My Top 10 Films of 2015

1.

Mad Max: Fury Road (★★★★)

Directed by George Miller

Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris

Bold, ingenious, and completely bonkers all the way through, George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is a visual masterpiece with a story so concisely drawn out and to the point, full of convincing characters with curtly explained backstories that it elevates an already brilliant film to the level of near-perfection.

The story is so concisely drawn out and to the point, and full of convincing characters with curtly explained backstories that it elevates an already brilliant film to the level of near-perfection. Furiosa, simply put, is one of the coolest characters ever created, her face smeared with black engine grease serving as her war paint, the fire in her eyes. There is a real passion to Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa that drives the story forward, as she strives for hope in a hopeless land, and carries scorn for those who have scorned her, but not malice.

It helps that she is paired with an engaging band of characters, including five excellent actresses as the wives, the oft-silent Max, played by Hardy with subtle brilliance in a performance that is a lot of physicality, but also a lot of expressions and eyes, and wasteland tyrant Immortan Joe’s sickly soldier, Nux, played by Nicholas Hoult in a revelatory performance full of humor and sadness.

It’s remarkable to notice this in a film with so few quiet scenes, but I emphasize that “Fury Road” is not your run of the mill summer blockbuster. I wish this was the standard, as opposed to soulless, dull and dead-eyed stuff like the “Transformers” franchise or  even movies that are playing it safe with formula and repetition, like many (not all) of the Marvel universe movies. Maintaining the sensibility and atmosphere of the previous “Mad Max” movies, but cranking the energy up exponentially, Miller realizes the full potential of this universe with “Fury Road” in a way that unsurprisingly took more than a decade to complete.

“Fury Road” establishes such an exciting new era of filmmaking for Miller, and proves promising for the modern action genre by indicating that there’s still hope to be foraged in what was starting to look like a hopeless genre. It’s the best film of the year.

 

2.

Anomalisa (★★★★)

Directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

Written by Charlie Kaufman

Leave it to writer/director Charlie Kaufman to give us the most human, soul-piercing film of the year and to do it entirely with stop motion miniatures, and the voice talents of only three actors.

“Anomalisa” introduces us to Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a renowned self-help author who is visiting Cincinnati to speak at a customer service convention. We follow him as he arrives in town, takes a Taxi to the hotel where the convention will take place and where he will be staying. We also come to realize that everyone he meets has the same voice — that would be the great Tom Noon, who is credited for this film as playing “everyone else.”

That is Michael’s affliction, or perhaps it could just be Kaufman’s fascinating way of presenting a person’s perception of his or her life as having become completely mundane and passionless. Either way, what we experience with “Anomalisa” is a man caught in a strange, Kafkaesque state of mind where he no longer enjoys any kind of modulation among the people he meets — everyone is the essentially the same person with the same voice, even in the music that he hears through his ear buds and in the hotel lounge.

This monotony of spirit is brought to a sudden, startling halt when Michael, from his hotel bathroom, hears someone outside in the hallway… someone whose voice is different than all of the others — that would be the great Jennifer Jason Leigh, who creates a fully fleshed out and complex character here and helps us to forget for a time that these are just miniatures, and that we aren’t actual watching living, breathing actors on screen.

While “Mad Max: Fury Road” is certainly the finest crafted BIG movie of 2015, it goes without saying that “Anomalisa” is the most beautifully and meticulously crafted miniature movie. So much work went into making this small world a reality, and all efforts have led to this final masterwork of human communication, heartache, pettiness and hope.

Kaufman is the man who brought us such cerebral masterpieces as “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and “Synecdoche, New York,” all four-star films in my book, and as with all of his previous work, “Anomalisa” reflects the serious questions, anxieties, feelings and observations about life, death, love and existence that are caught and sifted out of the fascinating filter of their writer’s mind, and what a mind it is.

 

3.

The Hateful Eight (★★★★)

Written/Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Funny, violent, mean, but certainly not lean, Quentin Tarantino’s 8^th movie is his longest (nearly 3 hours for the wide theatrical release, well over 3 hours for the 70mm roadshow presentation), and darkest cinematic outburst — I think outburst is just the right word for what Tarantino does. As with his previous work, “The Hateful Eight” feels like an erupting surge of ideas, a culmination of story, ideas and characters straight out of the B-cinema that Tarantino treasures so much.

This time channeling Sergio Leone, Agatha Christie and John Carpenter, Tarantino creates eight of his most dastardly characters yet, shoves them all into a haberdashery to wait out a blizzard, and blends in elements of a Leone western, a Christie locked-room mystery, and Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Paranoia, festering grudges and racism pervade this small space, where in a post-Civil War Wyoming we see the threads of Tarantino’s quirky, quixotic style intertwine with a dark and complex history.

What’s really great is the way in which Tarantino takes his grandiose ideas about the United States then and now, and fleshes them out on a small scale. These ideas are personified by the eight main characters, including Tarantino regulars Tim Roth (as Oswaldo Mobray – the little man), Michael Madsen (as Joe Gage – the cow puncher), Samuel L. Jackson (as Major Marquis Warren – the bounty hunter), Kurt Russell (as John Ruth – the hangman), and Walton Goggins (as Sheriff Chris Mannix – the Sheriff).

Among all of these revved up, larger-than-life performances is that of Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Daisy Domergue – the prisoner), who is a newcomer to the Tarantino universe along with Bruce Dern (as General Sandy Smithers – the Confederate), and Demian Bichir (as Bob – the Mexican). Leigh gives the most nuanced performance and nearly steals the show away from the others, although to do so in a Tarantino movie when Jackson is involved is not a task to be taken lightly.

It must be said that “The Hateful Eight” is not Tarantino at his very best – that would be “Jackie Brown,” a film that displays both his complete control as a filmmaker and his ability to pay homage to past cinema, while also paving an entirely new way for himself. It also shows a balance of violence and depth of character and startling sensitivity that this, his eighth and most brutal film, lacks — although it serves up plenty of terrific plot twists and turns, abundant cutthroat, vengeance-fueled brutality, and still proves, yet again, that Tarantino is a filmmaker to be reckoned with.

 

4.

The Stanford Prison Experiment  (★★★★)

Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez

Written by Tim Talbott

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” is a film of chilling relevance and brutal realism, in which director Kyle Patrick Alvarez weaves a disturbingly familiar portrait of how the power structures that we ourselves design can ultimately lead to a break down in our humanity in favor of something more animalistic, and more frightening.

What is perhaps most dramatic, upsetting, and infuriating about the results of the Zimbardo’s experiment is that although it featured only a mockup of these environments, and a simulation of the structure of power that exists in reality, between those who are trusted with the job of maintaining peace and order, and those who live behind bars, there is an undeniable and harsh reality that bleeds from that experiment and stains us as a society.

A rivalry that develops between the “guards” and the “prisoners,” all students who happen to be pursuing degrees at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. The question that the study poses is if these Stanford students will resort to this kind of behavior when placed within these circumstances, what does that suggest for actual correctional officers and prisoners who have to face conditions like this on an everyday basis, and for real? And how do these structures of power affect situations outside of the prison system?

Everyone’s performance in this film is incredible, and like so many great films, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” echoes the time and place in which it has been made. We see the everlasting significance of Zimbardo’s study, and the sweeping relevance of Alvarez’s film, which, with its impeccable timing, strikes a serious nerve and stays with you long after it’s over.

 

5.

Beasts of No Nation (★★★★)

Written/Directed by Cary Fukunaga

There is a tremendous sense of clarity and confidence built into Cary Fukunaga’s “Beasts of No Nation,” an incredible narrative and technical achievement featuring a powerful, ethereal score by Dan Romer, graceful writing, direction and cinematography by Fukunaga, and restrained, sincere performances all around.

Perhaps the most interesting observation I can make about this extraordinary film is how poetically the story is told. Fukunaga served as cinematographer on this film, as well as writer and director, and his visual style and fluid approach to storytelling calls to mind the transcendental work of filmmakers David Gordon Green (“George Washington,” “Joe”), Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter,” “Mud”), and Terrence Malick (“The Thin Red Line,” “The New World”).

Fukunaga also has a way off taking more “showy” shots and blending them into the story without distracting us from it. There is one particularly amazing sequence that shows the fractured passing of time, and is communicates both Agu’s moral deterioration, and his lost perception of time and place, as the violence becomes such a frequent part of his everyday life that it actually begins to lose its impact on him.

The anonymity of the film’s setting enhances the urgency of the story and steers it out of the way of being a preachy, political sermon. This allows the film and us to focus on the real journey, where we witness a young boy’s loss of innocence as he is abandoned, and then rediscovered in a war-torn land. “Beasts of No Nation” above all is a human story, not one chiefly fixated on placing the blame, and who better than Fukunaga to guide us through the dark and find humanity living among the shadows?

 

6.

Entertainment (★★★★)

Directed by Rick Alverson

Written by Rick Alverson, Gregg Turkington and Tim Heidecker

When viewed shallowly, from a distance and with slightly squinted eyes, the very premise of Rick Alverson’s “Entertainment,” which he co-wrote with star Gregg Turkington and Tim Heidecker, is not an unfamiliar one. The idea here is that Alverson and company are taking something we have seen before in more conventional films about aging entertainers, and deconstructing it in order to get a fuller grasp, not on the story arc itself exactly, but more on what about this kind of story makes sense in a naturalistic sort of way, one that is not blurred or sweetened saccharine by clean resolutions or sentimental revelations.

Alverson’s film doesn’t contain a single disposable scene, or a scene out of place. It is refreshingly efficient in its storytelling, and proves Alverson to be one of the most focused, confident and uncompromising directors working today. He makes confrontational movies about confrontational people, and there’s something both unsettling and somehow completely brilliant and refreshing about his approach.

Turkington as a truly strange and fascinating to watch as he re-interprets his own real-life character for the film, which has been digested and reinterpreted by Heidecker, Alverson and himself, and then switches it off and becomes the hollow shell of a man. As the film progresses, the comedian struggles to communicate with others, both through his belligerent stage character (based on “Neil Hamburger,” a character that Turkington performs as in real life),  whose act is made up of subversive, carefully constructed hacky jokes of misogyny, homophobia and overall distaste, and in his life off-stage.

That inability to communicate builds, driving the always restrained and subtly affecting story into increasingly surreal territory that paints the American Southwest as somewhat of a wasteland of washed up opportunity and spent talent. There is a lot of humor, but none of it comes without a little bit of a sting. That’s the kind of film Alverson is interested in making.

 

7.

Spotlight (★★★★)

Directed by Tom McCarthy

Written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer

“Spotlight” is a quietly harrowing thriller based on the 2003 Boston Globe investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The Globe’s “Spotlight” team of investigative journalists published a story that year that revealed a staggering statistic, that 6% of Catholic priests have been guilty of pedophilia, and that the church itself has done everything in its power to conceal this fact from the public.

As we watch the true story of the investigation unfold, and witness the slow uncovering of this massive scandal by the Boston Globe journalists, the tension builds and builds. So does the characters’ (and our) exasperation with how far the corruption spans, within the church and beyond. There are scenes where victims are interviewed about their experiences of abuse that are completely devastating, and then there are scenes of rage where we see the lies and moral decay of the abusers and their allies.

There is also triumph, as the “Spotlight” team, with the publication of the story, at last reveals this issue to the world, and by extension provides a new avenue for hundreds of victims of abuse to come forward with their stories.

The best ensemble cast of 2015, including brilliant performance from Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Live Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup, Brian d’Arcy James and Mark Ruffalo, and a slow-burning and emotionally searing screenplay by Josh Singer and director Tom McCarthy, make “Spotlight” one of the great investigative journalism films — “All the President’s Men” and “Zodiac” are perfectly fair comparisons.

 

8.

The Revenant (★★★★)

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Written by Mark L. Smith and Alejandro González Iñárritu

Last year, mad-scientist Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu managed to grab 3 of the big Oscars for Best Picture, directing and writing for “Birdman,” a razor-sharp take on acting, theater, blockbuster movies and… well, whatever else “Birdman” was about, it was a wild ride, shot and cut to appear as though the entire thing was done in one single shot — this was, I think, used to great effect, and helped to earn another Oscar for Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, which will again be noticed in Iñárritu and Lubezki’s new collaboration, the equally insane and technically breathtaking frontier film, “The Revenant.”

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as fur trapper Hugh Glass in this blisteringly cold but beautifully savage story of suffering and revenge. Glass was a real person who, in the 1820s, was abandoned by his men after being mauled within an inch of his life by a grizzly bear while on a fur expedition. In “The Revenant,” we act as witness to this harrowing and prolonged attack, and then watch as his team of hunters, led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) attempt to resuscitate him and carry him onward back to camp.

Henry decides to lead all but two of the men back, and leaves the cutthroat John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), the younger and more naïve Bridger (Will Poulter), and Glass’ half-native American son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) to watch over Glass and see to it that if he is given a proper burial should he perish from his wounds. Fitzgerald is a true snake who decides he’s had enough, and after killing Glass’ son, convinces Bridger that they must leave Glass to die in order to escape an impending attack by supposedly nearby hostile natives.

Glass survives once they’ve left, and film then follows him as he journeys through a frozen hell, returned from the dead, and fueled by a thirst for retribution against those who abandoned him.

“The Revenant” is a technical marvel, and features some of the most brilliantly framed and captured photography we have seen on screen. The production was shot in staggeringly cold conditions, in entirely natural light, and in geographical locations that are so isolated and unlivable that many cast and crew have come back with utter horror stories of working on this.

All of these touches and sweeping decisions layered in have made “The Revenant” a truly remarkable experience. With a sad, sometimes eerie and often atmospheric score by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto, and brilliant work by both DiCaprio and Hardy, as well as Gleeson and Poulter who are great young actors working among giants and holding their own just fine.

Iñárritu is a treasure in the world of cinema, and carries onward a great legacy of films, from “Babel” and “21 Grams,” to “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” he has tirelessly delivered striking works of art that challenge, thrill and make us feel deeply.

 

9.

Sicario (★★★½ )

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Written by Taylor Sheridan

Haunting: That is the word to describe “Sicario,” director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s descent into the dark world of Mexican drug cartels and CIA intrigue.

Hold tight for the first quarter of this film, as it’s a slow burn in which we are pulled gradually into an increasingly disquieting realm of secrecy, drug trade and unimaginable atrocities via our avatar, FBI SWAT agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt, never better), whose relatively naïve and innocent point of view — despite having helped discover dozens of decaying corpses hidden in the walls of a house, all victims of the cartel — matches ours. We know there are gruesome things going on, but are less aware perhaps of the extent to which the cartels are in charge. We also come to discover, as Kate does, the extent of our own country’s culpability for the drug-trade crimes being committed, and that is where the haunting really begins.

There are touches of Alfred Hitchcock and David Cronenberg here, as Kate is left in the dark about her involvement with the CIA task force led by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), and for an inordinate amount of time knows close to nothing about why she is being assigned to join Graver and his mysterious partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro) on a Cartel-related mission in Mexico. She eventually discovers the truth, as we do, and her reality spins faster and faster out of control until everything she though she understood about right and wrong, good and evil, and who she can trust is tested.

Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson delivers a brooding score that further enhances our sense of foreboding, and cinematographer great Roger Deakins captures some of the most striking and strange overhead shots of the Mexican desert I’ve seen, framing it almost as an alien place that could stand in for another planet in another galaxy. This adds to the out-of-place out-of-time anxiety that Kate begins to experience as she realizes she is way over her head.

Villeneuve, whose previous work includes “Prisoners” and “Enemy,” once again reveals as he did with those films his fascination with the fragile morality of man — this time, he layers it further into genre than ever before, weaving his themes into a story that is both a taught, nerve-shattering crime thriller, and a relevant web of horror that exists just south of the border.

 

10.

Krampus (★★★½ )

Directed by Michael Dougherty

Written by Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields

Writer/director Michael Dougherty’s “Krampus” is perhaps one of the most unlikely and surprising genre masterworks in years. With his family cooped up in a house in the midst of a sinister winter maelstrom, 12-year-old Max Engel (Emjay Anthony) is teased and tortured by his visiting cousins, and angry about his parent’s looming separation, and so loses his temper, rips up his carefully composed letter to Santa Claus, tosses the shreds of paper to the wind, and unknowingly summons Krampus, the mythical demonic shadow of Father Christmas himself.

What follows is a tour de force of filmmaking, with creature and sound design that will rival any movie of its kind that has been released in the past decade. Drawing from a more practical bag of tricks than audiences are used to seeing these days (George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” notwithstanding), Dougherty crafts a truly masterful series of set pieces in which we witness the wrath of Krampus and his minions — these include demonic Gingerbread cookies, man-eating toys, and eerie elves wearing elaborate masquerade masks. Krampus himself is saved for the final course, and trust me on this: he’s a doozy.

As with Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series, though, there is a great deal of humor cut with the cries of terror and bewilderment. Dougherty manages to establish a solid tone throughout the film, from the confidant set up of the family quarrels, to the sinister snowstorm that drifts in and turns the neighborhood into a claustrophobic winter wasteland, a nightmare reminiscent of Frank Darabont’s world in his screen adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Mist.”

Dougherty’s film takes a well-earned place beside Joe Dante’s “Gremlins” and Ron Underwood’s “Tremors” as one of the great horror-comedies. It offers real scares and real laughs, often times simultaneously, and with a pitch-perfect ending, invigorating practical effects and sincere performances that seriously invest in the material rather than treating it with a wink and a nod, “Krampus” has true potential to reach holiday-tradition status — families hopefully will try to squeeze a movie about a Christmas demon somewhere in between “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Elf” and “A Christmas Story.”

 

HONORABLE MENTION:

“Chi-Raq”

“Creep”

“Crimson Peak”

“Ex Machina”

“Inside Out”

“It Follows”

“Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens”

“What We Do in the Shadows”

‘Entertainment’ (2015)

Rick Alverson’s “Entertainment” is a film that subverts all connotations surrounding its title, and rather than directly entertaining us, actually challenges us by inspiring these questions: “What is ‘entertainment,’ why do those who seek to entertain do so, and what do we, the ‘entertained,’ expect from our entertainers?”

“Entertainment” follows an aging comedian (Gregg Turkington) as he travels across the California desert, performing at seedy clubs and prisons, all the while making his way toward some big Hollywood gig, and perhaps an estranged daughter.

As the film progresses, the comedian struggles to communicate with others, both through his belligerent stage character (based on “Neil Hamburger,” a character that Turkington performs as in real life),  whose act is made up of subversive, carefully constructed hacky jokes of misogyny, homophobia and overall distaste, and in his life off-stage. That inability to communicate builds, driving the always restrained and subtly affecting story into increasingly surreal territory that paints the American Southwest as somewhat of a wasteland of washed up opportunity and spent talent.

When viewed shallowly, from a distance and with slightly squinted eyes, the very premise of Alverson’s film, which he co-wrote with Turkington and Heidecker, is not an unfamiliar one. The idea here is that Alverson and company are taking something we have seen before in more conventional films about aging entertainers, and deconstructing it in order to get a fuller grasp, not on the story arc itself exactly, but more on what about this kind of story makes sense in a naturalistic sort of way, one that is not blurred or sweetened saccharine by clean resolutions or sentimental revelations.

Consider one scene where, after a typically lousy show, the comedian tries to explain to his cousin, John (John C Reilly), how he doesn’t really have an audience anymore that “gets it.” Meanwhile, John clearly doesn’t get it either, and offers the comedian some advice, that he should just try to be less weird, and maybe more people will get it.

This is a funny scene, but it also plays realistically with these opposite character types while again subverting expectations of some kind of cathartic moment between them. In this scene and many others, we witness the breakdown of direct communication and sense that no one is really on the same level of understanding. The comedian calls his estranged daughter frequently throughout the film, and always ends up having to leave a message — unable to reach her, unable to reach his audience, unable to reach himself. There is a lot of humor, but none of it comes without a little bit of a sting. That’s the kind of film Alverson is interested in making.

“Entertainment” doesn’t contain a single disposable scene, or a scene out of place. It is refreshingly efficient in its storytelling, and proves Alverson to be one of the most focused, confident and uncompromising directors working today. He makes confrontational movies about confrontational people, and there’s something both unsettling and somehow completely brilliant and refreshing about his approach. Alverson previously made “The Comedy,” a staggeringly unflinching foray into an aging yuppie-hipster played by Tim Heidecker, whose boredom and apathetic amusement with playing pranks on strangers in and around Brooklyn leaves him somewhat of a shell of a man. “Entertainment” can be viewed as a companion piece to that.

Turkington as a truly strange and fascinating to watch as he re-interprets his own real-life character for the film, which has been digested and reinterpreted by Heidecker, Alverson and himself, and then switches it off and becomes the hollow shell of a man (à la Heidecker’s character in “The Comedy”). As he journeys forward, the comedian wanders through the desert in search of something intangible, and visits various tourist attractions, including an airplane graveyard full of hollowed out shells of once were magnificent machines, an oil field where the derricks continuously drill and drill without repose, and an old West ghost town, all of which are better at indicating what is going on with the comedian than he himself is able to express to others. It also could be that Alverson is poking fun at metaphors — that also would be the kind of film that he is interested in making.

“Entertainment” is one of the best pictures of the year.

★★★★ (out of 4)

Beasts of No Nation (2015)

There is a tremendous sense of clarity and confidence built into Cary Fukunaga’s “Beasts of No Nation.” He has shown these qualities on each of his previous projects, which include the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s “True Detective” on HBO, which he directed, and in his adaptation — and, I think, the finest adaptation yet — of Charlotte Bronte’s gothic novel, “Jane Eyre,” which he wrote and directed.

Here, with “Beasts of No Nation,” Fukunaga directs and once again adapts his screenplay from a novel by Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala. The film follows Agu (Abraham Attah), a young boy whose family is torn apart in a civil war taking place in an African country that is never given a name.

Following the massacre of his village, Agu is found wandering in the deep African jungle and recruited as a child soldier by the rebel Native Defense Force led by a man they call Commandant (Idris Elba). Commandant is a tall, shrewd man, intimidating and manipulative, able to play on the fear, confusion and unchecked fury of the children he recruits.

Agu is no different, and is forced to commit unspeakable, gruesome acts, partially as ritual and initiation, partially as sport, partially as supposed acts of political insurgence. He also is abused by the Commandant, and through the abuse acted upon him and the acts of violence Agu is made to enact on others, we witness a nerve-wracking and at times challenging-to-watch spiral into the darkest depths of humankind.

Perhaps the most interesting observation I can make about this extraordinary film is how poetically the story is told. Fukunaga served as cinematographer on this film, as well as writer and director, and his visual style and fluid approach to storytelling calls to mind the transcendental work of filmmakers David Gordon Green (“George Washington,” “Joe”), Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter,” “Mud”), and Terrence Malick (“The Thin Red Line,” “The New World”).

Fukunaga also has a way of taking more “showy” shots and blending them into the story without distracting us from it. There is one particularly amazing sequence that shows the fractured passing of time, and is communicates both Agu’s moral deterioration, and his lost perception of time and place, as the violence becomes such a frequent part of his everyday life that it actually begins to lose its impact on him.

There is another extended sequence, more chilling and technically impressive than perhaps any other in the film, where we see the storming of a building by the rebel army. This shot rivals even Fukunaga’s harrowing 6-minute-long take in “True Detective,” and builds to a blood curdling climax where we witness a brief resurgence in Agu’s humanity, even as it is juxtaposed with more violent behavior.

“Beasts of No Nation” is an incredible achievement on both a technical level and on a narrative level. For the latter, we can also thank the stripped-down, powerful performances. Most notable among these are those of Attah and Elba, who carry us through this labyrinth of horrors with grace and stark sincerity. Attah, who makes his acting debut here, is capable of communicating so much with a subtle change of expression, and gradually shows with this performance that his skill ranges on a spectrum far beyond his years.

I mentioned earlier that the setting of the film is an unnamed African country. This is an important detail, as the anonymity of where we are actually works to enhance the urgency of the story as not a preachy, political sermon, but as a more raw, more direct journey into a boy’s loss of innocence as he is abandoned, and then found again in a war-torn land. This is a human story, and who better than Fukunaga to guide us through the dark and find humanity among the shadows.

With a powerful, ethereal score by Dan Romer, graceful writing, direction and cinematography by Fukunaga, and restrained, sincere performances all around, “Beasts of No Nation” is one of the best films of 2015 and Fukunaga’s finest work yet.

★★★★ (out of 4)

‘Blue Ruin’

Brace yourself before watching “Blue Ruin,” indie cinematographer/writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to his clever 2007 horror-comedy  “Murder Party.”

The opening scenes introduce us to a bearded vagrant named Dwight (Macon Blair), who lives in his car, squats in people’s homes to bath in their tubs, and scavenges through garbage cans for food.

He appears to have been at this lifestyle long enough to have developed a routine. When a policewoman approaches his car one morning and brings him to the station, that routine is shattered with news that the man convicted of murdering Dwight’s parents years earlier is going to be released from prison.

Dwight takes immediate action. He acquires a knife (after failing to steal a gun), and high tails it from Rehoboth Beach, DE back to his hometown in Virginia. Once he arrives and tracks down the released killer, the first domino falls. Once that first domino falls… well, you know how dominos work.

This is as stripped down, dark and dirty as it gets, a taut revenge drama tinted with pitch-black humor and brutal humanity drawn from questionable characters, all reminiscent of Joel and Ethan Coen’s debut feature, “Blood Simple.” This is particularly true in the way Saulnier allows suspense to build and give, build and give, until it explodes in a flash of violence on screen

“Blue Ruin” is one of the best thrillers you’re likely to see because it knows that when it comes to revenge, it never turns out quite the way you hoped. Revenge is messy, and so are the events depicted in this film. Dwight ‘s blood-paved path takes us through the bare nerves and tendons of human desperation and retribution.

★★★★ (out of four)

‘Joe’

Based on a 1991 novel by Larry Brown, “Joe” is a simple story that is told poetically with astonishing depth and almost frightening sincerity. Nicolas Cage, returning to top form after a recent sea of garbage, delivers another great performance as the eponymous anti-hero, Joe, an ex-con haunted by a violent past and an uncertain future.

When Joe crosses paths with a homeless teenager named Gary (Tye Sheridan) and his abusive, alcoholic father, Wade (Gary Poulter), their lives become irrevocably entwined in a web of violence, betrayal, retribution and redemption. Joe hires Gary temporarily to help his crew of forest workers (played by real-life laborers) who poison sick trees so they may later be replaced with healthy ones.

Their relationship starts off strong — they seem to share an almost psychic emotional connection, feeling each other’s loneliness and dreaming each other’s day dreams — but is complicated with Gary asks Joe to let his father come work for him too. Gary is a hardworking kid, principled and steadfast. His father is the opposite, an old drunk whose decayed morals and disparately vicious behavior lead him into trouble with violent people as he and his family, also including a wife and daughter, wander from town to town.

This is the kind of powerful character study we’ve seen before from Cage in films like “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” and “Leaving Las Vegas,” and director David Gordon Green, also in top form again after slumming it with unfortunate flops like “The Sitter” and “Your Highness,” generates an atmosphere thick with tension. This is a visual experience as well as a compelling story, and with “Joe,” Green is working in the mode of his early independent films, particularly his stunning first two features, “George Washington” and “All the Real Girls.”

His style is deeply reminiscent of that of filmmaker Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven,” “The Tree of Life”) — I actually find Green’s films more compelling and focused than Malick’s — and maintains a dreamlike rhythm that is punctuated by sequences of startling realism. Working with his longtime cinematographer Tim Orr, Green hypnotically captures the essence of the rural south, and the murky back woods setting these characters inhabit, in every frame.

The way Green works with actors (and non-actors) is just as riveting and, in this case, brutally so. Sheridan and Cage are so natural and subtle in this film. It’s fascinating to see these two generations of actors working together with results that spark and sizzle with energy.  Poulter, an actual homeless man at the time the film was made, is transcendent in this role, reaching notes most trained actors dare not approach.

Sadly, Poulter was found dead in a creek prior to the film’s release, leaving this as a deeply personal, painful and moving one-off performance. It’s truly unforgettable.

You can’t shake this film. Its humanity warms you and its realism causes you to shudder. It will undoubtedly be one of the year’s best films, and indicates the beginning of another golden period of filmmaking for Green.

★★★★ (out of four)

‘Mud’

After writing and directing the best film of 2011, “Take Shelter,” Jeff Nichols is back with “Mud,” a film for all of the senses and another masterful piece of storytelling that secures Nichols as a serious modern cinematic talent.

“Mud” is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Ellis (Tye Sheridan), who is experiencing the kind of summer where the adventure of childhood yields to the more severe reality of adulthood, including the possibility that his parents may not love each other anymore. Ellis lives in a worn down houseboat in Southeast Arkansas along the Mississippi River. He often cruises down the river on an old boat with his best friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), and one day the two venture off to a small island where they discover a curious sight: a boat lodged high in a tree.

They climb inside the boat, planning to claim it and use it as a makeshift clubhouse, when Ellis finds a grocery bag contain bread and beans and realizes someone already has claimed the boat and is living there. They climb down, head back out to the river to leave and come across a tall, filthy man called Mud (Matthew McConaughey). Mud wears nails shaped like crosses in the heels of his boots, which he says ward off evil spirits, blue jeans and a button down shirt, his lucky shirt, he tells the boys.

He also has a few tattoos and carries a gun in his belt, which he says is for protection against some bad people who are looking for him.

Much of what the boys come to know about Mud comes from Mud himself, but how reliable is the man with the mysterious past and the crosses in his boots, the man who is stranded on an island trying to fix up the boat in the tree and escape with his lost love, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), a woman living in town and seemingly under some kind of threat just like Mud?

Let’s talk about McConaughey for a minute, and his stellar, nuanced performance here that continues his long, successful climb from making a string of bad movies — “Failure to Launch,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Ghost of Girlfriends Past,” anyone? — to making brilliant movies. It started with “The Lincoln Lawyer,” which featured his best performance, continued with “Bernie” and “Killer Joe,” two more career bests, and Stephen Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike,” in which he stole the show as male stripper Dallas.

Now comes “Mud,” which features perhaps the best performance of his career as he continues to raise the bar for himself and for his career. This is strong, rich material and McConaughey delivers, developing the character Mud with such sadness and heartbreak, layered into an unstable, obsessive man capable of both love and reason, but not at the same time.

Also notable are knockout performances from young actors Sheridan and Lofland, and veteran actors Shepard and Joe Don Baker, who plays Mud’s nemesis, King, who in one chilling scene hosts a prayer group brought together to pray for Mud’s death. There also is a terrific turn by Michael Shannon, a Nichols regular, as Neckbone’s eccentric Uncle Galen, and two moving performances by Witherspoon, and Sarah Paulson and Ray McKinnon as Ellis’ estranged parents.

With the richness of a great novel, “Mud” unfolds at a slow, deliberate pace, affording every character the chance to develop into living and breathing people, including Sam Shepard’s supposed ex-CIA sniper, Tom Blankenship, who lives across the river from Ellis and mostly keeps to himself in his retirement, but who also is a paternal entity in Mud’s life.

The ebb and flow of the story, and the way Nichols allows it to happen in front of us so naturally, is remarkable, particularly in context of today’s American cinema. Like many great filmmakers, rather than rushing toward thrills and dramatic catharsis, Nichols takes his time and earns the emotional resonance we come to feel in the final moments of the film, and then continue to feel after we leave the theater. “Mud” is not a film we see and then forget: it stays with you, and will no doubt reward multiple viewings.

So far, “Mud” is the best film of 2013. Once again, Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone craft a visually striking, unforgettable experience that reestablishes just how powerful filmmaking can be.

★★★★ (out of 4)

“The Place Beyond the Pines”

“The Place Beyond the Pines” tells three stories that are woven together by the relentless threads of fate, paternal duty, and tragedy. The title references the setting of the film, Schenectady, New York — Schenectady stems from a Mohawk Indian word for “place beyond the pine plains” — and, more literally, a scene featuring a crucial turning point in the film that I won’t reveal here.

I begin with this because, as I watched writer/director David Cianfrance’s second major film and newest feat of fearless ambition after “Blue Valentine,” one of the best films of 2010, I was, above all, struck by the strong presence of the setting itself. The environment is another living, breathing character in “The Place Beyond the Pines.”

The first of the three stories concerns a carnival motorcycle stunt driver named Luke (Ryan Gosling) who discovers he has an infant son by an old girlfriend, Romina (a terrific Eva Mendes) and feels compelled to help raise him, despite the fact that Romina already has another boyfriend (Mahershala Ali). Luke befriends a mechanic named Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) who sees Luke’s desperation for some extra money, and gets him into bank robbing using his extraordinary motorcycle skills during the getaway.

Luke’s story bleeds into the next, in which an ambitious rookie cop named Avery (Bradley Cooper), a father himself, deals with corruption and greed in his police department. Ray Liotta is at his most menacing as Deluca, a seedy detective whose unannounced presence at Avery’s home one evening makes for one of the best and most uncomfortable scenes in the film. Avery’s wife, Jennifer (Rose Byrne) clearly knows something’s up, but Deluca just keep on smiling and joking around, through all the doom and darkness that looms over them.

Drugs, money, and false testimony: This department has it all, and the chief, Weirzbowski (Robert Clohessy), isn’t exactly clean, himself. All of this corruption weighs on Avery’s conscience, and leads into the final and, unfortunately, weakest act of “The Place Beyond the Pines,” which relies a bit too much on coincidence while slowing down the momentum of the film. Luke’s son, Jason (Dane DeHaan), befriends Avery’s son, A.J. (Emory Cohen), and the two come to learn about each other’s pasts in a journey of shame, redemption, and consequences that approach Shakespearean proportions, but don’t quite get there.

Cianfrance immerses us so deeply in this city, and in the lives of the characters inhabiting it, that at times we feel as though we can smell it, feel it and breath it in as the stories unfold. It’s a remarkable quality found in the films of Terrence Malick, Jeff Nichols and David Gordon Green, and here, Cianfrance pulls no punches: This is raw, innovative filmmaking, and although the intensity and plausibility noticeably fade in the third act, the first two are brilliant, and charge forward with breathless intensity.

Much of this intensity comes from Gosling and Cooper, who both continue to raise the bar and give one bravura performance after another. Eva Mendes, likewise, gives the best performance of her career thus far as a woman in agony, trying to raise her child right while torn between dreams and reality, and Mendelsohn, always an interesting actor to watch work, delivers another flawless performance as Luke’s vessel into high crime.

As the sons of the fathers, DeHaan and Cohen must deal with less riveting material, but one of them deals with it more authentically and effectively, and that is DeHaan, whose work in the superhero found footage movie “Chronicle” showed him to be a powerful screen presence. Here, he does a good job of communicating the sadness and frustration of dealing with his father, Luke’s legacy, particularly in contrast with that of A.J.’s father, Avery.

Although just as ambitious as his previous film, “Blue Valentine,” “The Place Beyond the Pines” ultimately shows Cianfrance’s reach exceeding his grasp. He captures the setting so beautifully and conjures up some wonderful ideas and twists of fate, but leaves the final act too messy, meandering and dependent on chance, and it does flow nearly as smoothly as the rest of the film. It is, however, good to know that Cianfrance is the real deal, a serious talent in modern cinema and a filmmaker to watch.

★★ 1/2 (out of 4)

‘Dark Horse’

Todd Solondz’s “Dark Horse” continues the writer/director’s fascination with sad, damaged characters searching for happiness, whose suffering we empathize with at times and relish in at others. All the while, Solondz dares us to look away, perhaps into the closest mirror, from the frightening sincerity on screen. As a filmmaker, he is fearless and pushes so far over the edge of what P.C. is these days that he circles back again and reminds us of the importance of breaking the laws and blurring the lines between the tolerable and the taboo.

Jordan Gelber is dynamite in this movie as Abe, an overly confident and confrontational toy collector who is in his thirties and living with his parents. Neither his emotionally distant father, Jackie (a stellar, subdued Christopher Walken), nor his coddling mother, Phyllis (Mia Farrow), expects much of him. His brother, Richard (Justin Bartha) is a successful medical doctor.

Abe works for his father at his real estate office, but Jackie’s secretary, Marie (Donna Murphy) does all of Abe’s work while he spends his time scoping out rare collector’s editions of toys on eBay on his computer.

In the opening scene of “Dark Horse,” Abe is at a wedding sitting at a table beside Miranda (Selma Blair). They are not together, and as he leans in and coolly tells her he doesn’t usually dance, she appears unsettled and uninterested. Later, he finds her again and, in a scene as painful, funny and awkward as Solondz has ever filmed, asks for her phone number.

On their first date, another painful scene where Abe rambles on about fate to a lethargic Miranda, he proposes to her.

Miranda, an emotionally troubled, depressed and medicated woman, at first refuses Abe’s marriage proposal sending him into a spiral of aggression in which he quits his job and curses everyone on the planet. Miranda soon after develops a sense of guilt and changes her mind. She wants to rebound from her passive, morose lifestyle and decides to settle for Abe, telling him as they embrace that “it could have been worse… so much worse.”

We come to understand Abe as a pretty delusional guy. Even from the opening scenes, as we see him pursue a girl who is the farthest thing from interested, and then drive home in his big, bright yellow eye-sore of a hummer while jamming to pre-teen pop music, what Solondz has referred to as “‘American Idol’ music,” we get the sense that Abe is hopelessly holding on to something that is long gone and never to be seen again.

As the film gradual evolves from its more straightforward first half into a kind of surreal series of events punctuated by Abe’s dreams and visions of interactions with Marie, his father’s secretary, we learn that Miranda has hepatitis B and will survive. But Abe is troubled by this and comes to question everything that has come before, and even argues with his mother and brother in one imaginary scene where he wants to know why Richard was the favored son.

With “Dark Horse,” the ever-subversive Solondz twists the “boy meets girl” story to its breaking point, and then in a truly unexpected finale, reveals the underlying sweetness of the whole damn thing. Although it is far from his darkest film, “Dark Horse” feels completely “Solondz” in its approach to telling a story in the age of the man-child. His film is darkly comic and moving without ever feeling sentimental.

Solondz tells a great story, and after his somewhat cold, distant “Life During Wartime,” an interesting but redundant continuation of his masterpiece “Happiness,” “Dark Horse” reveals that he still has a lot more stories to tell.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)

‘Zero Dark Thirty’

I chewed my nails and broke a sweat watching Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” one of the darkest, most suspenseful films of the year. It is Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s follow-up to their 2009 hit, “The Hurt Locker,” which won Bigelow her first directing Oscar, Mark Boal his first screenwriting Oscar and the movie Best Picture.

I don’t predict “Zero Dark Thirty” to be quite as successful, but for all it’s worth, this taut thriller about the decade-long events leading up to killing of Osama Bin Laden by a Navy S.E.A.L. team manages to chill your blood and raise your heart rate. In another excellent performance in an already impressive career, Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a character based on the woman who was the brains behind the entire operation.

In the film, there is a scene where she stands in a meeting room with fellow C.I.A. agents and their director (James Gandolfini), who asks for percentages of confidence that Bin Laden is in fact living inside a large, heavily surveyed compound nearby the Pakistan Military Academy. On the table the agents are standing around is a model of the compound and its surrounding geography. Everyone but Maya seems to think there is a 50/50 chance that Bin Laden is inside the compound. Maya says she is 100 percent sure. This is the place, and she knows it.

This scene, in part, defines what “Zero Dark Thirty” is interested in showing, Maya’s long and painful struggle to convince everyone of her confidence. She becomes obsessed with finding the man behind the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and devotes her life, and often risks it, to get the job done. There are some harrowing scenes of torture, which have come under much scrutiny by critics who say they glorify or misrepresent the truth.

From my perspective, they are a vital part of the film, and go a long way toward lending hard gravity to the film’s final shot. There is not a doubt in my mind that the C.I.A. has tortured, and in trying to learn Bin Laden’s location, I cannot help but believe at least the essence of what went on post-9/11 is reflected on screen here by the filmmakers. They are difficult to watch at times, but as parts of a whole they are necessary to the story — after all, this is a story based on true events, not a documentary feature.

As in “The Hurt Locker,” there are long periods of silence and waiting in “Zero Dark Thirty,” punctuated by scenes of quick, blood-curdling violence and action. Bigelow’s direction is not as stylish as David Fincher’s, but the overall pacing of this film is reminiscent of Fincher’s “Zodiac,” in that it tracks the search for one man over the course of many years and captures the obsession that develops in the course of trying to do so. “Zero Dark Thirty” is the lesser film for a lot of reasons, including some editing issues that rob a number of scenes of suspense, and an annoying, inconsistent series of title cards that seem redundant in hindsight, and unnecessarily split of segments of the movie.

The final 30 minutes of “Zero Dark Thirty” alone are worth the price of admission for this movie, as they capture the actual storming and killing of Bin Laden. No spoiler here, we all know he is killed at the end, so all that remains is the execution of the sequence, and Bigelow directs the hell out of it. A lot of silence and pure suspense, punctuated by some truly jarring explosions, all shot in night vision, leads up to what can only be described as the ultimate anti-climax, but that is the exact ending this film needed to prove the point it is trying to make. The amount of violence, torture, interrogation, death, tears and political tactics that went on between the 9/11 attacks and the actual death of Bin Laden leaves Maya and all of us thinking, what now?

It is a far more bittersweet, morally ambiguous ending than a lot of filmmakers would have approached, and that is why Bigelow and Boal are a great pairing. They take incredibly controversial subject material and, after Hollywood churned out a series of failed, preachy Iraq war movies, they made “The Hurt Locker.” Now, they have made “Zero Dark Thirty,” and once again they get it right, more or less.

★★★ (out of 4)

‘Cloud Atlas’

In the year 2012, filmmakers Andy and Lana Wachowski (“The Matrix Trilogy”) teamed up with filmmaker Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run,” “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”) to adapt David Mitchell’s acclaimed novel “Cloud Atlas,” which consists of six stories set in different times (a few in different worlds), for the screen, a challenging task considering the complexity and richness of the source material.

Here is a brief breakdown of the stories:

In the year 1849, a young American lawyer named Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) travels by sea to the south pacific to finish singing a business contract for his father-in-law. On arrival to his destination, he witnesses the brutal whipping of a slave named Autra (David Gyasi), who plays a crucial role in Ewing’s return journey to San Fransisco.

In the year 1936, a gay English musician and composer named Robert Frobisher (Ben Wishaw) begins working for famed composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent), all the while working on what will be his own masterpiece, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” and writing letters to his distant lover, Rufus Sixsmith (James D’Arcy).

In the year 1973, a journalist named Louisa Rey (Halle Berry) tries to uncover a nuclear conspiracy, and in the process becomes targeted by hired hitman Bill Smoke (Hugo Weaving).

In the year 2012, 65-year-old publisher Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent again) unwittingly ends up in a nursing home while on the run from some dangerous Irish gangsters.

In the year 2144, the world has undergone drastic changes and become an Orwellian dystopia. In New Seoul, Korea, a genetically engineered fabricant called Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), before her execution, recounts her journey from being an enslaved server at a fast-food restaurant to leading a revolution against a totalitarian government.

In the year 2321, referred to as “106 winters after the fall,” all technologically advanced civilization has left earth, most others have died and the only remaining people live in a series of tribes. Some of these tribes are made up of peaceful hunter-gatherers, while others are violent barbarians. One peaceful tribesman named Zachry (Tom Hanks) experiences visions of a grotesque being he calls Old Georgie (Weaving again).

After witnessing the death of his brother-in-law at the hands of cannibalistic tribal leader (Grant again), Zachry returns home to his village where a woman named Meronym (Berry), a technologically advanced visitor, has arrived in search of an outpost station called Cloud Atlas. Meronym needs someone to guide her, and after she saves his niece from a venomous bite, Zachry agrees to lead the way.

Were the Wachowski’s and Tykwer successful in their endeavor? My answer is yes and no. Yes, because “Cloud Atlas” is a mesmerizing, beautiful film, and the work of passionate and dedicated artists who handle the material with brilliant visual style. They succeed in restructuring Mitchell’s story in order to give the six different stories — seven including a sequence by which the film is bookended — better pace and shared meaning in the moment. The special effects are tremendous but used sparingly; this is a dialogue driven film with instances of violence, suspense and humor.

But even though the film works on so many levels, where the incredibly ambitious “Cloud Atlas” occasionally stumbles is in the story department, as many of the finer details slip through the cracks, particularly in the two final segments. The filmmakers skim over a lot of concepts involving the exact hierarchy of humans in the future. There is mention of “pure bloods,” and I suppose everyone else is an “impure blood,” but I had trouble understanding who is who and why. I want to understand this more, but “Cloud Atlas” moves right along and I just ended up accepting that there are bad guys and good guys in the future, which ultimately left me feeling less attached to the 2144 segment of the film.

Some similar issues occur in the final segment, but these become a little clearer the more I think about them. They do not take away from the overall experience.

The performances in the film are consistent and entertaining, surrounded by gorgeous art direction and production design. Nearly every main actor appears in each of the segments, sometimes disguised by brilliant make-up effects to the point where I didn’t recognize otherwise very recognizable people. This is an incredible ensemble cast that works together in so many different ways that I kept sensing that “Cloud Atlas,” on top of being one of the most ambitious movies this year, could have been such a disaster under the weight of so many terrific actors in one place.

Fortunately, a disaster it is not. Tom Tykwer composed a beautiful score, and Cinematographers Frank Griebe and John Toll capture striking, memorable images that I won’t soon forget.

Aside from some story development issues, the Wachowski’s and Tykwer have done a fabulous job interconnecting the stories of “Cloud Atlas.” The directing duties were split between them. Tykwer handled the middle three segments, which I think are the best, and the Wachowski’s shot the first and final two, which are good but not great. But because they made the brave decision to intertwine the stories rather than present the movie as an omnibus of sorts, where each story is told separately, “Cloud Atlas” soars.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)