What a year! I still haven't seen half of the movies I would like including Her, Wolf of Wall Street, The Hobbit and Inside Llewyn Davis to name a few, but the movies I have seen are ample evidence to demonstrate that this was an unusually rich year for cinema. Numbers one and two are set, but I could easily replace the rest with any of the "honorable mention" movies. They're all that good. Anyway, my top 10, as it stands now:
1. Upstream Color- It starts as a horror movie with a hint of sci-fi and some straight out fantasy elements. It's also kind of a crime thriller and a detective story, but ultimately, Upstream Color is a romance. It’s about a man and a woman’s difficult journey to trusting one another so completely that their identities become inextricably linked, as the movie’s wonderful poster suggests. Kris and Jeff have it hard, but once they connect, its a joy seeing them work together in perfect unison. The movie boasts a fearless performance by Amy Seimetz and by writer/director/composer/cinematographer/star Shane Carruth. I knew it was something special the first time I watched it, but like many great films it really came alive the second time around. This one’s an instant classic. It’s reputation will only grow with time.
2. Before Midnight- Devastating. After nine years of uncertainty, Julie Delpy Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater finally revealed that Jesse did miss his plane. What Midnight shows us is a couple, not on a one day tryst, but simply on one day of the countless they have now spent together — albeit one day in which the relationship is tested to its very core. Like its predecessors, the film has some brilliant use of setting, this time ancient Greece, and it has some of the greatests, most naturalistic dialogue ever written for a film. It also has the most chilling and horrifying scene of the year, the epic 30 minute fight that serves as the climax to the movie. Hopefully, this is not the last chapter in the series, and if the movie’s closing line is any indication (“it must have been one hell of a night we’re about to have.”) then I think we’ll be seeing these two lovers again at least once more.
3. Gravity- An avant-garde box-office hit in 2013, the year of the unbearably lame Hollywood blockbuster, who would have thought? Only Alfonso Cuaron could have done it, but not without the help of master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — who also shot Cuaron’s harrowing Children of Men and the sublime Tree of Life — and the always beautiful Sandra Bullock — here displaying amazing physicality and vulnerability which is all the more impressive considering that she’s alone onscreen for most of the movie. In space, life is impossible, the opening titles inform us. Bullock’s Dr.Stone has only one goal: to come back safely to earth so as live life how it was meant to be lived. Pure and simple, this is a humanist survival tale told with elegance and grace. It’s perfect.
4. Stories We Tell- The less you know about this one the better, but I promise it will change the way you look at documentaries forever. What begins as the story of the director’s mother transforms into a story about the director herself, until it finally becomes about our need to construct stories out of our own lives to make sense of them. Through this highly personal, moving tale, Sarah Polley somehow manages to show how stories are universally important to each and every one of us. That’s no small feat, and this film deserves all the praise it can get for pulling it off.
5. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints- Ruth and Bob love each other, but there’s one little problem. He's is in jail and she has to constantly live with the fact that she was the one who committed the crime that put him there; She also has to raise their child, conceived shortly before dad went to prison. Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck are two of the most talented and underrated actors working today. Here, they give stunning performances playing a couple separated by fate yet unwilling to give up hope of reunification. Each little moment in the film builds up to the couple's eventual meeting, which is one of the most profoundly saddest scenes I’ve seen. The movie is also a Western, lovely to look at.
6. Monsters University- Friendships take time and hard work to develop and strengthen. Mike and Sully’s was no different, but their relationship was so solid in the original Monsters Inc, it was easy to assume that they had always been best pals. MU takes that assumption and shatters it to pieces in its opening minutes, and that takes guts. Anyone accusing this movie of being lazy and formulaic is just plain wrong. Also, it comes with a short, The Blue Umbrella, which I could easily place by itself at number 3 or 4 on this list.
8. The Grandmaster- Words are inadequate to explain any film, but that applies doubly to any film directed by Wong Kar Wai, so I’ll leave you a clip. That right there is how you shoot an action sequence!
9. Like Someone in Love- The exiled Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami proves again why he’s considered one of the world’s best filmmakers. This time around, he’s in Japan, shooting Tokyo in that roaming melancholy, deeply affecting way he shot Tuscany for 2010’s Certified Copy. A call girl, a professor and a mechanic get into a Volvo... The whole movie, as Jeffrey Overstreet claims, seems like the setup for a joke, and it is indeed very funny, but also unbearably sad. Kiarostami’s characters inhabit a super-technological, completely commercialized dreamscape that works wonders for their careers, but heavily impares their failing quest for love. "Isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?” So said Celine in Before Sunrise. That’s all these three want; they just have to find the right way to go about it.
10. The World's End- Englishmen. Friends. Beer. Wright. Pegg. Frost. Action. Aliens. Apocalypse. Starbucks. If any one of these appeals to you — except the last one, naturally — I guarantee you’ll love this film.
Honorable Mention- The Bling Ring, Stoker, From up on Poppy Hill, 12 Years a Slave, Rush, About Time, Blue Jasmine, Pacific Rim, To The Wonder, Side Effects, Warm Bodies, Prisoners, Mud, Frozen.
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