a secret, in fact several of them had shared their bets with other bankers, who promptly laughed at them for their faulty investments. Carell’s character is especially convincing as he wanders back and forth between the people who rate bonds, Goldman Sachs (never forget the Rolling Stone line about the company: “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”) and the mortgage brokers on the ground in places like Florida, Arizona and Nevada. One government oversight worker is so negligent to what’s happening under her nose, she is quite literally blind. As the chips stack up against the housing market, these men watch in horror as their bank accounts grow off the failure of the American economy, and although they are rich, their souls will never recover. If that makes you mad, then what happens to the banks will send you ballistic.

McKay dissects the collapse with the precision of a surgeon, but the wit of a comedian. The movie is funny, often hilarious, especially as character narrate their own stories or address the camera to wink and smile and tell us “this sounds crazy, but this actually happened.” One of those instances comes when the Bear Stearns CEO sits in front of analysts telling them the company’s stock is rebounding, even as members of the audience are watching it freefall. The best parts are the characters and how they balance each other out: Bale is the anti-social genius, Carell is the moral overseer one step behind the market, and Gosling is the crude stock-bro playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship with the American economy. They couldn't be any more different, except they all have a keen sense for money and its hidden value in places only bankers have access.

This is a movie we need right now. The recession is over. The Fed is hiking the interest rate back up. Jobs are returning. Wages are stagnant, but all signs are pointing to eventual increases. And just few a years out, it’s already forgotten. Banks are still pushing their way around with no consequences, and they have still not been held responsible for the swindling of the American economy. The Big Short holds their feet to the fire, and it arms the public with their best weapon — information.

Tarantino at his most indulgent in Hateful 8

You’ve never seen a western like Hateful Eight, which is neither praise nor pan. 

Before we begin there, though, take yourself back to Inglourious Basterds. It had Hitler, Churchill, Nazis, the French resistance, a vile Jew-hunting SS officer, wise-talking GIs, machine guns, bombs, interrogations … everything one could hope for in a World War II movie. Pulp Fiction, a crime movie, had robberies, murders, drug deals, drug overdoses, fixed boxing fights, kidnapping, torture. Kill Bill, a revenge thriller in two parts, had kung-fu, animation, gunfights, swordfights, assassinations. I bring all this up because director Quentin Tarantino really packs everything he can into his movies, and he also boils his genres down to their most basic parts and then he exemplifies those parts with his subversive brand of glee.

Hateful Eight, though, is a western with few of the characteristics that define a western, least of all the adventurous spirit of the West. No saloon brawls, no high-noon shootouts, no horse chases or cattle rustlers, and not even a train heist or bank robbery. None of this is really out of the ordinary for Tarantino, who seems to thrive on taking what we expect and giving us something completely different. But Hateful Eight is not only a letdown as a western, it’s a tremendously indulgent film for the brash director, who likely didn’t hear the word “no” very often when he was pitching it as a three-hour, single-location stage play with overture and intermission and enough mindless dialogue to undo all the goodwill he’s earned from a career of mindless dialogue. 

The film opens on a stagecoach as it travels through a blizzard in Colorado. Inside the cabin are bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), John’s latest bounty that he intends to take to a town called Red Rock where she will hang for her crimes. Slowly, amid the snow and wind, the stagecoach begins assembling the cast: there’s the feisty stagecoach driver (James Parks), a former union officer Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and soon-to-be sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Early scenes take place in the stagecoach as three of the men and Domergue talk about bounties, bushwhackers and a letter from President Abraham Lincoln. This tedious dialogue is neither boring nor interesting, but it fills the cabin of the stagecoach for north of 20 minutes. And the landscapes are glorious, with scenic views of snow-capped peaks and of the tiny stagecoach framed against nature’s grandeur. This is why Tarantino filmed in 70mm, and it’s beautiful —a beauty that fades away as the film moves indoors permanently.

With a blizzard bearing down, the stagecoach stops at Minnie’s Haberdashery, where the film will spend the rest of its running time, and where our travelers take refuge inside with Mexican Bob (Demián Bichir), a proper English gentleman (Tim Roth), a weary cow-puncher (Michael Madsen), and Confederate general (Bruce Dern). What happens next would best be described by saying “the plot of Clue.” Men are killed, some coffee is poisoned, and Daisy Domergue cackles with delight as John Ruth questions who is and isn’t who they say they are.

Hateful Eight wasted so much of my time, that I will not to do the same here: the movie is simply far too long. A skilled editor could have his or her way with this and come out 45 minutes lighter, and the movie would gallop like cowboy’s quarter horse. Here, though, it’s so bloated and top-heavy it can never build momentum. Dialogue just keeps rolling out of everyone’s mouth, and so little of it is noteworthy or memorable that it all blends into a monotonous dribble of cowboy talk and frontier banter. Jackson has a great monologue about torturing a confederate soldier — he repeatedly says the word “dingus” which gets some decent laughs during a darker chapter about Union revenge — but these scenes are few and far between. 

With so much dialogue, you’d think the characters would have more — you know — character, but they never elevate out of Tarantino’s muck of words. Russell’s bounty hunter has an interesting look and particularly evocative dialect of country words, but he seems lost amid the exposition and mood that are telegraphed within pages of dialogue. Jackson and Goggins do what they can, even as the film ratchets tension around their plight that can only end one way. As characters trade conversations inside the store, amid the shaking of the blizzard and a broken door that needs to be hammered shut, none of it really leads anywhere. By the time the intermission starts, the film is nearly at the two-hour mark and you slowly start to realize that a better movie would have you walking to your car at this point. But Hateful Eight toils onward.

Post-intermission scenes do greatly improve, largely because key sequences from earlier are revisited in Tarantino’s out-of-order style of chapter organization. And while the first two-thirds are largely bloodless, the last third pours the guts, blood and mayhem on thick as all parties turn on one another. Snickering through much of it is Daisy Domergue, who might be the sole salvation in this twisted whodunit. Leigh seems delighted to play the demented little demoness. Russell has some great lines, and his thick porkchop sideburns do justice to his unapologetic ruggedness. Jackson is Jackson, which is way of saying he’s excellent, but I found the 75-plus uses of the N word thrown at his character excessive and entirely unnecessary — Tarantino believes we should take the power from the word, which is admirable but altogether impossible in this context.

I admire Tarantino’s vision, but Hateful Eight simply doesn’t work. Slap any other name on this film and every cowpoke on the range will tell you it’s too long, too wordy and too meandering. But Tarantino’s name is on it, so it’s brilliant — I’m sorry, but no thanks. He’s showing off here, and for once in his career, it’s not really working like it once did.

A space saga reawakened

It’s strange how a song, some yellow text and a movie logo just makes everything seem alright in the galaxy. It just feels like home, a warm hearth to lean against in the cold void of space. 

J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, is not the end-all/be-all, the alpha and omega, of cinema history the way the fanboys have been saying. But it is an utterly magnificent retooling of George Lucas’ floundering mega-saga. When Lucas turned his nuts-and-bolts space opera into a toothless CGI-painted joke, the franchise marched toward its own doom, one Hayden Christensen line after another. But Abrams has imbued the first chapter of a new trilogy with a newfound sense of wonder with a convincing cast, a snappy and electric story, and minimal CGI. It’s a coup for the franchise, a drastic course correction, a clean slate, a Mulligan in hyperspace. It’s also a action-packed thrill ride, one of the purest joys of the year.

The tone is set in the first seconds, in the first line of the famous scroll during John Williams’ iconic score: “Luke Skywalker has disappeared,” it says. The resistance, the side of our heroes, wants Luke to guide them forward. The First Order, the villains, wants to kill him and destroy the last links to The Force, a spiritual power that would likely die with Luke. The resistance has a map that leads to Luke’s last location, but the First Order, the last remnants of the Galactic Empire, attempts to capture it, thus starting the conflict of the current film.

Our players here are Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a resistance fighter and ace pilot; Finn (John Boyega), a stormtrooper with an awakened conscience; Rey (Daisey Ridley), a metal scavenger with a connection to The Force; and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a practitioner of the Dark Side who has started a one-person death cult that worships the defeated Darth Vader. These characters frequently cross paths in Lawrence Kasden, Michael Arndt and Abrams’ mostly competent, at times clunky, script that includes a crash course on Star Wars lore, complete with shout-outs to holographic chess, 12-parsec space runs and lightsaber genealogy. The film goes to great lengths to establish meta and spiritual connections to the original franchise, and its does so with complete care.

Early sequences revolve mostly around BB-8, a ball-shaped droid that is carrying the secret map to Skywalker’s location. The famous R2-D2 shows up later, but BB, with his cute hiccups and bloops, cements his place in the Star Wars canon long before then. Other franchise staples show up, including Princess Leia, now General Leia (Carrie Fisher); the still-dashing space smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford); Han’s walking carpet sidekick Chewbacca; and gold-plated C-3PO, human cyborg relations. Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon makes a triumphant return in a scene of pure exhilaration as Rey, Finn and BB-8 outrun TIE fighters in a desert wasteland filled with the relics of war from the original trilogy. 

Abrams’ world is populated by a huge variety of alien creatures, from snorting elephant-pigs and googly-eyed club owners to noodly space pirates and tin-headed bounty hunters. Many of the characters are made from physical special effects, silicone and moldable foam, and not computer animation. Even the sets are real, which was a big gripe about Lucas’ last movies: they were clinical and lifeless, projections designed, executed and presented from within a matrix of computer programs. Here, though, the world feels real and livable, and it’s populated by characters with souls. 

I hate to beat up on Lucas, but Force Awakens improves on every aspect of the prequel trilogy: from the special effects and sets to the acting and dialogue. Those films lost their way very early on, but this one steps forward with sure footing and a nostalgia for the original films. Abrams’ story could use some tweaking, particularly in some areas involving yet another Death Star, the dramatic reappearance of a “sleeping” character, and the state of the galaxy, which is never really explained how or why the First Order maintains so much power in a post-Return of the Jedi universe.

But these minor annoyances are made up for with great characters, lots of them, and all of them wonderfully constructed by the actors who play them. Boyega and Ridley are charmingly well equipped for this franchise, and bring to it a sense of adventure and heroism. And Driver’s Kylo Ren is a terrifying misfit who wields incredible power. He frequently hides behind a Vader-ish mask that gives him a Bane-like chamber for his voice to bounce around in with an eerie bass-rattle. Ford, playing the Star Wars veteran in more ways than one, helps hold all this together with a keen sense of humor; in fact, there are many jokes here, some in very unlikely, yet warranted, places. 

The best part of this new chapter is how it contributes to the myth of the Star Wars universe, The Force, and characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, and Luke Skywalker. “It’s true, all of it … the force, the Jedi … all of it is true,” Han Solo tells our reluctant heroes who only know of the events from episodes four through six as bedtime stories and forgotten lore that has been passed down two and three generations. The Force Awakens not only brings Star Wars back for the characters, but for the audience as well. And never before has this franchise felt so alive.

Phoenix Critics Circle Awards

The Phoenix Critics Circle has announced its annual film awards for 2015. Big winners include Spotlight, The Big Short, Ex Machina and, remarkably, Sylvester Stallone as the aged boxer Rocky Balboa. 

I've been a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle since it was founded in 2014. The group is made up of professional critics across a variety of media including print, radio and web. Here are the complete list of winners:

Best Picture

Spotlight

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Best Comedy Film

The Big Short

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Best Science Fiction Film

Ex Machina

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Best Mystery or Thriller Film

Sicario

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Best Animated Film

Inside Out

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Best International Film

Youth

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Best Documentary

Amy

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Best Horror Film

It Follows

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Best Musical or Musical Film

Straight Outta Compton

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Best Actor

Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs

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Best Actress

Brie Larson, Room

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Best Supporting Actor

Sylvester Stallone, Creed

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Best Supporting Actress

Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina

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Best Director

George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road

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Best Screenplay

Tom McCarthy, Josh Singer, Spotlight

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Best Score

Tom Holkenborg, aka Junkie XL, Mad Max: Fury Road