The Top Ten Movies of 2015
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- As we lay 2015 to rest, how about a glance back at the year's best of the best?
10. Mr. Holmes
Ah, Holmes sweet Holmes. The magnificent Ian McKellen tries on the iconic role of master sleuth and fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes from his sixties to his nineties and it fits beautifully. He's frail and contemplating his mortality. but he can still deduce with the best of them. Director Bill Condon takes the quiet, deliberate approach as he adroitly juggles time periods and storylines, three each, weaving them into an elegant narrative mosaic and a touching and original character study. Once again, the game is afoot and McKellen deserves a hand.
9. Steve Jobs
Another Jobs well done as tech guru Steve Jobs, played by the spellbinding and ferociously intense Michael Fassbender in the unprecedented third movie about the Apple co-founder in just two years, is the focus of a docudrama engrossingly scripted by Aaron Sorkin and commandingly directed by Danny Boyle that concentrates on the idolized and despised Jobs' contradictions and complexities in three acts that unfold in real time. Strong supporting work from Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, and Seth Rogen helps to feed our fascination and bring this "impressionistic portrait" to full dramatic life.
Call this one Ishmael and call us impressed. Director Ron Howard's seagoing epic is based on a true story about a nineteenth-century shipwreck that inspired Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby-Dick. Chris Hemsworth stars as the whaler in search of precious whale oil who leads the ill-fated crew of the Essex in Nantucket, Massachusetts as the beleaguered crew tries to battle an enormous, vengeful beast and then survive the elements without sacrificing their common humanity. This seaworthy seafaring saga, a cautionary tale about human nature, is an arresting mix of drama and spectacle.
7. 99 Homes
Sporting a title that suggests the 99 percent/1 percent divide, this intense, painfully resonant drama uses the 2010 housing collapse in Florida, two years after the global economic crisis, as a timely narrative springboard. Andrew Garfield stars as an unemployed construction worker who loses his childhood home and ends up signing a Faustian bargain by working for a ruthless, predatory real estate broker played by the brilliant Michael Shannon, who is making a killing on the backs of the less fortunate. Director Ramin Bahrani has fashioned a morality tale about coldhearted profiteering that saddens and enrages.
6. Brooklyn
Saoirse Ronan gives a marvelously expressive performance as a young woman, an Irish immigrant looking for a better life and navigating a romantic triangle. A twentysomething, she's torn between two men, one in her native Ireland and one in her new home in the titular New York borough. Director John Crowley knows what a valuable asset he has in Ronan's countenance, but he also delivers a richly detailed double sense of place and time – the early 1950s. Emory Cohen and Dombhall Gleeson are the men competing for her affection and the three of them make you care about the outcome of this handsome, nuanced period piece.
5. Inside Out
Boasting one of the most ambitious concepts in the history of animation, this psychologically and philosophically sophisticated feature is also a witty and poignant adventure involving the voices representing the five primary emotions in the mind of an eleven-year-old girl during the onset of adolescence. Writer-director Pete Docter plays not only to youngsters – although some of them may feel disenfranchised – as well as to grownups with memories of childhood. As intricate and esoteric and original and abstract as that sounds, it still flows and registers with a level of inventiveness that's off the charts.
4. Room
To describe this drama as unusual is to understate the case to a bizarre degree. The wonderful Brie Larson stars as a mother who has been abducted, impregnated, and forced to raise her now-five-year-old son, played by the remarkable if not miraculous Jacob Tremblay, in a single room – a 10-by-10 shed. The less you know going in the better. Suffice to say that director Lenny Abrahamson has gotten two astounding performances from his principals, that
the metaphor he creates out of the life she supervises and prepares her son for is an unforgettable accomplishment, and that this one will stay with you for a long time. That the film approaches something uplifting is absolutely astonishing, but it does.
3. Carol
Director Todd Haynes' sensitive, measured adaptation of the groundbreaking 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, is an absorbing lesbian romance and an elegantly accomplished period piece with an exemplary sense of time and place. Cate Blanchett as a well-heeled, married customer who falls for a Manhattan department store salesgirl played by the younger Rooney Mara. Blanchett is expectedly fine, but Mara is the revelation here: her indelible Audrey Hepburn-ish presence ought to be the breakthrough to stardom she's been looking for.
2. Spotlight
A superbly understated journalism drama, as we sit around and contemplate what seems like the death of investigative print journalism, one that can't help but put us in mind of All the President's Men. This gripping procedural docudrama shines the spotlight on the quiet heroism of Spotlight, the Boston Globe team that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service by uncovering the massive child-molestation scandal and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese. Director Tom McCarthy avoids sensationalism while employing a true ensemble as a workaday ensemble of reporters in his slow-build approach to a story that needed to be told.
1. The Martian
Literally and figuratively out of this world, the year's most fully realized film comes from director Ridley Scott and star Matt Damon, the former delivering a sci-fi drama that is visually crafty and commanding, the latter essaying an everyman NASA astronaut well worth rooting for as he struggles to survive on the Red Planet after being inadvertently left behind. Richly suspenseful and simultaneously generously funny, this is an exhilarating and immersive cinematic experience that celebrates intelligence, resourcefulness, expertise, and creative problem solving. It's science fiction that plays like science fact.
Now bring on 2016...
