criterionforum.org

1. Boyhood
2. Snowpiercer
3. Edge of Tomorrow
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel
5. The Lego Movie
6. Gone Girl
7. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
8. X-Men: Days of Future Past
9. Guardians of the Galaxy
10. The Unknown Known

1. We Are the Best!
2. Under the Skin
3. Welcome to New York
4. Black Coal, Thin Ice
5. Snowpiercer
6. Night Moves
7. Journey to the West
8. Child's Pose
9. Two Days, One Night
10. Godzilla

1. National Gallery
2. The Lego Movie
3. Journey To The West (Tsai Ming-liang)
4. Mommy
5. Lost River
6. Girlhood
7. Interstellar
8. Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever - probably the ultimate satire on the structure of Hollywood talking pet stories, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, shoehorned in 'importance of family'-related side plots in fantasy films, the least threatening bad guys ever with a non-stop patter about band trivia, rampant commercialism, memes and snarky comments from an out of control voice actor voicing Grumpy Cat (played by the top billed - shoving the cute girl lead out of the way to emphasise that - Aubrey Plaza!). Also the ultimate Lifetime TV Movie, as well as a complete destruction of its message-based wholesomeness. In other words perfect family entertainment for Christmas! Refreshingly undercuts the schmaltz inherent in the genre at every turn and better than a thousand Alvin and the Chipmunks, or 'Hop's! Surely destined to become a cult classic.
9. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr Moreau
10. The 50 Year Argument: The New York Review of Books
___

11. Night Will Fall
12. Mr Peabody & Sherman
13. White God
14. Turks & Caicos
15. Salting The Battlefield
16. Unfriended
17. Maleficent
18. Wild Tales
19. Brakeless: Why Trains Crash
This is an interesting documentary about the Japanese train crash in 2005 that killed over a hundred people. Using the story of that particular train crash as the spine of the documentary, it spreads out into a number of different issues from following the survivors (including one person disabled by the accident and another using Jake and Dinos Chapman-style vivid clay art to recreate his memories of the aftermath of the accident, in contrast to cute little animations of the time before the accident), to whether the need to travel faster and faster is a 'symptom of Japanese society' in general, along with more philosophical ideas of what is lost in speeding from one place to another compared to slower travel leading to more time to oneself or the need to stay with family overnight, that would otherwise be lost as being 'inessential'!

The documentary also talks a lot about the failures of the driver killed in the accident and the reasons behind that failure, in the train company's use of humiliation in front of colleagues and passengers when delays of even a few seconds occurred, used as a kind of motivational tool by managers. This turns the documentary into a kind of manager training tool, showing the inevitable consequences of pushing people harder: they make mistakes through nerves or simply through their mind being far more on their fear of punishment or a previous humiliation than on their task at hand. It was fascinating to see the way that this accident actually managed to inspire a kind of introspection on the part of the company on their management style and heavily packed train schedules. Whether this is just the kind of contrition that it is always necessary to have after such an accident is of course arguable, but I doubt if after similar train crashes in the UK there would be a similar soul searching about the pressures on train drivers that would cause them to take such tragic risks after falling behind schedule (I get the impression that as long as there was someone to blame, the issue would not be seen in an wider terms than that), or if there were, they wouldn't be acted upon.

But then I suppose the counter argument is that Japan is a much more highly pressured society.

...but then the counter-counter argument is that we're all going the same way!

The Grand Budepest Hotel, Wes Anderson
Nymphomaniac I & II, Lars Von Trier
Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie

Films with 2014 UK release date

1. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
2. Leviathan (Andrey Zvygantsiev)
3. Calvary (John Michael McDonough)
4. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
6. Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
7. Tom at the Farm (Xavier Dolan)
8. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie)
9. Omar (Hany Abu-Assad)
10. The Double (Richard Ayoade)

Potential top 10 films seen at festivals which will hopefully one day have a UK release date
The Quispe Girls (Sebastian Sepulveda)
The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher)
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissoko)
La Sapienza (Eugene Green)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amanpour)

1. Boyhood
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel

01. Under The Skin (Glazer)
02. Bastards (Denis)
03. Ida (Pawlikowski)
04. Nymphomaniac Vols 1&2 (Von Trier)
05. Leviathan (Zvyaginstev)
06. Inherent Vice (Anderson)
07. Whiplash (Chazelle)
08. Stations Of The Cross (Brugemann)
09. Norte, The End Of History (Diaz)
10. Enemy (Villeneuve)

1. Starred Up
2. Edge of Tomorrow
3. Only Lovers Left Alive
4. Tim's Vermeer
5. X-Men Days of Future Past
6. Lucy
7. Snowpiercer
8. Under the Skin
9. Ida
10. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Notable: citizenfour; The Drop; Coherence; Predestination; Dawn of the Planet of the Apes; Her; Locke; Heaven is for Real; The Grand Budapest Hotel; Enemy; Chef; The Lego Movie; The Rover; GOTG; The Two Faces of January; Honeymoon; Obvious Child; These Final Hours; Gone Girl

Interesting: Horns

Meh...Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit; Godzilla

1. BOYHOOD, Linklater
2. SNOWPIERCER, Bong
3. NYMPHOMANIAC, Trier
4. THE IMMIGRANT, Gray
5. UNDER THE SKIN, Glazer
6. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, Anderson
7. 22 JUMP STREET, Lord & Miller
8. ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, Jarmusch
9. CALVARY, J. McDonagh
10. KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER, Zellner

1. Boyhood
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. Under the Skin
4. Joe
5. The Lego Movie
6. The Rover
7. Night Moves
8. Locke
9. Ida
10. The Immigrant

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Magic in the Moonlight
3. The Duke of Burgundy
4. Rich Hill
5. The Nest (Cronenberg)
6. Noah
7. Selma
8. Beyond the Lights
9. Interstellar
10.Song of the Sea

1. Boyhood
2. Two Days, One Night
3. Birdman
4. Selma
5. We are the Best!
6. Only Lovers Left Alive
7. Under the Skin
8. The Grand Budapest Hotel
9. Snowpiercer
10. Obvious Child


Honorable Mentions: Inherent Vice, Interstellar, Calvary, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Foxcatcher, Gone Girl

Based on UK Release dates:

1) The Grand Budapest Hotel
2) 12 Years a Slave
3) We Are The Best!
4) Inside Llewyn Davis
5) Two Days, One Night
6) The Lego Movie
7) Mr Turner
8) Guardians of the Galaxy
9) Paddington
10) Gone Girl

Honourable Mentions: Muppets Most Wanted, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Boxtrolls, Under the Skin, The Wolf of Wall Street


Surprisingly Interesting: Earth to Echo [yes, it's a found footage E.T. - but manages to do some quite interesting things on difference and otherness in respect of its characters]

Special Mention for keeping my 3 year old daughter entranced and reducing her old man to tears: Tinkerbell and the Legend of the Neverbeast [No, really. Both my children really liked it, and it left me and my wife sobbing. It's really nothing special, but it works]

1. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
2. Under the Skin
3. Hard to Be a God
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel
5. The LEGO Movie

REVISED LIST AS OF OCTOBER

I caught a bunch of great films at the London Film Festival, so I've revised my list. New entries are marked with an asterisk.

Fish and Cat (Mokri) – I loved it so much I created a thread for it. I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve never seen anything like it. See it!

First Cousin Once Removed (Berliner) – Utterly wrenching personal documentary from a master of personal documentary. Alan Berliner’s mother’s cousin, Edwin Honig, is a poet and a mentor for the filmmaker, but he’s sinking in the quagmire of Alzheimer’s. So, with Honig’s blessing, he decides to document the decline, and presents it in a startling, provocative way, through rapid-fire juxtapositions of vignettes from throughout the continuum to oblivion. Thus we’re never given the comfort of a linear narrative, and are continually confronted both with moments of maximal lucidity and times when almost everything - memory, recognition, language – have deserted Honig. (The last thing to go, it seems, is poetry.) We get montages of Honig responding to the same stimuli in radically different ways and we slowly get a piecemeal biography of a remarkable man. It’s an incredible document, but it’s also brilliant filmmaking.

* Jauja (Alonso) - Alonso's most commercial (story! actors!) film yet is still vastly removed from the mainstream, and it's also profoundly beautiful and mysterious while at the same time being about as simple as a narrative can be (girl runs away / is kidnapped; father pursues). Along with Lav Diaz (qv), Alonso is rediscovering silent movie mise en scene (and Viggo Mortensen gives essentially a great silent film performance for most of the film), and the film is exquisitely mounted in Academy (with - attention, Herr Schreck! - cute rounded corners to ensure that projectionists don't mess with the precision framing). There's dialogue, but much more of the narrative is conveyed by how full figures are deployed in relation to the raw landscape. It's like a modern day Sjostrom or Stiller film (or outdoorsy Murnau). Despite the austerity of the style, it plays like a classic western, until it turns into a Raul Ruiz film when a trapdoor in the narrative drops us into a more allegorical level that's sublimely moving. The film comes to a perfect close with Mortensen disappearing into the landscape. And then the film drops us through another Ruizian trapdoor (or maybe it's a Pasolinian one?) I really liked this coda on its own terms, but I suspect it's going to be extremely divisive, and as an ending it's much less holistic and satisfying than the other one - which is probably the point.

* La Sapienza (Green) - Probably Eugene Green's most mannered film to date (and I fully realize how mannered the competition is!), but the mannerisms are more nuanced than ever, and they fit the material to a T. A too-long married couple cling to one another through a kind of reflex intimacy that's not even especially intimate. A professional crisis drives the architect husband back to his inspirational roots in Italy, and the wife is half-heartedly invited to tag along. We expect a spiritual rebirth for the couple, but Green's emotional and formal austerity make this an uncertain proposition. Along the way there are wry gags (some more successful than others) and provocative philosophy (about, among other things, the importance of - and source of - the divine in secular art and architecture) and severely picturesque locations, all culminating in

Spoiler

an embrace that's one of the most shatteringly emotional things I've seen in a film in years.

Exhibition (Hogg) – An unassuming domestic drama that has stayed with me longer than any number of flashier films. Joanna Hogg has a fantastic eye and ear, and this is her most controlled and accomplished film yet (though Archipelago is pretty great too). The central relationship is acutely observed and documented and the film is extremely perceptive about the ways in which domestic architecture modulates personal relationships.

Winter Sleep (Ceylan) – Already commented on in its own thread.

Force Majeure (Ostlund) – Spectacular comedy of mortification. Really just a bunch of horrible people being horrible to each other (and not without cause) at a ski resort, this is a very funny film that nevertheless manages to deal with interesting and substantial personal and ethical issues.

* From What Is Before - Intimate black and white epic from Lav Diaz that starts as a slow family drama (it's only about 90 minutes in that relationships and narrative outlines really start to come into proper focus), and almost imperceptibly ramps up its real historical / political concerns, by which time its grip around our throat is far too tight to shake off. With more than an hour to go, it seems like we're running out of characters, but Diaz is determined to follow his line of logic through to its ghastly conclusion. It joins the Alonso in the 'very late early cinema' category, with compositions that recall Murnau or Griffith. A recurring motif is the 'following eavesdroppers' shot, in which a character disappears into the background of a shot just as a stalker appears and follows the same trajectory. For a largely open-air, location-shot film, it can get appropriately claustrophobic.

Wild Tales (Szifron) – There’s no earth-shattering new vision of cinema at play here, but this black portmanteau revenge comedy is the funniest film I’ve seen this year, which has to count for something.

The Reunion (Odell) – If your classmates (who made your life miserable for nine years of your childhood) hold a reunion and invite everybody except you, here’s what you do: make a short film that imagines just what it is they might have been so afraid of; call them up and ask them if they’d like to see your film; record their reactions (to the call and to the film, if they’re prepared to brave it); make another film documenting all of the above. Odell’s film transcends elaborate revenge by playing a number of interesting recursive tricks (all the participants except herself are played by actors, the most highly fictionalized of whom use their own names, and the various narrative layers get nicely messed up wherever possible) and by keeping a clear, firm grasp on exactly what story is being told and by whom (it’s important to understand that the imagined version of the reunion is not Anna’s revenge fantasy, but her speculation on what her childhood tormentors were afraid might have happened if she’d actually shown up.) And, at base, it’s a rather powerful film about bullying.

Honourable Mention

Adieu au langage (Godard) – Spectacle of the year. It’s about time somebody started figuring out that 3D can do much more than just render fantasy in a vaguely realistic manner. Why not try the reverse?

* Pasolini (Ferrara) - Wonderfully idiosyncratic biopic that's fully immersed in Pasolini (including detailed stagings of his final writings and a version of his final film script that movingly casts Ninetto Davoli in the Toto role) but still 150% an Abel Ferrara film.

Under the Skin (Glazer) – Not much happening behind the eyes, but it looks and sounds great! And I’ve found all of Glazer’s other work to be various shades of annoying.

5.8 Metres (Deveaux) – Gorgeous, surreal CGI of high-diving giraffes. That’s it, really!

* Horse Money (Costa) - Perhaps Costa's most beautiful and hypnotic film to date. Like Jauja, it's composed in Academy, but the shadowy, burnished compositions are miles away from Alonso's wide open spaces. The long denouement with Ventura and a living statue stuck in a lift wore thin after the first quarter of an hour (yes, it sounds like the set up for a Monty Python sketch, but oh how it isn't) - it felt like an indulgence that a film with such a modest running time didn't really warrant. Title note: the English title is a bit wonky, since 'Cavalho Dinheiro' actually refers to a horse that Ventura used to own whose name was 'Dinheiro', so Horse Dinheiro would be more accurate - unless the American or UK distributor are also going to rename the main character 'Luck'.

1. Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Gone Girl
3. Interstellar
4. Nebraska
5. Nightcrawler
6. Under The Skin
7. Blue Ruin
8. Enemy
9. Inside Llewyn Davis
10. Filth

Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard)
L (Jacques Perconte)
Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne)
Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang)
Atlantis (Ben Russell)
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Chris Miller)
Horse Money (Pedro Costa)

HM:
Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller), Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (Johnnie To), February (Nathaniel Dorsky)

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas)
Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
The Badadook (Jennifer Kent)
The Guest (Adam Wingard)
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)
La Sapienza (Eugène Green)
Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund)
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan)
Horse Money (Pedro Costa)

Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan)
Calvary (John Michael McDonagh)
The Skeleton Twins (Craig Johnson)
Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)
Gone Girl (David Fincher)
Fury (David Ayer)
The Drop (Michael R. Roskam)
The Rover (David Michod)

1. Life of Riley (Resnais)
2. Mommy (Dolan)
3. P'tit Quinquin (Dumont)
4. 3 Hearts (Jacquot)
5. Interstellar (Nolan)
6. Lucy (Besson)
7. Beauty and the Beast (Gans)
8. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (Jeunet)
9. The Immigrant (Gray)
10. The Blue Room (Amalric)

Just outside: The New Girlfriend (Ozon), Venus in Fur (Polanski), The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (Cattet, Forzani).

1) Jauja
2) Quickeners
3) Episode of the Sea
4) Adieu au langage
5) Journey to the West
6) Night Noon
7) The Grand Budapest Hotel
8) P'tit Quinquin
9) Inherent Vice
10) Atlantis

Honourable mention: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Stella Cadente, The Iron Ministry, Model Village and Hacked Circuit.

1. Devil's Knot (Egoyan)
2. I Am Happiness on Earth (Hernández)
3. The Immigrant (Gray)
4. Camille Claudel 1915 (Dumont)
5. Stranger By the Lake (Guiraudie)
6. Under the Skin (Glazer)
7. Night Moves (Reichardt)
8. Bastards (Denis)
9. Snowpiercer (Bong)
10. Palo Alto (Coppola)

Next 10

11. The Rover (Michôd)
12. Blue Ruin (Saulnier)
13. The Signal (Eubank)
14. Interior. Leather Bar/Child of God (Franco)
15. Venus in Fur (Polanski)
16. Joe (Green)
17. Jersey Boys (Eastwood)
18. Cold in July (Mickle)
19. The Raid 2 (Evans)
20. Enemy (Villeneuve)

Underrated:

RoboCop (Padilha), Noah (Aronofsky), Transformers: Age of Extinction (Bay)

Overrated:

Ida (Pawlikowski), True Detective (Fukunaga)

Breakthrough Star of the Year:

Brenton Thwaites (The Signal, The Giver, Oculus, Maleficent)

Notable 2013 Films I Did Not See Till 2014:

1. Rush
2. Wolf of Wall Street
3. All is Lost
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. 12 Years a Slave

Films Not Yet Seen:

Winter Sleep, Horse Money, Interstellar, Boyhood, Gone Girl, Birdman, Foxcatcher, Inherent Vice, Exodus, America Sniper

Films I Don't Want to See:

Grand Budapest Hotel, Nymphomaniac

2014 Discoveries:

The Garden of Earthly Delights (Majewski), Corpo Celeste (Rohrwacher), General Orders No. 9 (Persons)

Re-release of the Year:

La Reine Margot (Chéreau)

10. Jodorowsky's Dune
9. Housebound
8. The One I Love
7. Force Majuere
6. Finding Vivian Maier
5. The Grand Budapest Hotel
4. The Babadook
3. Whiplash
2. Under The Skin
1. We Are The Best!

Honorable mention: Calvary, Nightcrawler, The Skeleton Twins, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Boxtrolls
Did not like/care for: Frank, Life After Beth, Only Lovers Left Alive, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

1. Boyhood
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. Foxcatcher
4. Under the Skin
5. Nightcrawler
6. Stranger by the Lake
7. Mr. Turner
8. Inherent Vice
9. Locke
10. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Boyhood
Adieu au langage
Beyond the Lights
Citizenfour
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Interstellar
Robocop
Selma
Snowpiercer
The Wind Rises