The 10 Best Movies of 2014

The Best Movies of 2014, from Boyhood, Citizenfour, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Gone Girl and more.

Despite a lack of racial diversity, gender equality, originality, strong box office returns or general cultural interest in things that aren’t Taylor Swift or “Orange is the New Black”, the movies manage to put out more than a few good ones each year.

But because all of the above are all anyone’s been clamoring for this year, it’s hard to say this was a strong year for the movies and then read a post like Mark Harris’s in Grantland. His article “The Birdcage” is the most compelling and informative Death of Cinema post you’re likely to read this or any year. He argues that Hollywood is following superheroes down the franchise rabbit hole, in which it isn’t enough for a movie to be a movie; it has to fit with the brand.

I look at my Top 10 list now and only see two blockbusters, only one of which will become a franchise, so presumably it can’t all be bad. But increasingly I’m not so sure. Following the events of “The Interview,” will Hollywood be likely to take the risks that produced that movie, among many of the other daring films this year? It’s unlikely that anything will ever be made quite like my Number One selection this year, but does the audience for such a film get smaller or larger moving into 2015?

The 10 films I’ve listed here are simply the ones I enjoyed the most, not necessarily the ones most likely to push cinema forward or be the game changers the industry needs. Later this week I’ll list out my picks for the 11-30 Best Films of 2014, and hopefully those will help tip the scales a little more. Continue reading “The 10 Best Movies of 2014”

Under the Skin

Scarlett Johansson is brilliant in the most daring performance of her career.

There are two types of surreal terror in the trippy, experimental sci-fi “Under the Skin.”

In the first, Scarlett Johansson seduces lonely men on the streets, brings them back to a dark, rundown home, and once inside, the confines become an empty, dark void. She disrobes, the men dutifully follow, and as they approach her, they silently slip into a pool of nothingness, completely enveloped by the darkness. As they sink, they don’t struggle, or even break eye contact. They simply vanish, soon to become nothing more than a snake-like shell.

In the second form, Johansson tries her trick again at a beach. Off in the distance, a man watches as his wife is drowning and flailing in a choppy sea. He hurries to save her, but ends up drowning himself. The man Johansson is seducing uses all his strength to save them both, and Johansson then knocks him out cold and begins dragging him away. Sitting alone on the beach is the couple’s baby, wailing all through the night, perhaps never to be claimed.

“Under the Skin” is less a film but an experience, one that combines the grimly fantastical and the grimly mundane to make something that is as much human as it is alien. Jonathan Glazer’s film captures the kaleidoscopic images that made “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Vertigo” genre bending classics, but this aural/visual experience is largely unlike any film ever made. It’s a mostly plotless yet immersive movie with impressive power and dramatic tension. Continue reading “Under the Skin”