Ranking 2014’s Movies: #s 92-79
According to the calendar, 2014 is over, but the Manifesto tends to operate on its own time. Ideally, this would be the point where we’d unveil our top 10 list, highlighting the very best that the prior year in cinema had to offer. The problem, however, is that 2014 hasn’t really ended yet, at least not in moviegoing terms. There are still a number of high-profile releases that technically came out last month (making them eligible for the upcoming Oscars) but that have yet to screen near me, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, and J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year. Given that these movies are all receiving considerable acclaim, it would be premature for me to present a finalized top 10 list without giving them a chance. So instead, I’m going to present a list of… everything else.
What follows is a ranked list, in ascending order of quality, of every 2014 theatrical release I’ve seen. I need not remind you that this exercise is profoundly ludicrous. Certainly, some movies are better than others, but just as certainly, attempting to slot different works of art into an inflexible hierarchy is absurd. But it does provide me an opportunity to go on record with my thoughts on all of the movies I saw last year, and unlike the Manifesto’s foolhardy Review of 2013, it allows me to do so in a matter of days rather than months. Just remember that these rankings are highly amorphous, and that if I re-made this list a week from now, the specific order would be highly jumbled, even if the general shape remained the same.
Can a computer have a soul? Can a movie? Her, Spike Jonze’s breathtaking, devastating film about a lonely man and his sentient operating system, spends a good deal of time pondering the first question and, in the process, answers the second. But let’s not bury the lede here: This is a movie about a man who falls in love with a machine. No matter the miracles science has provided in the new millennium, this is a tough sell. Yet the unique genius of Her—beyond its remarkable and vast imagination—is that it acknowledges the absurdity of its premise while simultaneously committing to it with the utmost sincerity. The result is a film that’s often uproariously funny, playfully mocking its gorgeous self-made universe with wit and good humor. But Her also, through a combination of sublime technique and heartfelt storytelling (Jonze also wrote the script), offers acute insight into the dynamics of modern relationships: what it means to be alone, to be loved, to be depressed, to be happy. It’s a movie about machines that affirms our very humanity. And it makes resoundingly clear that even if computers may not have souls, some movies surely do.
“I’d like to think that there’s more to a person than just one thing,” Aimee Finicky says early in The Spectacular Now. I’d like to think she’s right. There is certainly more than just one thing to The Spectacular Now, James Ponsoldt’s swooning, touching third feature. Like Aimee, it refuses to be pigeonholed. This is partly because, in strict genre terms, it has no strict genre; instead, it melds elements of various tropes, making it not only a winning coming-of-age story, but also an earnest teen romance, a wistful family drama, and even a sobering study of addiction. But far more important than the multiplicity of the film’s form is the raw power of its content. The Spectacular Now is not one thing, because it is many things: spry and funny, sad and heartfelt, honest and scary, rueful and rewarding. It’s a movie that would make Aimee Finicky proud.
“Life in space is impossible,” the opening crawl announces in Gravity. And so it is. Beyond the confines of our atmosphere, there is—as the crawl also succinctly informs us—no oxygen, no sound, no air pressure. Astronauts who brave the pitiless environment of space must take meticulous precautions just to survive; one mistake means death. It is for this reason that space is an ideal setting for a horror movie (such as one that sports perhaps 