Top 10 - 2014

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, but you needn’t look at them to know what the greatest cinematic accomplishments of 2014 were (as if the Academy would tell you, anyway). Listed below are my Top 10 films of the year, ranked in general order of preference, with runners-up and honorable mentions.

A quick note on the year before we get down to it: like any other year, 2014 had plenty to offer in the way of diverse, compelling, thought-provoking, and artistically and culturally prodigious cinema. If it seems to somewhat pale in comparison to 2013, at least for me, that’s because there were fewer films I unabashedly loved, and decidedly none I would deem masterpieces. In other words, there was no Inside Llewyn Davis. I awarded only one film all year the full four stars, although a few others came close. But in the absence of undeniable knockout punches, there was a lot to like.

TOP 10 after the jump!

10. Selma / Ava DuVernay

Nothing really more needs to be said about this film's staggering social resonance with current events. It's all there, and you know it long before Common mentions Ferguson in the stirring closing credits tune. DuVernay's film, a "biopic" about Martin Luther King Jr. and the seminal march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, is a hard-hitting and politically astute film that trades embalmed history for raw, jagged modern rhythms. With its digital cinematography and askew camera angles showing us sides (literally) of the Civil Rights Movement we've never seen before, it's a startling and surprisingly distinctive window into a horribly recent past. As King, David Oyelowo is brilliant, and DuVernay's shrewdest move is in not letting him absorb the picture, because she knows no movement is brought upon by one person, no change instigated by a few. In this refreshingly modest portrait of an outsize hero as in history itself, it takes many. King was the one, but he didn't do it alone.

9. Edge of Tomorrow / Doug Liman

The most exciting and satisfying summer release of 2014 was also one of the year's most narratively innovative pictures, mainstream or otherwise. Working off a fiendishly clever and impressively structured script, itself an adaptation of a Japanese manga, Liman takes gonzo sci-fi action trappings and video game logic to throw Tom Cruise and viewers into a looping narrative machine that reveals and elides crucial information in tirelessly cunning ways. Thanks to pin-sharp editing from James Herbert and Laura Jennings, each repeating episode feeds viscerally and wittily into the next, the ceaseless accumulation of experience and knowledge acquiring tense dramatic friction as time keeps resetting physical progress. Never before has the concept of an alien invasion been so cannily distilled in terms so singularly cinematic.

8. Pride / Matthew Warchus

"There is power in a union," sings Billy Bragg over the soundtrack at the end of Pride, a film whose timely and timeless sociopolitical import is matched in every way by its heart-swelling exuberance. There is power, indeed, and director Matthew Warchus, screenwriter Stephen Beresford, and one of the most infectious and uniformly developed ensemble casts of the year use that power to tell of the 1984 alliance between gay and lesbian activists and Britain's striking miners, an unlikely relationship promulgating the world's most useful virtues: compassion, empathy, and solidarity. Yet nothing about the film is didactic or pandering - this is as purely humanistic as cinema gets, a fervent paean to understanding and gay rights, to equality and community, to charity and to the seismic social and moral profit of collective action. Bringing one of the pivotal events in Britain's LGBT rights movement to bustling life while intimately detailing the individual arcs of his lovingly portrayed characters, Warchus and his team do their real life heroes proud. Solidarity forever.

7. Foxcatcher / Bennett Miller

In Bennett Miller's unsettlingly fastidious drama, a queasily bizarre true story is used as the groundwork for an unblinking study of the perverted American ethos. But the true horror comes not necessarily from what was done - Miller and screenwriters Frye and Futterman indulge in inevitable speculation, even as they underplay or omit some of the most disturbing details - but why it was done and what cultural conditions let it happen. The picture that is painted is one of an ethos gone awry, aspirations and claims to exceptionalism stunted by psychology and economy and sublimated into impulses both capitalistic and animalistic. It's all carried out by one of the most impressive combined acting feats of 2014, with Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo providing three very different but intertwined visions of masculinity, determination, and pursuit, all caught up in a very American mire.

6. Force Majeure / Ruben Östlund

A sharp, uncompromising dissection of marriage, gender roles, social expectations and assumptions, and the sanctity of the family unit, Ruben Östlund's pitch-black relationship drama makes a great companion piece to that other domestic nightmare from 2014, David Fincher's Gone Girl. But don't get the wrong idea: like Fincher's film, Force Majeure weaves a mordant streak of humor through its heavy themes, surveying moments of social behavior in deliciously awkward and scathingly funny detail. Östlund's rigorous formal control, meanwhile, imbues ski slopes, restaurants, and hotel corridors with a discomfiting stillness, as if the ideals and false facades of this already shaky relationship could shatter with the slightest of movements. Watching the fallout and the tireless ensuing dialogue - philosophical, sociological - is a reminder, both scary and absurd, of how tenuously the equilibrium of a relationship can be set, and how much we invest to keep it and ourselves stable.

5. The Grand Budapest Hotel / Wes Anderson

Giddily delightful and effervescent but with a considerable melancholic undertow, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the indie king of quirk's version of a war-time historical drama. In other words, it's a carnival-esque confection of impossibly rich colors, dioramic architecture, and stylized olde-worlde fashion playing host to a story of the decline of civilization. Anderson has always incorporated the dark, wistful, and caustic in his quaint dollhouse universes (Moonrise Kingdom, my favorite of his until this point, does so with a coming-of-age narrative), but here he takes it a few steps further, crafting what is his most physically, emotionally, and thematically textured work yet, a madcap period caper as snappy as an Ernst Lubitsch comedy and as suspenseful and pointed as 1930s Hitchcock. The tremendous, multi-tiered script underlines a poignancy inherent in the film's themes: what we're seeing is so long gone, or perhaps so imaginary, it can only be told through multiple levels of mediation.

4. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) / Alejandro González Iñárritu

Pulling off a truly astonishing technical gambit with incomparable verve and unwavering confidence, Alejandro González Iñárritu and DP Emmanuel Lubezki make the illusion of Birdman a dazzling cinematic accomplishment unto itself. But it's hardly an empty showboating magic trick: the (nearly) single-take premise is visceral and heady and immersive, but it's just as much the film's galvanizing aesthetic identity as it is the story's - and the film's - raison d'être. That's because Birdman is preoccupied with illusion, simulation, and the line between authenticity and artifice in the digital era, and so Lubezki's snaking camera captures all of those disorienting permutations of reality on a single plane. Here, nothing is to be taken at face value: movies are reality, characters are real people (a notion helped out by some brilliant casting), and reality and ego are all informed, and formed by, a media culture that has devoured and replaced daily life. Part sizzling backstage showbiz dramedy, all weird, wonderful meta-commentary, Birdman is a one-of-a-kind plunge into the hyperreal.

3. Inherent Vice / Paul Thomas Anderson

Inherent Vice is a cinephile's dream movie, and stands out in particular as a striking example of the kind of audacious and atmosphere-heavy American cinema that seems to be in short order today. It's also, blessedly, shot on film, and every frame of it is cinematic euphoria: this is the type of movie you can fall into and explore from the inside. Hazily nostalgic for an idealistic era before the visible encroachment of government corruption, political recuperation, and conservative hegemony, Anderson locates his magnificently meandering story on the precipice of a disillusioned cultural transition, weaving a deliberately and absurdly convoluted tale of conspiracy around a stoned hippie P.I. longing for more than just weed. Following him around Anderson's marvelously rich and expansive world is a loosey-goosey pleasure; he doesn't know where he's headed, and neither do we, and that's half the fun. The rest comes from Anderson's tongue-in-cheek direction of Pynchon's baroque prose, and his truly inimitable ability to craft this lavish noir homage as alternately silly and serious, lackadaisical and scrupulous, flippant and ambling but always committed to emotional sincerity and lucid narrative control. Sun-baked and just plain baked, it's a vision of a lost LA that belongs only to the movies.

2. Mr. Turner / Mike Leigh

Strangely, Mike Leigh's unusual and intensely human biopic of English painter J.M.W. Turner has quite a bit in common with Inherent Vice, which helps explain why I fell so hard for both of them. Where Anderson fleshed out an immersive and tactile 1970 LA brimming with character and mood, Leigh brings to magisterial life 19th-century England, populated with artists, aristocrats, innkeepers, patrons and critics. Anderson's film was about an individual caught in the unremitting tides of a rapidly changing culture; Leigh's is as well. Focusing only on the last few decades of Turner's life, Mr. Turner's greatest success is not in detailing the specifics of an artist's process, but in showing the artist living in and interacting with the world around him, its overwhelming beauty and equally overpowering sadness channeled into art considered both rapturous and vile. Leigh and his extraordinary team capture an entire idiom of early Victorian England, transporting us to noble houses, galleries, parlors, and seemingly everything in between while effortlessly outlining the beliefs and mores that constitute this robust social milieu. Huffing and grunting with blustery precision as Turner, Timothy Spall embodies the contradictory emotions of an artist in love with this world and yet ambivalent to it, understanding of it and yet misunderstood by it. It's the year's greatest performance in one of the year's most deeply felt and observed films.

1. Nabat / Elchin Musaoglu

I wrestled with including this film at all, as it has not been released theatrically and, as far as I can tell, has no imminent distribution plans. But I saw it as part of the 2014 Chicago International Film Festival, and the country that made it, Azerbaijan, did choose it as its 2014 submission for the Academy Awards, so I decided I would go for it. If you object to its inclusion, feel free to disregard it altogether and hold the rest of the list as is.

Nabat, about an elderly woman who refuses to leave her village in Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region after everyone else has evacuated due to war, is an astoundingly enveloping audio-visual experience and a serene, gravely moving portrait of a woman and a nation braving ravages both natural and horrifyingly man-made. Every element has been paid meticulous attention to here: from the irreproachable elegance of long dollies and tracking shots to the precise fluctuations of weather and character disposition that they capture, Musaoglu commands the frame and everything that takes place inside and outside of it. In some of the most breathtaking long traveling shots this side of Dreyer or Angelopoulos, he follows his steadfast protagonist as she withstands isolation and hunger, observing her waning resilience as the tempest of nature convenes around her. Images and sounds haunt us, so tangible we can feel, smell, and hear them as if they were right next to us: mud under our feet during a downpour; mist on our faces; the wet hide of a cow; the howl of a wolf or a gust of wind through a creaking door. Nabat is not a happy watch - it's exceedingly somber and sobering - but it is an enriching, plangently powerful one that honors the entwined suffering and strength of a land and its people.

And the great runners-up:

BOYHOOD by Richard Linklater

DEAR WHITE PEOPLE by Justin Simien

GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz

GONE GIRL by David Fincher

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR by J.C. Chandor

NOTE: I didn't mention Lukas Moodysson's ebullient WE ARE THE BEST! or Jim Jarmusch's languidly romantic ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE because I consider them 2013 films, but if we're going purely by 2014 US release dates go ahead and add them to the above.

Honorable mentions (films I really liked in some significant way):

IDA by Paweł Pawlikowski

THE IMITATION GAME by Morten Tyldum

INTERSTELLAR by Christopher Nolan

INTO THE WOODS by Rob Marshall

SOMETHING MUST BREAK by Ester Martin Bergsmark