Spoiler alert?

A few points to note before this all important ranking: These movies are picked from what I saw over the last 12 months so while Django Unchained, Stories We Tell, Spring Breakers and Paradise: Faith would certainly have crashed the party, I saw them a little before that. On the other hand this list contains a couple of titles which are yet to see the light of day in many territories but hey, it’s my list, so whatever. It’s also important to say that while I saw a great deal of films, I have obviously missed many more. This unfortunate list includes Blancanieves, The Wind Rises, No!, The Hunt, Pacific Rim, In A World..., Short Term 12, Wadjda, Rush, All Is Lost, The Great Beauty, The Selfish Giant and Hirokazu Kore-Eda's I Wish (although I did catch another of that directors films...). I blame many on the lack of English subs in Berlin. They could very well all be masterpieces.

Anyway, forget all that. This is nothing definitive, merely what pushed my buttons in 2013.

10 honourable mentions, in no particular order:

Star Trek: Into Darkness : J.J. Abrams gave hope for 2015 with this well executed sequel. Ubiquitous Cumberbatch at his Shakespearian best.

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom: Idris Elba showed us not the saint nor the sinner but a human being like us. Mandela died as the premier screened in Leicester square.

Blue Jasmine: Woody went back to the states and got back on form. Blanchet is brilliantly manic as the dishevelled lead.

Philomena: Judi Dench does a great Irish mammy and manages to loosen our tear ducts without breaking a sweat.

Nebraska: Bruce Dern gives a fine late performance in Alexander Payne’s surprisingly unsentimental road movie.

Mud: Jeff Nichol's great southern gothic saw McCaughnehey kick his remarkable comeback into gear.

Upstream Colour: Almost a decade after Primer, Shane Carruth returned to twist our collective melon.

A Field in England: Ben Wheatley sends us on a macabre civil war trip. No substances required.

Frances Ha: Greta Gerwig danced and despaired in this hip slice of melancholic monochrome.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints: David Lowery’s film might dip in the second half but this was almost the Terrance Mallick film we had all been waiting for.

  

10. 

Inside Llewyn Davis

Joel & Ethan Coen

The Coens made it five in a row with this melancholic ode to early 60s folk New York. Newcomer Oscar Isaac boasts timbre and timing as the titular lead.

9.

Beyond the Hills

Cristian Mungiu

After five years waiting, Cristian Mungiu followed up his jarring Palme d'Or winning debut with this uncompromising look at forbidden love in an orthodox monastery. Subversive realism bubbles under Mungiu’s sensational plot.

Check out a slightly longer review here.

8.

Blue is the Warmest Colour

Abdellatif Kechiche

Kechiche used dance, sex and uncompromising close-ups to immerse us in all the terrifying ecstasy of that first great love.  Maturing her character throughout, Adele Exarchopolous gives the performance of the year.

7.

The Act of Killing

Joshua Oppenheimer

There’s been plenty written about Joshua Oppenheimer’s exploitation document on the re-enacting murderers of Indonesia so let’s just say it already looks a classic in the genre. Whatever genre that may be.

6.

Museum Hours

Jem Cohen

 A woman visiting her dying relative spends a few short days with a Museum attendant. Cohen takes the most tender of love stories and overlaps it with a video essay on Vienna for the year's most quietly beautiful film. Seek it out.

5.

Gravity

Alfonso Cuaran

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney go space station hopping in Earth’s orbit after a rogue fleet of satellites wreck the place. The script was clunky; the plotline superfluous; but Alfonso Cuaron and his production team, in the most sophisticated ways imaginable, allowed us to feel, for the briefest of moments, like we were up there too.

Check out a slightly longer review here.

4.

Before Midnight

Richard Linklater

Celine and Jesse close out their ineffable 14 year saga with another day of long shot conversations under the European sun. The question is no longer “will it happen?”, but “will it last?” as our lovers deal with life and mortality on the Greek Peloponnese. I hope we meet again in 7 years time.

3.

Prisoners

Denis Villeneuve

All this talk of zero-G and flying satellites might lead you to believe that Gravity was the year’s best thrill ride but one could argue that this terrific film left us with even less fingernails. It’s interesting to note that the films boasted two of America’s most prestigious cinematographers and while Emmanuel Lubezki’s earthly vistas offered us the year’s most memorable imagery, Roger Deakins found a far stranger, more malevolent beauty in the trees and waters of Pennsylvania. Its star, Jake Gyllenhall, is a blinking powerhouse as a determined detective on the hunt for two lost girls. We hold our breath till the very. Last. Second.

 

2.

12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen managed to storm Hollywood, LA and the mainstream while staying true to his stern video art style. This brutal, wonderfully acted, slavery epic wasn't afraid to point the finger and could yet make McQueen the first black winner of Best Director at the Academy awards.

Check out a slightly longer review here.

1.

Like Father Like Son

Hirokazu Kore-Eda

As Cuaron, Oppenheimer and McQueen were busy creating there cinematic milestones, a director with a far more traditional ethos calmly delivered his masterpiece. His heart wrenching examination of nature vs. nurture had all the markings of a master. Kore-Eda has honed a purity of style and much like his spiritual father Yasijiro Ozu, patiently rakes the sands of family life to find a transcendental beauty within.  Astonishingly, his best might be yet to come.

Beyond the Hills

The favourite son of Romania’s New Wave follows up his jarring, Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with another film about two quietly defiant young women- their struggles and their friendship. Cristina Fluter and Cosmina Stratan play Alina and Voichita, two orphaned friends whose troubled past we can only guess at. There are hints that abuse and paedophilia plagued the girls’ orphanage but still, they survived. They also fell in love. We pick up with Alina returning home from a working spell in Germany to find that Voichita has taken solace in the local Orthodox convent. Alina is distraught. She wants nothing more than for Voichita to join her abroad and so decides to fight the priest for her affections. She lashes out and throws fits but when it goes too far the nuns suspect possession. The leading ladies shared the acting plaudits at Cannes for two greatly complimentary performances with Stratan remaining distant and tender while Fluter writhes with fury and passion. Framed beautifully in the grey autumnal light, there’s a fitting coldness here too. Like 4 Months…, this is a film devoid of any sentimentality, there’s just no room for such indulgences. With all of this Beyond the Hills should feel like a horror but amazingly, it looks like real life. Indeed, the films of the Romanian New Wave have seldom told us how to feel. They simply tell us how it is. 

Chasing Ice

National Geographic photographer James Balog assembles a crack team and sets out to gain visual evidence of our planet’s retreating glaciers by painstakingly capturing time-lapse footage over a number of years. Director Jeff Orlowski shoots a travel log of the mission intercut with the usual ominous looking graphs and interviews with straight shooting intellectuals. Orlowski’s documentary can feel a little sparse at times but unlike many of its kind it chooses sentimentality over scaremongering, portraying these vanishing behemoths not as something to fear, but instead as an endangered species.