We’ve got a lot
of words below, so I will keep this short. Yes, 2014 was a great year for
movies, and if you don’t think so I invite you to catch up with some of the
selections below. Or better yet, harass me online or in person as to what I got
wrong. A lesson I have come to terms with this year is that cinema only
flourishes when faced with passionate, well-argued criticism.
In 2014, I found
a lot of it at the well-respected venues (Kent Jones’ history of auteurism at
Film Comment, Richard Brody on National Gallery at The New Yorker, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis on the year in film) as well as at Letterboxd, a Goodreads-like movie database/community
that has become pretty much an addiction of mine. The site encourages you to
file short reviews for each film you log as seeing, which for me has not only
honed my writing but changed the way I think and watch. It’s all for the
better, I’d say, though after you skim through/slowly savor the list below I invite you to browse
my profile and make that judgment yourself.
And one last
thing about Letterboxd: it tallies how many films you see. The damage for 2014?
411, and only 130 of those were movies released this year. “Only," ha.
Anyway, here are
my picks for the year’s best, with links to my original reviews and Netflix
when applicable:
1/25/15 EDIT: After second viewing, Boyhood promoted from #6 to #3
1/25/15 EDIT: After second viewing, Boyhood promoted from #6 to #3
1. The Immigrant
It is
disingenuous for a critic to set rules for what constitutes greatness, since masterworks,
by nature, surprise and redefine their medium’s potential, at least in the
minds of those enraptured by such works. But I found have found one constant
across the films I consider the best, and that is something I would call the “Vertigo effect.” Contrary to debilitating
dizziness, this feeling overwhelms me at various points (including, almost
always, the ends) of great, great films, of which I use Hitchcock’s Vertigo as just about an unbeatable
yardstick.
This feeling is a
vast, complicated one, not necessarily sad but definitely incompatible with
happiness. It is the feeling of knowledge, summated and rendered ineffable,
departed from one fallen soul to another and yearning to converse without the
burden of circuitous language. It is both a transcendent feeling and one rooted
in the earth, for it is only through sounds and images that these films give
form to poetry. It is a feeling of collapsed time and palpable history. It is a
feeling multitudinous and impossible to do written justice, for it exists only
in the medium of its making and even then, just barely.
The Immigrant, as is obvious by now, left me with such
a feeling. It tells a simple story, of one woman spurned and coerced into
prostitution by a covetous pimp (Joaquin Phoenix, perfect), a story far from new. Many character actions come and go without
clarification, and much of the time our protagonist, Ewa (Marion Cotillard,
also perfect), drifts by in a haze of reluctance and indecision.
But
writer-director James Gray, with a touch of the sacred from Darius Khondji’s
photography and Chris Spelman’s music, never allows Ewa to suffer for
suffering’s sake. She always has an eye on meaning, self-worth and agency — in
a word, the future, and how to make it hers. If the film leaves you with a
heavy feeling, as described above, that feeling also emanates from two final
acts of compassion, which together constitute progress. Progress may be antithetical to loss, but so rarely does art convey, with a clarity that transcends
polemics and approaches gospel, how one cannot arrive without the
other. (My review) (On Netflix!)
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Grand Budapest Hotel is at once Wes Anderson’s most challenging
work and his most fast-paced and farcical. Which means there is a dissonance at
its heart that most will overlook, not necessarily out of ignorance but incompetence.
Lest that sound like me, the arrogant elitist, casting shade on the
groundlings, know that I’ll readily admit to my inability to keep up with the
speed of Grand Budapest’s invention, which
manifests through shifts in color, intrusions of artifice (miniatures, key
lights turning on, Gustave lecturing to the camera, etc.) and skips across time
and aspect ratios. It might just be too fun to engage with “properly,” i.e. to
discern its nuances from a distance.
All the more
reason to watch it over and over. I’ve seen this film three times now, twice in
theaters, and none of the jokes, which depend on framing (see above, and David Bordwell's essential essay here), sound
(see here) and deep space (“She’s been murdered, and you think I did it.”) as
much as words, have staled. It is truly an excellent piece of entertainment, in
league with such obvious influences as The
Grand Illusion and To Be or Not to Be.
And like those classics, there is so much more going on under the surface than
one viewing might be able to discern.
Most recently,
I’ve been chewing on the idea that Gustave’s cultivated, decadent world not
only “vanished before he ever entered it,” as Mr. Moustafa’s last lines
conclude, but never existed at all. The constant, jarring reminders that this
film is founded on artifice dislodge it from any historical reality, even as it
makes unmistakable gestures to WWII. Anderon’s camera quickly surveys the
hotel’s interiors yet leaves us with a near-complete image of every chamber,
bath and staircase, including where and how they all relate to one another.
Picture the concierge desk, with Zero behind it and Jason Schwartzmann later,
and it will come to mind as a real place, one decaying across decades, if not
in our memories. It is Wes Anderon’s humility that makes us long for a time we
swear we could touch, even when it’s nothing more than his creation.
3. Boyhood
As easy to love as to hate, Boyhood has attracted and sustained so animated a discussion because of its perceived “relatability.” Some see themselves in Mason Jr.’s every milestone and indecision, while others resent that the all-encompassing sweep of the title points to yet another white boy from Texas. Both takes are correct, but what else is there in Boyhood? Its main subject, more than Mason, turns out to be time, and how it shapes who we are by virtue of its passing alone — doesn’t matter if you change for the better or keep making the same mistakes, because you’ll always be defined by your past. The film responds by moving ever forward, to the point where the story merely stops rather than ends. Past and future are palpable specters in Boyhood, pinned loosely by the enrapturing present of watching them all collide at once. (My review)
4. Manakamana
I am not being
facetious when I say that Manakamana is
one of most thrilling films of the year. It is two hours long and composed of
11 shots, each of which studies, in contemplative stillness, the occupants of a
cable car gliding to and from the titular Nepalese temple. Most of those
occupants are humans, though you spend one 11-minute stretch staring at goats,
whose initial cuteness subsides once your mind wanders to their reason for
inclusion, viz. their role in Hindu ceremony.
Your mind will
wander a good deal, which is not a symptom of boredom but engagement. Blown up
on a cinema screen, these men, women, children and, yes, bovids offer but a
fraction of their lives for the camera, and the mystery of what transpired
before and what will after takes on a most pressing importance. This introduces
matters of modernization, representation and cultural relativism, all of which directors
Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez (affiliates of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography
Lab, the breeding ground of such other adventurous documentaries as Leviathan and People’s Park), have in mind. But beyond theory and beyond words, Manakamana makes palpable the beauty of
human connection, through the creation of art (as during that transcendent
passage seen above) and the very act of existing in time and space. (On Netflix, with a hilariously low average star rating)
5. Inherent Vice
Where There Will Be Blood told the story of
one man in monstrous control of his environment, Inherent Vice tells what can only loosely be defined as a story of
one man, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), completely overwhelmed by his. Between
these two Paul Thomas Anderson films lies the gap between modernism and
postmodernism, Great Men and everyone else, capitalism and whatever comes next.
From the erratic appearances of Doc’s ex, Shasta Hepworth (Katherine
Waterston), to the ever-shifting “Golden Fang,” which takes on forms insidious
and innocuous, the elements of Inherent
Vice contradict and confound, as you might expect of a Thomas Pynchon
adaptation.
This not just
narrative but tonal and thematic murkiness has led to downright hostile
reactions from some, but there are two reasons I believe this to be a great
film: First of all, it is hilarious,
pretty much non-stop for the first hour. You got Joaquin shuddering at doors
slamming behind him and white nuclear families running drugs and Josh Brolin
blowing a frozen banana in the out-of-focus foreground of a minute-long shot.
This is endearingly bizarre and very formally precise comedy that feeds into what
I believe to be the film’s primary mission: to make strange, and thus apparent,
the corruption, hypocrisies and queasy power structures of American society.
This Anderson and
D.P. Robert Elswit do through filmic, undoubtedly sober images, which
constitute my second reason. Inherent Vice
is a weird movie but not a surrealist one, for it uses the indexical,
this-is-reality properties of the cinematic image to see its subjects anew. The
world is screwed up enough without it needing to be filtered through and conflated
with a dream, basically. If approached in such a manner, that Anderson and
Pynchon are not just out to “mindfuck” you, then not only will you enjoy Inherent Vice but you may learn
something from it too. It’s just that those lessons happen to indict the
systems of meaning and value most of us take for granted. Funny, isn’t it?
6. John Wick
Coming to terms
with John Wick’s greatness requires a
few concessions. One: Keanu is preternaturally good at what he does and I feel
that’s a truth we don’t bow to enough. Two: Cinema is such an audiovisual medium
that a mediocre script, as in John Wick’s
case, does not preclude but actually facilitates greatness — that is, if the
directors are game. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, veteran stuntmen but
first-time auteurs, most certainly are, crafting thrills, laughs and uncannily
beautiful moments out of choreography, color, camera movement, music cues and
precisely timed pauses. Three: Subtext means nil if it does not spring out of a
vital, vibrant piece of art, and once in a rare while that art can also front
as a dumb action movie and be easily, blissfully enjoyed as such. (My review)
7. Two Days, One Night
A moving and
riveting act of witness, Two Days, One
Night strikes the perfect balance between politics and character study as
it follows one factory worker, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), who must convince her
colleagues to forfeit their €1000 bonus so that she may keep her job. Her
scramble for votes finds form in a deliberate, door-to-door structure, which
would be stiff and overly schematic if not for Cotillard’s ability to register each
victory or setback with a shift in gait, a return inward or unspooling out, a
raising or quieting of the voice also dependent on the outcomes before. By
condensing her struggle into a thriller-like race against time, the Dardennes
push Sandra out of depression and into action, into the hands of those who may
ignore her pleas but must at least look into her eyes as they do so. It all builds to one of the least sentimental triumphs of optimism in art
cinema history, filled with grace and will and hope for the unknowable future.
8. National Gallery
“Sublime” is
somehow a word both archaic and overused, but it is apt to describe and praise Frederick
Wiseman’s latest. On paper a cinematic tour of London’s prestigious art museum,
National Gallery builds to something far
more limitless and mysteriously affecting by the time its final frame cuts to
black. It takes three hours to get to that point, and in trademark Wiseman
fashion no protagonist or clear-cut goal carries the narrative. In fact, this
documentary is looser and quieter than his last film, the four-hour masterpiece
At Berkeley.
But it’s anything
but boring, considering how Wiseman’s camera observes the museum’s brilliant
docents, restoration facilities and stringent director, Nicholas Penny, whose frank,
borderline contemptuous impatience with some of his colleagues affirms, once
again, Wiseman’s unsung talent at capturing the often heated climate of the workplace.
As educational and even funny it may be moment-to-moment, this film glides with
a kind of unpretentious majesty, through history and through all the mediums of
art, from painting and music to dance and discourse. It left me stunned yet
empowered, as if I came upon a banquet with every great Western artist in
attendance and Rembrandt caught my eye and pulled out the empty stool between
him and Holbein.
9. Under the Skin
As cold and cruel
a vision you will ever see, as well as one of the most vibrant, Under the Skin is a lot of movie. The events as they occur are legible enough, but some
of them exact an emotional toll (particularly a scene on a beach and its
nocturnal follow-up) so traumatizing to throw the narrative and its larger
‘point,’ or at least your perception of these things, into disarray. Which is,
itself, one of the movie’s points: to distance you from Scarlett Johansson’s
protagonist to such an extreme so that you become aware of your own affect, and
how affect is perhaps the key tenet to being human.
The film’s second
half brings Scarlett down to earth, as it were, and introduces such human qualities
as emotion and sensuality (as opposed to just sex) into her bloodstream. But with
morality comes vulnerability, which is especially strong when you’re a woman
who looks like Scarlett. The terror at the end confirms the feminist undercurrent
that will have been so obvious for some since Scarlett’s entrance and, in turn,
contextualizes the film’s dispassionate violence. There is indeed a point to Under the Skin, many of them, but with
Jonathan Glazer’s visuals, Mica Levi’s score and Scarlett’s ultimate femme
fatale rumbling at the surface, there comes a point where the mystery becomes
more enticing, and distressing, than any of the assemblages of words that could
solve it.
10. Selma
I don’t need to
tell you how Selma is an
indisputably, unbelievably relevant film. That it takes place 50 years in the
past makes this fact all the more alarming, but again, this you know. What I
can tell you is that Ava DuVarney’s Selma
is just about a miracle of filmmaking intelligence, the awards-hungry
biopic premise executed with poise, perspective and artistic panache. Sure,
you’ll have no choice but to stump for Best Actor hopeful David Oyelowo, who
does justice to Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by foregrounding the unknowable
bustle of his inner life, or Best Supporting Actress contender Carmen Ejogo,
who not only is a dead ringer for Coretta Scott but makes flesh her strength
and compassion. There are innumerable obvious assets in Selma’s favor, but I have a feeling it won’t vanish in a few months
time because it was all flash, no truth, as is the case with its competitive
peers.
Like Lincoln, Selma pays very close attention to political procedure, and how it
forms those who hack through it as much as the other way around. The ideology that
is spoken hews closer to moral philosophy, and some of the most moving passages
turn to God (like after the second Selma bridge impasse) or his earthbound
translators (Martin’s phone call with Mahalia Jackson). Meanwhile, during the
traumatic “Bloody Sunday” reenactment, the crack of the lash from a
horse-riding policeman to a fleeing protestor’s back not only drives home the
act’s cruelty but sends the waves of history crashing down on you in the
theater, a witness to violence spanning eons.
Selma feels so uncommonly wise because it’s not about a historical
moment or the idea that fuels that moment (justice!), but how only through
the conflict between embroiled motivations and coolheaded tactics do those
moments appear. A great man once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice,” and the brilliance of Selma is how it embodies that “universe” more than any other word.
11. Mr. Turner
Selma excepted, Mr. Turner
is my ideal of a biopic: a mosaic of non-events, scenic rambles and moral
contradictions without a three-act structure leading it all any one place. This
will frustrate those who hope to learn about Turner's technique, or what
hardships he so valiantly had to overcome, or why his art ‘matters.’ The first
and last time we see J.M.W. Turner, he is sketching outdoors in silhouette,
bookends to remind us not only of Dick Pope's gifts but how the alchemy of
genius cannot be explained by language, filmic or otherwise. Which is all to
say the portrait this film interprets out of the relatively calm life of J.M.W.
Turner is incredibly complex, hinting at his disgust for pollution, violence
and bourgeois custom as motivations for his art and demeanor while depicting
his casual cruelty without apology. If the film lacks thematic through lines,
it more than makes up by lining each scene with a quiet yet
universal revelation. (Excerpted from a longer review here)
12. Force Majeure
The only movie on
this list, the only movie this year, that feels like it should have a Janus
Films logo at its start, for better or worse. The “worse” parts, for me, are
actually among Force Majeure’s
assets: Its modernist trappings, and embedded critique, evoke Tati and
Antonioni more than those of contemporary cinema’s groundbreaking artists; its
husband-wife sparring owes a great deal to Bergman, who is out of fashion in
critical circles today but who I adore nonetheless; and its ambiguous,
literally foggy ending echoes Fellini, if not the Neorealists.
Which is all to
say that if Force Majeure is not the
year’s most original film, it is also one of its most splendidly argued,
excoriating gender roles through meticulous frames that also allow space for
passion, humor and bug-eyed delirium. I submit the shot where Mats and Tomas
sit on pool chairs, fumbling with girls, beers and their own bodies, as the
answer to the leading question in A.O. Scott’s much-read essay: “Who or what
killed adulthood?” (My review)
13. Bird People
It’s safe to say
nothing can prepare you for this, which, for once, does not portend a ghastly
Michael Haneke or Gaspar Noé nightmare but a hopeful, winsome story of freedom.
I’d advise you go in cold with Pascale Ferran’s latest, but do know that
alongside its romantic pleasures, this film interrogates the inhuman efficacy
of working class labor, the privilege of the jet set exploiting them and
technology’s effect on the flesh-and-blood relationships relating to both
parties.
14. Stranger by
the Lake
"I'm gonna soak up the sun
Before it goes out on me
Don't have no master suite
I'm still the king of me
You have a fancy ride, but baby
I'm the one who has the key
Every time I turn around
I'm looking up, you're looking down
Maybe something's wrong with you
That makes you act the way you do
Maybe I am crazy too"
Don't have no master suite
I'm still the king of me
You have a fancy ride, but baby
I'm the one who has the key
Every time I turn around
I'm looking up, you're looking down
Maybe something's wrong with you
That makes you act the way you do
Maybe I am crazy too"
—Sheryl Crow
15. Snowpiercer
The sushi to
Marvel’s roach bars, Snowpiercer is a
blockbuster about many things — inequality, revolution, father-son
relationships, shoes — that dares to be funny, heartbreaking and weird. That
Bong Joon-ho covers a wide tonal spectrum should come as no surprise to anyone
who has seen The Host or Mother, two of the most inexplicable yet
oddly affecting genre films of the last decade. Bong knows an audience,
regardless of taste, wants to feel something from a movie, and so he tunes
every moment for maximum impact. It’s a post-apocalyptic movie where the weight
of each human life impresses upon you even as Bong throws so many away, one by
one. (My review) (On Netflix)
16. The Tale of Princess Kaguya
It’s nice, every
now and then, to watch a movie that totally wrecks you and remember that you
have a soul.
17. Goodbye to Language
I need another go
at Godard’s latest to see if my reserved admiration can blossom into full-on
love. There’s a good chance it will, since I will not make the same mistake of
expecting a narrative to cohere and order its pleasures. For the pleasures
here are gloriously formal: the heart-sinking twirl of Gia Kancheli’s “Abii Ne
Viderem”; the frizzled outline of Roxy Miéville, Godard’s exceptionally cheery
hound; the z-axis distance between fingers curled around a gate and the woman
those fingers belong to, gazing off somewhere else. It is insufficient to say
that every shot is beautiful because shots do not exist adjacent to one another
in Goodbye to Language. Images not
only superimpose upon another — they fill different eyes, due to Godard's deconstruction of 3D's left-right polarity, at the same time. This is interactive cinema
that needs to be picked up by a Kiarostami or Weerasethakul, but no one will
forget the confounding thrill of watching Godard master it first.
18. The LEGO Movie
“All I'm asking
for is total perfection.” (My review)
19. The Last of the Unjust
Everything about
this movie, from its title to its length (three hours, 40 minutes) to its
subject (the Holocaust), screams a pretty miserable time at the movies. But a
good two hours of The Last of the Unjust
fly by, in the company of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish Elder of
Theresienstadt ghetto. Interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in 1975, he defends his
controversial spot in Jewish history, and how his impossible task was to
“accomplish something without having any power.” Lanzmann neither vindicates
nor condemns him but lets him speak, and an engaging, jowly presence he is.
Juxtaposing Murmelstein’s testimony with tours of Theresienstadt’s relics
today, Lanzmann stresses language’s failure to unlock the Shoah and yet our
incessant need to try. (My review)
20. American Sniper
I did my
patriotic duty with this film right here, which I, naturally, invite you to read. The film is not some rah-rah “U.S.A.!” piece, but the story of one
brutally efficient soldier, stripped of all moralizing. What you take from it will
depend on your view of a soldier killing another soldier — not war, which is played by politicians — as a “necessary evil.” Simply
“necessary” and thus incapable of being “evil,” or vice versa? You and I lean
one way or the other in our individual interpretations of the phrase, but American Sniper sits right at the
middle, proposing an unholy equilibrium between the two. No film this year
demands or deserves a moral grappling so much as this one.
21. Lucy
Yes, Lucy is actually amazing and, yes, I
also included Lucy on this list to
piss off the haters, who must be punished until the end of time. Lucy will be
waiting for them there. (My review)
22. Venus in Fur
Roman Polanski’s
answer to that three-word, one-star review of Certified Copy on Netflix: “needs more BDSM.” This two-hander sees
narrative progress as razing gender binaries and yet, somehow, none of my
friends have heard of it. Cinema is still the new cinema! Watch this! (My review) (On Netflix)
23. The Strange Little Cat
If you have ever
leaned against the wall of your narrow apartment hallway, and your relatives
suddenly poured in through the door in front of you, and your dad called from
the other room asking you to greet them, and the old familiar voices drowned out
each other, and the dog couldn’t stop barking, and the chop-screech-chopping of
carrots in the kitchen somehow grew louder over this bedlam, and you remained
pinned there to the wall, in hell but wearing a smile, then rest assured that The Strange Little Cat knows you.
24. Night Moves
The movie where
Mark Zuckerberg relapses back to his previous life, Norman Bates, and all hell
breaks loose. A sensuous slow-burn, which I enjoyed wallowing in more than Only Lovers Left Alive and other
protracted, nocturnal affairs, Night
Moves sees Jesse Eisenberg weaponize his introversion to a chilling and
finally devastating degree. The great Kelly Reichert catches some of the
creepiest angles, from afar and up suffocatingly close, of this young star and
another, Dakota Fanning, that this world will ever have the privilege to see.
Eisenberg’s environmental terrorist is the embodiment of psycho male creepiness
today, the weirdo who would torture you with dental tools and not even have the
courtesy to ask, “Is it safe?” (My review)
25. Non-Stop
I think we can
all agree this is really the best
film of the year. (My review)
How About 10
More, This Time in Alphabetical Order:
Beyond the Lights
Coherence
Edge of Tomorrow
Foxcatcher
Listen Up Philip
Love Is Strange
A Most Wanted Man
Nightcrawler
The Trip to Italy (My review)
Wild (My review)
The Actors:
Best Lead
Female Performance:
Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night and The Immigrant
Six Other Great
Ones: Julianne Moore, Still Alice; Essie Davis, The Babadook;
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Belle and Beyond the Lights; Lisa
Loven Kongsli, Force Majeure; Reese Witherspoon, Wild; Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin
Best Lead Male
Performance: Timothy
Spall, Mr. Turner
Six Other Great
Ones: Joaquin Phoenix, The Immigrant and Inherent Vice; Ralph
Fiennes, Grand Budapest Hotel; David
Oyelowo, Selma; Philip Seymour Hoffman, A Most Wanted Man; Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler;
Jesse Eisenberg, Night Moves
Best
Supporting Actress: Tilda
Swinton, Snowpiercer
Five Other Great
Ones: Carmen Ejogo, Selma; Patricia
Arquette, Boyhood; Julianne Moore, Maps
to the Stars; Kim Dickens, Gone Girl; Melisa Sözen, Winter Sleep
Best
Supporting Actor: Josh
Brolin, Inherent Vice
Five Other Great
Ones: Rob Brydon, The Trip to Italy; Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher;
Ethan Hawke, Boyhood; Tyler Perry, Gone
Girl; J.K. Simmons, Whiplash
Other Random Superlatives:
Five Amazing
Non-Narrative Non-Features:
Glistening Thrills (dir. Jodie Mack);
Never Catch Me (dir. Hiro Murai); Too Many Cooks (dir. Casper Kelly); Transformers: The Premake (dir. Kevin B.
Lee); Pizza Freaks Unite (dir. Tim
& Eric)
Best
Soundtracks: Under the Skin, Gone Girl, Inherent Vice
Gotta Throw in
a Good Word For: Still Alice
I Actually
Really Enjoyed: Need for Speed, Hercules, Pompeii, new Hobbit, Oculus
The Ten
Greatest Older Movies I Saw for the First Time in 2014 (see a list of 50 here):
- Certified Copy (2011, dir. Abbas Kiarostami)
- My Darling Clementine (1946, dir. John Ford)
- The Birds (1963, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
- The Shop Around the Corner (1940, dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
- Tropical Malady (2004, dir. Apichatpong Weerasekathul)
- Playtime (1967, dir. Jacques Tati)
- The Long Day Closes (1992, dir. Terence Davies)
- Trouble in Paradise (1932, dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
- Stop Making Sense (1984, dir. Jonathan Demme)
- Sherlock Jr. (1924, dir. Buster Keaton)
Most
Revelatory Rewatches: Vertigo (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), Mulholland Dr. (2001, dir. David Lynch),
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)
Best Film Book
I Read This Year: Films and Feelings by Raymond Durgnat
Worst Films: A
Million Ways to Die in the West, A
Field in England, Sin City: A Dame to
Kill For
Potentially
Great Movie Ruined by General Fatigue and the Noxious Perfume Emanating from
the Woman Sitting Next to Me at the Film Forum: Leviathan
I Bought This
Acclaimed 2013/2014 Movie on Blu-ray But It’s Not Gonna Arrive Until Like
February: Stray Dogs
Limited
Release Movies I Regret Not Yet Seeing But, Honestly, There’s Only So Many
Times I Can Bus in From New Jersey — That Is, When I’m Actually in Jersey and Not Upstate, as Is the
Case for Eight Months of the Year — And See What May Be Less Than a Slam Dunk
(in order of decreasing regret):
Closed Curtain, Actress, What Now? Remind Me,
The Overnighters, Miss Julie, Concerning Violence, Beloved
Sisters, Story of My Death, The Blue Room, Jimmy P., Life of Riley, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baby Yaga, See You Next Tuesday
Well-Received
2014 Festival Releases That Won’t Open Until 2015 (Or At Least I Think): The
Iron Ministry, The Duke of Burgundy,
Clouds of Sils Maria, Jauja, Respire, Hard to Be a God,
Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, The Princess of France, Mommy, Timbuktu, The Look of Silence,
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on
Existence
The 130 Movies
Released in 2014 That I Saw This Year (with hyperlinks to my original reviews,
bolded if they are full length):
Abuse of Weakness; The Amazing Spider-Man 2; American Sniper; The Babadook; Belle; Beyond the Lights; Birdman; Bird People; Blue Ruin; Borgman; Boyhood; Calvary; Captain America: The Winter Soldier; Citizenfour; Coherence; Dawn of the Planetof the Apes; Dear White People; The Double; Dumb and Dumber To; Edge of Tomorrow; Enemy; Exhibition; The Expendables 3; A Field in England; Force Majeure; Foxcatcher; Frank; Fury; Get on Up; A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; Godzilla; Gone Girl; Goodbye to Language; The Grand Budapest Hotel; Guardians of the Galaxy; The Guest; Hercules; The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies; The Homesman; How to Train Your Dragon 2;
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1;
Ida*;
The Imitation Game; The Immigrant; Inherent Vice; Interstellar;
The Interview; It Felt Like Love; Jack Ryan:
Shadow Recruit; Jealousy; Jersey Boys; Joe; John Wick; Land Ho!; Last Days in Vietnam; The Last of the Unjust; The Lego Movie; Leviathan; Life Itself; Like Father, Like Son;
Listen Up Philip; Locke; Love Is Strange; Lucy; Magic in the Moonlight; Maleficent;
Manakamana; Maps to the Stars; The MazeRunner; A Million Ways to Die in the West; The Missing Picture; A Most Wanted Man; Mr. Turner; Muppets Most Wanted; National Gallery; Need for Speed; Neighbors; Nightcrawler; Night Moves; Noah; Non-Stop;
Norte, the End of History; Nymphomaniac;
Obvious Child; Oculus; The One I Love; Only Lovers Left Alive; Palo Alto; Particle Fever; Pompeii; Proxy; The Purge: Anarchy;
The Raid 2; Rosewater; The Rover; Sabotage; Selma; Sin City: A Dame to Kill For; The Skeleton Twins; Snowpiercer; A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness; Starred Up; Still Alice; Stranger by the Lake; The
Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears; The Strange Little Cat; The Tale of Princess Kaguya; The Theory ofEverything; The Trip to Italy; 22 Jump Street; Two Faces of January;
They Came Together; Thou Wast Mild and Lovely; Top Five; Tracks; Transcendence; Transformers: Age of Extinction; Two Days, One Night; Under the Skin; The Unknown Known; Venus in Fur; A Walk Among the Tombstones; We Are the Best!; Welcome to New York; Whiplash; Why Don’t You Play in Hell?; Wild; The Wind Rises; Winter Sleep; X-Men: Days of Future Past; TheZero Theorem
*I cooled on this
one considerably after a second viewing.
