So another fine year for cinema draws to a close. Through the newly released and the oldies revisited, festival marathons and lazy sundays in, I've watched something in the region of 250 films this year. The process of narrowing that down to a measely 10 is surely a futile insulting process and yet here we are, wahey! Of course, this is nothing definitive, merely the plucky few who stood out from the pack. 

Despite my best efforts, especially in these last few weeks, there are still plenty of supposedly notable films which I've missed. This shameful roll call includes: The Imitation Game, Oculus, Love is Strange, The Wind Rises, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, The Lunchbox, The Missing Picture, Proxy, Hide Your Smiling Faces, Cold in July, Ilo Ilo, and- perhaps to this list's greatest determinant- the documentary Manakanama and Lukas Moodysson's We Are the Best! All of these, and surely many more, could well be masterpieces. There are also questions of international release dates and advanced festival viewing but not to worry, from the big ones that kicked me straight in the gut to the little ones that have lingered on. this is just what hit home for me in 2014.

Keen eyed readers might also note one glaring, boy-shaped exclusion. Richard Linklater's latest swept me away as a cinematic achievement, but the story of Mason's last twelve years on earth just hasn't stuck with me since I saw it at the Berlinale ten months ago. In all honesty, even at the time, the last few years failed to register at all. My suspicions are that Boyhood hits home with parents much more so than with me so, with that in mind, I, Rory O'Conner, hereby state that I will watch and review Linklater's Boyhood once again when my first child turns 18. Stay tuned for that one folks, I expect to see something new.

Sorry Fellas...

10 honourable mentions, in no particular order:

Nightcrawler: A reliably dedicated Jake Gyllenhall stalks the L.A. streets as a sociopathic first-on-the-scene crime reporter. Dan Gilroy channels Paul Schrader and Brian DePalma for a startling debut. Master cinematographer Robert Elswit's lens has seldom been more seedy.
Edge of Tomorrow: By playing around with the endless possibilities of a video game reset button, Doug limon's clever little Sci-Fi became the blockbuster surprise package of the summer.
Starred Up: The finest moment of Jack O'Connel's breakout year, he played new-kid-on-the-cellblock son to Ben Mendelsohn's worrying, institutionalised dad. This solid, hard edged prison drama was elevated to new heights by its standout leads. 
The Babadook: A frightening directorial debut. Jennifer Kent used familiar horror set ups and children's fables to show how loss, motherhood and mourning can take their psychological toll.
The Grand Budapest Hotel: With career best performances from Saoirse Ronan and Ralph Feinnes and a blistering score from Alexandre Desplat, Wes Anderson delivered his finest work in 15 years.
Two Days One Night: Gunning for a 3rd Palme d'Or which wasn't to be, the Dardenne brothers cranked their empathy machine up a few gears. Marion Cotillard was brittle and brilliant in the lead role.
Night Moves: Kelly Reichardt swung her career to the extreme left with this strangely overlooked study of the moral complexities and hubris involved with eco terrorism. Confirmed the director is still, surely, one of the most interesting filmmakers around.
The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq: Wit the IMPAC winning author playing himself with nihilistic swagger, Guillaume Nicloux's Stockholm Syndrome pseudo-doc took a bucket of paint stripper to all the Berlinale razzle dazzle this year. It was also very very funny.
Blue Ruin: Another from a strong list of breakout directors, Jeremy Saulnier showed a virtuoso hand for cinematic imagery with his largely dialogue free revenge thriller. Shades of the great Peter Lorre can be seen in Macon Blair's edgy shivering Dwight.
The Guest: Mischievous, perfectly toned and full of neat cinematic ideas, the year's best genre effort was- almost- 2014's best laugh too.

10.
Foxcatcher

Beautifully framed, weighted photography from Greig Fraser; balletic, near silent wrestling scenes; and career best performances from its three leads. Bennet Miller's third feature was a work of both staggering quality and remarkable restraint.

Full Cannes review here.

9.
Nymphomaniac Part I & II (UNCUT)

With separate screenings in Berlin and Venice- which featured, among other off-screen things, a Cantona-quoting Shia Lebeouf walk-out, a Persona Non Grata middle finger to Cannes and a phone-a-friend Skype call between Stellan Skarsgard and director Lars Von Trier- this meaty, ornately detailed, 325 minute long unsexy film about sex provided further confirmation of the fun that can be had when the Lars show comes to town. 

8.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Bubbling beneath his blend of absurd tragic homor and colonial guilt, Roy Andersson found a defiant warmth for our sad old race. His trilogy ending masterpiece deservedly nabbed him Venice's Gold Lion too.

Full Venice review here.

7.
The Lego Movie


What a joy it would have been to have attended the first screening of this hilarious, anarchic riot. Not only did writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller debunk our (justifiably) cynical expectations, they seemed to take our worst fears about The LEGO movie- unimaginative, money grabbing Hollywood fodder- and turn them on their head. The film not only preached lovely things like nonconformity and play, it was also the most fun to be had in the cinema this year. Arguably the best received film of 2014, it currently sits with 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from a whopping 221 reviews. But when one Fox NEWS reporter denounced it as anti-capitalist, there was little else we really needed to hear.

6.
Under the Skin

Scarlett Johansson drove around Glasgow in a minivan and lured a few Scottish blokes into a pool of black goo. Director Jonathan Glazer added maverick hidden camera work to his already peerless imagery to create the year's strangest, most singular film. Mica Levi's score- a regular in its own right on any reputable year-end music list- brought haunting levels of depth. 

Scarlett was quite brilliant. 

Had the ending been up to it, Under the Skin would have surely been my number 1. It was ten years in the making, let's pray we don't wait so long for his next. 

5.
Citizenfour

Had they shot it in Hollywood we might have seen a long table littered with empty Chinese take-out and head scratching journos in loosened ties, but Laura Poitras' earth shattering documentary had little need for such cheap aesthetics. The stakes felt so urgent, the social responsibility so huge, it was like sitting at the source of the Nile as the frightening information leaked out. Once in a generation stuff.



4.
Whiplash

It's difficult to express in words what a driving, breathless experience Damien Cazalle's debut feature really is, but I suppose that's what I'm here to do. With breakneck editing, toxic dialogue and, from J.K. Simmons, the performance of the year, Whiplash seemed liable to burst from its snare-skin tight seams. The armrest gripping final showdown provided the year's best scene.

My adrenaline fuelled Cannes review here.



3. 
Interstellar

Amidst the cash cows and cynicism of blockbuster filmmaking, Christopher Nolan wasn't afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. Interstellar was as wonderfully ambitious as it was fundamentally flawed, and yet, to put it simply, a trip to the Cinema hadn't felt like that in years.

I laughed. I cried. I wiped my jaw off the floor. 

An argument for its greatness here.



2. 
La Meraviglie (The Wonders)

As Johnathon Glazer sent an Alien to Scotland and Christopher Nolan shot a man to the stars, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher chose to turn her lens to a small beekeeping farm in Tuscany. Delicate period details, warm, heartbreaking humanity and surrealist flourishes like something from a Herzog dream. A wonderfully personal piece of filmmaking, nothing this year felt so textured and real.

Full gushing Cannes review here.



1. 
Her

You could really talk for hours about the amount of hand crafted care and detail that was put into each inch of Spike Jonze's fourth film, even without mentioning the terrific cast, Hoyte Van Hoytema's crisp cinematography or Owen Pallet and Arcade Fire's rousing score. But that would be forgetting the simplicity of the film's neat core idea. Great science fiction is all about neat little ideas, and while a human falling for an artificial intelligence operating system might not be the most original of stories, Scarlett Johansson's Samantha falling out of love is.

With relatively scarce use of CGI, Spike Jonze and his wonderful production team crafted a vivid, thoughtful view of what our future might actually feel like, both the world which surrounds us and the increasingly integrated one on our screens. The results, of course, were marvellous, but they also managed to capture how a self aware O.S. might really feel. To that point that in a fine, resurgent year for science fiction, the being we empathised with most was made up of merely a silky voice and a computer screen. 

A touching, beautiful triumph, and one which almost reached the haunting levels of Roy Batty and those things he's seen...

It's like I'm reading a book... and it's a book I deeply love. But I'm reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you... and the words of our story... but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It's a place that's not of the physical world. It's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed.

Philip K. Dick would be proud.

Much peace and love for 2015 xxx

So what did it really feel like to go to the flicks in 2014?

A master Scandinavian absurdist took the gold Lion in Venice while, back in February, a similarly metalled Bear took an unexpected trip from Berlin to China. Boyhood was the bookies favourite for that particular gong, and it now looks odds on for Oscar glory too, but if March 2015 turns out to be the story of Linklater's 12 Year's a Boy, this year's razzle dazzle was all Steve McQueen and his 12 Years a Slave. Indeed, while somewhat unexpected turns were taken elsewere, the BIG, "important"- and truly quite brilliant- American thing still won the Academy Award while out on the French coast, the long, difficult European thing (Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep) still won the Palme d'Or.

It was a year when the dream factory churned out the sequels, remakes and prequels at an oddly interim level as the green beads of sweat began to form for its endlessly lucrative 2015. And yet despite all that talk of Justice leagues, expanded universes and Michael Bay, the real story of the multiplexes came, quite bizarrely, from the left of field. Guardians of the Galaxy (Decent), 22 Jump Street (Good) and The LEGO Movie (Great) let Hollywood show us that it was in on the joke, but a Tom Cruise Sci-fi styled Groundhog Day and a stupid-smart thrill ride from Luc Besson offered even greater escape than these. For the most part though it all seemed quite familiar and, far too often, tediously self aware. But then, like a great big gravitational shift, along came Christopher Nolan, Hans Zimmer and their mighty Interstellar to pummel us into our seats. To paraphrase the great David Thomson, cinema simply says: Look at this, isn't it amazing? Isn't it beautiful? Nothing else this year seemed to ask these questions so loud (and I mean LOUD) and clear.

It was a year when reality often offered more urgency and thrills than fiction. Documentary land introduced us to the defiant nationalism of Viacheslav Fetisov, the courage and charm of the American Samoan football team, the staggering integrity of Edward Snowden and what lies behind the curtain of Johannes Vermeer. Great twists were taken in Wes Anderson and Kelly Reichhardt's careers while It Felt Like Love, The Guest, Blue Ruin, Nightcrawler and Coherence proved that there's still fresh blood in American indie too. In other lands a young Polish woman named Ida listened to John Coltrane; a Russian man named Nikolay experienced the book of job; but then a rumble rumble rumble and a dook dook dook for something or other called the Babadook. We reeled with David Cronenberg and rallied with the Dardennes before Alice Rohrwacher, and her quiet Tuscan farm, gently let us reminisce on childhood and life. 

It was a year of North Korean hacking and Nymphomania; of Foxcatcher Farms and Budapest Hotels. Edward Snowden broke rank; Spike Jonze broke hearts; Jack O'Connell broke heads; Miles Teller broke sticks. Jonze, Besson and Glazer helped Scarjo rise from the ashes while Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Williams and Lauren Becall tragically returned to theirs...

So another year of the unexpected and the business-as-usual. And yet, like a fool, what struck me more than anything was just 8 quick shots and 90 seconds long. A scurrying little droid, a dessert plain, and the greatest opening chord in cinema history. 

Happy New year y'all, and thanks for all the reads. x 

2015 is coming, those twin suns loom...

It seems rather fitting that in the week when the European Space Agency completed it’s staggering, ridiculous, visionary, 20 year project to land a probe on a comet flying at 135,000 km/h that Christopher Nolan would release his own staggering, ridiculous, visionary film. Interstellar is a film about human endeavor, but it's a film about cinematic endeavor too, and in a year when big money movie-making became increasingly ironic, and tediously self aware, the emotional plunge pool of seeing a work of this stature, with its heart located so prominently on-sleeve, is about as close as you can hope to get to a cathartic cinematic experience in such cynical times as these.

It simply says; Yes, we can do better. 

Deep breath and... Defiant, plucky, Matthew McConaughey plays the defiant, plucky, Cooper; a salt of the earth, blue collar, farming, engineering, ex-test pilot (and so on) in the not so distant future. We learn that food is running out; that the world's armies have been disbanded; and that over population peaked and was cruelly dealt with. Cascading dust clouds suggest that the worst is yet to come. 

A gravitational anomaly sends our blue jeans/white-T/ Carhartt wearing hero to a hidden NASA base where efforts are being made to find humanity a new home. We learn that the team has discovered a loophole at the arse-end of Saturn and that an expedition, named Lazarus, was sent through to find inhabitable worlds. We find the team back on earth collectively blowing on one last roll of the dice; a plan to form a new colony while they attempt to solve an equation which holds the key to getting the rest of us up there too. They soon ask Cooper to take the wheel. 

Supernovas of shit collide with orbiting fans.

Much like the worn out, battered, retro futurist, mid 21^st century technology which sends Cooper and his mates to space, the kinks in Interstellar’s design are there for all to see. Plot holes and potholes arrive in equal measure, the pacing tied up in loopholes and knots. You can feel the narrative trip up on itself time and time again and yet, through wholehearted balls-out sincerity, the film still triumphs. 

This is, after all, what it's all about. How often do we hear directors waxing on about capturing what it really felt like to “go to the movies”? Well. Here. It. Fucking. Is. Christopher Nolan truly believes in cinema, and space exploration, and the human experience. It's up there in every heartfelt 70mm frame (he even still shoots on those dusty old things). So hunt down the biggest IMAX theatre you can; sit precariously close to the screen. Feel your neck creak back; feel the faux leather squeak as you grip the armrest of your seat. Feel the great sweeps and blows of Hans Zimmer's chords; the crisp, stillness of Saturn's rings; the overwhelming vastness and silence of space; and the delicate wonder of our unique place within it.

And remember how it felt. Life’s terribly short after all... 

Relatively speaking of course.

                On the evidence of Man Of Steel there is no reason to believe director Zach Snyder has done any growing up. His dark modern take on the Superman franchise is so concerned with its own immensity that amongst the onslaught of CGI spectacle and mushy mid-west Americana anything relatable is lost.

                We begin a little earlier than previous films with Krypton on the brink of destruction and the Machiavellian General Zodd (the great stone faced Michael Shannon) attempting to save his race by purging the lesser bloodlines. The new born Kal-El -soon to be Clark Kent- is sent to Earth by father Jor-El (Russell Crowe in full Shakespearian mode) with the hopes of his people hidden on board. From here we skip to a brooding older Kent (Henry Cavill) trying to find his way and keep his abilities somewhat under-wraps while a series of flashbacks build his mythology before a scorned Zodd returns to exact revenge.

                Dark Knight scribe David S Goyer takes up writing duties with Chris Nolan’s Syncopy productions pulling some strings in an attempt to continue the gritty universe of Nolan’s hugely successful Batman series. Sadly the end product feels miles away from Gotham city. As far as event cinema goes Man Of Steel commits a cardinal sin of sorts, as unlike the slick Noir of Nolan’s films, it just doesn’t look all that good. A metallic colour pallet of greys and blues combined with some shaky Bourne style camerawork- both of which are blurred considerably by the post produced 3D- results in a finale so difficult to decipher it might make Michael Bay blush.

                Snyder simply fails to provide any humanity to anchor these scenes.  One of Superman’s charms was the earnest rapport he has with his adoptive race but the only real glimpse we get of this-with Lois Lane (the ever-affable Amy Adams) in a military interrogation room- lasts for little more than a minute. A lighter touch just wouldn’t fit with the execs over in Warner Bros and their gritty DC dream. The moneymen seem desperate to kick-start a Justice League series and while Snyder’s film is far from deserving of spawning such a project, if and when the big bucks come in there will be little left to stop them. Sighs all round. 

Beau Trevail

Oh the mountain of must-see-movies and my humble attempts to scale it...

Progress will be compiled at the end of each month and the films are listed in order of preference.

Beau Travail 
Claire Denis (1999)

Denis Lavant gives a performance of pure intensity in this ode to absurd masculinity; Clair Denis’ use of imagery and music to tell this story of French legionnaires in East Africa is almost Kubrickian.

Chungking Express 
Wong Kar Wai (1994)

This distinctively Kar-Wai slice of pop noir feels so crisp and fresh it’s difficult to believe the film is almost two decades old. The soundtrack is a killer too.

Contempt
Jean Luc Godard (1963)

Bridgette Bardot, in full bombshell mode, and Michel Picoli fall out of love on the set of Fritz Lang’s fictional take on The Odyssey in Godard’s first attempt at high budget filmmaking. Far more romantic than Truffaut’s similarly themed Day for Night but vibrant and dramatic enough to pull it off.

Following
Christopher Nolan (1998)
With flashes of the director’s eventual hallmarks throughout; Following is an enjoyable glimpse at the roots of Nolan’s thinking. It's a little dated but still a clever, well made psychological thriller.