Critical Mass

It was a very good year

Critic’s obligatory ‘best’ list more challenging for 2014 thanks to quality of flicks

Some of 2014’s best films include (from top) Boyhood with Ellar Coltrane, Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson, Inherent Vice with Joaquin Phoenix and Whiplash, which stars J.K. Simmons (left) and C.J. Vana.
Some of 2014’s best films include (from top) Boyhood with Ellar Coltrane, Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson, Inherent Vice with Joaquin Phoenix and Whiplash, which stars J.K. Simmons (left) and C.J. Vana.

About a week ago, knowing I was hip-deep in end-of-the-year movie polls, a friend sent along a satirical article headlined something like "How to make a Top 10 movie list."

Among its recommendations were to select at least one obscure independent or foreign film to advertise your erudition and to demonstrate the fact that you had seen a lot of movies.

It also suggested choosing at least one crowd-pleasing blockbuster to show that you're in touch with popular taste, and not some effete liberal snob who only likes films by Jean-Luc Godard and Bela Tarr.

After you've chosen your outliers, you could safely fill out the list with movies certified by the critics -- you could just take a look at the year's top-scoring films at the Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes websites.

The piece wasn't that funny, but it was essentially true.

I don't put much stock in these clip-and-save year-end lists. I pick a Top 10 list because it's a requirement of my critics' group, The Southeastern Film Critics Association. If I wasn't in the association, I wouldn't get as many chances to see as many movies and couldn't do my job as well.

Because they're fun to peruse, I also like reading the lists. Over the next few weeks we'll run a lot of them from some heavily invested moviegoers in the MovieStyle section.

But are the movies in my Top 10 the year's best? That depends. I just try to be honest and pick movies that stuck with me. I try to make the list interesting. Then I cop out and add 15 more I wish I could have put in my Top 10.

This year it was especially difficult to winnow the field to 10. I liked a lot of movies and while it's too early to make pronouncements like this, 2014 may have been the best year for movies since 2007 -- the year of There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.

According to the 54 critics who voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the best movies were, in order, Richard Linklater's Boyhood, Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's

Birdman. None of these made my ballot, which mirrored the list below. That feels a little strange because if you woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to list my favorite working filmmakers, these guys would probably be among the first five or six names I would spit out. But this year, there were movies I liked better. These movies:

2014 TOP 10

  1. Under the Skin. If you've heard anything about Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, it's that it stars Scarlett Johansson as an otherworldly being on the loose in Scotland and that she's often naked. We meet her as she strips the clothes from a dead doppelganger. Why the girl's dead and how she died are just two questions Glazer never bothers to answer. We can assume Johansson's helpmeet (no one gets a name) is also an alien, probably her controller, but what they're up to is only hinted at.

The classic movie that Under the Skin most reminds me of is Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), more for elliptical storytelling than plot similarities. Like Roeg, Glazer -- in this film at least -- shows rather than tells, with the aural cues provided mainly by Mica Levi's weird synth score. It's no problem that the thick Glasgow accents of some of the characters at first sound nearly indecipherable. This is how our world looks to fresh, fully adult (perhaps super-intelligent) eyes. This is the naked lunch William Burroughs was talking about.

  1. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. I waffled over whether to put this little gem -- which screened at this year's Little Rock Film Festival -- on my list. It's the sort of festival darling critics put on lists to advertise their erudition. But it's a stunning little movie co-written by brothers David (who also directed) and Nathan Zellner based on an urban legend about a Japanese woman who travels to Minnesota to find the suitcase full of cash that Steve Buscemi's Carl Showalter buried in the Minnesota snow in the Coen brothers' 1996 classic Fargo. It's a beautiful and haunting story about irrational obsession and the ways movies can infect us. It's probably going to be seen by more people on DVD or video on demand than in theaters. It's poetic, funny and terribly sad.

It may get a theatrical release in 2015; maybe in March.

  1. Inherent Vice. I adore P.T. Anderson's latest (which should open here soon) even though I understand why some people who are smarter and have better taste won't. This is for people who can allow themselves to soak into movies, who don't require a scorecard to keep track of the characters. It's a dreamy movie that's all about textures, the flat valley light glancing off the David Hockney planes. It revels in its moviedom even as it replicates, in a very naturalistic way, a particular time and place. There's more than a little of James Ellroy's secret history of Los Angeles, with its extralegal supercops. Joaquin Phoenix's mutton-chopped, mumbling performance evokes the brilliant Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye.

  2. Love Is Strange. Ira Sach's plausible horror story is about a gay couple -- Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) -- in a committed relationship for 39 years who are very nearly destroyed by certain nightmarish vagaries of the New York real estate market. It chillingly depicts the way good, decent and fiscally responsible people can find themselves living within a Kafkaesque nightmare. It is a quiet, observational film elevated by its actors (the entire cast is superb) and the delicate accuracy of the writing.

  3. Force Majeure. A black comedy of sorts from Sweden. I'll save remarks for the review.

  4. Ida. The beautiful black-and white cinematography by Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal might be reason enough to see this unadorned drama from Pawel Pawlikowski. It's about a young novitiate nun in 1962 Poland who discovers a dark family secret just as she's about to take her vows.

  5. A Most Violent Year. Opening on Jan. 30, according to the latest information.

  6. Whiplash. More than a couple of deeply interesting ideas are teased out in writer-director Damien Chazelle's impressively entertaining, conventionally rendered debut. Whiplash, a kind of Oedipal drama, is set in the cutthroat world of the nation's premier jazz conservatory. Better than any movie I can think of, it conveys the close tolerance of ensemble performance and the unforgiving nature of music. J.K. Simmons will likely win an Oscar for his portrayal of demanding professor Terence Fletcher.

  7. Only Lovers Left Alive. Jim Jarmusch's atmospheric entry into the vampire genre features two genuine movie stars -- Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston.

  8. Locke. To try to describe writer-director Steven Knight's Locke is inherently reductive. It's about a Welshman in a car traveling from Birmingham to London, talking to various people on his Bluetooth-enabled mobile device as he drives. The film takes place almost in real time -- the real journey would take about two hours, but Locke makes it in 85 minutes. Except for a brief preface when we watch a pair of boots exiting a construction site and walking across a parking lot, the film takes place inside a nicely appointed BMW X5 SUV (were it not already taken, Ride Along would have been a good title).

This potentially claustrophobic experience is transformed into a rich emotional epic, one of the most satisfying and whole-feeling movies of the past few years, thanks to a thrilling if understated performance by Tom Hardy, a taut, nervy script by Knight (who wrote Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises) and dazzling visuals by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos. Locke is a man on a reluctant but determined mission, driving straight into an uncertain future as the pieces of his old life fly apart.

15 MOVIES I WISH I COULD PUT ON MY TOP 10

  1. Listen Up Philip. You might have to be a fan of Philip Roth's novels and '70s film stock to fully appreciate this bitter, mocking movie, but not to enjoy Elisabeth Moss' wonderfully calibrated performance as an unappreciated girlfriend.

  2. The Imitation Game. The best of a number of very conventional but very well made movies to come out this year.

  3. Two Days, One Night. The latest from the Belgian Dardenne brothers should open in Arkansas in the next couple of months.

  4. Mr. Turner. I watched my screener with subtitles on. You probably won't have the opportunity to do that in a theater, but Mike Leigh's sort of bio-pic of the deeply interesting British artist J.M.W. Turner (Leigh regular Timothy Spall) is extraordinary. Dick Pope's cinematography echoes the great landscape painter's work.

  5. Stray Dog. Ronnie Hall, the prime subject of Debra Granik's documentary, is one of those complicated Americans. He is a Vietnam veteran cum biker who makes a living running a small trailer/RV park in a community near Branson called At Ease. Hall looks like a movie biker. Granik came to know him when he won the role of Thump Milton, a backwoods crime boss, in Granik's 2010 feature Winter's Bone. (In that film, Hall memorably tells Jennifer Lawrence's character "You got something to say, child, you best say it now.")

Hall is a burly, bearded man who hints at a troubled, violent past. He did unspeakable things in Vietnam. He has hurt people since. But in recent years he has worked to reform himself, and the film portrays him as a more than decent figure. The Ronnie "Stray Dog" Hall that Granik captures is a working-class Buddha more concerned with honor and duty than material success. He helps people. He is kindly to those who can't pay the meager rent; he arranges dentist visits and fixes rotted floors.

  1. The Homesman. Director and co-lead Tommy Lee Jones says don't call this a feminist Western. So let's say it's a stark and haunting pioneer story about the toll nature takes on the people who live beyond civilization.

  2. The Immigrant. The most underrated film of the year. James Gray is not a perfect director, but he's a consistently intriguing storyteller.

  3. Nightcrawler. A deliciously creepy Los Angeles noir with a giddy performance by Jake Gyllenhaal.

  4. Still Alice. Yes, it's weepy. So weepy that at one point I had to stop the DVD screener and call it a night. But Julianne Moore's performance is shattering.

  5. Guardians of the Galaxy. What's not to like about heavily armed, biogenetically modified racoons?

  6. Blue Ruin. Jeremy Saulnier's first feature is not a conventional revenge story, though it offers some of the same cold thrills as the '70s vigilante movies it echoes. It charts the grim trajectory of a shambling, damaged but apparently gentle soul who, denied justice for a primal wound, takes the law into his hands. Yet that's only the first 30 minutes or so of the story. What's really interesting is what comes next.

That it never completely collapses into a good ol' Gothic shoot 'em up is a tribute to Saulnier's taut script, which communicates much about the futility of violent action without seeming preachy. Blue Ruin is a genre film, but it's not empty-headed. It's accessible in the same way Jim Thompson's crime novels are. Its view is more fatalistic, more alert to the limitations of the human mind and body ("That's what bullets do," Ben reminds a squeamish Dwight at a critical juncture) than the video game fantasies it superficially resembles.

  1. Leviathan. Russian gloom. Russian corruption. Would make a great double-feature with Love Is Strange.

  2. Ne me quitte pas. Hilarious and heartbreaking, this Belgian documentary by Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden is a harrowing look at the effects of alcoholism and the best buddy comedy of the year. It begins with Marcel's wife leaving him because of his drinking, and the drinking that ensues in the aftermath. (Marcel's friend Bob helps out.) I don't know the extent to which the narrative was shaped by the directors -- the film is one that Little Rock Film Festival programmer Robert Greene chose for his nonfiction series at this year's festival -- but it works on any number of levels as entertainment and as an artful examination of how humans live.

  3. Sacred Hearts, Holy Souls. I could make a serious case for local filmmaker Mark Thiedeman's beautiful coming-of-age story as one of the year's best.

  4. The Babadook. All-around good scary stuff.

10 MORE

  1. Boyhood. Richard Linklater's epic coming-of-age picture has been universally acclaimed. I liked some of it a lot and was impressed by the ambition, but in the end it's a long and meandering film that attempts and often achieves the impressionistic feel of remembered life. It is fiction imitating personal nostalgia. It was filmed over 12 years, allowing the actors (especially those who began the project as adults) to age in real time. It tells a rather quotidian but affecting story in a quietly empathetic way. It's an honorable and artistically successful project, personal quibbles notwithstanding.

However, Linklater has better charted the arc of human life in his Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) which parachutes into the evolving relationship of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) every nine years or so. The Before movies, which play out in something like real time, might be the flip side of Boyhood's crawl through male adolescence (it's easy to see how Linklater could have made three or four movies from this project). Boyhood is neither as striking nor focused, but it's very good.

  1. The Grand Budapest Hotel. I liked the production design and the casting, but it's second-tier Wes Anderson.

  2. Birdman. For my thoughts, see this 4,000-word essay on the blood, dirt & angels website. Here's a short link: tinyurl.com/l5yz5h3

  3. American Sniper. Clint Eastwood made two movies this year. This is the good one.

  4. Cold in July. Someone give Don Johnson a Best Supporting Actor nomination, please?

  5. Life Itself. A fitting tribute to the imminently decent Roger Ebert.

  6. St. Vincent. See my The Imitation Game remarks. Added bonus: Bill Murray!

  7. Snowpiercer. The first English language film from Bong Joon-ho, the Korean director who achieved international success with the monster movie The Host in 2007 and the unsettling murder mystery Mother in 2009, is strange and ambitious. It is an allegory about class warfare, environmental recklessness and possibly predestination. At times it seems like it was written by a bright eighth-grader with attention deficit disorder and a fondness for kick-butt martial arts movies. It has a gorgeous incoherence that overwhelms logical objections to its absurd premise.

  8. Interstellar. I've said enough about this movie.

  9. Big Hero 6. It overcame my initial reservations.

Honorable mention: Joe, Citizenfour, Belle, Edge of Tomorrow, Keep On Keepin' On, Jodorowsky's Dune, Wild Tales, Hide Your Smiling Faces

Movies getting a lot of buzz that are only so-so: Wild, The Theory of Everything, Unbroken

Movies that aren't as bad as all that: Lucy, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Men, Women & Children

Movies I Didn't See and Wish I Had: Selma, Goodbye to Language, Stranger By the Lake, The Strange Little Cat, The Interview, National Gallery.

Movies I Saw and Wish I Hadn't: I did a fairly good job of avoiding anything that might be considered among the year's worst. Transcendence wasn't good, but it didn't make me mad.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 12/28/2014

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