Every time he opens his eyes as big as saucers in 1945’s The Lost Weekend, Ray Milland performs in a mannered fashion, but it doesn’t prevent the film from being formidable.  It is a fine, non-signature Billy Wilder piece in which Milland plays a Renaissance man, a literate writer, who is relentlessly self-defeating because of alcoholism.  Don (Milland) is irascible and not really a charming drinker since it is always obvious he loves the bottle obsessively.

The ending is strictly Old Hollywood—Don should love Helen (Jane Wyman) enough to put his cigarette out in his glass of liquor, but would he?—but the movie survives it.  Wyatt, incidentally, is splendidly engaging.

The Lost Weekend (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I did not see The End of the Tour, Ex Machina, or Love & Mercy, but of those 2015 films I did see, here are the five best:

Two Days, One Night; Brooklyn; Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation; Spotlight; and Cinderella.

Honorable mention: Inside Out, Slow West, Furious 7, Phoenix. 

Matt Dillon‘s drug addict and thief in the 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy, declares that no one can talk a junkie out of being a user.  The pic is so dark that apparently this includes the junkie himself: he is incapable of such a feat.  It is not so much the drug life DC‘s script is bleak about, although it is, as life itself, a vision director Gus Van Sant delivers with fey, carefree poetry and brittle humor.  It is the best Van Sant film I know of.  Only standard-issue acting emanates from Kelly Lynch and Heather Graham, but Dillon is outstanding.

Cover of Drugstore Cowboy

Matt Dillon‘s drug addict and thief in the 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy, declares that no one can talk a junkie out of being a user.  The pic is so dark that apparently this includes the junkie himself: he is incapable of such a feat.  It is not so much the drug life DC‘s script is bleak about, although it is, as life itself, a vision director Gus Van Sant delivers with fey, carefree poetry and brittle humor.  It is the best Van Sant film I know of.  Only standard-issue acting emanates from Kelly Lynch and Heather Graham, but Dillon is outstanding.

Cover of Drugstore Cowboy

David O. Russell’s Joy (2015) may do a better job of showing the difficult struggle of building a manufacturing business than any movie in history, but to me it gets rather boring and colorless during its second half.  It’s less interesting, in fact, than Atlas Shrugged Part 2, another film about business.  And it’s assuredly unprofound.  Russell directed it in an imaginative and resonant way, though.