2015 was a bumper year for LGBT-themed material, with a particular emphasis on trans and women's dramas finding audiences of mainstream moviegoers.
The approaching award season can be measured in the rich array of star turns from familiar actors: Eddie Redmayne, Jesse Eisenberg, Tobey Maguire, and the neglected Paul Dano. On the distaff side, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Lily Tomlin have notched career peaks that should be rewarded at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and ultimately the Oscars. Consider the top four films to be in a four-way tie for Best Film of the Year.
1. The Danish Girl
Copenhagen, 1925. Danish artist Gerda Wegener paints her husband, Einar (Eddie Redmayne), in female garb. When the painting gains popularity, Einar starts to change into a female identity, Lili Elbe. With his feminist passion and Gerda's support, Einar opts for the first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, a decision that changes their marriage. Gerda realizes her husband is no longer the person she married. A childhood friend of Einar's, art-dealer Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), initiates a complex love triangle with the couple. A modern fairy-tale, with Redmayne again a top contender for a Best Actor Oscar. Credit also must go to the film's source material, the nuanced historical novel from queer author David Ebershoff.
2. The End of the Tour
Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg offer two of the year's strongest male characters, genius novelist David Foster Wallace and admiring Rolling Stone feature writer David Lipsky. Screenwriter Donald Margulies and director James Ponsoldt draw on Lipsky's bestselling memoir "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" to produce a subtle undressing of both men. Eisenberg's Lipsky kicks off their brief bromance by persuading his editor to let him write RS's first serious writer profile. Rarely does an American film capture the complex mix of isolation and self-promotion required to stay on top of a serious calling, and the petty humiliations and self-abasements American society demands of its best and brightest. Eisenberg gives us a nakedly ambitious young man who pushes his game to the max, even when the older man calls him out.
3. Love and Mercy
Paul Dano channels America's most enigmatic pop genius, Beach Boys frontman-composer Brian Wilson. Toss in John Cusack anchoring half the film as the same pop prince reduced to a Hollywood recluse by a jealous dad and an abusive shrink, and you have a riveting music-biz classic. Writer-director Bill Pohlad shows Wilson reclaiming his throne and his life after years of pills and isolation.
4. Carol
Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara hold us in their grip as an out-of-time lesbian couple in queer writer-director Todd Haynes' strongest drama to date. Haynes deftly displays the forces of hetero-oppression, with a strategic child-custody battle showing how far we have come since the 50s, when LGBT folks had no rights "real people" needed to respect. Haynes cradles his story in a Douglas Sirk-style world of hard-drinking, boorish men and desperate if witty women.
5. Grandma
In this delicious road comedy, a 75-year-old lesbian, Elle (Lily Tomlin), gets behind the wheel of a 50s clunker and, with her very pregnant granddaughter riding shotgun, sets off to collect on some old debts, from a bevy of aging girlfriends, a pissed-off adult daughter, and a sarcastic ex-boyfriend. Kudos to writer-director Paul Weitz for creating a star vehicle for Tomlin.
6. Pawn Sacrifice
Tobey Maguire gives a career turn as tortured chess master Bobby Fischer. The filmmakers incorporate the best traits of a classic sports film while digging deeply into a genius intellectual athlete whose dilemmas made him a man without a country. Maguire is deft at polishing some of the rough edges off the brutish Fischer, without being false to the chess king's fate.
7. The Surface
In Michael J. Saul's offbeat coming-of-age tale, a longhaired, 20something gay orphan impulsively buys an 8mm movie camera at an elderly neighbor's yard sale. Evan's (Harry Hains) impromptu chat with a man old enough to be his great-grandfather jumpstarts his obsession with personal filmmaking.
8. Hitchcock/Truffaut
Conventional wisdom once regarded Alfred Joseph Hitchcock as little more than a creature of Anglo-American media hype. French critic/New Wave director Francois Truffaut was discouraged by colleagues from undertaking a serious study of this master of suspense. Truffaut and a friend almost thought better of their project when a series of accidents landed them and their precious audio recorder in a pond of frozen water. Fortunately, Truffaut was not easily discouraged, and began a week's worth of in-depth conversations with Hitch about the foundations of filmmaking. Kent Jones distills 60 hours of Truffaut-Hitchcock chats into a complex 80-minute doc fleshed out with observations from Hitch disciples. A special treat for a new generation of Hitchcock fans.
9. Janis: Little Girl Blue
Amy Berg's shockingly intimate bio-doc lets Port Arthur, Texas-born white blues mama Janis Joplin play herself, showing how a "plain Jane" singer raised on the Texas Gulf Coast could seduce the hell out of blues fans, black and white, from Austin to San Francisco to Woodstock and beyond. Once you're exposed to Janis belting out, "Cry, cry, baby," you're hooked for life.
10. Tangerine
"Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped lie." This tart observation comes from the lips of a mother-in-law chasing her daughter's hubby down a cultural rabbit hole and into Donut Time, a Korean snack shop full of pimps and their transgender African American prostitutes, in director Sean Baker's sassy tour of everything the LA Chamber of Commerce would rather you not see.
11. The New Girlfriend
French bad boy director Francois Ozon, who upsets apple carts even in trendsetting French precincts, confronts the gender wars. Claire (Anais Demoustier) thinks she's being kind when she attempts to comfort the newly widowed hubby of her best girlfriend. But to her surprise, hubby David (Romain Duris) reveals himself to be a secret crossdresser. Ozon tests the limits of those who think themselves incapable of being shocked.
12. The Wolf Pack
A disturbing peek at the life-into-art project of six homeschooled brothers. A tribute to the plucky spirit of six longhaired Manhattanite boys, an audition tape for everything they ever hope to be. As one of the brothers notes, "If I didn't have movies, I would be a pretty broken person."
13. Freeheld
Peter Sollett commands a peerless ensemble (Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, Steve Carell) in the true story of one gay couple's fight for equal rights. Laurel Hester (Moore), a lesbian diagnosed with terminal cancer, is unable to give her partner, Stacie (Page), her pension benefits because their home state doesn't recognize same-sex marriage.
14. Tom at the Farm
In this gripping black comedy, a young man, grieving his late lover, turns up at the dead boy's rural Quebec funeral with a phony blonde dye-job, promising to deliver a eulogy that will make the conservative townsfolk take notice: respect the queer citizens in their midst. Tom loses his nerve and sits through a dull service by the parish priest, disappointing his late beau's mom and, ominously, the deceased's moody, possibly dangerous brother. Quebec queer prodigy Xavier Dolan takes us along a devious path to salvation for Tom (Dolan plays his slippery gay-boy heroes), opening up a portal for a more imaginative and risky kind of LGBT movie.
15. Liz in September
Eva drives from Caracas to join her husband and son for a summer vacation retreat. Car troubles intervene, and the kindly repair guy directs Eva to stay with a feisty group of lesbians while he puts her car up on the rack. Venezuelan director Fina Torres provides a witty Spanish adaptation of a pioneering American lesbian play, Jane Chambers' (1937-83) "Last Summer at Bluefish Cove." A classic lesbian gem takes on the concerns of women in the Southern Hemisphere, with their history of oppression by Latin machos, and other modern concerns: Assisted suicide, and the right of non-lesbian-identified women to experiment with other women without being tagged with homophobic labels.
16. Spotlight
Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber and Mark Ruffalo star in this passionate docudrama on how a dogged band of Boston Globe reporters uncovered the 2001 child molestation scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in Boston, setting off a tidal wave of disclosures that would embarrass the Vatican in major cities worldwide.
17. The Wonders
Alice Rohrwacher's beekeeping family comedy recalls gems from the Golden Age of Italian film. Gelsomina, a 12-year-old beekeeper's daughter (Maria Alexandra Lungu), gets under the skin of her macho father, Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck). The struggling tenant farmer's landlord is threatening his bees with toxic pesticides. Wolfgang wants to be a prize-winning beekeeper, but life, the untamable nature of his insects, and the ideals, curiosity and TV habits of Gelsomina keep getting in the way.
18. 45 Years
British gay director Andrew Haigh gets us uncomfortably close to an aging British couple (Tom Courtney, Charlotte Rampling) when they start in on each other as their 45th wedding anniversary looms. Rampling and Courtney defy the odds and give us a troubled couple whose marriage nearly crashes upon the discovery of the long-buried body of Courtney's first love.
19. Stand
Jonathan Taieb's Moscow crime drama features an attractive young Russian male couple, Anton and Vlad. One evening, while driving home to their apartment, the boys hear a loud sound in a park next to the highway. Vlad demands they stop the car and investigate; Anton is nervous about straying off the path in a city where anti-gay hooligans prowl the streets. Later, Anton and Vlad learn that a young man was brutally beaten to death that night, and the police haven't a clue. With references both to new techno toys (Google glasses, anyone?) and old-fashioned thuggery, the ending is stunning and depressing. One of a kind!
20. Sicario
An idealistic FBI agent (Emily Blunt) is recruited by an American government task force to battle the Colombia-based drug cartel. Quebec-born director Denis Villeneuve mixes extreme violence with a chess-player's strategic sense to create a thinking person's gangbanger-style adventure.