Alicia Vikander

The Top 10 Movies of 2015

best-2015

2015 was a year for ensembles, strong female-driven stories, real-life drama brought to the big screen, animated features, and surprisingly good science fiction. In a year which proved to hold as many gems before award season as during it, 2015 turned out to be a pretty good year at the movies. Limiting my list to ten there are certainly a number of films worthy of mention that didn’t find a place on this list including the best super-hero film of the year, a journey on Mars, Cold War spy intrigue, and the return of Star Wars, Charlie Brown, and Rocky Balboa all to the big screen. But enough of what didn’t make the cut; let’s count down the best movies of 2015…

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The Danish Girl

  • Title: The Danish Girl
  • IMDb: link

The Danish GirlAdapted from the novel of the same name by David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl is a movie that is constantly telling the audience it is an important movie without ever showing us why. The movie gives us the story of artist husband and wife Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) and Einar’s struggle with his own sexual identity leading him to take on the identity of Lili Elbe.

The movie tackles the issues of Lili’s sexual identity head-on while examining the effect of his changes on both his relationship with his wife and his artistic career. First, Vikander and Redmayne are both terrific in the film. However, aside from giving the leads meaty roles to dive into, The Danish Girl struggles in making the story of one of the first recipients of sex reassignment surgery interesting.

Don’t get me wrong, The Danish Girl a capable film that does justice to its sensitive subject matter, given Elbe’s standing in the LGBT community, but it’s certainly more notable for the performances of its two lead actors than its script. One could argue it’s dangerously close to the category of Oscar-bait.

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