EDGE Best Lists :: Kilian Melloy on the Year in Film

EDGE critic Kilian Melloy offers his choices for the 10 Best films for 2015:

1. Brooklyn

This year was especially ripe in period dramas and plump roles for gifted actresses. Nick Hornby's adaptation of the novel by Colm T�ib�n doesn't rely on car chases, fireballs, or fisticuffs. Instead, the drama is sustained through captivating storytelling. Director John Crowley guides this page-to-screen transition successfully, and Saoirse Ronan proves herself a top-shelf actress, mastering and giving substance to a role that could too easily have been reduced to fluff.

2. Carol

This, too, is an adaptation, a period piece, and a story in which women are central players. It's also a touching lesbian romance -- and it's based on a novel, "The Price of Salt," by Patricia Highsmith. Director Todd Haynes works the same Sirkian magic he conjured with "Far From Heaven," and the casting of Cate Blanchette and Mara Rooney as the scandalous (by 1950s standards) and slightly age-inappropriate lovers is a key ingredient.

3. Spotlight

Boasting the year's best ensemble, this Boston-set film recounts how a team of investigative reporters at Boston's newspaper of record, the Globe (under the auspices of a new editor who's not cowed by, nor beholden to, the city's deeply-rooted institutional good old boys networks), broke the pedophile priest scandal that rocked -- and continues to rock -- the Catholic church worldwide.

4. Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman's latest movie is as strange and wonderful as you'd expect it to be, coming from the off-kilter genius behind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation," and the underrated "Synechdoche, New York." In "Anomalisa," a middle-aged businessman has found success, but feels that he's missed out on the one true love of his life. He struggles with existential and emotional numbness until he meets Lisa, the one single person who stands out in a hellish landscape of (to his eyes) virtually identical people. How could this film possibly have been made as anything other than a stop-motion animation project?

5. Youth

Detractors call this film "aimless," as if that in itself were unheard of in movies. But Paolo Sorrentino (of "The Great Beauty" fame) has an aim, and he hits his mark: "Youth" teases, lulls, harangues, and scalds. Finally, you either come away feeling like you get it...or you don't. Superficially, the story concerns how two aging men, longtime friends Mick (Harvey Keitel) and Fred (Michael Caine), deal with their advancing years. Fred's ready to let go of work; Mick is keen to film one final movie, his "testament" and capstone to his career. Around them swirl the complications of human relationships and expectations, even as they retreat from everyday life at a luxurious European spa and resort.

6. Son of Saul (Saul fia)

First-time filmmaker L�szl� Nemes shows us an often-overlooked corner of the Holocaust -- the experience of "sonderkommandos," prisoners given trustee status, at the cost of certain death after just a few months. Their job: To coax new arrivals into the gas chambers and then help the guards rifle their discarded clothing for treasures. When one such sonderkommando named Saul thinks he's spotted his son among the casualties of the Auschwitz death machine, he suddenly gains a higher purpose: To secure the boy a proper Jewish funeral before his impending execution, a fate that might be avoided if a planned uprising succeeds. The steadiness of his quest gives Saul (played by G�za R�hrig) steadiness and calm in the midst of a turbulent world. Nemes' camera captures both the continual upheaval of the camp and the centered industry of Saul's mission.

7. The Martian

Andy Weir's self-published novel of the same name thrilled science geeks and shot to best-seller status when a mainstream publisher picked it up. Hollywood came calling, of course, and managed to respect the source material when turning it into a cinematic adventure. Astronaut Mark Watney -- immensely charming narrator of the book and scientifically literate astronaut -- is played by Matt Damon, who steps into Watney's space suit with confidence and pulls it off. Problem: Watney has been left behind on Mars when a sudden crisis sends his crewmates back to Earth. They think he's dead; no one is coming back to the red planet for another four years; Watney, in the film's instantly classic one-liner, is left to solve the problem of survival the only way he knows how: "Science the shit out of it!" In a related tale of desperate straits and long odds, director Ridley Scott regains his equilibrium after a short string of dismal misfires.

8. The Tribe

This Ukrainian film, written and directed by Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, has no subtitles. But don't feel bad: Even native audiences were left to puzzle out what the characters were saying. The film takes place at a school for the deaf, where a lost young man (literally; he has to ask directions to find the place) is taken in by a gang that runs the place with the collaboration of one of the staff. This is a tale of life stripped down to its core essentials: Survival, sexual power, hierarchical status, and brute domination. Moments of tenderness, violence, and frank carnality intersect and blend in kaleidoscopic fashion. As to the task of following the "dialogue?" It takes focus, but it's a richly rewarding experience.

9. The Danish Girl

Perhaps Tom Hooper should just stay away from musicals and stick with period pieces in which the protagonists struggle to specify -- in speech or gesture, rather than song -- their inmost truths. In "The King's Speech," it was a matter of George VI (Colin Firth) trying to overcome a stutter with the help of unconventional speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). That film won Firth the Oscar he was denied for playing gay in Tom Ford's "A Single Man," and snagged the statuette for Best Film and Best Director, among other categories. In this new movie -- which deserves more Oscar love, not least for leading man Eddie Redmayne, who took the prize for last year's "The Theory of Everything" -- Hooper dramatizes the true story of Einar Wegener (Redmayne), a transwoman struggling to become the person she knows she is despite her outer appearances -- and do so while holding on to the love of her wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander). Matthias Schoenaerts appears in still another deftly done supporting role.

10. The Revenant

Just when you thought Tom Hardy's 2015 schedule couldn't possibly accommodate anything more (he starred as Mad Max in "Fury Road" and did double duty as both Kray twins in "Legend"), here is with Leonard DiCaprio. Hardy plays John Fitzgerald, an untrustworthy man with a major part to play in Alejandro Gonz�lez I��rritu's historical drama, which is based on actual events; DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a Caucasian who once lived with Native Americans and came away from the experience with expertise as a guide (and also with a son). A fur trapping expedition goes horribly wrong; among other misfortunes, Glass has an ungentle encounter with a bear. That's how the movie starts. The rest is a slow and often searing unspooling of trajectories that collide with tragic results. The actors turn in compelling work, but the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki often steals the show.