Film Carew: The Top 20 Films Of 2014 Ultra-Mega-Countdown Super-Special

So long 2014! It’s been mighty real, and all, but it’s time to pack your shit up, pronto. 2015’s coming around, and we need you gone. But before you leave, let’s take one last sentimental traipse down memory lane, with a look at the greatest movies to grace your days.

As ever, with film-releasing, release-dates’re a little fuzzy; but we took ‘any film to newly screen in Australia’ as the starting point. And, oh, if you’re looking for Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour, Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, or Aril Folman’s The Congress —all of which found loving releases on local screens this year— well, they were on last year’s list.

Here’s this year’s: the Best 20 Films Of 2014.

20. Boyhood 

(USA, Richard Linklater)

It feels like a miracle that Boyhood even exists: Linklater’s adolescent odyssey shot over 12 years, finding lead Ellar Coltrane aging from 6 to 18 over three hours. Its production produces a piece of unique cinema, even if it has to overcome some hokey soap-operatics —scenery-chewing drunken step-dads, plural!— before finding its dramatic feet late in Coltrane’s dazed, confused high-school years.

19. We Are The Best!

(Sweden, Lukas Moodysson)

Moodysson returns to the form of his golden-boy glory days with this joyous tale of a trio of rebellious girls forming a punk band in early-’80s Stockholm. Letting his camera capture the natural nervousness and boisterousness of his adolescent stars, Moodysson has made one of cinema’s greatest portraits of that peculiar feeling of being 13.

18. A Story Of Children And Film

(UK, Mark Cousins)

Boogie Cousins, the laconic chronicler of the 15-hour The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, employs his encyclopaedic cinematic knowledge to author a fabulously-freeform history of children on screen; from wonky kids in MGM musicals to symbolist dreams in Socialist Albania, from ET to The Red Balloon, Tarkovsky to Panahi. It’s cinephilia of the sweetest stripe: wandering, philosophical, joyous, human.

17. Bloody Beans 

(Algeria, Narimane Mari) 

In this unique piece of performative docu-drama, a wild tribe of unsupervised kids play-acts the Algerian revolution amongst the production’s Lord Of The Flies-esque micro-society. As the turned-loose youth descend into an all-night cacophony of collective mayhem and rambunctious roleplay, Mari’s spotlit direction carries the twitchy terror of found-footage horror, and the pulsing electro-synth score sets the tenor for its breathless pace.

16. The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya

(Japan, Isao Takahata)

Eight years in the making, Takahata’s film is a wild shrine to the very possibilities of the animated medium. Its impressionist rendering of an ancient Japanese folktale comes through pencil scribbles and water-colour splotches, its ever-wobbling lines giving the film an aqueous, dreamlike, almost-psychedelic quality. The finally-finished film feels like a treasured gift for audiences who’ve spent decades suffering through hideously-ugly 3D animations.

15. Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?

(USA, Michel Gondry)

Sitting down with Noam Chomsky to talk life and philosophy, Gondry uses his subject’s thoughts and words as a creative springboard for this animated film, in which hand-drawn scribbles dance brightly, the whole alive with ideas and wild with dreams.

14. You & The Night

(France, Yann Gonzalez)

“Always follow the clues in dreams,” whispers one of the melodramatic participants in the orgy at the centre of Yann Gonzalez’s debut; and it’s advice that the filmmaker (and ex-M83 member) follows. Continually alighting into lurid, video-clip-ish flights-of-fantasy, You & The Night is a highly-stylised, emotionally-overdriven mish-mash of cinematic surrealism, ’80s erotic thriller, Italian gialli, and rock-opera.

13. Young & Beautiful

(France, François Ozon)

Where its premise —17-year-old takes up after-school gig as high-class call-girl— reeks of salaciousness and scandal, Ozon instead authors a cold, measured take on hyper-capitalism. Here, he sees the teenager’s desire to discover her body’s online price as the product of a society in which financial worth is routinely conflated with self-worth, and absolutely everything is a commodity.

12. Fish & Cat

(Iran, Shahram Mokri)

Razing the notion that single-take movies need progress in real time, Mokri’s astonishingly-choreographed one-shot folds time in on itself as it pirouettes through multiple perspectives of the same interactions. This endless singular-tracking-shot nods to Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr, The Shining and Gerry, but its actual narrative —college kids at lakeside campout stalked by cannibalistic yokels— artfully plays with horror-film cliché.

11. Edge Of Tomorrow

(USA, Doug Liman)

The year’s standout explosion-movie throws human-collateral Tom Cruise into an endless time-loop, in which he dies, time and again, at the hands of invading aliens, only to awaken anew each day. Obliterating the drab tropes of brand-managing superhero-movies, Liman mounts an ironic meta-riff on the video-game-isation of blockbuster filmmaking (and, if you peer deep enough, Cruise’s dianetic delusions), making for a wildly-entertaining, unexpectedly-hilarious case of the tentpole action-pic eating itself.

10. The Grand Budapest Hotel

(USA, Wes Anderson)

Much as Michel Gondry did with Mood Indigo, Anderson’s 8th feature begins with what seems like self-parody —its ultra-fussy dollhouse dioramas, dollied tableaux, throttling zooms, eye-of-God overheads, and hyper-stylised set-pieces like Anderson doing Anderson— before turning its fantasy-world into a sad symbol. The titular gilded palace provides its inhabitants with the illusion that it’s a safe enclave from encroaching European fascism, but, in reality, it offers them no protection from the cold, cruel world that lurks beyond; Anderson’s rapidfire comedy camouflaging a heart of dark tragedy.

9. Inside Llewyn Davis

(USA, Joel & Ethan Coen)

Where musician biopics and rockumentaries normally work feverishly to fashion mythology, the Coen Bros’ take on the Greenwich folk-scene circa ’61 instead gives us the titular anti-careerist, whose trials, troubles, and tribulations are no rites-of-passage on the way to fame, just quotidian suffering stitched with existential woe. It sounds grim, and often is, but it’s also blessed with the Coens’ sweet ear for dialogue, smart sense of the absurd, and meticulous approach to composition.

8. Come Worry With Us!

(Canada, Helen Klodawsky)

Klodawsky had never heard the music of Montréal’s almighty Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra when she started filming them; the social-documentarian more interested in the fact that this punk-rock co-op were bringing their toddler son and a nanny along in the tour-van. What results is an intimate chronicle of parental anxieties, financial insecurities, and the perilous nature of new-millennial artmaking; all soundtracked by a band whose latest LP, Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything, is another towering slab of righteous grandeur.

7. 10.000km

(Spain, Carlos Marques-Marcet)

10.000km begins with real-time scene of a pair of lovers in a Barcelona bed, limbs mingled, lives wholly intertwined. Then, one accepts an artist-residency offer in Los Angeles, and their now-divided lives are chopped up into digital fragments of tenuous connection/s; Marques-Marcet playing out his long-distance-relationship drama across the symbolic medium of Skype.

6. Miss Violence

(Greece, Alexandros Avranas)

There’s echoes of Dogtooth in this decade’s latest great Greek movie, but what Yorgos Lanthimos —and so much of the Greek weird-wave— depicts as droll comedy, Avranas delivers as dark tragedy: patiently, potently mounting a horrifying portrait of patriarchal society, indoctrinated misogyny, systematic abuse, and weak-willed enabling.

5. Force Majeure

(Sweden, Ruben Östlund)

When making his ultra-droll comedy-of-new-millennial-manners, Östlund hoped, like Ingmar Bergman before him, to raise the divorce rates in Sweden with a single film. His other goal was to stage the most elaborate avalanche sequence in cinema history; and, when the snow comes rushing towards a nuclear family at an alpine resort, dad Johannes Kuhnke grabs his iPhone rather than his kids, instantly turning a skiing holiday into a gender-warfare battlefield.

4. Manakamana

(USA/Nepal, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez)

Whether you see Manakamana —the latest sublime work from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Laboratory— as a cinematic shrine to transcendence or a sly critique thereof, it’s the year’s most distinctive piece of ethnographic art. Consisting, simply, of 12 single-take shots of pilgrims ascending to a Nepalese mountaintop monastery via cable-car, it’s a largely-silent meditation on the juxtaposition of the mundane with the divine.

3. Stray Dogs

(Taiwan, Tsai Ming-liang)

Tsai’s long portrayed those who’ve slipped through society’s cracks, but his minimalist pictures of urban alienation, fathomless longing, and mounting desire have always been delivered with a Buddhist calm. Stray Dogs finds his long-take slow-cinema rolling longer and slower than ever, but, this time, it resounds like an unalloyed howl-of-rage.

2. Under The Skin

(UK, Jonathan Glazer)

The hook for Glazer’s third film —Scarlett Johansson as alien black-widow, luring men to their deaths in rural Scotland— sounds plenty great, but it radically oversells the presence of actual narrative, whilst underselling Under The Skin’s sheer visual splendour, its gravity and greatness. The former video-clip whiz has created a sustained climax of visual rapture, its parade of unforgettable images alive to the wonders of the universe, clawing boldly towards eternity.

1. Her

(USA, Spike Jonze)

Though set in that favourite speculative-fiction time-period, the Not-Too-Distant Future, Her is an undeniable film of our times. Its premise —Joaquin Phoenix’s sadsack writer falls in love with an AI OS— serves as starting-point for Jonze to take the pulse of digital-society; his script chronicling the alienation of the modern metropolis, and the intimate union of human and device. With people mediating their existences through the prism of social-media —which is no window unto the world, but (black) mirror back onto ourself— Jonze essentially asks a simple question: who will want to deal with the difficulties, complexities, and challenges of a real relationship in an era of ever-increasing technological ease? Erecting his sublime cinematic fantasy, Jonze seeks only to draw closer to reality; Her an achingly-human attempt to understand both society and self.

Others Receiving Love: My Man (Japan, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri); Amour Fou (Austria, Jessica Hausner); Abuse Of Weakness (France, Catherine Breillat); Exhibition (UK, Johanna Hogg); Jimmy’s Hall (UK, Ken Loach); Two Days, One Night (Belgium, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne); Stop The Pounding Heart (USA, Roberto Minervini); Ruin (Australia/Cambodia, Amiel Courtin-Wilson & Michael Cody); Maidan (Ukraine, Sergei Loznitsa); Watermark (Canada, Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky); Concerning Violence (Sweden/USA, Göran Hugo Olsson); Finding Vivian Maier (USA, John Maloof & Charlie Siskel); School Of Babel (France, Julie Bertuccelli); All This Mayhem (Australia, Eddie Martin); The Distance (Spain, Sergio Caballero); Nymphomaniac (Denmark, Lars von Trier); Creep (USA, Patrick Brice); Listen Up Philip (USA, Alex Ross Perry); Nightcrawler (USA, Dan Gilroy); Interstellar (USA, Christopher Nolan).