Halloween party ideas 2015

Why should work on forex


Simple Strategies To Help You With Forex



The foreign exchange market, or forex market, can be a great place to invest your money, but like any market, it has its share of pitfalls. Too many traders jump right in without knowing what they are doing and end up losing their shirt. Before you start trading, read this advice.



It is always important that you learn from your successes and your failures. As with anything, you must take notes when you begin trading Forex. When something goes wrong, make sure you do not do that again. When something goes right, make sure you remember what you did to make everything end well.



When trading in the foreign exchange market, let your profits run as long as you safely can, but don't let your greed prevent you from being cautious. If you have made a significant profit on a trade already, withdraw some of the money from that trade to diversify into something else. You can never tell when a given market might crash.



It is smart to use stop loss when trading in the Forex market. Many new people tend to keep trading no matter what their loses are, hoping to make a profit. This is not a good idea. Stop loss will help anyone to handle their emotions better, and when people are calm, they tend to make better choices.



If you don't understand a currency, don't trade in it. Understanding the reasons behind why you are making a trade are paramount to a successful trade. A trade may look profitable from the outside, but if you don't understand the reasons behind it, you could lose out. Learn your currency pairs before risking money in the market.



To see the best results from your investment, stay in line with currency trends. A currency may seem oversold, but as long as it hasn't reached major support level, it remains a good investment choice. Sticking with trends will keep you from losing significant amounts of money, and will keep your profits strong.



When you get into forex market trading, first learn to read action in currency prices directly. There are many complex analytical tools and indicators available to forex traders. When you are starting out, though, it is better to get a feel for the raw action of the market. Leave the tricky formulas alone until you get experienced.



Keeping up to date with current world affairs can be a very good trait to have when using Forex. Political crisis such as wars, internal struggles, and many other things can reduce currency values. Also, things such as natural disasters that can be predicted, may reduce currency values. One should always stay current with what is going on in the world if they want to keep their investments safe.



A successful trader and an unsuccessful trader have a glaring difference. While the unsuccessful trader is ruined by a downswing, a successful one has the ability to weather the storm. When investing, never risk more than two or three percent of the total account. Several loses in a row is a quick road to ruin otherwise.



While lots of forex articles talk about the difference between "beginners" and "experienced traders," what you need to keep in mind is that learning forex is a process that never stops. Throughout your forex career you should strive to increase your knowledge of the process and your trading skills. Standing still can be no better than falling behind.



Understanding how to read the charts and analyze the financial data in forex can be the difference between success and failure. If you do not understand the numbers, you will not understand a good trade when you see one. This means you will ultimately fail, so make sure you're studying up on the numbers.



A useful tip for anyone new to the forex world is to analyze actual performance carefully and regularly. It is important to become familiar with price trends, trading methods and other fundamentals, but it is equally crucial to use one's actual transactional experience to learn from mistakes as well as from victories. By maintaining detailed trading records it will be possible to refine an overall strategy to achieve optimum success.



If a forex signal software offers a 100 percent guarantee or claims that you can avoid taking any kind of risks, you are facing a fraud. Look for software that explains honestly what they do and how you can use this data to maximize your profits and make informed decisions.



Forex trading, or foreign exchange trading, is designed to help investors make money through the swings in the value of foreign currencies. Using this you can make a few extra bucks, or even make a career. Do not start buying and trading before you have educated yourself about the market.



Forex trading can be extremely complicated, but it doesn't have to be. The main things you need for successful trading are knowledge, patience, commitment, and a good plan. By picking a simple strategy that is easy for you to follow and applying it sensibly and consistently, you can have lots of success with Forex trading.



If you are going to trade on Sunday night, watch out for 'slippage'. The market opens again on Sunday night, and rates of opening can be different from rates of closing. Your broker might be showing a rate that does not reflect the actual rate at which the exchange will be made. Losing money in this process is referred to as 'slippage'.



Set aside your emotions when trading. Don't trade too aggressively when trying to recoup a loss, and don't become too greedy when your positions are winning. Making too many trades can disrupt your strategy and increase your costs, while strong emotions can cloud your judgment and pressure you to take on too much risk. Staying calm and focused will help you get the best results.



Once you've learned the basics of trading on the forex market, it can be a great place to invest your money. A little education can go a long way in protecting you from big losses. If you apply the lessons you've learned from this article, you'll be a successful forex trader in no time.

HDMI is currently the best choice for Audio and Video connections.  Because it transfers both audio and video on one cable, in an uncompressed format, it’s perfect for high definition displays and setups.  HDMI is also compatible with the latest digital transmission standards like HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection).

HDMI has one main drawback.  Unfortunately it is not designed for long cable runs.  The higher the resolution and the longer the cable, the more the signal has a chance of become degraded.  This is because the cables are manufactured using twisted copper pairs of very small-gauge wire.  Unlike normal coaxial cable, this makes interference and degradation a reality whenever dealing with lengths over 50 feet.

Fortunately, the wise creators of the HDMI standard thought long and hard about their specification.  Because they choose to include a line for power within the cable, it has become possible to power repeaters that are internal to the cable.  Normally, signal boosters and repeaters need an external power source to boost the signal, but because of it’s design, HDMI can actually be extended without an external power source.

These types of HDMI repeaters come in several varieties.  There are cables with repeaters built in, as well as plug in repeaters that will connect two HDMI cables together while actively repeating the signal.  A converter can also be used to change the HDMI signal into a signal that will travel over standard Cat5 cable.  With this type of system, a unit is placed at either end of the cable run to transform the signal to go over cat5, and then transform it back to HDMI on the other end.

If extra care is needed for your signal, external power can also be used for your HDMI repeater.  This is a good idea because many HDMI sources simply don’t output the power needed to do a good job of repeating the signal.  Even cables with built-in repeaters often allow for an external power supply to be attached.  This is just a little extra protection for your signal and may be a good idea depending on the situation in which the repeater is needed.

Since HDMI is a digital signal, it cannot be degraded much before the picture and audio is not longer decipherable.  On analog signals, you can get quite a bit of degradation before the picture is totally gone.  On digital signals, corrupt is corrupt, you will start to see major artifacts with only a little bit of signal degradation.

This is why it’s important to use a proper repeater for all your long cable runs.  Do your research and find out which extender option is best for you: built-in, standalone repeater, or cat5 HDMI extender.  No matter what the situation is, there is probably a solution that will work for you.


If you want to put video on your website you must have a good knowledge of the basic video file types. What video file type to use? what are the pros and cons of each file type? These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself before proceeding with video implementation on your webpages.

There are three basic video file types on the internet. Mpeg, AVI and Quicktime. I believe the Quicktime file type is the most popular since a lot of huge entertainment and news sites use it exclusively on their web pages.

AVI is the oldest of the three main file types. It is a windows oriented video format but it's not the most popular because of the sound and video compatibility and synchronizing problems. Because the Quicktime format can be used on either a windows or a macintosh computer, the AVI video file type loses it's popularity every day.

The mpeg format is a popular video file type that uses it's high output quality to increase it's popularity over the Quicktime format. Mpeg is used on video games, cd-roms and other media that require high output quality. One disadvantage of mpeg is that it sacrifices file size to gain in digital quality. The mpeg video files are usually large.

Another disadvantage of the mpeg format is that you really need time and sophisticated hardware and software to convert plain video into mpeg. And let's not forget that the mpeg format is not supported by apple and macintosh meaning that if you put mpeg video on your website, those users with macintosh will not be able to see it.

Quicktime is by far the most popular video file type developed by apple for macintosh users, but is also compatible with the IBM-compatible machines and the windows operating systems. The hardware and software you need to digitize video into the Quicktime format is very inexpensive, compared to the mpeg format. So its much easier and cheaper to create video and put it on your website using the Quicktime format.


Online video publishing has indeed taken the Internet by storm in recent years, making the use of video for marketing, promotion, news and PR online a true key strategic component and a key business differentiator for internet marketers who want to communicate effectively about their product profile and benefits within the shortest possible of time.

Internet is full of information and the average attention span of a web user today is measured in seconds. When web users search for their information at a search engine, they will get thousands of search results; when they visit your website, they may only spend a few seconds and little efforts to scan through what you are selling or proposing and decide whether your content, style, look and approach are a good fit for what they were actually looking for. These first few seconds are crucial and if you can delivery clear and targeted message by offering a fast, highly visual way to get their further attention and engage their interest, you have done bingo.

Does this mean that you just need to simply put up 10-min video tutorial on your website or just slamming some video contents up on your web pages, you will instantly sell more products or services? If this is your way of marketing with video on the web and hoping to get high conversion rate of traffic-to-sales, you will more toward getting disappointments than good news.

In order to make your video to effectively market your products/services online and convey your product/service key traits and characteristics within a very short amount of time in a unique, memorable way. These are a few rules of thumb to follow:

<strong>1. Get Your Video Seen</strong>

If you want your video to be your effective marketing tool, it must be able to see by as many web users as possible. Hence, don't just keep and tight your video inside your web site borders. Let your video content be free and distributed to the majors video sharing websites such as YouTube and Google video so that not only others can watch and talk about it, but they can easily download it, redistribute it, if not even publish it directly on their own sites.

<strong>2. Small File &amp; Load Fast</strong>

Statistics show that average web users spend their time waiting for a page to load is about 7 seconds. Web pages that take longer than 7 seconds to load, their visitors normally are on the verge of clicking away and visit other website. Hence, you need to make sure your video file is small enough, ideally less than 1 megabyte and load almost in real time to keep the interest your visitors. AVI is the most common video format, the file size can easily exist 10 megabytes for a short 2-3 minutes video; hence if you share your video in this format, you most probably will get &quot;click away&quot; from you visitors because of long loading time of your video file. Hence, you must get a video format conversion tool to convert your video to a more internet friendly format such as SWF format.

<strong>3. Let Them Know It's A Video, A Short Video</strong>

If the web users do not know that it is a video, they won't click it and play it; hence your video will get watch. So, you must let the web users know that the &quot;box&quot; is a video; the best way is to make it look like a video / VCR-like by having a play and stop button where the web users can click to play the video and stop it whenever they want to stop it.

Let the web users know also this is a short video. No one wants to sit through a 30 minute presentation on the history of your company; be focused on your products/services and deliver your messages preferable within 2 minutes.

<strong>In Summary</strong>

Effectively market with video on the web is not just slamming some video content up on your web pages, it more toward effective video communication through video publishing &amp; sharing on the web.


Free music? Of course! But free and legal music? Yes, it’s possible. Everybody who has ever surfed the Net knows that music can be downloaded freely. Although there are many questionable sites that offer free music, you do not have to do anything illegal to find good music on the Web.

So, where can you download free and legal MP3? Below are some great sites where you can download good music without having to break the law.

Download Free and Legal MP3s at Amazon.com

Amazon.com may be best known for its books, but the site also features a Free Music Downloads section where you can download free and legal MP3s. The site offers music from different genres, including Alternative, Indie, Punk, Blues, Broadway, Children’s Music, Christian, Classical, Country, Dance, Folk, International, Jazz, Latin, New Age, Opera, Pop, Rap, Hip Hop, Rock, R&B, Soundtracks, and more. If you’re a musician or an artist, you can also upload your own MP3s here for free and let music lovers discover and experience your own brand of music.

Download Free and Legal MP3s at eMusic.com

Perhaps one of the best places to look for and purchase MP3s online is eMusic.com. This is because the site offers files that are not copy-protected, thus letting you download an unlimited number of songs to satisfy your music needs. The music may not come for free but for every new sign up, the site offers up to 50 files completely without charge.

Download Free and Legal MP3s at GarageBand.com

GarageBand is where you can find the best Independent music from the most talented Indie artists. The site has recently partnered itself with MSN music to realize the Internet’s true potential in providing a means for both artists and music fans to connect and transform the music business. 

Download Free and Legal MP3s at IUMA.com

IUMA is where you can find and download free and legal MP3s from famous, not-so-famous, and unsigned artists all over the world. If you’re into Indie music then this is the place for you. IUMA is mainly dedicated to bringing you music from undiscovered artists whom you should know about.


Download Free and Legal MP3s at Download.com

CNET’s Download.com is one of the premier places where you can download free and legal MP3s. The site has one of the largest music archives on the Web so you can have your choice of music to suit your taste. At this site, you do not only hear the artist’s music, but you can also take a closer look on how their music came to be by reading artist’s bios and stories.

Download Free and Legal MP3s at AmpCast.com

Ampcast is another music site where you can download free and legal MP3s. Search through their entire archive for Independent artists or music from popular rock/pop groups. And if you don’t like to download anything, you also have the choice to feeds from the Ampcast Surreal Radio. The site also offers great music videos which you can watch through video streaming and community features such as forums and chatroom where you can talk with other music lovers or Ampcast artists about your favorite topic – music.

As you can see, there are plenty of sources of free and legal MP3 music on the Internet, you just have to know where to look.



Early on, there were only comic books and video tapes that people brooded over to have a good laugh, but today there are so many websites available for the same. These websites are filled with funny crazy pictures, funny video clips and allow the user to surf through and watch any video they wish to. They can either watch the top rated ones or specify a search keyword and look for that one particular video. However, building a funny video website is not as easy as it seems. If an individual wants to create a website, they need to go through a rigorous process. And so, you can imagine the amount of details involved for a company to launch a website. Their main content would be based on humor and interactive flash games only.

Once a company decided to get into the funny video website category, they will need to assess the other websites already existing in the market and what they can offer that isn’t already there. As they discuss these issues with their team, they will also have to touch base with a good web hosting company to figure out if they can use their domain for the upcoming website. A funny videos website consumes a lot of bandwidth, so a dedicated server is usually required for hosting. The one thing to keep in mind is that every step of the way takes a lot of effort, so one must have a clear cut budget before delving into this pool.

A website needs bright appealing colors, simple easy to use layout and most importantly content that will catch the eye of the person browsing through the site. If they find it interesting, they will stop and spend couple of more minutes, else will move on to other websites. A good PHP or ASP programmer can do the customized coding and put in all the necessary links, but it is difficult to find someone who will understand your needs and create a site that satisfies your dreams. The funny images and videos that you put in your site should be unique and be humorous. Some also have the html code for the video to be embedded in other websites, like MySpace or Blogs. This will help your site stand out among the crowd and get people to notice it. Finding interested people to contribute to the funny crazy pictures, flash animation videos will take time for a start up venture.

Will there be categories to sort the videos into? For example, if a person wants to upload videos about his dogs, will your sites have a category labeled “Dog Videos”? This will come in handy when a new visitor is looking for funny videos related to dogs. This makes it easier for them to navigate through your site and find what interests them, making them stick around longer to browse the other features on your site.

Some of the crazy pictures and funny video clips on other sites have the option for the viewer to rate the video, and post a comment. These are added features that allow the user to feel important making them come back to the site. The company should therefore think through their plan and get their facts together before putting their site out to the public. And if it is not interesting, or the pictures aren’t funny enough, you will have lost a prospective member. It is therefore advisable for the company to spend time in doing their research to try and come up with an idea to outdo the other funny video websites.


Fcschat.com has released flash video chat, video messenger , 1to1 video chat plugins for webmasters. These plugins can be easily integrated in any existing websites. The flash video chat plugins are compatible with postnuke,phpnuke sites too.<br><br>

fcschat.com provides professionally developed, fully managed flash audio video chat solution for websites. It is a multi-user flash audio video chat software developed in macromedia flash MX 2004. It uses Macromedia flash communication server for its good quality audio video compression. You can adjust the camera bandwidth/compression and quality for flash video chat as per your site requirements. You can also opt in for a Firewall/Proxy version that works with firewall using HTTP Tunneling on port 80. It is the one of the best flash video chat available on net which can be customized to meet the looks of your site. Some of its features are:<br>
1) Stable Flash video chat front end <br>
2) Compressed audio video streaming <br>
3) Set video Bandwidth <br>
4) Set video Quality/compression <br>
5) Customize Gender, webcam icon <br>
6) Create Private rooms(Advanced and Premium Plans) <br>
7) Create static rooms <br>
8) Create dynamic rooms <br>
9) Control audio volume <br>
10) Publish/un-publish camera, mic <br>
11) Private messages <br>
12) One click room change <br>
13) Bold,Italic,underline text chat <br>
14) smileys support in chat <br>
15) color palette for font colors<br>
16) Ignore/un-ignore users <br>
17) View number of users in rooms <br>
18) automatic detection of camera and mic <br>
19) Easy to integrate <br>
20) View Multiple cameras in Premium chat Plan <br><br>

You can get an additional admin panel for flash video chat to control the chat in advanced and premium versions. <br>
The admin features are : <br>
1) Administer flash video chat in invisible mode <br>
2) View public/private conversations <br>
3) View/listen any user in chat <br>
4) Kick users <br>
6) Ban users for a fixed time. <br>
7) Realtime Data Transfer Stats <br>
8) Auto Deleting Dynamic Empty rooms <br>
9) View Private Rooms. <br><br>

Flash video chat Integration: It can be easily integrated with postnuke. Users logged in postnuke can be loged into the chat without any need to provide their userid again.
It can be integrated with asp, php, cold fusion, jsp... etc. There are no special requirements for its integration.

Creating your own Streaming Audio audio studio has never been easier. There are so many great products around today that will allow you to produce high quality streaming audio for a fraction of the price it used to cost.

HARDWARE

The first thing you will need is a compatible computer. Today every new computer is already set up with everything you will need. A basic sound card with a mic and line in jack. If you do not have a sound card they are very cheap and you can get a good one from any standard computer shop.

Next you will need a good mic. These come in all sizes and shapes with different configurations however a general all round mic like the Logitech Noise-canceling microphone is fine for beginners. I suggest you get a desk top one to start with, as you may want to move into video later and so you wont want a headset in your videos.

Of course you could go up a stage and get a preamp with a professional mic but this will start running into dollars and the whole aim of this article is to help you get started.

Next you will want to get some cables to connect up your tape recorder and other audio equipment. Again the computer stores now have packs that will connect up pretty well any device into your computer to digitalise your sound. You want to record directly onto your computer however you can get those old tapes and Vinyl records into a digital format also.

SOFTWARE - RECORDING

Recording your audio is probably one of the most critical parts of this process and again you can get software that ranges from free to many thousands of dollars. For this exercise I suggest you download the free copy of Audacity. This is an excellent free software package that will allow you to record from your microphone or any equipment you have.

It provides excellent editing capabilities and also will allow you to edit multiple tracks and then combine them into one single track. For a quick overview of how to do this you can watch this video and also download the software

http://mp3soundstream.com/Audacity_Tutorial_-_Free_Audio_Editing_Software.html

SOFTWARE - CONVERTING

The next piece of software you will need for your studio is a converting program that will allow you to convert different formats. For example you may have a real audio file and you want to convert it to mp3. dBpoweramp is like the Swiss army knife for the audio industry and will convert just about any file to any other file format.

Convert from one format to another, just about every audio type is supported: mp3, mp4, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Monkeys Audio, FLAC and many others whilst preserving ID Tags. It will also rip CDs for you.

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

SOFTWARE - REDUCTION

If you are going to stream an mp3 direct then you may want to recompile the file to a smaller format. RazorLame is a so-called "front-end" for use with LAME. LAME is a great MP3-Encoder, it's very fast, it produces high-quality files, has many advanced features (like Variable Bitrates and Joint-Stereo), and it's open source. Unfortunately, it is a command line utility, and that is where RazorLame comes in: It provides an easy-to-use graphical user-interface which makes MP3-encoding even easier!

The best way to use this software is to get one file and compile in a number of different formats to test the size against quality.

http://www.dors.de/razorlame/download.php

SOFTWARE – STREAMING

There are a few different ways of streaming your new audio files. If you have Macromedia products you can simple organize this your self however there are some great third party programs around that will do it all for you at a fraction of the cost.

MP3 SOUND STREAM

This is a simple piece of software that takes any mp3 or wav audio and converts the whole file into a swf file and then attaches a button so that viewers can listen on a web page without needing to download any extra software. This is because the flash plugin is on 98% of computes and if not it will automatically detect and load the small plugin. This is great for anyone not wanting to get into all the technical aspects of streaming audio.

You will not need to reduce your files at all with this program as it does it all for you. This is perfect for anyone wanting to stream one file at a time and wants to do it quickly and efficiently. It will stream even over most modem connections.

http://www.mp3soundstream.com

MSIJUKEBOX

For people wanting to stream a number of files then MSIJukebox is a great alternative. This software lets you choose any number of mp3 files and then organises them using an XML file. By using the above free programs you can significantly reduce the size of these files to save on bandwidth.

Because MSIJukebox streams the actual mp3 you can also have a lot higher quality playback including stereo files. This is much better for those wanting to stream a number of very high quality mp3 files.

http://www.msijukebox.com

SUMMARY

So there you have it. A complete studio set up for under $100. Just download all the free software and purchase any of the streaming audio products that you want. You can then create, edit and manipulate any audio files you like. You will also be able to add these audios to your website.

With the web surfer becoming much more "web savvy" than they were a year ago, they are expecting not only information but also an entertaining web experience.


This year wasn’t a year for agreement in something, movies enclosed. The Oscar race is up within the air, nobody is aware of what a lead role is any longer, and most of the entries below can be captive around and swapped out for multiple runners-up. Some that just about created the cut: The Hateful Eight, Inside Out, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Room, Magic electro-acoustic transducer XXL, Steve Jobs, Amour Fou, Clouds of Sils Maria, the design of Silence, Bridge of Spies, and concerning Elly.
One factor that everybody may well be ready to agree on is that in 2015, sequels absolutely, completely inherit their own as over simply expedient makes an attempt to recapture the magic of higher originals. Mission: not possible — land, with its elegant opera scene and its long-limbed Tom Cruise feminine equivalent in Rebekah Ferguson, was a a lot of coherent and assured show than the primary Mission: not possible film, created virtually twenty years earlier. The Force Awakens remedied lots of the sourness left over from the Star Wars prequels. Sure, there was Ted a pair of and bathtub machine a pair of, and therefore the Hunger Games: Mockingjay didn’t got to be 2 components, however there was additionally Creed and Mad Max: Fury Road, movies that didn’t simply continue AN existing series however pushed off of and subverted it. They created our franchise-heavy future look lots less grim.
19. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Sony Pictures Classics
This adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel is gutsy in a way that could only be pulled off by someone who’d been a teenage girl herself. So thank the gods for Marielle Heller, whose directorial debut allows 15-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley, one of the year’s best discoveries) to lose her virginity to and get her heart broken by her mom’s flaky boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård) without reducing her narrative to simple victimhood. It’s a terrible, not to mention illegal, relationship, but Minnie’s sexual and creative awakening run in parallel to it. And, because it’s her story, not his, we see her grow past him, emerging stronger and wiser and more ferocious.
18. Wild Tales
Juan Salvarredy / Sony Classics
Wild Tales starts with a darkly hilarious pre-credits short that escalates from small talk to a roar so perfectly it should have been released as an ad to get people to see the rest of Damián Szifrón’s anthology film. It ends with a wedding that becomes a smashing-bottles-on-the-floor rampage while also being, in a delirious way, kind of romantic? Everything in between is pretty good too.

17. 45 Years
Sundance Selects
The awful truth about the secret Kate (Charlotte Rampling) learns on the eve of the 45th anniversary of her marriage is that her husband Geoff (Tom Courtenay) didn’t even realize he was keeping it. But what she learns about the woman Geoff was in love with before her changes her entire perspective on their relationship, and suddenly, those cozy four and a half decades together seem like a lie.Rampling’s incredible in this movie, and all on a micro level, playing a woman going about in her preparations for a party while silently shaking apart inside.
16. Tangerine
Magnolia Pictures
Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) spends most of Tangerine as a nonstop ball of fast-talking, profane fury, while Alexandra (Mya Taylor), with her torch singer’s heart, is more measured, prone to hilarious, don’t-fuck-with-me pragmatism. But it’s in the stiller moments that Tangerine explores the way these Los Angeles working girls’ larger-than-life personas serve as armor against an existence that’s both difficult and dangerous, with their friendship the stabilizing force in a day-to-day that’s otherwise precarious. Merry Christmas Eve, bitch.

15. Blind
Kimm Saatvedt / Kimstim Films
Blind doesn’t just try to get inside the experiences of its protagonist Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), who recently lost her sight; it gets inside her head, as well, as all her fears about being spied on or looking ridiculous are visualized onscreen, as well as more elaborate fantasies in which her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) falls in love with another woman and gets her pregnant. The fictions Ingrid has been dreaming up and writing for herself intertwine with her insecurities with virtuosic cleverness to create an incisive portrait of a woman 

14. The Duke of Burgundy
Sundance Selects
Peter Strickland’s movie looks like some long-forgotten Euro softcore flick, set in a world populated only with beautiful, accented women who are obsessed with studying butterflies and engaging in ritualized BDSM. It’s so retro porny that the fact that it’s actually an engaging, heartachy relationship drama is practically a plot twist, revealed after a day of harsh tasks and harsher punishments turn out to have been prearranged by Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her lover Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna). Their actual problems and power struggles are more mundane, and the ways in which they’re managed (or not) are a potent reminder of the real-world relationship issues that exist under any fantasy of effortless erotic bliss.
13. What We Do in the Shadows
Unison Films
It’s not just the witty juxtaposition of vampire issues with roommate issues that makes Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s mockumentary good. It’s that Viago (Waititi), Vladislav (Clement), Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), and Petyr (Ben Fransham) are quietly miserable underneath the supernatural swagger, time stretching out infinitely in front of them in its cycle of petty bickering over chores, attempts to get into nightclubs to pick up prey, technology and culture speeding past, and friends and lovers dying. There’s a sweetness to the movie that makes it more than just a deadpan spoof of gothic romanticism; it’s genuinely touching as well as very funny.
12. The Martian
Twentieth Century Fox Film
The Martian has been labeled “competence porn,” but that’s not quite right, or at least, it doesn’t get at the core of its pleasures. What’s so irresistible about Ridley Scott’s geeky-great latest, aside from its buoyant optimism in the face of disaster, is that its characters aren’t just good at their jobs but that their cleverness allows them to skip over so many of the sorts of scenes that so often serve as screenplay filler. When Mark Watney (Matt Damon) wakes up alone on Mars, he figures out what happened right away, without rage or recriminations. He wants to live, and so, he gets to work. (Seriously, has a potato harvest ever been so suspenseful?) And when the NASA crew realizes he’s alive, they start problem solving on their end. Turns out being smart and sympatico is a really good look for a blockbuster.
11. Heaven Knows What
RADiUS/TWC
Drug abuse stories, while reliably sad, also tend to be grinding, similar descents into human misery. But Heaven Knows What does something different: It never romanticizes the homeless junkie existence that Harley (Arielle Holmes, whose life is the basis of the movie) has taken up, but it captures some of the go-for-broke grandeur she sees in it. Harley is the kind of person who’d slash her wrists to prove her love, which is exactly what she does in the harrowing opening scene. The drugs, the imminent decay, and the drifting into the arms of various unreliable men all speak to the heroic conviction she has in these terrifying choices, something the movie finds a sort of wild beauty in while never giving it any sort of endorsement.

10. Spotlight
Kerry Hayes / Open Road Films
Spotlight is so thoroughly uncool, from the dowdy office garb its reporters wear, to the clutter of their downstairs office, to the general lack of big speeches and teary moments its characters indulge in. It’s about workaholics who pound the pavement and get doors slammed in their faces and make spreadsheets and chase reluctant sources down on the street. It’s about the actual details of good journalism, and director Tom McCarthy has faith not just that that is important, but that it’s fascinating. You know what? It is.
9. Eden
Broad Green Pictures
Eden is a horror movie in the form of a delayed coming-of-age story about someone who never quite manages to make a career out of doing what he loves. That something is being a DJ, and the scariest part of what happens to Paul (Félix de Givry) after he falls in love with a particular type of house music as a teenager is that it’s not like he’s a failure — he’s locally famous, always on the verge. Mia Hansen-Løve’s movie spans over a decade, and is stunning in the way it handles time, which keeps slipping past. Paul is always looking forward to what’s next until suddenly he realizes his moment may have passed him by, and his friends have moved on or gotten married or found the success he never did, while he’s still standing still.

8. Ex Machina
A24
A Bluebeard story for the high-tech era, Alex Garland’s cool, keen directorial debut is as much about human arrogance as it is about artificial intelligence. The naive Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) gets summoned to king brogrammer Nathan’s (Oscar Isaac) remote fortress to evaluate the sentience of his flirty fembot creation Ava (Alicia Vikander, who’s had quite the year). And for a while, it feels as much like a fairy tale as it does a story of androids and eccentric billionaires. Nathan’s got his own agenda, but then, neither he nor Caleb really consider the full implications of a Turing test they’re implementing. And that’s where Ex Machina shows its breathtakingly cerebral, sci-fi soul — because rewarding a subject for passing as human doesn’t mean they’re actually anything like a human inside.

7. It Follows
RADiUS-TWC
The first three-quarters of It Follows are as wring-you-out visceral an experience as could be had in a movie theater this year — just pure, inescapable dread that turned any empty space onscreen into a place of vulnerability. Like all the best horror movies, David Robert Mitchell presents a baddie from whom there are no real safe spaces. The sexually transmitted ghost concept is a catchy hook, but the real theme of In Follows is that its monster isn’t always easy to see coming and will never stop tracking you down — a metaphor for death, but also a scary-as-hell presence onscreen in all of its shifting forms. So it flubs its ending. So what?
6. Taxi
Kino Lorber
Jafar Panahi’s warm, melancholy non-movie (he’s still technically forbidden from filmmaking for another 15 years by the Iranian government) is deceptively simple: Panahi, as himself, drives a taxi around Tehran, giving rides to strangers, friends, and family. But it contains the whole world, including Panahi’s past as a director and plenty of unease about the country’s future. A dealer of bootleg DVDs recognizes Panahi, whose banned movies would only be available via the black market. Panahi’s niece, tasked with making a movie of her own for school, recites the mandates on what’s considered proper until her pained uncle asks her to stop. Two older women, carrying goldfish in a bowl, recall one of the director’s earlier works. Layers upon layers upon layers, some grand and some personal — here’s hoping Panahi never stops defying the mandate that would silence him.


5. Creed
Barry Wetcher / Warner Bros.
Every Rocky movie needs a training montage or two, and Creed’s montage masterstroke — the moment it really confirms its excellence — is to mix Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) training for the big fight with Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) getting cancer treatment. It’s crushing and poignant — the athletic triumphalism you expect in a boxing movie intercut with another sort of physical struggle from an iconic character. It’s impossible not to tear up when you watch Rocky’s heir apparent help his mentor through the side effects of chemo, or see Rocky himself nod approvingly at the end of Adonis’s version of his famous run, this time with kids on dirt bikes circling him triumphantly. It’s torch-passing at its most wonderfully bittersweet — not as a calculated spin-off, but as the arrival of a worthy inheritor of a legacy.

4. Phoenix
Sundance Selects
God, Nina Hoss’s eyes. As Nelly, they look haunted, shocked, like a wounded deer not sure where to run. They’re the eyes of someone who still hasn’t processed the horror of what happened to her in the camps and to the world during the war. It’s easy to understand why the Berliners who used to be her friends, along with her husband,want to forget the recent, monstrous past and their place in it, butPhoenix delicately, devastatingly explores the way a victim of such trauma might long to put the past behind her too. After all, it’s easier to pretend it didn’t happen and that things can return to normal than it is to really confront how your loved ones betrayed you so fundamentally. But as Nelly returns to her bombed-out former home like a ghost, the truth can’t be denied, and in its light, she seems to rematerialize, whole again for a finale that’s a marvel.

3. Carol
Wilson Webb / Weinstein Company
Todd Haynes’ luscious period romance is so big and so intimate at the same time,a grand love story that unfolds in glances and things left unsaid, so that the touch of a hand on a shoulder is enough to make the world stop, even if no one else notices or knows. The first time we see that gesture between Carol (Cate Blanchett) and Therese (Rooney Mara), it’s from the outside, from the point of view of a character who stops by their table to say hello. The second time we see it, we understand that the guy unknowingly interrupted a pivotal encounter in the secret relationship that’s been building between the two women since they first met. The space between those two moments is where Carol exists, between the practiced exteriors the characters offer up to the world and their true selves.
2. Anomalisa
Paramount Pictures
Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion masterpiece is a movie about desperately looking for happiness in other people — searching for that special someone who can rescue you from your dreary existence and provide the sense of wholeness that’s always been missing. And the brilliance of Anomalisa is the way it finds empathy in Michael Stone’s (David Thewlis) despair and loneliness without ever losing sight of how fundamentally shitty and narcissistic it is to be continually disappointed in other people for not giving you what you need. Michael thinks he’s found the answer in Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the girl he meets during a one-night stop in Cincinnati, and where Anomalisa goes from profound portrait of depression to something bigger and more beautiful in how it treats Lisa. She’s not just the latest passerby in Michael’s purgatorial existence — she’s a whole, wounded person, and she, marvelously, comes out of their encounter having taken more from it than he ever could.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
Jasin Boland / Warner Bros.
Mad Max: Fury Road had strong female characters in the literal and figurative sense, let its title character play support to a host of women in the process of rescuing themselves, and portrayed sexual assault as it affected its victims, never as a source of titillation — all of which were great, and revolutionary in a mainstream action movie. But George Miller’s long-awaited latest also managed to blow everyone’s hair back with sheer visual awesomeness, with flamethrower guitars and chrome-huffing death cultists and a planet going slowly, thoroughly toxic. It so thoroughly inhabited its post-apocalyptic world that it never bothered to stop to explain, and never needed to; imperators and blood bags and green places weren’t hard to figure out, and they fleshed out a universe in which bodies had become precious resources as much as oil or water. There was no greater testament to movies as a grand visual medium this year.








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