MovieManifesto

The Best Movies of 2014, Nos. 10 & 9: Locke; The LEGO Movie

February 9, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

Tom Hardy in "Locke"; Chris Pratt in "The LEGO Movie"

After having analyzed 95 different 2014 releases over the past month and change, we arrive at last at the top 10. We’ll be splitting these into five separate posts of two movies each, with the top two titles dropping on Friday.

10. Locke (directed by Steven Knight, 91% Rotten Tomatoes, 81 Metacritic).
He just can’t stop talking about the traffic. Ivan Locke is cruising down the motorway in his BMW late at night while chatting nonstop via his Bluetooth, and he has a lot on his mind. He’s hurtling at high speeds toward a hospital so he can be present for the birth of his third child, but the woman he’s meeting isn’t his wife, it’s his mistress, Bethan (Olivia Colman). He’s abandoning his lucrative position as lead architect on a high-profile project that’s about to break ground, and he needs to constantly provide instructions to his panicky associate. And he has to call his wife, Katrina (Ruth Wilson), to inform her that he won’t be home for dinner because nine months ago, he and a coworker split a bottle of wine and fell into bed. This is a man whose life is disintegrating as his Beamer flies past one mile marker to the next. Yet whenever he finds himself speaking with Bethan, he acts less like an expectant father than a news reporter. She tells him she loves him; he responds, “I should be there in an hour—the traffic is very good.”

Banshee Review: “Tribal”, or how Cinemax’s Most Fun Show Turned Me into an Emotional Mess

February 7, 2015March 18, 2024 Jeremy BeckFeatures

I used to think Banshee was a stupid show. Fun stupid, certainly—there is always vicarious pleasure to be derived from watching invincible heroes maneuver out of impossible situations, especially when they complement their brawny machismo with a wink and a smirk. The show’s first season was happily insane, and even as its second run deepened its mythology and tightened up its writing—an improvement that rated fairly well in my catalogue of 2014’s TV shows—I never experienced it as anything more than impressively choreographed entertainment. Banshee has always been an enjoyable show, and it’s grown funnier and more confident as it’s progressed, but it never made me feel anything.

The Last of the Missing Pictures: Selma, A Most Violent Year, Still Alice, and a Sci-Fi Mind-Bender

February 6, 2015March 18, 2024 Jeremy BeckFeatures

David Oyelowo in "Selma", Oscar Isaac in "A Most Violent Year", Julianne Moore in "Still Alice", and some people in "Coherence"

Welcome to the third and final installment of The Missing Pictures. This is the last supplement to our rankings of every movie from 2014. If you missed the prior issues, you can find Part I here and Part II here.

37. Coherence (directed by James Ward Byrkit, 85% Rotten Tomatoes, 64 Metacritic). Aside from the ominous comet glittering across the night sky, all seems well at the beginning of Coherence, a spooky sci-fi yarn drenched in metaphysical inquiry. Eight privileged adults gather at a suburban house for a dinner party, the kind where someone blathers about the feng shui while passing around the ketamine. It’s the sort of pompous get-together that seems ripe for a cinematic home invasion (think Adam Wingard’s You’re Next), but Coherence indulges in a more introspective form of terror. The power does soon goes out (as does all cell phone service), but instead of intruders bursting through the door, the frights begin when two of the more manly guests venture down the block, peer through the windows of the only lit house on the street, and see…

The Missing Pictures of 2014, Part II: Feat. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Latest Marvel

February 5, 2015March 18, 2024 Jeremy BeckFeatures

Joaquin Phoenix in "Inherent Vice"; Bradley Cooper in "American Sniper"; Jack O'Connell and Ben Mendelsohn in "Starred Up"; Timothy Spall in "Mr. Turner"

The Manifesto is ranking every movie from 2014. Before getting to our top 10, we’re supplementing our rankings with the handful of films we saw over the past month. This is the second installment of The Missing Pictures; the third will arrive tomorrow. And if you missed the first, you can find it here.

49. Mr. Turner (directed by Mike Leigh, 97% Rotten Tomatoes, 94 Metacritic). At one point in Mr. Turner, the film’s title character, played with glowering disdain by Timothy Spall, inquires about the mechanics of an invention called a camera. It’s a question that befits Turner’s intellectual curiosity, but it also carries a touch of irony, given that the movie’s director has been wielding a camera for the past several decades. Mr. Turner is not Leigh’s best film, but it may be his most exquisitely pictorial, and its painterly images (courtesy of Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dick Pope) might even satisfy the lofty standards of its protagonist.

Ranking the Movies of 2014: The Missing Pictures (Part I)

February 3, 2015March 18, 2024 Jeremy BeckFeatures

Moebius, Shailene Woodley, John Lithgow, Alfred Molina, Michael C. Hall

Last month, the Manifesto began a Herculean undertaking: We decided to rank every movie we watched in 2014. At the time of our first post on the subject, we’d seen 92 releases from the 2014 theatrical year. We’ve since ranked the first 82 of those, with the top 10 still to come. In the meantime, however, I’ve watched an additional 13 films from 2014—some in theaters because their limited-release 2014 run didn’t reach me until 2015, some via Netflix and Amazon Prime. For the sake of completeness, I feel it’s only appropriate to add these into our ongoing rankings.

As such, our next three posts will look at “The Missing Pictures”: those movies that I was unable to watch before formally compiling these rankings but that I’m nevertheless shoehorning into the final list. In theory, this exercise could continue indefinitely; thanks to the power of the home-viewing market, I expect to be watching 2014 releases for the foreseeable future. But I need to cut the cord at some point, and with one regrettable exception, I’ve now seen virtually all critically acclaimed films from last year. (That exception, of course, is the Dardenne Brothers’ Two Days, One Night, as it’s yet to arrive at a theater in Denver despite Marion Cotillard’s Oscar nomination. Thanks a lot, IFC.) And so, next week we’ll present our finalized list of the Best Movies of 2014.

But first, enjoy these next three posts. As before, we’ll be presenting the movies in ascending order of quality. Unlike before, when we proceeded in ruthlessly linear fashion, there will obviously be some sizable gaps in the numbers this time around.