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Best of 2015: Movies February 24, 2016

Regular readers know I like to preface my list of faves with some box office stats, courtesy of the indispensable Box Office Mojo. A casual observer might think Hollywood had a good year in the U.S., with ticket sales a record, and up 7% from 2014. But two colossal hits, the Star Wars and Jurassic Park reboots, did not represent a tide that lifted leakier boats.

Photo credit: flickr user Hans Splinter

While their success hammers home the message that hits rule – does anyone mis-interpret the long tail phenomenon any more? – as my colleague Paul Sweeting writes, movies outside of the Top Five performed relatively poorly. Click through on his analysis; it’s worth a read. Studios can’t rely on the inertia of their old release and marketing tactics.

Meanwhile, in 2015:

• Star Wars, practically a remake rather than just a re-start, collected nearly $1 billion in domestic box office, making it the biggest hit ever in current dollars. Gone with the Wind and the original Star Wars did better by other accounting. The $650 million that the dinos raked in was way, way better than recent years’ top-performers, which were lucky to crack $300 million. The disappointing Avengers 2 was the only pure superhero Top 10 flick, and wonder of wonders, an original property, The Martian, made it onto that list. Too bad it’s not particularly sequel-friendly.
• Disney’s acquisitiveness paid off: it scored with Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar. Universal was a more surprising star via the fairly risky Jurassic move and the demographics-friendly continued success of the Fast ‘n Furious franchise, as well as those still-kicking Minions. There were just under 30 $100+ movies this year, which is about par for recent history. What really matters is how much one spends to make and market ’em.

I saw – and enjoyed – about half of the Top 20 movies last year. But only The Martian made my “best of” list. What else did? Proving I’m not a complete snob, but also not much of a reflector of popularity if a fair-to-middling predictor of Oscar-nom worthiness, last year I saw three 3.5-star movies. That was half as many as 2014. Here’s my take from my Rotten Tomato/Flixster reviews, Best Picture nominations in bold:

• Spotlight. Shamelessly hits all the newsroom cliches and features some mannered performances – I’m looking at you Ruffalo and Keaton – but the riveting script builds to a big, emotional payoff. Makes the case why we’d better save a few #$%@ newspapers.
• Mad Max: Fury Road – Oh yeah, Miller still has it. Totally metal.
• Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – This TV-funded documentary makes creative and enlightening use of rich archival material, and should be seen on a big screen with the volume turned up. God, I miss troubled-genius rockstars.

To round out my Top 10, these are my favorite  3-star movies:

• The Big Short – So close. Righteous anger and daring approach just falls short of satirically nailing the greedy b@stards properly.
• The Martian – Science heroes FTW! Go, NASA!
• Creed – It’s probably a bad idea to do a feel-good boxing movie in 2015, but what the hey, this is a really good one. Sly is amazing – touchingly so – and Jordan should be a huge movie star based on charisma alone. And then there’s the shadow boxing with YouTube scene and the the mid-movie single-take fight scene….
• Jauja – Remember I have a very high tolerance for slow-moving, so naturalistic they’re surreal, trippy head movies that take place on the Edge of the Great Unknown, where Civilization Loses its Way.
• Steve Jobs – In Hollywood, genius @ssholes get happy endings. Sorkin’s three-act structure is daring but not completely successful: it’s stagey and a bit static, and Fassbender is the slightly too-cold center of a stellar cast. Way better than Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs at least has a theory of why he was who he was.
• Sicario – Until the script loses its cojones and the third act turns it into just another revenge thriller, this is a tense, visually stunning, action flick that also has something serious to say about the ambiguity and futility of the War on Drugs. The slightly over-the-top score heightens the sense of dread, Del Toro and Brolin are solid, but Blunt is underwritten and wasted.
• Mr. Holmes – Yes, the pace is stately, but Sir Ian adds a marvelous interpretation to the Canon. True fans will be forgiven for getting a little weepy.

I did like Pixar’s Inside Out, that deftly blends gags and themes for grownups and for kids. But its animation is fairly uninspired, except for one art-gag that will be waaaayyy over the heads of the target audience. The Revenant was a cold, Epic Folly without any real meaning that certainly was no Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre, let alone Apocalypse Now. Bridge of Spies was classy but suspense-free. I haven’t seen Brooklyn or Room yet.

I’m still working on my Oscars hypotheses, but I don’t think they’ll give it to Iñárritu two years in a row.