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The 10 Best Movies of 2015

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Maika Monroe in David Robert Mitchell's "It Follows"

We all know top 10 lists are meaningless—arbitrary attempts to objectively quantify highly subjective works of art. But top 10 lists can also be meaningful, not just as encapsulations of the year that was, but as snapshots in time. Were I to pick the 10 best films from 2015 a month from now, or a month ago, this list would assuredly look different. Those who prefer their year-end collectives to be cemented in stone may deem that sentiment overly tentative, but I’ve always accepted that my opinions of movies are like my memories: fluid, changing with time, and susceptible to multiple feelings and interpretations.

But here we are today, and here I must enumerate my thoroughly impeachable rankings of the year that was. In reviewing 2015 at the movies, I am struck by how many big-budget pictures I enjoyed. From the thrilling action scenes of Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation to the equally thrilling dance sequences of Magic Mike XXL, from the interplanetary collaboration of The Martian to the intergalactic warfare of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, studios routinely served up rousing entertainment at the multiplex, and they should be commended for it. (Yes, they also served up the usual dreck.)

None of those high-profile movies, however, is on my year-end list. Instead, my top 10 is populated largely by more intimate stories focusing on relationships—mothers and sons, bosses and employees, men and women (and women and women). This should not, of course, reflect a value judgment on my part in favor of “smaller” films. I like all good movies, regardless of the scale of their production or the size of their target demographic. This year, I happened to gravitate toward more independent fare, but that is a coincidence rather than a signifier of taste.

But while the following 10 movies may not have been commercially successful—only two made more than $50 million at the box office, and just one topped $100 million—there is nothing small about their artistic achievements. They told beautiful stories, and they did so with clarity, vigor, and passion, lingering in my mind’s eye for some time after I watched them. They may span countries and eras and genres, but they are all powerful, provocative pictures, with their own singular style and vision. Here are the Manifesto’s 10 best movies of 2015. Read More

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Room: Within Four Walls, Two Lives Unfold

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson, in "Room"

The boy lives with his Ma in Room. Not the room, not a room—just Room. To preface the proper noun with an article is to suggest the possibility of other rooms, different rooms. But there is only Room: Four walls, a ceiling with Skylight, and beyond that Outer Space and Heaven. That is all there is. That is the world.

A harrowing, heartbreaking drama from Lenny Abrahamson, Room is a film of many virtues—superlative acting, tender writing, enormous feeling—but its greatest achievement is immersing its audience into the boy’s state of mind, articulating how he perceives this tiny, cloistered space that is his entire universe. The screenplay is by Emma Donoghue, adapting her novel, which she wrote from the perspective of the boy, named Jack (portrayed on screen by Jacob Tremblay, in an astonishing performance). Her script is a model of economy and minimalism; she supplies Jack with a few quick voiceovers that concisely set the scene, but otherwise, she and Abrahamson simply drop you into this strange, unsettling place and let you puzzle things out for yourself. Read More

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The End of the Tour: Talking About Writing, and Other Demons

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel talk (and talk) in "The End of the Tour"

Writing in the New York Times in 1996 about Infinite Jest, the magnum opus from David Foster Wallace, the critic Jay McInerney wrote, “While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences.” I feel similarly about The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt’s compassionate, provocative, and occasionally dull recreation of the five-day period shortly following the release of Infinite Jest, in which Rolling Stone‘s David Lipsky trailed Wallace on his promotional rounds. It is not an especially kinetic movie, and if it is in no hurry to go anywhere, its luxuriant patience occasionally creeps into stasis. But it is also a sharply scripted and profoundly affecting character study, tenderly depicting two writers who are deeply committed both to their specific jobs and to the grander notion of composing meaningful words. Wallace and Lipsky both believed that their prose, as painful as it was to conceive, might actually mean something. The End of the Tour nobly honors their commitment, even if certain stretches of its narrative feel meaningless.

The movie opens in 2008, with a dumbfounded Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg, even better than usual) learning of Wallace’s suicide, a tragic event whose dark shadow looms over The End of the Tour. It then flashes back 12 years, revealing Lipsky as a hungry and energetic young writer who keeps hearing about this rapturously received tome called Infinite Jest. Animated by both jealousy and disbelief, he scoffs at the reviews claiming that this mammoth novel heralds the arrival of the next Pynchon. Then he reads it. Not long after, he’s pleading with his editor at Rolling Stone to interview Wallace for a celebrity profile, and then he’s jetting off to snowy Illinois, hoping to reconcile this generation-defining book with the mere mortal who wrote it. Read More

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Ex Machina: Of Gods and Men, and Their Beautiful Machines

Jeremy BeckReviews
Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac in Alex Garland's "Ex Machina"

“Deus ex machina,” the literary term used to describe the contrived resolution of a complicated plot, translates as “God from the machine”. You might think, given that the title of Alex Garland’s arresting, deeply promising directorial debut is merely Ex Machina (sans “deus”), that there are no gods to be found here, only hubristic men and their miraculous machines. You’d be right, but only from a literal perspective. The two characters at the center of Ex Machina may be men, but they act like gods (one even proclaims himself as such), and while they play different parts—one fancies himself the benevolent savior, the other the impassive creator—they each seek to manipulate the fates of others. They soon learn that playing God comes with a cost.

Of course, they themselves are behaving at the whim of their own maker. Every director is the god of his own movie, and Garland hurls a Zeus-like thunderbolt in the film’s very first scene. His camera opens with a close-up of Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, nicely cast and effectively blank), with rivulets of electronic-blue light dancing across his face as though constructing a topographical map. An email with the subject “Staff lottery: WINNER” flashes across his computer screen, his cell phone blows up with congratulatory messages, and then without a word he’s off, flying via helicopter over the frigid lands of Norway. Garland conveys a reel’s worth of exposition in a few silent seconds, and this extraordinary economy demonstrates that Ex Machina isn’t interested in second place. It wants to be great, and it mostly is. Read More

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While We’re Young: Growing Older, But Not Growing Up

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts start in Noah Baumbach's "While We're Young"

The obvious irony of the title While We’re Young is that it’s a movie singularly fixated on the fear of growing old. Its hero is Josh (Ben Stiller), a fortyish documentary filmmaker who lives a life of relative comfort in New York City but is nevertheless plagued with anxiety, about both the specific utility of his work and his general place in the world. In other words, Josh is a lot like Noah Baumbach, the forty-five-year-old director of this bewitching, frustrating film. Like Josh, While We’re Young is smart, and it posits a number of interesting and worthwhile ideas. And, like Josh, it cannot entirely escape the nagging feeling that it’s just running in place, waiting for something to shake it out of its complacency.

In Baumbach’s recent movies, that something has taken the form of Greta Gerwig, the fearless and funny actress whose luminous, achingly vulnerable performance elevated Frances Ha from a crisply amusing cringe comedy into a startlingly humane coming-of-age story. Before that, Gerwig poured her heart into Greenberg, playing opposite Stiller, who delivered a career-best turn as a prickly and altogether unpleasant neurotic. Sadly, Gerwig is absent this time around, while Stiller reverts to his bland, inoffensive screen presence. His lead performance here isn’t bad so much as polite; an established star, he can coast on familiarity and charm, graciously ceding the spotlight to other, hungrier actors. In While We’re Young, he makes room for the magnetic Adam Driver, who plays Jamie, a boisterous aspiring documentarian who seems to idolize Josh. Read More

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