Monsieur Anderson at your service: a still from "Grand Budapest Hotel," one of the best films of 2014.
For viewers who are pessimistic about the present trajectory of cinema, 2014 seemed to offer few hopeful omens at first glance. Multiplex ticket tallies were once again dominated by fantasy and science-fiction franchises aimed at young audiences. Astonishingly, 13 of the top 20 box office performers this year were sequels or reboots, and every single film in the top 10 sprung from a film, novel, comic, or toy with a sizable pre-packaged fan base. Nonetheless, there was gleaming gold to be found beneath the corroded surface of film in 2014. Career-defining features from established auteurs seemed to be everywhere.
Science-fiction and horror cinema produced some vivid, original achievements. Thoughtful explorations of family, gender, and aging abounded. The numerous outstanding debut and sophomore features helmed by women offered promise for the future. In short, it was a bountiful year for St. Louis cinephiles. For viewers who are bit behind and looking to fill their queues, the films presented below are a good start.
For the purposes of this list, a film qualifies as a “Film of 2014” if it could be viewed theatrically by the ticketed general public in the St. Louis metropolitan area between January 1 and December 31, 2014.
10. A Most Wanted Man (Anton Corbijn; UK)
In a perfect world, Philip Seymour Hoffman's riveting turn as German intelligence agent Günther Bachmann in A Most Wanted Man would be enshrined as both his “true” final performance and one of the most essential in the late actor's career. Director Corbjin's film is a gratifyingly knotty and cold-blooded War on Terror thriller, but it's Hoffman that gives the film its soul, flawlessly depicting the battered, prickly idealism of a veteran espionage warrior. (Available now on DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon.)
9. Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Koreeda; Japan)
In the hands of another director, the switched-at-birth premise of Like Father, Like Son might have been the stuff of tawdry basic cable melodrama. Writer-director Koreeda, however, sculpts it into a profoundly moving tale of familial love's intricate joys and agonies. Owning to fantastically genuine performances and Koreeda's knack for unhurried, acute social realism, the film achieves a rarefied poignancy that cuts to the quick of contemporary parent-child relationships. (Available now on Netflix streaming, DVD, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon.)
8. Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund; Sweden)
In writer-director Östlund's mesmerizing, blackly comic tragedy, an unexpected event strikes an outwardly content nuclear family on a ski holiday, and in the process pries open hidden emotional fissures. Impeccably assembled and executed with morbid wit, Force Majeure is a gripping tale of social breakdown in miniature. Shot through with a potent sensibility of panicked free fall, it reveals itself as a supremely vicious horror story about the paper-thin illusions of trust and stability. (Available now for digital rental from iTunes. Available February 10, 2015 on DVD and Blu-ray.)
7. Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman; USA)
A brilliantly realized tale of alien incursion and temporal loops, Edge of Tomorrow is pop science-fiction action distilled down to its purest, most exhilarating form. Eschewing soggy world-building, director Liman throws the viewer into the center of a familiar sci-fi scenario, adds an unexpected twist, and then punches the throttle. Full of gritty action set pieces, gallows humor, and sophisticated cinematic storytelling, it's everything that popcorn filmmaking should be in the twenty-first century. (Available now on DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon.)
6. The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky; Ukraine)
Presented in Ukranian sign language without subtitles, writer-director Slaboshpitsky's pitch-black tale of boarding school criminality pushes formal boundaries and forces the viewer to assess how they watch movies. Although The Tribe's story features appalling violence, graphic sexuality, and stomach-turning exploitation, what truly shocks about the film is how unnecessary words prove to be in the creation of compelling drama. It's a daring, hypnotic means of conveying a grim tale of human brutality and obsession. (Available on DVD and Blu-ray in 2015.)
5. Her (Spike Jonze; USA)
Writer-director Jonze's wistful, aching tale of the digital love functions so splendidly as a romantic tragedy, one can be forgiven for neglecting that it is also an incisive science-fiction story about consciousness and connectivity. Indeed, what makes Her remarkable is how impressively it works on numerous levels. Within a distinctive near future world of jellybean hues and surrogate sincerity, Jonze effortlessly alights on seemingly every contour of human relationships and their intersection with technology. (Available now on DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon.)
4. Enemy (Denis Villeneuve; Canada / Spain)
With Enemy, Québécois filmmaker Villeneuve has created his first true masterpiece, a harrowing and enigmatic nightmare to rival those of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Lynch. Jake Gyllenhaal is astonishing as two unrelated men who discover that they are exact doppelgangers, a startling fact that proceeds to overturn their lives. Featuring unsettling visual and aural design and an overwhelming atmosphere of dread, Enemy strikes at the viewer's primal, ineffable fears about the self. (Available now on DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon. Free to stream on Amazon Prime.)
3. Nymphomaniac Vols. I + II (Lars von Trier; Denmark / France / Belgium / Germany)
Here's something unexpected: Danish provocateur von Trier's Nymphomaniac proves to be the filmmaker's smartest, funniest, most humane, and, yes, best feature in decades. Employing every formal flourish at his disposal with uncommon wit and cunning, von Trier weaves a grand, hypersexual fairy tale of one woman's struggles through a life of compulsive carnality. At once deeply empathetic and thoroughly unserious, Nymphomaniac is an exemplar of European art cinema as its most profane, extravagant, and engrossing (Available now on Netflix streaming, DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon.)
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson; Germany / UK)
Although the bombastic and irresistible The Grand Budapest Hotel exemplifies writer-director Anderson's stylistic preoccupations---meticulous design, bold compositions, agile comic writing---it is also his most self-critical and melancholy film to date. In relating the outlandish misadventures of a 1930s Continental hotel concierge and his loyal lobby boy, Budapest not only achieves a novel aura of poised zaniness, but also acknowledges the sad futility of yearning for the long-vanished and never-was. Anchored by a sublime, career-best lead performance from Ralph Fiennes, it's the rare film that elicits thrills, laughs, and sorrowful reflection in equal measure. (Available now on DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon.)
1. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer; UK / USA / Switzerland)
No film this year so perfectly captured the potential of cinema as Jonathan Glazer's eerie, cryptic, and utterly spellbinding feature about a predatory being disguised as a woman. Prowling the bustling streets and lonely motorways of Scotland in a cargo van, Scarlett Johansson's mysterious siren lures men to their dooms at the behest of equally inscrutable masters. Although it is implicitly an inverted alien abduction tale, Glazer's extraordinary film consistently defies genre. Evoking the writings of Jean Paul-Sartre and John Gardner’s novel Grendel, Under the Skin is fundamentally a story about existential struggle. The questions that Johansson's she-creature silently asks as she gazes at her reflection are universal: Who am I? What defines me? Glazer frames such impenetrable queries with sights and sounds that are as haunting as anything else in cinema this year. Recalling the masterpieces of no less a talent than Stanley Kubrick, Under the Skin brims with visions both breathtaking and horrific courtesy of cinematographer Daniel Landin, while composer Mica Levi's skin-crawling score throbs, squeals, and drones. The overall effect is unnerving and wholly unequalled, cementing Under the Skin's status as a work of cinema whose significance was unmistakable upon arrival. (Available now on DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase from iTunes and Amazon. Free to stream on Amazon Prime.)
The Next Best
11. It Felt Like Love
12. Citizenfour
13. The Homesman
14. Birdman
15. Boyhood
16. The Rover
17. Maidentrip
18. Calvary
19. Venus in Fur
20. Nightcrawler
Honorable Mentions: Abuse of Weakness, American Promise, The Babadook, Big Hero 6, The Boxtrolls, The Drop, Finding Vivian Maier, Foxcatcher, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Gloria, Gone Girl, Interstellar, The Lego Movie, Particle Fever
Slightly Overrated: Dear White People, Obvious Child, Snowpiercer
Underrated: New World, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, The Zero Theorem
Guilty Pleasure That Really Shouldn’t Be: Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Worst Offender: Monuments Men
Notable Films I Missed: Human Capital, Ida, The Immigrant, Jodorowsky's Dune, Mr. Turner, The Overnighters, Red Army, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Whiplash, Winter Sleep
Films We’re Still Waiting for in St. Louis: Art and Craft, Inherent Vice, Killing Time, Leviathan, A Most Violent Year, National Gallery, Selma, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Stop-Over, Two Days, One Night
