by Joyless Staff
Like any other year, 2014 is a bag of mixed pleasures—some we generally agree on and others that spawn incredulity. Our top movies of the year, as voted on by the Joyless Staff, reflect this diverse range of material making an impact. Although the Twin Cities has yet to see some of the year’s biggest films (most notably Selma and Inherent Vice), we have chosen our top 25 movies, taking up 13 spaces, accommodating four ties. Check out our individual lists here. Enjoy and happy New Year!
1. Boyhood / Richard Linklater
Richard Linklater’s newest (and strongest) film began in 2002 with a skeleton shooting crew, dedicated cast, and sporadic production schedule. Its actors age and grow along with their characters, not with the theatricality that comes from makeup or CGI but with the real, pinch-on-the-cheek “look how tall you are” that can only come from watching time pass. What's remarkable about this 12-year film project is not what it has to say about youth or coming of age—a topic well interrogated by thousands of other films—but its statements on the structure of memory. Not only do we watch Mason grow up and his parents grow old, but we also see a series of seemingly unimportant events flit by. It’s not the landmark moments (graduations, weddings, funerals) but those little afternoons in between—those that are actually remembered—that make this assiduously crafted portrait beautiful and complete. (Jeremy Meckler)
Full review by Daniel Getahun.
Full review by Daniel Getahun.
2. Under the Skin / Jonathan Glazer
Jonathan Glazer builds a perfect companion piece to Michel Faber’s novel of the same name on the obscure nature of empathy. Leaping beyond adaptation, Glazer captures an essence of Isserley (as named in the novel but not the movie)—an alien entity played by Scarlett Johansson, sent to earth with a task of luring men to an equivocal demise. Her impassiveness is simply a temporary mask to discovering her power, vulnerability, and ultimately self-destruction (all explicitly tied to her earthly gender). Dark, earthy and austere, Under the Skin creates a visually driven experience that grabs hold of not only your senses but primal emotions of fear, sex and death. With aesthetic guns blazing, Glazer creates one of the most disturbing sequences set to film and a searing finale that reads like modern folklore. References to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4, and even the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have less to do with appropriation than tapping similarly mysterious emblematic themes. (Kathie Smith)
Full review by Matt Levine.
Full review by Matt Levine.
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel / Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson might make movies as though they're dioramas, but in The Grand Budapest Hotel—Anderson's greatest film to date—a harsh, cold reality intrudes upon the director's snow-globe fantasia more overtly than ever before. Released in March of 2014 (around the same time that Syria's Civil War and Russia's intervention in Ukraine were making headlines), Budapest shows us what happens when war and brutality seep their way into Anderson's meticulous aesthetic. The film allows one of America's greatest modern filmmakers to construct a characteristically gorgeous confection while, at the same time, making a case for why his opulent romanticism still matters. "I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it," says one character. "But, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace." This line of dialogue might be the most blatant self-reckoning in all of Anderson's movies, and The Grand Budapest Hotel reminds us why that marvelous grace remains so vital and overpowering. (Matt Levine)
Full review by Jeremy Meckler.
Full review by Jeremy Meckler.
4. Ida / Paweł Pawlikowski
Along with The Immigrant, Ida is the most credible and original period picture of the year. While the former film sidesteps the glamorous trappings many period pieces succumb to, the latter transcends them. Watching Ida for the first time I was convinced Paweł Pawlikowski’s film floated right out of the early ‘60s. Every image is imbued with a cold, blustery lyricism that vividly brings 1960s Poland to life. The picture is ultimately an uncompromising piece of neo-realism with its circular structure, confrontation of the past, and use of non-professional actors. Ida may also be one of the most mysterious coming-of-age tales I’ve ever seen. When the eponymous character discovers she has a living aunt, she leaves her convent where she’s just days away from taking her vows and embarks on a bleak, revelatory journey into her past. Like many Italian neo-realist films, Ida is much more complex than it appears on the surface and shows just how profoundly the past shapes who we are. (Michael Montag)
Full review by Matt Levine.
Full review by Matt Levine.
5. Stranger by the Lake / Alain Guiraudie
In the days before and after a murder fails to disrupt their daily routines, men undress, sunbathe and couple at a secluded lakeside spot during summer holiday in France. Stranger by the Lake’s unembarrassed depiction of male bodies and gay sex could have severely limited its American release, relegating it exclusively to museum or gay film fest or home viewing, any of which would have played like a re-concealment of a film that spurns all the usual cinematic tricks of concealment. So what a thrill to have it as a multiplex option (well, it played at the Lagoon in Minneapolis) back in March. A bold entertainment in which technical perfection (Guiraudie’s methods have been frequently proclaimed as Hitchcockian) supports serious romantic inquiry and mortal terror, unfolded in the proper setting, in the sanctioned space of anonymous public pleasure. (Geoffrey Stueven)
Full review by Kathie Smith.
Full review by Kathie Smith.
6. (tie) The Immigrant / James Gray
James Gray turns the American Dream into a veritable nightmare in The Immigrant, a film that is both a period piece about the plight of a young Polish woman trying to survive in America and a dark love triangle that shows the impossibility of satisfying obsessive desire. The immigrant of the title (played by Marion Cotillard) arrives at Ellis Island in 1921 where her promise of happiness and freedom in a new land is crushed from the outset. The New York City Gray portrays is not a place of opportunity but a freak show of sorts, awash with charlatans, magicians, corrupt officials and lowly street urchins. Cotillard’s nightmarish predicament brings to mind Maggie: a Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane. Both are hard-hitting works of naturalism set in the underbelly of NYC, though Gray veers away from the absolute fatalism of Crane’s novella. The Immigrant is not only the sleeper of 2014, but its final composition is also the most striking shot of the year, sending its characters off into a hypnotic haze of dreams and nightmares just as the credits roll. (MM)
Full review by Kathie Smith.
Full review by Kathie Smith.
6. (tie) Norte, the End of History / Lav Diaz
Few movies have the clarity and breadth of Lav Diaz’s Norte, the End of History, anchoring its motifs in a narrative space defined by its length (a patient 250 minutes) and its frame (beautifully photographed Scope). Loosely riffing on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in a contemporary Filipino setting, Diaz plots an antithetical character study between Fabian, a pampered nihilist loquaciously overflowing with idealisms; and Joaquin, a physically disabled laborer unable to support his family. We watch as their lives shoot off into connected parallel trajectories: Joaquin, one of unfair martyrdom, and Fabian, one of unraveling potential. Both men are painful symbols of society’s failures (sharply pointed at the Philippines, but inherently felt beyond borders) through a stark diptych of innocence and depravity, modesty and arrogance, helplessness and aimlessness, and peace and violence. Norte, an engrossing experience from start to finish, is a testament to the power of cinema. (KS)
Full review by Matt Levine.
Full review by Matt Levine.
7. Only Lovers Left Alive / Jim Jarmusch
It's official: vampires have become so ubiquitous in modern culture that they've even infiltrated the outre world of Jim Jarmusch. Yet in typical Jarmusch fashion, this pop-culture template is used as a springboard for analyzing human connection, the significance of art, and the pitfalls of unceasing progress. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton play the two effortlessly coolest characters of the year, age-old vampires who strive to hold on to iconoclasm and dark romance in an age when decay and modernization have paradoxically become the norm. The references to Schubert and Shakespeare could have been obnoxiously elitist, but they're paired with a love for American soul music (Stax Records and Jack White both make indirect appearances) and the kind of blissful music that can be overheard in a Tangiers cafe approaching midnight. In other words, the film's ardent vampire protagonists (not to mention Jarmusch himself) care most about the temporary euphoria that art and human endeavor can offer, not to mention the potential for something close to eternal love. As HIddleston's Adam and Swinton's Eve bemusedly observe, it's the humans that have become zombies; these ageless, life-craving vampires have become more human than the rest of us. (ML)
Full review by Kathie Smith.
Full review by Kathie Smith.
8. Gone Girl / David Fincher
David Fincher continues his line of exquisitely crafted literary adaptations, following on the heels of The Social Network (2010) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). This time the novel is a pop-fiction thriller with strong anti-feminist undertones, but that doesn’t stop Fincher from turning it into one of the most gripping suspense pictures since Hitchcock’s golden days. The film follows Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) in the days following his wife’s disappearance. The story of their early romance (in dear-diary narrated flashback) is intercut with the investigation into her disappearance. The whodunit suspense plot is thrilling—even for those who know it ahead of time—and this is Affleck’s best role ever. What the film may lack in social conscience it makes up for in style and story, a gripping ride all the way through. Trent Reznor’s score is perfect: industrial and minimalist, the best collaboration yet between Reznor and Fincher. (JM)
Full review by Jeremy Meckler.
Full review by Jeremy Meckler.
8. We Are the Best / Lukas Moodysson
We Are The Best, directed by Lukas Moodysson, is a beautiful, sweet, and exuberant film set in Sweden—that other Minnesota across the Atlantic on the North Sea that enjoys slightly better healthcare, denser cities and better public transit. It also shares with us an unmistakable reticent warmth and good humor, inevitably grating to the nerves of bored thirteen year olds and surprisingly conducive to energetic three chord wall of punk rock sound. The young stars of the film, Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, and Liv LeMoyne evoke the 1980s Minneapolis punk sound in their desperate and silly anarchy, reminding us that rock-and-roll is foremost a mode of surviving the teenage years, and that the Hüskers first became stars at eighteen, Tommy Stinson at thirteen, and Elvis Presley, the king, seventeen. The tagline sums it up: A film for everyone who used to be thirteen years old. It’s not to be missed. (Joseph Houlihan)
Full review by Peter Schilling Jr.
Full review by Peter Schilling Jr.
10. Force Majeure / Ruben Östlund
Deconstructions of the modern nuclear family are nothing new in global cinema (consider the icy satires of Michael Haneke and Todd Solondz), but rarely are today's gender norms and preconceptions of status and success as mercilessly imploded as in Force Majeure. A well-off Swedish family travels to the French Alps for a relaxing family holiday, but when the virile patriarch seems to run away in cowardice when a controlled avalanche threatens their resort, this bastion of even-keeled security comes apart at the seams. There's no shortage of awkward humor (at times, Curb Your Enthusiasm comes to mind) and cuttingly brilliant jabs at human behavior, but there's also an undercurrent of sympathy and shrugging acceptance: people might be ridiculous and self-absorbed, but we're also in it for the long haul, and the connections we make ultimately make it worthwhile (even if they're often more painful than they are reassuring). Abetted by Fredrik Wenzel's meticulous cinematography, Force Majeure might constitute an unflinching dissection of the family body, but it's surprisingly gleeful watching its razor-sharp scalpel cut into a social structure that's often revered without question. (ML)
Full review by Kathie Smith.
Full review by Kathie Smith.
11. (tie) Edge of Tomorrow / Doug Liman
Tom Cruise hasn’t been a movie star for 20 years, but watching Edge of Tomorrow you can forget that for a moment and see him slip back into his well-worn action hero boots. This time he is an unlikely one, a phony American military officer who is accidentally sprayed with alien blood during a firefight, granting him a Groundhog Day-like eternal return—he wakes up again and again on the same day, only to die again storming the same beach. What could be a B-movie popcorn flick turns out to be a compelling action thriller; but what's more, its repetitive premise ends up nearly as philosophical as Groundhog Day. The conflation of computer generated explosions and mind bending thought experiments is smart and engaging (if a bit familiar), and Cruise and Emily Blunt play off each other with surprising grace. (JM)
Full review by Daniel Getahun.
Full review by Daniel Getahun.
11. (tie) Li'l Quinquin / Bruno Dumont
Consider this mystery: A dismembered body of a woman (sans head) has been discovered inside the gut of a dead cow found in a spot impossible for the animal to reach on its own. From there Li’l Quinquin, Bruno Dumont’s miniseries released theatrically in its 200 minute form in the US, spirals into the rattling psyches of a narrow-minded seaside Podunk town: the two antithetical detectives feigning competency, addled adults providing vague leads, and a pack of young, dysfunctional (yet likable) ne’er-do-wells—including the movie’s namesake, Quinquin—who are products of their surroundings. At its most simplistic, Li’l Quinquin, tempered with slapstick humor and bittersweet melancholia, is an intoxicating blend of Twin Peaks, True Detective, and Parks and Recreation; far more complex is Brumont’s ability to effectively juggle various genres within a policier while filleting a small town’s penchant for bigotry. This is not a mystery to be solved, but one to be scrutinized. (KS)
Full review by Lee Purvey.
Full review by Lee Purvey.
12. (tie) Manuscripts Don't Burn / Mohammad Rasoulof
Equal parts suspense film and howl of despair, Manuscripts Don’t Burn bluntly details the horrors of life under a fascist regime. Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof knows this subject firsthand—he made this film in defiance of a 20-year ban on filmmaking levied by the Iranian government and redacted the names of his cast and crew from the credits to protect from the type of retribution dramatized onscreen. The narrative follows a pair of impoverished workers hired to execute a group of intellectuals threatening to publish a story that would expose a particularly heinous government act. Amazingly, Rasoulof manages to make one of these killers a nuanced character, who struggles with crippling debt and mounting guilt even as he grimly fulfills the demands of his job. This surprising level of empathy for the type of person who threatens the filmmakers’ existence on a daily basis only makes the film’s urgent message more disquieting. (Frank Olson)
Full review by Jeremy Meckler.
Full review by Jeremy Meckler.
12. (tie) Nymphomaniac / Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier’s latest provocation is the cinematic equivalent to Kanye West’s Yeezus—an insane collision of high art and bad taste that seems designed to confound both the fans and detractors of its controversial creator. The narrative is structured as an eight-part conversation between Charlotte Gainsbourg’s sex addict and Stellan Skarsgard’s intellectual and plays out like a dialogue between von Trier and his critics. Each section has its own style and tone, which results in some uneven quality but ensures that the film is never boring. In fact this is probably von Trier’s most conventionally entertaining film to date despite its extreme content. Two standout moments—the epically sarcastic meltdown of the wife of one of the nymphomaniac’s conquests, and a shot where Gainsbourg is framed in between the giant erect penises of two men arguing in an unsubtitled African dialect—were as funny as anything in theaters this year. (FO)
Full review (of Nymphomaniac Part 1) by Kathie Smith.
Full review (of Nymphomaniac Part 1) by Kathie Smith.
12. (tie) Two Days, One Night / Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Leave it to the Dardenne Brothers to deliver a full spectrum of human imprudence and altruism right at a time when we need it the most. Although this unembellished story utilizes the framing of a small Belgium community, its implications—that we look beyond the end of our nose to see the effects, both positive and negative, of our actions—have a much wider, if not global, scope. Two Days, One Night follows Sandra (played by Marion Cotillard with tenuous resilience) over the course of a weekend as she goes door to door and asks co-workers to forego their bonuses so she can keep her job—a vote forced upon workers in an obvious, but not uncommon, attempt to exonerate employer culpability. The movie’s structure is surprisingly simple only to hide its complexity in the texture of each interaction, uncovering facets of humanity and the heart-crushing effects of collapsing capitalism. (KS)
13. (tie) Birdman / Alejandro González Iñárritu
A remarkable number of films this year--Boyhood, Her, Under the Skin—expanded the boundaries of mainstream cinema, but none matched the exhilaration I felt watching Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman. Engineered to appear uninterrupted, the film’s marathon takes are a technical achievement all on their own, turning even the smallest moments into set pieces. But it’s the seamless fit between Emmanuel Lubezki’s virtuosic cinematography and the film’s showbiz subject matter that makes Birdman truly revelatory. The camera swirling around washed-up star Riggan Thomson is both mocking and sympathetic, subjective and objective: it lets us experience his delusions, but it also demonstrates how our media-hungry, always-on environment feeds them. Birdman is a spectacle about spectacle, one that’s attuned to its ego, but also subversive of it: the quiet moment in the middle of the film, when the camera leaves the actors behind and settles instead on their empty dressing rooms backstage, was my favorite in cinema this year. (Benjamin Voigt)
Full review by Matt Levine.
Full review by Matt Levine.
13. (tie) Dance of Reality / Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dance of Reality, a semi-autobiography set under the dark shadow of Chilean authoritarianism, hits on those sensations Kenneth Koch called:
| "…the green Azores, Fond memories of childhood, and the pleasant orange trolleys, A girl’s face, red-white, and her breasts and calves, blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, fahrenheit Temperatures, dandelions, and trains…" |
It evokes the child’s revelry, games and imaginations that spiral off into incomprehension; and besides this, it holds up the kind of necessary violence (explicit and implied) that snuffs out fantasy and codifies our rigid social structure. Jodorowsky is very good at forcing these tensions into conflict, and this beautiful film ultimately challenges us to seek a little more beauty in our own lives. (JH)
Full review by Matt Levine.
Full review by Matt Levine.
13. (tie) The One I Love / Charlie McDowell
Though I never rank films in top ten lists (except when the Brazil-like bureaucracy of Joyless Creatures demands it), The One I Love ranks at the very top for me, in part because I found this strange admixture of sci-fi and relationship drama tremendously entertaining and one of the few truly thought-provoking films this year. With little pretense and a lot of great acting, The One I Love's central (and secret, if you haven't seen it) conceit isn't merely Twilight Zone fodder, but a device used to peel back layers of the soft and nearly rotten onion that is the marriage of Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss). There's not a wasted moment in this one, and it's going to be sadly ignored come Oscar season, which is a damn shame especially in light of Moss' brilliant performance. (Peter Schilling Jr.)
Full review by Kathie Smith.
Full review by Kathie Smith.
13. (tie) Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets / Florian Habicht
Finding Nemo was the rare movie that made Roger Ebert want to sit in the front row of the theater, letting the images wash over him. I felt the same way during the ecstatic live portions of Pulp, a documentary centered on the namesake band’s final reunion show in their hometown of Sheffield in 2012. This time it was the music that drew me closer. The best reason to see Pulp during its one-day local theatrical run was for a theater’s more vivid simulation of live music, but the film has plenty to offer on a smaller screen, too. Like Searching for Sugar Man it shows, in continually astonishing detail, popular music’s inexorable entanglements with human lives, its perfect fit, like the ultimate ergonomic device. Like 45365, it creates a compelling portrait of a town via incidentals: the residents of a retirement home stage a “Help the Aged” musical number, and a Sheffield building advertises its condominiums with the line “Don’t you want me baby?” (GS)
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