The Best Films of 2014
Okay, I know this is a little late, but I my motivation is an effort to be fair. I wanted to see enough really great year-end films that I could put together a Best List that I was comfortable with. In doing so, I found that this was a much better year than I initially thought, so much so that I’ve put together a list of 25 great films rather than the expected ten. So, let’s get started . . .
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25. The Babadook
Horror directors love kids and demonic possession but they rarely know how to make them passable beyond just having their toys fly across the room. Amid the minefield of dreck (a calendar year usually offers at least five of these films) comes Jennifer Kent’s Babadook a movie that offers a glimpse into what it might really look like if a mother discovered that her son were surrounded by supernatural forces. Essie Davis plays Amelia, a single mother whose husband died in an accident on the day she gave birth to her son. Several years later, the kid, named Sam, is a textbook picture of childhood anxiety. Then one night he opens a pop-up book and finds it scribbled with creepy charcoal writing from a being called Mister Babadook. What follows is a journey into a dark world that blurs the line between what is real and what is not. The movie is not all jump scares and special effects, it’s really about a mother who realizes that she is unable to keep her child safe in a world that is out to do him harm, and the unexpected forces she has to learn to push back in order to give her son some peace.
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24. Cake
It’s always a gamble when a comedian tries to stretch their dramatic muscles – in truth it’s a 50/50 proposition. In 2014, Jennifer Anniston took the chance and gave us one of the best performances of the year. She plays Claire Bennett, an angry, difficult person who has recently suffered a tragedy and has retreated behind a defensive wall. She’s difficult to deal with, and is satisfied to simply stew in her misery. But that’s not the whole picture. The greatness of Cake is that Claire wants to get a handle on what has happened to her while grappling with the recent suicide of a woman in her support group. The story doles out the pieces of her life gradually instead of making everything clear at the beginning – over the course of the film we get bits and pieces of her story so that by the end we get the full picture. It’s a gradual approach that makes the story more interesting, and Jennifer Anniston, an actress that is familiar to us, presents something new, a character she’s never played before. She does a wonderful job in a movie that is dramatic, but contains elements of great humor as well. It’s not the story of a women moving from darkness to light, but the story of a woman moving from darkness to a place where she can live comfortably with the things that have happened to her.
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23. Top Five
If you’ve followed Chris Rock’s career over the past few years, which includes not only trips to Madagascar and a number of vapid throw-away comedies, then you know that motivation behind Top Five, a examination of the cold and merciless world of celebrity as it exists in the 21st century. He plays Andre Allen, a stand-up comedian who is tired of throwing away his career and wants to do something serious. In what amounts to Rock’s version of Stardust Memories he takes a look at not only his own career but also the world of celebrity at large. He wrote and directed this film in which he gets to comment on reality television, tabloid journalism and Tyler Perry. It’s a very funny and perceptive look at how one comedies sees the world around him, the business of his chosen profession and his own life. It takes a lot of guts to make a movie this honest and this self-deprecating. Rock has made on of the best comedies of the year but also one of the best statements on the industry.
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22. The Boxtrolls
At a time when most animated films are bland, interchangeable, and packaged and propped up to sell toys at McDonald’s, here was a movie with a it’s own individuality. I had no faith that a movie called The Boxtrolls could be anything more than just a throw-away for kids, but this movie is a delight, a pitch-black, wicked British comedy that could have been conceived by the Monty Python gang. The story is simple, but the animation and the characters are not. It involves a young boy who is kidnapped as an infant by Boxtrolls, who hide out in the sewers under the streets, building their own world and living off the refuse that the surface-dwellers throw out. Turns out that they’re actually not evil, in fact quite the opposite, they’re just being victimized by an evil exterminator who wants to rid the town of the Boxtrolls in order to gain passage to a cheese club. The movie is not all that you expect, it’s wickedly funny, touching at points, and self-referential when the need calls for it. More than that, it’s very very British in it’s comedy. That makes it one of the most original movies of the year.
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21. The Skeleton Twins
It is often said that there is an undercurrent of sadness in all comedy, and nothing proved that better than Craig Johnson’s comic-drama The Skeleton Twins which teams SNL alums Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader as brother and sister Milo and Maggie dealing with the pangs and misfortunes of being the offspring of massively screwed-up parents – Mom is a New Age featherhead and Dad committed suicide years ago. Oh, and they’ve both been on the cusp of committing suicide themselves. If this doesn’t sound like a tasty nugget of comedic joy (and in most cases, it isn’t) the point of the film is to examine two people whose misery is complimented by a life that contains a lot of laughs – we laugh through the murk of their circumstances. It’s a drama and a comedy and it works well at balancing both beautifully. Hader and Wiig do a wonderful job of playing two of life’s happy little runts – nobody pays them any mind, but they have each other and that’s all that matters.
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20. The Book of Life
The Book of Life was a joyful, giddy experience, brimming with energy and life, which is odd to say since much of it takes place in the land of the dead. But don’t let that description dissuade you, just because it is about the dead does not mean it’s a dreary experience. It’s more about remembering those who have come before, honoring one’s heritage, and being true to yourself. It’s all there but not in a preachy manner. The animation is something special, using a block design so that characters look like wooden puppets. The story is simplistic, but not simple minded. It begins in the land of the living and involves a love triangle between three childhood friends: good-hearted Manolo (voiced by Diego Luna) who wants to break his family’s bull fighting tradition by becoming a mariachi singer. There’s spunky and independent Maria (voiced by Zoe Saldana) who Manolo will be in love with forever after. And there’s Joaquin (voiced by Channing Tatum), a rustler-buster whose medal-strewn military uniform hides a great deal of insecurity. They both love the beautiful Maria, but it is Manolo who loves her from deep down in his very DNA. At a time when most animated movies are interchangeable, this is something new. It’s fun, it’s energetic, it’s got great music and great animation. This is one of those films where the filmmakers really cared.
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19. The Theory of Everything
This one surprised me. Watching the trailer, I kind of figured it was a bore on two fronts: 1.) a story about a handicapped man dealing with a crippling illiness and 2.) a fragmented biography that hits the highlights of his life without giving us a sense of the man himself. I’m happy to say I was wrong on both counts. The movie tells the story of Stephen Hawking, but not in a pitying way. We meet him as a charming but undisciplined student at Cambridge. Then, quickly and mercilessly, the darkness falls. ALS hits his body like a ton of bricks and he is quickly rendered immobile. The irony is that while he finds himself trapped in a body he cannot move, his mind is expanding, giving us his theories that would forever change our understanding of our universe. The movie is not typical. Eddie Redmayne, who gets the role of a lifetime here, never asks for our pity. He plays Hawking as a brilliant man who is sometimes difficult, sometimes fascinating and whose mind is forever voyaging. This is no standard biopic, it’s one of the most amazing portraits of one of the most amazing people of our time.
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18. Blue Ruin
This tiny indie action picture is a breath of fresh air to anyone who is utterly bored with the Hollywood revenge fantasy of Jason Bourne and the Taken series. Those movies are disposable fantasy, but Saulneir’s film is about the messy, bloody business of revenge as it might happen to those of us who don’t have training at hand-to-hand combat – or an army of stunt doubles. We’re introduced to a man whose motivation is only gradually revealed. *SPOILER ALERT* His name is Dwight and he’s been on the street ever since his parents were murdered some years ago. He gets information that Wade Cleland, the man responsible, has just been released from prison. So, Dwight makes up his mind to exact his revenge. Following the man to a bar, he initiates a violent encounter that puts him on the wrong end of the man’s family. What becomes of Dwight is fascinating, and what becomes of his story is an extremely violent and surprisingly funny rumination on the reality of revenge. Dwight is scared to death, not just for himself but for his family. He knows that the Cleland method of revenge is blood-coded in the familial hillbilly code of honor and, try as he may, can’t quite get himself prepared for war. With his pudgy stature and bug-eyes, he wears a mask of pure terror. The movie has a great deal in common with Fargo, especially in the way that bad planning begets a trail of dead bodies.
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17. A Walk Among the Tombstones
Amid that copious amounts of pitious action pictures that Liam Neeson seems determined to call a wise career move, eventually he had to make a good one. And he has. It’s called A Walk Among the Tombstones, a great crime drama that is a throwback to the kinds of cops and criminal pictures from the 1970s. The movie opens in 1991 where we meet a drunken Brooklyn police detective named Matt Scudder whose career is derailed when he kills a suspect while drunk. Shoot ahead to 1999 and we find that Matt has left the force and gone private although he doesn’t have a license. His AA meetings are bullet points for his life. He’s hired to find two sickos who are kidnapping and murdering the wives of local drug dealers. What is most special about A Walk Among the Tombstones is it’s atmosphere. We’re smack-dab in the middle of Brooklyn as it was in the last year of the 20th century, a world in which the inhabitants are mired in a misplaced paranoia over Y2K – misplaced as we see The World Trade Center looming on the horizon. The world presented here is bleak and indifferent. There’s a quiet stillness to the film that is a lot more thrilling than just violence and jump cuts. Director Scott Frank, who wrote Out of Sight and made the criminally overlooked gem The Lookout creates a film out of elements that linger in our minds; a service van, a piece of duct tape, a ragging cough, a groundskeeper, a red coat, a nude painting, a meat cleaver, a flock of pigeons. We remember unusual faces – the supporting cast is made up exclusively of unknown actors. Frank has a way of leading all of these elements into the plot in a way that makes them stand out in our minds. When it’s over you’re thinking about this movie in a way that other thrillers do not.
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16. The Normal Heart
This movie shook me up, and had me feeling its effects for days afterwards. Directed by “American Horror Story” creator Ryan Murphy, it tells another kind of horror story, one that his great anthology series could never capture. Based on the play by Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart tells the story of the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, but pinpoints a very acute and important moment in the history of gay Americans. It opens on Fire Island in 1980, just as the era of disco hedonism was giving away to the era of caution and safe sex. After decades of shame and oppression, gay men were just beginning to assert themselves sexually but then had to cull their sexual adventures in light of an unknown disease that was infecting and then killing them in large numbers. Our focus falls on a pudgy Jewish reporter, Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), who tries and fails to get some measure of help but finds that the sick and dying have been written off because they are dismissed as sinful freaks of nature whose condition is a punishment from God. Yes, the movie is preachy and often one-sided, but what is special is that Murphy gives the film a funerary tone. There are long spaces of time when we feel the weight of absence of those who have succumb to AIDS, and therefore we feel the helplessness of those who are affected by it. This is a dark, and sometimes difficult film to experience, one that is unsettling in its tone and mood. The latter half of the film has the feeling of a wake, not just for an individual, but for thousands of individuals who have died needlessly and for the thousands who will soon meet the same fate.
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15. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Possibly the closest approximation of what a thoughtful superhero movie might look like, at least out of this series. While it isn’t deeply psychological like The Dark Knight, nor the rock star epic of Iron Man, this second adventure for Cap does something refreshing – it actually tells a compelling story. More than that, it plays like the great espionage thrillers of the 1970s like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor or Marathon Man, back in the days before movies got lazy and replaced brain power and good writing with shaky-cam and kickboxing. Captain America: The Winter Soldier builds its story almost from nothing. It begins without ominous foreshadowing and allows the clouds to form. It builds slowly, slowly, step by step so that we only understand the story as our beloved Captain America (aka Steve Rogers) does. In other words, it has the patience to tell the story as it unfolds, and not just creating a predictable straight line from the beginning to the end.
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14. Edge of Tomorrow
All it takes is a novel idea and the willingness to take it into creative areas. That’s the success of Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman’s big-budget sci-fi epic starring Tom Cruise as a wet-behind-the-ears military officer who is thrown into boot camp then finds himself in a war zone fighting aliens only to get killed and discover that he’s repeating the same events over and over and over. What could have been just a grim sci-fi retread of Groundhog Doy is actually one of the cleverest action movies of the year. It’s inventive, it’s funny, it’s over the top and its explanation of how and why Cruise is repeating the same events over and over is so twisted and convoluted that you can’t help but laugh.
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13. American Sniper
Not just one of the best films of the year, but also one of the most controversial. Clint Eastwood’s retelling of the story of late Marine sniper Chris Kyle, the most successful American sniper in history is also the stoyr of the American male, how he functions on the job, what he goes through, and the lengths that he is willing to go through to protect his family from the trauma that he is suffering. Bradley Cooper turns in one of the best performances of the year as a man who refuses to be defined by his profession, but who never-the-less tries to come to grips with the natural of what he is asked to do. This is a very American story, about a very American sense purpose, national pride and masculinity. Are the facts true? I have no idea, but the story is told with purpose and meaning.
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12. Gone Girl
Glory be, they didn’t screw it up. Actually, David Fincher turned Gillian Flynn’s book into one of the best films of the year. On the page, Flynn concocted a brilliant and complex pot boiler that seemed to move in at least five different directions, shuffling a dozen different characters around like pieces on a chess board. In terms of narrative, it walked the knife-edge, veering close to becoming convoluted but never losing focus. The movie works just as well as the book (and in some ways better), and the fact that the author wrote the screenplay – which I always champion – is probably the reason why. Gone Girl is a complex story that opens one way, and then turns another way before turning into something completely different. The story is all about perspectives sprung from the story of a marriage that never should have happened in the first place. We meet Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a college professor who, years ago, married Amy (Rosemund Pike) and was happy as long as their marriage was padded with money and hot sex. Then the recession hit and they both found themselves out of work. Without the cushion of surface comforts, it is revealed that their marriage was as joyful as a cupcake made of arsenic. The mask hiding the bitterness in their union is seen by everyone else as a match made in Heaven. Then one day Nick comes home and finds Amy missing. There some broken glass and an overturned ottoman in the living room. What follows is a labyrinth of a plot that no one can guess (if you haven’t read the book). But it’s not just a pot-boiler, Gone Girl turns out to be a wicked commentary on how the media goes out of it’s way to turn potential tragedy into ratings gold, twisting and turning the facts to meet their intentions while destroying the lives of those involved.
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11. Selma
What could be written off as just another dusty old historical epic turns out to be much more engrossing than that. Directed by Ava DuVernay, the movie tells the story of the attempts by Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) to organize a march from Selma to Montgomery in order to secure the equal voting rights for blacks in Alabama. That struggle is laid out in clear terms so that we know what the stakes are. It deals with King’s struggles within the Civil Rights workers, his struggles at home, and his struggles in trying to get a wishy-washy LBJ to get off his duff and help make it happen. There is great storytelling here, DuVernay is a great organizer of narrative and of clarity in storytelling. She tells an important story with the skill of an old master.
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10. Living Things
Eric Shapiro’s tiny independent treasure is one of those great unheralded experiences that critics happen upon in a pile of DVD screeners. It’s one of those films that you’ve never heard of, but you urge people to see it despite the fact that they probably won’t. This one came inside the mailer of a more high-profile film that I didn’t care for. Tucked away in a white envelope I’d never heard of it, or the director, or any of the actors, but the simplicity of its idea was breathtaking. Running just over an hour, the movie is an exhausting experience with no car chases, no gun battles and no cacophony. It is constructed entirely out of words and contains only two actors, seated at a dinner table debating each other. They are at opposite ends of the political and social spectrum and find themselves in a heated ethical debate that gets more and more heated and we are engrossed at every single minute. We meet Rhona, a pretty 29 year-old woman who prides herself on her left-wing mindset. Her demeanor seems ruled by new age philosophy and vegan logic. She is preparing dinner for her boyfriend and his father. The boyfriend’s father arrives early. He is Leo, a veteran who is a conservative and a devoted meat eater. Their conversation begins on tenter hooks and steamrolls into a debate about ethics, plants, meat, war and anything else that they can throw at each other. Their argument is heated and never forced. Words fly like bullets and each combatant is ready with an intellectual response. Debate becomes argument. Arguments turn to a confessional and the two find themselves laying all their ill feelings for each other on the table. They argue over animal cruelty, climate change, health, morality, and spirituality. Rhona is an idealist whose point of view comes from books and education. Leo is more practical, he’s a man who has seen the real world on the battlefield and off. When it is over you are exhausted. Shapiro opens the doors of intellectual debate and lets the issues fly.
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9. Nightcrawler
Nightcrawler is a wickedly brilliant thriller, a social satire and an eerie look into the mind of a sociopath who can manipulate with the power of cold-blooded reason. That sounds like a tall order, but this is a deceptively simple plot made functional by a well-mounted script and a near-perfect performance by Jake Gyllenhaal. He plays Louis Bloom, a man who seems to be as bland as the white shirt on his back. He’s a drool, square fellow who talks with the confident detachment of a marketing video and dresses as if he’s stealing from Good Will. Outwardly, he’s painfully unremarkable, the kind of guy that you pass every day without notice, just another face in the tapestry of your busy day. He lives on the fringes of Los Angeles. When we first meet him he’s collecting scrap metal to make a few bucks. On the way home he passes a car on fire, and pulls over. What interests him is not the firemen rescuing the driver, but the presence of a man with a video camera (Bill Paxton) who is filming the action. Louis asks the man which news channel he works for, but the man tells him that he’s freelance – he finds accidents and crime scenes, shows up, films footage and then sells it to the local news stations. Louis has a burst of inspiration and, before you know it, he’s bought himself a police scanner and a cheap video camera and is scouting police activity. What follows is a brilliant thriller about a man with no ethical standards whatsoever who is willing to cross police tape and muck around in the worst of inhumanity just to make his name is a bottom-feeder industry. It’s hard to describe too much of the plot without giving much away, except to say that when Louis films the aftermath of a domestic bloodbath before the cops show up, he ends up all but manipulating the news in order to get the footage. He’s morally bankrupt, but we find ourselves glued to the action. We also find ourselves laughing at how willing this screenplay is to go for the throat. We laugh even when it isn’t appropriate. Take, for example, the moment at the end when two people have an intimate conversation in front of a piece of footage on a screen. It’s a moment so cold and heartless that you can’t help but laugh.
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8. Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
Lars Von Trier’s two-part epic actually made a lot of critic’s worst list, but I found it to be a brave movie that begins with a woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsborough), who is awakened bruised and beaten in an alley by a man nurses her back to health. During her recovery confesses that she has been a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac whose life has been plagued with the affliction as far back as she could remember. Von Trier and his actors are not shy about delving into all manner of deviant behavior to show the journey of this woman, nor is his screenplay unwilling to explore the consequences (those show up mostly in the second part). This is not simply a case of porn as art, this is a movie about a woman who is systematically destroying herself and those around her by throwing her body to anyone who will have it. It’s a sad journey presented in the cold light of day. Given both parts, I probably prefer the first part to the second, but as a whole it paints a tragic portrait of sex addiction as being just as destructive and degrading as an addiction to drugs or alcohol.
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7. Guardians of the Galaxy
Director James Gunn gives the superhero genre just what it needs – an injection of pure fun. All the way, this movie looks and feels as if someone is trying to make a cult film, and if that is their intention then they’ve succeeded beautifully. It’s also a risk for Marvel Studios because unlike The X-Men and the Avengers, The Guardians aren’t exactly a household name. They’re hardly even third string benchwarmers, and the movie opens with a perfect commentary as the hero, called Star Lord, introduces himself to his adversary, who retorts “Who?” That’s appropriate. I’d never heard of the Guardians, but apparently they’re a rag tag group of wannabe superheroes who are chased across the galaxy after they come in possession of a silver ball that – say it with me – Has the Power To Rule the Universe. The plot isn’t the point, it’s the characters that work. Star Lord is Peter Quinn (Chris Pratt) a space jockey who sells junk for a living. He’s flanked by the assassin Gamorra (Zoe Saldana), a muscle man Drax (pro wrestler Dave Bautista) who talks like a pulp novel; a genetically altered raccoon named Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and his walking house plant named Groot (Vin Diesel). This movie was fun all the way. It was funny, lively and contains a gallery of goofy supporting characters that remind you of great sci-fi comedies like The Fifth Element, Brazil and Buckaroo Banzai. I’m sure the movie will be a mega-hit, it deserves to be.
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6. Life Itself
Steve James’ documentary tells the story of the life and times of beloved film critic Roger Ebert, and yes, I can be accused of gushing here. Those of us who write about film owe a debt to the legacy that Ebert left behind after his death more than a year ago. He was my hero, and I might have been satisfied with any portrait of his life, but James has done something special. While the movie loves and adores Ebert, it also honors his belief in full disclosure. That means that the movie doesn’t shy away from the more difficult aspects of Ebert’s life, most especially his battle with cancer in his thyroid and salivary glands. Much of the film is told from friends, colleagues and his devoted wife Chazz, whose devotion and sunny disposition are a tonic for Ebert’s difficult final years. We get the story of Ebert without the movie becoming a safe pre-packaged commercial that only shows us the highlights. The movie takes us through his lonely early years as an only child from downstate Illinois, to his lonely college years to his years on television with sparring partner Gene Siskel and finally through the years of his illness. James doesn’t shy away his camera away from Ebert’s disfigurement, his jaw which sling down. It’s hard not to be aghast by it at first, but his positive outlook makes you comfortable with him.
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5. The Imitation Game
Morton Tyldum’s biography of the work of Alan Turing is actually two stories. On one hand it’s the story of the attempts by a group of British scientists to decode the Nazi’s Enigma machine, a device that when decoded could end the war. On the other, it’s the story of Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) a man with a serious social anxiety disorder and a closeted homosexuality at a time when such behaviors were illegal in England. The second story is actually more interesting, featuring possibly the most three-dimensional character that Cumberbatch has ever played. It’s not far from any of his other characters from Sherlock to “Khan” but the difference is that Turing is a lot more sympathetic. He’s a wounded man, wrapped inside his own brilliance but unable to deal with the rest of the world. The Imitation Game is one of those miracle films that could have gone wrong in a dozen different ways. Yet with good writing, and a brilliantly layered performance by Benedict Cumberbatch who gives the year’s best performance, the movie finds its heart as well as its historical urgency.
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4. The LEGO Movie
In a year of tasteless soup for animated pictures, this one was an exhilarating ball of fun. It’s a bright, colorful, quick-witted adventure that stretches the animated form as far as it can possibly go, spinning its characters into other dimensions and other realms. like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Toy Story” the animators open the visual canvas to create something really special and distinct. The story takes place in a world comprised entirely of LEGO, a world that keeps changing and remaking itself based around the functions of the toy itself. Our focus is on a generic worker brick named Emmett Brickowski (voiced by Chris Pratt from Guardians of the Galaxy), who is perfectly happy in his brick-a-day world until he is recruited to save the world from President Business (voiced by Will Farrell) who wants to glue the world together and keep it from ever changing again. What follows is the head-spinning adventure in which the entire makeup of the world keeps changing. We get cameos by William Shakespeare, Gandalf, Superman, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Abraham Lincoln, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, C-3PO and Shaquille O’Neal. We visit a pirate world, a cowboy world, a subterranean world and many more. This is a bold piece of work. At a time when most animators are satisfied to simply tell generic stories with no imagination or creativity, here’s a movie that has it to spare. This is what an animated movie should be.
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3. The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson’s great confection is the kind of bizarre, droll comedy that Alec Guinness used to make. With tick tock precision of pastel design, whip-smart dialogue and square-jawed performances Anderson whisks us through a bizarre murder mystery set in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, which is apparently located somewhere in the Alps. The story focuses of Gustav H (Ralph Fiennes), the legendary concierge of The Grand Budapest along with his faithful bellboy Moustafa (played in a wonderfully droll performance by newcomer Tony Revolori). The two are soon neck-deep in the theft of a priceless painting to which Gustav is falsely accused of stealing. Anderson must have written the dialogue to a metronome because it is so sharp, so precise that you don’t want the characters to stop talking. This is one of those comedies that you appreciate looking at as much as listening to. Anderson is the master of his comic canvas, painting everything on a Dick Tracy-style canvas that never lets up.
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2. Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Everybody loves a comeback, and there hasn’t been a more pleasing comeback then Michael Keaton, who gave the best performance of his career as a once-beloved action star Riggen Thompson, who was the star of a hit superhero franchise 20 years ago but walked away from it. Now, in his 60s, he takes a suicidal venture by financing, writing, directing and starring in his own play. What seems to be just a witty in-joke turns out to be a much bleaker portrait of the lonliness, alienation and despair that follows and actor who has long past his sell-by date. It’s not just that Riggin is losing his mind, but how and why he’s losing it. Here is a movie that says more about the human condition and the identity crises of an actor’s id than just about any movie in recent memory.
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