Finding alternatives in 2015 to big-budget blockbusters and beard-stroking festival films wasn't easyIt has been a lean year. All too often, it felt like you had seen the movies of 2015 before — each new release seemed to be the shadow of a shadow of an original idea. You could see it popcorn flicks such as "Fifty Shades of Gray" or "Ant-Man" as well as Oscar-bait biopics such as "The Imitation Game" and "The Theory of Everything," never mind glacial "slow cinema" such as "Winter Sleep." Cinema is not dead, but it has lost its mojo, split between the extremes of gazillion-dollar superhero fireball porn or beard-stroking festival films while ceding the cultural middle-ground to television and online video.

10 Ex Machina: Let me begin with a protest vote for “Ex Machina,” a sci-fi thriller about a cold, sexy fembot played by Alicia Vikander. Surely releasing this in Japan would be a no-brainer, right? Wrong. "Ex Machina," Alex Garland's brilliantly twisted techno-fetishistic take on the Turing test, has opened pretty much everywhere in the world — including nearby South Korea back in January! — but it still doesn't have a release date here. Japan's lag on releasing overseas films was once excusable, but these days it's just pathetic.

9 Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 14, 'Person to Person': Protest vote No. 2. This delightfully ambiguous, cynical yet uplifting ending to the long-running AMC series about a 1960s advertising agency — where hippie love and utopianism winds up as just another ad campaign — surpassed almost anything the big screen had to offer. And it was hardly alone in that regard, as "Fargo," "Transparent" or "Better Call Saul" can attest. Whatever edge in quality movies once had over TV is gone.