This post comes a bit belated, what with it now being 2015 and all. But for me it was important to see every last movie that I thought might be important to the year end rankings. Necessarily, I wasn't able to see some of the year's tail-end releases until January had already set it. Now convinced that I've done my duty as an amateur critic as capably as possible, what follows now is a list of every 2014 movie release that I've seen followed by the 20 best of the year. Enjoy!
13 Sins, 22 Jump Street, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, American Sniper, The Babadook, Bad Johnson, Belle, Big Eyes, Birdman, Blue Ruin, Boyhood, Captain American: The Winter Soldier, The Congress, Cuban Fury, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, Divergent, The Double, Edge of Tomorrow, Enemy, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Filth, Force Majeure, Foxcather, Frank, Friended to Death, Fury, The Giver, Godzilla, Gone Girl, Goodbye World, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Guardians of the Galaxy, Happy Christmas, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Horns, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 1, Ida, The Imitation Game, The Immigrant, In Your Eyes, Inherent Vice, Interstellar, The Interview, Into the Woods, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Knights of Badassdom, Labor Day, Laggies, The Lego Movie, Let's Be Cops, Love Is Strange, Lucy, Maleficent, The Maze Runner, The Monuments Men, Nightcrawler, Noah, Non-Stop, Obvious Child, The One I Love, Only Lovers Left Alive, Pompeii, The Skeleton Twins, Snowpiercer, Starred Up, Still Alice, Stranger by the Lake, The Theory of Everything, Tom at the Farm, Top Five, The Two Faces of January, Unbroken, Under the Skin, Walk of Shame, The Way He Looks, Whiplash, The Wind Rises, X-Men: Days of Future Past, You and the Night (80 films total)
Top 20 Films of 2014
20. Fury (4 out of 5 stars)
Fury was one of two very good American-centered war films in 2014, the other being American Sniper. But, when push came to shove, I chose to side with the fictional combat tale over the one steeping in real life. Why? Because I'll always prefer a story that humanizes both sides of an intensely antagonistic struggle rather than default to the admittedly easier "us vs. them" ideology, in which "us=good" and "them =bad." Of course though, the Nazis are the bad guys, and of course this World War II set drama would culminate in one of those all too frequent High Noon style standoffs. Yet what makes Fury to be both seen and taken to heart is how it remembers to humanize the individuals underneath the uniforms, and the picture is never afraid to detour from conventional plot structure in favor of humanizing this point. Additionally, the film contains what is likely the greatest tank battle ever committed to film, an adrenaline-fueled tour de force of machinery and cinematography.
19. Enemy (4 out of 5 stars)
Enemy marks the first collaborative effort between Jake Gyllenhaal and French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, this despite the fact that their follow-up film (Prisoners) was theatrically released first in autumn 2013. Much has been made of the fact that Gyllenhaal's first major attempt at solo headlining a franchise failed rather mundanely. Sure, there were fleeting moments of sly humor and wit hid underneath the musculature the Swedish-American donned to literally fill out the role of a mainstream action star. Thankfully that timeline was not meant to be, and he took a momentary step back from the spotlight to seriously think about what kind of actor he wanted to be. And now after a few interesting choices Enemy is the film to note that Gyllenhaal fully embraced the idea of being an indie auteur. A brief plot description for the film would be that a man living and loving in Toronto is advised by a colleague to watch a certain flick. When he does so he spots an actor in the movie that bears more than a striking resemblance to him. An exact resemblance, in fact. What follows is a tale that weaves down ever more labyrinthine corridors. And while "the double" is now a cliched plot device Villeneuve finds unsettling new ways to breathe life into a tale older than Alexandre Dumas. Also, Enemy contains what is single-handedly the greatest "what the f--k" moment from any motion picture of the year.
18. You and the Night (4 out of 5 stars)
You and the Night feels like what the union of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Xavier Dolan's aesthetics might appear: incredibly vibrant, emotionally charged, sexual panoply laced with sorrow. This film is not only French, it might very well be the most outre French film I've ever seen. The tale ostensibly is about an attractive young man and woman who, with the aid of their cross-dressing maid, are hosting an orgy at their posh apartment one evening. And I applaud this motion picture for not shying away from some graphic sexual depictions, especially when they turn surrealistic. But the idea of group play is, by and large, merely a MacGuffin because You and the Night is so much more interested in revealing what lies naked under the skin, in the soul, than in the mere form underneath the clothes. The film's dialogue is often wonderfully over the top, and at many points I felt as if I were watching an adaptation of an obscure stage dramedy I'd never heard of before. But that is not the case, and the film stands out boldly as its own creation.
17. The Grand Budapest Hotel (4 out of 5 stars)
The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's second consecutive period piece, and by leaping even further into the past (one as historically astute as it is broadly fictional) the director frees himself from any lingering suspicions I harbored after his last outing, the tenderly rendered but vaguely hollow Moonrise Kingdom. Anderson's aesthetic as a filmmaker is singularly specific and inimitable. Even Tarantino, his closest stylistic cousin of the modern movie era and who paints in a recurring pattern of blood-soaked homage flecked with irony, lacks the high-wire follow through of the aesthete from Austin, Texas. And while some may deride his purview as both limited and repetitive, I think his commitment to a specific vision is what has made him one of the most original and exciting directors of twenty-first century American cinema. This latest picture of his, set in the 1930s Central European country of Zubrowka, displays a career best performance from Ralph Fiennes, never more nimbly doleful. And while Zubrowka may never have existed on any real map, it is a land well worth a visit.
16. The Imitation Game (4 out of 5 stars)
Like a succeeding film on this list, The Imitation Game is also a World War II era combat tale, albeit one of a very different kind. This motion picture tells the remarkable true story of Alan Turing, a brilliant English mathematician who leads the charge to uncrack the Nazi's seemingly impenetrable Enigma machine. Huzzah, for king and country! And the surface tale matches that spirit, crackling with scientific inquiry until, in beatific glory, we behold one of the modern computer's first true ancestors. It's a remarkable story that is both excellently filmed and acted. The film's inner core though contains a sadder and altogether more poignant tale, one involving barbarous treatments against the then perceived disease of homosexuality and what happens when one man, deprived of true romantic love, turns ever-increasingly to the one object with won't fail him, that won't reject him.
15. Frank (4 out of 5 stars)
Musicians have a reputation for being temperamental and difficult to work with. Some also bear the albatross of being tortured geniuses. Frank then is a story interested in the positive correlation known to exist between artistic creativity and mental illness. Michael Fassbender plays the film's title character, a man who lives his entire life wearing a giant fiberglass head. Domhnall Gleeson, playing the straight man and providing the audience with a vantage point into Frank's band before he joins it, revels in the aura of his masked lead singer and front man. Yet he still tries to determine the artistic direction they follow, in ways both large and small. But such an off-beat group, which includes a mercurial Maggie Gyllenhaal, believes that Frank must be protected from the world at large. As it unfolds, the film is by equal measures hilarious and thought-provoking, and Fassbender once again proves that he is a fantastic performer even when deprived of an actor's primary trait for storytelling: his face.
14. Gone Girl (4 out of 5 stars)
This is a tale we've all heard before: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl experience marital strife, and then girl just...disappears. David Fincher has been on one helluva roll since '08, having directed four excellent adaptations of paperback source material (three fictional, one non-fiction). Accordingly he turns what could have been a tawdry thriller in the wrong hands into an icy indictment of the state of matrimony and exposes those secret selves lurking beneath the facade of the partner we think we know. Fincher's greatest coup though was in casting relative unknown Rosamund Pike as the missing girl in question, Amy Elliott Dunne. Once again, Fincher seems to have a preternatural gift for finding actresses who seem to blossom fully formed once he puts them onscreen, and Pike proves herself never less than magnetic under his precise direction. It must also be mentioned that Ben Affleck, portraying the man accused of killing his wife, chomps into the part with such natural douchebag charisma you'd swear he'd been born for this.
13. Love Is Strange (4 out of 5 stars)
Love Is Strange is the best romance of 2014, and it just so happens to be a tale about two recently married gay men. Also, the men are both senior citizens. This film starts where most other romantic ones would end, with the trading of the nuptials. Ira Sachs is too clever a director to follow such well trod territory though, so instead he has created a tenderly rendered drama in which one of the men is fired from his position as a Catholic high school music instructor, and without their combined income they lose the NYC apartment which they call home. One moves in with a nephew and his family while the other crashes on the sofa of downstairs neighbors in their old building. Suddenly, having just pledged their lives together, they've never been more physically and emotionally separate from one another. Alfred Molina and John Lithgow are superb as the recently wedded duo, and they bestow both their characters and the couple's relationship with such hangdog grace and lived-in candor that it can't help but make you wish that all couples in their twilit years could be as much in love as these two are.
12. Starred Up (4 out of 5 stars)
I've never seen a more engrossing film which purports to be in my own language and yet in which I understand less than 80% of the dialogue that is said. Jack O'Connell, he of the recent World War II epic Unbroken, stars here as a juvenile delinquent transferred (or "starred up"as per the picture's title) to a brutally intense adult prison, one in which he along with a number of his onscreen peers speak with near-impenetrable English accents. It was as if their jaws had been crammed full of broken glass, and each man violently flings his words like dangerous debris. None of this matters though because the finished product here is fantastic, and Starred Up is one of the most thoroughly rendered prison dramas to ever be put onscreen.
11. Stranger by the Lake (4 out of 5 stars)
The term Hitchcockian is used a lot these days, but I swear that if dear old Alfred had lived long enough to make a sexually explicit thriller about a murder centered upon a gay nude beach in France then this would likely have been the end result. Stranger by the Lake functions as a meditation about men and how their desires come into direct conflict with proscribed norms and mores. I'll mention here that the film features very graphic, non-simulated sexual acts between adult males. But if that particular caveat can be overcome, then one can truly appreciate how this French thriller pulses with eroticism and danger behind every bush, beneath every wave.
10. Force Majeure (4.5 out of 5 stars)
What happens when a man fails in a pivotal moment to act like he is expected to as the default protector of his family? This is the question posed and meditated upon in this Swedish language film. Force Majeure centers on an idyllic family spending a week at a chic ski resort. But when a seemingly out of control avalanche threatens the lives of the family Tomas, the patriarch, turns and flees while leaving his wife and two young children behind. And while the danger falls short of actually reaching them a more insidious damage creeps in. The film is both startlingly clear-eyed and often uncomfortable in its depiction of gender roles and what is assumed, fairly and unfairly, about these respective parts we occupy.
9. Whiplash (4.5 out of 5 stars)
I'll admit to not having listened to a vast amount of jazz in my life, but director Damien Chazelle most certainly has. And he uses this musical style as both the diegetic soundtrack and the stylistic muse of his debut film. Whiplash is a motion picture that lives up to its title; it is a turbo-charged, violently kinetic exploration of how true greatness must be achieved, if it ever can be, through crucible. Miles Teller portrays a young drumming prodigy and J.K. Simmons his sadistic coach who is determined to push him to the breaking point and beyond. The dynamic interplay between these two characters, who need and repel each other in equal measure, is breathtaking to watch and unfolds with all the palpable intensity of a lucid dream.
8. Foxcatcher (4.5 out of 5 stars)
Bennett Miller has directed only three feature-length films, all of which are stories based on actual people and circumstances. And while Capote was a gripping portrait about writing a Great American Novel in the form of a real life horror tale from the heartland it is the latter two, first Moneyball and now Foxcatcher, which ostensibly center around the world of sports. In reality though they function as obverse sides of the same coin by using athletics as an analogy to explore fundamental precepts about America itself. And while the former is an uplifting story of persevering as an underdog and using shrew acumen to get ahead it is the latter film that really sinks into your marrow and shows you just how fetid and disturbing the underbelly of patriotism in this country may truly be.
7. Blue Ruin (4.5 out of 5 stars)
This film centers on a desire as old as the human condition itself: revenge. The picture opens on a homeless man living by the ocean, scrounging for his daily existence. It doesn't take long for us to uncover that the circumstance which drove him to such dire straits was the murder of his parents. As if that distant trauma weren't bad enough, now the responsible offender is being released from prison. In our vagrant's mind that clearly cannot stand, and so he begins a somber journey which exacts much bloodshed and an ever higher toll on his psyche. And while that description could seem to render this film interchangeable with almost any recent Liam Neeson or Denzel Washington flick, it couldn't be further removed from such shoot 'em up fare. The title Blue Ruin refers not just to the busted car which carries the protagonist along his journey; it also references the overwhelming sadness which drives an already broken man to risk losing those final vestiges of decency he holds so dear.
6. Guardians of the Galaxy (4.5 out of 5 stars)
"We are Groot." Who would've thought those three words would bring tears to my eyes? This story combines the trappings of the original Star Wars with the rollicking spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and boy does it pack a wallop for having done so. Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't just the best popcorn flick of 2014, it's also the best movie released to date by new juggernaut on the block, Marvel Studios. While The Avengers was also an excellent high sugar candy rush, it has to be noted that there were a half dozen preceding films required to fit such a colorful cast of characters into a single theatrical release. Yet Guardians of the Galaxy manages to not only introduce and wedge together an equally vibrant group of misfits, it also forces them to confront an evil bad guy hell-bent on...you know what, it doesn't even matter. This film is just too much fun to bother getting bogged down in plot. So make like Groot, and shake your groove thang along with him.
5. Interstellar (4.5 out of 5 stars)
Some people have compared Christopher Nolan to the lake Stanley Kubrick, and I don't think it's an unfair comparison. The filmographies of both directors are full of emotionally distant, coolly intellectual, complicated tales in which it can be hard to glean meaning and answers from. Yet with his latest offering Nolan has made what is doubtlessly his most emotional motion picture thus far. And by pouring so much of himself into this celestial epic he has made what is arguably his second-best film (The Dark Knight stands unchallenged). Upon first viewing Interstellar left me with a slightly muddled impression; I knew I liked it but wasn't sure that I loved it, to say nothing of all the quantum mechanics talk which went over my head. But having remembered that Inception also left a similar aftertaste I braved the theater once more, and this time I became an acolyte of Interstellar. The film is an allegory of humankind painted on an incredibly large canvas with broad brush strokes yet which still uses a sophisticated palette with regard to the interplay of emotions and choices being presented. What Nolan has achieved with Interstellar is in creating a terribly complicated, deeply divisive, nearly three hour space opus. And I can't recommend it highly enough.
4. Nightcrawler (4.5 out of 5 stars)
Nightcrawler is a film that has three things going in its favor above all else: remarkably assured direction from debut filmmaker Tony Gilroy; the return from the wilderness of Rene Russo (also Gilroy's wife) who fully evinces her character's take-no-shit sexuality and hard-edged opportunism; a portrayal from Gyllenhaal which is not only the best performance of 2014, but also the best of his career. His charming Lou Bloom is a spider, a predator who through happenstance stumbles into a career filming car crashes and robberies along the neon-flecked highways of Los Angeles at night and peddling them for broadcast on the morning news. "Think of our newscast as a creaming woman running down the street with her throat cut," Russo's character advises Lou. And Lou immerses himself in the business of this kind of network news. He likes seeing his footage on television, and he becomes good at this line of work. Very, very good at it. Nightcrawler stands as the most scathing indictment of the network news industry since Sidney Lumet's Network. And to top it all off, the film contains a performance for the ages.
3. Boyhood (4.5 out of 5 stars)
As has been noted elsewhere before and will be noted ever after, this film could have failed spectacularly. No one on the project was bound by a legally traditional studio contract, so the project continued in essence on nothing more than a good faith clause on the part of all of its principal leads. So any of the professional (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) and non-professional (Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater) actors could have jumped ship at any point. Additionally Coltrane, the story's main subject, could have turned into a rather stilted or untalented performer as he aged. (Not everyone who who stars as the turkey in their elementary school play will turn out to be Julliard worthy, as we well know.) And even upon completion the finished product could have come across as nothing more than a gimmick, an opportunistic narrative conceit that trivializes the actual maturation of a normal kid. Thankfully, the gods of cinema smiled upon this project because none of that came to pass. Instead, Boyhood stands as one of the most original and achingly moving films of the twenty-first century, a journey across 12 years in three hours that can't help but leave us in awe.
2. Ida (5 out of 5 stars)
This Polish drama, filmed in black-and-white and stunning in its cinematographic composition, tells the story of a nun in 1960s Poland who, before being allowed to take her final vows, must travel to Warsaw and visit the only living relatives she has left. Once there, her aunt informs the young woman that her real name is Ida (rhymes with Rita) and that she is actually a Jew. What follows next is a road trip, one both intimate in narrative detail and epic in dramatic scope as it hunts through the buried wreckage of the past, literally and figuratively. And at nearly every turn, in subtle but ceaselessly surprising ways, the director undercuts our perceptions of who these characters truly are. Ida is the cinematic example of a pristine snow globe: it fills you with thoughts of beauty, sadness, and wonder all at the same time.
1. Under the Skin (5 out of 5 stars)
This film is the closest spiritual successor to 2001: A Space Odyssey that I have ever seen. Like 2001, this one also contains a borderline impenetrable tale, a minimum of dialogue, and evocatively haunting imagery and sequences. It has also grossed barely a dollar or two, and I only know one other person who has actually watched it thus far. And while Scarlett Johansson spends not an insignificant part of the film naked, anyone who decides to watch it with titillation in mind will be sorely disappointed. this is because there is nothing erotic about this film despite its plot, to wit: Johansson's character is an alien in the guise of a beautiful young woman who cruises the streets of Glasgow in a shoddy van ensnaring any young man too unfortunately horny to resist the ride that she offers. What happens next to these men is beyond eerie, is utterly captivating, and is nearly indescribable. Johansson's character, which is never named, is completely divorced from any connection the the desires her sensuous form creates. (And Johannson, to her credit, imbues the role with the razor sharp impassivity it duly requires.) But then an event occurs which renders the boundary between the false external surface and the unknown being within less liminal than she expects. And by the time it reaches its altogether startling conclusion, the tale has become something wholly more important than could previously have been thought. Under the Skin is the best film of 2014.
