This has been one of Hollywood’s worst years in my memory, but it has been a terrific year for movies over all. The anticipated Oscarizables have mainly ranged from the blandly enjoyable to the droningly disastrous. Partly, the problem is merely one of scheduling: most of Hollywood’s inspired directors, the ones whose images have a natural musical sublimity and complexity, weren’t on call this year. My list reflects the unfortunate accident of a calendar year with no release by many of the best American directors working in or out of the Hollywood system, such as Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Miranda July, Terrence Malick, James Gray, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
There are a lot of independent films on the list. I do like them, but no more than other kinds of movies per se. There’s no aesthetic value built into a film’s provenance or budget, but as Hollywood increased its dependence on overmanaged franchise films, independent filmmaking on low and ultra-low budgets became one of the two main engines of artistic advancement in the world of movies during the past decade. The other has been the independently financed productions of Hollywood directors (including those listed above). Nonetheless, there are things that Hollywood movies can do that independents usually can’t—especially to address power at its own level, from the top. It doesn’t mean that Hollywood alone can or should make political films, but that to work in Hollywood is (to borrow to make films politically. That’s why the absence of most of Hollywood’s best artists from the year’s roster is sharply felt; it makes the industry seem not merely aesthetically stultified but irrelevant—and it’s why Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” is such a welcome return to prominence by a filmmaker whose political vision is itself an aesthetic invention (and has also been so in his grossly under-recognized films, such as “Red Hook Summer” and his remake of “Oldboy”).
I’m unhappy to note that very few of the movies on this year’s list were directed by women. It’s a reminder that there aren’t enough women making movies, at every level and branch of the art. Nonetheless, many of the best directors now working are women, though mostly outside the Hollywood system—including Agnès Varda, July, Josephine Decker, Eliza Hittman, Amy Seimetz, Julia Loktev (and, of course, Lena Dunham, whose return to feature filmmaking I eagerly await)—but they don’t have new films this year, either. Chantal Akerman, who died in October, was among the list of essential women directors, and if her last film, “No Home Movie,” had been released, it would have placed high on the list. (It’s scheduled for release in April.) All best-of lists are haunted by the stifled voices of great women filmmakers, including Elaine May, Julie Dash, and Claudia Weill. The year’s best rediscovery and restoration is Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground,” the independently produced feature that she completed in 1982; Collins died in 1988, at the age of forty-six, without seeing her film released.
Most of the season’s prestige releases, the films being ballyhooed for Oscars and already racking up awards in critics’ groups, fall into one of two categories. Some reflect the bludgeoning, dulling force of directorial will to bravura exertions that seemingly declare, with the pompous vanity of each image, that they are important, that they are artists. Others depict the scripted action with an earnest and straightforward modesty that reveals their lack of insight and inspiration—that puts onscreen not the limits and boundaries of the story but the limits of their own ideas. In both cases, what used to be inconsequential artistic failures appear as crises of cinematic form—because the prominent creations of serial TV have surpassed both kinds of movies.
It’s no longer enough to tell a story, because television does it—not better, but more, and more easily. The power of the cinema remains undiminished, but few of the directors of this year’s run of “prestige” releases make much use of it. It’s a commonplace that movies are a visual medium and that, when movies started talking, the decadence of the medium has been the inert photographing of actors reciting the script. That commonplace is wrong. The greatness of images isn’t in the coherence of their narrative logic, or the nuance of their dramatic implications, but in their excess—not in what they mean but in what they are.
No amount of willfully controlled staging and planning and composition can endow an image with the spark of the absolute; the creation of a movie isn’t visual or logical but metaphysical—beyond the filmmaker’s intentions—inseparable from the filmmaker’s very being. The most inspired directors make images with an innate complexity and independent existence; they have an instinctive taste. As for those who don’t—their films used to seem merely adequate and mediocre; now they seem oppressive, reactionary, and destructive. The gap between taste and tastelessness—between beauty and mere meaning—has become a crisis of cinematic identity, and in the very existence of the cinema as an art form.
The cinema’s self-conscious modernity arose when its makers put a virtual mirror into its lenses and revealed the filmmaking process in the films themselves. They reflected the world around the movie within the movie, the director on the screen. But television has outrun the cinema here, too, by replacing the mirror with an echo chamber; by means of social media, television has gone beyond reflexivity to become participatory. It has become its own story. “Transparent” isn’t about an elderly father who comes out as a transgender woman; it’s about the making of a show on that subject. “Mad Men” is about the making of a show about advertising people in the nineteen-sixties. Unlike movies, where reflexivity is a matter of aesthetics, TV has made it a matter of ethics, politics, and sociology.
While enduring the fetishizing aestheticism of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” I wanted George Miller to stop the action and show the trickery involved in endowing Charlize Theron with Imperator Furiosa’s prosthetic arm. With the vast and sparsely populated landscapes of “The Revenant,” I wanted Alejandro González Iñárritu’s balletic cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to swivel the camera around to show the teeming crew and the high-tech caravansary behind them. Yet even if Miller and Iñárritu abandoned the faux audacities of their bombastic style for these sorts of radical moves, which were radical in 1960 and are still radical today, it probably wouldn’t help: they’d do so with the same willfulness that they bring to the hermetic grandeur of their actual work. They wouldn’t need to free themselves from their scripts or their intentions but from their very taste—from themselves.
The very best movies of the year are works of hard-won freedom, reflecting the exertion to overcome external or internal obstacles, horrific and violent persecutions, or the oppressive psychological weight of personal habits or inherited styles. In “Chi-Raq,” Spike Lee returned from a virtual exile from the film business; for years, he has been making superb films that, for all their artistry, have gone nearly unnoticed. (His other 2015 film, “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” is on my list, too.) I interviewed Lee last year about the lack of independent backers for his films—something I found surprising, even shocking. It’s gratifying that Amazon Studios has invested in his vision and restored his work to the prominence that it so greatly deserves. What’s all the more remarkable is that the film that might be called his comeback, “Chi-Raq,” has nothing of the retrospective, nostalgic, or self-righteous about it—it displays an uninhibited freedom of invention. Here, taking huge personal, artistic, and political risks, Lee creates a latter-day masterwork—perhaps his best film to date.
In “Li’l Quinquin”—which was made for French television and broadcast as a miniseries—Bruno Dumont, in his mid-fifties, shed the quasi-religious self-containment of his earlier work and made a film that’s as outrageously comical and straightforwardly tender as it is riotously surrealistic and probingly documentary. I wouldn’t say that he improved but that he liberated himself—from himself.
It’s in no way intended to diminish the risks of prison or death faced by several of the directors on the list by comparing their audacity to that of filmmakers working here or in Europe in comfortable circumstances. The difference in courage and risk is enormous. But the monstrous difficulties that Abderrahmane Sissako and Jafar Panahi confronted to make “Timbuktu” and “Taxi” are nonetheless no proof or guarantor of their artistry—and not the reason for their greatness. The emotional extremes and devastating intimacies that Alex Ross Perry and Josh and Benny Safdie plumb in “Queen of Earth” and “Heaven Knows What,” respectively, are also films that resist and oppose these young filmmakers’ settled cinematic ways; they knocked themselves out of their usual orbits to make films of artistic and personal reinvention.
Some other films among the year’s best only apparently flaunt a classical style of unmediated storytelling. With movies such as “Digging for Fire,” “Results,” “Stinking Heaven,” and “Wild Canaries,” the form is only superficially classical. Their very subject is stories themselves—where stories come from, how they’re used, what good they do. These playful films’ seemingly straightforward naturalist aesthetic is a thin dance floor laid over a psychological abyss.
For the past half-century or more, moviemaking has been demystified—and reinfused with another mystery, that of the studio director as artist. The reflexive mode has revealed the methods of moviemaking, even as it posited the makers themselves as elusive demiurges, magicians who showed how their tricks were done even while bewildering and beguiling spectators with the doing of them. Now, everyone knows everything, and the glance into the kitchen of cinema has made us at once suspicious and nostalgic—suspicious of the mystagogue with the secret recipe, nostalgic for the comforts of home and for the transparency of the storyteller at the hearth. Television populates that domestic—or online—solitude with characters who come by every week (or, with bingeing, move in for the weekend).
Movies were born to nourish and enrich solitude in public. Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut (in a moment that’s the climax of Kent Jones’s superb documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut”) about his effort to “use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion.” (He also added, drolly, “It’s the kind of picture in which the camera takes over. Of course, since critics are more concerned with the scenario, it won’t necessarily get you the best notices… .”) The art still exists; the mass audience hardly and rarely exists anymore, not with small and often sparsely packed art houses, not with streaming video on portable devices. (Abel Ferrara’s “Welcome to New York” was released this year only on video-on-demand; had it received the theatrical release that it deserved, it would have been high on the list.) Directors are increasingly solitary heirs to a collective passion, communing personally with each but never to all. The Oscars are the ceremony that celebrates and sustains the nostalgia and the illusion, and most of the ostensible “prestige” releases of awards season are its totems. But the artists— bearers of the mystery—leave nostalgia behind and advance with viewers, one by one, to renew the cinema as the art of the future.
The List
No one can see everything, and I hope to be able to add to the list when catching up with good things I’ve missed. This year, I didn’t predetermine the number of names in a given category but followed my pleasures to fill up to ten slots. One twist: this is the year of paired performances that are both equal and inseparable, both among leads and supporting roles, and the list reflects that experience.
Best Movies
“Chi-Raq”
“Li’l Quinquin”
“Queen of Earth”
“Heaven Knows What”
“Taxi”
“Timbuktu”
“In Jackson Heights”
“Mistress America”
“Stinking Heaven”
“Arabian Nights”
“Carol”
“Trainwreck”
“Digging for Fire”
“Wild Canaries”
“Results”
“Creed”
“The Princess of France”
“Field Niggas”
“Iris”
“Irrational Man”
“Da Sweet Blood of Jesus”
“Uncertain Terms”
“Young Bodies Heal Quickly”
“By the Sea”
“While We’re Young”
“Entertainment”
“Approaching the Elephant”
“In the Name of My Daughter”
“Buzzard”
“Fifty Shades of Grey”
Best Director
Spike Lee (“Chi-Raq”)
Alex Ross Perry (“Queen of Earth”)
Josh and Benny Safdie (“Heaven Knows What”)
Jafar Panahi (“Taxi”)
Bruno Dumont (“Li’l Quinquin”)
Best Actress
Teyonah Parris (“Chi-Raq”)
Arielle Holmes (“Heaven Knows What”)
Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston (“Queen of Earth”)
Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke (“Mistress America”)
Amy Schumer (“Trainwreck”)
Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (“Carol”)
Catherine Deneuve (“In the Name of My Daughter”)
Cobie Smulders (“Results”)
Rosemarie DeWitt (“Digging for Fire”)
Dakota Johnson (“Fifty Shades of Grey”)
Best Actor
Michael B. Jordan (“Creed”)
Nick Cannon (“Chi-Raq”)
Jafar Panahi (“Taxi”)
Channing Tatum (“Magic Mike XXL“)
Seth Rogen (“The Night Before“)
Jake Johnson (“Digging for Fire”)
Best Supporting Actor
Caleb Landry Jones (“Heaven Knows What”)
John Cusack (“Chi-Raq”)
Kevin Corrigan (“Results and Wild Canaries”)
Sylvester Stallone (“Creed”)
Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jore (“L’il Quinquin”)
Bill Hader (“Trainwreck”)
Henri Douvry (“Stinking Heaven”)
Charles Grodin and Adam Driver (“While We’re Young”)
Bradley Cooper (“Joy”)
Michael Shannon (“The Night Before”)
Best Supporting Actress
Mia Wasikowska (“Maps to the Stars“)
Tessa Thompson (“Creed”)
Parker Posey (“Irrational Man”)
Tilda Swinton (“Trainwreck”)
Best Screenplay
Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee (“Chi-Raq”)
Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (“Mistress America”)
Amy Schumer (“Trainwreck”)
Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie (“Heaven Knows What”)
Ryan Coogler and Aaron Covington (“Creed”)
Noah Baumbach (“While We’re Young”)
Bruno Dumont (“Li’l Quinquin”)
Lawrence Michael Levine (“Wild Canaries”)
Best Cinematography
Ed Lachman (“Carol”)
Sean Price Williams (“Heaven Knows What”)
Sean Price Williams (“Queen of Earth”)
Matthew Libatique (“Chi-Raq”)
Maryse Alberti (“Creed”)
Khalik Allah (“Field Niggas”)
John Davey (“In Jackson Heights”)
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