Checking my list

Half a year behind, as usual, I’m ready to make my summation of the films of 2014.  First I fill in some films that took a while to reach home video, and then give my overall ranking in comparison to the critical consensus, as I calculate it from various polls.  My aim is to provide a finer filter for those who have some trust in my taste -- to take the fifty most acclaimed films of the year, and to offer clues to which you might actually want to see.

When it comes to Andersons, I typically prefer Paul Thomas to Wes, and this past year was no different.  In fact, I liked the loosey-goosey Inherent Vice (MC-81, NFX, #7) as much as any of P.T.’s films.  Usually I’m not that fond of movies for which the best advice is to not even bother making sense of them, but in this case I was happy to go along for the trip.  To summarize the film, or even to list its characters, would be a fool’s errand -- it’s all too much, doesn’t add up -- but the movie is a fun ride that will leave you dizzy and disoriented, yet eager to get back on for another spin.  A late example of L.A. noir, set a little after the wave of the Sixties had crested, crashed, and receded, this first-ever adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel comes out as paranoid and convoluted as you would expect.  And who better to center it on than the stoner PI played by Joaquin Phoenix, weird but strangely winning, as we have come to expect?  I can’t pack any more of this big baggy monster into a tight case of 200 words, but if I haven’t convinced you to see it yet, get a fuller picture from Andrew O’Herir of Salon (who has, incidentally, moved into my triumvirate of favorite critics, with Anthony Lane, longtime New Yorker writer, and Stephanie Zacharek, of the Voice and elsewhere.  Other opinions I always value, without necessarily agreeing, are A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis of the NY Times, Ty Burr of the Globe, and Dana Stevens of Slate.  Not that there aren’t others worth reading, but with these I always know where I stand.)

To round out my perspective on the Top 50, I finally took a look at two international heavyweights, and one weightless debut.  Leviathan and Winter Sleep, both long and lugubrious, are the must-see latest from two modern masters of world cinema, the latter having nudged out the former for top prize at Cannes.  Andrei Zvyagintsev and Nuri Bilge Ceylan look at Russia and Turkey, their respective homelands, each with a bleakly beautiful eye and a stately pace, punctuated by searing confrontations between fully-realized characters. 

Leviathan (MC-92, NFX, #30), set in a decaying fishing village above the Arctic Circle, references the Hobbesian definition of the state, a passage from the Book of Job, and an actual whale skeleton on the beach, in ways that that are heavy but not heavy-handed.  The title defines Putin’s Russia, but also the state of nature, nasty and brutish for sure.  A corrupt official has his eye on a seafront piece of property for development, long in the family of a stubborn mechanic with a beautiful younger wife, and a troubled teenage son from a previous marriage.  The mechanic decides to fight city hall with everything he’s got, and unleashes a Job-like string of woes.  I send you to Andrew O’Herir again, at least his first paragraph, to fill in more of the context.  It’s all very powerful, and powerfully depressing, in the grand Russian tradition.

Things ain’t too happy down in Turkey neither, as portrayed in Winter Sleep (MC-88, NFX, #32), though the Central Anatolian landscape of Capadoccia is equally striking, and equally a character in the story.  A wealthy retired actor has inherited a tourist hotel high above the town, hewn out of the soft sandstone characteristic of the area.  He too has a beautiful younger wife, and a difficult divorced sister with whom he has a fraught relationship.  In truth, each of his relationships is fraught, because really, he’s kind of an asshole, despite his own view of himself as benign and enlightened.  His forced humor, feigned modesty, and dubious charity are only a cover for privilege and egotism.  Without a raised voice, this film records some of the most eviscerating conversations I have ever heard.  With Ceylon channeling Chekhov, this too has a very Russian literary flavor.  Needless to say, the acting in both these films is superb, though none of the players were familiar to me. 

Nor in Strange Little Cat (MC-80, NFX, #31), a strange little number that started out as a student assignment to make a film derived from a Kafka story.  Ramon Zűrcher’s final product bears little resemblance to “The Metamorphosis,” but tells a family tale that is uncanny in its own way.  Spending one day with an extended family inside the tight confines of a Berlin apartment, we gradually come to understand who is who, how they are related, and how they relate to each other, with weirdness taken for granted on all sides.  The cat may be the least strange occupant of the place.  Short but dense and offbeat, the film turns out to be oddly disarming, when you’re ready for something completely different.

Couldn’t bring myself to watch Stray Dogs (MC-84, NFX, #20) or Norte, The End of History (MC-81, NFX #29), shying from the prospect of dismal duration.  I have little more patience for so-called Slow Cinema than for Slow Food.

Among “Best Picture” nominees, I found American Sniper (MC-72, NFX) more palatable than I expected.  As a battle film over which battlelines were drawn, I expected a jingoist screed.  Clint Eastwood turns out to be more subtle as a director than as a right-wing ideologue and operative, especially given the eye-opening performance of Bradley Cooper as the deadliest sniper of them all.  I would compare this film favorably to The Hurt Locker, for its you-are-there feel for Americans in combat in Iraq (while both are far surpassed by Generation Kill, David Simon’s HBO series).  Taken simply as a taut, economical, action-adventure war movie with overtones of the Wild West, American Sniper has a lot to say for itself.  Gladly oblivious of the story of Chris Kyle in Iraq and afterward, I could take it without a lot of baggage.  Within its genre, Eastwood delivers a fine specimen, until he fudges the aftermath, when the sniper goes home.  Sienna Miller could have been given more to do, as the wife who needs to bring her husband home from the war, psychologically as well as physically.  The film glosses over the adjustment, much as the soldier himself does, and then brings up his shocking death without really confronting it, a decisive failure of imagination and nerve.  If they weren’t going to deal with it, they should have ended the film where Kyle ended his memoir, adding only an endnote, instead of a half-formed scene that raises more questions than it resolves.

On a different note, I have a sleeper to recommend -- it’s a good touchstone, to determine whether you should take my cinematic recommendations and reservations to heart.  If you prefer Gone Girl to The Blue Room (MC-72, NFX), then you probably should look elsewhere for film finds.  Mathieu Amalric’s film is half as long and twice as good, in a fine Gallic tradition of psychological thrillers mixing sex and murder – no femme is more fatale than a French one, ever since the New Wave one-upped the American film noir.  Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau -- his partner in sex, crime, and filmmaking -- adapt a Simenon novel into a bantamweight puncher worth of its pulp-ish models, from Hitchcock to Clouzot, Truffaut, and Chabrol.  The film is swift, elliptical, and confounding.  I won’t spoil any of its unfolding.

At this point, I’m ready to offer my own summation of the best films of 2014, ranking them in comparison to the critical consensus, as I compute it.  I list them under four headings, in roughly declining order of my preference.

EXHORTATIONS (I urge you to see these):

Boyhood   (#1)

Selma  (#10)

Mr. Turner  (#16)

Two Days, One Night  (#12)

We Are the Best!  (#25)

RECOMMENDATIONS (I advise you to see these):

Ida  (#6)

Whiplash  (#8)

Nightcrawler  (#17)

Inherent Vice  (#7)

Under the Skin  (#3)

Ilo Ilo (Singapore)

Gloria (starring Pauline Garcia)

Leviathan  (#30)

Winter Sleep  (#32)

Like Father, Like Son  (#50)

It Felt Like Love  (#49)

Beyond the Lights

The Trip to Italy

The Blue Room

APPRECIATIONS (you might find something to like in here):

A Most Violent Year  (#37)

Birdman  (#4)

The Immigrant  (#14)

Tracks

Wild  (#48)

Still Alice

American Sniper

Strange Little Cat (#31)

Only Lovers Left Alive  (#11)

Foxcatcher  (#28)

Force Majeure  (#15)

Love is Strange  (#35)

Listen Up Philip  (#19)

Theory of Everything

The Imitation Game

Locke  (#42)

EQUIVOCATIONS (you’re on your own with these):

The Grand Budapest Hotel  (#2)

Gone Girl  (#13)

Stranger by the Lake  (#19)

Snowpiercer  (#18)

Goodbye to Language  (#9)

I hope you find something new and notable in this list, which you might not have heard of otherwise.  Search in the box at the top left of this page for my comments on individual films, which include direct links to Metacritic for more info and opinion.