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

Tokyo, Autumn, 2003. Magic hour lighting, florescent adverts. Fuzzy Guitar. Kevin Shields. A young American rides an escalator; takes a train; discovers some shrines. Despite the over-privileged POV, Sofia Coppola's devastating Lost in Translation seemed to capture a mood for so many people at the beginning of the 21st century. One of uncertainty, of searching for something private, for authenticity, in an increasingly dense and overly connected world. Coppola certainly had her finger on the pulse of generation Y but it was her distant leading lady who seemed to embody the whole thing. It was the role which made Scarlet Johannson famous, but it also showed us the distant look which would make her a star.

It's a look which seems to take the torch from Hollywood's passing old guard. Indeed, Coppola has stated that she based her and Bill Murray's on-screen relationship with that of Bogey and the recently deceased Lauren Becall. The late, great actress famously admitted that "The Look"- so gleefully coined by Warner Bros' ad men- came as a result of holding her chin down to her chest to stop her incessant shaking until right before the cameras rolled. Her's was a look of world-weary defiance for a genre synonymous with shadows and betrayal,  but Scarlet's is nothing like it. Her's is curious, a look which attempts to digest what the world's throwing at her, trying to find some simple beauty, perhaps, in all the chaos and information of 21st century life. 

A great deal has happened since those fluorescent Tokyo nights. Scarlet's become, arguably, the great star of her generation; an old-school curvy bombshell in an era obsessed with size. Those looks have taken her to the murky waters of FHM’s Sexiest Women and, arguably, the the even murkier waters of Woody Allen’s Muse. She nabbed roles with drooling directors like Brian DePalma and Michael Bay and donned the slinky leather suits of Marvel's Avengers project too. For better or probably worse- this is Hollywood after all- the actress' beauty has become her defining characteristic, and it looked as if her once promising career was on the slide. And yet, over the last 12 months three brilliant, very different directors- from Maryland, Paris and London- saw something else. Something different, it would seem, than anyone had before.

Her, Lucy and Under the Skin appear to pluck on differing strings of the Science Fiction genre and yet all three are connected by a core idea. Scarlet's three characters- an infinitely expanding Operating System, a human being realizing her full mental capacity and a sexually predatorial Alien who lures men into a pool of goo- might not sound like comparable entities, and yet these three directors used them to ponder the same thing: If an unfamiliar, vaster intelligence were to take a good look at our home would it see the beauty of it or the horror? Would it find complexity or insignificance? 

Leaving talk of the dreaded Male Gaze asside for a moment, what is it in those eyes and lips, that skin, that voice which caught the attention of Spike Jonze, Luc Besson and Jonathon Glazer? And what about Sofia Coppola too, when she sent her out- all wide eyed, existential and 19 years old- through the subways and shrines of the Japanese capitol. We marvel at Scarlet, she marvels a things. 

The fundamental idea Sofia Coppola had in 2003 is not so different to the one Jonze, Besson and Glazer have had over the course of the past year, it's just the stories, the worlds and characters that have gone supernova.

But so has she.

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.

An Autumn Afternoon

Yasujiro Ozu (1962)

The swansong of the great director's career, An Autumn Afternoon is yet another exercise in cinematic beauty and artistic precision. Like many of the 53 features which came before it, this is a film about family, marriage, mortality and booze. The beauty of the everyday, the warmth of Chisu Ryu's smile.

The story is as neat and distilled as any in Ozu's career, perhaps even more so, with Ryu once again playing a father seeking a husband for his daughter, an act which will leave him a lonely widower. A patient, ponderous and simple tale, but oh what colour, what symmetry, what sincerity. I watched it with a blood transfusion gripping my right arm, both knackered and alone in a Berlin hospital ward. I visited his grave less than two weeks later, in a shrine on the outskirts of Tokyo, close to nine thousand kilometers away, with regret and endless gratitude in my heart.

Stray Dog
Akira Kurosawa (1949)

In 1949 Akira Kurosawa offered his own twist on American film noir with this hot-n-humid buddy cop thriller set, and largely shot, in the seedy underbelly of post war Tokyo.

Toshiro Mifune, in the third of his 16 collaborations with the director, plays Murakami, a desperate, obsessive DI on the trail of the killer who bought his stolen gun on the black market. We're told there are 7 rounds in the misplaced Colt 1908, so as the days go by and the bodies pile up, we slowly count them down. Buddying up with an old-pro detective named Sato (played by fellow Kurosawa favourite Takashi Shimura), Murakami sets out into the brothels and motels of a bombed out city to earn his redemption.

Noir was a genre born of America's post war existentialism. Kurosawa took the genre to a country, and city, which lost bad in WWII, and used it to examine the relative nature of morality. Both copper and criminal are veterans of the war and the film ponders why they now find themselves, psychologically, on differing sides. At one point Sato says that "Dirt breeds evil"- to which Murakami responds: "there are no bad people, only bad environments". Tokyo was floored by America's firebombs in 1944; and such men, having lost so much, choose what to make of the rubble. The humanist, and surprisingly beautiful climax to this film is surely testament to that.

Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray (1954) 

Joan Crawford gives a dominant lead performance in this strange, subversive, much discussed Western from 1954. 

She runs a bar called Vienna on the outskirts of a frontier town. A train-line is set to run past which she knows will bring business and prosperity but the locals are desperate to run her out. Crawford's character made her wealth through unladylike ways and we quickly learn that the locals despise her for it. The mob, led by a fire and brimstone wielding Mercedes McCambridge, demand to see her hanged and so quickly set to work to do just that.

After a less than thrilling American opening, the film- like many great melodramas of the time- was soon championed by Truffaut and his mates in Cahiers du Cinema, causing many to take a second look. It's seen as a strange sort of classic today and it's no doubt worthy of it. McCambridge's mob runs in clear parallel to McCarthy's communist witch hunts; Crawford is as dominant a female character as the Western genre had seen; and the repressed, emotional showdown between her character and her foe suggests all sorts of erotic, perhaps even homosexual, currents running underneath. 

As strange as it is subversive, Truffaut wrote that those who reject it should basically throw in the towel. What more do you need to hear?

The Hidden Fortress
Akira Kurosawa

Toshiro Mifune plays a general tasked with getting his princess home safe when a war between the clans leaves them stranded behind enemy lines. Disguised as peasants, weighed down by gold, the duo enlist two hapless, greedy farmers to guide them.

One of the more populist films of the great director's career, Akira Kurosawa agreed to take it on so that Toho studios would fund his more artistic efforts. Fair enough. Upon release, it became, at the time, the director's most successful film. The story is top shelf action-adventure stuff with things to say about camaraderie and greed, but it's the boldness of the imagery which still sets it apart. The first film shot on TOHO studios' answer to Hollywood widescreen, Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Yamasaki take to the format with absolute ease, capturing the Mt Fuji vistas of their location shoot with dramatic sweep and scale. 

As great an influence on Star Wars as John Ford or The Seven Samurai, our lowly guides would become the blueprint for R2D2 and C3PO. Vadar mentions the rebel's "Hidden Fortress" in episode IV. The headstrong princess, well, you get the picture...

Bringing up Baby
Howard Hawks (1938)

Cary Grant spent an entire career balancing the suave with the silly- arguably better than any actor, at any time- but that scale was surely never tipped more to the latter than in this quintessential screwball comedy from the great Howard Hawks. Cary plays a soon-to-be-married zoologist on the hunt for some funding. Katherine Hepburn plays the niece of the wealthy trustee. The titular baby, you might have guessed, is Hepburn's pet leopard. Madness, of course, ensues. 

Despite their undeniable chemistry, it must be said, Hepburn's shrill British delivery hasn't aged quite as well as the daft brilliance of her great co-star. The pair somehow keep it lean as the story flies all over the shop but it's surely down to Hawks' deft hand that our concentration doesn't wane. 

If the rule-book of the Screwball comedy does indeed today state that the more two characters drive each other up the wall, the more they are in love; then in 1938 Howard Hawks was surely holding the pen.

Roman Holiday
William Wyler (1953)

Audrey Hepburn plays a want-away Princess Anne on a tour of the Italian capitol. She chooses to shake her royal responsibilities for one day in order to take in the sights with a dashing American reporter. Both have their own reasons for the shady rendezvous, but of course, they fall in love.

Gregory Peck, as usual, has charm to burn, but despite the postcard moments, his costar, in what is now seen as an almost mythical Oscar winning debut, is simply irresistible. Hepburn survived WWII, by holding up in a rat infested Arnhem cellar, just 8 years before; a fact which seems to make her lightness of touch here even more revelatory.

Rainy day fodder of the highest order; director William Wyler's final shot is a true gem.

Robert Downey Junior attempts a hop, skip and jump from the world of Iron suits to that of gold statuettes with this admittedly heavy-handed but, at times, quite enthralling story of a slick lawyer’s return to his hometown and the defendant he is forced to take on. The case: a puzzling hit and run. The main suspect: his own father.

As most things American, this is a film about father and son, played here by Roberts Duvall and Downey Jr. respectfully. Dad’s an honourable judge in small town Indiana; his prodigal son a hot-shot defence attorney living in Chicago. The younger man returns home to attend his mother’s funeral but is met with little warmth. He’s quick to turn on his heels but the homecoming is unexpectedly prolonged when dad kills a man while out driving that very night. Downey Jr. steps in to defend his old man, not knowing the ethical and emotional conundrums which lay in wait.

The set-up packs a few surprises and, for the most part, it works. Duvall’s staunch geriatric sees the law as something honourable and just; but to his son it’s a malleable profession, open to interpretations. You would hope that such moral Rubik’s cubes would offer director David Dobkin enough to go on but instead we’re forced to swallow whole helpings of sentimental clichés. We could scrap the older brother with the lost baseball career and the younger brother with the disability and still have a fine, presumably more focused, film, but then award season does beckon.

 Indeed, with its heavy handed deliveries and earnest sweeping emotions, The Judge does little to dodge those pitfalls we’ve come to expect around this time of year. And yet, seeing swaggering RDJ and tireless Bobby Duvall duking it out over all that moral code and retribution stuff, I can think of worse ways to spend a cold grey autumn evening.

(Insert courtroom pun ending here).

Double Indemnity reviews: Giving much talked about films two lines more.

Tim's Vermeer
Teller (2013)

It's significant to note that this fascinating, detailed doc about a novice painter's attempts to replicate a classic Vermeer painting was directed and delivered by Penn & Teller, perhaps the two most famous illusionists in the world. Could you imagine anyone better equipped to ask if understanding the trick makes it any less brilliant or, moreover, does solving the mysteries of the world make them any less great?