2015: The Year’s Best Movies, From a Classic Screen Romance to the Ghosts of Auschwitz to Delusional TV Stardom

If movies aren’t quite what they used to be in terms of cultural impact and centrality — and neither is “cinema,” a term that connotes something slightly different — 2015 was nonetheless a year of dazzling riches. We had a Disney-crafted, mega-marketed sequel or remake or whatever it was that will almost certainly end up as the top-grossing movie of all time. (Bearing in mind that if we adjust for inflation, it probably still won’t be as big as “Gone With the Wind.”) At the other end of the spectrum, we repeatedly saw indie or art-house directors all over the world respond to the challenge of TV by creating ambitious and unpredictable work meant to be seen in the dark, amid a roomful of strangers.

J.J. Abrams’ relaunched “Star Wars” franchise will keep the swimming pools of Brentwood and Beverly Hills chlorinated, and the Audis and Beemers fueled with premium gas, for a few more years. But anyone who thinks it will bring back the glory days of Hollywood is kidding themselves. Auteur-type directors who find themselves at the top of my list this year, like Todd Haynes or Christian Petzold or Abderrahmane Sissako, do not expect to be culture-vulture cocktail-party heroes the way Bergman or Fellini once were, and they’re better off for it. Today’s movies — oh, what the hell, today’s cinema — are more daring, more aesthetically varied, more global in scope and vastly more diverse than ever. There’s no need to overthink that.

There are some obvious themes this year, though how to interpret them I’m not sure. Of the movies in my top 10 (by personal convention, I always pick 11), only three were directed by white American men. As God is my witness, I never considered that as a factor. Two of the films feature transgender sex workers, one a documentary made on the streets of New York, the other a drama made on the streets of Los Angeles. Two others have protagonists who were sent to Auschwitz, with radically different results. Two feature Kristen Wiig, which isn’t surprising since she seemingly appeared in a dozen films this year. What might be called “gender issues” play a central role in nine of the 11, which is another way of saying they’re about human beings.

Any number of movies I really liked did not make this list, or the second-tier honorable mentions, and I look forward to your earnest messages of correction and castigation. In the so-called real world of politics and public discourse, 2015 may have felt like a running series of horror-movie outtakes, too outlandish and disgusting for any self-respecting producer of mid-‘80s teen slasher flicks. As anybody who has read anything I’ve ever written is aware, I don’t think we can separate these things: Politics is at least as much a subset of pop culture as the other way around. Still, when it came to the projected dreams we watched and wanted to watch and still might watch, there was not just hope on the movie screen in 2015. There was wonder.

”Carol” I keep putting Todd Haynes’ work of masterful craftsmanship and profound emotion, with its magnificent performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as lesbian lovers in early-1950s New York, in the No. 1 position on this list and then taking it out again. Arguments could easily be made for the next three films on the list, but the fact that “Carol” is not just a breakthrough work of “queer cinema” (which it certainly is) but one of the great American screen romances and the crowning achievement of one of our most original and talented visionaries, gives it the edge. If you haven’t seen “Carol” yet and have developed some preconceptions, I will reiterate that it’s a complicated and generous work of human drama, not a political tract, and that Haynes and cinematographer Edward Lachman have made a stylish, melancholy and unbelievably gorgeous period melodrama.

”Son of Saul” First-time director László Nemes pushes past the clichés and conventions of Holocaust cinema to address a horrible but obvious fact: The Nazi death camps were industrial workplaces, even if the industrial process was mass murder and the output dead bodies by the thousands. Saul Ausländer, the Hungarian Sonderkommando or “work Jew” at the heart of this story, is surrounded by grousing co-workers, irritable bosses, minor corruption and workplace intrigue, and performs the worst job imaginable, while clinging to some sense of the human possibilities outside the inferno of Auschwitz. Most of the story is shot in closeup and tightly focused on the implacable visage of Géza Röhrig as Saul; his odyssey toward a single moment of freedom is riveting from the first frame to the last.

”Timbuktu” Yes, African director Abderrahmane Sissako’s wry, rich, tragic and spectacular tale of life under the rule of Islamic militants in northern Mali’s legendary “library city” was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar last year. (It didn’t win, but I don’t begrudge “Ida” the prize.) That’s because the academy’s rules make no sense; “Timbuktu” did not play anywhere in the United States until late January of 2015. I have previously argued that a confluence of talent and circumstance have rendered Sissako — who was born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, educated in Russia and now lives in France — a figure of unique cultural importance. Far more to the point, he’s a great artist: Watch “Timbuktu” and then “Bamako,” his outrageous Brechtian assault against the Western banks and financial powers, and find out how his films speak to the mind, the heart and the spirit all at once.

”Phoenix” If Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” had been directed by R.W. Fassbinder or Douglas Sirk, it might have wound up something like Christian Petzold’s shattering, noir-inflected fable set in postwar Berlin, where a cabaret singer named Nelly (the amazing German actress Nina Hoss) comes home from Auschwitz with a face rebuilt by plastic surgery. Nelly is looking for Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), her husband, former accompanist and true love, and she finds him. But Johnny doesn’t recognize her or doesn’t want to, and he may have his reasons. Johnny’s delusional scheme and its consequences may have more to do with tormented cinematic psychodrama than with real life in post-Holocaust Germany, but both streams converge in Petzold’s best film yet, and in Hoss’ unforgettable final rendition of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low.”

”The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” Stanley Nelson has been making courageous, inquisitive documentaries about America’s racial history for years: His films “Jonestown,” “Wounded Knee,” “Freedom Riders” and “The Murder of Emmett Till” are all landmarks of historical investigation and reinterpretation. With this fair-minded and far-reaching exploration of the legendary African-American radical group that struck terror into the white establishment in the late 1960s — an especially urgent work for a new activist generation — Nelson has outdone himself. While his sympathies are clear, Nelson makes no excuses for internal Panther failures, or for its vainglorious and self-destructive leadership. But the reasons why the Panthers energized an entire generation of African-Americans (and a lot of white folks too), and why they became the group J. Edgar Hoover feared most, also come into focus. Watch this 10 times, and you’ll learn something new with each viewing.