The Ten Best Films of 2015 | Features

2. “Inside Out” (Pete Docter)

In the wake of a few surprisingly uninspired efforts, Pixar Animation Studios returned to top form with one of their finest films to date, a hilarious, heartwarming and genuinely thoughtful tale that takes us into the mind of an ordinary girl and introduces us to her key emotions—Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Fear (Bill Hader)—as they try to help her navigate the perils of a new home, school and friends. Like the best Pixar films, it takes an absolutely inspired idea and presents it in a spectacularly entertaining and innovative manner that mines the material for a lot of laughs (including some advanced ones that will have the adults chuckling), plenty of earned sentiment (I suspect the final sacrifice of long-lost imaginary friend Bing Bong will be to this generation of children what the passing of Bambi's mother was to their parents and grandparents) and enough real insight into the nature of human emotion that it could serve as a teaching tool to help explain the tricky subject to kids. Long after the tie-in T-shirts have faded and the stuffed toys have been relegated to a closet, my guess is that kids who see it will continue to carry around the lessons they learned from it, and when they have kids themselves, they will use it to pass those lessons on to their offspring. (Peter Sobczynski)

1.  “Mad Max: Fury Road” (George Miller)

George Miller, the director of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” as well as the director or co-director of every other entry in the series, was 70 when his latest work hit theaters. You could tell, and yet you couldn't. It is one of the best new-school action films of recent years, but at the same time, paradoxically, the most old-fashioned. The fourth installment in this post-apocalyptic saga has plenty of characteristics that smack of a “2015 reboot,” or at least a revamp. It scrambles after dude-pleasing "awesomeness" quite unabashedly, and makes the most of its wild juxtapositions and gleefully ridiculous images, such as combatants atop long poles swaying above the caravans like conductor's batons, and drummers and a fire-spitting guitar player providing a mobile soundtrack to the film's seemingly neverending chase. It fills its lead role with the puppy-loving method hunk Tom Hardy rather than bringing back its original lead actor, the increasingly unhinged and unemployable caveman Mel Gibson. With help from playwright Eve Ensler (“The Vagina Monologues”), Miller and his screenwriters rethought the series' ethos to make its women more complex as well as more central to the plot; there are points in the film where Charlize Theron's transport driver, Imperator Furiosa, the would-be rescuer of a water-hoarding dictator's harem, seems to be driving the story in every sense, with Max serving as her reluctant ally and enabler rather than as her protector or mentor or teacher, or whatever other role that a male title character would usually play in this sort of movie.

The style of “Mad Max: Fury Road” draws heavily on next-gen video games and music videos, with brighter colors, more crowded frames and much faster cutting than audiences saw the last time out (1985's “Mad Mad Beyond Thunderdome”). At the same time, “Mad Max: Fury Road” is very old-fashioned, modeling some of its longer, wider shots on John Ford and Akira Kurosawa (great use of shadows and silhouettes), and drawing its symbolism and foreshadowing from parables, myths and religious texts, as well as Homer's “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” epic poems that have informed the entire series. (A maybe-or-maybe-not related trivia note: Miller's family is Greek, and changed its name from Miliotis.) This is a movie so determined to connect to viewers through images alone that you could easily imagine it as a black-and-white silent picture from about 1928—and wouldn't you know it, there are plans to re-release the movie in monochrome to theaters. Maybe they'll go all the way, drop the sound out and add title cards. (Matt Zoller Seitz)

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