The best films of 2014 were merciless
on marriage (unless you’re a vampire), often obsessed with things of the past
(most especially if you’re a vampire) and enveloped in profoundly evocative,
inventive, hypnotic, ingeniously deployed music from the likes of Trent Reznor,
Mica Levi, Jozef van Wissem, Nick
Cave and the Bad Seeds and Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood—music of the sort that
rarely gets noticed by the awards people yet raises the atmospheres of their
respective films to dizzying heights.
I’m
alarmed by the dominance of US or UK films on this list of mine, which says
something not about the quality of foreign language films in 2014 but, rather,
their increasingly neglectful distribution in Canada—I’ve made a list elsewhere
of the year’s best films waiting for distribution and all of them are from other, non-English-speaking countries.
I
hope you’ve seen some if not several of the films below (I kick things off with
a no-brainer—don’t be calling me no contrarian!), and that you feel compelled to
seek out those you haven’t seen, or perhaps haven’t even heard of. As always, there’s
no ranking, and in fact I urge you to pay equal attention to the titles listed
in that final paragraph—sometimes those “honourable mentions” have a funny way
of sticking with you longer than some of the titles that leap immediately to
the final cut.
Boyhood
That Richard Linklater’s 165-minue,
12-years-in-the-making chronicle of one reasonably ordinary kid coming of age
in Texas turned out to be a major crowd-pleaser serves as a welcome antidote to
the token cynicism that to draw an audience you need baroque mythologies and shit
blowing up every ten minutes—why not someone growing up every ten minutes? At
once epic and intimate, sweeping and absorbed with minutia and achingly fleeting
moments, Boyhood broadens our notion
of what movies can do—and Patricia Arquette’s turn here has stayed with me as one
of 2014’s most moving supporting performances.
Winter Sleep
It is the accumulation of
several smaller events—a rock hurled at a car window, the reading of a letter,
a meeting interrupted—that imbues Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s most
recent film with its gravity. The story of a hotel proprietor unable to
recognize how his condescension and arrogance has distanced him from those he
loves and wants to be loved by—including his younger, resentful wife—Winter Sleep is roughly based on Chekhov
but the way it unfolds over its three hours-plus, largely through protracted
yet tense and riveting conversations in gloomy rooms, recalls Bergman.
Inherent Vice
Paul Thomas Anderson’s
adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel is a comic narcotic noir about love, drugs,
corruption and real estate in 1970 Los Angeles, with each of its key
characters—Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Joaquin Phoenix—representing a
different aspect of that moment’s cultural sea change.
The Immigrant
Speaking of Phoenix, the
consistently under-loved American auteur James Gray’s latest features another
truly remarkable performance from the actor, in a role that incrementally,
fascinatingly migrates from the film’s fairly despicable villain to a figure of
tremendous pathos. Of course, the star of this gorgeous, Cimino-esque melodrama
is the magnificent Marion Cotillard, in another of the year’s best
performances, playing a Polish woman attempting to forge a life in 1920s New
York.
Two Days, One Night
And speaking of Marion
Cotillard, she knocked it out of the park again this year as the first movie
star to feature in a Dardennes Brothers film. She plays an emotionally troubled
woman trying to convince her fellow factory workers to help save her job—by declining
a pay raise.
Gone Girl, Force Majeure
Marriage is examined and
diagnosed malignant in these two blackly comic, elegantly crafted but otherwise
very different films, one a sprawling noir procedural about a missing woman
from novelist Gillian Flynn and director David Fincher, the other a chilly
chamber drama from Swedish director Ruben Östlund about a family ski vacation run horrendously off-track by a cowardly
gesture made in a moment of panic.
Under the Skin, Only Lovers Left Alive
Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation
of Michel Faber’s novel follows Scarlett Johansson as an alien hunter
harvesting horny Scottish hunks before going perilously native. Deeply creepy
in its tonal precision, with echoes of Kubrick and Roeg, and anthropological in
its outsider view of life on Earth, this is science fiction without the token
exposition. Jim Jarmusch’s latest, about non-violent vampires, is also a
fantastical genre film, albeit one that forgoes most of its genre’s tropes in
favour of the director’s trademark deadpan humour, nocturnal tours of Detroit
and Tangiers, scenes of musical bliss, and, in contrast to the preceding
marriage-stinks narratives, a tender and insightful tribute to long-term love.
(I mean, really, really long-term.)
20,000 Days on Earth
Nick Cave could be a cousin
to Tom Hiddleston’s pale, raven-haired, brooding rocker in Only Lovers, but Cave is a living, breathing, touring, eating (more
or less), aging, hard-working family man residing in Brighton. Which is to say
he isn’t fictional—or is he? Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s enormously
inventive, insightful feature debut is a documentary profile of the
Australian-born singer-songwriter on his 20,000th day of existence,
which involves car-bound conversations with ghosts, an aborted lunch with
Warren Ellis, visits to his archive and his Foucault-lookalike shrink, and a
recording session. ‘Higgs-Boson Blues’ gives me chills.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Inspired by the fictions of Stefan Zweig, Wes Anderson’s frenetic,
nostalgic, melancholy comedy is set in the 1930s, much of it in the titular
alpine hotel nested in a fictional central European republic gradually falling
prey to a thuggish foreign power. Dark times loom, yet at the Grand Budapest
all efforts are made to stall time and maintain a rarified air. Ralph Fiennes
gives one of his most dynamic and appealing performances as the dandyish
proprietor and mentor to a young bellhop.
Stranger By the Lake
Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger By the
Lake is a starkly seductive, all-male, Hitchcockian thriller set entirely
at a secluded nude beach and the surrounding woods used for cruising. One
evening, after everyone else has left the beach, a man witnesses a murder—but
this doesn’t keep him from coming back the next day and flirting with the
killer. Death and eros are tangled up, yet the motives are as mysterious as the
sex is explicit.
Some other films I’d be remiss to exclude from any look back on 2014:
the great Paulina García gave my single-most favourite performance in Sebastián
Lelio’s brilliant character study Gloria; Mark Ruffalo was for me the
stand-out in a trio of remarkable performances in Bennett Miller’s bracingly
bleak Foxcatcher; Agata Kulesza is wonderful, fierce, sad and ornery
in Pawel Pawlokowski’s exquisite Ida; Kelly Reichardt makes a couple
of tonal fumbles but still comes off as one of the US’s best filmmakers with Night
Moves; Nicolas Cage gave a fearsome yet heartfelt performance in David
Gordon Green’s Joe; and Petra Costa made one of the year’s most haunting and
lovely doc feature debuts with her grief memoir Elena.
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