In 2015 more movies were released than ever (an average of a dozen a week). And while many of them offended one’s sense of truth, beauty, and politics, mainstream media (both conservative and liberal) promoted them nonetheless — as if only newness mattered, and not quality.
Commerce smothered art in 2015, disguised as movie love. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t still excellent, satisfying films — the best, Queen and Country, released in early January by British master filmmaker John Boorman, remained unsurpassed. You could still have a good time going to movies in 2015, but it required discernment, personal taste, and political rigor. Thus, this year’s Better-Than List reminds filmgoers that in cinema as in politics, quality and integrity are more important than popularity. It’s never too late to vote for the better movies.
Queen and Country > The Force Awakens
The visionary Boorman’s memoir/swan song recalls the roots of family, citizenship, and morality, all conveyed in cinematic mythology. The Disneyfied Star Wars replaced pop mythology with fascist marketing, deceiving viewers who are ignorant of the difference.
Alonso Ruizpalacios’s mixed-race Mexico City college students search for their ethnic and cultural roots in the style of Sixties New Wave cinema, superior to Quentin Tarantino’s pointless mashup of spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation movies. By exploiting American racism, QT promotes it.
The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet > The Revenant
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s coming-of-age fable expresses an outsider’s affection for 20th-century Americana, while Alejandro González Iñárritu reduces the history of the American West to savagery — and Obama-era self-deprecation.
Love at First Fight > The Martian
France’s Thomas Cailley updates the service comedy — social experiment in the military viewed as Millennial screwball romance — but ultrahack Ridley Scott minimizes NASA space exploration as Matt Damon’s solipsism in outer space.
Creed > Straight Outta Compton
Ryan Coogler reenergizes pop ethnography and Sylvester Stallone’s bootstrap boxing franchise, reasserting that All Lives Matter because all are connected. But F. Gary Gray’s bio-pic about the hip-hop group N.W.A. panders to current social cynicism and valorizes hip-hop culture’s most noxious historical episode.
The Green Inferno and Knock Knock > Mad Max: Fury Road
Eli Roth’s two-fer made him the year’s wittiest political filmmaker, reviving low-grade genres as social satire — the opposite of George Miller’s craven, violent, utterly mindless spectacular.
The Stanford Prison Experiment > The Big Short and Spotlight
Kyle Patrick Alvarez experiments with the power dynamics of masculinity, while Adam McKay and Tom McCarthy both ignore race and gender components in films that celebrate white professional-class privilege (via stock-market arrogance and anti-Catholic journalism). Alvarez’s compelling, watchable actors contrast with McKay & McCarthy’s miserably dull all-celeb casts.
An authentic Mafia critique from Italy’s Francesco Munzi surpasses Scott Cooper and Johnny Depp’s mob-monster Whitey Bulger film. The crime movie Scorsese cannot make vs. the movie Scorsese has made ad nauseam.
Macbeth > The Force Awakens*
Justin Kurzel uses Shakespeare to envision a metaphor for modern political nihilism, a moving, classical reminder of what has been lost to Star Wars infantilism.
* Yes, Star Wars again. Its menace is no phantom.
In the Name of My Daughter > Carol
André Téchiné’s family saga goes beyond modish sexual transgression through deep insight into class ambition. Todd Haynes’s dull lesbian melodrama endorses the cliché of 1950s repression (while still favoring the dominant bourgeoisie) to make today’s political correctness seem “smart.”
Denis Villeneuve explores the moral parameters of the U.S. drug wars while Steven Spielberg plays moral-equivalency games with Cold War history. Visionary boldness vs. visionary smugness.
Horse Money > Timbuktu and Arabian Nights
Portugal’s Pedro Costa owns up to colonial debt in an emotional, visually arresting art film. He humanizes the personal cost of Europe’s immigrant debacle, while Mauritania’s Abderrahmane Sissako, in Timbuktu, panders to jihadist clichés and liberal guilt. Meanwhile, Miguel Gomes’s trilogy, Arabian Nights, reveals Portugal’s (Europe’s) capitulation to G8 and ISIL narratives.
Expat American Eugène Green’s Western-heritage drama, delighting in the ethics of classical architecture, perfectly contrasts with Alex Garland’s juvenile rehash of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Adult sophistication vs. teenage sci-fi misogyny.
Appropriate Behavior > Trainwreck
Desiree Akhaven’s bisexual-identity farce (the year’s most original comedy) was ignored by mainstream-media acclaim for Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s hetero-skank privilege.
The New Girlfriend > The Danish Girl
François Ozon spiritually redeems sexual dysfunction, but Tom Hooper settles for a ghoulish, politically correct tearjerker. Compassion vs. freakdom.
David O. Russell puts a human face on capitalism in a bio-pic that’s really an American social comedy — the opposite of Danny Boyle’s babbly hagiography, which deifies and sentimentalizes corporate fascism.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence > Anomalisa
In several powerful tableaux, Sweden’s Roy Andersson connects personal anxiety to historical anxiety, while Charlie Kaufman pampers faux existentialism with zombie puppets.
Furious 7 > It Follows
James Wan’s populist sequel in the Fast & Furious franchise celebrates E Pluribus Unum brotherhood, but David Robert Mitchell’s Detroit-set ruin porn and scaredy-pants narcissism result in the year’s crummiest thriller.
— Armond White, a film critic who writes about movies for National Review Online, received the American Book Awards’ Anti-Censorship Award. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.