The movies of 2014 seemed to line up that way for me as well: a handful of strong contenders for my favorite, without anyone clearly separating from the pack. It appears to have been a general consensus that the year as a whole wasn't the strongest, and that's probably true, but what it did give us was a wide variety of very good movies. What my favorite movies of the year also suggest is that the majority of interesting films are released outside of the ever-constricting bubble of Hollywood, both the big budget blockbusters and even the mid-level prestige pictures. The latter proven by the fact that most of these I saw (or were originally released) in the first half of the year. And each of my top three I saw before Memorial Day.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here are my top 14 movies of 2014, including an alternate (/alt/) pick that I think would make a good double feature with the main choice. Think of them as an unofficial #15-28, though not necessarily in the order they appear.
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14. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)Though there are some gorgeous shots of the Cappadocian landscapes here, Winter Sleep has much less of an exterior focus than the director's earlier Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Yet Ceylan proves himself just as adept at exploiting the spaces within confined areas as he is with the undulating hills of rural Turkey. Those often claustrophobic interiors are mainly just long conversations and arguments and you have to be patient with it, but it'll slowly cast its spell on you.
/alt/ Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund)The central relationship in Winter Sleep is between a couple who've gradually drifted apart whether they know it or not. The couple in Force Majeure have a fracture in their marriage after a single event (though there probably was some sense of malaise leading up to that). What's gradual is the aftermath, the slow and hilarious chipping away at the husband Tomas's (Johannes Kuhnke) manhood by his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli)
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13. The Double (Richard Ayoade)
The dystopia of the world in which Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) lives is matched only by the dyspepsia of the other people who inhabit it. The first bright spot for this most quiet and unassuming of persons--aside from his completely unrequited crush on the copy girl (Mia Wasikowka) who works in his building--is the arrival of a potential new friend. Problem is the new friend, James Simon, is in every physical way an exact replica of Simon James. Second problem is James is thoroughly more self-possessed than Simon and exploits that to his full advantage. Third problem is that, besides the two of them, no one seems to notice the uncanny resemblance. It took a second viewing of Richard Ayoade's second feature (his first, Submarine, I could not warm to) to appreciate not only how tightly plotted the story--adapted from a Dostoyevsky novella--is, but how insular and cohesive the world he creates is. Each moment, each frame, each gesture seems completely of a piece, yet none of it feels programmatic.
/alt/ Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)If the shapelessness of Reichardt's earlier films--Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek's Cutoff--were off-putting to some (though certainly not me), then Night Moves shows she can craft a more structured story. It is essentially a movie of two halves. The first being the story of three eco-terrorists planning to bomb an environmentally unfriendly dam. The second, the aftermath of that plan. Reichardt slowly ratchets up the tension, first narratively, then psychologically, before exploding towards an ending of such banality, the abruptness of it all takes your breath away.
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12. Palo Alto (Gia Coppola)
/alt/ Adult World (Scott Coffey)
Amy (Emma Roberts, again) could be the older, only slightly more worldly, cousin of Palo Alto's April. If April is a lost soul in the way that high school kids inevitably tend to be, recent college grad Amy knows what she wants. She has purpose. Only problem is that purpose--becoming a successful poet--eludes her. Naively, when she meets her hero, the amazingly-named Rat Billings (John Cusack), she thinks it's all going to fall into place. In a society that presupposes that anybody can do anything, Adult World rightly says that maybe we can't, that maybe we're not all entitled to greatness. Billings, criticizing April's writings says that "If everything were great, nothing would be great." It's got a dark, irreverent streak of humor that hit a particular sweet spot in me.
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11. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The first thing most would say about PTA's latest is how confusing it is. That, it certainly is. And maybe that's as it should be, mimicking the feeling private dick Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) must be experiencing trying to keep track of all the narrative threads thrown at him during the course of the movie. (It's also possible that the thick cloud of haze he's walking through isn't so much confusion as it is an actual cloud of weed smoke.) Vice seems more overtly reminiscent of the Scorsese- and Altman-influenced earlier Anderson works than either of the more recent There Will Be Blood or The Master. But there's also a hint of the garish surrealism of Fellini and the kaleidoscopic dialogue of early Allen (taken largely from the Pynchon novel). Yet the stew is uniquely Anderson and like those two most recent works, a uniquely American movie./alt/ Selma (Ava DuVernay)
(BTW, you got a beef with its historical accuracy? I got a bridge you can jump off of.)
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10. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent)
I don't care enough about or watch enough of the genre to make any sweeping declarations such as "Jennifer Kent's debut is among the best horror movies in recent memory." But holy shit, isn't Jennifer Kent's debut among the best horror movies in recent memory? Rather than being a detriment, its meager means (part of its budget was secured through Kickstarter) is a virtue, forcing Kent to rely on mood and suggestion to add to its ever-heightening sense of doom and dread. Add to that two of the best performances of the year (by Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman) and you have one of the real surprises of the year.
/alt/ Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier)When Dwight, essentially living as a hobo, gets wind that the person who killed his father years ago is being released from prison, he begins haphazardly plotting to avenge that wrong. The problem is that he has no idea what he's doing. Saulnier's first feature, Murder Party, was a very funny riff on horror movies but began to tiredly spin its wheels in its final act. Blue Ruin suffers from no such failing because of how fully a character he and actor Malcolm Blair create in Dwight, a man both in over his head and also so determined to wrong a right that there's no turning back. Ultimately what the movie shows is that sometimes revenge is proven to be a dish best served awkwardly and incompetently.
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9. Witching & Bitching (Álex de la Iglesia)The funniest movie about a bunch of hapless crooks who accidentally run into a coven of cannibalistic witches I've ever seen. Women scare men enough on their own. When you add the supernatural into it, all bets are off.
/alt/ Neighbors (Nicholas Stoller)
The funniest movie about a fraternity moving into a suburban house next door to a married couple and their newborn I've ever seen. (Remember, man purses before regular purses.)
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8. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
In terms of simple aesthetics, there were many beautifully shot movies in 2014, but the black-and-white, Academy ratio of Ida may be the finest. The story, about a nun-to-be who is sent to find out about her past before she takes her vows and learns that she's an orphaned Jew whose parents were murdered during the Holocaust, is haunting enough on its own. But Pawlikowski often shoots his actors to emphasize their isolation, putting them near the bottom of the frame and accentuating the vast space above them. It's as if the specter of history or even God continues to weigh on their shoulders.
/alt/ Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
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The slickness of Fincher's eye obscures the intrinsically pulpy nature of this movie. It's the kind of movie that would've appeared as the B movie in a 1947 double feature, but with the meticulous control of an A-level master. Underneath it all is also a piercing and cynical look at how relationships (marriages and sexual relationships especially) force us to play prescribed roles, how each interaction is an affectation. It's also the most fun--after four great, but portentous films--Fincher has had since the Fight Club/Panic Room days.
/alt/ Coherence (James Ward Byrkit)
Modestly budgeted science fiction (or lo-fi sci-fi as some have dubbed it) seems to be finding a strong foothold in recent years. What's great about Coherence is how it finds its drama within the simplest of situations: a dinner party among friends. When a comet passes overhead, something odd and troubling happens and a lot of scientific theory is discussed. But just about everything we see and hear happens between the characters. It's more chamber drama than space opera and though the inciting incident is celestial, the movie has its feet planted firmly on solid ground.
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6. We are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson)
Punk may have already been dead by 1982, the year We are the Best! is set, but don't tell that to Bobo and Klara. Adapted from his wife Coco's graphic novel, Lukas Moodysson returns to the sweeter and more generally good-natured tone of his earlier work with this story of two young Swedish teen wannabe punks. Klara, with her mohawk and says-what's-on-her-mind attitude, unafraid and even purposefully stirring things up, is the driving force of the two, making decisions even if others don't agree. But it's Bobo who's the heart and soul of the movie--her hair, look and personality almost completely antithetical to the punk aesthetic. The two start a band with a third girl almost fully out of spite (what could be more punk than that?) and when they finally perform at the end of the film chanting "We are the best," it's difficult not to agree./alt/ God Help the Girl (Stuart Murdoch)
Musicals these days are so few and far between that it's disappointing when Hollywood so regularly makes the ones they do put out pompous and bloated. That's part of what makes Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl so refreshing. It's a tiny sliver of a film really, so light and airy it's as if it floats away once you watch it. Some may find it a bit cloying but I found it utterly charming thanks to Murdoch's (of Belle & Sebastian fame) delicate and playful songwriting and, like We are the Best!, three endearing performances.
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5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
By now most everybody knows the backstory of Boyhood: director Richard Linklater briefly filmed his cast for a few days each summer over the course of 12 years showing the life of a boy from 6 to 18. It's certainly a daring approach that has little-to-no precedent in the history of cinema. The Antoine Doinel series, the Up series, and even Linklater's own Before Trilogy may come close, but those follow characters (or actual people) over a long period of time through a series of separate movies, not one. When the 16-year-old Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) visits his older sister at the University of Texas, he counters the normal enthusiasm of looking forward to going away to college with the idea by saying it's not a "transformative experience," specifically citing his mother who went back to school and is still going through the same struggles of everyday life. I'd say my experience with the movie (as opposed to many others who loved it) was also not transformative. I don't necessarily think it's trying to be. The power from the story comes from the everyday, the moment-by-moment accumulation of life. That scene, and one more heralded one later, is important also because it connects Mason to his mother (Patricia Arquette). We may talk about how lives drift apart or paths intersect but in reality everyone's life moves in a parallel direction with each other. And while this is certainly Mason's story, it's also about how time doesn't just pass for you, but everyone else in your periphery.
/alt/ The Boxtrolls (Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi)Each of the three features produced by the Oregon-based animation studio, Laika, explore the darker terrain of childhood. What's moving about this latest one--about a group of underground creatures wearing cardboard boxes that come out at night scavenging through trash to make tools and other contraptions--is that it celebrates the beauty in the ugly, the sublime in the mundane.
Don't listen to what "Richard Sherman" has to say on this.
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4. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata)
I'll admit up front that Studio Ghibli is a huge blind spot for me and Kaguya is the first of Takahata's I've seen. And what a movie to start off with. The watercolor and charcoal animation give an appropriate otherworldly feel to this, which is based on an old Japanese folktale about a girl born of a bamboo tree and her rural "parents" who move her away from the country and into a palace to fulfill what her father believes is her destiny to become a princess. Kaguya overflows with moments of staggering beauty: the scene where she flees the palace, in which the animation changes from elegant to fiery and passionate or a sequence where she reconnects with an old friend. The first two acts are more or less focused on Kaguya's upbringing in the country then her desire to free herself from the shackles put on her by her "destiny" once she's moved to the palace. But the story shifts gears drastically in its final act, turning into something even more lyrical, and crescendoing to an overwhelmingly emotional last scene. This movie, frankly, devastated me. Even to a novice like me, this movie certainly feels like a closing of a door of some sort. It's an elegy for Takahata, for whom this is very likely a swan song, and for Ghibli, about whom rumors have swirled that their own production will cease. Bring your tissues./alt/ Bird People (Pascale Ferran)
Kaguya, as an adaptation of an ancient folktale and with its traditional animation style, is an examination of loneliness deeply rooted in the past. But Bird People, a remarkable accomplishment in the realm of visual effects and set mostly in a Parisian airport hotel, brings that sense of isolation bracingly into the modern day. I'd probably be spoiling too much to reveal just how those special effects manifest in the movie. But those effects really come to the fore in the second half, when the somewhat emotionally draining first half evolves into more magical realist. As silly as that turn may be, it all remains thoroughly clear-eyed, never forsaking the melancholy that exists within and among the lost souls of a lonely hotel.
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3. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
/alt/ Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)
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2. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
/alt/ The Great Flood (Bill Morrison)Sound and image combine in a different sort of way in Bill Morrison's documentary about the Mississippi River Flood of 1927. The images, culled entirely from film archives, are all as faded and dilapidated as the land and buildings the flood tore through all those decades ago. The music, by Bill Frisell (he on guitar as part of a quartet), is informed by both the jazz and blues that existed at the time as well as what morphed into something different as a result of the displacement of large communities. The music itself though is original (mostly), pulling these images fully into the present. But the final section has Frisell working in Kern & Hammerstein's classic "Ol' Man River" (which also came out in 1927). The people depicted in these archival films weren't concerned about their images being unearthed decades later. They were lives intent on being lived. But time, like old celluloid through a projector or the waters of the mighty Mississippi, just keeps rollin' along.
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1. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
When you're a vampire couple, you've got enough days in your calendar to spend a significant time away from each other. So while Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives secluded in Detroit, Eve (Tilda Swinton) lives, among the people, in Tangier. But when Adam goes through a depressive, existential crisis--brought on mainly by the human "zombies" who have wasted their much more limited time on earth--Eve pays a visit to the Motor City. Certainly you can read Adam's collection of vintage instruments and analog methods of communication as Jarmusch being nostalgic, but this is a longing of a different sort. And at the same time it's a lover's lament for the city of Detroit, a once vibrant metropolis, a cultural and economic powerhouse now in the midst of decrepitude. Yet Adam's pessimism is balanced by Eve's curiosity, her embrace of the contemporary, and her optimism. "This place will rise again," she says of the city. "When the cities of the south are burning, this place will bloom." Vampires themselves are the epitome of death and rebirth and Jarmusch, for all his old man pining for the way things used to be, finds a deeply felt resurgence in his own work here. If The Tale of the Princess Kaguya was an elegy, then Only Lovers Left Alive is a wake./alt/ Love is Strange (Ira Sachs)
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are another aged couple dealing with a form of separation anxiety. The movie doesn't make a deal of its central couple being a gay couple or martyr them for the inherent unfairness of how they're separated because of it (George is a Catholic school music teacher who is fired because of his new marital status). Instead, the movie speaks to the specificity of their situation, the power of a decades-long relationship between these specific people.
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I'm often reluctant to calcify a year's collection of movies into a certain theme. For one, these are simply my personal favorite/best movies of 2014. These are all individual works that were conceived and executed at a different time by people from different parts of the world. But also these are opinions I have in the now. My opinions on some of these which I've seen only months ago may have shifted ever so slightly already. The real legacy of 2014's films can only be judged with time.
But it seems to me the thread running through a lot of my list is, as it happens, time--characters running out of time, trying to catch up with it, or just figuratively (maybe even literally) stuck in time. From the almost elongated but moment-to-moment accumulation of time in Boyhood to the section-by-section unpeeling of time in The Grand Budapest Hotel; from the frozen in amber historical times of Selma and Inherent Vice to the moving of time away from past tragedies in Ida and The Babadook; from the endlessness of time in Only Lovers Left Alive to the specter of time itself in Interstellar, it's the one bit of currency we will all have to exchange at some point.
To return to a sports analogy, Father Time is undefeated.
Wait, you thought I was done? Here's a list of 14 more!
(in no particular order)
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan)
Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry)
Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Koreeda)
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)
Venus in Fur (Roman Polanski)
The Final Member (Jonah Bekhor & Zach Math)
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)
The Immigrant (James Gray)
Locke (Steven Knight)
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi)
The Trip to Italy (Michael Winterbottom)
They Came Together (David Wain)
Obvious Child (Gillian Robespierre)
Calvary (John Michael McDonagh)
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