Most years, this is the part where I grouse a little bit about how, to quote one of the year's best performances, I just thought there'd be more. That the movies would be a bit more inspiring, more fun, more challenging.
But I will not be doing that here. The films released in the United States in 2014 made it, as a body, one of the strongest years of film I can remember living through, and certainly my favorite in the decade that I've been blogging. Whether it was a summer crammed full of really smart, inventive popcorn movies, the great run of genre-bending indies in both horror and science-fiction throughout the year, or the sheer number of films that grappled with film language and how images communicate meaning, across genres, countries, and levels of difficulty, I never stopped being surprised and excited. It was a treasure trove: even bumping my list of honorable mentions up to 15 instead of my usual 10 (so it's a top 25, for once), I still couldn't make room for everything I felt deserved a spot.
I don't know, maybe I'm just getting old and my tastes are softening: for the first time in living memory, three of the four biggest Oscar players have made my top 15, which is always a kind of disconcerting place to be. But then I think upon these films, and imagine the years spent revisiting and rediscovering them, all I know is that I'm grateful for such rich work, and the vibrant filmmaking culture they speak to. And then I peek ahead at 2015 and some of the films I already know are going to be heading up next year's version of this list, and I'm more eager to see where the art form is going than I have been in quite a long time.
(links go to my original reviews)
The 10 Best Films of 2014
1. Goodbye to Language
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. The Last of the Unjust
4. Under the Skin
5. The Missing Picture
6. Mr. Turner
7. Snowpiercer
8. National Gallery
9. The Babadook
10. Boyhood
(Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France)
The artiest sort of art film; the kind where, when it is accused of being wilfully obnoxious and pretentious, it's hard to come up with a reasonable counter-argument. The only one I have is that it's marvelously full of wonky energy and surprising low-brow humor, alongside its mind-expanding experiments with what can be done with visual representation in the age of digital cinematography and 3-D. Godard is up to nothing less than a full-on assault against our understanding of what it means to see a movie, demanding that, in every beat of his radical formal experiment, we confront our relationship to the moving image and how it denotes meaning. Or, we can just laugh at farts. It works either way.
(Wes Anderson, USA / UK / Germany)
Of course it's a confection: eye-pleasing colors, frivolous comedy, twinkling music of the most fussily decorative sort. There's a reason why cakes are a major plot element. And then again, like every one of Anderson's films, it uses its delicate surfaces as a means of working around and in to a sense of profound loss and melancholy. It's never worked as well as it does here, in a music box parable of the end of an elegant way of life in the fires of World War II and the difficult some people (Anderson clearly being among them) have in allowing the past to remain in the past. Farce, elegy, '60s-style caper: it's a sorrowful delight, and the director's best film.
(Claude Lanzmann, France / Austria)
Hardly the indulgent parenthesis to Shoah that far too many people want to dismiss it as; released in the director's 88th year, the fifth and probably last work crafted out of his mountain of 1970s interview footage is a reckoning with time, memory, and the genre of the documentary like none other. It is a carefully curated and shaped recursive argument in which the elderly Lanzmann recalls the young Lanzmann interrogating the elderly Benjamin Murmelstein's words of praise for the enormously controversial younger Murmelstein. Immensely valuable as a work of history that plumbs one corner of the Holocaust, but no less important as an inquiry into how Holocaust narratives are formed, and, indeed, what the phrase "Holocaust narrative" even means.
(Jonathan Glazer, UK / USA)
A film that's already great, and then it sticks in your head, and sticks, and sticks. Using enormously unconventional tools of improvisation and voyeurism to shape the narrative, the filmmakers create a one-of-a-kind mixture of poetic body horror, hallucinogenic science-fiction, and tone poem on urban loneliness and lust. The film is simultaneously eerie and tender, resting securely on the back of Scarlett Johansson's performance as one of the most wholly alien aliens in recent cinema, flashing just enough human emotion through that we can still feel for her/its confusion, dislocation, dissatisfaction, and ultimately fear of mortality. If there was just one film this year that I can guarantee they'll still be talking about a generation from now, this is it.
(Rithy Panh, Cambodia / France)
Among the boldest cinematic memoirs that have ever been made or could ever be made. Confronted with the reality that a huge slice of his life has been eradicated from history, first by the dictatorship responsible for committing the atrocities of his youth, then by a world content to largely forget about that regime after it was gone, Panh engages in a unique form of testimony, reconstructing still images in three dimensions and moving pictures, giving form and physicality to his memories of life under the Khmer Rouge. An invaluable document of moral crimes too easily forgotten, and a stirring attempt to reconstruct and legitimise a personal history, it is troubling, powerful, and the most essential film on this list.
(Mike Leigh, UK / France)
If it did nothing else, the fact that this tribute to the elegance of 19th Century landscape painting was an immaculate demonstration of the potential of cutting edge digital cinematographer would please me a hell of a lot. It does a lot else, restoring the good name of the biopic with an elusively structured, endlessly resonant portrayal of a Great Man who's a crabby shit when you get to know him. With Timothy Spall giving a career-defining performance in the title role, it's one of the strongest psychological portraits of Leigh's entire career, and a terrific exploration of how the personal and the social interact and influence each other. It's generically Prestige Cinema at its most accomplished, beautiful, and challenging.
(Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
There are satiric films we praise for their crafty sublety; Snowpiercer is not one of those. It's about as blunt and angry as a high schooler who just discovered Marxism, and God bless it for that; we need more outrageous and impassioned statements in favor of class justice in the world. And all the better if they're situated in such a top-notch example of speculative fiction at its most gonzo. Creating a fable-like environment of Train-As-World, the sheer volume of brashly imaginative spaces in the film is enough to make it a minor genre masterpiece, but with the flashy action, wonderful menagerie of caricatured performances, and warped sense of humor that pervade the entire feature, there's nothing "minor" about it.
(Frederick Wiseman, France / USA)
The English language doesn't offer enough words to convincingly make the case that a three-hour meander through the galleries, storage, and bureaucracy of an art museum is one of the year's most legitimately fun and totally captivating movies. But if you trust me enough to dive in, you'll be treated to a most fascinating, inquisitive documentary, asking and answering without words, throughout its running time, the twin questions of Why does art matter? and What makes art interesting? The film never proscribes solutions, only offers up a number of possibilities as it encounters a seemingly limitless number of ways of engaging with fine art; it finds everything it glances at endless interesting, and it communicates that interest with electrifying immediacy.
(Jennifer Kent, Australia)
No burying the lede: it's here because it's a fucking miraculous horror film, terrifying at a primal level without any cheap tricks or gore, just rock-solid sound design, a flawlessly creepy boogeyman, and That Goddamn Book, maybe the scariest prop I have ever seen in a motion picture. But it's also here because all of that is in service to a remarkable psychological thriller about a toxic mother/son relationship, and a drama about the pain of grieving that doesn't shy away from any bullshit: moving past loss is hard and it sucks, and it makes you angry. Maybe not this angry, but the raw emotional honesty of The Babadook is even more impressive than the visceral terror that honesty begets.
(Richard Linklater, USA)
The clearest sign of 2014's overall strength is that I could barely make space in my top 10 for one of the most audacious and successful experiments in mainstream cinema in a generation. Carping that it's a gimmick is entirely missing the point: the filmmaking method and the story told are exactly identical, providing a window into how one life, one family, and the surrounding culture evolve over time. Linklater and his collaborators have blessed us with a completely singular object, and even if bits and pieces of it don't work (I'm not all that found of the last three years, myself), the whole is one of the most organic and unique psychological portraits in the history of English-language cinema.
Honorable Mentions
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Cheatin'
Edge of Tomorrow
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Heli
The Homesman
Ida
The Lego Movie
A Most Violent Year
Norte, the End of History
Only Lovers Left Alive
The Raid 2
Selma
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Two Days, One Night
Best Unreleased in the U.S.
The Look of Silence
Bottom Ten
10. Annie (Will Gluck, USA)
All musical comedies really need are upbeat singers and likable songs. Annie has a cast veering between boredom and active hostility, and the music is overproduced pop crap; Quvenzhané Wallis’s attempt to bind it together with appealing, cheerful optimistm only throws into relief the forced shrillness of the whole film.
9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Jonathan Liebesman, USA)
It’s not just the chaotic staging or casual sexism, both of which are depressingly common. It’s not that the turtles are some of the most hideous CGI characters in history. It’s all these, in the matrix of an insultingly insincere and derivative screenplay, that make this noise orgy so unendurable.
8. Left Behind (Vic Armstrong, Canada)
“Better” than the Kirk Cameron films only in that it doesn’t appear to have been shot in redressed church basements, this film ruins an unruinable premise - Nic Cage fights the Antichrist - with a scaled down, tepid airplane thriller with no stakes, muddled themes, and Cage at his most boringly well-behaved.
7. As Above, So Below (John Erick Dowdle, USA)
On the subject of an unruinable premise: how monumentally incompetent do you have to be to make goddamn catacombs look overlit and airy? As incompetent as Dowdle & Company, whose ability to drain the atmosphere from their horror film is compounded by an inscrutable spiritual parable grafted onto the second half.
6. Devil's Due (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, USA)
The irritating titular pun is the most cunning thing in this weak-kneed “Satan’s baby” flick. It employs found footage aesthetic with a film-breaking carelessness, though its conviction that the under-acted domestic drama at its heart is more interesting than its meager pleasures as horror is an even greater sin.
5. 3 Days to Kill (McG, France / USA / Greece / Russia)
Enervating, generic Eurotrash action, with a cartoon devil woman taunting a puffy, inert Kevin Costner through vividly unexceptional setpieces. Besotted with its unending litany of unamusing jokes and languid, underwhelming character drama, it's a chore to get through, and it's impressively stupid even by the standards of producer Luc Besson.
4. Sabotage (David Ayer, USA)
A starry-eyed tribute to horrible people being horrible, though the worst is when they're simply sitting around airing out their personalities. Toxic in its attitudes towards women, insulting in its attitudes towards non-whites, it features a comatose Olivia Williams giving its best performance, and it is the ugliest damn thing.
3. The Expendables 3 (Patrick Hughes, USA)
Nothing I saw all year made me half as angry at the time I'd wasted. The filmmakers gave up entirely in their third at-bat giving us mildewy, soporific action and painfully contrived plot developments and dialogue. It's hardly the worst-made film on this list, but it is absolutely the laziest.
2. Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, USA)
Somehow making a hellish-looking doll seem bland and rote, while wallowing in fake-out scare scenes so ludicrously over-telegraphed that they're almost laughably tedious, it's certainly the year's most boring horror film; and that's without mentioning how immensely tacky it is, using real-life tragedy as the springboard for its nonsensical story.
1. The Legend of Hercules (Renny Harlin, USA)
Unlike the other films on this list, Hercules is at least a spectacular great deal of fun in its badness, between the basic cable-level effects, and Kellan Lutz’s jolly, loopily ineffective starring turn. Bozo nonsense of the first order, and incompetent filmmaking and screenwriting at an Ed Wood level.
Best Use of 3-D, Non-Godard Division
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
In a film that added precious little to its vastly superior predecessor, just about the only clear justification A Dame to Kill For offers for its independent existence is the inventive, inveigling, and texturally complicated way that it translates Frank Miller's graphically aggressive flat images into convincing three-dimensional environments.
Best Surprise
John Wick
Even armed with the knowledge that it was much better than the basic idea of Keanu Reeves avenging his dead dog had any right to be, I was nowhere near ready for how much better: nothing less than the best American action film of the current decade, a movie using highly impressionistic editing to imply rather than state the plot outright, a movie boldly using color as a storytelling element, a movie with absolutely terrific fight choreography every inch of the way. Reader, the gap between this and my list of honorable mentions could not have been finer.
Biggest Disappointment
Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
Words have meanings, of course, and "disappointment" probably shouldn't mean "I was expect a visually grotesque nightmare of abysmal plotting and insults piled on insults, and all I got was a lousy, forgettable movie". But that is what I mean now. My hope had been that it would be a contender for Worst of the Year; as it was, even at the time I first saw it, it couldn't crack the bottom 10.
Best Popcorn Movie
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Just about everything a body could want from a summer franchise movie: vivid settings, terrific special effects, and absolutely jaw-dropping sound all used to create a grand old sense of spectacle. Meanwhile, the intelligent (but not too intelligent) engagement with society and morality, and the way it actually advances its series' overarching story within the context of an entirely satisfying self-contained narrative, give it brains and bite more than its most superficially entertaining elements suggest. And if there was any doubt before that motion capture performances were "real" acting, there most certainly oughtn't be now.
Guiltiest Pleasure
Eva Green's glorious ham and cheese on rye performance as the living embodiment of the most devout misogynist's fantasies of the castrating terror of empowered women in 300: Rise of an Empire
Film That Will Least Deserve My Positive Review a Decade Hence
Maleficent
Blame impossibly lowered expectations: prepared for the ugliest, dumbest, most insulting piece of shit that Disney could possibly use to extend its brand dominance over the minds of America's little girls, the fact that it was kind of halfway intelligent about its storytelling decisions, and boasted a terrific Angelina Jolie performance, tricked me into thinking that I liked it. I have since re-watched it, and, well, I still like her...
Film That Will Least Deserve My Negative Review a Decade Hence
Noah
Maybe it's just that it looks all the better with the dimwitted Exodus: Gods and Kings serving as a counter-example of what a secularised Bible movie can be when it's really going poorly, but I don't think so. In the many months since it first came out, I've thought more about Noah than many more apparently more successful and objectively good movies, and have concluded that its insane messiness is indivisible from its fearlessness: this is the kind of movie that plunges recklessly after its ideas, as a story, as a work of visual storytelling and world-building, and as a collection of performances, and it does this without checking itself or polishing itself to a dully respectable sheen. We need more of those, not less.
Film I'm Most Eager to Re-Visit
Godzilla
In retrospect, having this serve as the end to nine months of giant monster movies was an error: I was a bit kaiju'd-out, and the insipidity of the film's human lead made it hard to think about it. Maybe I'll end up liking it more, and maybe I got it exactly right when I liked it just a little, but I'm eager to have a chance to see it when it seems like something fresh in Hollywood ecosystem, not when it feels exactly like 40 other movies I'd just finished watching.
Best Moment
Creation in Noah, a quick recap of the first chapters of Genesis done in harshly chromatic colors, kaleidoscoping editing, and an overall sense of boundless energy and visual creativity that's maybe the most characteristic and probably the best stretch of filmmaking in Darren Aronofsky's whole career.
Worst Moment
The climactic debut of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" in Jersey Boys, which continues that film's primal sin - turning a frothy jukebox musical into a sepulchral biopic - while adding in a new wrinkle: an orchestration that's just dissimilar from the original version that the incredibly iconic song lands with a dissonant rage on your ear, like loved one who has been replaced by a pod person.
Best Cameo
Uma Thurman, as the viscerally angry and tart-tongued wronged woman who just wants to show her children the whoring bed, in Nymphomaniac (the degree to which this is a "cameo" can be debated, but it's not much screen time in a whole lot of movie).
Worst Cameo
Toni Collette as the most overqualified and, one presumes, expensive piece of unspeaking set decoration ever in Tammy.
Best Line
"Goodbye, yard! Goodbye, crepe myrtle! Goodbye, mailbox! Goodbye, box of stuff Mommy won't let us take with us but we don't want to throw away. Goodbye, house, I'll never like Mommy as much for making us move!"
"Samantha! Why don't you say goodbye to that little horseshit attitude, okay, because we're not taking that in the car."
-Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and Mom (Patricia Arquette), Boyhood. Screenplay by Richard Linklater, with input from his actors
Worst Line
"From an economic standpoint alone, what you’re asking is problematic".
–Pharaoh Ramses (Joel Edgerton), not letting Moses’s people go, Exodus: Gods and Kings. Screenplay by Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian
Worst Come-On
"Your barge and you are quite impressive."
–Thermistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) to Artemisia (Eva Green), 300: Rise of an Empire. Screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad
Longest Incomprehensible Mass of Syllables
"Ragnar Danneskjöld?"
"Dagny Taggart!"
-The first meeting of train magnate Dagny Taggart (Laura Regan) & pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld (Eric Allan Kramer), Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?. Screenplay by James Manera & Harmon Kaslow & John Aglialoro and the angry, omnipresent ghost of Ayn Rand
Best Title
Only Lovers Left Alive
Worst Title
Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
Best Poster
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Best Teaser Poster
Gone Girl
Best Title Treatment in a Poster
Blue Ruin
Worst Poster
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Best Trailer
Knight of Cups
Of course, being thoroughly in the bag for Terrence Malick in the first place can only help, but that's just the thing: the stunning three-way collision of genre story mechanics, pacific human feeling, and Malick+Lubezki visuals filtered through prosumer video equipment is the sort of thing that I contend could make a Malick partisan out of thin air. Combining Michael Mann urbanism with airy mysticism, the trailer is already one of the most singularly uncontainable things I saw all year, and the promise of the movie to come out of it is almost unbearable.
Worst Trailer
Paddington
It's one thing to sell a children's comedy as a broad farce with gross-out humor and idiotic carnival music; Paddington looks like an early contender for Worst of 2015 from this footage, but no worse than it had to be. But producing this kind of brain-rotting junk from what is, by all accounts, a wildly delightful family movie (I still haven't seen it, alas), now that takes some kind of miraculous anti-cinema voodoo.
The Ten Best Classic Films I Saw for the First Time in 2014
Ordered chronologically
Hypocrites (Lois Weber, 1915)
The Tale of the Fox (Władysław Starewicz & Irene Starewicz, 1937)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)
Chronicle of the Years of Fire (Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, 1975)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
House (Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1977)
Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987)
The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)
Beau travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz, 2004)
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