During the first half of 2014, I wondered if we might be in store for a weaker quality of cinema this year in terms of serious Best Picture quality films. I’d seen only a handful of higher-quality movies, and very few of those were worthy of consideration as serious Oscarcontenders. Granted, the early part of the year rarely spawns many if any eventual nominees for Best Picture. Since 2000, 11 of the 14 Best Picture winners were released between October and December. Going back to 1990, 16 out of 24 winners were released in the final three months of each year. And to drive home the point that as time goes by more and more nominees are taken from the slate of films released later in the year, consider that last year’s entire slate of nine Best Picture nominees were all released from October to December.
Still, the first nine months usually provide at least a short list of potential dark horse candidates for Best Picture and movies that enjoy early Oscar talk even if they eventually fade away as the award season fare hit theaters. This time, however, I saw less than half a dozen movies that would really quality for any “best of” list concerned with strong productions worthy of such Oscar talk. Granted, the summer had a number of terrific blockbusters despite the domestic downturn in receipts (coming in about $569 million short of 2013′s domestic grand total, or about 5% down for the year); but I was left fearing I’d have few films to point to when it came time to assemble this list of the year’s greatest cinematic achievements.
Thankfully, I was very wrong. The post-summer season has turned out better than I’d expected, and 2014 is another fine year for movies — including a lot of exceptional original dramatic productions of the sort everyone keeps insisting Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.
Not only did I find enough top-notch movies worthy of inclusion on a “best of” list, I found so many that I went for a top-20 list instead of just a top-10 list, and at the end of the article I even felt it necessary to include a list of additional films that deserve mention (I simply didn’t want to stretch the discussion of all of the films longer than 20, and it was hard enough deciding how to order these 20 entries).
These films have, as of today, topped more than $3.7 billion at the worldwide box office, and with several only just starting to roll out slowly in theaters this month, that number is sure to rise. When all is said and done, these 20 films should combine for perhaps $4 billion, give or take. More than half are low-to-extremely-modest budgeted productions, many of them R-rated adult dramas. They represent a wide array of genres, storytelling techniques, themes, and perspectives. In short, it’s a pretty awesome list of films.
To be very clear, this isn’t my list of personal “favorite” films, this is my list of the films I would consider the greatest overall movies of the year and the ones I’d consider contenders for my own nominations for Best Picture at the Mark Awards, so to speak. Many are also on my list of favorites, to be sure, but this is an attempt at a weightier list.
20. Nightcrawler — Driven by a nails-on-chalkboard intense performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, brilliant cinematography from Robert Elswit, and a darkly funny new approach to the otherwise obvious skewering of modern news media, the first hour-and-a-half are spot on cinema. The last half-hour descends into fantastical extremes that wrongly morph into plot-driven thriller territory that loses sight of its earlier powerful themes, but these flaws are overshadowed by how much it gets right. Topping $38 million off an $8 million budget and a decidedly quiet marketing approach, the film wasn’t a blockbuster but it was plenty profitable.
19. Chef — After several years of big-budget tentpole films, Jon Favreau went small with his movie about a chef who departs a prestigious restaurant and starts his own food truck. The sequences of food preparation are fabulously staged not merely to get your mouth watering (which it absolutely will), but more importantly to depict an artist at work on a canvas or sculpture. And the famously volatile temperament of artistic geniuses rears its head time and again, first in a wonderful confrontation between artist and critic, and later when father lets his obsession with his craft drive him to react to his son as he would a careless adult employee. This was another low-budget production that made a nice profit in theaters, to the tune of $46 million box office.
18. Snowpiercer — A sci-fi adaptation of a 1980s French comic book series, this film made waves when it hit VOD just two weeks after its initial theatrical release. Director Joon-ho Bong delivers a biting political and social satire framed as a sci-fi summer flick, complete with lead actor Chris Evans fresh off his blockbuster turn in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The film plays like a kinetic action-driven Terry Gilliam production not unlike 12 Monkeys, and Tilda Swinton is a standout performance. While the domestic run was weak (most blame the VOD timing, although Weinstein insists there was a method to his seeming madness), the international gross was more than double the modest $40 million budget. The final tally from worldwide box office and home release is somewhere in the $100 million range, giving it a comfortable win.
17. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies — Peter Jackson ended his latest trilogy in spectacular style, crafting a visual feast including the greatest portrayal of a dragon ever put to screen, and that’s just to get things started. This epic confrontation gives everyone their moment in the sun, and the payoff proves Jackson was right in his decision to split the story and expand it to connect with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Off a budget reportedly north of $200 million, this one’s just three weeks into its theatrical run and has already amassed more than $740 million. One can only imagine the later Blu-ray and DVD trilogy box set payoff, especially the inevitable giant six-film set.
16. Guardians of the Galaxy — The first thing I have to say about this one is, I know many readers are already asking, “Why isn’t this higher on the list?” Well, because the rest of the list is just that darn good, folks. I loved Guardians, it’s among the very finest of Marvel’s movies, and if this were a pure “favorites” list instead of a more considered “best of the year” list, it would rank much higher indeed. But this spot on the list is still worthwhile, I assure you, and you needn’t doubt my appreciation for all of the sci-fi fantasy and humor. James Gunndefied all expectations (well, all except for those of us who were insisting all along that it would be a huge hit to the tune of more than $500+ million, because we knew Marvel + Gunn + Guardians was a recipe for awesomeness) and has established one of the great modern sci-fi franchises.
15. American Sniper — When Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle says he doesn’t regret the times he killed, that he’s ready to face God for those choices, and that his only regret is that he couldn’t save more of his fellow soldiers, you may feel it summarizes the film’s narrative sentiment. Yet, in an insightful piece at The Hollywood Reporter by Alex Ben Block, Clint Eastwood says he used the first take of that scene because of the flash of uncertainty behind Cooper’s eyes. It’s the sort of nuanced, subtle detail that can turn everything in the film on a dime and make you realize we’re witnessing many things here: the myth of the man as he himself imagines it, the myth others see, and then the pure painful reality of how things really are.
The war becomes a series of killings and deaths, as Cooper feels compelled to carry the weight of more killings on his soul to try to stem the endless death of his friends around him. Whether the film is accurate about Chris Kyle’s feelings we can’t know, but the film avoids stories about Kyle’s experiences that seemed dubious and focuses on what the war did to him and those he loved. The movie took $9.6 million from just four theaters in two weeks. It won’t go into wide release until later this month, but when it does I expect it to dominate the box office for a while.
14. The Imitation Game — A superb period piece about an important secret wartime mission, it delves deeper and concerns itself more with the characters and their struggles, and in particular the terrible injustices done to Alan Turing. Whether or not Turing had helped defeat Nazism, the oppression he faced for being gay would be inexcusable bigotry. That his country persecuted him despite his crucial role in helping win World War II makes the story of his fate all the more shocking. Benedict Cumberbatch delivers one of the year’s finest performances, with heartbreaking humanity and a quiet yet desperate need to be understood and accepted.
The film at times falls into the trap of portraying Turing’s possible Asperger’s Syndrome with the currently en vogue notion that it’s sort of a “superpower” that makes him a genius. And the story too often treats his social discomfort and emotional struggle as humorously lovable quirkiness. But the overall attempt to show respect and admiration for Turing, and to show that his struggle with those problems did not define him as a person, wins out in every scene. Even the wrongheaded choice to suggest he knew about a spy in his midst but initially was afraid of exposing the person is intended to demonstrate how fearful he was of persecution himself and yet that his loyalty to Britain led him to overcome any personal fears and speak out. Budgeted at $14 million, the film’s critical acclaim and audience buzz has helped it climb to $64 million and counting so far. When it inevitably gets an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and Best Actor, its box office will no doubt benefit.
13. The Good Lie — One of the most underappreciated films of the year, it didn’t generate much at the box office but it enjoyed positive reception from critics and those who did manage to see it. It’s one of two films especially significant in 2014 that focus on storytelling from the perspective of the non-white characters, without trying to shoehorn in a white main character to stand in for the audience perspective. The marketing highlighted Reese Witherspoon‘s small supporting role to try and attract audiences, but the film never looses focus on the narrative of the immigrants, played in top-notch performances by Arnold Oceng, Kuoth Wiel, and actual former child soldiers Ger Duany and Emmanuel Jal.
I wish the marketing had in fact showed more about the film’s first Act setting in war-torn Sudan, the children walking a thousand miles in search of safety, and how they remain haunted by their experiences years later. Revealing just how deep the story goes could’ve attracted much more interest, and would’ve sold the film more on its greatest strengths. As the theme behind the title becomes clearer, and when it finally comes full circle, it’s as emotionally compelling as you could ask for in a film. On a tiny budget they pulled off a big story and production superior to many Best Picture nominees of past years, despite the light $2.7 million box office return. I just hope it can attract the bigger audience it deserves on the home market.
12. Gone Girl – David Fincher’s latest has become something of a phenomenon, taking in more than $360 million and counting worldwide (even enjoying a slight resurgence at the foreign box office recently). Not bad, to put it mildly, for a $60 million budget picture. Then again, the best seller source novel and stellar cast helped add to the anticipate and buzz, as did the somewhat shocking nature of the story and its many unexpected turns. The enthusiastic word of mouth from audiences and critical acclaim are spot on, as this is yet another engrossing thriller from Fincher and among the most entertaining of the year’s cream-of-the-crop dramatic productions.
Some of it might seem a little far fetched at times, neither of the main characters ends up being easily sympathetic or particularly relatable, and it suffers from a few “why won’t they just say the obvious thing that would clear up the problem?” moments, but it’s easy to overlook such things when the rest of the film is the stuff of a director who has hit a stride and has some of the most consistently great output of any filmmaker working in Hollywood today. Two of his previous three films received nods for Best Picture, and the one that didn’t (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) was surprising in its absence from the list of nominees. We’ll see if this year makes up for that.
11. Foxcatcher — One of the year’s most uncomfortable and unsettling films to watch, it also sports (no pun intended) some of the year’s best performances.Steve Carell has received praise for being “unrecognizable” in his role as John du Pont, and he certain achieves that, but it’s not merely makeup and hair dye we’re talking about. His entire body moves differently, there is a dark malevolence and madness in his gaze. But let’s not forget how incredibly unrecognizable Mark Ruffalo becomes in the film as well. He grew a beard, wore his hair differently, and put on a lot of muscle, then carried himself with a subtle but confident swagger belied by his seeming gentle, matter-of-fact but determined demeanor.
Then there’s Channing Tatum, who isn’t receiving nearly enough credit for his own terrific performance that requires him to transform through performance alone, without any significant physical alteration other than a firmly set lower lip and ever-furrowed brow. But you won’t even think about who you’re watching, so easily does he slip into this role and project the pent up aggression and personal doubts that erupt sometimes in dominant wrestling performances but other times as dangerously self-destructive outbursts. Director Bennett Miller makes every scene a tightly wound spring about to burst with energy, and gets the best from his cast. With a budget exceeding $20 million, it’s taken about $8 million in a limited release in just over 300 theaters, and will expand this month as its Oscar hopes seem to be on the rise.
10. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes — The summer’s greatest blockbuster is also the film that brings us into the top ten of the year’s very best films. I’ve compared it favorably to The Dark Knight, and with good reason. This is the perfect blend of big-budget pop culture entertainment and exceptional dramatic storytelling that resonates strongly with audiences. A visual masterpiece in which the main characters often speak in sign language, it maintains a quiet dignity even for its hate-minded antagonists. Andy Serkis continues to brilliantly demonstrate why the Oscars need to nominate performance capture roles in the acting categories, and Toby Kebbell helps out in that mission with an unforgettable supporting turn.
Matt Reeves’ directing is smart and avoids rushing anything, content to linger on very personal moments and hold back the action as a tool in service to the story, rather than allowing the action to dominate storytelling. But when the action erupts, it’s spectacular and emotionally as well as viscerally engrossing. Whatever else anyone wants to say about the decline in summer box office revenue and the increase in sequel releases, this year saw some of the best quality blockbusters in a long time, and Reeves’ picture is the cream of that crop. No wonder its $170 million budget resulted in success to the tune of $708 million in global receipts, one of the year’s top-grossing films.
9. The Grand Budapest Hotel — This is the early-year release that’s going to prove the rule by being the exception this year. As what I feel is now a certain Oscar nominee, Wes Anderson’s latest film is widely loved and has made it onto a huge number of award nomination lists — including the Golden Globes,Producers Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild, BAFTA, Art Directors Guild, and the Critics Choice Awards — including the most important from a predictive standpoint. Critics and audiences alike loved the movie, with good cause. It sports winning performances by Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori in main roles, and a wonderful supporting cast including Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, and many others.
Hilarious, bizarre, and often unexpectedly touching, it isn’t entirely unlike a warped fairy tale of sorts. Some of Anderson’s fans consider it too mainstream, but I find that complaint a bit too precious and cliquish. Anyone who suggests this movie isn’t exceptionally unique and outside the normal boundaries of popular mainstream fare is kidding themselves. Yet it managed to capture audience imaginations worldwide, and this $27 million budget indie production managed a whopping $174 million at the global box office. That success, plus its popularity and the fact industry voters are rediscovering it now, should be enough to ensure it a spot on the Best Picture list at the Oscars.
8. The Theory of Everything — I must admit I didn’t expect much from this one, as it appeared we were getting a story about the amazing Stephen Hawking reduced down into a simple period piece love story. Plus, the poster sort of looked like some weird prequel/reboot for the Austin Powers franchise. Little did I realize how much power was contained in that simple love story. Ignore for a moment the fact that, yes, the film largely hurries over any of Hawking’s scientific work and theories, and so anyone seriously hoping for insight into the long process that went into forming those theories is going to be immensely disappointed. What doesn’t disappoint is the emotional impact of the performances, and the integrity of the honest portrayal of the relationship.
I was surprised at how willingly and maturely the film examined painful truths about what the couple experienced and the ways their affections were inevitably drawn elsewhere, and that the film makes no judgments because we see that there are no villains here, only real people feeling lost and confused and in love. What also surprised me is that Jane is in fact the primary protagonist in the story. To be sure, Stephen and Jane share the spotlight and much of what we see is about his pursuits, but it is her perspective that dominates most of the film and certainly her emotional journey is at the center of the film. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones deliver incredible performances of grace and enormous complexity. Redmayne deserves the Oscar for Best Actor, as he doesn’t remotely attempt anything so simple as impersonation. What he accomplishes with his eyes and face is a revelation. Watch how much he says with his face in the shaving sequence, it’s nothing short of awe-inspiring.
7. Skeleton Twins — Another of the earlier releases in 2014, and still among the year’s finest productions. I love this film, I love the characters and how the film is often content to simply let them exist together in scenes and interact with no particular plot point being developed. I love the acting and how the performers seem to care about these people they’re portraying, having fun and yet also sometimes feeling sadness that leaves them at a loss for words (literally, in at least one scene where the performers couldn’t continue delivering their lines, and when you see it you know that’s not just hype). The humor is sharp, wonderful, and catches you off guard like the best wit should. It succeeds because the characters are just so well written, and so well acted.
6. A Most Violent Year — Lost amid much of the shuffle this year is writer-director J.C. Chandor’s latest magnificent achievement. 2013′s All Is Lost was a stunning piece of cinema, and now Chandor tops himself with a film content not to answer all of its own questions. The story cares most about how these people respond to the increasingly small and dangerous trap in which they find themselves, as the threat of violence — done unto them, and the increasing chance it will be done by them — looms larger while the tensions become unbearable. Oscar Isaacs and Jessica Chastain turn in Oscar-caliber performances in a unique tale of self-delusion and self-betrayal. As I watched Isaac’s, I was reminded very much of the corruption of Michael Corleone’s soul in The Godfather. Both are men who start out taking personal pride in the fact they aren’t corrupt, but they are blind to their own ambition that makes them increasingly willing to turn a blind eye to the corruption around them and put it out of mind.
Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader prove that the best comedic performers have a special insight and grasp of humanity that digs down that extra layer for the rawest emotional responses, in themselves and their audience. When the two sit in a booth at a bar, there is an easy comfort that’s apparent even in the moments of silence between them, and you feel they’ve know each other forever and you sense they are family. If you saw them in public somewhere as they are in that scene, you’d feel it, that’s how real it is and how strongly it resonates off the screen. Writer-director Craig Johnson gave them a fantastic script with two of the year’s most fully realized characters, so bless him for that. And here’s an interesting thing to keep in mind, too — so much of this film just look so lovely, the colors and the lighting create a mood that’s almost timeless, and it’s another part of the film I love so much. With only $1 million in production budget, the film actually technically did quite well, bringing in nearly six times that budget. Alas, that of course translates to just $5.7 million, so I strongly encourage you to discover this film on home media if you’ve not seen it yet.
Michael Corleone said of his gangster relatives, “That’s my family, Kay. That’s not me.” Isaac’s Abel Morales (a name full of puns and Biblical metaphor) marries into a gangster family, works his way up through the corrupt heating-oil business, and entrusts the paperwork and finances to his wife despite knowing perfectly well her inclinations. Then, he pretends his hands are clean. He even managing exasperation while talking to his lawyer, who is an actual gangster, when he learns the man kept secrets from him. Morales finally seeks a path not of virtue, but a path that allows him to keep his own hands clean while realizing his ambitions through the vice of others, until we finally see what it takes for him to embrace the truth of his own corruption. Abel’s corruption is that he’s always known the truth, he just lied to himself so that when he shares the lie with others he can claim to believe it as much as they do. Still in very limited release, this $20 million budgeted production has taken a mere $337,000 at the box office so far, but it expands internationally later this month and into February.
5. Interstellar — I don’t care what the mixed reviews say, and I don’t care what the box office prognosis claims, this is Christopher Nolan’s best film to date and a remarkable film through and through. Few films can claim such ambition, and it ranks among the all-time best sci-fi productions in Hollywood history. The sense of realism is typical of a Nolan production, but the miraculously realized sequences of black holes and water worlds and frozen alien landscapes goes beyond anything he’s attempted before. And this is also the most emotional story in Nolan’s stable of films.
At it heart, it’s about a father who left his family promising to return, only to realize the crushing guilt that he cannot go home. His regret, and his children’s regret, are what all the permutations about distance and time really boil down to. How far are we from those we loved and lost? Can we ever get them back? Examining such simple, painful human moments through the prism of science fiction is of course what all of the best sci-fi does. It speaks to the human condition and teaches timeless lessons that transcend space and time.Interstellar more clear aspires to and succeeds at that genre tradition than any other film in the last decade or more.
It’s a story that just gets better every time I see it, and the stunning visuals never cease to amaze me. Some have complained about the sound, but the sound was one of the things that struck me as ambitious about the movie. It’s experimental, it attempts a naturalistic impression of sound and tries to get us to trust enough to experience the entire film even if we don’t catch everything in every scene, because we’ll figure it out and it’ll all make sense eventually. In that way, the film has faith in its audience, and despite some accusations of over-explaining, it in fact is reserved in that regard and thus has caused separate allegations of not explaining enough.
It seems most people got it, though, to the tune of $661 million worldwide and counting, making the $165 million budget a rather obviously good investment. While it hasn’t soared as high as some expectations that envisioned Inception-like numbers, this entirely original hard-science non-summer non-DiCaprio-starring non-action-adventure is a major hit and proves that ambitious, complex, smart original stories can still succeed in Hollywood.
4. Wild — By the time I saw this movie, I thought I already had my list of the year’s best films all finished. So imagine my surprise when one of the top-five turned out to be something I hadn’t seen yet. Reese Witherspoon’s tour de force performance in director Jean-Marc Vallée’s follow-up to last year’s Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club was nothing like what I expected, since the trailers make it appear more of a lighter story about character-building in the great outdoors. This is a brutal exploration of one woman’s life falling apart until she’s lost everything, and the underlying self-awareness she exhibits in isolating herself so she is forced to confront emotions and truths she couldn’t otherwise face is part of what makes this such a compelling story.
Movies that allow a single performer to dominate the screen, and whose presence must make up for the fact there’s no firm plot line per se, have my utmost respect. Witherspoon does just that, and her transformations come in broken pieces because we see her life out of order exactly the way our own past rises up in memory in nonlinear fashion depending on what’s relevant to our predicament today.
Piecing yourself back together when all of the pieces hurt, and when they don’t seem to always fit neatly, can be exhausting, and it’s often more than we can handle. Especially someone like Witherspoon’s real-life character Cheryl Strayed, who spent years avoiding facing her demons and became used to feeling almost nothing at all in order to stop hurting. There is a moment close to the end when we suddenly realize how carefully she has guarded her emotions, and that she’s yet to full break down the walls holding back her most private and searing pain. When it comes, it’s among the most beautiful moments I’ve seen in film all year, and Witherspoon manages it all with her eyes and a trembling that starts in her bones until it shakes her to the ground.
With a budget well under $20 million, the film has taken in $27 million so far at the domestic box office and begins its international roll out this coming week. With some Oscar prospects in the future (Witherspoon should easily get a nomination, and is likely in a three-way race with Julianne Moore and probably Jennifer Aniston), it should continue performing well.
3. Boyhood — I walked out of the theater convinced I’d just seen the shoo-in for the Academy Award for Best Picture, because I had a hard time imagining anything would top this film. It’s the sort of achievement that makes you think a filmmaker should maybe stop and retire because they’re unlikely to produce anything else to match what they’ve just accomplished. Richard Linklater reaches that level of cinematic transcendence here, and while I don’t remotely want him to really stop making movies, it’s hard to imagine living up to this sort of legacy again.
You’ve probably heard that the film was shot over 12 years, with all of the actors aging in real time and continuing to play the same characters. Well, that’s not a gimmick and the film isn’t a one-trick pony. Think about how many films you’ve seen that try to falsely convey the passage of time in characters’ lives, using recasting for different ages or makeup and so on. Perhaps it never felt as if the story suffered or as if anything was lacking, but with Boyhood cinema combines the storytelling elements of passage of time with the literal real passage of time. This film literally aged along with the characters, you really see every person getting older. Losing that distinction between the art and reality creates a sense of buy-in that exceeds whatever is typical in such films.
We watch this boy grow up, we watch his parents go from youngish adults to the cusp of middle age, and as we are engaged in the story by the amazing acting all around — Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Lorelei Linklater could easily garner Oscar nods for their naturalistic, fully realized portrait of a semi-broken family — that conscious awareness of the film’s extended production time gives way and we accept it on a subconscious level. It’s fully immersive, and for a character drama to attain that level of immersion is exceedingly rare, and this particular instance is exceedingly unique.
2. Selma — I will have much more to say this coming week with regard to the campaign waged against this film by those claiming it besmirches the legacy of LBJ. Here, I will focus on other aspects of the film, but let me just say that if what you’ve mostly heard about the movie is the controversy regarding how Johnson is portrayed, know that the complaints are about a handful of brief scenes totally five to ten minutes of the film’s length. And know that, contrary to disingenuous claims by the more extreme critics of the film, it doesn’t remotely portray Johnson as a racist, nor as nonsupportive of civil rights. Now, that’s enough about the important white guy in the film about the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Let’s talk about what really matters in this movie — the civil rights movement, MLK, and Selma.
The choice to march in Selma was carefully discussed and decided, it caused divisions within the movement, and the prospect of extreme violence scared many activists. David Oyelowo‘s King begins as a sometimes soft-spoken, sometimes uncertain man who is moved to powerful expression and resolute action when confronted with injustice. In front of the crowds, he knows they need to see his strength and determination, but behind the scenes his guard is down and we see a vulnerable man whose hope and faith in the future are mixed with doubts about whether he is leading people down the correct path. He makes hard choices, unpopular ones even, but he realizes that as the person everyone looks to for leadership, he has become somewhat responsible for their lives and their safety, and so he feels compassion for their suffering but also intense guilt and inner turmoil about asking them to risk their lives and their family’s lives. He knows that risk is the only way forward, but that’s a concept easier to convey in a speech than to follow when you know people have put their lives in your hands.
Selma comes at a time when we as a nation face renewed significant questions about racial inequality, police brutality, and the slow dismantling of civil rights legislation by our courts. The Voting Rights Act, passed 50 years ago after the march in Selma in 1965, was cut apart by the Supreme Court in 2013, making the film’s messaging and historic reminder very bittersweet indeed. No other film in 2014 is as relevant, none as important, not only because of these truths about how those events 50 years ago speak to us today, but also because it is such a triumphant, magnificent film in its own right. This story doesn’t need the prism of a kind white liberal character for the audience to experience the events. The black characters aren’t here to impart wisdom so that their suffering and experience can lead to enlightenment and fulfillment for white characters who then go on with their own lives. This story is about the injustices our nation carried out against black citizens, and how those citizens stood up and took their rights by righteous demand and by righteous action, not a story about how someone gave those rights to them. The black community led, and some of the white community followed, and that’s not a dynamic we see in cinema very often, even in films that purport to tell true stories.
Oyelowo’s moving, deeply human performance is surprising in how he doesn’t try to win us over with an impersonation, nor does he attempt an early speech to convince us he’s the King we’ve seen in newsreels. He shows us the man, then shows us how that man became the legend. And by the end, all you see is MLK. It’s an intentional choice, so that our expectations about King don’t taint how we perceive and interpret the earlier personal scenes and the tired nightly strategizing. Rather than taking the King we think we know and putting him into those moments, the film smartly reintroduces us to Martin Luther King, Jr. via the things we’ve not seen or heard before. It establishes him as a real person in his own right, not merely some simple idea of a person shared in our collective conscience.
My only real complaints are that the film cuts away from King and Selma’s movement a few times to show Johnson or Governor Wallace, and it is distracting when the rest of the film achieved an intensely personal sense of time and place. Those moments away weren’t really needed, to be honest, and the same information could’ve been revealed via the protesters seeing a glimpse of an interview on TV or reading a quick headline in the newspaper. Likewise, the use of on-screen text formatted as FBI records is to get across the point the civil rights activists were constantly monitored, that even the supposedly sympathetic federal government treated them with suspicion and sometimes with outright contempt and threats, and to serve the simple cinematic purpose of letting the audience know who new characters are in certain scenes. But the FBI text doesn’t add enough to make up for the distraction it causes, and the film would work better without it. These are minor quibbles, though, and nitpicking aside the film is the MLK movie we have long waited for.
Selma stood at just over $2 million from very limited release, but it went into wide release this weekend and looks to add another $12 million to its tally. With a budget of $20 million, it shouldn’t have any trouble making its way into profitable territory in a few weeks. If it can overcome the politically motivated backlash and garner some Oscar attention, that will lift it to even higher box office.
1. Whiplash — After such a glowing assessment ofSelma, it is difficult for me to name any other film as the best of the year. And indeed, in writing this article, I’ve switched these two films back and forth from first and second place. In the end, what drew me to nameWhiplash the year’s best film is that no other film this year achieved the degree of perfection in every frame, in every emotion, in every second of it vastly complex and contradictory characters and themes.
Whiplash is simply perfect filmmaking, there’s not a missed beat (pardon the expression) or wrong choice made from start to finish. Most films have a point of view and you can sense that point of view clearly, and that’s great and I love films that do that. But Whiplash presents a point of view that it frankly condemns, that it rejects as much as it rejects the man espousing it, and then it shows the chaotic and outrageous circumstances in which all of these terrible events and wrong choices collide in a near catastrophe from which springs a final, desperate, brilliant act of artistic transcendence.
The film doesn’t get into the point that such transcendence is possible other ways, that other points of view debunk much of the horrible behavior and assertions made by the film’s intentional blatant villain. This movie isn’t about other things, it’s about this thing right here right now, and it’s ability to be so alive in its own moment is mesmerizing. It’s brave filmmaking that accepts at face value the wrongness of what the antagonist says and does — we are absolutely supposed to disagree with him and we are absolutely supposed to sympathize with everybody who condemns him — but that doesn’t change the final outcome, which stands despite all that came before. It’s the most viscerally exciting, artistically challenging, explosive demonstration of the power of cinema to come alive and confound that I’ve witnessed in years.
J.K. Simmons deserves to be handed two Oscars, right now, to hell with waiting for the official ceremony. Miles Teller manages the impossible by matching Simmons’ intensity and obsession pound for pound, and hasn’t received enough recognition for his own Oscar-caliber performance. If it were up to me, I’d just hold a separate special Oscar event and just hand out gold statues to everybody who worked on this film — just line everyone up and have them come by and take an Oscar.
I cannot fathom that Damien Chazelle has never directed a distributed feature film before Whiplash (I have his first non-distributed film, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, and plan to watch it as soon as possible). This isn’t the work of someone just getting started in a filmmaking career, there are choices and insights in this movie that many great long-working directors wouldn’t have done as well. Chazelle’s approach and how he speaks about filmmaking is likewise shockingly way ahead of where you’d expect him to be — just look at Tasha Robinson’s fantastic interview with the director at The Dissolve. He speaks of realizing he should think about the movie as a sports film, and took inspiration from Raging Bull. Which, when you see Whiplash, makes total sense. But to conceptualize a jazz music film that way beforehand, to imagine that and then achieve it… Raging Bull, wow.
I am reminded of my earlier remarks about filmmakers quitting while they’re ahead, and I guess Chazelle would be in a tough position if he listened to such advice, since he’s just made a perfect movie that represents everything I love about film. Where is there to go from here? But no, Damien, don’t quit — make many, many more films. Because what you did in Whiplash was genius, and you’re only just turning 30 years old next weekend, so you have many more years to try to catch lightening in a bottle again. I have faith you’ll do it, because something this wonderful can’t have been a fluke. Good job.
With nearly $7 million already in the bank from domestic receipts, the film heads overseas this month and into February for a slow international roll out. It’s a dark horse Oscar candidate, but its prospects improved after the Producers Guild, Writers Guild, and Critics’ Choice Awards all nominated it for Best Picture. And Simmons is definitely among the sure-thing candidates for a Best Supporting Actor nod. I think it can also garner a screenwriting nomination as well, and the more categories it appears in when the nominations are announced, the better it will perform in foreign markets. Since it cost only $3 million to produce, it’s not far from gravy at this point.
Some other contenders that didn’t make my final list, but get honorable mention are Pride, Kill the Messenger, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Judge,Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Edge of Tomorrow, The Drop, and the controversial Exodus: Gods and Kings (which was vastly better overall than I expected, but the racial problems of the casting made it impossible to ignore the artistic choice of having a handful of white faces in the major roles surrounded by non-white actors in a story about Egyptian and Semitic peoples around the 14th Century B.C.). Were I to make a “favorites” list of films from 2014, many of these would be on that list.
Sadly, I’ve yet to see Unbroken, Rosewater, A Most Wanted Man, Love Is Strange, Enemy, Into the Woods, or St. Vincent. Those films are all potential contenders for my personal list of 2014′s best films, but at some point you have to make your picks and not wait around to see everything you’ve missed, right? So hopefully I won’t come to regret any inclusions or exclusions.
What say you, dear readers? Which of these 20 films are on your own best-of-2014 lists? And which films did I leave out that made your lists? Sound off in the comments below!
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