David Farnor | On 22, Dec 2015

2015 will go down in film history as the year when everything changed. Netflix released its first original feature, MUBI began to snap up movies for exclusive distribution, FrightFest launched its own digital label with Icon and, in an industry where day-and-date distribution has increasingly become the norm for smaller titles, Artificial Eye’s 45 Years was the first simultaneous release to break the £1m barrier at the UK theatrical box office, proving that cinemas and streaming aren’t mortal enemies.

It’s equally revealing just how many films released in cinemas in the last 12 months are already available on Netflix UK, Amazon Prime Video or other subscription services. Where will 2016 take us? Goodness knows. But with the quality of films being released on VOD – or straight to VOD – constantly rising, you can be sure that there’ll be something worth streaming. We’ll be there to give you the lowdown on it all. Until then, from indie flicks released directly on digital platforms to cinema hits that finally landed in our living rooms, we pick the top 20 VOD films of 2015:

20. White God

“A cautionary tale about the abuse of animals… White God is an unabashedly feral thriller that gnashes and thrashes its way through your nervous system, until climaxing with a bizarre, beautiful finale that leaves a haunting note lingering over the sea of rabid hunters. Rise of the planet of the dogs? The Birds with teeth? Homeward Bound for adults? From its ferocious images to its fervent love of trumpets, White God is a monster all of its own.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

Read our interview with the film’s dog trainer here.

19. Mistress America

Brooke Cardinas (Greta Gerwig) is a New Yorker who’s everything a New Yorker should be: hip, witty and eloquent, especially when talking about her favourite subject. Herself. We meet her, crucially, through the eyes of Tracy (Lola Kirke), a young college student whose mother is marrying Brooke’s father. They click instantly: Tracy looks up to her almost-bigger sister and Brooke loves being looked up to.

“After Frances and While We’re Young – written without Gerwig – Mistress America marks the lightest entry in Baumbach’s catalogue yet. The excitement of Brooke and Tracey’s new-found sisterhood fizzes in every frame, leaving us as caught up in their bond as much as they are. But, as you’d expect from Baumbach, there’s an acerbic undercurrent that runs through it all, one that skewers the current hipster generation with a spiky wit… The result is an uniquely uplifting yet downbeat comedy; a coming of age story that buzzes with youth and sighs with age.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

18. Nightcrawler

“The night can be a lonely place, especially if you’re out in the city, on the streets, with only criminals and sociopaths for company. It’s here that the movies have forged some of their most fascinating characters, from Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle to Ryan Gosling’s Driver. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom is a strong addition to the canon, an enthusiastic go-getter who has left his moral by the kerb as he slithers into the gutter… All Lou needs is a profession where his particular set of skills will come in handy. Enter the ‘nightcrawling’ trade, the camera-wielding bottom feeders who prowl the streets, listening to police radios for crimes and accidents they can film and sell on to the news stations… Gyllenhaal has rarely been better, wiry and wired in every scene.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

17. It Follows

Imagine someone walking towards you. Not very scary, is it? Wait until you see It Follows. David Robert Mitchell’s horror thriller follows Jay (Maika Monroe), who finds herself on a date gone terrifyingly wrong, when she wakes up post-sex strapped to a chair and is told that something is going to try and kill her. Why? We don’t know. Who? We don’t know that either. What we do know is that this entity will continue following her until it catches her and shuffles her off her mortal coil.

There are some conditions – the creature only moves at walking speed and only the person being followed can see it – but these, crucially, are things learned by those on the run; there’s no Basil Exposition living in Detroit to give Jay the answers.

“That simplicity is what gives Mitchell’s script its scares – and there are a lot of them packed into these 100 minutes… It’s clever. It’s unconventional. And it’s very, very creepy.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

16. Spring

‘Are you a vampire, werewolf, zombie, witch or alien?’ asks Evan in Spring. It’s a conversation that cuts straight to the heart of the movie’s post-modern magic: after years of horror-romance flicks, as soon as you meet someone who seems a little weird, surely it’s the first question you ask? After all, Evan is perfect genre fodder. After a personal tragedy – and some unwise brawling – he finds himself with no real connections in the US and ever fewer reasons to return. So he hops on a plane to Italy, where he meets young scientist Louise.

“What follows is more straight romance than horror, as the pair spend the 90 minutes hanging out. He is instantly smitten, while she remains distant and aloof; a dynamic that feels like something of a reverse Twilight. Their relationship, though, is more mature than that; it comes with the baggage and history that twenty-somethings and older carry. As they learn more about each other, that bond evolves, and continues to evolve… Keep your vampires and aliens. Sometimes, the most terrifying – and magical – thing is another person.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

15. Mr Holmes

“What happens when one of the sharpest minds in literary history begins to fail? That’s the question posed by Bill Condon’s remarkable Mr. Holmes, in which Ian McKellen stars as the famous Baker Street detective, approaching his centenary year and concerned that everything that defines him is deteriorating. It might not sound like the Holmes we’re used to seeing these days, and that’s because it isn’t – but if there’s room on cinema screens for Robert Downey Jr’s ass-kicking interpretation, then there’s certainly room for McKellen’s: a sensitive and elegant meditation on memory, wrapped in an ingenious unpicking of the Sherlock mythology… A serene but devilishly smart take on one of popular culture’s most enduring legends.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

14. What We Do in the Shadows

Viago, Deacon and Vladislav are three flatmates in this mockumentary from New Zealand. They wake each other up for flat meetings. They go out on the town. They get annoyed at each other for not doing the dishes. And they try not to disturb Petyr downstairs. They’re just normal, typical blokes. Who happen to be vampires.

“It’s a simple idea but that simplicity makes the humour delightfully complex. From the moment the desperately eager Viago (Taika Waititi) rouses Vladislav upstairs, only to find a hairy Jemaine Clement surrounded by naked ladies halfway up the wall, it’s clear this Kiwi comedy is taking its vampiric lore seriously… The result is a creative mix of old tropes and new ideas; a revitalising bite to the neck for a genre that has become all too familiar in recent years.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

13. Jodorowsky’s Dune

“Jodorowsky’s Dune doesn’t exist. But if it did, it would probably be the greatest film in the world. That’s how director Frank Pavich feels. By the end of this movie, you probably will too. Pavich traverses the globe to interview the cast and crew of the failed project, assembling one of cinema’s best not-making-of documentaries. Frank’s secret weapon is the book that the Alejandro Jodorowsky and his astonishing artistic team assembled to wow studios. That group included everyone from Chris Foss and H.R. Giger (pre-Alien) to Moebius, people that the filmmaker seemed to pick up through sheer willpower alone… The DNA of Dune can be traced through its most memorable output, from Blade Runner all the way to Prometheus – an astonishing tribute to anunfinished dream.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

Jodorowsky’s Dune was released straight to VOD in July 2015.

12. The Way He Looks

“Brazilian writer-director Daniel Ribeiro expands his award-winning short film I Don’t Want To Go Back Alone into this full-length coming-of-age drama, whose original title translates as Today, I Want To Go Back Alone, a subtle difference that reflects a shift in focus between the two films. The result is a sensitive exploration of blindness, sexual identity and first love that ranks with the very best teen movies.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

11. 45 Years

Marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence. So goes the old joke, which has been around even longer than Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) have been hitched. But 45 Years carries the weight of that time in just two words. Marriage, here, is no laughing matter. In fact, in Andrew Haigh’s hands, it’s a horror story.

“All relationships are haunted by previous partners. For Geoff, that haunting takes physical form when a letter arrives out of the blue, informing him that the body has been found of a former girlfriend, who fell off a mountain in the Alps 50 years ago. As the couple prepare for a 45th wedding anniversary party, the thought of this old flame, frozen and unchanged, begins to possess Geoff. The date of their post-nuptial celebrations draws closer, but they fall further apart… Haigh’s last film, 2011’s Weekend, captured the beauty of a fledgling romance. The warmth of that brief encounter is replaced here by a chilling sadness, but the director’s striking, intimate touch remains. This is a movie built on tiny details and unspoken gestures.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

Read our interview with Andrew Haigh here.

10. Mommy

“‘We still love each other, right?’ That’s Steve to his mum, Die, in Xavier Dolan’s new film, Mommy. ‘That’s what we’re best at, buddy,’ comes the reply. When she says it, it really means something – because we see exactly what she goes through… Antoine Olivier Pilon is superb as the hyperactive, hyper-excitable, hyper-aggressive teen, one moment saying sweet things to his mum, the next blowing up in her face. But he’s nothing compared to the enfant terrible behind the camera. At the tender age of 25, Xavier Dolan has already notched up several impressive films, doing everything from writing and directing to starring and designing the costumes – often all at the same time. Here, he crafts his most mature and impressive film yet: one that knocks you for six, both technically and emotionally.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

9. Song of the Sea

“Hey, kids! Who fancies a story about death? That’s the kind of question that would get a children’s entertainer fired, but it’s also what makes Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon so special. Unafraid to raise such serious subjects with its young audience, the studio’s latest – Song of the Sea – is an astonishing animated gem.”

“Unlike the unhappy adults around them, [the young characters] realise that embracing the pain and sorrow of grief are part of getting older. There is a trust implicit in conveying such a message in a kids’ film, which goes hand in hand with the gentle speed and blurred reality: like the best children’s movies, Song of the Sea has faith in its audience to be mature in everything but imagination.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

8. Ex Machina

“‘If you’ve created artificial intelligence, that isn’t the history of man. It’s the history of gods.’ Programmer Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson) wins a prize to spend a week on a private work retreat with his boss (Oscar Isaac) – only to discover it’s really to put a top secret robot through the Turing test. The robot in question? Ava, a female with enough self-awareness to know what she is…. What follows is a fascinating psychological thriller, as identity, power and ethics come into play. But that early conversation is where the thrilling script reveals its biggest surprise: that Ex Machina isn’t about Caleb at all. It’s about Ava.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

7. Coherence

“Writer-director James Ward Byrkit’s debut feature is a no-budget talker doomed to obscurity by its near-complete lack of marketing moolah, which is a huge shame because it’s exactly the kind of cracking, creepy brain-boggler you used to catch on Channel 4 in the middle of the night… Set in one house (kind of), at a dinner party where eight annoyingly WASPish characters yap inanely about yoga and feng shui, it soon veers off into a twilight zone where an indistinct menace drives a twisty, intelligent script towards a genuinely alarming climax. Imagine Friends if Central Perk were an inter-dimensional portal to existential terror and you’re part way there.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

6. Force Majeure

“[This] viciously funny, button-pushing black comedy revolves around a seemingly perfect family, whose ski holiday is ruptured when the husband and father reveals his character in the face of an apparent disaster… A superbly thought-out black comedy that dares to touch every nerve.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

5. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Ana Lily Amirpour’s directorial debut, which sees the deserted streets of the fictional Bad City stalked by a young, undead vampire, is a cool affair, one that sinks its teeth into genre trends and mixes them with other strains of cinema to produce something that fizzes with ideas.

“The greatest Iranian skateboarding vampire Western ever made.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

4. Birdman

Riggan (Michael Keaton) is a washed-up superhero movie star trying to prove his artistic relevance by adapting Raymond Carver for the stage. He’s surrounded by equally desperate creatives, from his concerned producer, Jake (Zach Galifianis), to his lover and supporting actress, Laura (Andrea Riseborough).

“As the chaos unravels, leaving us increasingly uncertain of what’s actually happening, events are accompanied by an ever-evolving drum score by Antonio Sanchez… It’s the perfect match for this bunch of thesps; self-indulgent, amusing and thrillingly unpredictable. The barmy end product is scathingly sharp but bursting at the seams with uncontrolled ideas; a satirical screenplay that echoes the meltdown of its own middle-aged movie star.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

3. Mad Max

“George Miller’s two-hour insane blockbuster is the kind of movie that you’re never sure you haven’t hallucinated completely… In a world of male-oriented, sequel-driven cinema, Fury Road presents the story of a woman fighting her way out of a guy’s clutches with bad-ass efficiency. She’s nobody’s property and she knows it. And she has a bionic arm. How did she get it? Who cares? It’s what she does with it that matters.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

2. Whiplash

Grimacing, laughing and sweating profusely, Miles Teller is astonishing to watch in action as a young drummer who finds himself under the tutelage of a merciless teacher (J.K. Simmons). Together, the pair form a dazzling duet, riffing off each other. All the while, their relationship changes key, from nasty humour to just plain nasty.

“The director skilfully modulates the tone from unnerving comedy to sceptical horror, but the real crescendo occurs within the last movement, a blistering dash to the closing bar that finally throws all that rigid conducting out of the window and goes for a freewheeling rim-shot to the gut… Crash, bang, wallop. What a video.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

1. Inside Out

“The best Pixar films have always had an element of autobiography about them, and Inside Out reads practically like a manifesto for Pixar’s output – heck, it’s practically a tour of the studio. Gather a bunch of diverse personalities together and let them work the controls in order to inspire outrageous flights of imagination, devastating heartbreak and cinematic joy. It was only a matter of time before Pixar made the logical leap and actually made a film from the viewpoint of the emotions they have so effortlessly mined over the past 20 years.”

Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

 

Special mentions: Films released straight to VOD in 2015:

The following titles were released straight to VOD this year and were also rated highly by our writers:

Beasts of No Nation
Cary Fukunaga’s brutal story of a child soldier is Netflix’s first original feature film.
Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

AAAAAAAAH!
Steve Oram’s thought-provoking horror comedy is simultaneously darkly funny, genuinely shocking and surprisingly moving. One of the first titles released by the new FrightFest Presents VOD label.
Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

Junun
Paul Thomas Anderson’s breathtaking, experimental musical film was released exclusively on MUBI around the world in October 2015.
Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

What Happened, Miss Simone?
Netflix’s first originally-produced feature documentary is a masterfully assembled portrait of an iconic performer.
Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

Beyond the Lights
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s crowd-pleasing romance was released straight to VOD in the UK after screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, but, thanks to support from The Bechdel Test Fest, ourselves and others, the film went on to enjoy several sold-out cinema screenings, as well as reach a wider audience on VOD.
Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

Creep
After screening at FrightFest 2014, Patrick Brice’s micro-budget horror went straight to Netflix in the UK. It’s a horror that deserves to be screamed about.
Our full review – plus where to watch it online.

 

Votes cast by Ian Loring, Matthew Turner, Simon Kinnear, Mark Harrison, Neil Alcock, Ivan Radford.

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