Items25The creator’s order
  1. 1Boyhood (2014)Boyhood (2014) 7.9/10 on IMDbReleased 5 Jun 2014Richard Linklater lets changes in faces, houses and family routines carry time without forcing each stage into a lesson. Ellar Coltrane and Patricia Arquette make the ordinary transitions emotionally substantial. The unusual production method earns its value through what it allows the film to…0
  2. 2The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased 8 Feb 2014Wes Anderson's intricate framing gives a vanished social world the clarity of a carefully preserved miniature. Ralph Fiennes makes courtesy both a comic performance and a form of resistance. The film's elaborate surfaces are rewarding because their fragility gradually becomes part of the emotional…0
  3. 3Whiplash (2014)Whiplash (2014) 8.5/10 on IMDbReleased 10 Oct 2014Damien Chazelle makes the rehearsal room's distribution of attention feel almost physically violent. Miles Teller and J. K. Simmons turn musical precision into a struggle over authority. The editing is exhilarating, with the film strongest when achievement remains inseparable from the uncomfortable…0
  4. 4Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased 17 Oct 2014The apparently continuous movement keeps the theatre's corridors inside an actor's increasingly unstable sense of himself. Michael Keaton's openness to embarrassment gives the technical bravura a useful centre. Its comedy is most revealing where artistic ambition and the appetite for recognition…0
  5. 5Gone Girl (2014)Gone Girl (2014) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased 1 Oct 2014David Fincher makes public storytelling part of the thriller's machinery, with images and explanations changing what everybody thinks they know. Rosamund Pike gives the central performance extraordinary control. The film earns its place through sustained manipulation of perspective, best…0
  6. 6Nightcrawler (2014)Nightcrawler (2014) 7.8/10 on IMDbReleased 23 Oct 2014Jake Gyllenhaal makes the aspiring crime cameraman's professional language more chilling than an openly villainous declaration. Dan Gilroy turns Los Angeles roads and night-time light into a system of opportunity. Its satire is sharpest where individual ambition fits the market's demands…0
  7. 7Leviathan (2014)Leviathan (2014) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased 24 Sept 2014Andrey Zvyagintsev makes the coastal landscape both immense and useless as protection against local power. Aleksey Serebryakov gives the central man's anger a convincing exhaustion. The film's force lies in how intimate grievances and institutional pressure keep feeding each other, rather than a…0
  8. 8Winter Sleep (2014)Winter Sleep (2014) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased 13 Jun 2014Nuri Bilge Ceylan lets long conversations expose the gap between a man's cultivated self-image and what other people experience around him. The rooms and winter landscape give those exchanges physical weight. Its demanding length rewards viewers willing to listen for the small evasions inside…0
  9. 9Force Majeure (2014)Force Majeure (2014) 7.2/10 on IMDbReleased 15 Aug 2014Ruben Östlund stages a family's alpine holiday with enough visual precision that an apparently brief event can unsettle every later conversation. Johannes Bah Kuhnke's performance makes self-explanation increasingly comic and painful. The satire works because the argument concerns a role that…0
  10. 10Mommy (2014)Mommy (2014) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased 19 Sept 2014Xavier Dolan's restricted frame makes the household's emotional volatility feel bodily close. Anne Dorval, Antoine Olivier Pilon and Suzanne Clément give the changing alliance considerable force. The film's expressive excess is most effective when a small expansion of freedom can be felt as a…0