‘Spotlight’ film shined the brightest

By Michael Phillips

Chicago Tribune

So many images to remember, and to take our minds off Donald Trump and Islamic State and all the homegrown terrorists for a couple of hours. At the movies this year, we found moments of quiet beauty, even amid skillful corporate product (re-) launches such as “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Early in that film, not a Top 10 contender but worth seeing, Daisy Ridley sleds down a desert dune with a fantastically large digital junker of a spacecraft half-buried in sand behind her. It’s my favorite sight in the movie.

Some other standout images of 2015:

In “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for 16 seconds, director George Miller’s camera follows behind the murderous high-speed parade of vehicles, then pivots around and to the front of the car carrying all the kettle drummers rousing the troops for battle. Then the electric guitarist goes krrrannnggg! and shoots flames out of his instrument. Mr. Miller, thanks for the cinema.

In “Carol,” cinematographer Ed Lachman shoots Rooney Mara through a series of windows, many of them rain-spattered, on super 16 millimeter film. It doesn’t look like digital photography. It looks like the past (early 1950s New York, shot in Cincinnati) and, more importantly, it captures the inner feeling of Mara’s character, a young woman about to come into clear focus for the first time in her life.

In “Anomalisa,” the customer-service wizard voiced by David Thewlis checks into the Fregoli, wittily named after the psychological delusion that everyone is in fact a variation on the same person. The man behind the desk does not break eye contact. Even as he’s typing. The joke is quiet, and perfect, and the film is my second favorite of the year, though it doesn’t open wide until January.

Top 10

1. “Spotlight,” directed by Tom McCarthy. A tale of investigative journalism and legacy-media glory from the early 21st century, this was the best newspaper movie since “All the President’s Men.” It may be the last great one. As another director (Joel Coen) once put it: The crucial task for any filmmaker is tone management; the “Spotlight” ensemble worked as one, beautifully.

2. “Anomalisa,” directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman, opening wide in January. A customer-service expert finds heartache and a little bit of solace in Cincinnati in this astonishing stop-motion marvel, the year’s most indelible animation.

3. “Love & Mercy,” directed by Bill Pohlad. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, played by Paul Dano and John Cusack in respective career bests, copes with his demons, chemical and human, while creating some of the saddest happy music in history. The finest musical biopic in decades.

4. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” directed by Marielle Heller. The year’s most astounding feature directorial debut, funny and scary in perfect balance, explored one 1970s San Francisco teenager (Bel Powley) and her ongoing affair with the dangerously easygoing boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard) of her carelessly sensual mother (Kristen Wiig).

5. “Son of Saul,” directed by Laszlo Nemes, opening wide in January. This one makes up for all the earnest, effective but carefully sanitized responses to the Holocaust. At Auschwitz in 1944, a Hungarian prisoner (Geza Rohrig) takes his one shot at moral sanity. The film’s perspective is brutally narrow and, in the end, unforgettable.

6. “Carol,” directed by Todd Haynes. Gorgeous, incisive adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith romance “The Price of Salt,” in which a secret love refuses to stay a secret in early 1950s America. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara excel.

7. “Beasts of No Nation,” directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Like “Son of Saul,” a bruising emotional experience. But stories about human devastation and survival, in this case involving child soldiers in an unnamed African country, cannot tell their truths by being easily digestible.

8. “Creed,” directed by Ryan Coogler. In a year dominated by reboots, some very good, Coogler’s was the most affecting (yes, more so than “The Force Awakens”). Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone duked it out for audience sympathy and understanding and everybody won.

9. “Heart of a Dog,” directed by Laurie Anderson. One multimedia artist’s droll experience of post-9/11 life in America, as seen through the eyes of a rat terrier (and through the prism of her Glen Ellyn, Ill., childhood).

10. “Tangerine,” directed by Sean Baker. Shot for nearly nuthin’, this high-velocity entertainment is my new favorite Christmas movie. An LA streetwalker seeks out the pimp who done her wrong. Improbably beautiful and brilliantly alive.

Runners-up

“Amy,” “The Assassin,” “Best of Enemies,” “Bridge of Spies,” “Brooklyn,” “Cartel Land,” “Dope,” “45 Years,” “In Jackson Heights,” “The Look of Silence,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Martian,” “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” “Queen of Earth,” “Results,” “The Second Mother,” “’71,” “Taxi,” “Trainwreck,” “What We Do in the Shadows.”