Having done this for three years now, I can feel my ambition choking my purpose. Before this, in 2011, 2012, and 2013 (parts I and II), I seemed to be striving towards completism. This was a way to chronicle memories of time spent, a strategy of justification and understanding. Why am I watching all of these movies — no, better yet, why am I logging my feelings after watching all of these movies? But now that there is a modicum of expectation attached — it was nice to hear that people have enjoyed this in years past, so I’ll keep doing it if it only for that reason (also to quiet the demon in my brain) — I seem to be approaching it more like a task and with less of a sociopath’s deadened joy. This year’s list has ballooned to 50. It is extremely difficult to keep up with popular culture, and I say that knowing what a piece of wasteful human garbage it makes me sound like. I try to watch the shows and listen to the songs and read the books for reasons I’ve elucidated in the past. The spreadsheet wants what it wants.
So I saw 142 films released in 2014. This is more or less about the number I’ve seen in years past, though I feel as if I’ve missed a particularly high number of relevant titles this year — 56 in total, are still unchecked on my ROLLING FILMS LIST Google Doc. Among them are Leviathan, Dumb and Dumber To, Why Don’t You Go Play in Hell?, Beyond the Lights, The Theory of Everything, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, John Wick, The Judge, American Sniper, Miss Julie, and Force Majeure. I’ll get to them, I promise. Some of those 56 surely would have made this list — I keep looking for two hours to steal for citizenfour, but I haven’t found them yet. We can only do so much, see so much, feel so much. These are ones that are done, seen, felt. Some of them, anyway.
50. The Immigrant
The dry fart of elegance. James Gray makes lovely paintings, but I’m not so sure if they’re great movies.
49. The LEGO Movie
48. Non-Stop
Popcorn for the corndogs. Neither should work, even as trifles, but both do because I suspect there’s more invention in the minds of their creators than even the financiers were willing to wager. Which is to say, these movies were profitable as well as enjoyable. Let it not be forgotten that Non-Stop director Jaume-Collet Serra also made the 2009 horror minorpiece Orphan, while The Lego Movie bros Phil Lord and Chris Miller are responsible for lost-to-the-ages MTV animated series Clone High. Being a studio hack doesn’t have to be soulless.
47. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
Mike Meyers directed this documentary about the quasi-legendary rock manager famed for turning Alice Cooper into chicken-head-biting, good-taste-exempting pariah and star, while also overseeing the careers of Teddy Pendergrass, Anne Murray, and Emeril Lagasse among other modestly remembered but at the time quite fucking famous celebrities. I get the impression Meyers did this because Gordon was outlandishly kind to him as he was going through a divorce, allowing him to stay at his Maui estate for months, cooking for him every night and sharing the wisdom Gordon had gleaned from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Shep Gordon is a well-rounded, successful, thoughtful, searching product of a Hollywood that created unimaginable opportunities for men from nowhere with no ambition. Shep Gordon is also a guy who wore this T-shirt fairly often. Take the good with the bad. Meyers’ movie isn’t particularly well made, it ambles between segments in Gordon’s life — I for one would have liked to hear a lot more about his working relationship with the famously particular, fabulous, and fascinating Luther Vandross — and it lacks any visual flair, cascading around with animated sequences, talking-head interviews, archival photos, and muckety punchlines. Meyers also inserts himself into the movie, which is both boldly honest and the move of a deluded star. I like this movie because it features people who never talk out of school talking all out of school. Michael Douglas shares a handful of stories in the movie about Gordon’s predilection for Playboy Bunnies that is simply not available in any other medium on earth. Sometimes access is king.
46. Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
The general whatever-fuck-this-maniac response Lars Von Trier receives at this stage (conclusion?) of his career as a director is particularly frustrating for me because I only now have started to understand what in his films works for me and what does not. The deconstruction and diagrammatic sequences in this movie, the chapterized storytelling and the omnibus approach to one woman’s sexual pain and pleasure seems like really novel and sui generis filmmaking. Likewise for Melancholia and even Antichrist. The structure is fast and loose and wonderful except when it isn’t. It leaves room for Uma Thurman to thunder in for the most devastating six minutes on screen this year, only to vanish forever. It also allows space for Shia LeBeouf’s increasingly affected and wonderful acting. His accent is questionable, but his mania, especially in Vol. 1, is thrilling. I love insane public catastrophe Shia, but it’s messing with the perception of a pretty talented and striving young actor. Sure he’s a narcissist. He’s an actor for chrissakes.
45. Locke
The pour! Like someone actually took you up on the bet that they’d watch Tom Hardy read the telephone book, but instead of the Yellowpages they replaced it with a script about concrete and man’s filial duties. Seriously, this movie is 84 minutes of Hardy, affecting a cold while Welsh, whining the whine of a stymied middle manager with some disrupted side action, an angry wife, and an irate boss. And it’s riveting. A truly inspirational script and a truly damaged leading man who never doesn’t have fun. I would watch Hardy read this blog post and I hate myself.
44. Snowpiercer
43. Coherence
I found Snowpiercer — when not involving Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, or Alison Pill — basically a grim, underwhelming sci-fi actioner. But I admire the effort. Coherence, on the other hand, was the opposite experience, a brain-dicer with little expectation, less budget, and lots more intriguing quantum physics than Christopher Nolan’s wet-blanket sad-daddy spaceship saga. And they’re not even the third or fourth best science fiction movies in an unusually great year for the genre.
42. Love Is Strange
I have had so many fights and makeout sessions and awkward conversations in the hallways of New York City apartment buildings. They are the secret pillow forts or treehouses of adults city-dwellers, where important whispered conversations happen and decisions are made. This isn’t necessarily the most trenchant emotional observation in Ira Sachs’ beautiful movie, but it is an acute one. Two important bookends of Sachs’ movie take place in these hallways, and they’re both chilling in their closeness to real life.
The most trenchant observation in the movie doesn’t necessarily have to do with gay love, either, largely because that is treated as a common fact of life, save one inciting incident in the Alfred Molina’s character’s life. In fact, it’s far more perceptive and precise about how we treat aging people with no place to go.
Both my maternal and paternal grandmothers are alive, but neither are in good health. One, my mother’s mother, who we call “Tots,” has struggled with esophageal cancer for the better part of five years. I sat beside her on Christmas evening as she quietly cried watching her entire family eat coffee cake and peanut butter cookies and blueberry pie. She can’t eat anything other than Equal instant breakfast. The rest is too acidic, it burns. She lives on a steady diet of the stuff, and her daily dose of Lidocaine to ease the pain of a cursed mouth. My father’s mother, Marge, is 92 and was moved to a retirement home after a nasty fall in her apartment two years ago. She lived on her own until that point, 24 years by herself after the death of her husband. She is a tough old Irish broad like Anne Enright or Joyce might write about. Quiet, steely, sturdy. She suffered a stroke two months ago, and on Christmas Eve I experienced that most incredible and horrible moment where my grandmother, who descends into and out of a slippery dementia, looked me in the eye and registered not an ounce of recognition. I hugged her and kissed her and looked at her and she just couldn’t figure who I was. Later, I watched her tell my father that her last name is “Tanturri,” which it is not. “Your name is my name,” my father said. She wasn’t buying it. Two hours later, she was wheeled to bed, and then asleep and we were on our way back to our homes. Tots lives with my mother, and has for two decades. She raised me just as much as my mother, who worked two jobs the way single moms in America always seem to. Tots had to leave her home in the ’90s because she needed to be close to her family, to those who could watch after her as she watched over them. Marge was more independent for longer, but she has faded faster. They are helpless without their families. This is true of the characters in Sachs’ movie, too, which knows how difficult that pain can be for the families who must look after their aging elders, who seem to have less usefulness than ever. It’s not a glamorous thing to portray. No one wants to feel bad about the selfishness that their own families make us understand about ourselves. Doesn’t make it not true.
41. The Unknown Known
Speaking of truth and dementia, here is the first time Errol Morris has ever been stumped by his subject. Donald Rumsfeld has the most astonishing smile, a split between kindly old skeleton and upper bicuspid-baring demon bureaucrat ice cream salesman. He flashes it several times in this confounding movie, where Morris starts and stalls his engine of interrogation over and over again in pursuit of the what lies in the mind of a maddening figure of fin de siecle arrogance. I like all of Morris’ movies, they are staggeringly watchable, even when they don’t turn out the way he’d hoped.
40. Fury
39. The Imitation Game
This is the same movie. A timid man of letters, thrust into the middle of World War II, enters a macho environ populated by four men; said scholar is ostracized before ultimately proving himself and soon becoming a rallying force thanks to the misguided love of a good woman. Heroism ensues. Then tragedy. Fury seemed like a joke the first time I saw it — I must have said “Who is this movie for?” out loud five or six times on the drive home — but it has grown more impressive in my memory. The Imitation Game is extremely dull by the standards of structure, but it has a couple of ingenious moments. Points for making the chugging gears of a giant Plinko board look like something other than a game show distraction. Benedict Cumberbatch seems like a fine actor, I wish I knew if he had another gear. Brad Pitt has good hair.
38. Godzilla
This is movie about two monsters falling in love and trying to find a room to fuck in, but then another monster comes and ruins their sex party. And we’re supposed to root for the no-sex-party monster because he has cultural capital and because all of the human are made of some sort of organophosphate. I might have enjoyed more monster time, but the red-flares sequence is the single most beautiful and unnecessary thing I saw on a big screen this year.
37. Virunga
A cause doc with a little spymaster intrigue, mixing corporate geopolitics and deliriously adorable gorillas under siege. There’s an unspoken tension in this movie between Belgium, which was once the colonizer of Congo, and the new overlords of colonial life, international business interest. That’s not explored because, well, they filmmakers have sided with the Belgian man who runs the national park that the film takes its name from that also features precious resources that the corporation would like to acquire posthaste. If this film were not funded and promoted by Netflix — it could well be a high-end edition of Frontline — I likely wouldn’t have seen it. But I have, and for its kind, it’s as informative and elegantly drawn as this sort of thing gets. No sex monsters though.
36. Starry Eyes
Little-seen but amazing in its intensity and corporeal gruesomeness. (Not my favorite year for horror. It may have been quite poor, actually, if we’re not counting Listen Up Philip.) Living in L.A. you see a lot of women that you used to think only appeared in Guns n Roses videos. And by that I don’t mean Stephanie Seymour, but actually wide-eyed, hopeful, slowly deadening actress-types (also, now, improv types) who have genuine beauty and spark and definitely played a killer Desdemona in high school. (This isn’t a gendered issue either, the himbo actor-waiters are strong out here.) The star of Starry Eyes, Alex Essoe, whom I’ve never seen before, has that wide-eyed spark. She is an expressive and wonderfully desperate performer. This has a touch of discomfitting gender issues — it features one of the most stomach-turning, mad-eyed fellatio scenes in movie history — but you never can tell if that’s for knowing effect or the filmmakers Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmeyer are in on the joke or not.
35. The Drop
34. A Most Wanted Man
Dead men tell no tales, but they can still do amazing things on screen. Still gutted about Hoffman and Gandolfini, I just loved watching them in movies — a pure enjoyment, even in crap. This isn’t their best, not by a shot, but both movies have a measured solemnity, like they knew they would be seen as the sober farewells. Lehane and le Carre are quite meaningful to a handful of friends, and so I’m happy for them and thankful for these two guys.
33. Life Itself
32. Jodorowsky’s Dune
Proof that a life in the movies is not a waste. Roger Ebert died at 71 and Alejandro Jodorowsky is a living firecracker at 85. Two men who always thought bigger and sometimes had bad ideas, but never gave up on them.
31. Blue Ruin
The most fun you can have for less than a million dollars. Read this.
30. Calvary
I was asked to be a godfather recently, to stand in a church and reject Satan out loud, in front of my family and a priest and some strangers. This was a late baptism, for a boy who is six years old. It felt awful. I love the boy, my nephew, he is wonderful, but the prospect of rejecting Satan and saying an Our Father and standing in one of those palaces has become so distasteful that I despise even the theatrical acts involved. A priest rubbed oil on a boy’s chest and drew crosses on his shoes and arms and splashed some water on his head and now he’s on the side of good. Ritual becomes normalcy for a kid who, to that point in his life, had never even been in a church. What a world.
You get the impression Brendan Gleeson’s priest in Calvary gets what I’m saying.
29. Palo Alto
The best use of James Franco’s cheesehead grin and leering provocations this year. After The Interview and the North Korean hack saga, Franco has perhaps never been more reviled, but I must say his winsome, amateurish short story collection Palo Alto has become a lovely, elliptical first feature by another person with the last name Coppola. It’s Gia, one of Francis Ford’s granddaughters. Emma Roberts is perfect in this. Nat Wolf is perfect-er.
28. The Rover
Audio evidence of my fondness here.
27. Cheap Thrills
Some written thoughts about it here.
26. Guardians of the Galaxy
Bradley Cooper’s best work to date.
25. Nightcrawler/Enemy
Jake Gyllenhaal blacked the fuck out in 2014 and we can draw the line from his improvement as a performer and selector of film roles directly to the end of his relationship with Taylor Swift. Look at his filmography since 2011, after their alleged split. EXACTLY. Also, Gyllenhaal looks like this now. Word to the wise.
24. The Trip to Italy
23. Listen Up Philip
Disgusting men and their disgusting bad habits, but oh how we praise them and make them famous and laugh at their grossness. I think the self-aggrandizing monsters in The Trip to Italy are actually more loathsome, or the moral odometer, than the self-deluded pricks Listen Up Philip. The latter wins because it has Elisabeth Moss and those Alanis Morissette-listening twits don’t.
22. [We’ll get there.]
21. The Double
20. Night Moves
I wrote at length about Jesse Eisenberg earlier this year, and had a nice talk with him about his career. He’s an incredibly intelligent guy, so verbal and high-strung but never bracing. I really enjoyed chatting with him. He had a lot of questions for me about Bill Simmons. I loved both of his movies and thought him never better. He’s a charming leading man, but he’s actually better when likeability doesn’t figure into it. I can’t wait to see what he does as Lex Luthor, beyond act crop circles around Henry Cavill.