10. Gone Girl
David Fincher's deceptively sly, disturbing adaptation of Gillian Flynn's novel is a consistently delicious meditation on sex, lies and media iconography. Rosamund Pike completely commits herself to a layered, deranged role.
9. Inherent Vice
Offering the closest thing you might get to a theatrical contact-high, PTA's Pynchon adaptation does justice to the author's penchant for absurd comedy, nonsensical plotting and poignant historical commentary. Worth watching, if only for Martin Short's scene stealing cameo as a cocaine-snorting Dentist.
8. Guardians of the Galaxy
A huge win for Disney/Marvel/nerds, James Gunn's space-action comedy was the top box-office grosser of the year and for good reason. Fully realized and filled with real soul (as truly evidenced by the funk-soaked soundtrack of 70's hits), this is the rare hollywood film that takes as much time for inventive space battles as it does for hilarious, endearing dialogue between CGI and human characters. The cinematic minting of Chris Pratt (a funny, funny, amazing man) has been one of the best surprises of the year.
7. The Lego Movie
Easily the best animated film of the year, The Lego Movie's limitless comic, visual and aural imagination amounts to a sheer a blast of cinematic joy. Lord/Miller, currently the top comedic writing/directing team in the biz, also inject a necessary nostalgia and anti-conformist spirit that infuses the breathlessly told story with actual weight. An instant classic.
6. Concerning Violence
Hugo Goran Olsson's largely unseen follow up to The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (only having been screened in London and New York) is one of the most searing indictments of European (and American) atrocities in Africa committed to film. Using the words of Frantz Fanon's anti-imperialist The Wretched of the Earth and documentary footage from Swedish news archives (which makes up 95% of the film's footage), Olsson presents a clear and present case for the formulas that create armed resistance to occupation.
5. Life Itself
Master documentarian Steve James lends a careful, meticulous but satisfyingly soulful touch to the life story of Roger Ebert, the world's most famous film critic. Not one to shy away from difficult themes or imagery, James smartly puts us bedside with Ebert as his health deteriorates, all the while building a convincing case for a perfectly flawed, but brilliant man who battled with alcoholism, ego and weight. But what shines through most is Ebert's true love for film, family and the joys of a fully-lived life.
4. Boyhood
For most of Richard Linklater's magnum opus, we see people. And as the film - following 12-years in the life of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and his family - progresses and the actors begin to show their age, we start to see ourselves. I think the unanimous adoration for Boyhood comes from a very real place; it is not borne out of nostalgia for a more precious, innocent time, but from Linklater's ability to capture the thrills, melancholy and joy inherent in the twists and turns of growing older.
3. Interstellar
Painting on the grandest of all cinematic canvasses, visionary director Christopher Nolan literally swings for the moon with his latest, a space exploration that literally transcends time and place. Admittedly, this is Nolan at his messiest and it deserves all the critical dissection it has received, but for sheer awe and thought-inspiring spectacle, Interstellar belongs on the very same shelf as Kubrick's 2001 and Kaufman's The Right Stuff.
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
Minute for minute, the most pleasurable film of the year, Wes Anderson's comic caper is at once a sumptuous cinematic feast, hilarious heist flick and richly moving ode to an era of irrevocable change. Anderson's films have been described as being only for those with taste's similar to the director's, an opinion I have always met with derision. But with each passing film, he has been (literally) showing us his evolution from maker of meticulously framed and planned filmic storybooks to an auteur that commands a serious grasp of all the available cinematic tools as well as a keen sense of the intricacies of the human heart.
1. Keep On Keepin On / Whiplash / We Are The Best!
From Boyhood, through to The Lego Movie and many other films released this year, I kept seeing the theme of human expression, be it artistic, scientific or wholly creative in nature. In my own life, music has been my most significant form of expression. To me, the freedom and satisfaction that comes along with creating, practicing and playing music for an audience are wholly tangible; almost vital. The three best movies of the year, for me, managed to capture this same feeling in - virtually unidentical - cinematic bubbles all their own.
Keep on Keepin On is a remarkable documentary (perhaps still pending a proper theatrical, streaming or DVD release) that follows the burgeoning, fruitful relationship between Clark Terry, an ailing, legendary jazz trumpeter and 23-year-old blind piano prodigy Justin Kauflin, just as Kauflin prepares to compete in an elite, international competition. First time director Alan Hicks draws on his years as a drummer to portray, accurately and intimately, the remarkable bonds created between fellow musicians.
Whiplash is wunderkind director Damien Chazelle's intense cinematic exploration of fiery artistic ambition that happens to be played with sticks. But I found it less of a realistic portrayal of the modern jazz drummer's struggle than a breakneck, machismo-fueled celebration of the almost violent passion in the foundations of the (film and musical) genre. So bruising that some of the (permanent) calluses on my hands began to harden as I gripped the seat.
And finally we come to We Are The Best, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's latest, following three unapologetically shit-disturbing 12-year-old girls in 1982 Stockholm aspiring to start a punk band - with almost zero musical talent. Hilarious, rebellious and heartfelt, this is one for the heralded canon of punk rock cinema. Moodysson directs with an honest, unflinchingly critical eye toward Swedish society in the early eighties, a time that was fraught with Cold War-imbued paranoid rage towards the political other; a time where to be punk was to embrace a dead art form.
Those that choose to express themselves through music, in all of its structures, practices and century-old traditions, know that how and why we choose to play is more important than the playing itself. Today, it is increasingly difficult to have ourselves truly heard in the growing and crowded cacophony of digital voices. For this reason, it seems only natural that we gravitate to cinema that so beautifully offers artistic solace amidst an uncertain future.
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