100 Best Movies of 2015 Ranked
The latest: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant celebrates its 10th anniversary!
2015 was a year marked by excellent award-winning domestic and foreign movies, and punctuated by some notable blockbusters. And a high number of the films on our guide to the 100 best movies of 2015 contain the same throughline: justice and humanity for the disenfranchised. The award nominations spread covered a large swath of topics, from exposing evil through journalistic justice in Spotlight, to child soldier recruitment in Beast of No Nation, to unlikely interplanetary survival in The Martian.
In foreign film, Embrace of the Serpent covers the plight of the indigenous tribes against the threat of white colonialism, and Mustang follows the demanding lives of five young orphan women living in a conservative Turkish society. Even a blockbuster like Mad Max: Fury Road is about the fight for liberation in a dystopian desert hellscape.
The 100 best movies of 2015 are ranked by Tomatometer, all Certified Fresh with positive Popcornmeters from at least 1,000 user votes. Before we go any further, that means, yep, even Fresh and popular Rotten movies arent’ making the cut, including worldwide box office hits like Jurassic World, Minions, Spectre, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, and Fifty Shades of Grey.
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Spotlight, the thrilling and scarring drama based on The Boston Globe’s investigative reporting into child abuse in the Catholic Church, won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for 2015. Best Adapted Screenplay went to The Big Short, Adam McKay’s comedic yet prescient take on author Michael Lewis’s bestselling book about the United States housing bubble and financial crisis in the 2000s. The Revenant, a western revenge film set in the wild American frontier, would win Alejandro G. Iñárritu Best Director and Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar for Best Lead Actor. Brie Larson’s simmering performance in the claustrophobic abduction thriller Room would earn her Best Lead Actress. Mark Rylance impresses in Bridge of Spies, the Cold War prisoner exchange drama directed by Steve Spielberg and co-written by the Coen Brothers. Alicia Vikander’s performance in The Danish Girl, a heart wrenching story based on one of the first recorded instances of gender reassignment surgery, would earn her Best Supporting Actress.
Mad Max: Fury Road would take home a staggering six Academy Awards: Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Costume Design, and Best Film Editing. The spectacular experiential film spawned a prequel in 2024, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
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Pixar’s Inside Out won Oscar gold for Best Animation. Like Fury Road, its popularity would earn it a follow-up film in 2024: Inside Out 2. British animation fans might consider Inside Out’s win an upset, as it was nominated alongside the hit Shaun the Sheep Movie. Created by Aardman, the studio behind the beloved Wallace & Gromit franchise, Shaun would receive positive reviews from critics and audiences alike and spawn a sequel in 2019: Farmageddon.
Outstanding foreign films include Son of Saul, A War, and Aferim!. Hungarian film Son of Saul follows a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz who is part of a unit forced to, by threat of death, aid with the removal of gas chamber victims in concentration camps. The devastating drama won Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes. Danish war drama, A War, follows a commander in the Danish military in Afghanistan who, while attempting to thwart a Taliban attack, calls in an airstrike and is charged for the war crime of killing eleven civilians. Aferim!, the Romanian entry from Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards (though not ultimately nominated), is a Western-style comedy-drama about a lawman hired by Wallachian nobility to track down a Roma slave accused of having an affair with the noble’s wife.
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In comedy, Melissa McCarthy and Amy Schumer delivered a one-two punch in 2015. In director Paul Feig’s action laugh-fest Spy, McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, a shy CIA handler turned foul-mouthed international agent who must thwart a criminal plot by Rayna Boyonov (Rose Byrne), dodge setbacks from bozo fellow spy Rick Ford (Jason Statham), rescue her work partner/crush (Jude Law), and fend off the advances from a comically pervy undercover contact, Aldo (Peter Serafinowicz). Trainwreck, directed by Judd Apatow, stars Amy Schumer, as a sex-obsessed lush of a magazine columnist who struggles to maintain a steady partnership with her boyfriend (Bill Hader), due to her party girl ways and a severe commitment allergy. Trainwreck’s been praised by critics for being a refreshingly subversive take on the traditional romantic comedy.
And 2015 was not without its fill of action! Tom Cruise returned to the big screen as Ethan Hunt for the fifth time in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Hunt and his ensemble of IMF agents (featuring Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames), and introducing a disavowed MI6 agent (Rebecca Ferguson), employ their skills to expose and dispose of the shadowy organization known as The Syndicate, in a globetrotting adventure lauded for its gripping pace and exceptional stunts. Marvel’s Ant-Man took a bow, introducing Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, an out-of-work engineer turned petty thief turned microscopic superhero. Ant-Man would eventually receive two sequels, Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), though the titular hero would make crossover appearances in Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Now, it would be impossible to discuss epic 2015 action movies and leave out Furious 7. Dom Toretto and his team of inexplicably superhuman gearheads are back for another white-knuckle adventure. This entry in the pulse-heightening franchise introduces a new villain, Deckard Shaw (Statham again!), who claims to have killed the team’s friend Han (Sung Kang). The film also says goodbye to Toretto’s best friend Brian O’Connor, as actor Paul Walker sadly perished in a real-life auto collision before the film wrapped production.
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A few more worthy films! The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, is a bizarre tale set in a seemingly authoritarian world where single adults force themselves to find a partner in 45 days or be transformed into an animal of their choosing. Such an odd concept could only come from the mind of writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos, who later directed the critically acclaimed films The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite, and Poor Things. Straight Outta Compton, directed by F. Gary Gray, is a biographical account of the early lives of hip-hop artists Ice Cube, Easy-E, and Dr. Dre, who formed the legendary group N.W.A., and was shot on location in Compton, California. The role of Ice Cube was a breakout for actor O’Shea Jackson Jr., who portrayed his own real-life father in the movie. The Witch, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, is an independent folk horror film set in pre-Revolutionary New England, where a Puritan family fears they are being stalked by evil. The film thrust Robert Eggers onto the scene as an outstanding director to keep an eye on. He would continue to make unconventional but well-received movies like The Northman, The Lighthouse, and 2024’s Nosferatu, which earned four Academy Award nominations. (Tyler Lorenz)
