20 Best Films of 2015 So Far
As June strikes up its merry chorus, it's hard to believe that we're nearly halfway through a year we're still not wholly used to writing in date form —seriously, 2015? it feels like something out of a sci-fi movie, and come October 21st it will be. Yet it must be said that when we look back on the films released since the beginning of January, there have been enough excellent movies to cover several months more. In fact, when compiling this list of Best Films of the Year so far (which extends to the end of June, as we've already seen all the major releases for the rest of the month and can include them in consideration), we've taken the unprecedented step of increasing the total list to 20 titles, concentrating exclusively on narrative features (docs will get their own list soon) and dropping any festival-only titles from consideration (festival favorites will also get their own separate feature).

So here are the 20 honest-to-God theatrically released narrative films from January-June 2015 that we feel make the best all-round case for this being a pretty terrific year at the movies so far.

'71
“‘71” (Original Review)
“Mad Max: Fury Road” might be the best action movie of 2015 so far (and probably of the previous ten years), but not far behind is a far more modest endeavor, the low-budget British thriller “’71,” a pulse-pounding picture with something to say. The feature debut from TV hotshot Yann Demange strands squaddie Jack O’Connell (immediately throwing off any memory of the turgid “Unbroken”) in the midst of enemy territory at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, a target for both Irish Republicans and nefarious higher-ups on his own side. Lean, frantic and unbearably tense, it’s likely to have immediately put Demange near the top of wish-lists for many new projects: few modern filmmakers have captured chaos with such clarity or sustained suspense for so long. But it’s not just a stripped-down genre exercise —Gregory Burke’s fine script finds enough time to break for a breather to give a nuanced take on the politics of the time (war being “posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts” is one of the quotes of the year), or to locate the humanity in the men and women around them. Both realistic and strangely hallucinatory, it’s easily one of the most striking debuts in some time.

The Duke Of Burgundy
“The Duke Of Burgundy” (Original Review)
British director Peter Strickland had us at his second film "Berberian Sound Studio," which showed his love of moviedom's Giallo corners with an intoxicating, heady take on the craft of filmmaking itself. 'Burgundy' is less meta in that regard, but it's no less concerned with mood and atmosphere, establishing a cloying, rotten-fruit eroticism between his two central characters ("Borgen"'s Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D'Anna), who are engaged in a game of sexual domination and submission fifty shades knottier, kinkier and more complex than anything that happens between Ana and Christian. The gradual revelation of who truly calls the shots in the relationship is the story's central trick, but the film is unhurried, instead opening up like a pollen-heavy flower that somehow immediately spoils. In dealing so thoroughly with the nature of fetishization, the film becomes an exercise in fetish itself, from the sensuous shucking of seamed silk stockings, to the polishing of leather boots, even to including a credit for a fictional perfume "Je Suis Gizella," as though Strickland wants us to imagine a runner spritzing the air with a baroque atomizer between takes. It's self-conscious in the extreme, arch and artificial, but also quite unique.

"Eden"
"Eden"
“Eden” (Original Review)
Hollywood’s about to get its first major EDM movie with the Zac Efron-starring “We Are Your Friends,” but any further studio films as such may be late to the party: French helmer Mia Hansen-Løve has already delivered what may be the definitive DJ Bildungsroman, a sort of Gallic “Boyhood,” if you swapped in Daft Punk for that awful scene with the waiter. Building on the nuance and humanism of the devastating one-two punch of her previous films “The Father Of My Children” and “Goodbye First Love,” "Eden" is a decades-spanning story of Paul (Félix de Givry), who comes up alongside Daft Punk in the dawning years of French house and reaches a modicum of fame, but keeps the party going long after many of his friends have embraced adulthood. Hansen-Løve is concerned as much with the comedown lows as with the pupil-dilating highs, thus eschewing the tropes of the music movie for an easy, low-key naturalism that feels steeped in authenticity (her brother Sven, who co-wrote the film, is a well-known DJ), but it’s about more than just BPM: the film serves as a sort of defining statement about the generation that refused to grow up.

"Ex Machina"
"Ex Machina"
“Ex Machina” (Original Review)
Science fiction at its best can be a laboratory in which weighty philosophical and allegorical concepts are explored within genre entertainment. Alex Garland, the writer of such sci-fi films past as Danny Boyle's "Sunshine," "28 Days Later" and the adaptation of "Never Let Me Go" seems to innately grasp that balance in his quietly dazzling directorial debut. Set in a highly controlled, stylized environment, a kind of Petri dish in which we can observe the interactions of its three principals minutely, he orchestrates "Ex Machina"'s investigation of identity, misogyny and power relationships with the precision of a safecracker, aided by a trio of tremendously assured, committed performances. Most centrally, Alicia Vikander continues her imperial phase as the otherworldly robot Ava, Oscar Isaac is unknowably charismatic as the reclusive genius with literal skeletons in his closets, and Domhnall Gleeson confirms his value as an actor who can negotiate a seeming everyman role but invest the character with personality and a kind of deep ambivalence —he may be our proxy, but that doesn't mean we have to like him. It's a chilling, taut, precisely calibrated movie, so well-engineered that it feels almost like the product of artificial intelligence itself. (Already seen? Check out our spoilery podcast on "Ex Machina")

Girlhood
“Girlhood” (Original Review)
From the sparkling, authentic performances from an immensely talented unknown cast, to the lyrical but gritty photography to the sublime soundtrack that uses, among other pop cuts, the Rihanna song from which the quote is taken, everything in Céline Sciamma's "Girlhood" "shines bright like a diamond." Coming-of-age stories are now as played-out a genre as any, yet Sciamma's take on the travails of a young black girl (a luminous Karidja Touré) growing up in the tough suburbs of Paris, negotiating gang politics, criminality and her own burgeoning sexuality, is shot through with a vibrant sense of life, and feels anything but tired. According her young, exclusively black, almost exclusively female cast a degree of honest agency and respect that this segment is very rarely accorded on film, Sciamma's movie is much more than an exercise in political correctness, delivering a thrilling and often poetic meditation of the quest for self-identity in a modern urban setting that transcends all its specifics (language, geography, class, skin color, sex) to become something truly universal and achingly relatable. It's a film about early adulthood that makes deep, chiming sense to anyone who ever made that transition themselves --that is, to everyone.