#3
Boyhood
Dir. Richard Linklater
I doubt many people reading this listen to Ben Rector, but in his song “I Like You”, Rector sings that “life is not the mountain tops, it’s the walking in between.” If ever there was a film that perfectly encapsulated the meaning of this lyric, it is Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, an extraordinary look at the ordinary lives of a boy, his family, and the “little punctuations” they experience in life, not necessarily the exclamation marks or the periods but the commas and ellipses that connect life’s primary clauses. What makes Boyhood so remarkable is its ability to generate empathy through life’s unremarkable moments, not by focusing on the milestones people use to define their lives but instead by showing the seemingly insignificant events that string those milestones together. Boyhood is a sweeping epic, and yet, it is unbelievably intimate, and effortlessly soulful. Yeah, I loved it.
#2
Locke
Dir. Steven Knight
I am fascinated by movies about moral dilemmas. I can’t say for sure, but I think it primarily has to do with the fact that such films really allow me to place myself in a character’s shoes and wonder how I’d act in similar circumstances. Now, you take a magnificent actor like Tom Hardy and put him at the center of a character study like this, and you’ve pretty much got me in the bag from the first scene, as was the case with Locke from writer-director Steven Knight. Hardy gives one hell of a performance as Ivan Locke, a construction worker who sits at a stoplight prepared to go about his night until he flips his blinker the other way and does what he feels is right. For a movie that focuses entirely on a man in a car making, taking, and missing phone calls for 85 minutes, Locke is as fascinating and as tense as any film I saw all year… save for one.
#1
Gone Girl
Dir. David Fincher
When I think about the movies, about what draws me to the theater and what keeps me going back each and every week, films like Gone Girl are the ones that immediately come to mind. The more I think about David Fincher‘s latest airport fiction adaptation, the more I love it, and I’ve been thinking about Gone Girl a lot since I first saw it in October. It is so unsettling and yet so inviting, aided by a fantastic score and a thematic undercurrent I just can’t seem to shake. Gone Girl is a cunning film from a cunning filmmaker, at once a twisted thriller and a biting satire. It’s got laughs, thrills, and themes that could keep me talking and writing for hours, it features one of the best ensembles from 2014 — not to mention two of the year’s best female performances in Rosamund Pike and Carrie Coon — but more than that it is purely entertaining while at the same time being thought-provoking and complex. And so, without further ado, it is my pleasure to crown David Fincher’s latest effort, Gone Girl, my favorite film of 2014.
So there you have it, my top ten films of 2014, a year that at first glance felt relatively weak to me, but its strengths really showed as I dug back through all the films I saw. For reference, here are all the films in my top ten, listed in numerical order:
- Gone Girl
- Locke
- Boyhood
- A Most Violent Year
- Whiplash
- Enemy
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Layover
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Nightcrawler
Now it’s your turn, you guys. You’ve had an opportunity now to check out three different top ten lists on this site, between mine, Brad’s, Mike’s; what do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? What were your favorite films from 2014? Which ones do you still have to catch up on? Whose top ten list is the unequivocal, absolute, objective best? Sound off in the comments below!
