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