Dominic Mill
1) The Raid 2
The Raid was a surprise hit a few years back. The Indonesian martial arts film – directed by a chubby guy from Wales and starring a former truck driver – delivered brutality by the bucketload, melding phenomenal choreography with blistering editing in an orgy of pure, unadulterated badass. There were high hopes when aforementioned Welshman Gareth Evans returned to the fold for a sequel, this time backed by a bigger budget and the good will of martial arts fans everywhere, and boy did he deliver.
Where The Raid was a contained 90 minutes of sparse dialogue and copious violence, The Raid 2 is a sprawling crime epic – but with even more violence. Many of the fight scenes in The Raid were undeniably brilliant, but the pitched battles that punctuate its sequel are peerless. I struggle to think of the last time I saw something this jaw-dropping on celluloid – not to mention that it looks absolutely gorgeous. If The Raid turned things up to 11, its follow-up turns things up to 20, with stunning cinematography, a vast wealth of eccentric characters, picturesque locales and more punches than you could shake a million sticks at. In my mind at least, this stands as the greatest action film ever made.
2) The Infinite Man
A sleeper hit at SXSW this year, The Infinite Man is a distinctly Australian slice of genius. A piece of self-aware brilliance wrapped in a genuinely affecting love story, Hugh Sullivan’s feature length debut is equal parts effortless smarts and aching humanity. Reworking the standard bottle piece with near endless ingenuity, The Infinite Man is a time travel comedy that actually understands time travel.
The actors are on point, the jokes are weighed perfectly against the drama and the script must have been an absolute nightmare to write. The story of one control freak guy trying to construct the perfect weekend getaway sprawls into a vast, decade spanning, multi-layered epic addressing everything from Tantric sex to Greek philosophy. It’s the earnest romcom to Primer‘s low-key thriller, and I love it to pieces.
3) Snowpiercer
Movies like this just don’t get made any more. Boasting a stellar cast, a bonkers concept and a steam punk pirate version of John Hurt, Snowpiercer is something special. The screenplay may clunk and the action may defy comprehension, but it’s a perfect storm of bat-shit insanity that keeps on giving. Chris Evans is gruff as hell as the man inciting revolution on the last bastion of human society – a train that has devolved into a bonkers Marxist nightmare as it circumvents a globe in a permanent apocalyptic winter.
Tilda Swinton is magnificent, Jamie Bell does his best Colin Farrell impression and Alison Pill plays the organ in a world that is equal parts Gilliam and Glukhovsky – and if those aren’t selling points I don’t know what is. Following the the box office flop of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, major studios seemed reluctant to invest in another ambitious sci-fi, but boy am I glad they shelled out for this one. I love me a crazy movie, and Snowpiercer is about as crazy as you can get.
4) Blue Ruin
I can’t remember the last time I saw a film this perfectly constructed. Every aspect of Blue Ruin has been filed down to an exact point – there is not a single line of dialogue, not a single shot, not a single moment that is not key to the plot. This is lean and mean filmmaking at its leanest and meanest – Blue Ruin is a film without dead zones or excess. It gets in, tells its story and leaves you gasping for air.
The cinematography is gorgeous, Macon Blair looks like an even wussier version of Joe Lo Truglio, and the shocking violence is matched by a pitch black sense of humor. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s sophomore project comes across like the work of an old and grizzled pro. The tale of pan-generational violence may not be new, but it has rarely been told this well – and never with such proficiency.
5) The Lego Movie
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are pretty much running the universe at this point. 22 Jump Street tickled our funny bones all over again this summer, but it was The Lego Movie that stands head and shoulders above the rest of 2014’s mainstream fair. The film seemed all but destined to be a colorful mess of product placement and Star Wars references when it was first announced, but what we got instead was zaniness of the highest order. The cameos are numerous, the jokes even more numerous and the humor reaped from hearing Morgan Freeman shout “Cover your butt” is near endless.
Just to make things even better, The Lego Movie then went on to stand for all the right things. Above all else this was a film that emphasized creativity and individuality – hurling the controlled and contrived worlds of the Lego Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises out a very high window and replacing them with those crazy, stupid and excessive contraptions we all spent our childhoods intricately constructing. It’s funny and heartfelt, and it made me feel like a kid again.