Michael Shannon might be the most underrated actor in the game today. His credits include a wide array of television and film. From Groundhog Day to Vanilla Sky to 8 Mile, he took on all comers on his way up. Now as a legitimate Indie lead, he most often plays the antagonist, and no one does it better these days.
In 99 Homes, he is Rick Carver, a real estate predator whose evil knows no bounds when it comes to evicting people from their homes and then selling them for a profit.
Andrew Garfield plays Dennis Nash, the movie’s everyman. Nash struggles to make ends meet while taking care of his mother and son. As you might guess, the two main characters meet when Carver comes knocking on Nash’s door to kick he and his family out. The cat and mouse that ensues between the two main characters takes myriad twists and turns and in the end, you’re left stunned. It’s about hard work, the housing crisis, betrayal and what’s most important in life, and it’s gripping for the whole ride.
The courageous obstacles the investigative storytelling team at the Boston Globe faced in exposing the Catholic Church for its systemic sexually abusive priests is brilliantly told with a superb director and cast in tow. Spotlight excels due largely to it’s lack of frills or forced emotion choosing to let the horrors of the story carry the weight. The constant grappling of the subject at hand illuminates some of the darker aspects of human sexuality and power as the investigative team interviews former abuse victims, lawyers, and in one of the most fascinating scenes in the film, an accused priests. It functions on every cinematic level with experienced poise and demands rapt attention far longer than a lesser quality piece could manage.
20 years after driving off into some distant Tina Turner-less hellscape, Mad Max roars back into the cultural forefront to launch a female heroin into his former place as road revving post-apocalypse bad-ass #1. When Max is captured prisoner by war-lord Immortan Joe, his escape coincides with the kidnapping of the king’s prized mating slaves by his best driver Imperator Furiosa. The two protagonists soon join forces to try to get everyone far away from his maniacal rule, constantly thwarting attack plans from Joe’s hellish motor cavalcade in some of the most imaginative car chases ever put to film. With so much time between iterations in the series, it’s hard to tell what kind of impact a more Mad-Max-centric movie would have had, but the culmination of all of it’s parts (nostalgia, feminism, advancements in action films since the 80’s) make Mad Max the most jolting watch of 2015 both physically and thematically.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl excels due to it’s immature mistakes, and though it’s tendency to try a little hard is too much for some, so are high schoolers. The film tells the story of Greg, the ultimate “who cares” senior in high school who makes parodies of art-house legends with titles like “My Dinner with Andre the Giant” with his best friend Earl. After being forced to befriend a fellow classmate recently diagnosed with leukemia, Greg learns how to grow-up the hard way, ripping his struggles with going to college and making friends firmly into perspective. The films quirks and depictions of life after puberty are really touching, and even with its flaws Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a remarkably entertaining watch with some beautiful after-thoughts that won’t go away after the credits roll.
The contention between humanity and machine is put to the ultimate test when a brilliant developer tries to combine the two. After a young software engineer working at the bottom of the totem pole at a technology mega-corporation earns a trip to the company’s reclusive founder’s Alaskan mansion, he finds out that he will be performing a Turing Test, given to determine the success of artificial intelligence, on a newly developed prototype the founder has created in his technology haven. Though nothing new to the big-screen, Ex-Machina handles artificial intelligence with grave and understandable respect, adding a perpetual churn of off screen-dread to this intricately layered sci-fi masterpiece. By the culmination of the film, the audience realizes the incredible mistake potentially waiting happen with the scientific breakthrough 50 years in the making, and it’s much more terrifying than the frenetic ending the film drives madly towards.
