2015: A pretty good year for movies! Sure, in terms of both smarts and spectacle, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road drove right over just about everything else. But even when Imperator Furiosa wasn’t tearing across screens, there were plenty of other movies that demanded to be seen, considered, and argued over—from Sicario to It Follows to Room, from Magic Mike XXL to Creed to The Night Before, from Ex Machina to Tangerine to Spotlight to Carol.
Those highlights aside, 2015 was still, depressingly, dominated by male directors—and, depressingly, 2016 looks to be much the same, with women writers and directors finding far more work in television. (If you’re looking for new stuff from Lynn Shelton, Lisa Cholodenko, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Michelle MacLaren, Lena Dunham, or Nicole Holofcener, look to Netflix and HBO; if you’re wondering why Obvious Child’s Gillian Robespierre doesn’t have a billion movies lined up, join the club.) But even with Hollywood’s longstanding misogyny—and even when, apparently, we’ve all done something terrible as a species to deserve the karmic retribution of the forthcoming The Angry Birds Movie—there’s still a ton of stuff coming out in 2016 that’s well worth getting excited about. Or curious about. Or both.
