Film / News
Bristol best of 2015: Films
1. Inside Out
Incredibly, Pixar did it again with this conceptually daring animation taking us inside a little girl’s noggin to show how all the emotional bits fit together. Kids and adults alike loved it, while boffins praised its psychological sophistication and elegant depictions of such tricky notions as abstract thought. It’s welcome proof that not all of Hollywood considers its audience to be morons.
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2. Force Majeure
A bourgeois, middle class Swedish couple’s marriage collapses at a swanky ski lodge in the Swiss Alps after the patriarch scarpers rather than protect his wife and children during an avalanche. Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s viciously funny, magnificently controlled fourth film reworks the disaster movie as a blackly comic, forensically precise exploration of masculinity and gender roles. It also provoked many an uncomfortable post-screening discussion.
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3. 45 Years
Child-free couple Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay’s 45th wedding anniversary is derailed by a ghost from the past in Andrew Haigh’s bracingly raw and honest drama, featuring exemplary performances by its veteran leads. Extra points awarded for one of the least flattering sex scenes in movie history.
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4. Inherent Vice
The ever-brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson does The Big Lebowski with this dark and scuzzy Pynchon adaptation that pitches its mutton-chopped, Marlowe-esque gumshoe (Joaquin Phoenix) against The Man in paranoid post-Manson 1970 LA, as he mounts a convoluted, psychedelic investigation that takes in a vanished tycoon, Aryan brotherhood bikers, a resurrected tenor sax player and a collection of erotic ties. Easily the grooviest film of the year.
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5. Girlhood
Celine Sciamma’s unofficial trilogy that began with Water Lilies and Tomboy concluded with this confident blend of cliché-dodging rites-of-passage drama and understated social study. Further demonstrating her enviable ability to dramatise the lives of ordinary teens without coming over all sanctimonious or preachy, it boasts a hugely impressive performance by non-professional newcomer Karidja Toure as a young woman who joins a girl gang on a tough Parisian housing estate.
Read the Bristol24/7 review