Counting Down Two Top Tens for 2014

Tying a ribbon on a Top 10 list and calling it a day is hard. (I know, I know: almost as hard as four tours in Iraq or walking into a phalanx of billy-clubbing police!) Here are some movies I saw a year and a half ago at festivals in other countries, which have taken permanent root in my mind; there is one I literally saw this afternoon, down the block from where I live, and instantly adored. Watch as I judge films that dextrously show new possibilities in the form against those that reflect or uncover deep social needs (though many of the best do both). And while we're at it, let's induce false rivalries or frames of comparison among movies that seem incorrigibly esoteric against those that are merrily commercial! It's all silly, and impossible, and obsessively absorbing, and great fun.  You already know all that.  So enough of the hemming and hawing that delayed my 2012 and 2013 lists for months, during which I did none of the re-watching that I considered necessary, in order to make sure my lists were "right."  What would that even mean?

The rankings were made more difficult this year by the fact that I had way more A– grades than usual but no actual A's among U.S. releases. In other words, I'm not that much more beholden to my favorite movie of the year than I am to my 17th favorite, and I had no runaway cause célèbre.  It seems nuts not to see Mr. Turner or Heli or Exhibition or A Most Violent Year on here, or even films I rated slightly lower on balance but think about constantly, like the intoxicating Under the Skin, the exquisite and subtly suggestive Love Is Strange, the heartwarming but unsentimental Ilo Ilo, the soft-spoken but tough-minded melodrama Beyond the Lights, or the shimmering, sobering Timbuktu.  I've included a couple movies that I'm suspicious might reveal more "cracks" on second viewing and also excluded some, like The Immigrant (featuring the year's best performance, by Marion Cotillard), that I relished on first pass and only admired more on two successive viewings. There's no higher compliment I could pay to my chosen titles than to observe how movies as staggering, lifelines as invigorating, experiments as successful as the ones in this paragraph were kept from the roster.

Enough. What will follow over the coming days are two overlapping Top 10s, one here and one here, in keeping with my website's delineation between U.S. releases and world premieres in each calendar year.  Can't be up too late rhapsodizing, but here are the first thoughts that come to mind in relation to the movies I'm seating in first class as we board our flight into, hopefully, another spectacular year in the cinema ...

Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 5

Liv LeMoyne, Mira Barkhammar, and Mira Grosin in the aptly titled We Are the Best!

After installments 1, 2, 3, and 4, we reach the final dozen partnerships I want to salute from the last year of ticket-buying and festival-hopping.  Please note that I hadn't seen Selma when I plotted out this series, or else I would have recognized its sprawling and sterling supporting ensemble of activists—Stephan James, André Holland, Wendell Pierce, Tessa Thompson, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Henry Sanders, Keith "Short Term" Stanfield, Niecy Nash, Oprah Winfrey, Colman Domingo, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and more. They convey so much with few if any King-like moments to seize the spotlight, evoking several historically august personages without pulling focus or acting "important." And I still haven't screened Leviathan, A Most Violent Year, Cake, The Good Lie, Top Five, Inherent Vice, American Sniper, or several other commercial releases that seem like viable plays for this type of recognition... to say nothing of the many, many festival titles I've missed.  But conceding all those necessary omissions, there's still so much to savor.

41. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive - Talk about directorial conceptions that would be hard to penetrate: Only Lovers is a mordant hipster globe-hopping comic romantic political vampire story about devotion over time, the dying world, the gutting of Detroit, dysfunctional relatives, and rad taste in guitars. It's funny, spooky, taciturn, and strange. As much as Tilda Swinton seems like an osmotic chameleon—capable of turning into anything she touches, the weirder the better—I refuse to believe it doesn't take work. Even though Tom Hiddleston joined the movie late, when Michael Fassbender had to bail, he seems like he's always been there: not just throughout pre-production, but for the last 2,000 years. One imagines that pretending to be in love with Swinton or Hiddleston would be easy, but wittily conveying several centuries of familiarity and un-gloopy admiration is surely a special skill. I was in the seeming minority in being spellbound by Jarmusch's Limits of Control a few years ago, which also featured Swinton and John Hurt, but that was unmistakably one man's weird vision; actors offered themselves as manipulable pawns. Only Lovers Left Alive is just as idiosyncratic, yet it feels co-authored by everyone in it, but especially by its leads, like a funky hallucination they had together. Pull up a popsicle and enter the dream.

42. The Miners and the Queers, Pride - Matthew Warchus directed one of the year's largest ensembles; there must be two-dozen actors with speaking parts and legible arcs in Pride. The clear mapping of everyone's journeys, both common and private, plays like an unpretentious miracle. More than most films in this feature, Collaboration is the explicit theme of Pride, and its ethos of empathetic mobilization is impossible to refuse. It's hard enough these days to drum up people's energies in solidarity of their own tribes, as evidenced by how little business Pride did compared to what it deserved. WTF, gays?? But it's even harder to mobilize people on behalf of folks who don't remind them of themselves, particularly across the urban-rural gulf. Even free-thinkers and anti-patriarchs like Xavier Dolan (Tom at the Farm) and Josephine Decker (Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) seem openly terrified of crossing that particular divide. So at risk of just effusing over this movie's blatant message and with all due respect to how expertly it pulls off its projects, the common cause hammered out within the story between the Welsh laborers and the lavender Londoners was one of the most transformative spectacles in a year of cinema. Extra points for the film's repeated attention, witty but pointed, to the vestiges of sexism among even the most emancipated or outwardly effeminate of men.

43. Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait - Have you ever painted a self-portrait? Have you ever done it with your paintbrush on one continent and your canvas on another?  And also while the canvas is on fire?  That's more or less what Mohammed and Bedirxan accomplish in the year's most bracing movie, and arguably its most urgent.  He's a renowned film artist who has expatriated to France to escape the burgeoning Holocaust at home, and also to safeguard and disseminate footage of that violence that has already been entrusted to him. She, a Kurdish activist more recently settled in Syria, is now a stalwart holdout. Intent on documenting the ravages and tending to the mostly-abandoned children of Homs, she is eager for an expert's advice about what to shoot and how to export the footage. These two never met until "their" film premiered at Cannes. What is indescribably horrifying to watch is also indescribably ennobling to behold: two swimmers caught in strong, bloody currents, clinging to each other across time zones, surviving the cataclysm, inciting us to action and inspiring us to realize our own potentials as witnesses and testifiers.

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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 4

Ukrainians gathered on Independence Square in Maidan

(Catch up on Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and afterward, keep reading through the big finish.)

31. Claude Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein, The Last of the Unjust - Critics largely treated Unjust as though it were extra recommended reading attached to the prodigious syllabus that is Lanzmann's Shoah. But the projects are very different, and this is a prodigious event in itself. Murmelstein, once the Chief Rabbi of Vienna and later the appointed supervisor of the Jewish ghetto and concentration camp at Theresienstadt, remains for many people an emblematic face of Nazi collaboration, and he knows it.  So not only is he rare for being the unambiguous center of an epic-length Lanzmann documentary but he arrives to his interviews as Lanzmann's subjects seldom do: fully aware of the frameworks and biases that many, many people will apply to his testimonies, if they even listen at all.  He seems to have decided that all he can tell is the truth, his truth, and hope for some benefit of the doubt. The documentarian seizes on Murmelstein's candor and his amazing recall of salient details, including the horrible fates of prior Theresienstadt supervisors.  The narrative appeals to the part of Lanzmann that likes to complicate received narratives, even if Murmelstein isn't always prepared (who is?) for such astringent, indefatigable probing.  He tows a line of asking for understanding without begging for sympathy, with Lanzmann both helping him draw that line and repeatedly shoving him off it. As heavy as the film is, it's remarkable how invigorating it is to see a weighty conversation about an absolutely intractable circumstance get the screen-time and thorough contextualization it deserves, sustained by a vigorous inquirer and an impressively reflective subject.

32. Roger Ebert and Steve James, Life Itself - A lighter documentary, but far from insubstantial, particularly since neither Ebert nor James is interested in doting hagiography. Affection for Ebert flows across Life Itself and from multiple sources; anyone eager to honor his memory or his durable, capacious careers as journalist, critic, and media personality would do well to rent the film. But the scenes that stick are those where James wants to shoot something Ebert doesn't want filmed (like the excruciating suction of his esophagus), or where Roger and his wife Chaz are of different minds about how much to broadcast of his ongoing medical challenges or of bad news arriving in real time. Occasional conflicts like these help make Life Itself a Steve James film, not just a loose facsimile of Ebert's memoir or a straightforward extension of his self-perceptions. The same could be said of the fair hearing Gene Siskel gets in Life Itself, neither sidebarred nor sentimentalized nor set up as the obvious lesser of two equals.  Just as Jamesian is the prismatic view of complex professional pressures, the tough ligatures linking work to family or individual to community. It says plenty about Ebert that he wanted an actual filmmaker to document his life, not just a trusted friend, and that he'd want the movie to be good, not just fond.

33. Cheng Pei-Pei and Ben Whishaw, Lilting - It's difficult to play two characters who, beyond misunderstanding each other, have absolutely no context for grasping or reading each other.  It's even harder to do that without the actors suggesting that they themselves are out of sync, or without resorting to the kind of broad, superficial semaphores of impatience that suggest a clean, improbable rapprochement is just around the corner. Cheng Pei-Pei and Ben Whishaw clear all these obstacles in Hong Khaou's delicate film. They offer Lilting such a strong center that it survives the vaguer storytelling and characterizations all over its margins. Cheng is an elderly, unassimilated Chinese immigrant to the UK who has recently lost the son who placed her in an assisted living center. She does not realize he did so only temporarily, until he could screw up the courage to come out to her as gay and convince her to live with him and his boyfriend, whom Cheng's character already doesn't like. The son died before he could clarify anything, so now the mother and the boyfriend glare at each other across linguistic, cultural, and generational barriers, and across chasms of secrecy and grief, while also contending with other, private matters that add to their sorrow and anger. Much of this is communicated via silent expressions; even when they speak through a translator, all we need to know is written on the features of Cheng's and Whishaw's faces. The film is a tiny labor of love, kept aloft by the year's unlikeliest star pairing, and one of its most moving.

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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 3

Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, and Lena Dunham in Happy Christmas

(Catch up on what I'm doing here and here. And yes, I recognize that these are getting longer.)

21. Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh, and Marietou Touré, Girlhood - The complaint writes itself and is practically rhetorical: "Why'd Boyhood get so much attention and Girlhood so little?" To be fair, Céline Sciamma's study of four Afro-French teenagers, and of one in particular, won't open in the U.S. until hopefully next year. At that point, many of my readers will have their best shot at nullifying this objection by buying lots of tickets and endlessly chatting up the movie.  Once that comes to pass, we can all admire first-timer Karidja Touré's artful projection of vibrancy and heartache in the lead role but also the sinuous rapport of all four actresses at the center of the film, playing characters who are often but not always lifelines for each other. The relations synthesize most gorgeously during their exuberant, full-length, indigo-lit sing-along to Rihanna's "Diamonds" but their spirit, as bruised and boisterous as the song, courses through the whole film. Sciamma taps into it deftly and created the context in which it could thrive, but she couldn't access it and we couldn't savor it if her actresses hadn't conjured it.

22. Everybody in Goodbye to All That - Maybe they really do make this kind of movie all the time in France, but it's nonetheless remarkable when an American filmmaker understands character this way: not just as a carefully sculpted centerpiece, dominating a table to which spectators and fellow actors dutifully pull up a seat, but as a porous environment, a weather system, a loosely bonded atomic cloud through which motives, desires, personalities, ideas, and situations pass and accumulate. That's how writer-director Angus MacLachlan approached Otto and how Paul Schneider plays him, with a relaxation and a sense of ongoing discovery rarely connoted by adjectives like "impeccable," which Schneider nonetheless deserves. So do the other members of the cast, most of whom are women. Melanie Lynskey's brave and angry wife, Ashley Hinshaw's friend with benefits, Anna Camp's hot-and-cold churchgirl, Heather Graham's simmering old flame, Audrey Scott's believably all-seeing daughter, and especially Heather Lawless's resilient free spirit: these are not just refractions of Otto, but permeable, evolving creations of their own, as Otto is, and at no cost to their dramatic coherence. Smaller parts rendered by Michael Chernus, Amy Sedaris, and national treasure Celia Weston are just as indelible. They don't just honor the personalities implied by the script.  They contribute to an idea about life that the script hopes to promulgate: that we're all making it up, co-creating, but hopefully not lying.  Men and women alike, they are all midwives to this insight, expert and utterly un-arrogant.

23. Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, and Lena Dunham, Happy Christmas - "He's only saying it because they're friends," some readers will grouse. "He's only saying it because we're friends," one particular person might be saying, with typical, self-effacing modesty. "Oh my god, for real," say actual spectators of Happy Christmas and Goodbye to All That, who know the truth. Lynskey is the only well-known actor I can also call a friend; the filming of Happy Christmas, not far from my home, was the occasion for finally spending real time with her.  But private sympathies aside, her project choices consistently incline toward ensemble pieces, and when we're all lucky, not just her, these are the effects. Happy Christmas gifts all its actors with roles that draw off past personas (Kendrick's chipper edge, Lynskey's dejection and carefully tended hope, Dunham's jovial listening and self-ironization) while nudging most of them into new territory (Kendrick's a mess, Lynskey's a mom, and I did say most of them).  For a certain kind of indie audience, this is an irresistible cast. The comfy scenes, including a hilarious post-credits stinger, where these three bat around ideas for the Lynskey character's next book have the punchy whiff of the actresses simultaneously creating and goofing off. But they aren't playing themselves, and this isn't all a joke: witness one of the film's best moments, where Kendrick's and Dunham's characters pose genuine queries to Lynskey's about motherhood; she is gratified but also made nervous by their too-quick glorification of her role and her choices.  Name the last movie where this many women asked this many rarely-broached questions and evoked such multi-dimensional investments and responses on all sides, spoken and not.

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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 2

Jafar Panahi, or is that Kambuzia Partovi, in Closed Curtain

(For context on this series, visit Part 1. For continuations, see Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)

11. Cast and Crew, Boyhood - One of my favorite morsels in this year's Hollywood Reporter Actress Roundtable came when Patricia Arquette described the experience of having to be these characters on- and off-camera during short spurts over a 12-year period.  Playing a mom to two young kids who had to buy her as their mom, or at least as a second mom, involved the usual interruptions of motherhood. Thus, when one of them needed a sandwich, there was no more line-running or ruminating on the character, just a trip to the micro-budgeted craft-services table to see who wanted what.  In her way, it feels like Arquette is speaking for lots of folks involved in Boyhood, from Ellar Coltrane to the perfectly-cast grandparents to the people who paid for the shoot, edited the footage, and stocked the lunch table with sandwich stuff. They all kept it real. So, fine, I'm in the camp that admired Boyhood without quite absorbing it as a religious experience.  On the sheer scale of artistic accomplishment, I see a prodigious if uneven experiment, a great performance by Ethan Hawke, and an above-average family chronicle with angles and textures a more conventionally produced movie couldn't have, for better or worse.  But as a collective enterprise of trust and long-term devotion, among collaborators who showed us a family and were a family, this was awfully special.

12. Kristen Stewart and Peyman Moaadi, Camp X-Ray - I have, thank goodness, never been to Guantánamo or to any facility resembling it, so I can't fairly assess this film's encapsulation of that environment or of the experiences people have there, on either side of the jail bars. But Stewart and Moaadi certainly convinced me I was privy to a nascent, plausible, and variously friction-filled relationship, hard to put into words, between a mysterious captive and an erstwhile captor, herself a vulnerable underling by virtue of her age, her inexperience, and her gender. Their performances really land.  And as an Army brat, I particularly admire Stewart's strong, persuasive hold on what many young soldiers are like. Movies often seek to show that, but few past the smell test.  In a year where Stewart also showed agility and sensitivity in scenes with Julianne Moore and Juliette Binoche, she was best with Moaadi.  He continues Stewart's laudable run with world-class duet partners.

13. Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald, Citizenfour - Doesn't it seem silly to group what this trio pulled off, and the context in which they did so, alongside the collaborative work of even the best actors and storytellers?  Yes and no.  One thing this team understood was that the filming of Snowden's disclosures wasn't finally separable from the disclosures themselves; image and representation are seminal, as boon and as danger. With that knowledge in mind, they construct a scene of History in Action that we can trust, even as they acknowledge the labor that goes into even the most "unvarnished" depiction—and even as they hope out loud that information might just this once travel at a speed of light before cults of personality and image-making inevitably overtake it.  What a heroic and endlessly debatable enterprise. What a rare look at such a pivotal circumstance, reflecting so much thought about what these people were doing, at concentric levels of critical remove from their own minute-by-minute and all-but-unprecedented experience.

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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 1

Kevin Allesee, Julian Walker, Nikki Jane, Gary LeRoi Gray, Wanita Woodgett, and Torrey Laamar in Blackbird.

"The thing that counts the most with me is the friendships, and the love, and the sheer joy we have shared making movies together. My friends."

If you don't know who said that and when, it is conceivable that you are reading the wrong blog, but that's okay.  It just means our lives are very different, which is fine.  The first reason these words linger in my mind today, even more than it does every day (no, seriously), is that during a month when everybody's making lists of the best single films and most outstanding individual accomplishments of the year in film, I realize how little we salute collaborations.  Outside of acceptance speeches or unbreakable ties on Ten Best lists, it's hard to pay tribute to the aspect of movielove that isn't about beholding solo artists' achievements but about relishing teamwork among filmmakers, or bonds between characters, or resonances across films.

The other reason is that New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are always occasions when I dwell on my own gratitude for the relationships that sustain my life and enable my good fortune.  This blog isn't the place to repay more private debts, but much of the thankfulness I feel is toward movie artists, for how they inspire, educate, and move me—often via their own visible camaraderie.  I genuinely feel happier in my life and better able to communicate, empathize, rebound from hardships, and admit my limitations because of the impressions of life, however reassuring or confronting, that I glean in the cinema.  So here are 52 occasions, one per week of the year, when the currents running between characters or the collaboration nourished among creative artists filled me with joy, admiration, humility, or insight.  I've limited myself to movies either released in 2014 or bowing at festivals in the last year, hopefully to arrive on screens near you in 2015.  I didn't love every movie, but that's the whole point: all of these relationships were gems to me, even the ones that were nestled in the rough.

1. Regina Hall and Kevin Hart, About Last Night - In their support of Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant and in their frisky, cantankerous rapport with each other, Hall and Hart generated the closest thing I saw in any 2014 romantic comedy to the vivid, spiky ensemble work that sustained the genre in the classic decades.  They don't play down to the genre, or defer to their co-stars.  Contemporary and frequently raunchy as they are, they act like they're in Libeled Lady, or a sexed-up, 21st-century Palm Beach Story.  As tasty as the whole film was, I wanted to keep watching their characters, even though you wouldn't necessarily want to be them or count on them in real life.  And with so many filmmakers giving Hart a long leash to improvise or ceding him his own unchallenged spotlight, which he's often very good at filling, it was great to see an actress go so fully toe-to-toe with him (among other bodily contacts).

2. Catherine Breillat and Isabelle Huppert, Abuse of Weakness - With typical flintiness, Breillat answered my question to her at TIFF '13 by saying that Huppert was the only professional actress she had any interest in working with.  As a piece of acting, Huppert's rendering of a palsied, embittered, undisguised surrogate for Breillat is often impressive but somewhat uneven, though less so than the film, which starts out strong, stagnates for a while, but sticks its pointed landing.  Setting all that somewhat aside, as an instance of making oneself a conduit for a forceful, sui generis filmmaker with something angry, complex, and somewhat inchoate to say about an extremely difficult time in her life, Huppert's work is exceedingly generous without being at all soft.

3. Alex and Ali, Alex & Ali - I hope more people get to see this documentary about a man from the U.S. South and a man from Iran who were friends and lovers a half-century ago, when the latter's family hosted the former as an exchange student, and who are now attempting to reconnect at a very different time, personally and politically.  The story is as harrowing as it is happy, and I won't reveal how they resolve their very difficult circumstances, but their willingness to be filmed at all was inspiring enough.  Their candor about thorny matters of head and heart, unfolding unpredictably in real time, is all the more so.  Sobering and valuable storytelling, straight from life.

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