Another year of movie-watching having passed, I have rated all the movies I saw in the past year on a 1-10 scale and organized them into two lists. The first list contains all the movies I’ve seen so far that were officially released in 2015. (Note: I saw several of these films in 2016. ) The second list contains all the movies I saw in calendar year 2015 that were not released in 2015. I am grateful that my techniques for deciding what movies to watch have become so effective that I did not see any movie that I rated below 6/10 (although, believe me, a 6/10 is a lot worse than a 10/10). Unlike most of my lists, this is not a meta-list, with its aura of objectivity, but simply a case of my subjective personal preferences.
2015 FILMS SEEN
10
Anomalisa (US, 2015) Dir: Charlie Kaufman
9
45 Years (UK, 2015) Dir: Andrew Haigh
Spotlight (US, 2015) Dir: Tom McCarthy
The Big Short (US, 2015) Dir: Adam McKay
Heart of a Dog (US, 2015) Dir: Laurie Anderson
Room (Canada/Ireland, 2015) Dir: Lenny Abrahamson
Brooklyn (Ireland/UK/Canada, 2015) Dir: John Crowley
Tangerine (US, 2015) Dir: Sean Baker
8
Amy (UK, 2015) Dir: Asif Kapandia
Bridge of Spies (US, 2015) Dir: Steven Spielberg
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (US, 2015) Dir: J.J. Abrams
7
Grandma (US, 2015) Dir: Paul Weitz
Trainwreck (US, 2015) Dir: Judd Apatow
The Revenant (US, 2015) Dir: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
What Happened, Miss Simone? (US, 2015) Dir: Liz Garbus
Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia/US, 2015) Dir: George Miller
OTHER FILMS SEEN IN 2015
10
Forbidden Games (France, 1952) Dir: René Clément
The Virgin Spring (Sweden, 1960) Dir: Ingmar Bergman
The Act of Killing (Netherlands, 2012) Dir: Joshua Oppenheimer
9
Strike (USSR, 1925) Dir: Sergei Eisenstein
It’s a Gift (US, 1934) Dir: Norman Z. McLeod
Los Angeles Plays Itself (US, 2003) Dir: Thom Andersen
Beginners (US, 2010) Dir: Mike Mills
Poetry (South Korea, 2010) Dir: Chang-dong Lee
Barbara (Germany, 2012) Dir: Christian Petzold
Museum Hours (Austria/US, 2012) Dir: Jem Cohen
Under the Skin (UK/US, 2013) Dir: Jonathan Glazer
Mr. Turner (UK, 2014) Dir: Mike Leigh
Happy Christmas (US, 2014) Dir: Joe Swanberg
Inherent Vice (US, 2014) Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
Goodbye to Language (France, 2014) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard
Two Days, One Night (Belgium, 2014) Dir: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
8
Scarface (US, 1932) Dir: Howard Hawks
You Only Live Once (US, 1937) Dir: Fritz Lang
Saboteur (US, 1942) Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Scarlet Street (US, 1945) Dir: Fritz Lang
The Naked Kiss (US, 1964) Dir: Samuel Fuller
Henry & June (US, 1990) Dir: Philip Kaufman
Farewell My Concubine (China, 1993) Dir: Chen Kaige
The Pillow Book (UK, 1996) Dir: Peter Greenaway
American Pimp (US, 1999) Dir: Albert & Allen Hughes
Forks Over Knives (US, 2011) Dir: Lee Fulkerson
Upstream Color (US, 2013) Dir: Shane Carruth
Selma (US, 2014) Dir: Ava DuVernay
Flowers (Spain, 2014) Dir: Jon Garaño & Jose Mari Goenaga
It Follows (US, 2014) Dir: David Robert Mitchell
American Sniper (US, 2014) Dir: Clint Eastwood
Maps to the Stars (Canada, 2014) Dir: David Cronenberg
Force Majeure (Sweden/France, 2014) Dir: Ruben Östlund
7
The Far Country (US, 1954) Dir: Anthony Mann
This Boy’s Life (US, 1993) Dir: Michael Caton-Jones
Infernal Affairs (Hong Kong, 2002) Dir: Andrew Lau & Alan Mak
Waste Land (UK/Brazil, 2010) Dir: Lucy Walker
The Punk Singer (US, 2013) Dir: Sini Anderson
6
The Ruling Class (UK, 1972) Dir: Peter Medak
Snowpiercer (South Korea/US, 2014) Dir: Bong Joon-ho