Best of '15: Music Videos of the Year

We'll begin our daily year in review partying with some music.

The best music videos are like short films. Or, rather, all music videos are short films. The best of them can give cinematic thrills, though. Not that you'd want two full hours of most of them. Still and all, here are 15 favorites of the year. Apologies to two tremendous auteurs who dabbled in music video this year (P.T. Anderson with Joanna Newsom and Xavier Dolan for Adele) but if you're a legit auteur with great films under your belt, expectations run too high to excited when the video is only "good".

Disclaimer: Endorsement of videos is not neccessarily endorsement of songs though it helps, sure.

Suggestions for what we missed are welcome in the comments since it's easy to miss great ones if a less than spectacularly popular artist makes them...

15 BEST MUSIC VIDEOS OF 2015
(after the jump)

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Production Design Interview: Building the World(s) of "Room"

Once you've seen Room, you're unlikely to forget "Room". To Jack (Jacob Tremblay) "Room" is the entire world. He names everything in it and says hello each morning to the only (inanimate) friends he has ever known. The space had to be tight, visually memorable, and emotionally specific and you had to have cameras function inside it. A tall order. To design Room, and the world outside of it in Room, a Globe nominee for Best Picture, Lenny Abrahamson entrusted the ingeniously creative production designer Ethan Tobman who had previously worked in low profile independent film but attracted much more attention for recent high profile work for music superstars like Beyonce, Eminem and Madonna.

We had the pleasure of talking to Tobman about his process, his time in music video, and how he got emotionally inside and outside of that tiny space to design it. 

NATHANIEL R: Room has such a memorably specific central set, how do you even know where to begin on a project like this?

ETHAN TOBMAN: The way I approach any project, but specifically Room, is to read the script and put it away for a week and think about the things that inspired me about it. The research begins immediately, but I need to allow myself to think pretty abstractly about some of the emotional and thematic concepts. [More...]

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Happy 25th "Mermaids"

Rachel Flax would never approve of anniversary postings.. But Rachel Flax, portrayed by Cher at the tail end or her weirdly brief A-list actress run, didn't always know what was best so celebrate we shall after the jump...

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Adele + Dolan = "Hello"

New contributor Coco here, very happy to be joining the Film Experience team. Have you seen the latest Adele video?

Isn't it only logical that Adele's almost four-year hiatus was broken thanks to one of the most prolific auteurs of our times? It's unclear how much of a role Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan played in getting Adele to record her long-awaited third album, but he directs the video for first single "Hello". 

It's clear from this video that Adele is a huge fan of Dolan's Mommy, that she saw it, and that it was so trasnformative it inspired her to get up and finally record the follow-up to her megaselling and Grammy-winning album 21. That might be giving Dolan too much credit -we'll have to wait for the 25th anniversary oral history to find out the details- but the influence is there. Not only does it feature Dolan's trademark exhuberance, it also sounds a lot like the kind of song that would have been part of the Mommy soundtrack, especially with those "I'm sorry" chorus toward te end. 

What do you think? Was Adele totally inspired by Dolan? Do you think the song will win all the Grammys?

"Tilda Swinton" by Christopher Doyle

How have we not seen this short film from legendary cinematography Christopher Doyle before? It plays like a music video but the title and subject is Tilda Swinton. Well Tilda AND Shanghai AND Chanel.

"TILDA SWINTON" BY CHRISTOPHER DOYLE from Diane Pernet's ASVOFF on Vimeo.

Tilda Swinton, the goddess extrordinaire, descended in Shanghai on the day of the Solstice. In this film by Christopher Doyle, colors, textures and physiques merge into landscape. Swinton transforms her body into striking brushes and shapes against the backdrop of Pudong's skyscrapers and the dark alleys behind.

Hat tip to The Film Stage for pointing us to this unseen curio.