Tangerine – “Baker’s film is so confident, so honest, so gosh darn friendly, of all things, that the tatty seediness of the underlying facets of the subject matter are never as off-putting or as uncomfortable as they potentially could have been. He never belittles his two heroines, never pokes fun at their respective situations. Instead, he celebrates their fearlessness while recognizing with gut-wrenching honesty the lengths they feel as if they must go to in order to be true to themselves and what it is they want out of life.”

Not every movie is Mad Max: Fury Road or Carol. Heck, they’re not even The Water Diviner, The Duff or even No Escape, perfectly acceptable genre fair that even with a misstep here or there proves to be hugely enjoyable in and of itself all the same. No, some movies are nothing but lost causes only worth sending to the dung heap, while others should be buried deep, deep within it never to be heard from again. The following ten titles are sadly some of those.

For the past couple of years I’ve been tracking everything I watch for the first time. This year that number came to 410 films that I’d never seen before, and of that number 241 were features that were released to domestic theatres at some point during 2015. Here to my mind are the top 100 of them, ranked in as close to semblance of order as I feel comfortable assembling them into.

As we’re now well into Oscar season, the following are my picks for the absolute pest performances, screenplays and what-not for 2015. Many of these individuals and films will certainly get singled out for Academy Award consideration; quite a few of them sadly will not. To my mind, however, all are worthy of recognition, and push come to shove were arguably my favorites in their individual categories.

[45 Years] is a tale with no heroes, no villains, just one filled with life, loss, understanding and, most of all, love, Kate and Geoff’s journey towards their anniversary party as universal and as human as any that has ever graced the screen.

As handsomely composed as Concussion (2015) is, there is a rudimentary staleness difficult to get beyond, the film never rising to the same heights as 2015’s other major procedural, Tom McCarthy’s close to brilliant Spotlight.

Daddy’s Home is too inconsequential and slight to matter, the fact it does so little with its primary female character only augmenting my feelings on this front a substantial amount. Ferrell and Wahlberg remain a potent comedy team; I just hope the next time they join forces it’s in a better movie than this one ultimately, and sadly, proves itself to be.

If American Hustle was Russell’s Martin Scorsese meets Sidney Lumet movie, than Joy is where he’s stomping into Billy Wilder meets Preston Sturges meet Robert Altman territory with gleeful conviction. A sprawling cast of characters, over-the-top narrative arcs, larger-than-life bursts of emotional exuberance, a cacophony of voices strung together like a symphonic operetta, the director is reaching for the stars in much the same way as his protagonist is.

Both a celebration of the human spirit as well as an emotional wallop as patriarchal prejudices conspire to deprive five sisters of their seemingly unbreakable familial bond, this is a remarkably prescient story that feels as if it were ripped from the headlines, it’s last moments darn near close to perfect.