Year in Review: Top 10 Films

What we do and why we do it: In one way or another, every film on my Top 10 list deals with these preoccupations. Several concern artists who continue to practice their craft despite a world that has moved on or never had a need of them to start. Others are about faith and how we cling to it or deviate from it because of the circumstances we encounter. Still more are about love and how we are able to feel so deeply for those who have hurt us.

Almost none of the characters in the films on this list planned the events that happen to them. Instead, they are thrust into situations in which they must act. For some, their actions are calculated, while others may react without thinking, but all are defined by how they act and how the people around them cope with the ramifications.

With one exception, few of the characters chronicled in these films will change the world with their decisions, but all this proves is that the little moments can often be the most devastating. For most of us, the choices we make will affect only ourselves and those closest to us, but it is that proximity of heart and mind that makes those choices all the more important. My top 10 films this year are about how we act when it is not our lives hanging in the balance but our souls.

Five other films hovering just outside the top 10 that deserve a mention: A Most Wanted Man; Nymphomaniac; Citizenfour; We Are the Best!; Winter Sleep.

The top 10 of 2014:

10. Frank, directed by Lenny Abrahamson

 

If this were a list of my favorite films of the year, Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank would be right at the top. Somewhat divisive among audiences, the film has a rambunctious, carefree attitude that is simply infectious if you can get on its wavelength. Though its subject is an underground rock band led by an enigmatic genius, the film has the audacity to take as its main character a wannabe artist who lacks the inspiration or talent to create. Seen through this lens, the film becomes a sharper, more cutting indictment of the world of art, music, and mediocrity

This is not to say the film is not a tremendous amount of fun from minute one until its poignant closing moments. As I have mentioned before, Michael Fassbender is unparalleled as the titular Frank, but the rest of the ensemble is doing amazing work as well, in particular Maggie Gyllenhaal and Domnhall Gleeson. The music is great, and there simply was not a film that delighted me more this year or about which I have thought more often. It is arty, inventive, unassuming, and downright great.

9. Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

 

Paul Thomas Anderson has never failed to make an interesting film, and despite having nearly 20 years in the feature game, he has never made the same movie twice. Each film is its own distinct gem, and Inherent Vice is another. Sunny, breezy, smoked out, and paranoid, this is not only unlike anything Anderson has tried before – it is unlike anything nearly anyone has tried. Adapting a densely packed, digression-filled Thomas Pynchon novel, Anderson turns the story of a private detective in 1970s Southern California into a metaphor for the failures of the hippie movement to achieve lasting change.

A stellar Joaquin Phoenix leads a sprawling cast through a hazy story in which the laid-back attitude is all a put-on. Anxieties run deep in this film as mothers fear for their children, wives for their husbands, patriots for their country, and just about everyone for his safety. At the same time, it is an acid-trip love story, one last feel-good tale to mark the end of feel-good times. Everyone gliding through the plot seems to have the sense that the party is over, but rather than retreat, they throw one final rager with Anderson as the master of ceremonies.

8. A Most Violent Year, directed by JC Chandor

 

Abel, played by Oscar Isaac, is an honest man in a dishonest business. A heating-oil magnate in early 1980s New York, he is fighting to keep his company afloat without staining his soul. The slow-burn drama of writer-director JC Chandor’s latest plays out against the backdrop of a city that is descending into hell. Abel and his rivals are desperate to succeed, and we understand why. Success means escape. At the start, Abel has already moved his family to the suburbs, but the violence of the city and the corruption of his industry follow him. He soon realizes he must choose between his conscience and his company.

Chandor is a master at tightening the screws on his characters, forcing them deeper into the holes they have dug until they no longer know which way leads back to the light. This is only Chandor’s third feature, after Margin Call and last year’s stunning All Is Lost, but already, he has proved himself to be among the best of his generation. Though set in the ’80s, Chandor’s preoccupation with modern America shines through in this work as it has in his previous two films, and the point seems roughly the same: We have lost our way in the darkness, but hope exists if we are willing to struggle.

7. Goodbye to Language, directed by Jean-Luc Godard

 

Director Jean-Luc Godard is a giant of cinema. There has never been anyone like him, and there never will be. Along with his French contemporaries in the 1960s, Godard may as well have invented the art-house cinema, since if it did not exist before Godard, they would have had to build it. The most remarkable thing about him is that he is still innovating, still pushing the boundaries of what is possible in film, and still challenging audiences and critics to see the world through his eyes. At 84 years old, Godard has done it again with the equally baffling and enthralling Goodbye to Language.

I have never said this before and doubted I ever would, but if you see this film, see it in 3D. While most 3D plays as a gimmicky parlor trick, the third dimension is essential to the experience of Goodbye to Language. From his earliest days, Godard has always advanced a kind of pure cinema, experiential as well as experimental, and his latest film may be the pinnacle of both in his career.

A difficult sit technically with a complicated structure, confrontational imagery, and an assaultive soundtrack, the story may be his most relatable in years, if not entirely accessible or penetrable. It is enough to say the film is about living beyond expression and simply taking in the abundance of life while we are able. So, if the medium remains malleable in Godard’s hands, the message is timeless.

6. Mr. Turner, directed by Mike Leigh

 

Art goes in cycles. What is fashionable today will be gauche tomorrow, and next week, a whole other set of criteria will be used to judge our world. Depending on the era and the medium, these cycles have lasted decades or passed in the blink of an eye, but just as nothing stays popular forever, nothing once popular disappears for long. History now knows JMW Turner as probably the finest painter to come out of England, and he enjoyed unparalleled success in the art world for most of his life. His unfortunate circumstance was to live long enough to fall out of favor in his own time.

Mike Leigh’s gorgeous biopic of the notoriously prickly painter, played by a never-better Timothy Spall, cuts right to the heart of the matter, depicting a world transitioning from the old ways to the new. A man of the sea, whose paintings often depicted the coastlines and ships of the world, Turner lives to see trains barreling through the countryside, making sea travel just a little more irrelevant. Toward the end of his life, the camera comes along, and Turner’s fear is palpable.

No longer will his one-of-kind paintings be the only connection most have to other parts of the world. Instead, a highly reproducible medium has come to democratize art. At the same time, the style of painting he pioneered and perfected has fallen out of favor with the critics and the elites. Turner is a man who devoted his life to his work, and as his work means less and less to the world, he reflects on what this says about his life. Films about artists are rarely this honest, insightful, or downright lovely.

5. Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

 

 

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman is another story about an artist but one with much more modern preoccupations. The film will be remembered for many things, including the technical achievements of its cinematography, the welcome return of Michael Keaton to a starring role, and the takedown of the elitist critical culture, but its cumulative effect is greater than any individual achievement. As it shocks with its beauty, it cuts with its words and pleads for understanding from the depths of its thematic soul.

Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, a washed up actor famous for a superhero he played 20 years ago who wants to shed that skin and be appreciated as a true artist. To do so, he mounts his own Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel, hoping to earn critical credibility and revive his fading star. Everything in the deck is stacked against him, and no one around him believes he will succeed – or that he should succeed. After all, who is he to adapt Chandler? It is just possible he is trying to take a shortcut to merit, and the world will see him for the phony he is.

All the while, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shoots the film to appear as one unbroken take, meaning that while Thompson believes he is performing a high-wire act, we know he has already fallen and is spiraling into an abyss. The movie makes clear that Thompson is no longer a star. He is a meteor falling to Earth, and though his final descent is tragic, it is magic to behold on the big screen.

4. Force Majeure, directed by Ruben Ostlund

 

The first thing I picture when I think of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is its blinding white scenery. I see it when I close my eyes, and immediately, Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto No. 2 in G minor” begins to play. The stage is set for an Ingmar Bergman-esque marital drama that hides beneath a thin veneer of black comedy. The bleakness and the humor collide off each other at every twist and turn, and by the end, you cannot tell if you are shedding tears of relief or crying in a fit of hysterics.

An almost too-perfect family vacations in the French Alps. They take group photographs and eat pleasant lunches and play with new toys, but they stand behind a façade, hiding from the world and each other. In the most dramatic way possible – an avalanche – the façade is broken, and all hell breaks loose. They are forced to confront the lies their family is founded on and made to question whether the lies are preferable to the alternative.

Östlund’s screenplay systematically dismantles everything this family knows about its existence, from the roles of the husband and wife to their relationship with their children to the institution of marriage itself. They are broken down piece by piece until they are left with nothing but the shards of a past to which they wish they could return. Finally, we are back in the harsh cold of a white-out blizzard, and these people must either trek ceaselessly forward into the unknown or retreat into the comfort of a time before the darkness came.

3. Calvary, directed by John Michael McDonagh

 

The evolution of Brendan Gleeson’s work with the McDonagh brothers has been a marvel to behold. It began in Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter and transitioned into the pair’s dark hit-man comedy In Bruges. Gleeson then teamed up with John Michael McDonagh to make the underrated and under-seen The Guard. This year, Gleeson and John Michael McDonagh came together once again and produced the best of the lot, Calvary.

It has all the markings of a McDonagh film, from the uniquely Irish milieu to the pitch-black comedy to the meditation on faith in a seemingly godless world. However, Calvary stands out as being two shades darker than anything preceding it and twice as thoughtful in its spiritual inquest. Gleeson plays a Catholic priest preaching forgiveness to a world that has given up on the idea. His faithless parishioners have little practical use for this holy man’s philosophies, and they are more interested in their next drink at the bar than in drinking the blood of Christ.

Still, the priest carries on as a shepherd imparting wisdom and keeping faith amid a flock of lost sheep. There is no victory to be won. In fact, he has already lost at the beginning of the story, but his calling is to try, in the face of hate, sin, and tragedy, to shine light on a bitter, cynical world. Though his journey may be fruitless, every step of it makes for riveting cinema, the kind to which I hope Gleeson and the McDonagh brothers continue to devote themselves.

2. Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay

 

 

Sometimes, world events conspire to make a film mean more than it otherwise might. Even without this context, Selma would be a brilliant film, but for the times in which we live, it is vital. No other film this year cut deeper than Ava DuVernay’s politically charged Martin Luther King Jr. biopic. Bold, confrontational, and impressionistic, Selma would not fit anyone’s definition of a classic biographical picture. Instead, it is a snapshot of a movement, of a time in history when change was possible if the people demanded action.

David Oyelowo embodies the passion of King as he leads the effort to ensure voting rights for African Americans in the South in 1965. He is weary from the battles he has already won and lost, but the fire burns brightly in him, and he is ready for the next fight. This may not be the historical King, but the film is not a documentary, and DuVernay gives us the King we need right now. With protests and riots flaring up across the nation, DuVernay and Oyelowo give us the version of King who could step off the screen and lead us to a brighter future today – if only that were possible.

The juxtaposition of pain and hope in Selma is almost too much to bear. For every step it takes forward, the movement King leads is beaten two steps back. This is the reality of progress. There are no giant leaps and few world-changing moments, but there are small victories that illuminate our path just enough for us to know there is still a brighter light ahead. We must continue to fight and break down the walls put up before us. This is the lesson of Selma, as vital now as it ever was.

1. Leviathan, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

 

Few films are capable anymore of stunning me into silence. I have seen and experienced a lot at the cinema and generally am unflappable. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan stunned me. Taking the biblical book of Job as its inspiration, the film is a shot across the bow of modern and historical Russian politics, skewering everything from bureaucracy and power to family and faith. It is bleak, oppressive, and perfect.

Beginning with the simple story of a man whose home is being repossessed by the local mayor, Zvyagintsev layers slight upon slight and indignity upon indignity until the crushing weight of all we witness collapses and suffocates us. Relief does not come quickly, if at all, for most of the characters. Instead, they are subjected to a long, slow descent into madness. They are tunneling to hell, and the more they try to claw their way back out, the more earth they bring down around them, burying them and pushing them further into the darkness.

There are no heroes, only shades of villainy, and all innocence is quickly snuffed out by the ceaseless misery of circumstance. Zvyagintsev creates a world in which no structure is safe from corruption and no foundation, however sturdy, is safe from collapse. Those who fight are beaten back down, and those who do not are beaten down more quickly. At the end of the day, no one is coming to save you – not your leaders, not your church, not your family. If you are to survive, you must find the will to do so within yourself before it is too late and that too is pounded into oblivion.

Thank you for being a part of Last Cinema Standing’s 2014 Year in Review. Click below to check out any of our previous Year in Review coverage, and keep coming back as we discuss this year’s Oscar race and the year in cinema that will be 2015.

Year in Review – Top 10 Performances

Year in Review – Top 10 Quotes

Year in Review – Best & Worst

Year in Review: Best & Worst

I am the kind of person who tends to see the negative first. I have no problem admitting that, and I live a fine, happy life, but the negative is what jumps out at me. So, in pouring over the events that defined 2014, the list of the bad was markedly easier to compile. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized the joy is in the details.

How bad a year could it have been with so many great films and so many vital stories being told? How gloomy could I be about a year in which important new voices made themselves heard and some of the great voices from our past screamed out once again? There is good to be found, and yet, if you want the morose and the bitter, skip on down to the second half of this article, and you will find that, too. For better and worse, here are the trends and moments that defined 2014 for me.

 

Four best things

 

1. Music at the movies

Music and movies go hand in hand, really. From the earliest days of the form, when “silent” cinema meant no dialogue, all music, the two arts have been inseparable. However, when movies try to depict the art and artists behind the music, at best, the results have been mixed. For every truly brilliant The Commitments or Coal Miner’s Daughter, there is a Beyond the Sea or Get on Up to push the form back to its blandest biographical inclinations.

Not so this year as three great films about music and musicians (four if you count the well-regarded God Help the Girl, which I have not seen) graced cinema screens. From the insanity of Whiplash to the sublime We Are the Best! to the sublimely insane Frank, musicians had their day at the movies all year in 2014. In one way or another, each of these films strikes at the heart of why making music, or any art, matters. It is something one feels. One must do it. There is no other choice, and these films understand that.

2. Cinematography

My favorite film craft is cinematography. As a purely visual art, it is the one thing filmmakers hold over other storytellers. In lighting, composition, and movement, cinematographers can create great work without a word or a sound. The best find ways to push the medium forward and expand what we think of when we think of movie visuals. Others work to perfect the old ways, while still saying something fresh and interesting.

Emmanuel Lubezki turned Birdman into a cinematic magic trick, making the film appear as though it were shot in one unbroken take. Fabrice Aragno made 3D a valid form of artistic expression with the innovative, baffling, and always intriguing Goodbye to Language. Dick Pope took audiences inside the mind of a painter by filming the world the way an artist might see his work in Mr. Turner. Each of these artists deserves praise for refusing to settle for good enough and pushing the boundaries of what we should expect at the movies.

3. Triumph of the cult masters

Fresh blood is integral to the world of cinema. New ideas and new ways of looking at the medium help prevent stagnation and promote growth. However, there is something to be said for the artists who have stood up against the stale since the beginnings of their careers, the filmmakers for whom the ordinary was never an option. They may not be heavy hitters at the box office, and audiences may not be able to make heads or tails of their films, but the cult masters of cinema are as vitally important as the household names and their ilk.

Since his first feature came out in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard has made the reinvention of cinema his primary goal, and he is at it again with Goodbye to Language. Similarly, the far less prolific Alejandro Jodorowsky returned to screens this year after a 23-year absence with the daffy and brilliant Dance of Reality, making one wish he does not stay away for that long again. Finally, Lars von Trier, that prickly Danish provocateur, unleashed his epic sex drama Nymphomaniac to audiences who probably were not ready for it but who needed it none the less.

4. Actors taking chances

About those household names, though, those shining stars of the cinematic universe – sometimes, they take chances, too, and when they do, the results can be electrifying. There is satisfaction in celebrities unconcerned with vanity in their work, willing to look ugly or weird or repulsive. Jake Gyllenhaal transformed into a slithering, creeping creature of the darkness for Nightcrawler, revealing sides of his persona previously untapped. Michael Fassbender, usually so still and so expressive, donned a giant paper mache head and became the embodiment of artistic exuberance in Frank.

Marion Cotillard shed the glamor of some of her previous roles and tackled the part of a clinically depressed mother of two fighting for her family’s livelihood in Two Days, One Night. The always adventurous Charlotte Gainsbourg joined forces once again with von Trier, and in their third collaboration, Nymphomaniac, she goes farther than she ever has before to depict a woman who has degraded and destroyed herself her whole life but still deserves and demands respect. If only more actors took risks such as these, we might have a much more interesting film landscape overall.

Four worst things

1. Sony cancels The Interview

 

As if anything else could top this list, Sony’s handling of the debacle around The Interview was the worst mismanagement of a crisis in the film industry in recent memory. The company made wrong decision after wrong decision every step of the way, and by the end, it was so shrouded in failure that even the eventual release of the film could not erase the stink of the situation.

So, yes, the movie has been seen now, possibly by even more people than would have seen it had no controversy been stirred, but the facts remain: Fearing for its own reputation and stock, Sony failed to support the artists who make the products that keep its film division humming. I have yet to see the film but plan to do so. It is apparently only OK, which it has every right to be. It is just a shame we had to go through all of this just to exercise our right to find out for ourselves.

2. Deaths of icons

Apologies to the great talents who will not be mentioned in this section, but a couple hundred words is too few to express the loss and regret of a year’s worth of departed icons. Every year, we lose countless talented people – stars, innovators, and journeymen – but 2014 seemed to hit particularly hard on that front, beginning in February with the death of one my all-time favorite actors and one of the all-time greats, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

If it had just been Hoffman, it would have constituted a rough year, but death was unrelenting over the last 12 months, claiming Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall, Gordon Willis, Ruby Dee, Richard Attenborough, and a host of others. It is always sad when an icon dies, but it felt like we bombarded with such notices over the last year. Here is to hoping 2015 is kinder to our poor hearts.

3. Science at the movies

When I wrote about Godzilla back in July, I said it is unfair to criticize an entertainment spectacle for its failings in the science and nature department. These are not documentaries, and they should be given license to create inspiring new worlds. However, if a film – and Godzilla is a prime offender – wishes to engage debate about its science, then by all means, let us have that debate. Godzilla and Interstellar, two of the worst movies I saw this year, leaned on their science as the basis for story, then forgot to consider what it was they were selling. Pseudoscience in fiction is fine unless you are selling facts.

On the flipside of that coin, two movies about real-life scientists, brilliant men whose accomplishments in their respective fields continue to inform the ways we live today, seem to have forgotten their main characters were learned scientists. The Imitation Game reduces Alan Turing to an autistic savant whose genius we could not begin to understand, so the film does not even try. Meanwhile, The Theory of Everything finds the love story between Stephen Hawking and his long-suffering first wife of greater intrigue than the history of time or the origins of our universe.

4. Good intentions

It is nice to be nice, and it is good to be good, but no one ever made history that way. World-changing events are always messy, revolutionary leaders are often prickly, and endings are rarely sunshine and happy days. It is fine to depict an ideal world, since many of us go to the movies hoping to escape the harshness of everyday life, but artists who take harshness as their subject have a responsibility to emotional honesty that was sorely lacking in several major films this year.

Pride, about the movement for gay rights and union solidarity in 1980s England and Wales, Dear White People, about antiquated racial attitudes being alive and well in modern America, and Unbroken, a hagiography of U.S. Olympian and war hero Louis Zamperini, all had the best of intentions with mixed or offensive outcomes. Unbroken is the worst of these, but each failed in its own specific ways to champion the cause it meant to and instead fell back on clichés and stereotypes, not exactly the best way to move the world forward.

Check back tomorrow as Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review continues with the Top 10 Quotes of the Year.