Sam Woolf's 10 Best Films Of 2014

Like its housebound younger sibling, 2014 was a standout year for film specifically because it lacked a nucleus. Plaudits are settling on a handful of films to pin the year’s highest honors to, but no one movie was THE movie of 2014. Instead, the last twelve months offered a stunning selection of terrific all-arounders, works not defined by one exceptional element, but that were capable of providing the full, satisfying viewing experiences needed to achieve timelessness, and not just an Oscar. With new films from the likes of Mike Leigh and the Dardennes, 2014 had as much to offer from the old guard as it did the new, with folks like David Fincher, and Andersons Wes and Paul Thomas confidently navigating career midpoints. There was plenty new worth celebrating as well. Gareth Edwards and James Gunn delivered on the small budget promise of their early work by turning around two of the year’s most memorable big screen spectacles. Long-missing voices like Gina Prince-Bythewood returned to the scene with something to prove, and did just that. And there were even a few truly out-of-the-blue announcements of talent to watch, like Jennifer Kent, and her nightmarish Mr. Babadook. When winnowing my list of 2014’s best down to just 10, initial impressions of a nominee were considered, along with its long-term viability. If a movie bowled me over in theatres, great; if I couldn’t shake its impact weeks or months later, even better. This meant that many films I liked a lot, or outright loved, couldn’t quite make the cut. (As well as those I just couldn’t get to in time: apologies to Selma, Goodbye to Language 3D, Winter Sleep, etc.). So, before getting into the numbers, allow me to give a moment of thanks to those left on the chopping block: thanks, The Raid 2 and 22 Jump Street, for showing how to do a sequel right. Thanks, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, for reaffirming my belief in emotional blockbuster storytelling. Thanks, Locke, for being so much more than just a gimmick. Thanks, John Wick, for being as smart as you were sensationally badass. Thanks, A Most Wanted Man, for having the year’s most tense and pedestrian climax. Thanks, Gone Girl, for "octopus and scrabble." Thanks, Nightcrawler, for giving the world Lou Bloom. Thanks, Snowpiercer, for just being Snowpiercer. And thanks to Citizenfour, Life Itself, and Jodorowsky’s Dune, for being just a taste of 2014’s exceptional range of notable documentaries that I still haven't gotten to. Anyway, enough preamble: here are my picks for the 10 Best Films of 2014. 10) Edge Of Tomorrow While it’s certainly fitting that the year’s best, most confusingly-branded action movie only gets better with each rewatching, it’s not as though the virtues of Edge of Tomorrow aren’t all present the first run through. Tom Cruise remains as eminently watchable a movie star as still exists. The assured direction of Doug Liman offers setpieces cut into diamonds instead of ribbons, and Christopher McQuarrie’s ingeniously structured script features some of the darkest laughs all year. But there’s a philosophy, a tao guiding every component of Edge of Tomorrow that makes it not just a superior blockbuster, but a future classic of the action genre. The film draws a line in the sand between those aspiring to be the best of their class, and those striving to be better than its limitations. Edge of Tomorrow, as standard-bearer for the latter, delivers world-threatening stakes free of needless destruction porn, a male-female partnership built on respect instead of romance, and a fully developed character arc around which to center the whole affair. Edge of Tomorrow makes good on the promise of being to sci-fi action films what Groundhog Day was to comedy by blowing up the template and building it back up better than ever. When blockbuster after blockbuster gets what it means to be entertaining wrong, it’s all the more satisfying for one like Edge of Tomorrow to come along, and get it so, so right. 9) Whiplash Following a maddeningly paced battle of wills between an aspiring jazz drummer (Miles Teller) and his monstrous, charismatic mentor (J.K. Simmons), Whiplash grabs you by throat from the first shot and never lets go. As the year’s most twisted crowd-pleaser, the second feature from writer-director Damien Chazelle was both competitor and counterpoint to a pair of 2014’s other esteemed auteur offerings. A tale of obsessive self-destruction and abusive relationships, Whiplash shared thematic notes with the excellent thriller Gone Girl, while also cheating off of Fincher’s pages a bit to create a sickly visual canvas on which to smear Teller’s blood, sweat, and tears. Leaner and meaner than the similar look at artistic ambition found in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ostentatious Birdman, Whiplash’s vicious editing provided 2014 a much-needed reminder that, when it comes to shots, whose is longer doesn’t matter. Mirroring the tumultuous syncopation of jazz, Chazelle’s script keeps you on your toes as to whether what you’re watching is a story of rewarded perseverance, or masochistic cruelty. That its climax could make for one of the most exhilarating finales of the year while still maintaining that ambiguity proved Whiplash had the discipline of vision needed to match the electricity of its central performances. 8) Boyhood The first time you watch Boyhood, it’s hard to argue that Richard Linklater wasted his time by filming the story of an average kid from Texas over the course of the 12 years it took star Ellar Coltrane to age from adolescence to adulthood. Boyhood is both a science experiment and an astounding artistic achievement, a still frame look at each of the formative years of a young man’s life. Played in sequence, these glimpses into the lives of Mason Junior and Coltrane blur together to create the kind of life in motion film has always captured, but rarely from such a macroscopic level. Watch Boyhood a second time, and its merits as an actual film are more open to debate, with peaks and valleys revealing themselves as they do in life itself. The real power to Boyhood isn’t in the decade-spanning conceit, but in how that conceit makes the viewer filter Mason’s growth through their own. The fact is, most teenagers aren’t very interesting people, which is why Boyhood isn’t really Mason’s story so much as it is your own. Like any good time capsule, the magic of first opening up to Boyhood won’t repeat itself until you yourself have something new to bring to it. As such, Boyhood may not be 2014’s single best film, but it will undoubtedly be among the year’s most enduring. 7) Force Majeure Cringe is the lingua franca in Ruben Östlund’s observantly written, gorgeously shot, and riotously funny interrogation of social mores, Force Majeure. On trial is an unspectacular Swedish family getting away from it all in the French Alps. A snafu over breakfast snowballs into an all-out referendum on gender roles, parental responsibility, and relationship dynamics that envelopes everything and everyone in its wake. An awkward two-hour tango around a conversation no one wants to acknowledge exists, let alone actually have, Force Majeure starts as bourgeoisie satire, but builds towards hilarious, uncomfortable universality when the truth has to constantly mogul between self-deception and rationalizing. The film leaves it up to the viewer as to who’s right or wrong, and if anyone could be either, but the precision of Östlund’s direction is anything but ambiguous. Racked focus has the punch of a pratfall when empty slopes and chalet halls are making room for everything that’s not being said when people desperately want to put an embarrassment to bed, so long as it’s on their own terms. It’s that control which elevates Force Majeure from being just a handsome, intimate piece of Schadenfreude to a painfully memorable experience that will cause plenty of dicey conversation, and more than a few cancelled ski trips. 6) Inherent Vice Squarely landing between the unmovable must-haves of this list and the more flexible upper half, Inherent Vice is an 11th hour write-in, and also a bit of a cheat. As of this writing, the contact high of watching Paul Thomas Anderson's loopy, sometimes lyrical period romp is still in my bloodstream, and, boy, is it a buzz worth indulging. For more specifics on why Joaquin Phoenix's Doc Sportello is a ganja-loving gumshoe worth following down Anderson's drug-fuelled rabbit hole, check my recent review. Its inclusion here owes as much to the film's quality as it does perfect timing; Inherent Vice is, in many ways, the perfect chaser for film 2014, a menagerie of bizarre and wonderful experiences that constitute one powerful, unwieldy whole. With its luminous cast of actors and characters, Inherent Vice makes for a finely directed goose chase through 1970 L.A. that's going to reverberate with movie-goers well into 2015 and beyond. 5) Ida With its remarkable black and white cinematography and classically mismatched leads, Ida is a captivating paradox. How does a film use rarely more than a third of the frame to develop such richly detailed imagery? How can camerawork that’s 99% static feel so lively from the first frame to the last? How can a deeply personal trek through the thorny landscape of post-Holocaust Poland often be so funny, sexy, and lively? Half the answers lie in director Pawel Pawlikowski’s framing, which makes Ida look like a film that never moved beyond storyboarding because it never needed to; who needs technical trickery when you’ve got negative space, and faces that know how to use it? The rest of the answers can be found in the performances from stars Agata Trzebuchowska, as the titular church mouse on a journey of self-discovery, and Agata Kulesza, as Ida’s hard-drinking and harder-hewn aunt. Like the rest of Ida, stark opposites bump combatively against one another until black and white dissolve into something in-between. Dichotomous as it might be, it’s the trio of director and actresses in Ida that make every profile a marvel, and every two-shot an act of sharing more than just space. 4) The Grand Budapest Hotel By sheer attrition, The Grand Budapest morphed from being, in my eyes, another charming bit of Wes Anderson frippery, into perhaps 2014’s most purely pleasurable viewing experience. Minor imperfections don’t really amount to much when taken as part of the splendiferous pyramid Anderson structures out of a four-layer narrative, one backed by Alexandre Desplat’s indelible score. The imagination of The Grand Budapest Hotel is boundless, but its framing, staging, and editing further establish Anderson’s brand of whimsy as the product of authoritarian rigor. At the centre of the decadent, decade-spanning matryoshka doll is Ralph Fiennes, giving a career-highlight performance as Monsieur Gustav H. Refined but garish, irascible and romantic, Gustav is a character found only in myth and movies. As the vanguard of a more dignified time that only ever existed in the minds of those struck with Golden Age nostalgia, Fiennes delivers a performance as delicately layered as the rest of the film. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s madcap requiem for an era of culture and cinema gone by, one fondly remembered not because it was perfect, but because to forget it would be wasteful. And wasteful is beneath the standards of The Grand Budapest Hotel. 3) Only Lovers Left Alive The first hour of Only Lovers Left Alive is my favorite movie of the year. The second is still very, very good, but the film’s intoxicating strain of supernatural cool and languid dread wavers once something resembling a plot spoils the purity of the mix. Writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s need to force the existential issue plaguing his pair of centuries-old vampires is largely unnecessary, as the bleaching effect of time is ever-present for cynical aesthete Adam (Tom Hiddleston), and Eve (Tilda Swinton), his vivacious yang. Did Adam and Eve lose their humanity when they became vampires, or have their souls been chipped away at and rebuilt over the ages, with each new phase of civilization reflected in them like the Ship of Theseus? Only Lovers Left Alive is a film overflowing with apocalyptic beauty, where life, art, and love are all the more precious for springing up in a world enveloped by a sense of encroaching doom. The only safeguard against the pained immediacy of Jarmusch’s fears for the future is the comfort of knowing he’s created a timeless romance with Only Lovers Left Alive. 2) Two Days, One Night While its titular ticking clock and checklist structure make it almost Nolan-esque in comparison to their other films, Two Days, One Night is just as patiently, precisely observed in its slice-of-life approach to drama as other films from the Dardennes brothers. The plot stakes are low: a Belgian woman (Marion Cotillard) has just one weekend to convince her co-workers to save her job instead of taking a pay bonus. The emotional stakes, though, are as high as can be, contained and pressurized in Cotillard’s Sandra as they are in any person fighting for their existence day-to-day. Though the film’s social politics comprise an important part of its identity, what makes Two Days, One Night such an affecting work of soulful humanism is its unflinching portrayal of the ugly banality that comes with depression. Using characteristic long takes, the Dardennes capture every cycle of gain and setback faced by Sandra, every moment of despair and hope a person can experience when the present crisis might be their last. In the process, the Dardennes and Cotillard craft a heroine of unique circumstance but universal humanity, and pay loving tribute to the everyday support and empathy that forms between family, friends and communities. 1) Under The Skin Under the Skin has the exact same plot as any first contact film from Le Voyage dans la Lune to Avatar: species travels to new celestial body, encounters native life forms, mayhem ensues. Stripped down to a beat sheet skeleton, it’s a giant cliché. And yet, Under the Skin is also the most singularly haunting film of 2014, an overwhelming plunge into the endless void of space and death that’s flecked with the distant white of starlight and life. A speck of pink living, driving, and stalking amidst the nothingness is the sublimely cast Scarlett Johansson as an alien mimic prowling Glasgow for prey. To say even that much is to say far more than the film ever does, and despite its hypnotic soundtrack, it’s the silence of Under the Skin that gives it an otherworldly power. Like the obsidian Monolith from one of the sci-fi classics it often evokes, Under the Skin stands before you unyielding, unkind, but not uninviting. It gives so little because it has faith the viewer can make their way through the rich fog of its ambiguities. Playfully masking the only line of exposition as a pun (when trawling for men to abduct, the creature often asks for directions to the “M-8.”), Jonathan Glazer has directed one of the year’s simplest stories in the most audaciously opaque means imaginable. Beyond just its entrancing compositions and experiments with form, Under the Skin is the most “movie” movie of 2014, a dark star in the constellation of cinema as visual medium, and, as Roger Ebert would say, “machine that generates empathy.” Whether that empathy can, or should be shared with a thing that doesn’t have any of its own is just another of Under the Skin’s many entangling mysteries.