THE 7th ANNUAL ANTAGONIST AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILMMAKING

As the Oscars ring close the movie year that was, I shall also present my more private awards honoring the best of the 2014 movie crop.

And quite an exceptional best it is, too! Though one film dominates the list to follow like nothing has ever dominated the Antagonists in their brief history, the breadth of movies that were absolutely terrific in this way or that continues to amaze me, the more I think about it. 2015 has a lot to live up to.


BEST FEATURE
Goodbye to Language
An unfair advantage: what other film this year (or last year, or the year prior...) actually tried to literally challenge the ways our eyes work while we watch a film? And did that on top of a narrative that twists in on itself while conversations pile up and some of the most academic fart jokes out there proudly march across the screen? In a year with plenty of films that actively questioned what films are and can do, none was so assertive in demanding everything its viewers could offer, and reward them with such a totally unprecedented experience.

1st Runner-Up: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Meanwhile, pure conservatism: Wes Anderson making the most Wes Anderson movie yet. But the impeccable fussiness of the film's design is only half the equation; the way that his precise clockwork filmmaking matches with the story's surprisingly rich vein of mournfulness and self-conscious nostalgia makes it truly special.

Also Cited:
Mr. Turner
-For beautifully marrying style and subject, and telling a story of artistic achievement that mixes the ugly and the beautiful without apology
Snowpiercer
-For the creation of an absolutely perfect world in service to a roaring satiric broadside against everything shitty in The World Today
Under the Skin
-For creating a work of alienation that's truly alienating, terrifyingly beautiful, and full of mysteries that have more to do with psychology than sci-fi


BEST DIRECTOR
Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
There is a level of tonal control present in every frame of this movie that would be impressive even if we didn't know how much of it was shot, essentially, without a clear sense of what was going to happen moment-by-moment. It is a brave act of letting the material find its own shape, while also constructing an incredibly precise frame of visuals and concepts around that material. Finding a way to make pure ideas into pure cinema is the greatest challenge a filmmaker can face, and Glazer met it head on here.

1st Runner-Up: Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language
How fearless do you have to be to conceive of the "split eye" effects, let alone to go ahead and execute them? A lot of it is the same ol' late-period Godardisms - grumpiness and mild xenophobia when contemplating the state of modern Europe - but the expansiveness of the experiment, trying to rip cinema into constituent atoms and see how it all works, puts it on par with the most adventurous work of a career that has never shied away from blowing things up.

Also Cited:
Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
-For bringing everyone and everything to the same level of theatricality, but making room for undercurrents of emotion
Jennifer Kent, The Babadook
-For a debut feature that shows more skill for building terror and marrying it to character arcs than directors who have been doing this for years
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
-For the superhuman act of bringing a cast and crew to the exact same artistic and emotional place every year for twelve years, and never letting a seam show


BEST ACTRESS
Agata Trzebuchowska, Ida
The ingredients are all simple enough: innocence, loss of identity, confusion at being dropped into a new wide world. But the way they're combined in the script is anything but simple, and it would be enough work for Trzebuchowska to merely embody the role in a way that makes her character feel authentic and present, with all those demands placed on her. But "mere" is not at all what she's gunning for, and the rich, complex, sympathetic performance she gives provides the irreducible humane core of a very knotty movie that could easily turn into an explication of idea rather than a character drama, without such a presence in is center.

1st Runner-Up: Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
So many challenges! Create a portrayal of not-quite-healed depression that never foregrounds itself, but can't ever be overlooked - check. Persuasively depict the state of economic panic, but feel more like an individual woman than a signifier - check. Be a movie star in a Dardenne brothers film and sink down to their naturalistic level - check. Simply put, it's the clear high-water mark of Cotillard's estimable career.

Also Cited:
Leslie Duncan, Le Week-End
-For making domestic ennui feel fresher, angrier, and more fragile than it has in years, without softening a cruel character
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin
-For playing a non-human as a scared woman surrounded by aggressive men - but never underselling the inhumanity
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Beyond the Lights
-For portraying clear-cut melodramatic situations with lacerating acuity, and because who doesn't like to coronate a new star?

Honorable Mention:
Paulina García, Gloria
-For creating a moving, unapologetic depiction of hope, lust, and dissatisfaction in middle age, in the middle of a film whose "official" release year I still haven't worked out


BEST ACTOR
Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner
The best work of character creation in years, period. The unlikable bully, grunting and glaring; the whip-smart art connoisseur whose instincts are tactically sharp and nuanced; the rich, romantic soul required to be such a radical painter; Spall doesn't seem to stop for even a moment to think of providing keys for how we should seek to link these things together, but simply lets all of them radiate outward at all moments. His Turner is a contradictory figure who nonetheless feels devastatingly real for every second of the film, as messy in his humanness as movie characters ever get.

1st Runner-Up: Brendan Gleeson, Calvary
The character, a written, is a concept surrounded by other concepts; Gleeson's job is to make him a living, breathing human being, and he does this with beautiful shagging that could make your heart stop. Even though the movie is handed to him on a platter, he always makes sure to earn every bit of it, even managing to convince us of the truth and inevitability of a perplexing finale.

Also Cited:
Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel
-For playing the driest of sophisticated comedy with an arch air, and always making sure that we can feel the heart underneath the fussiness
Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
-For the creepy, reptilian intensity of his staring, and his flawlessly-oiled repetition of bromides that he treats as holy writ
David Oyelowo, Selma
-For playing one of the most iconic men in living memory as a man first, an icon never, letting us see the tactician beneath the martyr


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Agata Kulesza, Ida
An arguable co-lead? Yes, but I love best about Kulesza's powerful acting is the way her worn-out bitterness and devastating awareness of all the shit that the world has to offer is how she defines the shape of the movie for Agata Trzebuchowska to expand into. Her Wanda is a complex, fully-rounded figure with her own needs and problems, but she ultimately functions to contextualise another performance without pulling focus from her co-star. That is the very best kind of supportive acting, and the richness of her character just makes it all the sweeter.

1st Runner-Up: Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer
A full-on caricature of Ayn Rand as a talking gargoyle, there's not much nuance or delicacy going on anywhere in anything she does. But is magnificently grotesque. In the early going, as this most erratic of films is still finding its shape, Swinton provides the channels of warped energy where it will end up doing its best work, and the echoes of her work never come close to dying out.

Also Cited:
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
-For the quiet frustrations, prideful self-reliance, and frequent exhaustion that all pave the way for "I thought there'd be more"
Alison Pill, Snowpiercer
-For making an unforgettable impression of comedy and terror in just one scene of a massively overstuffed film
Marisa Tomei, Love Is Strange
-For providing an extensive unspoken backstory to a character who's barely even the fourth-most prominent role of a two-hander


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Ben Mendelsohn, Starred Up
With impressive speed, Mendelsohn has established himself as one of those actors you can always count on, and brutish convict Neville Love might very well be the best work of his career. A father who wants very hard to love his son - also a convict - and without the emotional skill set necessary to make that happen, Mendelsohn's work glides cleanly back and forth between thuggishness and pathos, never settling in a place that leaves us comfortable or able to predict the next swerve.

1st Runner-Up: Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
Hawke and Richard Linklater have already proven themselves one of the most essential actor/director teams in modern cinema, and this long-form act of character creation is yet another triumph for them. A well-intentioned but ultimately immature figure of helpless instability, Hawke creates a father figure easy to like, and important to outgrow, hovering in the background of his film but casting a long shadow over it.

Also Cited:
Kristofer Hivju, Force Majeure
-For creating such a vibrant, deep sidekick that it's hard to wonder why we're not watching a movie about him
Toby Kebbell, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
-For helping Andy Serkis to legitimise motion capture as a villain with surprising depths of sorrow and sympathy to augment his calculated wrathfulness. That "circus chimp" scene, man...
David Koechner, Cheap Thrills
-For using his comic training to flawlessly play a blowsy satire of the idle rich that invisibly shades into sadism


BEST CAST
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Cameo upon cameo, all of them saddled with loopy, goofy dialogue and situations, and nearly the whole cast lives up to precisely the demented level of mannered insanity that Wes Anderson badly needs to inhabit his film if it's going to have any kind of human anchor at all. Starmaking turns rub shoulders with easy, likable romps by veteran character actors, and all of them in concert help to convince us that this is a real world that could actually be inhabited by all these different people.

1st Runner-Up: Two Days, One Night
The patient march of superstar Marion Cotillard through a collection of wildly dissimilar personality types could easily feel a helpless collision of professionalism and raw amateurs, but instead the vividly-etched supporting ensemble provide a real and entirely plausible collection of personalities and private concerns for Cotillard to define herself against.

Also Cited:
The Lego Movie
-For inhabiting comic stock characters with wit and vitality, cheerfully throwing themselves into the fray without any self-consciousness about making a cartoon
Pride
-For fleshing out a cartoon British town with wacky miners and sassy gays who feel, down to the smallest role, like lived-in, realistic human beings
Selma
-For forming an activist community that feels as lumpy, internally tense, and unified by passion as such things are in life


BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Grand Budapest Hotel, by Wes Anderson & Hugo Guinness
Adopting a refined, European literary flair inherited from Stefan Sweig, and building a mad '60s-style caper comedy around it just makes sense, especially in the precise, performative world of Wes Anderson. What pushes the script from "awfully delightful and good" to "damn near perfect" isn't the nesting doll structure, but the way that structure turns the film into an elaborate commentary; this is how we imagine the past, this is how we keep it alive, this is how we ultimately have to let it go to enjoy the present.

1st Runner-Up: Ida, by Paweł Pawlikoski & Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Once upon a time, brainy tours of post-war Europe with smart characters grappling with complex social questions were far more common than they are now. And even then, Ida would have stood out for its calm insight, its historical literacy, and its remarkable depiction of shifting personalty conflicts.

Also Cited:
The Babadook, by Jennifer Kent
-For mixing probing domestic drama with monster horror so perfectly that it's hard to say which is the strong angle

The Lego Movie, by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman and Phil Lord & Chris Miller

-For turning the dubious assignment to sell toys into an indictment of formulaic Hollywood filmmaking and referendum on childhood imagination in the internet era
Mr. Turner, by Mike Leigh
-For refreshing the biopic form through quicksilver chronological changes and clincally direct close-study of its subject


BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Homesman, by Tommy Lee Jones & Kieran Fitzgerald & Wesley A. Oliver

Movies that deconstruct the myths of the American West aren't rare, but ones that have the sociological fearlessness of this quasi-feminist psychological thriller surely are. And it's almost unheard of for films that would dare to navigate the dumbfounding structural game this one sets itself at the two-thirds mark, rebooting itself without changing its town or its thematic ambitions.

1st Runner-Up: Snowpiercer, by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson
It is not a clever satire; it is not a sophisticated satire. It is an angry, direct, loudmouthed satire, taking place in a hypnotically imaginative world, with bold comic book declarations by its characters (who did, after all, originate in a comic book). And that's the kind of satire we need more of right now.

Also Cited:

Edge of Tomorrow, by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth

-For refashioning a sci-fi thriller into a character drama and commentary on movie stardom
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, by Takahata Isao & Sakaguchi Riko
-For upgrading one of the cornerstones of Japanese literature into a contemporary feel that preserves the piece's elegant classicism
Under the Skin, by Jonathan Glazer & Walter Campbell
-For challenging the bedrock assumptions of what "genre" means and how narrative reveals itself


BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FEATURE not cited under Best Feature
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Updating folklore is always a tricky task, and the filmmakers achieve that here with a sparse efficiency that pays tribute to the underlying story will giving it urgent new life. Even at their best, Japanese period dramas can have a tendency to formalism and rigidity, but Takahata Isao and company have injected this film with alertness, active vocal performances, and a focus on letting the characters have personalities that drive the story, rather than making the story define them.

1st Runner-Up: Two Days, One Night
The Dardennes' love of social realist message-telling meets the mechanics of a thriller, and we're all better for it. This isn't just an outraged shout for basic decency in an indecent world; it's gripping, vitally watchable cinema, exciting no matter how grim-faced things get.

Also Cited:
Heli
-For finding a new urgency in the hoary old "Mexico sure has cartels" framework, heightening both the cruelty and humanity of its scenario
Ida
-For grappling with history - both real-world and cinematic - and doing it with visual elegance and acute storytelling
The Raid 2
-For proving that action cinema is still capable of out and out poetry and narrative grandeur of an epic scope


BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
"It looks like a moving painting" is an easy thing to say about animation, but this really looks like fine graphic art come to life: the expansive emptiness and emphatic brushwork of Japanese drawing turned into fluid, kinetic animation with all the insight of Studio Ghibli's best visual experimenter. It is beautiful, it's unlike any animated feature ever made, and it's a wonderful demonstration of what can be done in mixing computers and hand-painted art, by people who really feel like pushing the envelope.

1st Runner-Up: Cheatin'
A new high in ambition for American treasure Bill Plympton. It's a surprisingly nuanced story of passion and betrayal, given that none of the characters speak and can barely change their facial expression. The surprises the narrative takes are pleasing, but the film's real strength lies in the tension of Plympton's exaggerated drawings, showcasing emotional beings at their rawest.

Also Cited:
The Boxtrolls
-For proving that Laika just won't give up finding ways to expand their wonderful toolkit in the creation of delicate fables
The Lego Movie
-For the exquisite technique of creating plastic in a computer and then using it with the best humor and manic creative throughout
Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants
-For mixing photorealism and warped design without any doubt, and telling a sweet children's story of enormous ambition and scale


BEST DOCUMENTARY
The Last of the Unjust
An interrogation of what historical documentation even is, Claude Lanzmann's reckoning with himself as a young man forcing another old man into his own reckoning has layers upon layers simply because of what it is and how it functions. And that it is also an invaluable oral history of one particular corner of the Holocaust, told by a controversial figure right in the heart of that history, it's hard to imagine what could make it more essential, as cinema or otherwise.

1st Runner-Up: The Missing Picture
A most unconventional memoir told with immense visual care, imbuing a population of still clay figures with lives and histories. Rithy Panh's attempt to rebuild the testimony of those whose suffering was disappeared by the Khmer Rouge is one of the great humane gestures in modern documentaries.

Also Cited:
National Gallery
-For rendering a great museum as a living organism, and quite casually reminding us why art still matters
Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border
-For extrapolating from the specific to the universal, without losing sight of the immensely thorny politics and real-life suffering that the specific entails
The Unknown Known
-For allowing a slippery man to present his own history of self-aggrandising contradictions, and allow the very slickness of his testimony to speak against him


BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Mr. Turner (Dick Pope)
In a year where great works of cinematography were as plentiful as I've ever known them, it would take something enormous to be the cream of the crop. I present you with Pope's unbelievable marriage of digital technology and painterly technique, creating a world that's both real and more-than-real for the story of a painter to take place. That it's the most beautiful film of the year is one thing; that it's beauty is so deliberate and purposeful is what puts it over the top.

1st Runner-Up: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Lyle Vincent)
Shimmering, metallic black and white that plunges us into the urban darkness: it's as much a visual tone poem as a horror film, and very good at both of those things. The title character is defined, above all things in the script or images, as a shape of smooth blackness, and the cinematography makes certain that all that black hits with merciless impact.

Also Cited:
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Emmanuel Lubezki)
-For the tossed-off flawlessness of the gimmick, and the playful, intelligent use of color and onscreen light sources
Goodbye to Language (Fabrice Aragno)
-For the sheer effort it took to execute the conceptual ideas, be they inventive 3-D tricks or emphatic distortions of digital media
Ida (Ryszard Lenczewski & Łukasz Żal)
-For the stateliness of its black and white and the brave use of the 1.37:1 aspect ratio with frames that are as startling as they are beautiful


BEST EDITING
The Raid 2 (Gareth Evans)
The fact that the film's editor, director, and fight choreographer were all the same man probably explains why the pace and impact of the action is so flawlessly managed with the most ruthlessly precise cuts conceivable. The onscreen movement creates momentum, and the editing then confirms and intensifies that momentum. It's what all action editing is supposed to do, really, but it's virtually never this perfect in execution or thrilling to watch.

1st Runner-Up: National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman)
Wiseman's documentaries are noted for their lack of editorial slant; he presents events within an institution without telling us what to think about them. But he can also shape and guide the direction of our thoughts by combining angles and scenes in an oh-so-precise way that finds National Gallery telling a remarkably clear story about its subject, with intuitive and unexpected juxtapositions all providing a elegant intellectual throughline.

Also Cited:
Boyhood (Sandra Adair)
-For turning a twelve-year production into a flow of moments and feelings that invisibly glide together
Edge of Tomorrow (James Hebert and Laura Jennings)
-For making a peerless virtue of repetition, whether to sharpen action, make character relationships more touching, or just to score easy jokes
John Wick (Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir)
-For eliding everything that is unnecessary and focusing the action sequences into expressionist bursts of human movement


BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Adam Stockhausen)
History as a collection of old-fashioned toys, life as a giant cake; the world could not possibly be more artificial and fussed-over, but Stockhausen infuses it with just enough archaic elegance that it not only feels like a place that could exist, in some magical past, but that a place whose passing would trigger precisely the kind of bemused sorrow felt by the characters. It's like falling asleep and dreaming that you're in the world's most delightful cuckoo clock or train set, which even as it gets scuffed up never fails to surprise and entertain.

1st Runner-Up: Snowpiercer (Ondřej Nekvasil)
Given a series of rectangular boxes, Nekvasil creates a panoply of totally dissimilar spaces that each individually suggest some of the most imaginative science-fiction design you could want, while all fitting together in weird, unpredictable ways. It's pure fantasy, and yet it absolutely convinces us of its existence on its own terms.

Also Cited:
The Boxtrolls (Paul Lasaine)
-For foregrounding the deep, abiding love that went into this film, conceiving a thoroughly nonsensical but charmingly evocative storybook backdrop
Interstellar (Nathan Crowley)
-For creating a vividly detailed functional world that's both fantastic and impressively grounded, telling its stories through implication rather than words
The Lego Movie (Grant Freckelton)
-For committing to the unspoken rules that "ought" to define this world, and using that limitation as a chance to ramp up on the creativity rather than shut it down


BEST COSTUMING
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Milena Canonero)
The colors, first. Has purple ever looked so purplish? The costumes are, in a rather literal way, the link between the human beings onscreen and the intensely designed world they populate, and a middle ground must be struck between outrageous stylisation on one hand, and enough flexibiltiy for people to feel like people within them, on the other. And this is achieved faultlessly, all while building the elaborate scheme of wholly unnatural colors and their narrative implications.

1st Runner-Up: The Immigrant (Patricia Norris)
Anyone can make costumes that evoke the past. That's why we call them "costume dramas". But not anybody can use clothing to tell us about the past, and how people lived and moved in it, and what they thought about themselves. And this is the grand achievement of Norris's costumes, which split the difference between functionality and picturebook illustration in the most rewarding, eye-catching way.

Also Cited:
The Great Beauty (Daniela Ciancio) - not reviewed
-For capturing the way that haute couture is used by the upper classes as weapon and shield alike
Love Is Strange (Arjun Bhasin)
-For capturing what makes its characters fit in their own world and stand out in everyone else's
A Most Violent Year (Kasia Walicka-Maimone)
-For bringing 1981 to life, and suggesting the way that people present themselves to the world as an elaborate act of living theater


BEST HAIR & MAKEUP
Foxcatcher
An object lesson in the value of subtlety. Okay, maybe making Steve Carell look like an eagle is the exact opposite of "subtle", but it's the work done to Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo that really impresses: altering them in ways that unlocks the life and history of the characters without letting the makeup do all the work for the actors. Somehow, while leaving the cast looking completely recognisable, the make-up managed to knock all of the movie star out of their faces, opening them up to unexpected range and depth.

1st Runner-Up: Only Lovers Left Alive
Here is something of a miracle: this film found a new look for vampires. And, better still, it's one that feels exactly right, like people who have been bleached in the moonlight for centuries, and have the grime and thinness of lifetimes sucking the energy from their flesh and hair. It is the most otherworldly Tilda Swinton looked in a year where "make Tilda look like a cartoon" was something of an unofficial theme.

Also Cited:
The Grand Budapest Hotel
-For the marvelous Tilda aging make-up, but also the elaborate hairdos that all tell unique personal stories
Inherent Vice
-For capturing the shaggy, sweaty, sandy tenor of 1970 California with laid-back organic ease
The Rover
-For making life at the end of civilization look persuasively dirty and wearying


BEST SCORE
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Alexandre Desplat)
Artifice of the most arch, stagey kind; the film sounds like the inside of an Eastern European music box orchestrated by the Looney Tunes at their most fanciful. It could not more perfectly pair with the movie's overall fussy look and prim settings; and like the script, it has just the right undercurrent of tragedy to feel more bittersweet than its most superficial elements suggest. It's the most energetic, lively music written for a film since, well, Desplat's own "The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe" for Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

1st Runner-Up: Under the Skin (Micah Levi)
In places, it's almost a fair question if this is music at all, or the droning, angry sounds of the inside of an alien mind. The whole film extensively and effectively creates a sense of profound unknowable otherness, and the willfully disconcerting score is quite possibly the strongest tool it has in building that affect. Beautiful and terrifying in succession, just like the movie itself.

Also Cited:
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Antonio Sanchez)
-For the propulsive adrenaline shot of a boldly original all-drum score
The Homesman (Marco Beltrami)
-For the mixture of classic Western textures and haunting modernist elegy
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Joe Hisaishi)
-For the regal elegance of traditional Japanese forms given Romantic sweep and heartfulness


BEST SOUND MIXING
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The distant sound of tinny music playing in a gas station cues us and the characters to the realisation that electricity has returned to a post-apocalyptic world. It's the most indelible moments of storytelling through sound of the movie year, and it's only one of many moments where the careful massaging of offscreen audio creates a whole, tangible world. It doesn't get more immersive than this.

1st Runner-Up: Goodbye to Language
Immersion, meanwhile, is not the goal of a film whose aggressively formalist use of its audio tracks to compare and contrast with the 3-D images we see alongside the sound. The film is famous for calling attention to how we see cinema; no less impressive is the demands it places on how we hear, and what that cues us to know and believe.

Also Cited:
American Sniper
-For not just the messy, confusing presence of war, but the creepy muffled sound of war in the far distance as a looming threat
Fury
-For the sheer cacophony of battle surrounding us and devouring us, just as it smothers the poor soul in the heart of it
Noah
-For, above all, the creaks and animals noises inside the ark, the most rich, immediate-sounding movie place of 2014


BEST SOUND EDITING
Fury
War always sounds one way in movies: bullets pinging, men grunting, explosions rattling. We all know what war sounds like. But set a movie in the cramped, metallic body of a tank, and suddenly war takes on an entirely different auditory texture, one that is muffled and yet horribly present, indistinct and body-shaking simultaneously. War has never sounded quite like it does in Fury, and the film's presence and impact are indivisible from the care put into tweaking every last effect.

1st Runner-Up: Godzilla
I can only imagine how exciting and terrifying it must be to have the chance to update one of the most iconic roars in of cinema history for a modern popcorn movie audience, but the team who gave Godzilla his new voice did so with gut-wrenching effectiveness. And that's not to mention the thuds and rumbles that go into giving the film's massive beasts their weight and physicality.

Also Cited:
American Sniper
-For the harsh clarity of gunshots, and the perfection of that television-watching scene
The Babadook
-For the scratching, scrabbling title monster, and the "ba-ba-ba DOOK-DOOK-DOOK" that will haunt me for ages
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
-For the natural and yet disorienting sounds of a not-too-distant future of intelligent apes and the apocalypse


BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The work done in Rise of the Planet of the Apes has begun to show its age, but it's still an example of CGI character-building at its most nuanced and effective. Or it was, at least, until its sequel came along to blow it out of the water. The volume of CGI characters, the complexity of camera movement and lighting surrounding them, and the absolute reliance of every inch of the story on their coming across as psychological actors rather than effects, all combine for some of the most ambitious and effective work of the computer age.

1st Runner-Up: Godzilla
Replacing men in detailed but funny suits with an all-digital menagerie could have gone wrong in so many ways, but the physical presence of this entirely-nonexistent monster is faultless. It's such a triumph of perfect effects work that it almost immediately ceases to register as any kind of effect at all.

Also Cited:
Edge of Tomorrow
-For creating armies of deeply convincing mechas and aliens that provide a realistic backdrop for the story, rather than pulling focus to themselves
Guardians of the Galaxy
-For creating an endless world of fantastic delights and marvelously intimate characters that feels totally authentic throughout
Interstellar
-For combining the tactile with the digital in a complex, utterly persuasive symphony of literal universe-building

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THE 6th ANNUAL ANTAGONIST AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILMMAKING

The 6th Antagonists, that is, but only the fifth by that name. At some point, I shall have to at least come up with a crappy MS Paint graphic of what an Antagonist actually looks like.

Apologies for the lateness of this post this year! Sometimes life is not very busy, and sometimes it is, and I've been in the latter of those two states for all of the young 2014. But at least I'm getting it taken care of before the new year has produced any films at all likely to make an impact on next January's incarnation of this list.

Update: "The Academy can have their dumb rules, but you needn't follow", grouses a friend; and he's quite right. I've updated two of the categories below - Adapted Screenplay and Hair & Makeup - with a movie that certainly deserves more attention than a lot of 2013 releases, if only it hadn't premiered in the United States on television. But the Cannes International Film Festival ought to count for something.


BEST FEATURE
Southwest
We all have ideals for what we want cinema to be, and this was maybe the closest I've come to finding it in my years as a reviewer: a movie that seems to come from out of nowhere to invent a completely new visual and narrative sensibility. It's the kind of work that challenges one's sense of the possibilities of the medium, and even if it's cryptic and obscurantist to the point of inscrutability, the emotional logic of this gorgeous fairy tale in celebration of life, youth, aging, and remembering cuts through with potency and clarity.

Thanks to Nick Davis for mentioning to me that the film was released in the United States this year, and was thus eligible.

1st Runner-Up: Gravity
Pure cinema at its experiential: feel feelings, see sights, hear sounds, in the most convincing and involving way. It uses the bleeding edge of technology to link our sensations to that of its protagonist in thrilling, immediate ways, and then plunges her and us into a vigorous fable of rebirth that, however corny, is emphatic and rich.

Also Cited:
12 Years a Slave
-For presenting a very specific human story with depth and moral passion, exploring history in a robust, alive way
Before Midnight
-For revisiting old friends in a new context that manages to be as true and irritating and messy as life itself
The Lords of Salem
-For demolishing the distinction between high and low art, creating a pictorial masterpiece out of horror and blood


BEST DIRECTOR
Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing
Glorious simplicity: allow people who have committed grievous moral crimes to tell their own stories, and indict them through their own candor. The truly genius documentary director knows that he must permit his subjects a safe space and freedom, and this Oppenheimer does brilliantly, making the year's most ethical film without ever imposing ethics from on high. And being so intimate with his players, he manages to sketch a remarkably comprehensive portrait of a series of events largely unknown outside of their native country.

1st Runner-Up: Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
The film's achievements are impossible to separate from the director. For in a great respect, this film is its direction, with every gesture of the florid moving camera, every slow-down to visit with the characters in close-up, the precise position of every beat working in perfect concert to create the film's potent reality.

Also Cited:
J.C. Chandor, All Is Lost
-For taking a nearly empty location and hardly any words, and crafting a thrilling and moving psychological fable
Edward Nunes, Southwest
-For crafting and maintaining a delicate tone of magical fabulism, permitting the creation of potent, direct emotion
Rob Zombie, The Lords of Salem
-For brilliant stolen imagery, better original imagery, and the most uncanny realism of any modern horror film


BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Sometimes, the only reason not to be boring is to prove how much more sophisticated you are than everybody who believes the simple truth. And the simple truth is that Blanchett's performance is one of the best that Woody Allen has ever directed, not for want of competition, with a frigid theatricality and brittleness to the character's self-definition that is an exact fit for all of the actress's strengths. It's magnetic and captivating, and if saying so means I'm being as unimaginative as possible, well, at least I know I'm right.

1st Runner-Up: Margarete Tiesel, Paradise: Love
Everything about the film would tend to make Teresa inhuman: whether as a victimiser of other characters, or a victim of an angry camera content to physically humiliate her. Tiesel permits neither reading while including both in her characterisation, creating a cunning, broken portrait of willful self-delusion and sexual panic.

Also Cited:
Amy Adams, American Hustle
-For adding just the right bittersweet romantic truth to a frothy comedy, while perfecting that comedy on top of it
Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
-For finding new things in a well-worn part, and permitting herself to edge up to unlikability in search of honesty
Danai Gurira, Mother of George
-For expressing complex, conflicting impulses in a true and lived-in manner, turning a concept into a woman


BEST ACTOR
Oscar Isaacs, Inside Llewyn Davis
The best collaborators with the Coen brothers find ways to make the filmmakers' idiosyncratic, arch dialogue sing like poetry; the very best manage to do that while finding facets of the character that aren't even alluded to in the script. Isaac justifies that very, giving the best performance in a Coen film since Fargo. Llewyn Davis is a cruel bastard; he is a wounded romantic; he is a depressed pragmatist. And the character is so much more, a vivid portrait of insulated, untouchable humanity at its most self-aware and trapped.

1st Runner-Up: Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Maybe the year's hardest role. Ejiofor has to not merely play a anthropomorphic symbol of The Misery of Slavery as a flesh-and-blood human, he also has to portray a man whose survival instinct is to demolish his personality, without playing a blank. That he does all of these is the chief key to the film's artistic triumph.

Also Cited:
Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips
-For those glorious final ten minutes, and the two hours of careful building that made those minutes land so hard
Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight
-For creating such a complicated mix of warmth and negativity that for the first time, he upstages Julie Delpy
Gael García Bernal, No
-For exploring the point where cynicism, outrage, and optimism coalesce, and being funny as hell in doing it


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Léa Seydoux, Blue Is the Warmest Color
A day-dream who turns into a complicated, difficult lover, Seydoux smashes through the script's apparent limitation that she is only viewed through girlfriend Adèle's perspective, existing in such a particular and complete way that by the time the protagonist discovers that there's a lot of complicated humanity to other humans, we've been ahead of her for a couple of hours already. It's easy to see why anyone would fall in love with her, a key to making the entire film work: she is a smoldering and fascinating prickly personality.

1st Runner-Up: Emma Watson, The Bling Ring
There is no sure-fire way to impress me quicker than to do a tremendously great job of being a lousy actress, and Watson, exploding Hermione Granger in a cleansing nuclear holocaust, finds the perfect mixture of shallowness and intelligence in playing a woman whose surface fakeness is tactically precise.

Also Cited:
Elizabeth Debicki, The Great Gatsby
-For investing into a film that's deliberately all about theater and surfaces a spike of vibrancy, wit, and vivacity
Scarlett Johansson, Don Jon
-For using her voice and body language to create a caricature and cartoon who is also a perfectly lived-in human
Sarah Paulson, 12 Years a Slave
-For playing Pure Evil as a human quality, not as melodrama, and being all the more unsettling for being wholly real


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
More Pure Evil, and where Sarah Paulson's character feels, overall, like hateful human being, Fassbender's slave owner is different from that. More than any movie villain, he reminds me of the Judge from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a force of demonic evil embodied in human form; the actor's gift is in portraying that kind of mythic wickedness in a way that doesn't detract from the physical, historical realism of the movie around him. He is terrifying, but he is also flesh, and that makes all the more dangerous.

1st Runner-Up: Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
He's aided considerably by a script eager to make everything grey and transform his kidnapping pirate into a normal, small person driven by the desperation and need that every person is driven by; but for Abdi to convincingly play that in a non-schematic, disarmingly casual way speaks to an intuition bordering on genius.

Also Cited:
Dane DeHaan, The Place Beyond the Pines
-For anchoring a flighty third act in a clean, human-sized way that proves him our reigning Young Actor To Watch
Ben Foster, Ain't Them Bodies Saints
-For playing a romantic stalker with quiet, mumbling dignity, and imparting rich emotion to gorgeous absraction
Matthew McConaughey, Mud
-For the best and most complicated role in a great year, wheedling and friendly in just the right proportions


BEST CAST
Inside Llewyn Davis
The trick with any Coen film is finding people who can say the words naturally. The trick with this particular Coen film is that title character is so central to our perception, and such a tremendously meanspirited prick, that the ensemble has to simultaneously play the one-note version of themselves that he understands them to be, while also letting the audience understand that there's a complete human being behind that impression. This is done, making a movie both hilarious and psychologically complicated more of both those things.

1st Runner-Up: The World's End
A story about stale friendships needs two things to be absolutely perfect if it's going to do anything else right: we have to believe that these people know each other's most intimate truths, and we have to believe that this now makes them awkward and uncomfortable around each other. Mission very thoroughly accomplished.

Also Cited:
American Hustle
-For making stock characters relatable and fun, and finding chemistry in interesting, unexpected directions
Saving Mr. Banks
-For Emma, who I couldn't fit, and the pitch-perfect ensemble of studio functionaries sweating to deal with her
The Wolf of Wall Street
-For portraying hideous behavior in manner entirely true to the characters, alive and pungent and kinetic


BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Inside Llewyn Davis, by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
It is not the funniest, the most thematically probing, or densest of the Coens' scripts. It is, however, as unusual as anything they've ever done, in the way it presents character almost sideways, identifying its title character in a certain way and then testing that definition at every step and complicating it. It also boasts a stunning structure that looks completely shapeless until at the very end it gives you the key to understanding its shape and how the form of the thing is one more element of character exploration, and the richest.

1st Runner-Up: Before Midnight, by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke
At this point, all they have to do is not screw up, and they didn't do it. Just the lunch table scene - a collection of thoughtful monologues about sex - and the hotel room scene - a horrifyingly accurate two-hander about domestic arguments - would make this the best-observed piece of writing of 2013.

Also Cited:
American Hustle, David O. Russell and Eric Singer
-For being the year's best collection of dialogue, and having one of its most effectively disordered character studies
A Hijacking, by Tobias Lindholm
-For treating sensational content with cool detachment and exploring bureaucracies of all sorts with great insight
The World's End, by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright
-For burying clear-headed, uncomfortable observations about aging just underneath a loopy, funny genre riff


BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
12 Years a Slave, by John Ridley
Reducing the twelve years of the title to a swift flow of historical miseries, the script has a cunning way of making all of its apparent missteps (a needless flashforward opening, episode scenes) into strengths by folding them into the perception of its protagonist. And everything that's not an apparent misstep is historical storytelling of the highest order, using the briefest amount of time necessary to contextualise moments and sweep us into its world, while sketching characters quickly but vividly in just a few lines.

1st Runner-Up: No, by Pedro Peirano
Political process stories are very difficult to make remotely interesting, which is why the ones that do it well are as valuable as gold. And No doesn't do it very well - it does it damn near perfectly, laying out a dense historical scenario in comprehensible pieces and making its backstage story hilarious and fleet-footed, too.

Also Cited:
The Bling Ring, by Sofia Coppola
-For mercilessly autopsying celebrity culture with laugh-out-loud wit and fearless irony
Captain Phillips, by Billy Ray
-For investigating a sociologically complex situation without dumbing it down or making it antiseptically intellectual
Ernest & Célestine, by Daniel Pennac
-For telling a simple fable with a level of decency and affection that's anything but simplistic

Honorable Mention
Behind the Candelabra, by Richard LaGravenese
-For cutting to the heart of a celebrity drama to find the sensible human center of it, depicting a rancorous domestic drama with insight, wit, and a brilliant control of time


BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FEATURE not cited under Best Feature
No
Talky political situations spiked with pawky humor and relentlessly likable characters. A story of media representations filmed in an in-your-face style that's itself an example of media representations. And a presumably Inspiration Tale of Good Triumphing so full of pleasant-natured cynicism that it never for a second feels like a heartwarming story about heroes, but a tale in which the bastards we like beat the bastards we didn't. Energetic and smart and cinematic, it's the best combination of art and entertainment.

1st Runner-Up: Ernest & Célestine
A distinctly Gallic sensibility to the surface-level misanthropy and antisocial tendencies of its two titular characters doesn't keep it from being any less universal of a kid's bedtime story. There's a gentleness and generosity to it that transcends language, resting in its friendly characters and likably silly plot.

Also Cited:
Blancanieves
-For reworking an intensely familiar story into something fresh and even dangerous, with visual flair and elegance
A Hijacking
-For taking a hugely uncommercial tack to telling its thriller story as a character drama and intellectual procedural
A Touch of Sin
-For depicting a variety of desperate humans with sensitivity and a tricky lack of precision that adds to its empathy


BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Ernest & Célestine
The only animation of the year that genuinely felt like something new and unique and personal; and in a happy accident, it's accompanying the animated film with the most playful story and richest sense of character. A lush children's story to be certain, but soft and warm enough to captivate anybody.

Also Cited:
Frozen
-For complicating the Disney formula without trashing it, and for the glistening dance of light on snow
The Wind Rises
-For simply and beautifully playing tribute to imagination, without denying its damaging real-world ramifications


BEST DOCUMENTARY
The Act of Killing
I feel like I have written about this film so many times in so many contexts, and have barely scratched it. And now this is probably it, for a while. What is there to say at last, about the most mind-expanding film I saw in 2013, one who whose cutting but subdued moral code and outlandish collection of once-in-a-lifetime visuals combined to make a most exquisite, complicated study of intensely warped humans? Only that I am profoundly grateful that the film exists, as I am profoundly troubled by the fact that it has to.

1st Runner-Up: At Berkeley
The documentary as pure act of observation, though Frederick Wiseman's personality is unmistakable in the way images are combined and considered. It is a grand snapshot of life in America in an era of economic discomfort, and a definitive statement of 21st Century academe as a working, living, breathing entity.

Also Cited:
Leviathan
-For creating beautiful abstraction out of a rugged, wild form of economic life, and for its complex visions
Stories We Tell
-For the bravery and candor of using a deeply personal story as a window into how people construct history
These Birds Walk
-For getting down and dirty with a slice of life completely ignored by virtually every other part of humanity


BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Southwest (Mauro Pinheiro, Jr.)
Two words: aspect ratio. Namely, 3.66:1, an aspect ratio so comically wide that I don't think it even counts; it is an illusion and a dream, as surely as the impressionistic dreamlike events it depicts. But it's not just because of the laser-focused exactitude with which Pinheiro wields this ridiculous frame, but the gorgeous, cryptic images created in creamy black-and-white, that make it such a triumph of the cinematographer's art. It is a film largely told through images, and they are gloriously up to the task.

1st Runner-Up: Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
I'll admit to discomfort over the CGI thing, but there is a precise neatness to every shot and every light that sets this a million miles over something like Avatar: it is rigorously controlled, and married to the live-action flawless, and the way that the camera tells the story and defines the characters is visual art at its purest.

Also Cited:
The Bling Ring (Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt)
-For the sun-blanched California, and that awe-inspiring slow zoom of the house's exterior as it's being robbed
Inside Llewyn Davis (Bruno Delbonnel)
-For a mordant collection of muted winter tones that inject a layer of forgiving nostalgia into a brittle scenario
Mother of George (Bradford Young)
-For dumbfounding use of color, and for brilliantly lighting dark skin better than any of a thousand bigger films


BEST EDITING
All Is Lost (Peter Beaudreau)
One man, one boat (and one raft), one big ocean. It takes a masterpiece of cutting to make that kinetic, and Beaudreau's work is at least that. The simplest gestures are intensified thanks to some very pointed cuts, implying huge swaths of activity in the space of a single ellipsis, and the momentum of the film owes a great deal to what is covered extensively versus what is glossed over, and exactly what beats take us out of the tiny scope of the film for our rare glimpses of something wider. Great survival thrillers are made of this.

1st Runner-Up: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón & Mark Sanger)
The collision of insanely long takes with punchy dialogue scenes might seem random or simply convenient, but the ebb and flow of the pacing in the film produced by its very specific ordering of long and short shots is every bit as critical as the choreography of the camera movement. It is specific and masterfully pacey.

Also Cited:
The Bling Ring (Sarah Flack)
-For its detached, analytical way of separating and combining its dehumanised subjects with scientific curiosity
Her (Jeff Buchanan and Eric Zumbrunnen)
-For doing more than anything else to convince that a disembodied voice has a real presence in the mise en scène
The Lords of Salem (Glenn Garland)
-For ruthlessly dictating how and when we should react to events, playing us like a spooky fiddle


BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Her (K.K. Barrett)
A vision of the future that does something so simple, I can't stand that it isn't done more often: it looks at what we do right this minute, and asssumes we'll keep doing exactly the same. And so we end at a world mostly like our own, but with just a little more space to emphasise the direction we're headed with all our doodads and gewgaws, creating something that looks less like high-tech futurism and more like the setting for an Apple-themed MMORPG. Sleek, a little bland, a little soulless, and completely lived-in.

1st Runner-Up: The Lords of Salem (Jennifer Spence)
A film that runs the gamut from the psychotic Italianate indulgences of the final nightmare-concert-fantasy, to the scraped-up realism of the low-rent apartments crammed with personalising bric-a-brac. It's not just rare for horror to create such a thorough world for its protagonist to live in; it's rare for any movie to do it.

Also Cited:
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
-For creating a fantasy version of The Twenties that is lush enough to embrace and gaudy enough to condemn
Inside Llewyn Davis (Jess Gonchor)
-For a Greenwich Village based in iconography over reality, bent just enough to suit the film's mordant comedy
Pacific Rim (Andrew Neskoromny and Carol Spier)
-For comic book fantasies of the first order made physical tangible and plausible and vibrant with color


BEST COSTUMING
The Bling Ring (Stacey Battat)
In a film where character, theme, and even narrative are all ultimately functions of the desire to procure overpriced, sub-attractive clothing precisely because it isn't desirable for any real reason other than as a signifier of class, influence, and power, the clothes had better be goddamned perfect. Low and behold, they are: even the costumes that are only ever seen adorning hangers so vividly evoke the characters and their world that it's literally impossible to imagine what the movie might be without them.

1st Runner-Up: Mother of George (Mobolaji Dawodu)
Color and texture as psychological marker, as emotional cue, and as signifier of one's fidelity to traditional old-fashioned lifestyle; in a beautiful film that uses imagery for just about every important narrative purpose, the bright, showy costumes are a key insight into who these people are and how they function.

Also Cited:
Blancanieves (Paco Delgado)
-For contributing to the sense that this is a real-world fairytale by rendering haute couture as Expressionism
Her (Casey Storm)
-For being just abnormal enough from us that you can't help but notice, and reflect on how it affects the wearer
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
-For understanding exactly why Gatsby's shirts matter, and building an entire world of clothing on that principle


BEST HAIR & MAKEUP
12 Years a Slave
The literally blistering reality of slavery is not merely made to be real in a documentary sense, but in a vivid, empathetic sense where the viewer is directly confronted with each wound and drained, sweaty expression. The whipping scene alone would earn this slot; it is fragile flesh made real in the most nauseating way.

Also Cited:
American Hustle
-For evoking a fantasy of The '70s and defining and shaping character, rather than embalming them in style
Prisoners
-For evoking a specific kind of lifestyle; and for confrontationally exploring the effects of violence

Honorable Mention
Behind the Candelabra
-Make-up as character, as comedy - the work down on Rob Lowe is one of the most amazing things I saw all year - and and the stuff of a low-key body horror exercise. The film relied to a great extent on the perfection of its latex effects, and they certainly delivered, rendering an eerie Michael Douglas and a distorted Matt Damon in exactly the way the film required.


BEST SCORE
Ain't Them Bodies Saints (Daniel Hart)
There is something a little cloying, perhaps, about the way that folk orchestrations are used in this winsome slice of Americana. But that's not really the same as saying that it doesn't work, because by golly, it surely does that: creating a weary, evocative wall of musical sounds rather than actual pieces of music, that simultaneously express the characters' feelings while also placing them at a level of abstraction. I wouldn't want to go jogging to it, but as an audible depiction of yearning, lost love, and uncertain hope, it's flawless.

1st Runner-Up: Maniac (Rob)
Electronic cues as distorted and out-of-place as the titular psychopath, the score suggests what would happen if the 1980s hadn't stopped but gotten stuck on repeating loop that grew ever more corrupted and mutated and nightmarish as it went along. Its jagged edges make it a virtually perfect horror soundtrack.

Also Cited:
Her (Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett)
-For delicate romanticism in an idiom as subtly futurist as the rest of the world building, and more touching
The Lords of Salem (John 5 and Griffin Boice)
-For atonal rumbles that drive the mood, and screaming cacophonous "rock" that drives the plot
Man of Steel (Hans Zimmer)
-For being everything you could ever want a mainstream popcorn movie to sound like: grandiose and grave


BEST SOUND MIXING
Gravity
This was sewn up less than 120 seconds into my first viewing of the film, when the sounds of being stuck instead a space-suit helmet begin to wrap themselves around you from behind, almost as though you're leaning back into the film's world. It's my single-favorite moment of sound of the year, and the whole film doesn't really drop down from that level; in a film where CGI and 3-D spent all of their time creating a fully three-dimensional space, the audio does a fantastic job of convincing us that we're within that space.

1st Runner-Up: Inside Llewyn Davis
Music = sound mixing; that's lazy, academy voter thinking. Except that in a film where musical performance is so much a part of character psychology, floating the songs atop and into the visuals is absolutely essential to making the thing feel unified, and this has some of the best marriage of song and dialogue I've ever heard.

Also Cited:
All Is Lost
-For so perfectly depicting Our Man's relative awareness of his situation through solely audible means
Frozen
-For lots of reasons, but "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" would probably be enough all by itself
The Lords of Salem
-For building up the bangs and shocks of horror into something far more intense than the genre usually dreams of


BEST SOUND EDITING
The Lords of Salem
Horror relies on good sound; that was old news generations ago. Still, few horror films exploit that truth to any kind of success. It is not the least, and may indeed be the best, of the reasons that The Lords of Salem is such a singular genre experience, that it includes such perfect expressions of all the usual horror audio tropes - flat interior echoes, shrieking door creaks, bowel-rattling hums in the bass - while also introducing an entire population of sounds that could only happen in a movie about evil coming in the form of music.

1st Runner-Up: All Is Lost
The moment that it occurs to you that they didn't actually have Robert Redford on a boat in the ocean, in queasy-making calms or nightmarish storms, is the moment you start to wonder why it's so easy to believe that he was. The easiest answer: the excellent cacophony of waves, echoes, and rumbles of a living ocean.

Also Cited:
Berberian Sound Studio
-For being the backbone of a story explicitly about sound editing, and helping to create a state of pure paranoia
The Conjuring
-For making a house sound like the most suffocating, unearthly place to be, even before the ghostly clapping
Frozen
-For evoking a snowscape with all the noises of winter turned up just enough to give everything a dose of magic


BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Gravity
How could it not be? There are so many individual elements that would make the argument that it's the year's best on their own: the photorealistic everything, the perfect execution of Emmanuel Lubezki's complex lighting scheme, the sheer variety and scope of moving pieces, the best post-production 3-D in history. That all of these things exist in one package is all the argument needed to anoint a new champion of the digital toybox school of effects, hugely realistic and entirely spectacular, hand-in-hand.

1st Runner-Up: Man of Steel
The morality of a "superhero" being complicit in so many deaths is one thing; the unbelievably convincing depiction of the cities crumbling and tornadoes devastating Kansas, however, is quite another thing. This world is never less than convincing, and its panorama of sci-fi marvels never less than enthralling.

Also Cited:
Ender's Game
-For sprawling space vistas and battles that do not call attention to themselves, but simply exude authenticity
Pacific Rim
-For the successful marriage of realistic textures and physics with the broadest designs from a boys' daydreams
Star Trek Into Darkness
-For improving on an already-great original, creating a bright and bold but wholly plausible idea of the future

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