Good gawd we're finally done, and only a few days late. We saw 34 movies released in 2015. They skewed American and middlebrow, but that's only because we weren't trying so hard to impress you. Here they are, from worst to first. 
​
34. While We’re Young 
We love Woody Allen too, but this is a love letter to Woody at his most slapdash. If the choice Noah Baumbach's Brooklyn offers is Ben Stiller's self-important Gen-Xer or Adam Driver's amoral Millennial, we'd rather live in Princeton. ​​(KH)

33. Run All Night

32. Taken 3
2015 was not a good year for Late Neeson.
 
The tagline for Taken 3 is "It Ends Here," and we know the producers mean it when CIA agent Bryan Mills, chased by unknown assailants, is forced to pause and catch his breath in a bathroom stall. "I have low blood sugar," he explains gravely, "because I haven’t eaten since yesterday." Liam Neeson, our modern Alexander, sits, weeps, and demands a bite of chocolate, because there are no more Albanians left to kill.
 
And then, magically, more Albanians arrive in Run All Night! But Liam Neeson does not even get to kill them.
 
I have higher hopes for Neeson as Gen. Douglas MacArthur next summer. (MK)

 
31. Vacation
The cultivation of nostalgia is a weakness of both movies and families, a weakness this Ed Helm reboot simultaneously admits and denies. Everything good is in the trailer, which is pretty good. Everything in bad taste, they saved for the film. Christina Applegate is still the smartest, most beautiful girl in your high school. One day she will get a role worthy of her wit. Debbie Do Anything is not that role. (KH)

30. Get Hard
​Apparently, somebody thought it was a good idea to make a fim that’s 15% anti-capitalism and 85% prison rape jokes. Michael Bay’s underrated Pain & Gain is a far superior example of brocialist cinema. (MK)

29. Southpaw
Hollywood seems especially interested in what Jake Gyllenhaal can do without. In Source Code, they took his legs. In Southpaw, they take his girls. He is never very happy about the loss, but he always barrels on like your best Adderall-addicted student, determined to pass the test. Unfortunately for Billy "The Great" Hope, he seems to have learned a little too well from the Rocky school of boxing, in which young six packs are taught to mumble and take every single punch their opponents throw. (KH)

25. The Overnight
​Will they or won't they have an orgy? Always a fun question, always a disappointing answer--but not without some brave moves along the way. Best sport of the year: Adam Scott. (KH)

24. Inside Out 
​2015 was the year in which Hollywood decided to test the limits of women named Joy. In this version, much lauded for its engagement with psychology research, Amy Poehler learns the value of Sadness. Thanks to an Internet obsessed with brain science, America can, too. (KH)

23. Trumbo
A very modest, cautious film about a very immodest, incautious man. I liked Louis CK as a rumpled Hollywood red, and I liked Trumbo’s explanation of communism to his young daughter—basically, it means sharing your lunch. This, like the rest of the movie, seems to have infuriated conservatives, but it’s hard to see why they should be so worked up: Stalinist apologetics have seldom been so placid. (MK) 

22. Brooklyn 
Enough with heroic individualism. In a form obsessed with mavericks and geniuses, Eilis Lacey's reserve is as refreshing here as it was in Colm Toibin's novel. While we would all appreciate a respectable job and a garden apartment on Clinton Street, every Brooklynite knows that life in America doesn't really begin until you get a great swimsuit and choose a baby Brando for yourself. The soft, pale, ordinary flesh of this film felt even more radical than sunglasses in Ireland. (KH)

21. Far From the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy's happiest novel, practically tailor-made for Hollywood. Carey Mulligan is sharp and modern as Bathsheba Everdene, whose head for business is as cool as her romantic heart is hot, and Matthias Schoenaarts is our shepherd, we shall indeed want, especially when he stabs sheep to life. But like Tom Sturridge as Sgt. Troy—one of Western literature's all-time greatest chotches--the film, for all its lush visuals, somehow felt too thin. (KH)

20. The Martian
​19. Jurassic World

Two movies about the power of Nature, as measured against the power of Man (yes, him again). Both Men in question are full of classic Hollywood charisma, although I found Chris Pratt's Harrison Ford impression much more appealing than Matt Damon doing his level-best with a script that still reeked of the message-board geekery that infused The Martian in book form. ("Oh no, disco music!").

But the two movies present diametrically opposite views of the same question. Jurassic World offers a charming edition of the original franchise's traditionally conservative bio-politics: Nature is ungovernable, and arrogant human efforts to adapt it are doomed to disaster. The Martian, meanwhile revels in the limitless technical mastery of capitalist civilization, filtered through heroic individual genius. The gender politics also diverge in interesting ways: Damon's stranded Man becomes whole by subduing Mars's rugged Nature, while the source of Pratt's masculine prowess (reactionary as it may be) is precisely that, when confronted with genetically engineered monsters, he does not "science the shit out of this."  

Shorter version: I have a lot of pompous, half-baked thoughts about science, gender, and capitalism. These movies are both fun. ​(MK)

16. The End of the Tour
Add "nerds" to Hollywood's many pipelines in need of serious attention. The tech geek, the eco-terrorist, and the fiction writer should not in any way have the same flat, peevish personality, but if all you saw were Jesse Eisenberg films, you'd be forgiven for being confused. Jason Segal was the surprise of the year here, inventing, rather than channeling, a humane DFW all his own. (KH)

15. Sleeping With Other People
After Lesleye Headland's spiky, triumphant Bachelorette—everything Bridesmaids should have been—we've both been looking to her follow-up film. This one is a mixed bag, as any bag that contains the luminous Alison Brie and the profoundly unconvincing Jason Sudeikis is likely to be (Hollywood is apparently determined to make this smirker a Leading Man, but he's Ryan Reynolds, not Chris Pratt.) In any case Headland's raucous wit drives things forward, and Brie brings pathos to her role as a woman oddly obsessed with an unappealing ex (Adam Scott, in a vaguely repulsive turn). It's not a great film, but it's a reliably funny and surprising one: I'm eager to see what Headland does next. (MK)

14. Macbeth
From the first shot, of a dead baby, Justin Kurzel brings every strength of cinema to this adaptation, offering a number of thrilling nonverbal glosses, all of them fully supported by the text. The thunderous opening and closing battles are a movie all their own. But for all the filthy beauty of Michael Fassender at war, Macbeth is still a story about the dangerous power of words and political ambition. It's a shame so many of the Bard's great lines were rushed, and his Scottish state so thinly realized. (KH)

13. Star Wars
It's now apparent that the prequels had to fail so J.J. Abrams could restore our faith in the franchise. Sometimes there's nothing better than a film about the future that feels like a gift from the past. (KH)
​
12. Trainwreck
Amy is not broken, and she knows it. I can only imagine Judd Apatow made her say that. But despite his nebbishy moralizing, Trainwreck is pretty close to the New York rom-com we needed, bending gender roles at necessary moments and never failing to bring in LeBron. (KH)

11. Room
The horror of Room doesn't actually depend on its ripped-from-the-tabloids premise, but on its sly evocation of our crumbling welfare state. How many mothers are like Brie Larson, in love with their miraculous children, but confined, at wit's end, and at the mercy of a capricious master? It shouldn't require an imagination as indomitable as Joy's to demand the larger world we deserve. Lovely turns by Larson and Tremblay. That treacly score, though? Ugh. (KH)

10. Creed
Can we talk Michael B. Jordan pecs for a minute? Bro is aesthetic. It hurts for me to say—more even than you know—but this year, at least, I think he's got Tatum and Hemsworth beat. Well done, sir.

As for the lesser matter of the film itself, it was a pretty damn good Rocky movie. I have no credibility on this subject, because I love them all, including the unjustly maligned Rocky Balboa. But Ryan Coogler's film stayed true to the best features of the series—humility, sincerity, unsentimental Phillyness—while avoiding many of its classic pitfalls (it helps that the plot doesn't pivot on the humiliation/defeat/literal death of a black guy). Coogler's fierce, Meek Mill-infused spin on the unavoidable running montage is one of the highlights of my year in film. (MK)

9. Mad Max: Fury Road
God, I hate car chases. God, I loved this film. There's no accounting for it. In the end, I just have to give it up for Charlize's blistering fortitude, Tom Hardy's quiet, workmanlike support, and that unconscious thing with the electric guitar. I don't even mind models in distress—​not in a narrative that dares to kill a pregnant woman, and makes rescue a female art. A solidarity story through and through, as all the think pieces say. (KH)

8. The Big Short
7. 99 Homes

Two ways of looking at 21st century capitalism—one from the top down, and the other from the bottom up. Guess which got the megawatt cast, the Oscar noms and $121 million at the box office?

None of this, of course, would surprise Rick Carver, Michael Shannon's feral Florida real estate boss in 99 Homes: "America was built on bailing out winners," he tells the hapless Andrew Garfield, whose family he evicted weeks earlier. "A nation... of the winners, for the winners, by the winners." Of course I loved the movie's savage portrait of the housing crisis, and the actual eviction scenes here are some of the rawest and best film moments of 2015. But Shannon's performance actually pushes past simple polemic: he embodies the ferocious joy of profit so well that I left the theater wanting to hop into his Porsche, evict some poor saps, and listen to more hard-man speeches about America.

As for The Big Short, well—you don't have to be Hal Draper to be suspicious of its glossy portrait of financial ruin, focused on the handful of "underdog" winners who swapped high fives in their garages while the market buckled and Rick Carver kicked senior citizens onto the curb. For all its progressive politics, the movie does betray a certain yearning for "emancipation-from-above"--as if a more moral, organic gardener-capitalist might be all we need to save us (especially if he looks like Brad Pitt).  

Really though, it's hard to begrudge the movie its stars or its success. If Adam McKay can get millions of Americans to watch what amounts to a two-hour campaign ad for Bernie Sanders, more power to him. No one who sees even this improbably jolly film can come away from the theater thinking that "America never stopped being great," or that the system really works for most of us. (MK)

6. Magic Mike XXL
Jared Leto's Oscar night dig at Magic Mike was unconscionable, more evidence that we are living a pretty narrow room. As our Iron Uncle noted, the sheepish undulations of Channing Tatum do recede in this chapter, but only to make way for the dreams and doubts of his fellow travelers. More buddy comedy than hero cycle, XXL knows that what America really wants is to feel valued and economically stable, without ever having to be ashamed. It's not quite the female liberation movie it wants to be, but for God's sake, at least it wants to be. (KH)

4. 45 Years 
Does lifelong couplehood work? Is it even, like, a good idea? These are the small matters at stake in Andrew Haigh's quietly brutal film. Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling play a comfortably retired English couple whose 45th anniversary plans are disturbed when the remains of his long-lost girlfriend, who died half a century before, have been found in the Swiss Alps. In truth the movie is a bit of a trap: we meet these at their moment of greatest upset, and we never get a rich enough sense of how they made it together 4 years, let alone 44. But Rampling is brilliant--"a star presence who can command the screen just by watching the passing landscape from a boat"—and the final five minutes, when the trap is sprung, make up my favorite film scene of the year. You'll never hear "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" the same way again. (MK)

3. Tangerine
Best friends and transgendered sex workers Sin-Dee and Alexandra tear across Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, each in pursuit of respect. It's a big ask, but writer-director Sean S. Baker offers what they seek so readily, it almost insults them to congratulate him. Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez are exquisite screen presences, commanding our attention and reminding us that there are all kinds of people who actually walk in LA, and ride mass transit, too. Hands-down down the most admirable movie of the year, and not just because it's shot on an iPhone. (KH)

2. Clouds of Sils Maria 
Like all of Olivier Assayas's work, this is many films in one, but mostly, it's an extended conversation about power, time, and compassion between aging star Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart). I understand why Kirk needed to watch it multiple times, because the eye can miss so much when the weather changes, and an actress disappears into her role. Anguished, funny, natural, false, it's one of those rare films that gives range to everything we might've thought too limited to bother with, from Kristen Stewart to a view through the clouds. (KH)

Between Force Majeure, 45 Years, and this film, the last two years have been very tough for Alpine vacationers. I think I'm going to stay away from Switzerland until things settle down for a bit. (MK)

1. Anomalisa 
An animated masterpiece about love in a hotel best experienced without knowing much else. I thought I was over Charlie Kaufman, but obviously, I hadn't even begun to fall. Boredom has never been so interesting, awkardness has never been so beautiful, and the human mind has never been so effective at convincing itself it is real. Just see it. Then read Zadie Smith say everything I would want to say if I had her gig at the New York Review of Books. (KH)

From deep in the heart of Texas—just minutes from the George Bush Presidential Library—the Iron Texan runs down his Super Tuesday Top Eleven -- Eds.

11. Magic Mike XXL
Close enough to the Top 10 that I couldn’t bear to leave if off. I kind of expected Jurassic World (Indominus Rex!) to be my movie of the summer until this little gem stole its way into my heart. The pure pleasure of Big Dick’s convenience store dance to the tune of “I Want It That Way” might have been the best scene of any movie this past year.

We have been very busy reaching for the future this winter. Bernie Sanders. These books we're writing. The perning gyre of where we will live. But, as in all previous years, we have to pause these ceaseless narratives for a moment to give some time to The Iron List.

No one is very excited about 2015 in film (see: #OscarsSoWhite, etc). But this is a complaint we've been leveling for a while now (see: Iron List 2014, Goldfarb every year). The truth is, as our lives have gotten longer, they have grown busier, more complicated--just bigger all around. Faced with so much urgent reality, we admit it's hard to be just to film. To take it seriously as diversion, which is what it must always be, and to take it seriously as art. But goddamn it, we can try.

We can try to recall how good it was to see Mad Max in 3D, which we never do, and to cap it off with boxed rose in a shopping center, which we always do. We can try to understand why we paid $5.99 for Vacation On Demand (false question: the answer is obviously Chris Hemsworth). We can try to see all the films we have missed between now and the airing of the Oscars on Sunday night, and we can admit that we will fail and will probably not even be able to post our master list until after the gold trophies have been awarded, which will be better in a way because why should the Oscars ever get the final word?

In the meantime, we can give you the real and true opinions of Iron List stalwarts, like Kirk Michael Vader, who actually writes about movies for money. And we can give you this picture of Chris Hemsworth, an actor working at the peak of his craft.

No longer are we talking about movies merely because we saw them. Now we are talking about the top 15 movies of the year. Movies we actually liked! Kinda. With reservations. But increasingly fewer reservations as the list counts its way down.  (Our individual 2014 film rankings, meanwhile, are available here.)

15. Non-Stop. Reservations? Fuck your reservations. An action thriller wherein a U.S. Marshal has to solve a murder mystery, and clear his own name, all whilst flying on an airplane 40,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean? Wherein the one and only LIAM NEESONS not only does all of the above, but also quiets a fussy bunch of dissatisfied airline customers by promising them twelve months of free international travel? With the assistance, as those exuberant valets forgot to mention, of the sexy and mysterious flight attendant LUPITA NYONG'O? What about it indeed. (MK)

On occasion you go to the movies and you just have a great fucking time. This was one of those occasions. (KH)

14. Under the Skin. Polarized reactions leave this film in an odd spot. Matt is suspicious of its artiness, and frankly (I think) a little freaked out by its praying mantis premise, whereas I'm totally down with the chilling way it handles the perverse mystery of being a woman. Because that's what's going on here, right? An alien arrives in Scotland, puts on Scarlett Johansson's body, and proceeds to reap all the power, and then the pain, that come along with that deal. I like a film that makes you so uncomfortable you feel the need to talk through it. And I like a director that dares to film a movie star driving a van around Glasgow, propositioning actual men. (KH)

I didn't like this movie. Sorry. But I did like Namwali Serpeli's n+1 essay about it! (MK)

13. Birdman. If you've ever had any kind of performance itch, the exhilarating long tracking shots of Inarritu's answer to Noises Off will make you wish you'd given your life to the theater. Especially if Ed Norton and Emma Stone were going to be there, making saliva bridges on the roof. The first third, in which all of the souls and stakes of the St. James were still being discovered by the camera, was pretty close to the best film of the year, but pretty soon, those shots ran out of appealing tricks. Much as I liked his levitations, I didn't really care for Riggan Thomson's talking alter ego, or even his regular ego, which wanted, I don't know what, respect? The Hollywood-Broadway rivalry was pretty juvenile (maybe that's accurate, I hope not), as was the portrait of The Critic as a posh old woman who delights in ruining famous scruffy men. Lovely last shot, though, of Emma Stone's face, looking up, jaded no more. (KH)

12. Gone Girl. Honestly, the book was better. You always lose something when you turn a first person novel into a film. It's the difference between looking through a character at the world, and looking at a character within her world. But enough education. This is not your MFA prof. I like the way both book and movie expose the nastiness at the core of our assumptions about enlightened women and men: that "smart" women are lethal and "nice" guys are fake. A deeply misanthropic story, but I have to say I admire its vengeance. I can't really say it's a feminist story, but I don't buy that it's anti-feminist either. For its part, the movie did have its own unique charms. Goldfarb's reading of the film as Lynchian is pretty great, and Ben Affleck is almost too perfectly cast as a guy with a face you just want to punch. (KH)

11. Mr. Turner. Well, Mike Leigh is basically my favorite working director, and J.M.W. Turner's art is all over my desktop, so there was no way on Mr. Turner's blue-green earth that I wasn't going to like this film. In fact it's a damn fine snorting good movie. Thomas Hardy said that Turner did not paint objects modified by light, but "light as modified by objects," and Leigh is scrupulously faithful to that vision. Some of the objects here are so lovely -- including Turner's aged servant and father, Billy -- that I often wished for more of them, even at the expense of the luxuriant light. But I'll take what I can get. (MK)

10. Ida. The title says it all. A beautiful little shard of a film, as slender and lovely and sad as any of the three main characters’ highly visible spinal cords. For me, it evoked more than it achieved—a little bit more narrative flab on those bones might have produced a fuller experience—but it won’t be easy to forget Red Wanda or her quietly yearning niece. (MK)

9. Foxcatcher. A very weird film about the disease of wealth, as embodied by Steve Carrell in prosthetics, and the deadly awkwardness of getting in its way. My favorite Bennett Miller flick by far, though I'm a bit troubled by the liberties it takes with the Schultz-DuPont story, which seems more disturbing, and more interesting to me, than the foreboding trajectory this movie takes. So what's good about it? The determined creepiness of the DuPont PR machine, the thin line between a spar and an embrace, and especially the plaintive brotherly love between Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, two actors I'd watch take a helicopter, never mind move with studied agility across an Olympic wrestling mat. Carrell, too, was chillingly good, which is saying something, because I thought I was over his schtick. (KH)

Personally, I had 22 Jump Street ahead of this. But  the "ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist" helicopter chat is still probably the best pure Tatum moment of 2014. (MK)

8. Noah. Biblical literalism done the right way. Are there problems? Of course there are problems. But they begin with western monotheism itself, which -- as Darren Aronofsky's movie makes beautifully, terrifyingly clear -- is founded on a primordial fable of justified genocide. Genesis 6:7: "And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them."
     For all its flaws, Noah makes you feel the weight of this destruction -- and, even more wonderfully, it makes you complicit in it. We are rooting for this righteous Lord, and his patriarchal servant Russell Crowe, to destroy both man and beast; to purge the planet of its corrupt creatures and begin again, purified. How marvelous! How ghastly! This is an achievement that can survive any conceivable complaints. (MK)

7. Boyhood. It's a dream and a remarkable achievement to film a single story with the same cast in the same locations over twelve years. For that alone, Boyhood deserves all the praise it's gotten. But we are Linklater fans -- chiefly of the talky Before trilogy, which explores similar lifespan questions with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke -- so our reservations can only be measured against our expectations. For my part, I wish the film had been braver. So much of its focus was on the remarkableness of its own premise -- "How big you've gotten!" "Where have the years gone?" -- as though Linklater, scattered across numerous other projects and preoccupations over that twelve-year span, couldn't quite trust his audience to follow the thread. But the thread is right there. It's Ellar Coltrane's face. It's his body. Ellar is the thread. If only Linklater had had a little more confidence in that, the writing might've been freer, the story fuller. 
     On the other hand, the pleasure of watching Hawke and Patricia Arquette age was an unexpected one, as was the undercurrent that underlies a great many American childhoods: domestic instabilities aside, they are, so often, very safe. (KH) 

Totally agree. Linklater parented this film much more like Hawke than Arquette, and it shows. (For me, most of all in Arquette's character, who as Iron Mom Freddi Karp has pointed out, dwindles all too easily into a cliche of long-suffering dignity.) But damn: I'm still glad I got to take that ride in Dad's Mustang. (MK)

6. The Drop. Tom Hardy, James Gandolfini, and Rust and Bone's Mattias Schoenaerts (an Iron Favorite from 2012) are tough guys and schemers in Brooklyn, going through the usual paces required by a Dennis Lehane short story. Goldfarb isn't wrong to call this movie "slight," but I see it as something closer to an epic in miniature. Of course it helps to have Gandolfini here, offering us in his final role a dark, muffled parody of a small-time Soprano. But it's Tom Hardy who steals the show, and makes this the best American movie I saw in 2014. Just as Llewyn Davis is the cat, Hardy's Bob Saginowski is the pit bull puppy, in the best possible sense. (MK)

Hardy's gravelly performance is even more amazing when you consider that he talks like no human person has ever talked and still manages to convince you he's from New York. A totally singular voice. (KH)

5. Selma. The standard pitfalls of biopics -- impersonations, hagiography, bad writing -- none were on display here. Selma is remarkable not just for its calm insistence on the radical King (this is a #BlackLivesMatter film, make no mistake), but also for its success in rewriting the great orator, whose actual words are somehow licensed to Steven Spielberg. Ava DuVernay surely deserved those rights, but she and writer Paul Webb made do with what they had. That said, it's hard to beat the original footage. See Selma. But then watch the Selma chapter of Eyes on the Prize. (KH)

4. The Trip to Italy. This really was the year of beloved directors making follow-ups that weren't quite as good as their predecessors (see: Boyhood, Mr. Turner, Night Moves). Like 22 Jump Street, this was a sequel that was all about its sequel-ness. Winterbottom, Coogan and Brydon double-down so hard on the elements that worked in The Trip -- the impression-offs, the Romantic scenery, the mouth-watering food, the women they don't deserve, the brush with death at a famous grave -- that at times it felt like the same movie. But while the Lake Country tour is still the better film about tourism and artistic rivalry, there was enough development here -- via Italian film history and Coogan's tender relationship with his teenage son -- to make The Trip to Italy it a worthy second chapter. I like a mellower Coogan. I like him quite a bit. (KH)

3. Two Days, One Night. It's official. These Belgian brothers cannot make a bad film. As Will put it so well in his post, this isn't just a story of economic insecurity in our neo-liberal age, it's a tale of mental instability, too. Cotillard's Sandra is perhaps the most poorly-equipped person in Belgium to organize her co-workers to save her job. And yet, she plods on through the weekend in her tank tops, ringing bells and knocking on doors, giving her same tepid spiel to each colleague, because she knows she can't let her patient family down. Aside from one notable shark jump, the pacing is masterfully understated, and the moments of genuine emotion are in every case moments of solidarity, each of them hard worn and well-earned. My God, was there optimism at the end. The most brightly colored film we've ever seen from the Dardennes. (KH)

2. Force Majeure. As Will K. points out, this film shares its major premise with a Seinfeld episode: on a skiing trip in the Alps, a father tramples over his own family to escape a looming avalanche. (NB: there should be more serious European art films made on the basis of Seinfeld episodes: I would totally see a Portuguese "Sniffing Accountant,"  a Dutch "Marine Biologist" or a Romanian "Bizarro Jerry.") 
    But Force Majeure also so much more than that. Above all it's a gorgeous, unsparing depiction -- in the perfect setting of a modern ski resort -- of the alienation and hubris of twenty-first century bourgeois society. Don't believe me, or don't care? Well, it also features an amazingly domesticated turn from your second favorite Game of Thrones wildling, and by far the best Alberto Tomba "La Bomba" reference in 2014. Seriously: see it tomorrow. (MK)

1. Leviathan. If you know us, you probably saw this coming from across the Arctic, caudal fins and all. Director Andrey Zvyagintsev did make my original Iron List's #2 film of the previous decade. 
     This film is heavy handed, sure: but some things are just heavy. Like whales, for instance. Or Russian tragedy. In Leviathan, Zvyagintsev disdains the elegant parsimony that often characterizes many internationally successful non-Anglophone films, including Ida, Force Majeure, and his earlier masterpiece, The Return. Instead he mounts a far riskier but potentially grander attempt to represent human experience in all its clumsy joys and agonies: the bad jokes, the worse decisions, and the predictable but no less painful victory of the powerful over the powerless. 
      There's a hint of truth in the accusation made by Putin's Ministry of Culture, that Leviathan gives Western audiences exactly the portrait of Russian society that they wants to see: corrupt, soaked in vodka, and intolerably bleak. How accurate the film's portrayal of family life and small town politics near the Arctic Circle is, I can't say: I've never been to Murmansk Oblast. But that's beside the point. If the film is in some sense anti-Russia (or Putin's Russia, at least), it is certainly not anti-Russian. The people in this town, from the central figure of Kolya -- the Job-like handyman whose home is threatened by the town mayor -- to the dopey policeman Pasha, or his ebullient wife Angela, overflow with life and sympathy. The very richness of their world is what makes its destruction so crushing, and Leviathan so powerful. (MK)

What we most regretted missing in 2014: Locke, Enemy, Norte, Inherent Vice, Top Five, Only Lovers Left Alive, Stranger by the Lake, A Most Wanted Man, Nymphomaniac, Exodus: Gods and Kings. 

And there you have it: another year in the books. Sometimes you have to write to know what you think (h/t Joan Didion), and we guess we think this year was not so bad after all. Side note: we are now halfway through the decade in film, with some strong contenders for the next leviathan Iron List. Will we still have the energy to blog in 2020? Will you have the energy to submit longwinded lists of your own? The next five years will tell. For now, we're off to Hot Tub Time Machine 2: a strong contender for #30 in 2015. 

And now, the Big Kahuna: the Official Iron List. Between us, we saw 36 films in 2014, all of them considered here. Ain't no envelopes to open, we just do it 'cause we're s'posed to. Here are numbers 36 through 16:

36. Authors Anonymous. A group of no-talent literary hopefuls gather in suburban LA to support each other in their craft. Or, your annual reminder that there's nothing worse than unfunny comedy. Especially unfunny comedy that sneers at art. RIP Dennis Farina. (KH)

Poor Ostreicher. He was so much happier in American Reunion. (MK)

35. A Walk Among the Tombstones. Another variation on Liam Neeson's righteous revenge formula. Just not a very good one. (KH)

You can't kill The Neesons with fists, or blades, or bullets, but leaden noir cliches will definitely work. Like, really well. This movie is to Taken as Nell is to Schindler's List. (MK)

Movies I Wanted to See but Haven’t Gotten to Yet: Beyond the Lights, Nightcrawler, Foxcatcher, The Homesman, The Babadook, Begin Again, Child’s Pose, Lilting, Leviathan, Under the Skin, Tracks, A Most Violent Year

Movies I Should Want to See but Can’t Bring Myself to Care About: The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, American Sniper, Interstellar, Big Eyes, and The Grand Budapest Hotel (I know, I know.  But I the horror of Moonrise Kingdom still haunts my dreams.)

Movie I Started but Didn’t Finish: Palo Alto (I didn’t hate it but I wanted to get to bed and then I forgot to watch the last half hour.  It did feel like it was based on what I imagine a James Franco short story to be, though, so good job.)

I saw 27 movies in full this year.  I didn’t hate any of them.  Here’s my ranking from worst to best:

Ed: Blue Ribbon contributor Dave Goldfarb is so cranky with himself this year! Just wait til he hears what we think of Manu in Two Days, One Night.

Let’s get this straight. I was a terrible movie viewer this year. Terrible. Too much good television to watch? Maybe. More like: I’m incapable of watching movies at home without multi-tasking. The result? A year of watching movies that make one thing clear: I’m a philistine. I’m *positive* I must have watched more foreign language movies from 2015, but…I can’t remember what they were. Despite time spent Googling “foreign movies 2014” (while watching other movies). The only two subtitled movies mentioned below I watched in the last week for the sole purpose of not revealing the depths of my cultural shallowness via this list. 

When it comes down to it, when forced to choose between watching that darn foreign movie that I would actually like and enjoy, I hemmed and hawed about subtitles preventing me from simultaneously reading some bullshit about the Mets offseason and watched some unenjoyable garbage that I ended up hating even as I ignored it (Dumb and Dumber To comes to mind). Anyway, here’s my list, which I will now defend vigorously and with anger, denying everything written above, because you and your list full of foreign gems is bullshit and you’re a commie pinko who liked Noah: