Top 10 Movies of 2015 So Far

Achievement Unlocked: the year is now over 50% complete.To celebrate the arbitrary passing of 180 days (not 182.5 days like in this article’s first draft – cheers Google), the Flickering Myth team have compiled the Top 10 Movies of 2015 So Far (based on UK release dates, to make things easier). Here’s a spoiler: Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 didn’t make the cut.Over the past few weeks, our prestigious group of writers have submitted their personal Top 10s in order. The number one pick receives 10 points, the number two pick receives 9, number three gets 8…and so on until the tenth pick has a solitary ‘one’.If you want a more ’25 frames a second’ version of the Top 5, you can click on the video below to watch the July edition of The Flickering Myth Movie Show. The Top 5 Movies of 2015 So Far chat gets going from 12 minutes in, but all the minutes are equally good.But if you prefer your countdowns in an easy-to-digest, page turning format, that ‘next page’ button below is the one for you… 10. John WickSince that fateful day when Keanu Reeves fired his gun in the air and yelled “aaaarrrrgggh” he’s become a regular in the action genre. He dipped his toes with Point Break. He experienced box office and pop culture success with Speed, before ending the century as Neo in The Matrix, arguably the most significant action movie of the last 20 years in terms of cult-following, pop culture reference and blue printing future action films (even if The Matrix pilfered from more sources, than films in turn have since aped The Matrix).Whilst Reeves has often been dismissed as someone lacking in acting range, what he has done is take to the action world with great aplomb and enthusiasm. He does a lot of his own stunts. He throws himself into whatever he’s doing and takes his job very seriously. The crash course Martial arts training delivered to him in The Matrix trilogy has made him a very believable on screen fighter. He might not need to be making space on his mantle for an Oscar, but Reeves knows how to work hard. So now we have John Wick. A film that on paper sounds like a sillier version of Taken. At a modest 20 million budget, and with Reeve long since departed from box office radar, one might have assumed it was a glorified straight to Netflix special. It is not. It’s Reeve’s throwing his hat into the “mature action hero” ring. Now he may be 50 now, but he barely looks a day over 30. John Wick took critics by storm in the US at the tail end of last year. It’s garnered a cult following since and finally arrives on UK shores..Read the rest of Tom Jolliffe’s ★ ★ ★ ★ review here. 9. Big Hero 6With Pixars’ John Lasseter and Edwin Catmull involved, you know they’ve probably done well, and in Big Hero 6, there is very little disappointment. This is the next film to surface after the “redemption quadtrilogy” of The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Wreck It Ralph (a personal favourite), and the musically unending smash hit Frozen. Since bringing these guys in, Disney have totally turned it around, with some saying that Pixar has actually taken a little hit in creativity since Catmull and Lasseter assumed control of both studios.Tangents aside, Big Hero 6, directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams, is an adaptation of a little known Marvel comic, about a 14-year-old boy called Hiro (spectacularly mispronounced as “Hero” by seemingly everyone, bar one character in the film), a total robotics prodigy, with genius level intellect, who participates in underground robot fighting. Keeping the pledge of “no spoilers” (or no proper spoilers?) alive, he ends up making friends with a nurse robot called Baymax; a rotund, inflatable, and charming friend…Read the rest of Irwan Lowe’s ★ ★ ★ ★ review here. 8. A Most Violent YearHow far do you go to chase your American Dream while all around you is being torn asunder in the most violent year in the history of the greatest city in the world? For Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis), an immigrant who has worked his hands to the bone to become the city’s premium purveyor of oil, he will go as far as being decent and upstanding will take him. Along with his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain, Interstellar), they have worked their way to the top, but despite Abel’s best intentions of keeping his business clean, Anna knows what it takes to be the best, and when Abel seeks to purchase a bay-side oil refinery, he soon learns the true worth of chasing his dream, as the police led by David Oyelowo (Selma) and his bitter rivals close in.Director J.C. Chandor has built himself quite a healthy reputation over the last few years with his two debut efforts: Margin Call was a taut, at times breathless look at the excess of Wall Street; while All Is Lost was even better, a minimal but wonderful story of a sailor stranded at sea with a superb (and criminally overlooked) performance of Robert Redford. Third time out, you can see the confidence acclaim brings, running through the veins of A Most Violent Year in arguably the director’s most ambitious film yet. Cool, assured and riveting, Chandor’s third-leg of his early tripod of work is his shining glory…Read the rest of Scott J. Davis’ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.7. BirdmanAlejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is the type of film that only comes around once every several years. It is hilarious and entertaining while at the same time also challenging and dramatic. It is a portrait of a single man that makes bold statements about the current state of our society at large through its use of universal themes.The film opens with Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) having conversation with his growl of an inner voice while levitating in his shabby, theatre dressing room. The voice, that of his legendary former superhero character alter ego Birdman, is a character in itself, perpetually plaguing Thomson over the course of the film by way of his own pride and insecurities.While attempting to prove his relevance, through a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Thomson finds himself struggling to stay sane in a world far different from the one that once praised him for his big screen action movie exploits. Putting it all out on the line as writer, director and star of the play, Thomson’s perceived abilities are pushed to their very limits while he is simultaneously confronted by his past regrets as a husband and father…Read the rest of William Fanelli’s ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.6. It FollowsWhenever someone thinks the horror genre has just become brown-stained remakes and derivative straight-to-video nonsense, a movie like It Follows comes out and shakes the foundations. A brilliantly written movie, superbly acted and masterfully directed, It Follows is tremendous in every sense of the word.Like a urban legend you never knew, It Follows tells the story of young and naive girl Jay (Maika Monroe) who innocently sleeps with a boy from her school, only to discover that he’s passed something to her. This ‘it’ is now following her, manifested in a physical form. But only she can see it, and it won’t stop following her until she is either dead or passes it on to someone else.It Follows is quite obviously a metaphor for sexually transmitted diseases and the dangers that come with them. It’s not exactly the most subtle of metaphors and even the dumbest of folks can work this out, but It Follows never acts smug about what it’s saying. It knows that the audience will twig to what David Robert Mitchell is trying to say, and therefore it doesn’t act like it’s better that you for being so ‘clever’…Read the rest of Luke Owen’s ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.5. Kingsman: A Secret ServiceIn Matthew Vaughn’s second adaptation of a Mark Millar comic, he has once again succeeded in making an ultra-silly, violent and hugely entertaining film. Starting with the death of his father, we see estate teen Eggsy heading on the wrong path in life until he calls on an old favour from a veteran agent (Firth). What ensues are a range of training montages, fight scenes, tons of laughs and a lisping Samuel L Jackson. It is a film nothing short of perfection.The success of the film is due to the rapport between the cast and the wonderful direction from Vaughn and script from Jane Goldman. It feels as if the film has breathed into life from the comic book pages just as easily as Kick Ass did back in 2010; only this time it’s the spy thriller getting the treatment. Taking various elements from James Bond, Bourne and The Avengers (1961) it’s a spy thriller that hits all the clichés and inverts them spectacularly. There is no over the top love interest for Eggsy, no real damsel in distress etc. Instead we have all the gadgets imaginable combined with a sidekick assassin with blades for legs, an eccentric billionaire villain in a remote cave lair and more action then you can imagine. With snappy dialogue, hilarious one liners and the cutest pug I’ve seen in a while, it’s laugh a minute from start to finish…Read the rest of Helen Murdoch’s ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.Oh, and see what the Flickering Myth Movie Show panel thought of the movie, too – particuarly that one over ANAL-ised joke – in the video below:4. Jurassic WorldIn an age where the current trend is to rejuvenate long abandoned franchises with a shinier coat of paint known as CGI, Jurassic Park is one of the very few series that benefits from that fancy modern technology. I’ll always be a supporter of practical effects and doing everything the hard way, but two decades worth of advancements in cinema equate to being able to do shitloads of cool stuff with dinosaurs, more importantly stuff the original trilogy was incapable of pulling off.Of course this results in a different approach tonally; it’s even mentioned in the movie that Jurassic World must be bigger and scarier. Director Colin Trevorrow uses this opportunity to add a dash of unexpected yet welcome satirical edge on the current state of Hollywood; consumers want new ideas and to see things they have never seen before, while it is up to corporations and focus groups to test a myriad of concepts in hopes of finding something that makes gangbusters. The analogy here is with the Jurassic World itself; it is hard to believe that an amusement park filled to the brim with living, breathing dinosaurs could lose its “wow factor” but it is, revenue is still climbing but so are costs. The solution: genetically splice different breeds of dinosaurs to create a mega-attraction…Read the rest of Robert Kojder’s ★ ★ ★ review here.And also, listen to Luke Owen defend the movie’s merits on the Flickering Myth Podcast episode below… 3. Ex MachinaDesire, lust, and love are undoubtedly some of the strongest emotions that humans come equipped with, but can artificial intelligence become so sentient that it can experience those feelings too? Ex Machina (the directorial debut from Alex Garland, writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine) asks this and many more bold questions that raise so many provocative thoughts about the society we live in today, that it is hard not to call this one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking sci-fi thrillers of the current generation. You could probably go one step further and argue that it is one of the most original films ever made.It all starts with the performances from the three leads involved (Oscar Isaac, Domnhall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander) that instill an almost haunting presence to the narrative. To give away too much of the plot would be of a disservice to the viewer, so I’ll just say that Isaac is absolutely menacing and weirdly psychotic as the genius creator of the android played by Vikander, whom also delivers a remarkable performance filled with so many little new nuances and tics in her facial expressions and overall body movements. These two steal the show in a game of testing the audience to see if they can figure out just who is spewing lies and manipulating Gleeson…Read the rest of Robert Kojder’s ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.Or, if audio is your thing, there’s the Flickering Myth Podcast review below.2. Mad Max: Fury RoadTruly original world building is hard. Sure, a film maker can take inspiration from an existing novel, comic book or TV; but dropping your audience into a world they’ve not seen before is never easy and must be increasingly difficult today when every other release looks the same bar the costume the characters are wearing. Re-enter George Miller and just watch how effortless it can seem when done well.If anyone knows the world of Mad Max it’s of course Miller. Writer and Director of the original trilogy from 1979 to 1985, Miller created an action movie icon from his hero Max Rockatansky; loving husband and father who saw everything taken away from him on the edge of an apocalypse and who would go on to wander the desert in search of salvation where gasoline became the new currency. Armed with a $150 million budget (standard by today’s standards but skyrocketed from what he had in the 80s, even adjusted for inflation) Mad Max: Fury Road expands on the world Miller showed us in the previous films and seamlessly fits this new chapter into where we left off in 1985.Read the rest of Rohan Morbey’s ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.And don’t forget that whole video in-studio debate on it, too:1. Whiplash “There are no two words in the English language more harmful,” J.K. Simmons tells us, “than ‘good job’.” Spoken with such uninhibited truthfulness, the mantra of Terrence Fletcher, an eccentric, hot-headed conductor with a stringent desire for perfection, has the capacity to convince us he’s right. While many of Terrence’s methods in gaining said perfection don’t so much border the line as flat-out cross it (picture throwing a chair at a drummer for missing tempo), we can’t help but hear at least a morsel of reason in his idea that if no-one was ever pushed to be great, no-one would be great. And that’s where Whiplash, writer/director Damien Chazelle’s extraordinary story of drumming and determination based on his own short film, earns its colours: the audience’s continuing conflicting loyalty as we follow two obstinate, erratic characters. We don’t know whether to love or hate, to laugh or cry, and it’s searingly compelling.Essentially following something of a boxing movie formula, the film finds Andrew (Teller), a promising young drummer with a steely determination to be the best the world has ever seen, working his way up from the bottom after being spotted and trained by a seasoned veteran – enter Terrence Fletcher (Simmons). We can’t help but be reminded of something like Rocky as the young and determined talent is put through stringent work-shopping by the unbridled old trainer searching for the next sensation – in this case, jazz legend Buddy Rich – coupled with sweaty training sequences with visceral, bloody dilutions. Expectedly, of course, the way in which Whiplash develops that formula differs completely from Rocky going the distance, not least through how Terrence and Andrew’s relationship develops. What begins as precarious doesn’t take long to turn completely fractious as tempers rise and two large egos lock horns, and really, the whole film becomes a showcase for two dynamic, subversive and completely electrifying performances…Read the rest of Edward Gardiner’s ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ review here.And don’t forget about that tremendous in-studio discussion on the Top 5, to be relived in the video below:No Avengers: Age of Ultron. Controversial.What are your favourite films of the year so far? Let us know in the comments section below.