I have a lot of fun compiling this every year even if it’s nothing special. Top ten movie lists are everywhere and fairly meaningless other than their ability to highlight movies that the reader may have otherwise ignored. The constant battle for me always seems to be between not just mirroring the movies up for all the awards, and not being a snob and pulling out super obscure films no one has heard of. All that said, let’s get right to it.
Honorable mentions for this year go out to Edge of Tomorrow, Nightcrawler, Snowpiercer, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Yes, Edge of Tomorrow is just another Tom Cruise action movie, but it was a lot of fun and pretty clever – think Groundhog Day as a video game versus alien invaders. Nightcrawler is dark and memorable and Jake Gyllenhaal was denied what should have been a sure thing for an Oscar nomination – think Taxi Driver as a crime scene videographer. Snowpiercer is an R-rated Hunger Games on a train. It just couldn’t decide between being a dark comedy or a melodrama. I’ve only ever been a tepid Wes Anderson fan, but The Grand Budapest Hotel finally made me think he’s capable of producing a truly great film – someday. I loved how this movie was made and how it felt – I just couldn’t get into the story.
Moving right along, my top ten movies of 2014:
10. Whiplash – I already feel that when I look back at this year’s top 10, I won’t believe that I had Whiplash this low. It sticks with you afterward as much as any movie this year and has possibly one of the best endings I’ve ever seen. That said, it tells a small story that might have worked every bit as well in a short film. And through most of it I felt I had been hit over the head with the lone beat of the story thread.
9. Wild – Reece Witherspoon’s basically one-woman show tackling an ambitious 1100 mile hiking trail in the Pacific Northwest. Well acted and well written, it offers brilliant moments of existential reflection that everyone can relate to regardless of your own experiences.
8. The Theory of Everything – Great biopic of Stephen Hawking starring Eddie Redmayne who probably deserves the Oscar for his performance. Ultimately, I would have liked to have seen more of the science and how it parallels Hawking’s life. There’s some of this, but not enough in my opinion.
7. Interstellar – Voters largely ignored Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar for the major awards after embracing his film Inception four years ago. I don’t exactly get it. Any beef you might have with Interstellar could likely be said of Inception. It worked for me as an intellectual blockbuster anchored by a poignant father-daughter relationship. Of course it’s not perfect, but how many movies are?
6. Guardians of the Galaxy – Easily the best Marvel movie this side of The Avengers and manages somehow to be something completely unique. It’s hard not to smile the whole time watching Chris Pratt fly around the galaxy. The soundtrack is so good, it got people talking about soundtracks again. It’s filled with fun, original characters and I eagerly await the sequel.
5. Chef – While it may be unambitious and feel a tad amateurish (let’s call it “unpolished”), Chef is bold and uncompromising in its simplicity. It serves as Jon Favreau’s love letter to food and family. There are extended scenes of food preparation that would have been cut from most movies, but they work beautifully here. If you’re looking for that “feel good movie of the year,” this is it.
4. Selma – The most emotionally impactful movie of the year for me. Having to fight to overcome prejudice and injustice always gets to me. The filmmakers struck the right balance between Martin Luther King Jr the legend and the man. I also agree with their choice to focus on only the three month period centered around the march in Selma, Alabama. I’d rank this higher, but all in all it was just another well-made biopic.
3. The Imitation Game – I’m actually surprised this isn’t being discussed as a more serious challenger in the best picture race. For me, it’s a better version of 2001’s winner A Beautiful Mind. I knew only a few details of the story beforehand and was fascinated to follow the haunted, stubborn genius of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing. A group of computer scientists (long before such a term existed), struggle to break Nazi code with an untested machine that may not work in order to win the largest war in human history? I’m in.
2. Birdman – Far too slowly and not too surely, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu may be starting to become a filmmaker whose genius is recognized outside of the film industry. His trilogy of sorts of Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel earned 10 total Oscar nominations and Javier Bardem snagged another for 2010’s Biutiful. Now with Birdman, Inarritu hits one out of the park in a wonderfully weird portrait of an existential midlife crisis. If American Beauty tackled middle-age on marijuana, Birdman approaches it on cocaine. It’s probably the best movie of the year, but as much as I’d like to reward Inarritu’s body of work, another under-appreciated director released a magnum opus this year…
1. Boyhood – For a while, I was calling it a virtual tie between these top three, but at the end I stopped asking myself which is the best movie and asked which movie do I want to win. At that point it was no contest. Richard Linklater has been a bold, innovative filmmaker since the beginning of his career with 1991’s Slacker, a film without a protagonist and following random people around Austin, TX, almost as if the camera were the main character looking for conversations that interested it. There was 2001’s Tape, set ENTIRELY in a single hotel room with no real action other than a riveting conversation. Real life conversation and characters are Linklater’s specialty as further evidenced in his “Before” trilogy which earned Linklater two Oscar nominations for screenwriting prior to Boyhood. I first heard about the project that became Boyhood over a decade ago and was in awe of the ambition knowing few in Hollywood who would have the patience or guts to tackle a project so large in scope that would likely yield so little reward. There’s a good chance the gamble will pay off in gold trophies in a couple weeks.
Boyhood works on so many levels for so many people and has the audacity to not even really bother with a plot. As Linklater recently told Entertainment Weekly, “our lives don’t have plot. ” If art serves to hold up a mirror to society, Boyhood might just offer the clearest reflection to date.