Top 10 Week... Films of 2014

#10: Snowpiercer
Call it the little engine that could. Despite having to do battle with its own distributor (The Weinstein Company, continuing its strategy of eating its young), Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer emerged unscathed by the notorious Weinstein scissors and found an audience despite being cast adrift in its release. A story of dystopia set entirely in one location (a train hurtling around the frozen globe), Bong makes effective use of the inherent claustrophobia of the setting, giving the story a great amount of urgency that combines with the naturally kinetic energy of the narrative's video game-like structure that sees its heroes advancing one level at a time, one fight at a time, to make this one of the year's most entertaining and well-assembled films.

Top 10 Week... Performances by Women in 2014

#10: Elizabeth Banks, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
I said it in my review of the film and I'll say it again now: Elizabeth Banks is the secret MVP of The Hunger Games. Across three films, she has built a character who goes much deeper than her gonzo, attention drawing appearance. There is great humanity in Effie Trinket and of all the major characters in the story, she has perhaps the most complex relationship with Panem, in that she has benefited from her place in it and revels in part of its culture, but also has a strong attachment and affection for the victims of the Capitol's brutal dictatorship. Those mixed feelings come across in the way that she engages with the rebellion with her being grateful to be with the people she considers friends but at the same time displaying a hint of wistfulness for the life that she's left behind and all its privileges and rewards. Banks' performance is the breath of fresh air that keeps the story lively when it might otherwise have sunk beneath its somber tones, buoying it up with quick, short notes of comedy. Performances like this one rarely get rewarded, but God do they ever bring something necessary to their stories.

Top 10 Week... Performances by Men in 2014

#10: Andy Serkis, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
There will eventually come a day when motion capture performances are embraced as deriving from as legitimate an artistic space as life action performances. Until then Andy Serkis will continue to give wonderful, amazingly nuanced performances that challenge the notion of a motion capture performance as little more than the act of providing a frame over which to drape CGI. As Caesar, the evolved chimpanzee who provides the bridge between the declining human race and the ascending apes, Serkis is the soul of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (and its predecessor). Both drawn to and repulsed by humans due to his previous experiences with them, Caesar fights not only with himself, but with the other apes in the community, driven by his desire to create the best possible world for his children to live in. Serkis brings the perfect mixture of confidence, wistfulness, regret and hope to the performance, and in the process makes a chimpanzee one of the most "human" characters to grace the screen in 2014.

Top 10 Week... Scenes of 2014

#10: Opening Monologue, Dom Hemingway
Dom Hemingway opens with Jude Law as the eponymous character looking straight into the camera and delivering a 2 minute monologue about how glorious his penis is. He compares it to Picasso (because it's a work of art), declares that it should be studied in science classes (because it defies nature), asserts that it would win a medal if medals were given out for such things, insists that sonnets should be written about it and wars fought over it. It (the monologue, not the penis) is ridiculous, it is sublime. It is the perfect introduction for the character and more than sets the tone for the film that is about to unfold.

Top 10 Week... Posters of 2014

#10: Blue Ruin
The perfection of this poster is best understood if you've seen Blue Ruin. In a typical revenge thriller, the guy holding the gun would be the one seeking revenge, but the scene depicted in the poster is just one of the many scenes in which things go terribly awry for the protagonist. It's a great "mood" poster, too.

Review: Whiplash (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons

When do the ends stop justifying the means? If you shape a young talent into a star, but crush his spirit in the process, is his ascension to that next plateau still a win? Damien Chezelle's Whiplash is the story of an abusive relationship, but it's also a story about the atmosphere and attitudes that foster that kind of abuse and enshrine the abuser in a position of institutional power. The result is a brutal duet played out between actors Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons and a story with madness at its core, the madness of men so driven towards the highest level of achievement that they're willing to destroy themselves and others to get there. It is a film of sometimes unbearable emotional intensity and so tightly coiled for so much of its running time that when it finally and fully explodes in its finale, it leaves you breathless.

Review: Gone Girl (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike

Because professional film critics seem to be taking great pains to avoid talking about spoilers in Gone Girl, I'm going to state right off the top that this is going to be a fairly spoilery review. If you've managed to remain unspoiled about this story, then don't read any further - although the fact that I'm not even sure how that's possible is one of the reasons I decided to go full-spoiler. I didn't even read the novel but went into the film aware of the plot twist because the book was so ubiquitous. The other reason I have no hesitation in discussing the plot in some detail is because the twist is, frankly, the least interesting thing about this story. That's not a knock on Gone Girl, which is a first rate thriller that unfolds with the sort of ferocious precision we've all come to expect from David Fincher; it's just an acknowledgment of the fact that there's so much going on here that the inner workings of the plot are really a secondary concern.

Review: Boyhood (2014)

* * * *
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater

I remember hearing about Richard Linklater's ambitious plan to film a movie over the course of a decade, allowing the actors to age naturally on screen as the story is being told, shortly before it started filming back in 2002 and thinking that it sounded like an incredibly interesting idea, but wondering how he would get around the gimmick inherent in the premise. The answer, as it turns out, was to make the film as if there is no gimmick at all, allowing each segment to exist within its own time without having those points in time become in any way the focal point. Boyhood is not a series of snapshots about what life was like in 2002 and then 2003 and then 2004, etc.; instead it manages to capture the rhythm of the steady flow of time as we grow and change during its course, ensuring that the story feels whole rather than like a series of pieces put together. Boyhood is a film that not every filmmaker could have pulled off with such grace, and Linklater makes it look and feel effortless. This movie is a masterpiece, plain and simple.

Review: The Immigrant (2014)

* * * *
Director: James Gray
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
            - "The New Colossus" - Emma Lazarus

The immigrant story is one of two competing narratives. One is a story of hope and opportunity, the other is a story of hardship, marginalization and, in some cases, exploitation, both framed by another set of competing narratives, one in which immigrants are desired for their contributions to the growth of a nation, and one in which they are villified and characterized as leeching off the strength of a nation that they did not help to build up. James Gray's The Immigrant functions in both modes of the immigrant story, beginning and ending in hope, but bridged by a prolonged period of despair and pain. It is a thematically rich and visually stunning work anchored by great performances from Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jeremy Renner. No wonder its distributor (The Weinstein Company strikes again) has essentially abandoned it in release.

Review: Life Itself (2014)

* * * *
Director: Steve James

More often than not, critics are characterized as being the bane of a filmmaker's existence, the potential obstacle between a film and its audience. For that reason alone, Life Itself is a somewhat extraordinary film, celebrating as it does the life of film critic Roger Ebert. But Ebert wasn't just any film critic, nor was he really "just" a film critic. He was a wonderful writer and a champion of movies he felt deserved a bigger audience but were perhaps too small and/or obscure to find it on their own (one of the more famous examples is his embrace of Steve James' documentary Hoop Dreams), and he was knowledgeable with respect to film history and insightful when it came to breaking a film down. All of this is even more impressive when you consider that he wasn't even someone who grew up dreaming of becoming a film critic, but rather came into the occupation somewhat by chance as a result of joining the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times just as their regular film critic was leaving. That he would build his career up from those circumstances to become, arguably, the most famous film critic in North America and a Pulitzer Prize winner to boot is only a small measure of his extraordinary talent, and but a small reason why he's deserving of such an affectionate and compelling tribute.

Review: Snowpiercer (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Go Ah-sung, Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, John Hurt

Having now seen it, I can't really imagine how Harvey Weinstein could think that there's 20 minutes to cut from Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer. It runs at a robust 126 minutes but this is a taunt, white-knuckle science fiction thriller from beginning to end. Though it came at the price of sacrificing a large-scale theatrical release for an extremely limited theatrical run with simultaneous VOD release (which in hindsight I think will start to look like The Weinstein Company cutting off its nose to spite its face, as in what seems like an unusually quiet summer movie season this could have been at least a modest hit), Boon was able to successfully fight to keep his film intact - and thank God for that. This is a terrific film of incredible ambition and skilled execution. If you're lucky enough to have an opportunity to see it in a theater, seize the chance, but seek it out wherever you can find it.

Review: Ida (2014)

* * * *
Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Starring: Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata Kulesza

All of her life she's known herself as Anna, a WWII orphan with no family save for the nuns who raised her in the convent since infancy. Now, on the verge of becoming a nun herself, she learns that she does have one surviving family member after all, an aunt, and that before being allowed to take her vows she must meet with her. When she does, she learns that her name is actually Ida and that she's Jewish. If she is shocked by these revelations, she does not show it; she accepts them with the same placidity with which she greets everything. All she says is that she'd like to visit their graves. A tricky request, as the aunt points out, given that they were Jewish and killed during the Nazi occupation of Poland. This is the starting point for Pawel Pawlikowski's remarkable Ida, a wonderful, moving, and sometimes surprisingly funny film.

Review: Under the Skin (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Starring: Scarlett Johansson

Nothing can really prepare you for the hypnotic power of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, a science fiction film that is as coldly graceful as it is inaccessible. A film in which none of the characters are named and nothing is explained, full of striking, brutal images, it's a film that starts to unsettle you immediately and keeps you unsettled right up until its final image. I don't think I've ever seen a movie quite like this one; the closest I could think of was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which this film seems to echo in one sequence in particular. While I don't think that Under the Skin possesses the same transcendent power of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, it is a mesmerizing piece of filmmaking from a director completely confident in what he's doing.

Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori

To enter a Wes Anderson film is to enter a world that resembles our own in only the most superficial of ways, a hyperreality that plays by its own rules and is at once much flatter and much livelier than our own. You know a Wes Anderson film the second you lay eyes on it, because his visual style, the mathematical precision of his particular brand of whimsy, is so distinctly his own that it can belong to no one else. The director's latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is at once 100% in keeping with his work leading up to it, while at the same time being a significant departure. The Anderson hallmarks are all here, but despite the film's candy colored pallet, this is a much darker and more violent film than those that came before it. It's a film that's as mournful as it is funny, the pall of loss hanging over every scene but never dragging the film down.