The Best Movies of 2015 - Enjoy all your iTunes movies on the go

Introduction

This article is posted on the vanityfair website, written by Katey Rich, the editor of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood. Here you can find the  best iTunes movies of 2015. All the movies are available on iTunes Store. You can rent or purchase the movie to play it on your Apple devices. 

If you want to enjoy iTunes movies with your family or you want to watch iTunes  rentals or purchases on tablets like LG V10, Nexus P6, Samsung Smart TV , etc. , you can use the iTunes movie  converter, which can convert Fairplay protection M4V videos to common MP4, MOV, AVI and other video formats for playable on anywhere.

iTunes Movies: a friend with really good taste and the biggest film library imaginable.

On the iTunes Movie Charts, it was a big year for some of the usual suspects—Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Fifty Shades of Grey, among the biggest films of the year, all did gangbusters business in iTunes rentals and purchases.

But iTunes has released several other Top 10 lists of the year’s most downloaded films on their platform, and it’s there that the surprises roll in—like the list of top independent movies, where last year’s best-picture Oscar nominees The Imitation Game and Bird man rule the roost alongside 2015’s sci-fi art-house phenom Ex Machina. Or the top documentaries list, where the gritty exploration of the drug war Cartel Land tops the chart, just above the Amy Winehouse doc, Amy.

The ability to watch small independent films from the comfort of your home is one of the many great things the Internet has brought us, but the iTunes Movies Store, with its consistent highlighting of indie films right there on the homepage, has brought more visibility to smaller projects than perhaps any other outlet. “Just including indies as part of the conversation alongside major films that most people may not have heard of before makes so much difference,” says Rebecca Sosa of A24, the distributor of Amy and Ex Machina.

For Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, the realization that it was important to include smaller films alongside the big studio offerings came while watching the Academy Awards. “You have all of these documentaries or independent films that were nominated, and you’d never seen any of them,” he remembers. “One of the things we decided very early on was to attack this by trying to go after as many indies and docs as possible, and letting them know we were available.”

Apple wasn’t just making the films available, but promoting them heavily, featuring indies and docs in the “New and Noteworthy” section on the landing page and establishing rigorously curated categories where audiences knew they could find something great. “We just decided very early on that we were going to promote and highlight indie films and documentaries at the same levels we were doing that with Hollywood films,” Cue explains. “Part of it was getting people aware that these things existed, and as they become aware, they start flipping through and seeing stuff that’s there—most people are just amazed.”

“You could buy a horror title and put it on a digital platform three years ago and probably do O.K.,” says Paul Davidson, the senior V.P. for film and TV at the Orchard, the company that distributed Cartel Land. “That world has gotten so crowded. It’s super-important to pick up titles that have something unique . . . that a platform like iTunes sees it as a value add to their overall catalog and something they want to editorialize and merchandise to their consumers.”

It’s not just a matter of putting energy behind the films when they debut on iTunes, either. For Amy, says Sosa, the promotion began during the theatrical release in July, encouraging iTunes users to pre-order the film. “When it came out in October on iTunes, it already had half the amount of pre-orders as Ex Machina,” says Sosa—especially impressive given that Ex Machina had three times the box-office gross of Amy. “iTunes, they do their homework, they know their movies, they’re at the festivals,” Sosa says. “And they know equally how to promote.”

“I don’t think it’s a surprise, when you look at the total revenue of a doc or indie title, a significant portion is coming from the iTunes platform,” says Davidson, who adds that Cartel Land made $1.3 million on cable and digital, nearly double its theatrical gross. “[iTunes] really have curated a great area of the store with respect to indies and documentaries. Consumers know where to go.”

Below, the iTunes Top 10 of 2015: the most downloaded films overall, the most downloaded independent films and documentaries, the most downloaded films that debuted at film festivals in 2015, and finally, the year’s “editorial picks”—as good a place as any to start catching up on the best films of the year.

Top Movies:
1. Star Wars Digital Collection
2. Big Hero 6
3. American Sniper
4. Inside Out
5. Kingsman: The Secret Service
6. Interstellar
7. Jurassic World
8. Avengers: Age of Ultron
9. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1
10. Fifty Shades of Grey

Top Independent Movies:
1. The Imitation Game
2. Birdman
3. Ex Machina
4. The Theory of Everything
5. Whiplash
6. Wild
7. St. Vincent
8. True Story
9. Woman In Gold
10. Still Alice

Top Documentaries:
1. Cartel Land
2. Amy
3. Citizenfour
4. I Am Chris Farley
5. Froning
6. Meru
7. Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine
8. Dior and I
9. The Wolfpack
10. Propeller: A Vans Skateboarding Video

Top Festival Discoveries:
1. Ex Machina
2. True Story
3. Woman In Gold
4. Bone Tomahawk
5. Dope
6. Cartel Land 7. Mr. Holmes
8. Amy
9. The Overnight
10. I’ll See You in My Dreams

Editorial Picks:
Mad Max: Fury Road
Amy
Inside Out
Dope
Cartel Land
Ex Machina
It Follows
The Martian
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Room
Paddington
Spy
Straight Outta Compton
Tangerine

What a year of movies! Watch the films that made the Best of iTunes 2015. Don't forget the iTunes movie Converter! Enjoy all your iTunes movies on the go.