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