Paul Thomas: The best movies of 2015 that you'll never see

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Best-of lists are a silly season staple. You may think it's just a matter of listing the 10 best books or films or TV shows of the recently concluded year; you'd be wrong.

There's no fun in compiling such lists if they simply recycle conventional wisdom. The trick is to turn conventional wisdom on its head while engaging in unashamed intellectual snobbery by stacking your list with books/films/tv shows that most people have either never heard of or failed to appreciate.

In that spirit of pretentiousness and one-upmanship, we present this column's 10 best films of 2014:

1. Dropkicks: I have seen the future of the movies and his name is Clevon Dill. The 18-year-old Paraparaumu prodigy shot this definitive example of guerrilla filmmaking entirely on his iPhone and on a budget of less than $500, most of which was spent at McDonald's. The amateur cast are pitch perfect in their portrayal of the disaffected kids who haunt Kapiti's shopping malls and skater parks. Dill, an Orson Welles for the social media age, is changing the way we think about and respond to the cinematic experience.

2. Fade to Blue: According to those who simply didn't get it - you know who you are - pornography with laugh-out-loud gags is still porn. Aldo Frothheimer's fusion of screwball comedy and hard-core sex achieves at a stroke what our culture has been inching towards for decades: the convergence of mainstream entertainment and pornography.

3. In the Footsteps of the Khans: This Chinese documentary captures a year in the life of Urt, a yak herder in the remote Mongolian province of Khovd, a solitary figure in an unforgiving landscape. This stark and poetic documentary makes a profound statement about man's relationship with the universe. And yaks.

4. Ca Va, Connard? (How's it going, Asshole?): Writer-Director Serge Profiterole's bittersweet tale of teenage elopement harks back to the halcyon days of the French new wave, specifically Jean-Luc Godard's 1959 masterpiece, Breathless. Simultaneously thwarted and rejected by their parents and the system, the young lovers symbolise a generation of European youth sacrificed on the altar of economic orthodoxy.

5. A Fistful of Thimbles: A lovingly restored version of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Jakoffsky's criminally neglected 1937 revisionist western about a mysterious stranger who rides into a small, lawless frontier town and opens a haberdashery store. Tragically, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a fan of westerns, completely missed the subtle allegory: he denounced the film as capitalist propaganda and sent Jakoffsky to a Siberian labour camp.

6. Tally Ho!: Damien Poltroon, scion of the Poltroon theatrical dynasty - his great-uncle Sir Peregrine wrote the definitive post-war kitchen sink drama Where's My Supper, You Slag? - announces himself with this searing indictment of the English class system centred on a self-made Anglo-Pakistani millionaire's dogged quest to become Master of Foxhounds at his local hunt.

7. Dead as Disco: Who said Kiwis can't make world-class crime movies? Plenty of people, if the truth be told, but they've been well and truly put in their place by first-time director Natalie Tripod, previously best known for her Briscoes TV ads. Grittiness and intrigue abound as wheelchair-bound Maori transvestite private eye Sheila Guy rolls down the mean streets of Havelock North.

8. Last Exit to Tokmok: Igor Uulu's stately but riveting portrayal of the effects of westernisation on his native Kyrgyzstan follows the progress of a Harvard Business School graduate who returns to the former Soviet republic to oversee the transition to a free market economy only to find himself increasingly distracted by comely tractor driver and staunch communist, Benoka.

9. Revenge of the Morons: Kick-ass special effects extravaganza from veteran special effects extravaganza maestro Butch Rampage about two high school dropout brothers who accidentally construct a doomsday machine while fooling around in their father's basement workshop and wipe out the entire human race. I can't wait for the sequel.

10. Blow Hard: Celebrated Scottish documentary maker Angus McGonagall goes inside the self-contained, whisky-sodden world of professional, competitive bagpiping. The film charts the progress of perennial strugglers the Pipes of Muckhart in their do or die bid to make the lucrative finals of the Clackmannanshire League.