Well, this sure has been a weird year for making a Top 10/15 list. Movies that I originally ranked highly didn’t quite make it, but movies I ranked a tad lower stayed with me all year. In some cases I was deliberately conservative earlier in the year. I needn’t have been. It was the year of the music movie, as three of my picks are movies that feature music prominently but are not musicals per se. There is a bona fide musical but it’s not one of the ones you’ve probably heard of. It certainly was a great year for soundtracks.
Of course there have been plenty of quite good films that just aren’t my favorites of the year. Selma, A Most Violent Year, Wild, Rosewater and Nightcrawler were all well done. Guardians of the Galaxy and The Raid 2 were good fun but you won’t see them on my list either. Inherent Vice just wasn’t for me, and I had issues with American Sniper. Some years I include festival movies that haven’t actually released yet. I didn’t have to this year, although if you’re curious, those would have been 99 Homes and The Tribe, but both have secured distribution and will be ready to rank in 2015.
Check Out: CraveOnline’s 14 Best Movies of 2014
Most interesting to me are that a number of films on my list, numbers 13 and 10 specifically, are favorites because of what they say about the way we view films, what we expect from them and what that says about our needs. I suppose after 37 years of film viewing, 15 years professional analysis and the rest of my amateur practice, I seek out those sorts of cinema experiences. The rest are just damn powerful, creative works of art.
Fred Topel’s 15 Best Films of 2014:
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
The 14 Best Films of 2014 - A Fourth Opinion
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15. Goodbye World
A film I reviewed at the Los Angeles Film Festival last year finally got its release this year. Writer/director Denis Hennelly and co-writer Sarah Adina Smith found a new approach to two tried and true cinematic genres: 1) the end of the world and 2) the group of infighting “friends” stuck in one location together. The infighting is super-intellectual political and philosophical debate that manages to provoke without preaching, and the apocalypse is damn suspenseful and surprising. I hope people keep discovering Goodbye World.
Read my interview with Goodbye World director Denis Hennelly.
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14. Unbroken
The life story of Louis Zamperini was so awesome, you’d have to really screw up to make a lousy movie out of it. What director Angelina Jolie does that elevates Unbroken above typical awardsy movies is she stays out of its way. Oh sure, there’s beautiful Roger Deakins cinematography and harrowing action scenes with great visual effects, but you need only remember that Zamperini really did all of this to be more awed by the real story than the presentation. It only left me wanting more when I found out the most extraordinary thing Zamperini did happened after the movie ends.
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13. Boyhood
I’ve been in the pro-Boyhood camp since I saw it at Sundance. Perhaps the biggest common criticism speaks to what I got out of the film. In many ways, Boyhood could be made traditionally with a three months shoot, two sets of actors aged up and down. We would take it for granted because we’re used to seeing that. Seeing the actual boy and girl age 12 years is different. It’s subtly different and may be imperceptible but it’s worth thinking about. That to me makes it more than just a gimmick.
Read my interview with Boyhood star Ellar Coltrane.
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12. Begin Again
The movie I absolutely needed to see at a low point creatively, Begin Again has inspired me all year and I know it will continue to. It has something to say about art vs. commerce, relationships both business and personal, and believing in yourself. I tried to think of a less corny way to say it, but I think Begin Again tells us those things are not corny. They mean a lot and we may always need a reminder or a jumpstart. There’s always a new creative endeavor to believe in. The music rocks too
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11. Gone Girl
I have a lot of helpful friends who want to give me advice for improving my love life. They tell me I need to have “game.” I need to say this or do that to land a lady. Finally, I have an example to give them for why I’m not interested in that tactic. If I have “game,” if I put on a performance to “win” a woman, I will attract someone like Amazing Amy and I’m going to get Gone Girled. That is what Gillian Flynn’s source material is warning us, and David Fincher is having some fun with it too.
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10. Winter's Tale
I went easier on Winter’s Tale than most critics and I was still too hard on it. Winter’s Tale has been the gift that keeps on giving this year. I have bonded with others who witnessed its sex bed and oceanliner infant dropping. I’ve encouraged them to see the alternate ending which involved Russell Crowe’s frozen corpse and face ice. I became so fascinated I read the book, which is so crazy, I realized Akiva Goldsman’s only mistake was trying to make Winter’s Tale make sense. It’s not supposed to make sense. That may have been an unfortunate concession to Hollywood, which seems obsessed with making even fantasy movies appear to make sense (foreign cinemas like Hong Kong and Bollywood do not share this rule). Not all stories are supposed to make sense. I do wish Goldsman had included the "troublesome midget" (Mark Helprin’s words, not mine) who lights a train on fire but dies by falling into a sinkhole in one line of prose.
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9. The Overnighters
As you may be able to tell from reading my reviews, I am a pretty spiritual guy. I believe in moral and ethereal forces, and spend a lot of time thinking about humanity’s relationship with one another. The Overnighters puts many of those theories to the ultimate test. This documentary about a pastor who gives shelter to day workers with criminal histories asks tough questions and shows a family sacrificing to make their ideals a reality. As a film, director Jesse Moss kind of lucked into an incredible story as it was happening, but that too must have been a gift of some kind. I believe in that.
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8. Rudderless
The second music movie on my list, Rudderless also uses music as an inspiration, but as an emotional healing more than any actual career achievement for the musician. It is the powerful story of a father mourning his son, finding a way to go on by playing the music his son left behind. As you might imagine, it contains many emotional gut punches, but the kind you want out of a drama. Don’t sugar coat this. Let us go through everything Sam (Billy Crudup) is going through with him. Then when we see there’s a way to survive a tragedy, we can believe it in a meaningful way.
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7. Tokyo Tribe
Not surprisingly, the best musical of the year was the Japanese rap opera Tokyo Tribe, not Into the Woods or Annie. I don’t even care much for rap, but these are melodic enough raps for me. The sheer inventiveness of handing off the story to different rappers won me over instantly, to the point that when they started speaking, I was itching for the rap to continue. Of course it’s a bloody, sex-filled (usually nonconsensual) gang war movie, so making it a musical adds an irreverent sense of whimsy to the violence. Everyone seems in on the joke, so it’s a clever way to process the genre, but totally politically incorrect. It’s opened in Asia, so it counts for 2014, but I don’t know when you’ll get a chance to see it in the States next.
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6. The LEGO Movie
It’s simply extraordinary the way Phil Lord and Chris Miller took a toy and its cross promotional brand synergy and turned it into a satirical indictment of the Hollywood blockbuster. Warner Brothers and LEGO were either incredibly good humored or they didn’t get it. Given how powerful the satire is in The LEGO Movie, it’s likely the latter. Also, the usual animated story about the social outcast who doesn’t follow the rules was the perfect fit for a world where there actually are instructions for how you’re supposed to build things. Don’t follow the instructions, kids. And also, please stop making Chosen One stories. Lord and Miller did the definitive one. It’s over now.
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5. 22 Jump Street
As extraordinary as Lord and Miller’s Lego Movie was, 22 Jump Street was totally speaking my language. I am Franchise Fred because I truly believe they should always make more sequels to everything, no exceptions. I stand by that and 22 Jump Street is why. They were able to comment on the buddy movie archetype of the first movie in a new way, yet reflexively consistent with 21 Jump Street. They were able to mine new jokes out of similar situations, and create new situations from existing backstory. They made fun of the process of milking a franchise dry while also embracing everything it enabled them to do. Of course the closing montage was just a personal gift for Franchise Fred. And Jillian Bell is amazing as Jonah Hill’s foil. I wish I’d discovered Jillian Bell first but she was already quite successful on her own.
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4. Blue Ruin
The movie I discovered in my trip to Cannes was released this year, and I will continue to champion it. There were some other excellent down and dirty action movies this year like John Wick and The Raid 2, each with much more elaborate choreography, but something about this gritty indie was more powerful. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see Macon Blair train for three months in Silat, but evoking the ‘70s tragic men of action, Blue Ruin was powerful tale of violent revenge with some clever twists on the genre’s supporting characters.
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3. Coherence
Funny, I gave Coherence the number three spot last year for seeing it at Fantastic Fest, and here it ends up at number three again. How’s that for consistency? This intellectual sci-fi film with no visual effects is far more exciting than even Guardians of the Galaxy. When seeing a glow stick gives you more “whoa” than Star-Lord’s blacklight, that’s some powerful storytelling. Over the last year, I learned how to describe the movie without spoiling it. It’s about a group of friends at a dinner party who discover they have become affected by quantum decoherence. If you know what that is, it’s a spoiler. If you’re like me, you’ll enjoy discovering quantum decoherence and all the intellectual questions it raises.
Read my interview with Coherence filmmakers James Ward Byrkit and Emily Foxler.
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2. Interstellar
I completely loved Interstellar and everything about the plot, emotion and spirituality worked for me. I saw it as Christopher Nolan embracing emotion and the unknown more than he ever has before. Where Inception was a structural masterpiece that left me cold (and frankly I felt the tragic love story was cheap and shallow), I was proud to see Nolan include X factors that might not answer everyone’s questions. I feel I understand those X factors completely but that’s why film is interpretive and open ended. I also liked the ice planet and the out of control spinning space station. I think McConaughey should have said “All right, all right, all right” when he hooked back up. I was already all in, wouldn’t have taken me out of the movie.
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1. Whiplash
Curse my conservativity. I was a little afraid to give a movie I saw the first night of Sundance the highest rating. I was leaving room for something to be even better, but I should’ve given Whiplash a 10/10 and thrown down the gauntlet for other Sundance films to measure up. Whiplash is such a powerful movie that it can mean different things to different people. I related to the desire to want to perform at one’s peak and win that elusive approval of a tyrant, though in retrospect I realized that I thrive more with positive reinforcement. For the trifecta of music movies, Whiplash could be about anything but it happens to be jazz drumming. I stand by everything I said at Sundance, but even more so nearly one year later.
Read my interview with Whiplash writer/director Damien Chazelle.
