The Best Films of 2014

Make no mistake: the list that follows was always going to be incomplete. No one, not even the most driven of film lovers, has time to watch every movie released in a given year, and my film viewing is notably missing a few major films that came out in the last quarter of the year. That said, these were the fifteen films I feel best represented what made 2014 a damn good year for film.

15. It Felt Like Love

This jagged, charged coming of age story is unlikely to be everyone's cup of tea. However, for all its faults -- a pretty terrible, overtly symbolic ending, the not-always successful or pleasing lengths it goes to to get confrontational and put off its audience -- its piercing look at adolescence and female sexuality is riveting and authentically discomfiting in equal measure. 

14. God Help the Girl

Few films brought me as much joy in 2014 as Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch's infectiously feel good, shaggy musical. Murdoch knows exactly what he wants his film to be and while that may be loose, rambling and inconsequential, it doesn't mean it isn't also just goddamn delightful. It's a pop soundtrack as film. And yet, it is not merely fluff, but rather someone bleeding their personal life and disappointment into something that's genuinely a breath of fresh air. We need more escapism that is this assured.

13. Joe 

Nicholas Cage gave in one of 2014's best performances simply by refusing to act like Nicholas Cage. Cage's performance as the titular character is so restrained that it's easy to forget that he's the one playing him. However, when called upon to express his Cage-ian rage, Cage is prepared, which is useful for the story of a man who befriends the son of an abusive alcoholic -- a figure who may just be the flip-side of the coin of who Joe is. Director David Gordon Green shoots this in his usual beautiful, lyrical style that he's been drawing upon since George Washington.

12. Blue Ruin

Films about revenge too often concern themselves with creating a moral high ground from which its protagonist can mete out justice. Blue Ruin has no interest in doing this whatsoever. The events that lead its hapless criminal Dwight (Macon Blair) to seek vengeance are long before the film took place and director Jeremy Saulnier demonstrates a complete lack of interest in going into too much detail of the specifics. In stead, Saulnier goes into the tricky business of haphazardly trying to violently get back on someone. It's a thrilling film, but it also rids its narrative of badassery. And that ultimately makes it even more exciting.

11. The Immigrant 

James Gray's latest film has been compared to silent films. It's story is old school: in early 20th century New York City, an immigrant Ewa (Marion Cottilard) just off the boat is taken in by a cruel pimp Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) and falls into a bizarre, unhealthy love triangle rounded out by the pimp's cousin, a magician named Emil (Jeremy Renner). Ewa slowly ends up debasing herself in order to try to save her sister, detained at Ellis Island due to illness. This is a slow, subtle film that relies on largely understated acting and classical compositions. The kink here to this narrative is the way Gray refuses to turn this into a story of simple good and evil; Ewa is no saint but a fighter, and Phoenix ensures that the volatile humanity of Bruno seeps through the cracks of his hideous facade.

10. Gone Girl

No film released this year made me feel like it was putting in as much effort to take me on a wild and crazy ride. In hindsight, there are quibbable things about Gone Girl (including whether it's misognystic or not). But they miss the point of David Fincher and Gillian Flynn's vision. This is a film that pulls out the rug at just the right moment on half-a-dozen different occasions, and nails every single one of its absolutely bonkers reveals. It's a thrilling film to watch because its so perfectly constructed and so completely willing to embrace its unhinged, nightmarish story.

9. Snowpiercer

The Weinstein Company wanted to release director Joon-Ho Bong's epic dystopian action film in a truncated form. Bong fought back and won, and that's fortunate; Bong's films are so distinctive for how they mix idiosyncratic visions with deeply affecting emotional cores. Blunt as the film's class conflict metaphor is, it's also powerful and far more nuanced than it's often given credit for. Oh yea, this is also simply an exhilarating film, filled with breakneck, ceaselessly inventive action-packed conflict.

8. The Lego Movie

The writer-director duo Chris Miller and Phil Lords keep proving themselves endlessly adept at adapting junk properties and turning them into solid gold. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their effort to make what essentially amounts to a commercial for a beloved toy. Yet this proves to be so much more than a cynical cash grab. Put simply, The Lego Movie is a whip-smart deconstruction of our pop culture today, one of the savviest and often most insightful of recent memory. It's also just an absolute treat. 

7. Ida 

Director Pawel Polikowski draws upon the works of Polish masters like Andrzej Wajda to tell this story of a soon-to-be-nun who learns some dark secrets about her family history. Polikowski relies on carefully planned compositions and gorgeous black-and-white cinematography to tell his story. This isn't a showy film and yet it's one of the most ecstatic and striking films released this year. But the simplicity and understatement of its direction mask what is a truly horrific story about the way the past lingers and the way people choose to forget because sometimes it's easier to.

6. Ernest & Celestine 

This animated story is a wisp. It looks gorgeous; it is drawn like a masterwork of watercolor painting, and it is told with the simplicity of a well-loved children's book. Ernest is a bear; Celestine is a mouse. One lives above and the other below in the sewer system. The two species fear one another. Ernest and Celestine befriend one another. Simple enough. But directors Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, and Benjamin Renner lovingly build this world and use animation and story-book logic to craft something whimsical and utterly distinctive. 

5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a terrific film, and Dawn deftly builds on its foundations to create something even more emotionally resonant and complicated. There are some great special effects work here and Andy Serkis gives another stunning performance. But what sticks with you at the end of the day is the way the film creates a no-win situation and then mercilessly tightens the screws. It's a beautiful, heart-wrenching tragedy. 

4. We Are the Best!

Few films I watched made me want to immediately revisit them like We Are the Best!, a small film about Swedish female adolescent punks. This is a film of pure joy, where it makes you giddy and the world seem a little bit better when you leave. And it does it in a totally non-cloying, non-saccharine way. It's observation of its three central characters is lovely and honest, and it tells a story rarely seen. It's a story of female friendship that places those friendships above everything else in its narrative.

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel 

Wes Anderson's films have always been meticulously constructed confections and The Grand Budapest Hotel is no exception. What Anderson's films have also always been is achingly melancholy. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the apex for both of these qualities. It's certainly Anderson's silliest film, but it's also his most haunted film. Anderson draws on classic Hollywood capers and the cultural decadence of Fin-de-Siecle to tell a film that is a lot of fun to watch, but also leaves you wondering if that fun wasn't a little bittersweet to obtain.

2. Boyhood 

Boyhood is an achievement. Richard Linklater spent twelve years gathering his cast together in order to watch the growth of one child, Ellar Coltrane (and Linklater's daughter Lorelai Linklater). But what makes this so much more than some ambitious experiment and, in stead, one of the best coming of age stories -- and films more generally period -- is the ways Linklater refuses to tell this story in any conventional way. Linklater captures casual, mundane moments, the sort of stuff that makes up the day-to-day but we wouldn't necessarily consider monumental, and turns these moments into the monumental moments they deserve to be. Boyhood has a sneaky cumulative power, building into so much more than the sum of its parts. It's stunning. 

1. Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer's abstract science fiction film is mesmerizing. Glazer strips its plot of everything but the bare necessities to tell the story of an alien seductress (Scarlet Johansson) who hunts unsuspecting victims along the coast of Glasgow. When Glazer isn't contemplating the eerily blank expression of his protagonist's deadly alluring face, he is showing the fate of her victims. These scenes are so abstracted that it isn't entirely clear what takes place. What is clear: they are hypnotic. The film's envelops us in a tonal poem and fills it out with gorgeous imagery, the likes of which were not seen in anything else in 2014.

Just Missed the Cut:

Coherence

Edge of Tomorrow 

Nymphomaniac Vol. 1

The Guest

Obvious Child

Starred Up

Guardians of the Galaxy

Captain America: Winter Soldier

Maidentrip

Night Moves

The Double

The Final Member

Cheap Thrills

Life Itself

Interstellar