Coming back to my previous efforts of somehow ranking the films that I have seen… oh my there was a gap, a gap since December 2014… never mind, fortunately the films are documented in the blog, so I can try to assess which ones I really liked, which ones not so much, even if in some cases I do have little recollection about them. Matter-of-fact, doing the ranking with a bit of a distance may be a good idea, perspective changes over time and I am sure this list now looks differently from what I would have written a year ago.
Previous entries were:
Best films of the last two years (Update Dec. 2014)
Best 2011-2012 Releases I have seen
The Movies of the Year, or the previous rather, and a bit of the one before
My top 10 list of good films of 2009 and 2010…
So here are the 2014-2017 releases (incl. the odd 2013 one) that I have seen and documented on the blog since early 2015. I do not remember most films well enough to rank them in detail (and who would want to pretend precise ranking anyway?), so I introduced categories, not necessarily suggesting precision of ranking within the categories.
Will try to update this with more once I get down to writing up some that I have still on the backlog.
Tier 1: The Favourites
- Room (Lenny Abrahamson 2015)
- Whiplash (Damien Chazelle 2014)
- Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan (Norte – The End of History) (Lav Diaz 2013)
- The Revenant (Alejandro G. Innaritu 2015)
- Ex Machina (Alex Garland 2015)
- Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller 2014)
- Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund 2014)
- Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016)
- Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan 2016)
- Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu 2014)
Tier 2: Pretty Good ones
- Krigen (A War) (Tobias Lindholm 2015)
- The Big Short (Adam McKay 2015)
- Arrival (Denis Villeneuve 2016)
- Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross 2016)
- Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman 2015)
- Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade 2016)
- What Richard Did (Lenny Abrahamson 2013)
- Slow West (John M. Maclean 2015)
- The Drop (Michael R. Roskam 2014)
- Spotlight (Tom McCarthy 2015)
- Inside Out (Pete Docter 2015)
- Creed (Ryan Coogler 2015)
- Sicario (Denis Villeneuve 2015)
- The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos 2016)
- 山河故人 (Mountains May Depart) (Jia Zhangke 2015)
- 天注定 (A Touch Of Sin) (Jia Zhangke 2013)
Tier 3: Was alright
- Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols 2015)
- The Invitation (Karyn Kusama 2016)
- The Martian (Ridley Scott 2015)
- 22.63 (Hulu)
- Lion (Garth Davis 2016)
- The Tunnel (터널) (Kim Seong-hun 2016)
- The Girl with all the Gifts (Colm McCarthy 2017)
- The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker 2016)
- Train to Busan (부산행, Busanhaeng) (Sang-ho Yeon 2016)
- Deadpool (Tim MIller 2016)
- Moana (Ron Clements, John Musker, Chris Williams (IX) , Don Hall 2016)
- Kong: Skull Island (Jordan Vogt-Roberts 2017)
- 10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg 2016)
- It Follows (David Robert Mitchel 2015)
- Big Hero 6 (Don Hall, Chris Williams 2014)
- American Sniper (Clint Eastwood 2015)
- Southpaw (Antoine Fuqua 2015)
- John Wick (David Leitch, Chad Stahelski 2015)
- Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg 2015)
- Black Sea (Kevin McDonald 2015)
- Straight outta Compton (F. Gary Gray 2015)
- Out of the Furnace (Scott Cooper 2013)
Tier 4: ah well…
- Everest (Baltasar Kormákur 2015)
- Rogue One (Gareth Edwards 2016)
- Split (M. Night Shyamalan 2016)
- Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson 2016)
- Jian Bing Man (Da Peng 2015)
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams 2015)
- Crimson Peak (G. del Toro 2015)
- All is Lost (J.C. Chandor 2013)
- Selma (Ava DuVernay 2015)
- Unbroken (Angelina Jolie 2014)
- The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum 2014)
- Big Eyes (Tim Burton 2014)
- The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou 2016)
Tier 5: Not good, no really, not good
- The Mermaid (Stephen Chow 2015)
- Poltergeist (Gil Kenan 2015)
thomas4cinema 