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.

In the early 2000s, a right-wing website propounded that Catholic seminaries possibly around the world had become havens for homosexual men.  If this is true, it is hardly the biggest shocker one could hear that out of these havens came priests who were pedophiles opting to sexually molest young boys (albeit girls were molested too) such as all those the movie Spotlight (2015) steadily refers to.  Only boys are referred to as the Boston Globe reporters interview the men who, as youths, encountered the perverted priests.

No, Spotlight is not a documentary, but rather a drama about the Globe‘s reportage on the molestation and Church cover-up scandal.  The vile Father John Geoghan is there, briefly, in the film’s prologue, after which, well over 20 years later, the Globe‘s new editor (Live Schreiber) proves curious about the Geoghan legal case.  Some of the best scenes in the movie feature the lawyers of victims as they speak to the reporters.  They are played by Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup, and both they, and the scenes’ dialogue, are grabbers.  The engrossing, humorless screenplay is by the director, Tom McCarthy, and Josh Singer.  McCarthy and his cinematographer keep the fancy visuals out of Spotlight, with camerawork that is almost flavorless.  They know the spectator’s attention must be on the Globe‘s discoveries, on the deadly serious subject matter.

Memorably is the newspaper team enacted by John Slattery, Brian d’Arcy James, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo (who is superb), and Michael Keaton (as deep and effective as he was in Birdman).