Rather than recoil, as a sane person would, from the ubiquitous lists of "highlights" at year's end, I've done my own. If nothing else, "best of" lists reveal their authors' taste and perspective so readers can either take further notice or run screaming. Lists also draw attention to deserving films that may have escaped prior consideration, although one of the following opened at 771 screens in the U.S. and has so far amassed over $24 million worldwide.
It's a good thing that Richard Linklater's Boyhood found an appreciative crossover audience. Some on my list have yet to - and may never - find U.S. distribution, unlike, say, Horrible Bosses 2, which has grossed (pun intended) nearly $49 million as of this writing.
Not included in the list but among the best I saw this year are these short films, in alphabetical order: Glistening Thrills and New Fancy Foils (both Jodie Mack); Journey To The East (Tsai Ming Liang); The pimp and his trophies (Antoinette Zwirchmayr); Red Capriccio (Blake Williams); Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (Margaret Honda); Twelve Told Tales (Johann Lurf); and Under The Atmosphere (Mike Stoltz).
It's a good thing that Richard Linklater's Boyhood found an appreciative crossover audience. Some on my list have yet to - and may never - find U.S. distribution, unlike, say, Horrible Bosses 2, which has grossed (pun intended) nearly $49 million as of this writing.
Not included in the list but among the best I saw this year are these short films, in alphabetical order: Glistening Thrills and New Fancy Foils (both Jodie Mack); Journey To The East (Tsai Ming Liang); The pimp and his trophies (Antoinette Zwirchmayr); Red Capriccio (Blake Williams); Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (Margaret Honda); Twelve Told Tales (Johann Lurf); and Under The Atmosphere (Mike Stoltz).
The features I liked this year, in order of preference.
1. Ida - Dir: Pawel Pawlikowski. To my mind, no other film in 2014 came as close to perfection as this portrait of postwar Poland in the 1960s as seen through the grim enlightenment of a young Catholic novice (Agata Kulesza) about the secrets of her - and Europe's - grievous past. The stark black and white compositions from cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal are stunning, and the screenplay by director Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz eschews all bombast and sentimentality.
2. Goodbye To Language 3D - Dir: Jean-Luc Godard. With copious jump-cuts in both image and soundtrack, Goodbye To Language 3D is easily the most ADD-affected film of the year. Its parallel narratives, however slender, are threaded together through frequent appearances by Roxy Miéville, who happens to be the octogenarian filmmaker's mixed-breed canine. The 3D technology, developed especially for this film, takes an impoverished gimmick to new levels as it explores flora and fauna, naked human bodies, Mary Shelley, Roxy's sniffing snout, and both old and new modes of communication. Accompanying this visual mayhem are the works of Beethoven, Sibelius and others, as well as the voice of Godard recycling centuries of philosophy and literature. You'll be reeling for days from its scant 70 minutes.
3. Jauja - Dir: Lisandro Alonso. A beautifully realized puzzle of a film, Jauja asks questions that are unanswerable to its creator, much less any viewer who attempts to corral its narrative. Though the screenplay by poet Fabian Casas and director Alonso is based on the real-life massacre of the indigenous people of Patagonia by Argentine troops in the late nineteenth century, Jauja inserts a melancholy Danish cavalry officer (Viggo Mortensen) and his somber young daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) into a surrealist's Heart of Darkness.
4. Boyhood - Dir: Richard Linklater. Though not the first film to span a fictional character's life over the course of real time (for example, see Marco Bellocchio's Sorelle Mai from 2010), Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale, which tracks thirteen years of its young protagonist's childhood and adolescence, pulses with the popular culture that reflected and influenced American life of the early twenty-first century. Young Mason's quest for purpose will be studied, perhaps fruitlessly, by the automatons who will one day replace us.
5. Phoenix - Dir: Christian Petzold. Using as their basis the macabre 1963 French novel Le Retour des Cendres by Hubert Monteilhet, director Petzold and the late filmmaker Harun Farocki conjured a delirious screenplay that probes the post-WWII German psyche through evocations of Georges Franju's clinical horrors and the matriarchal melodramas of Douglas Sirk. With the most satisfying conclusion of any film I saw all year, Phoenix is a worthy successor to Petzold's arthouse hit Barbara (2012) and a work to be savored by filmgoers of all stripes.
6. Child's Pose - Dir: Calin Peter Netzer. The so-named Romanian New Wave reached another high note with Netzer's portrait of a wealthy, domineering matriarch intent on saving her capricious son from a prison sentence for driving drunk and killing the child of an impoverished family. Veteran actress Luminita Gheorghiu is chilling as the suffocating mother whose clashes with the police and the victim's grieving parents lay bare the expectations of the privileged in a society rife with corruption.
7. L'il Quinquin - Dir: Bruno Dumont. Made for French television as a mini-series, L'il Quinquin finds director Dumont satirizing a Bruno Dumont film. The four fifty-minute broadcast episodes that constitute the feature version combine the baffling existentialism of Dumont's more
somber works with caustic black humor that targets small-town paranoia and provincial racism. As the police investigation into a series of gruesome murders unfolds, tic-laden lead inspector Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) meets his match in the titular delinquent Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), a chubby ragamuffin with an eternal smirk and a taste for mischief.
8. Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait - Dir: Wiam Simav Bedirxan, Ossama Mohammed. One of two documentaries in my top ten, Silvered Water is a harrowing compilation of cellphone videos and web downloads that puts the viewer in the midst of the Syrian civil war. At times sickening in its graphic depiction of torture, mutilation, and death, Silvered Water somehow coalesces these disparate fragments of video, some so pixilated that they court abstraction, into a cine-poem of disquieting beauty. Narrated by Mohammed, a Syrian filmmaker now exiled in Paris, Silvered Water (titled after the translated name of its co-director, fearless activist Bedirxan) transcends the banality of the 24-hour news cycle and its endless talking heads. It's often difficult to watch, but even harder to forget.
9. What Now? Remind Me - Dir: Joaquim Pinto. My other documentary choice is a cine-journal by filmmaker Joaquim Pinto, a sound engineer for Manoel de Oliveira and the late Raoul Ruiz, who has lived with HIV for over twenty years. This beguiling cinematic diary, nearly three hours long, follows the lives of Pinto, his partner Nuno, and their four dogs in a rural Portuguese village. We see Pinto visit old friends and recall those lost to AIDS. He ruminates on the nature of viruses and endures the harsh effects of experimental drugs. But What Now? Remind Me is not only about the challenges of living with HIV; it's also a meditation on the pleasures of a quotidian life, captured in their everyday majesty by Pinto's watchful lens.
10. Listen Up Philip - Dir: Alex Ross Perry. A dark comedy featuring a bitter, self-obsessed asshole of a novelist (Jason Schwartzman) as its focus doesn't sound inviting, but Listen Up Philip is a savagely funny jab at the New York literary scene and an off-handed evocation of reclusive author Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint) in particular. The trail of destruction that obnoxious, antisocial Philip Lewis Friedman plows through his personal and professional relationships will make you cringe, but Listen Up Philip triumphs through director Perry's sharp, acerbic script and inspired performances from Schwartzman, Jonathan Pryce as a dour, middle-aged novelist/mentor, and Elizabeth Moss as Philip's maligned girlfriend.
Runners Up (in alphabetical order): The Babadook (Jennifer Kent); La Camioneta (Mark Kendall); Heaven Knows What (Ben & Joshua Safdie); Horse Money (Pedro Costa); Ilo Ilo (Anthony Chen); Letters To Max (Eric Baudelaire); The Look Of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer); The Princess Of France (Matías Piñeiro); Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne); and We Are The Best! (Lukas Moodysson).
1. Ida - Dir: Pawel Pawlikowski. To my mind, no other film in 2014 came as close to perfection as this portrait of postwar Poland in the 1960s as seen through the grim enlightenment of a young Catholic novice (Agata Kulesza) about the secrets of her - and Europe's - grievous past. The stark black and white compositions from cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal are stunning, and the screenplay by director Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz eschews all bombast and sentimentality.
2. Goodbye To Language 3D - Dir: Jean-Luc Godard. With copious jump-cuts in both image and soundtrack, Goodbye To Language 3D is easily the most ADD-affected film of the year. Its parallel narratives, however slender, are threaded together through frequent appearances by Roxy Miéville, who happens to be the octogenarian filmmaker's mixed-breed canine. The 3D technology, developed especially for this film, takes an impoverished gimmick to new levels as it explores flora and fauna, naked human bodies, Mary Shelley, Roxy's sniffing snout, and both old and new modes of communication. Accompanying this visual mayhem are the works of Beethoven, Sibelius and others, as well as the voice of Godard recycling centuries of philosophy and literature. You'll be reeling for days from its scant 70 minutes.
3. Jauja - Dir: Lisandro Alonso. A beautifully realized puzzle of a film, Jauja asks questions that are unanswerable to its creator, much less any viewer who attempts to corral its narrative. Though the screenplay by poet Fabian Casas and director Alonso is based on the real-life massacre of the indigenous people of Patagonia by Argentine troops in the late nineteenth century, Jauja inserts a melancholy Danish cavalry officer (Viggo Mortensen) and his somber young daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) into a surrealist's Heart of Darkness.
4. Boyhood - Dir: Richard Linklater. Though not the first film to span a fictional character's life over the course of real time (for example, see Marco Bellocchio's Sorelle Mai from 2010), Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale, which tracks thirteen years of its young protagonist's childhood and adolescence, pulses with the popular culture that reflected and influenced American life of the early twenty-first century. Young Mason's quest for purpose will be studied, perhaps fruitlessly, by the automatons who will one day replace us.
5. Phoenix - Dir: Christian Petzold. Using as their basis the macabre 1963 French novel Le Retour des Cendres by Hubert Monteilhet, director Petzold and the late filmmaker Harun Farocki conjured a delirious screenplay that probes the post-WWII German psyche through evocations of Georges Franju's clinical horrors and the matriarchal melodramas of Douglas Sirk. With the most satisfying conclusion of any film I saw all year, Phoenix is a worthy successor to Petzold's arthouse hit Barbara (2012) and a work to be savored by filmgoers of all stripes.
6. Child's Pose - Dir: Calin Peter Netzer. The so-named Romanian New Wave reached another high note with Netzer's portrait of a wealthy, domineering matriarch intent on saving her capricious son from a prison sentence for driving drunk and killing the child of an impoverished family. Veteran actress Luminita Gheorghiu is chilling as the suffocating mother whose clashes with the police and the victim's grieving parents lay bare the expectations of the privileged in a society rife with corruption.
7. L'il Quinquin - Dir: Bruno Dumont. Made for French television as a mini-series, L'il Quinquin finds director Dumont satirizing a Bruno Dumont film. The four fifty-minute broadcast episodes that constitute the feature version combine the baffling existentialism of Dumont's more
somber works with caustic black humor that targets small-town paranoia and provincial racism. As the police investigation into a series of gruesome murders unfolds, tic-laden lead inspector Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) meets his match in the titular delinquent Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), a chubby ragamuffin with an eternal smirk and a taste for mischief.
8. Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait - Dir: Wiam Simav Bedirxan, Ossama Mohammed. One of two documentaries in my top ten, Silvered Water is a harrowing compilation of cellphone videos and web downloads that puts the viewer in the midst of the Syrian civil war. At times sickening in its graphic depiction of torture, mutilation, and death, Silvered Water somehow coalesces these disparate fragments of video, some so pixilated that they court abstraction, into a cine-poem of disquieting beauty. Narrated by Mohammed, a Syrian filmmaker now exiled in Paris, Silvered Water (titled after the translated name of its co-director, fearless activist Bedirxan) transcends the banality of the 24-hour news cycle and its endless talking heads. It's often difficult to watch, but even harder to forget.
9. What Now? Remind Me - Dir: Joaquim Pinto. My other documentary choice is a cine-journal by filmmaker Joaquim Pinto, a sound engineer for Manoel de Oliveira and the late Raoul Ruiz, who has lived with HIV for over twenty years. This beguiling cinematic diary, nearly three hours long, follows the lives of Pinto, his partner Nuno, and their four dogs in a rural Portuguese village. We see Pinto visit old friends and recall those lost to AIDS. He ruminates on the nature of viruses and endures the harsh effects of experimental drugs. But What Now? Remind Me is not only about the challenges of living with HIV; it's also a meditation on the pleasures of a quotidian life, captured in their everyday majesty by Pinto's watchful lens.
10. Listen Up Philip - Dir: Alex Ross Perry. A dark comedy featuring a bitter, self-obsessed asshole of a novelist (Jason Schwartzman) as its focus doesn't sound inviting, but Listen Up Philip is a savagely funny jab at the New York literary scene and an off-handed evocation of reclusive author Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint) in particular. The trail of destruction that obnoxious, antisocial Philip Lewis Friedman plows through his personal and professional relationships will make you cringe, but Listen Up Philip triumphs through director Perry's sharp, acerbic script and inspired performances from Schwartzman, Jonathan Pryce as a dour, middle-aged novelist/mentor, and Elizabeth Moss as Philip's maligned girlfriend.
Runners Up (in alphabetical order): The Babadook (Jennifer Kent); La Camioneta (Mark Kendall); Heaven Knows What (Ben & Joshua Safdie); Horse Money (Pedro Costa); Ilo Ilo (Anthony Chen); Letters To Max (Eric Baudelaire); The Look Of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer); The Princess Of France (Matías Piñeiro); Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne); and We Are The Best! (Lukas Moodysson).
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