This was kind of a weird year at the movies. There are a lot of really good movies, but the number of great films that rise straight to the top are relatively few. Which makes putting together a list such as this one a lot more fun.

Two big blockbusters made the list, one a family movie, the other a lost-in-space comedy, both in the top 10 grossing films of the year. The rest are a list of serious, low- to mid-budget movies spanning genres and styles, all made for adult audiences. No superheroes to be found.

 

#10: The Martian

Who knew Ridley Scott had The Martian in him? Scott is seriously serious in his motion pictures, both tonally and thematically. His work in the past decade has become almost parodic of his early masterpieces: dour affairs without joy or pleasure to be found.

But then came The Martian, a light-hearted comedy about a man stuck on Mars. Scott’s exacting precision as a technician finally made room for humorous characters and a relaxed style. Much of the credit for The Martian goes to Matt Damon, who holds a conversation with himself for about half of this movie. Damon hasn’t been this good in a decade, and his performance as Astronaut/Botanist Mark Watney reminds us of his inner-movie star quality.

#9: Ex Machina

On the Stake Podcast, I said that Ex Machina is more interesting than it is good. But today I think that’s wrong. Ex Machina is very good, if only because it is so thematically and narratively confrontational.

Having seen the film twice, I walked away with two different conclusions about Alex Garland’s debut film about A.I., humanity, and empathy. That audiences take from the film such differing emotions and reactions speaks to the success of the story and the writing. But Garland shows an additional capacity to direct; with a a camera, but more importantly, with actors. Alicia Vikander, Domnhall Gleason and Oscar Isaac all give memorable perforamces that work against our archetypal understandings of men, women, heroes, and happy endings.

#8: Mediterranea

Mediterranea is a movie for made for this moment on earth. The world is in a refugee migrant crisis the likes of which we have never faced. In Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, Eastern Europe, millions and millions of people are looking for a home.

Mediterranea is the story of two of those people, Aviya and Abas. Economic migrants from Burkina Faso, the two friends travel on foot across Africa to Tripoli, where they board a boat headed to Italy. Their story is told with unflinching realism; Italian director Jonas Carpignano doesn’t make heroes of his migrants, nor does he make cartoons out of the Italian locals, some of whom welcome refugees and some of whom violently do not.

Instead, Mediterannea goes after a more enduring truth: we all want to provide and protect the one’s we love. For some, that task is becoming nearly impossible.

#7: Carol

There are two films on this list that deal with love, romance, and loss. One is a stylish and elegant 1950s lesbian drama, the other is a hyper-modern comedy about trans sex workers. The two make a great pairing.

Todd Haynes’ Carol is an illicit love affair between two women in the 1950s. It is an old-fashioned movie, expertly crafted and fully imagined down to the most minute detail. Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett both give quietly regal, classical Hollywood performances, deeply affecting but easily recognizable. They are full of longing and stillness, soulfully connected despite their age and class differences.

The direction and photography follow the same pattern, soulful, lingering, quiet. Todd Haynes is as sophisticated an artist as one will find in the movie business, and his work continues to improve. Velvet Goldmine (my favorite of his films) has an exuberance and wildness in it’s component parts, but it doesn’t come near the fascination of a film like Carol.

#6: Tangerine

Tangerine is a low budget indie movie about transgender prostitutes, shot on the streets of Los Angeles with an iPhone 5. Sounds like a gimmick, perhaps, but Tangerine is the best trans movie in a year that provided a surprising number of trans-oriented films.

It’s Christmas Eve in LA, and Sin-dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) just got out of jail. Her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) informs her that her boyfriend has started cheating on her, and she sets out to find the pimp who broke her heart.

Sean Baker’s movie captures real people, living real lives. That comes through technique; every shot is beautiful and the direction takes advantage the low-key tools. Baker can get his camera anywhere, and some of his shot constructions are simply stunning. But if the film looks great (and it does) it’s performances are even better. The leads bring authenticity to the scathing humor found in their work as trans sex workers (that’s what happens when trans actors get trans roles). But even more, every character Sin-dee and Alexandra encounter is memorable.

It only takes about 5 minutes of this film to realize Tangerine is brutally funny and moving, and truly original.

#5: Experimenter

The experimenter in Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter is the social-psychologist Dr. Stanley Milgram. He was the creator of the Milgram Experiments in the early 1960s, which led subjects to believe they were administering electric shocks based on whether an unseen man was answering questions correctly.

What Milgram was really studying, though, was obedience. Would a subject administer electric shocks to an unknown human person simply because they were told to do so? Milgram found that, more often than not, yes. The Milgram Experiment has been controversial since its publication 1963, but director Michael Almereyda is interested in more than just the ethics of Staney Milgram.

Almereyda’s interest is in lies, truth, and deception. His film blurs the lines of genres and mediums (media, technically), incorporating stage-performance and absurd surrealism. Peter Sarsgaard plays Milgram with a dignified air of sophistication; his family fled the holocaust, and his interest, or perhaps need, to know why humans obey the order to torture and kill each other is understandable.

#4: Mad Max: Fury Road

For sheer manic-panic excitement, nothing this year come’s close to Mad Max: Fury Road. George Miller’s return to the post-apocalyptic outback is as good as anything bearing the name Mad Max, and just possibly better than the originals.

But Fury Road is more than just a high-octane action movie. It also demonstrates for all the young men making movies right now to make a modern action movie. It has been called feminist; I don’t know if that’s true. But either way it is a humane film about human beings with actualization and complexity. That itself is worth celebrating in action cinema.

That Fury Road created such a ripple in the movie-going world is evidence that too few genre, action and sci-fi films are really striving not just to kick ass, but to redefine movie culture. Avengers and Jurassic World may have made a billion dollars, but no one is pitching a battle about whether they are moving the ball forward in 2015. That was left to Mad Max: Fury Road.

#3: Inside Out

There are certain genres where the highest quality cinema immediately makes itself known. Animated family movies is one of those genres. When a truly great animated film releases, it becomes so evident that the culture as whole rejoices (this isn’t true of course). That was the case for Inside Out, back in June. Number three is probably too low for the best film Pixar has yet made. But so it goes.

Inside Out is the first meta movie in Pixar’s canon. They have always made films that treated the intellectual capabilities of children with dignity. And now they made a film that anthropomorphizes the dignity of a child’s brain. Riley is everyone, her brain is everyone’s brain: a mess of conflict, contradiction, fear and goodness and wonder. The broadness of Riley’s emotions may oversimplify what it feels like to be a kid, but the portrait of Riley learning to understand complex emotions is the single best moment in movies this year.

#2: Queen of Earth

There aren’t enough movies like Queen of Earth. Sophisticated psychological dramas for adults that explore humanity in its most dark and toilsome arena: the decaying mind. Writer/director Alex Ross Perry doesn’t pull his punches in Queen of Earth: he has created two complex women in a simple scenario, and asks each to push themselves to their utmost limits.

There has been a lot of talk about Leo DiCaprio’s intense, limit-pushing performance in The Revenant. But Leo has nothing on Elisabeth Moss. The terrible, despairing reaches that Moss finds in her performance as Catherine are just this side of Roman Polanski’s darkest depths. Against this spiraling wildness, Katherine Waterston’s Virginia embodies her frustration, anger, and sadness with an authentic concern.

#1: Spotlight

Spotlight is an investigative film about crimes so horrible that no one wanted to believe they were true. Set in Boston in the early 2000s, the film depicts the work of a team of journalists working for the Boston Globe, who are directed by their new editor to explore accusations surfacing around the Catholic Church about rape and sex abuse of children.

Nobody particularly wants this case, but if it’s true, then it needs covering.

Spotlight was written and directed by Tom McCarthy. This is McCarthy’s fifth film; his output has been unsteady: last year he made the bizarre, and bad Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler, a few years before that, the excellent The Station Agent. With Spotlight, McCarthy is so confident and assured that he’s clearly taking the next step as a director, because this is superbly efficient and gripping film-making. The actors are at the top of their games; Michael Keaton and John Slattery are particularly inspired, giving subtle performances conveying conflict and depth with the smallest of touches. Most of the characters in this film were raised Catholic, and as the story unfolds and the scale of the priest sex abuse scandal becomes clear, the horror hits home for everyone in powerful, intimate ways.

What elevates Spotlight to the top spot this year, though, is McCarthy, who seems to understand not just how to tell this story, but why. The revelations of the priest sex abuse scandal, and the cover up in the Catholic Church is one of the most important news stories of the past half century. The reporters on the Spotlight team were not prepared for what they found. A decade later, priest rape is still coming to light across the U.S. We’ve needed time to grasp the magnitude of this story. With Spotlight, we can take a big step towards doing just that.

Update: An earlier version of this article claimed that Spotlight was Tom McCarthy’s second film. It is his fifth. We regret the error.

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