Here there is The 5 Best and Worst Movies of 2015 (So Far)

We’re now more than halfway through 2015, so it’s a great time of the year to take stock on what the best and worst movies have been so far. Awards season isn’t here until the fall, so there are lots of great films still to look forward to. But there have still been some really good films from the first half of 2015, and some really bad ones too. Here’s a look at the best and worst movies from the first half of the year. The list spans genres, from big budget blockbusters to critically lauded independent films to genre offerings to awards season fare, looking at a variety of the films that critics loved and hated so far in 2015.

Best of 2015 (So Far)

1. Mad Max: Fury Road

Source: Warner Bros.

Hands down one of the best movies of the year is one that probably won’t get any big awards nominations due to its action/science fiction genre, though it certainly deserves them. Mad Max: Fury Road surprised many when it came out not only to huge success at the box office, but also to rapturous reviews from critics who praised the film for its storytelling amidst all the beautifully realized action. With standout performances from Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, as well as an arresting artistic vision, director George Miller’s post-apocalyptic desert is a harrowing place filled with monstrous former humans and the insane vehicles they’ve engineered to survive.

More surprising and more subversive, Mad Max: Fury Road takes the form of a big budget action film and gives the audience the most feminist narrative that’s hit major movie screens and/or made that much money at the box office, like ever. Hardy is sort of disguised as the protagonist while Theron is the real hero and he just tags along to help her character save a group of abused women. There have been a million great articles and reviews online discussing why the movie presents a wonderfully refreshing feminist mindset under the guise of a typical action flick, and it gained a ton of press when a men’s rights blog urged men not to go and see it. For original storytelling, thrilling action, beautiful art, and a great social message, you can’t beat this movie. Mad Max: Fury Road is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a 98% rating.

2. Inside Out

source: Disney/Pixar

Pixar’s first offering in over a year from Up director Pete Docter has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is being lauded as the next animated classic from the legendary animation studio. The movie has been highly anticipated for some time and it seems like it was definitely worth the wait for fans of Pixar’s best work. The movie follows the internal mental turmoil of a young girl named Riley who undergoes a jarring move from the Midwest to San Francisco with her family when her dad gets a new job. Like Woody Allen’s classic Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, the movie takes place in a sort of control center in the protagonist’s brain. InInside Out that place is called Headquarters and her emotions are personified in characters representing Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Like Pixar’s best works, it’s being called funny, adventurous, and emotionally moving. This could very well be Pixar’s next Oscar winner after a short dry spell.

3. It Follows

source: The Weinstein Company

It Follows was the little independent horror movie that blew away critics and audiences. Horror movies rarely get reviews this good, but It Follows has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes with the review aggregating site saying it’s “smart, original, and above all terrifying.” The film’s buzz grew from grassroots promotion on social media and word of mouth before critics started raving about it. The story follows a teenage girl who’s haunted by a strange curse after a one-night stand. The only way to get rid of the haunting presence is to sleep with someone else and pass on the curse, increasing the teens’s sexual guilt. It might sound like a heavy-handed metaphor for the guilt and nerves that come along with early sexual encounters, particularly in today’s confusing culture, but the film pulls it off in a supremely scary way while paying homage to horror classics. Critics said their nerves were wrecked even after leaving the theater, which is the greatest compliment a horror film can receive.

4. Selma

Source: Paramount Pictures

This Martin Luther King Jr. biopic turned Ava DuVernay into the hottest new director in Hollywood. It was widely considered the biggest snub of the Oscars when DuVernay herself wasn’t nominated for Best Director even though the movie got a nod for Best Picture, to the point that protesters gathered outside the Oscar ceremony to draw attention to the lack of diversity in the nominees and host Neil Patrick Harris made a joke about it. But DuVernay isn’t exactly hurting, with her name in the ring for a variety of high profile projects including Marvel’s Black Panther movie. Selma focuses on MLK’s historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 and features a gripping performance from David Oyelowo as the civil rights leader. Focusing on three crucial months in MLK’s life, the movie also draws attention to the fact that we’re still far from inhabiting a world that meets his ideals. The movie has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was generally lauded by critics.

5. Clouds of Sils Maria

source: IFC Films

Most people know Kristen Stewart from the Twilight franchise and being splashed across the cover of tabloids, and that’s a shame since she’s lately been racking up work in small independent movies that make her “the most compellingly watchable American actress of her generation” according to Variety’s review of this movie.Clouds of Sils Maria won Stewart the Cesar award, the French equivalent of the Oscar, and while Americans might not give her that much praise for her emotionally fraught performance as the assistant to a hugely famous American actress played by Juliette Binoche, she deserves that recognition.

The incredibly complicated film could be watched many times before the viewer plucks out all its nuances and a different message could be discovered upon each viewing. The movie follows that actress played by Binoche as she prepares to be in a restaging of the play that launched her career 20 years later, this time playing the older character. Stewart’s character goes with her to a remote area of the Swiss Alps to help her prepare for the role, and Chloe Grace Moretz plays the young trainwreck of a Hollywood starlet who is usurping the younger role in the play. The film has an 89% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Worst of 2015 (So Far)

1. Fifty Shades of Grey

Source: Universal

This trainwreck of a movie was one of the most anticipated films of the year, as the erotic novels have famously sold bazillions of copies and ignited tons of controversy about whether or not the central relationship portrayed in them is a horribly misogynistic vision of a woman being abused and brainwashed by a powerful man or a sex-positive look at BDSM. Tons of women in particular read the books and much was made about whether the BDSM practices described within were becoming mainstream. Anyway, everyone knew about Fifty Shades by the time this movie was released, and many were expecting something that at the very least was going to be sexy. Wrong.

This might have made $569 million at the box office per Box Office Mojo and those sequels are definitely happening because of that, but the movie was reamed by critics. There was some debate as to whether it was as bad as the books were poorly written, but the general consensus was that the leads had zero chemistry, the sex scenes were not titillating or boundary-pushing, and it was nothing more than a poorly done romantic drama. “Basically, they made a lousy, mid-2000s-era Katherine Heigl romance with a handful of explicit sex scenes spliced throughout the familiar clichés,” said Richard Roeper.

2. Mortdecai

Source: Lionsgate

This Johnny Depp flop was another disappointment from the formerly renowned actor’s post-Pirates career. The movie not only got terrible reviews for being incredibly unfunny, with a pathetic 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it also tanked at the box office, only making $30 million worldwide on a production budget of twice that according to Box Office Mojo. Mortdecai is based on an obscure trilogy of mystery novels from the 1970s about a playboy-art-dealer-spy and audiences didn’t respond fondly to it, despite an A-list cast that aside from Depp included Gwyneth Paltrow and Ewan McGregor. “It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house,” said Robbie Collin for The Telegraph. That review also referred to the film as “psychotically unfunny.” Reading the bad reviews for Mortdecaiis definitely one activity that is more fun than actually watching the movie itself.

3. Jupiter Ascending

source: Warner Bros.

Science fiction fans want to believe that the Wachowski siblings will make another good movie aside from The Matrix. Unfortunately this year brought another misfire from the Wachowskis in this movie, a big budget, overly ambitious, visually impressive film that fails in the story department. Not even Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis could save this movie from filmmakers who are more concerned with making everything look interesting than telling a story.

The movie sees Kunis playing an average girl on Earth who finds out that she’s really the princess of a planet in a faraway galaxy when Tatum’s character, an alien ex-military hunter, comes to tell her about her true destiny. This was a huge box office flop, only making $181 million worldwide (most of that in foreign markets) on a budget of $176 million according to Box Office Mojo. Its poor reviews lead to a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Richard Roeper guaranteed that it would make it on his worst films of 2015 list back when it came out in February. And the poor Wachowskis are running out of chances to prove themselves. Perhaps their Netflix seriesSense8 will be better.

4. Chappie

source: Columbia Pictures

This is another disappointment from a big name sci-fi filmmaker. Neill Blomkamp is known for the modern sci-fi classic District 9, but Chappie didn’t quite live up to those lofty heights. The movie about a society terrorized by a robotic police force had some pretty heavy-handed political commentary. The titular robot and main character gets stripped of his programming and then has the ability to think and feel like a regular person. The government that created this police force doesn’t like this and decides to try and destroy Chappie. A cameo from the South African electronic music duo Die Antwoord wasn’t appreciated by critics, who also called Blomkamp out for repeating themes from District 9 and Elysium in an unoriginal way. The Wrap said, “special effects can’t make up for the lack of story and auto-recycling. … It’s also easy to recognize that Blomkamp’s films, each set in near-future riffs on our own society, now represent a groove that is stuck in a rut.” The movie has a 31% on Rotten Tomatoes.

5. Serena

source: Magnolia Pictures

This film has been the subject of intense fascination from Hollywood and movie fans because somehow a movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence from the Oscar-winning director Susanne Bier based on a bestselling, well-reviewed novel went straight to VOD. This is the kind of thing that should have gotten a big awards campaign and instead they tried to sweep it right under the rug. The film has an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has gained a lot of attention with people asking the question, how did this movie go so wrong? That both leads were praised for their performances makes the fact that this movie turned out bad all the more confusing.

It’s one of those films you watch and wonder how all the tiny strange choices, like shooting in the Czech Republic and trying to pass it off as the Smoky Mountains of the 1920s, made for a whole that doesn’t make sense. “Most of all, Serena is interesting because it’s a much more rare artifact than a really bad movie: It’s an incompetent movie. Unlike more famous movie disasters, it plays out not like the product of one unchecked monstrous ego but of a thousand tiny decisions gone wrong,” said Vulture in a great article summing up the weirdness that is Serena.

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