10 Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, down to the wire 2014 Edition

After much contemplation and procrastination, here now is my seventh annual “wait, you’re still doing these?” list of 10 movies released last year I really liked, a.k.a. the last “best-ish of 2014” movie list you’ll ever read.

Last year, I omitted any Oscar Best Picture nominees from contention, figuring (rightly) that nobody needed to hear my thoughts on Gravity in mid-February. I’m keeping that tradition alive this year, with one inescapable exception, so let’s start there.

Boyhood

Boyhood is the best movie I saw last year. Nothing else came close. It starts with an audacious conceit, telling a twelve-year-long story by shooting, a bit at a time with the same cast, over that exact span of time. High marks on degree of difficulty alone. It’s the artistic equivalent of putting your family into the Mayflower and hoping you make it to the New World.

That’s the how. The what is, in some ways, even more impressive. Though not without dramatic moments, the script avoids the cliche “coming of age” milestones and melodrama you might expect. Instead, it gives us moments of life lived, glimpses of gradual changes to its characters and their world.

Looking back on Boyhood weeks or months later, I don’t recall a plot or a three-act structure. I recall moments — remember that time camping? Remember that visit to grandma’s? Remember that time at school? That’s exactly how it feels when I remember my own childhood.

Director Richard Linklater’s first notable feature, Slacker (1991), documented a day in the life of dozens of characters living on the margins of Austin society. Where Slacker goes wide and shallow, Boyhood goes narrow and deep. Together, both showcase a filmmaker pushing the formal boundaries of mainstream narrative film.

Under the Skin

My second favorite movie of the year is Under the Skin. This is a cold, slow, dark film with moments that are deeply disturbing and utterly heartbreaking. Scarlett Johansson does outstanding work portraying an alien sent to Earth to…well, I won’t spoil that, but it doesn’t bode well for humanity. Filmmaker Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) casts a light on how strange our everyday lives are when seen through the POV of a character whose humanity is literally skin deep. No film from last year (or many other years) better embodies the concept of “alienation.” Months on, this one still haunts me. The electronic score from Mica Levi (Micachu) is my favorite of the year.

Guardians of the Galaxy

In his finest performance of the year, Bradley Cooper stars as a traumatized, morally questionable killer. Who is also a talking raccoon whose best friend is a walking tree. I speak of course of Rocket Raccoon, one of the titular Guardians of the Galaxy. James Gunn’s over the top space opera delivered the most fun I had in a movie theater in 2014. He makes it look easy (it’s not — see Film Crit Hulk’s excellent analysis for why). Guardians is the spiritual successor to Star Wars my inner ten-year old has been longing for. Good luck trying to do better, J.J. Abrams.

Jodorowsky’s Dune

2014 also introduced me to the spiritual precursor to Lucas’ 1977 masterpiece (as well as Scott’s Alien and Cameron’s Terminator), in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. Hollywood is full of tales of mythic, almost-made movies but this one tops them all. Stop for a second to consider that we almost lived in a world in which Salvador Dali, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger co-starred in a sci-fi flick. At the center of it all is Alejandro Jodorowsky, the now 86 year-old director whose creative energy burns brighter than any six directors a third his age. Inspiring and mind-blowing.

The Babadook

While we’re talking genre films, the best horror movie of 2014 was The Babadook. The film, from first-time Australian director Jennifer Kent, tells the story of a single mother and her young son whose home is invaded by a sinister spirit harkened by the arrival of creepy pop-up book. Strong characters, good performances and well-constructed scares aside, what makes The Babadook is the emotional truth underlying all its terrors.

Calvary

In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a thoughtful priest in a small Irish town who is told, in confession, that he’ll be killed in one week — not because of anything he did, but precisely because he’s done nothing to deserve it. And that’s just the opening scene. Writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s dark comedy shows a spiritual man trying to navigate a world that may not have much use for spirituality. Added bonus: the photography of the Irish coast is gorgeous.

Ida

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida offers a different look at a spiritual figure surrounded by characters who have lost their moral bearings, this time in the shadow of the Second World War. Ida is a novice on the verge of taking her convent vows, encouraged by the Mother Superior to seek out an aunt, her only living relative. The film is in many ways Calvary’s opposite — quiet vs. talky, black and white vs. color, muddy and cramped vs. bucolic and wind-swept. Yet I can’t help but think that their central figures would kind of hit it off.

Cheap Thrills

Speaking of morally bankrupt, the characters in Cheap Thrills hit bottom, then grab a shovel and dig to new depths of depravity in search of a purely material salvation. Craig (Pat Healy) and his sometimes friend Vince (Ethan Embry) are invited home by a rich couple (Sara Paxton and the wonderfully cast David Koechner) and pitted against each other in increasingly degrading competitions for ever-greater sums of cash. First-time director E.L. Katz keeps the audience guessing at how far the games will go in this darkest of dark comedies, and cringing as things go exactly where you fear — and beyond.

Blue Ruin

Like Boyhood’s coming-of-age story, Blue Ruin is a film firmly situated in a genre but committed to subverting the usual genre trappings. A revenge thriller, the film quickly dispatches the quest for vengeance — in this case, the main character’s desire to kill the recently paroled killer of his parents. It spends most of its runtime dealing with the violent aftermath of that act, reminding us that one man’s closure may be another’s freshly opened wound.

Honeymoon

There are many good contenders for the last spot on my 2014 list. Since you already know “Everything is Awesome,” I’m going to give it to Honeymoon, a really smart horror movie from Leigh Janiak, another a first-time female director. Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) and Harry Treadaway (Penny Dreadful) star as newlyweds on their honeymoon in a cabin by a lake. He gets worried when she starts acting less and less like herself and wandering off into the woods.

Honorable mentions:

• Keep an eye out for yet-unreleased indie Brooklyn comedy Fort Tilden.
• Movies that would have made this list if you cut out all the scenes with humans talking: Godzilla, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
• Frank, which is a little twee and uneven in the early going but sticks the landing straight through my heart by the end.
• Two must-see performances in good but not-perfect movies: Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler and Gene Jones in The Sacrament.

Originally published 2.22.15 at sevendeadlyseans.tumblr.com.