In a year where two highly innovative English language films (Birdman and Boyhood) stood above the pack, it was foreign language films in 2014 that contained much of the lifeblood of the year’s cinema. Pawel Pawlikowski weaves a magical, deeply meditative spell with the lean and sublime Ida, a black-and-white film shot in a nearly square format. Containing two of the year’s best performances, the film is at once melancholy and luminous as it explores its themes of guilt, pain, transformation, loss, and survival in post-holocaust Poland. Equally haunting, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night takes a simple story in terms of plot and plumbs its depths for signs of human vanity and sacrifice, extracting every nuance of feeling from the film’s spare, savvy depiction of confrontation.
Eighty-five-year-old Chilean surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowky made his first film in 23 years and also had a documentary featuring his wild attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune. Not to be outdone, 84-year-old Jean-Luc Godard kept up his late in life mission of attempting to bend the boundaries of film itself. While the results of each of these efforts certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (I found Godard’s The End of Language essentially impenetrable yet still intriguing) they represent a life force largely missing in American films. Jodorowsky meanwhile, unfortunately received far less attention for his wondrously crazy memoir The Dance of Reality than for the eye-opening Jodorowsky’s Dune. Understandably, a film with a limitlessly imaginative scope and one that, had it ever got made, would have in its cast the likes of Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles, drew much attention.
Other highlights among foreign language films was Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure, a deft combination of two ostensibly strange bedfellows: philosophical speculation surrounding a married couple’s conflict and deadpan humor. Two films that had little in common except their central theme of just how far an overbearing mother will go to protect her difficult son, also shone with sharply realized filmmaking and outstanding acting. Child’s Pose, the Romanian film from Calin Peter Netzer, features a stunning performance from its lead, Luminita Gheorghiu, and the forthcoming 2015 Canadian film, Mommy, from “boy wonder” director Xavier Dolan, both are emotionally draining yet superb. Finally, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-da, always excellent in depicting children, in Like Father, Like Son tells how two families deal with the bombshell revelation that their six-year-old sons were switched at birth.
Innovation and risky filmmaking is also represented in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, a wacky, infectious adaptation of the heretofore unfilmable author, Thomas Pynchon. Yet Inherent Vice may not be the oddest concept for a film this year. In Stephen Knight’s Locke, Tom Hardy gives one of the hear’s best performances as a Ivan Locke, a construction manager who takes a momentous overnight drive to London. The highly compelling film contains one set–Locke’s car–and no other characters except those on the other end of a series of increasingly frantic phone conversations.
First-time directors also made a huge impact in 2014. Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, delivers a disquieting dagger with a film that was both a real kick and one that teetered on the edge of many of our worst fears. Jennifer Kent’s first feature, The Babadook, blurred the supernatural and the psychological in a film that both scares the hell out of you and makes you think. Obvious Child, directed by Gillian Robespierre, tackles the subject of an aspiring stand-up comedian (Jenny Slater) who decides to get an abortion after a one-night stand, and was both bracingly funny and resonant in its capturing the angst of Brooklyn twenty-somethings.
Finally, the year’s biggest box office winner was uncustomarily actually a very good film. After all the year’s fine art films, Guardians of the Galaxy was a crowd-pleasing jolt of fresh air.
Dozen Best:
Ida
Birdman
Two Days, One Night
Boyhood
The Dance of Reality
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Inherent Vice
Only Lovers Left Alive
Snowpiercer
Foxcatcher
Nightcrawler
Blue Ruin
Runners-Up:
Force Majeure
Gone Girl
Locke
Starred Up
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Babadook
Child’s Pose
Chef
Like Father, Like Son
A Most Wanted Man
Calvary
Top Five
Obvious Child
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – J.K. Simmons, Whiplash; Edward Norton, Birdman; Ethan Hawke, Boyhood; Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher; Kristofer Hivju, Force Majeure
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Agata Kulesza, Ida; Emma Stone, Birdman; Patricia Arquette, Boyhood; Uma Thurman, Nymphomaniac: Volume 1; Laura Dern, Wild
BEST ACTOR– Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler; Tom Hardy, Locke; Steve Carell, Foxcatcher; Joachim Phoenix, Inherent Vice; Jack O’Connell, Starred Up; Michael Keaton, Birdman
BEST ACTRESS – Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night; Agata Trzebuckowska, Ida; Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl; Luminita Gheorghiu, Child’s Pose; Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive
FAVORITE FILMS OF 2015 SO FAR – Mommy, Stations of the Cross, Clouds of Sils Maria, Human Capital, Gabriel, 10,000 KM, It Follows
OVERRATED – Under The Skin, Goodbye to Language, The Immigrant, The Theory of Everything, Listen Up Philip, Whiplash, Interstellar, Lucy
FAVORITE DOCUMENTARIES – Life Itself, Jodorowsky’s Dune, The Dog, Rich Hill, The Missing Picture, The Overnighters, Point and Shoot