The Movies We Loved in 2014 — By Friends of the Blog

We don’t tune into awards shows to be told what the best movie is. That’s not why they’re so popular. We tune in to disagree, to do it with friends and family around us, because the real show that night is what’s happening in front of the TV – it’s your arguments for and against the choices being made. It’s your chance to stand up for the movie you feel closest to and defend it.

My own views on movies are shaped by the people I’ve gotten to make and discuss movies with over the years, the critics I read or the actors I pay attention to. So I asked them – What was your choice for best film of 2014? What movie most connected with you? Which one will you take forward with you into the rest of your life? I’m excited to see both some expected choices and some very unexpected ones in the mix:

Birdman
by Kaylyn Aznavorian

Of all the Oscar nominees for Best Film this year, I can honestly say I best connected with Birdman. Besides the obvious – fantastic acting, great writing, and an overall brilliant film, as someone who is actively working in the film and television industry, this film perfectly addresses the life of a person in entertainment. The entertainment business is almost like the relationship between candy and children. If the candy’s good, kids keep buying, but then perhaps a new candy comes out. Sure, the first candy’s good, and sales continue, but over time, that candy’s sales will decrease until it eventually retires. Why? Kids like new. They like change.

As an actor, you’ve got to be able to deliver that change they crave. We experiment – different roles, different moods, and in the case of Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), different means of presentation, such as the stage rather than the screen. If you fall in your prime, it can be difficult to brush yourself off and get back in the limelight, because you have GOT to convince people you’re worth watching over the shiny new actor with the nice abs or pretty hair. You’ve got to convince them all that you’re the classic – the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, if you will- and worth investing in.

Not only that, while putting everything you have into redeeming yourself as an actor, personal relationships can be difficult to handle, especially whenever most of those you care about don’t understand what it is you’re going through. Although I have yet to have my big Hollywood breakthrough, I absolutely get it, and my biggest fear, much like anyone else who is serious about a career in entertainment, is becoming that reject candy after I’ve finally made a name for myself. Bravo to Keaton and the rest of the Birdman cast and crew. By far, one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.

Kaylyn Aznavorian is a model, actress, and screenwriter from Bedford, Virginia. She has recently been featured on a 25-story billboard in Times Square, on season three of the award-winning series House of Cards, and is currently in preproduction on an original screenplay titled The Price of Beauty, which will raise awareness of domestic violence in the United States. You can follow her work here.

A “Boyhood” Searching for “Birdman”
by Qina Liu

I believe the best film of 2014 was Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). I was in awe of Emmanuel Lubezki’s seemingly one-shot takes; and the wonderful performances of Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, and the rest of the ensemble cast; as well as the self-aware and satirical script. The members of the Academy would agree with me; the film was nominated for nine Oscars and won four of them, including best cinematography, best original screenplay, best directing, and best picture.

But while I loved how Birdman appealed to me on an intellectual level, that wasn’t the 2014 film that I connected with most. Birdman didn’t keep me up at night or leave me with a gnawing hole in my heart, wondering what I am going to do with my life. As much as Birdman spoke about art, the film was essentially actor/director Riggan Thomson’s story. You could safely watch from afar as Thomson suffered humiliation after humiliation for the sake of art and “super realism.”

Instead, my story is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a nostalgic and poignant film that captures the mundane experiences of everyday life. I know people who didn’t enjoy the film. “If I wanted to watch someone pump gas and take pictures, I’d go on a car ride with you,” one of my friends wrote on Facebook.

But to me, Boyhood didn’t feel long or ordinary. It’s my story and one I don’t want to end. Like Boyhood‘s protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), I spent summers “soaking up the sun” to Sheryl Crow and Queueing bookstores for midnight releases of Harry Potter. Boyhood was my childhood, and to re-watch it is to re-live it.

Of course, I’m not done growing up. Like Coltrane and Patricia Arquette’s characters, I’m still searching for meaning. I still find myself at late-night diners questioning my existence. I still haven’t figured everything out. But as I watch art, I’m slowly learning to live.

Qina Liu is one of my favorite critics, a Buffalo native who excels at digging out the subtle motivations that make film narratives work. Read her work at Pass the Popcorn.

Nightcrawler
by Roy Sexton

The movies this year that spoke to me at the most instinctive and visceral levels all seem to focus on people living in the margins, people faced with a world that chews them up and spits them out, people who won’t go down without a fight. Bad Words, Foxcatcher, Whiplash, Still Alice, and Nightcrawler all still resonate with me for these reasons – I was immersed in those five cinematic, corrosive worlds and I can’t (won’t) shake them off.

Perhaps this reflects a midlife dyspepsia on my part, but these films captured my feelings toward a culture that seems more combative by the minute. In a strange way, they gave me hope – that there are others (the respective filmmakers) who view things as I do.

As individuals, we are all one bad day away from utter collapse, but a kind word, a career opportunity, a tough life lesson, a toxic moment might save our souls, while still damning us to hell.

Of these five films, Nightcrawler haunts me most. Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo are dynamite as two sides of the same Horatio Alger coin. Americans can be opportunistic and relentless to a fault, but the film never writes these characters off as sick parasites. We are them, and they are us. Bathed in noir blue light, Gyllenhaal’s predatory hustle is a fractured fairy tale of the American Dream as it exists today. Everyone wants to be an American Idol, a Snooki, a Kardashian. We don’t like admitting it, but we want to be something, to be remembered, perhaps at any cost. Nightcrawler is a cinematic allegory for the ages – of the lengths we can go to survive and thrive – giving us the antihero our troubled times deserve.

Roy Sexton is a theatre actor and movie critic based out of Ann Arbor, MI. He writes witty, insightful film reviews at Reel Roy Reviews, you can check out his book, and he is closely involved with The Penny Seats Theatre Company.

Nightcrawler
by Amanda Hatheway

As I’m still catching up on last year’s films, I am going to say that Nightcrawler left the biggest impression on me. Yes, of course it (mostly Gyllenhaal) was creepy, it’s supposed to be. I had my own theories about sensationalism in TV news before seeing this film and my concerns spiraled into a dark place of enlightenment. It almost grows to be a most twisted black humor piece. It comments most brilliantly on entertainment, stats, shock-value, and asks what really is “the news?”

Amanda Hatheway is a fashion blogger and photographer with a focus on cruelty-free and animal-free products.

Butter Lamp
by Kunsang Kelden

Clocking in at just 16 minutes, “Butter Lamp” by Chinese director Hu Wei and French producer Julien Feret was my surprise favorite of the year. The Oscar-nominated short takes place in front of a series of kitschy Chinese-made backdrops used by a traveling photographer who has set up shop in a small village in Eastern Tibet. The film follows the photographer at work, ushering in Tibetan nomads for photos, sometimes encouraging them to swap their traditional clothes for sleek looking modern garb. Each photo in the series speaks volumes with the juxtaposition of nomadic life high in the Himalayas and modern Chinese kitsch.

Each scene is a little vignette, with an almost Checkhov-like quality in the way they’re told, the most moving of which I found was an old grandmother who was having her photo taken for the first time. The backdrop chosen was of the historic residence of the Dalai Lama, the Potala Palace in Lhasa, of which she has dreamt visiting her entire life. When the backdrop is unrolled, she is so moved she immediately begins prostrating to the image and refuses to turn around to take a photo. Eventually, the backdrop is replaced with one of a beach and a palm tree. Regardless of whether the director or producers would like to admit it, this film is inherently political. Its commentary of China’s colonialism and globalization in Tibet is a creative and refreshing narrative style that I hope influences many more filmmakers in China to come.

Kunsang Kelden is one of the most impressive human beings I know (no pressure) and is currently studying in London. She cares deeply about a free Tibet. You can read more about Tibetan culture at her blog Lhakar Diaries.

Under the Skin
by Vanessa Tottle

I am here to be put on a hook and bedded. If I say something against this, I am here for your ridicule. I am a target and an opportunity. In a bar, I am not to be left alone. From the front of a classroom, you might hint at reciprocity, as if the grades I’ve earned have a cost to be taken from my flesh. You might cop an awkward feel in a train and apologize with a shit-eating grin on your face. You might dig in my bag and hold my passport like a ransom as I refuse to show you my panic and my mind races for options. You might crawl into my tent at 2 a.m. There are times in the field I’ve slept with a knife at my side.

I am lucky. I have resources. I said no to tougher and bigger as a kid, when I was meek and small and bruises were a victory. I can make you feel “no” in your bones when I say it now. I can fucking haunt you with “no.” I have learned how to withstand the most ridiculous confrontations and pressures, but that’s never the same as feeling safe. It’s not the same as feeling what I’m told is normal, as if I’m not just here to be put on a hook and bedded.

There are many who can’t make you feel it in your bones, who don’t have resources, who didn’t learn what I forced myself to in order to feel confident and protect myself, or who may know all these things and have still been beaten or raped or killed in similar situations.

Under the Skin puts the shoe on the other foot. It’s the men on the fringes of society who won’t be missed, who no one will listen to, who no one will search for if they go missing. An unnamed woman (Scarlett Johansson) preys like a rapist, a social predator hiding in plain sight, who makes you feel her approval is worth a cost in flesh, is worth a ransom, because you serve no more purpose than to be put on a hook and bedded. Even if it makes you feel it for two hours, it makes you FEEL it. It makes you feel unable to withstand. It makes you feel unsafe. But you get to walk out at the end and call it “horror.” For a woman, sometimes we call that “just another day.”

Vanessa Tottle is a paleontologist by trade, and is the creative director for this site. She’s written powerfully many times on the treatment of women in the media and the increasingly organized war on women’s freedoms.

Tie – Captain America: The Winter Soldier
and Guardians of the Galaxy
by Erin Snyder

Yeah, yeah: ties are cheating. But I’ve got a good excuse. First of all, I’m not calling these two movies the “best of the year” because I think they each deserve that title individually. In fact, if only one of these movies had come out this year, I don’t think I’d have picked it. It’s the two of them together that delivered something exceptional.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t great: I thought they were. But I saw a lot of great movies in 2014. What set these apart is the larger Universe they’re part of. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is easily the most ambitious project going on in Hollywood right now. Of course, this is old news: the MCU has been around since 2008.

These two films didn’t just occupy completely different sectors of the same shared Universe; they dramatically expanded that Universe in new directions. I don’t just mean in terms of plot or setting: these movies introduced entirely new tones and genres to the Marvel Universe.

I had a lot of great experiences in the theater this year – Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The LEGO Movie, Edge of Tomorrow, Her… but in my opinion the clear winner is Marvel. They’re building something we haven’t seen before, at least on film. We’re seeing plot lines developing across multiple franchises and platforms. We’re seeing characters interacting with each others’ stories without realizing it. And most importantly, we’re seeing movies try to do something they haven’t done before.

These two movies expanded the possibilities for where Marvel can go. They’re developing larger, connected stories on a scale we’ve never seen on film.

And that, hands down, is the best thing I saw in a theater in 2014.

Erin Snyder is a novelist and critic. You can check out his latest novel Facsimile, read his reviews at Welcome to the Middle Room, and experience some seasonal shock to the system at Mainlining Christmas.

Interior. Leather Bar.
by A.E. Larsen

When I was asked to submit a brief piece about what I thought the best movie of the year was, I was initially hesitant, both because I haven’t seen a lot of the big releases this year and because most of what I have seen simply hasn’t moved me or stayed with me in any real way. But eventually I decided that I did have a choice, though not an obvious one by any means: James Franco’s arthouse piece, Interior. Leather Bar. The film is a docufiction that purports to be about Franco’s attempt to reconstruct the lost 40 minutes of William Friedkin’s controversial 1980 movie Cruising. Franco casts a straight friend, Val Lauren, in the Al Pacino part as a straight cop going undercover in a gay leather bar where he watches men having sex and engaging in sadomasochistic acts.

I say the film “purports to be” about reconstructing the lost footage, because as a number of critics pointed out, only about 10 minutes of footage actually gets reconstructed, and instead most of the film is a discussion about how Franco, Lauren, and other straight actors feel about what they’re watching. But what many of the film’s critics failed to recognize is that the film isn’t actually about Franco’s attempt to reconstruct the lost footage. It’s actually Franco using the reconstruction to study the reactions of vanilla straight men when confronted with open demonstrations of kinky gay sexuality. Lauren is confused about what he’s doing because Franco hasn’t told him that what he’s really filming is Lauren’s discomfort with the loss of his heterosexual privilege that has kept him from having to view gay sexuality in action.

So why am I calling this the best film of 2014 (or more precisely, the best film of 2014 that I’ve actually seen)? It definitely has problems; it’s very talky, and at times it gets way too meta. But it actively pushes its audience to think about the way that conventional cinema privileges heterosexual romance over all other forms of sexuality to the point that, as Franco comments in the film, he’s internalized his hetero privilege even though he doesn’t want to. He complains that audiences are trained to accept extreme violence but to blanch at gay sex. Whereas The Imitation Game embraces its heterosexual privilege by exaggerating the meaning of Alan Turing’s brief engagement to Joan Clarke and cannot bring itself to show Turing actually engaging in homosexual activity even when that activity is central to the plot (he’s being investigated for homosexual sex, after all), Interior. Leather Bar. actively pushes its audience outside the bounds of hetero privilege and dares to treat explicit kinky gay sex as a suitable subject for a movie. It’s not the best movie of the year by any conventional set of standards, but it was a far more thought-provoking and bold film than any other I saw this year.

But if you want a more conventional best film of the year, I’ll say Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It was fun, had a smart plot, had lots of violence, and absolutely no sadomasochistic gay sex.

A.E. Larsen writes the absolutely essential An Historian Goes to the Movies, which considers how far movies stray from historical reality. Sometimes, a movie is forgiven and sometimes it’s not. Either way, I always learn something.

Interstellar
by Jessica Greenberg

My pick is Interstellar, if just to bring focus to the sound design. The score is evocative, sometimes minimalist, and the sound as a whole has a retro-futuristic flavor that I love. The use of silence, or near silence, at appropriate moments is equally well done. I thought it was interesting that the world of the spaceship was less dominated by the typical beeps and blips you might find in a sci-fi blockbuster, which I think supports the more philosophical tone of this movie. Sound design by Richard King, and music composed by Hans Zimmer.

Jessica Greenberg is a lighting designer and assistant professor of Theatre Design at Weber State University. Check out her impressive design portfolio.

Whiplash
by Keith Ward

“There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than ‘good job.’” – Fletcher

Most stories about the relationship between a mentor and student are safe, empowering, predictable, and frankly hokey experiences. Whiplash subverts this cliché genre in surprising new ways. Out of all the movies I watched in 2014, it both disturbed me and challenged my preconceived notions the most.

Whiplash focuses on aspiring jazz drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller). A first-year student at a Julliard-like music school, he rejoiced when renowned instructor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) recruits him into his band. Neyman soon must re-evaluate his ‘good luck.’ Fletcher’s methods are brutal. Rather than offering praise to encourage the best in his students, he uses humiliation and sadism to push them past their limits. To him, the ends always justify the means. But Fletcher’s cruelty is matched by Neyman’s own obsession with becoming a great musician. As the story progresses, the line between victim and accomplice becomes increasingly blurred.

I was raised in the “feel good” generation. It was during my childhood that kids started to get awards at sporting events just for participating. Many of us never really knew what it was like to be a loser until we were thrown into the terrible post-2008 job market. I certainly didn’t learn to appreciate criticism until halfway through college. Maybe my generation’s fear of hurting other people’s feelings has held us back. Personally, I like to think that positive reinforcement is important and feel pride in some of my generation’s accomplishments. Whiplash’s narrative does not side with Fletcher, depicting the dark repercussions of his methods, but it does show us that his mean-spirited technique can be effective. Achieving greatness in any medium, from music to acting to filmmaking, must come at a personal cost to the artist.

I recommend that you go see Whiplash. But keep in mind that it is definitely not a date movie. The story revels in making its audience feel uncomfortable and it kept me on the edge of my seat. It features an excellent jazz soundtrack, creative editing, brilliant performances by Teller and Simmons, and an intelligent story that challenges the viewer. I couldn’t ask for much more from a motion picture.

Keith Ward is an actor making his feature film debut this year as the lead in a film I’m very excited about, the upcoming romance Beyond Hello.

Whiplash
by Justine Baron

Sometimes, the films that speak to you the most are the ones you never imagined you would love so much. To me, Whiplash is one of the most affecting films of 2014, and this is coming from someone who has little knowledge of jazz music and no musical skills whatsoever. When someone comes along and creates a story built in a world you don’t necessarily relate to, about a subject you know little of, and you become not only pleasantly lost in it but also so on-edge the whole time that you feel physically tense, that is what I believe is a part of great filmmaking.

Some of the credit goes to the performances, and I think plenty of us who saw this can agree that J.K. Simmons was the most intense and scary he’s ever been. Miles Teller also stepped out of the box and into a role that really showcased his true talents as not only an actor, but a musician as well. I had no idea he had those skills. Credit also goes to Damien Chazelle for a smart, bold, and engaging script with plenty of witty dialogue and layered themes, the biggest of which asks the question: how far is one willing to be pushed to achieve greatness? A question I don’t often ask myself. Along with the outstanding performances and great writing/directing, the music, the editing, and the cinematography here work so well in accordance together. Whiplash is such a skillfully crafted film. It shocked me and really made me question the moral implications of this abusive student/mentor relationship. I fell in love with this film instantly, and that’s why I believe it’s the best of 2014.

Justine Baron is a production assistant with a passion for movies. She runs the incredibly informative film site Justine’s Movie Blog. I may not always agree with her, but I do always read her, and she’s one of the few critics I consider go-to.

Whiplash
by Tim O’Neill

Let’s talk about Whiplash. It may not be my definitive favorite of 2014, I had a few this year, but it fills a dark horse niche that I’d like to celebrate. Like Foxcatcher, another favorite of 2014, Whiplash is a nail biting, mano a mano study of masculinity, whose plot evokes yawns when explaining it to friends. This movie isn’t great because of what it is, but how it is. This lean story of ambition, competition, and motivation almost feels like it spontaneously appeared out of the hands of its craftsmen: the actors, cinematographer, editor, and sound mixers. To his credit, Damien Chazelle’s direction feels like the invisible hand of a composer himself, letting the instruments do the talking.

Like Black Swan, Whiplash confronts the horrifying sacrifices one makes in the pursuit of artistic brilliance. But not since Fight Club have I seen a movie that so daringly grapples with the subject of masculinity. Most films that do center on stories of extreme violence, and of course here there is a little of that. But here, violence – or perhaps more accurately machismo – comes in the form of competition. Men learn by doing, and doing better than the next guy. Fathers scold, brothers fight, and the scars define us. Or at least that’s what J.K. Simmons is yelling at me. I had a theatre professor in college a lot like Simmons’ character, Fletcher, who offended a lot of students with his abrasive style. He used to say that we would never learn if he wasn’t brutally honest about our work, emphasis on brutal. This idea that artists, like athletes, have to be pounded into the ground in order to be great is certainly compelling. I still think what few basketball skills I have are primarily the result of the pickup games I played with my cousin, whose early growth spurt gave him a full head over me. On the other hand, you can’t throw a chair at a student, c’mon guys. And would he have thrown a chair at a female student? Oddly, I found Whiplash to be a fairly positive portrayal of masculinity. This isn’t a depressing movie about an alcoholic father who beats his son, there is something genuinely, unsettlingly rational at its core. I may not completely agree with Fletcher’s philosophy, but he does seem to get results.

People have been calling Whiplash a horror movie, or a monster movie. I can get on board with that, but perhaps what’s truly horrifying is the notion that Fletcher might be right, or at least not entirely crazy. The ending certainly leaves that question up for debate. Speaking of which, the ending alone makes this one of the best films of 2014. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie climax so dependent on editing.* Plenty of movies have great action climaxes built around superb editing, but those would still read well on the page. I haven’t read it, but I assume the script for the final scene of Whiplash reads something like “then Andrew takes control of the band and proves that he has what it takes.” Seriously, the last 5 minutes are essentially a live jazz performance covered from every conceivable angle cut together by the ghost of Keith Moon. I saw the movie weeks after it came out in a small, half-full theater and the audience still erupted in applause. Now THAT’S filmmaking.

*Full disclosure, I’m an editor.

It’s true, Tim O’Neill is an L.A. based editor, whose credits range from the feature The Unidentified to the TV documentary Tracker and the comedy series Compulsive Love. His edit reel shows a rare flexibility across genres.

The Rover
by Olivia Smith

Australia. Our art is driven by what pleases American and English critics who hardly matter to America or England anymore. We want to be like our bigger brothers. We’ve killed our own art. While New Zealand poaches local and Polynesian artists, we chase them all out like dogs. Where once we loomed large, Australian movies now make up 3.5% of our domestic box office. We even chased the new Mad Max trilogy to Namibia. The Australian movie industry has been choked to death.

When something like The Rover arrives, it’s special. It’s not just special because it’s Australian – like writer Joel Edgerton, director David Michod, and most of its stars, including Guy Pearce. It breathes Australian. It feels the desert. It features actors of Cambodian and Chinese descent, which may seem inconsequential but is something much Australian film ignores. It feels like the madhouse circus this place can be, finds brilliance hidden in among the xenophobia and paranoia that pervades our politics. Its story is simple, yet deceptive. A man (Pearce) and his kidnapped protege (Robert Pattinson) pursue the man who stole his car. Along the way, Pearce trains Pattinson to interact with the world by dominating others, by murdering them. Yet Pattinson only ever does it for Pearce’s respect. Both men are haunting. The film is parched of all emotion, cast in the pall of a hurt Pearce won’t reveal. Pattinson feels like the wood from the bonfire a night before – crisp, flaking apart where the wounds are, disintegrating before your eyes. You watch with tremendous sorrow, but it makes no difference. What you watch has already burnt. It can no longer be fresh again, it can no longer be restored.

Olivia Smith is an Australian-based writer who’s offered us a unique perspective from a country struggling with whether to publicly fund or privatize the arts.

The Babadook
by Andy Crump

Horror movies tend to be treated as though they’re disposable; this is as true today as it has been for most of horror fiction’s existence. But then a person like Jennifer Kent comes along and makes a horror film that makes 90% of what her genre peers output, as well as most of 2015’s Academy Awards nominees, look like absolute clown shoes. Few horror yarns founded on a driving metaphor work that metaphor as beautifully as The Babadook does. The film is terrifying, but it’s also heartwrenching, gorgeously made, and indelibly true. How can a movie about a boogeyman feel more authentic than most films that purport to root themselves in reality?

Andy Crump is a film writer and critic at Movie Mezzanine and Screen Rant. He and I get in some pretty legendary battles over films, but I always appreciate the writing he does and the care he puts into it.

We had enough reaction that we’ll be featuring Part 2 of this article next week. That’ll be featured and posted here once it’s up!

What the Oscars Missed

by Gabriel Valdez

The logic used to choose this year’s Oscar nominations is…what’s the right word? Unfathomable. There’s the odd technical category in which I agree with them completely, but the nominations are riddled with head-scratching decisions.

Selma, for instance, is nominated for Best Picture without being nominated in any other category but Best Original Song, “Glory” by Common and John Legend. The Academy must be really big Common fans.

All 20 nominees in the acting categories are Caucasian. I’m not of the opinion that nominations in an awards show should be subject to any quota for minority nomination. I am of the opinion, however, that there’s no way the 20 best performances this year include zero roles performed by other ethnicities.

To paraphrase a friend’s reaction, it’s almost as if the Academy is saying, “We gave you 12 Years a Slave and Lupita last year, leave us alone,” and chucking Selma into the Best Picture category just to dissuade criticism of how whitewashed the Oscars are this year.

In each category, I’ll be naming a film or person who deserved a nomination this year, who the Academy overlooked. I won’t focus it on minorities – I have my own rankings for our awards, which we’ll present before the Oscars, and I’m just taking the first person off each board who wasn’t nominated by the Academy. But I look at those boards and then I look at the Oscar nominations, and I see a big difference.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Nominated: Big Hero 6, The Boxtrolls, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Song of the Sea, The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Forgotten: Actually, we’re all good here

One of the most controversial choices I make today is going to be agreeing with the Oscars wholeheartedly. I don’t believe The LEGO Movie is enough of something to earn a place alongside the awe-inspiring texture of The Tale of Princess Kaguya, the gracefully epic How to Train Your Dragon 2, or the surprisingly rousing and emotional Big Hero 6. I’m not as high on The Boxtrolls, but I would still choose it over LEGO. I have not seen the Irish animated film Song of the Sea, but even if I had to take it out, I’d only replace it with The Book of Life.

BEST FILM EDITING

Nominated: American Sniper, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Imitation Game, Whiplash

Forgotten: Gone Girl

My two favorite awards at the Oscars are always Editing and Cinematography. I’m weird like that. The oversight of Kirk Baxter’s work in Gone Girl is surprising, but like much of what David Fincher does when he’s not de-aging Brad Pitt, the finished product itself may be too audacious for the Academy to process. Gone Girl‘s narrative game of shells is handled with greater editing precision than any other film this year. It is perfectly cut, creating rhythm and tension from a story that could have easily been a complete mess in the hands of a lesser editor. I can understand and forgive most oversights on technical awards, but this one is nothing short of astonishing.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Nominated: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Imitation Game, Interstellar, Into the Woods, Mr. Turner

Forgotten: The Raid 2

There’s one film here that should walk away with this, and it rhymes with “A Man To Arrest For Smell” (work with me here). That said, there is a nomination missing, and it’s from a film I would not expect most members in the Academy to have even heard of. That would be Indonesian martial arts epic The Raid 2. Imagine if Stanley Kubrick had been in charge of designing the sets for a gang epic, half of it taking place in majestic hotels redder than blood and tiered dance clubs of glass, the other half erupting into the slums, snowy back alleys, and dismantled housing projects of Jakarta. Does it even snow in Jakarta? I don’t know, but it does in one scene in The Raid 2, and it’s not because of Jakarta, it’s because of the sheer operatic power it holds in that moment, to take your breath away, to make you feel profound loss.

The production design in The Raid 2 isn’t just nice to look at, it is emotionally evocative: unsettling, touching, beautiful, and glum each in turn. It can evoke emptiness in its richest moments, fear in its most overpoweringly banal form, and the threadbare desperation of a moment. It’s rare that you come across a martial arts film in which you could take away all the fight scenes and still have a deeply compelling drama in a fully realized world left over.

BEST SOUND

Nominated: American Sniper, Birdman, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Interstellar, Unbroken, Whiplash

Forgotten: Fury

I know everybody came here for Best Sound, but I’m combining Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, since the split between these categories is largely vestigial, and every year only serves to double the nomination count across four movies. A fifth (Hobbit for Editing, Whiplash for Mixing) is always included just to maintain the illusion that these categories don’t overlap in most of their qualifications. Anyway, who cares about all that? Where the hell is Fury? I’ll admit, I’m normally the one tossing a non-war film into the mix for Sound. I’m tempted to do that with Gone Girl‘s thick, white-noise silences or Under the Skin‘s candid, on-the-street backgrounds. But this year, Fury is one of the few films to create so much through so many sound cues. Half the film takes place inside a tank, and we need to hear not just what war sounds like, but what war sounds like when you’re behind inches of armor with barely enough space to turn your head. Fury crafts this beautifully, and I’m disappointed to see one of the year’s best films with zero nominations in any category whatsoever.

Additionally, I love Interstellar. Love it. Like, Interstellar and I are thinking of moving in together and getting a puppy just as a test run to see if we want to have little Matthew McConaugheys running around crying all the time. But the one nomination Interstellar does not deserve is sound, not when 10% of the dialogue is drowned out by Hans Zimmer beating the everloving tar out of a pipe organ. I recognize it was a directorial choice, and I won’t say it was the wrong choice, but sound is Interstellar‘s pianissimo, not it’s forte.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Nominated: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, X-Men: Days of Future Past

Forgotten: Actually, we’re all good here

Can’t disagree with anything here. If it’s just about fidelity, you look for a place to include The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, but I’d like to see this award continue trending more toward the artistic use of visual effects, and not just how many you can have moving on-screen at once. Which is why I’m ecstatic to see no Transformers nomination.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Nominated: Patricia Arquette – Boyhood, Laura Dern – Wild, Keira Knightley – Imitation Game, Emma Stone – Birdman, Meryl Streep – Into the Woods

Forgotten: Carmen Ejogo, Selma

Rene Russo in Nightcrawler and Carrie Coon in Gone Girl both deserve more acclaim than they’re getting for what they did this year, but the disinclusion of Carmen Ejogo’s Coretta Scott King in Selma is very puzzling. She holds two of the most powerful scenes on film this year. In Selma, she isn’t just tasked with portraying her character, she also has the responsibility of communicating and then reacting to the emotions that Martin Luther King must restrain. Every moment she’s on-screen, she’s portraying two characters: Mrs. King and her husband. She creates the shape and space for David Oyelowo’s performance as Dr. King, and – with the possible exception of my next two choices – there is no joint performance this year in which two actors better realize a give-and-take relationship.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Nominated: Robert Duvall – The Judge, Ethan Hawke – Boyhood, Edward Norton – Birdman, Mark Ruffalo – Foxcatcher, J.K. Simmons – Whiplash

Forgotten: Robert Pattinson, The Rover

There are some actors I’m very happy to see nominated – you cannot be unhappy that J.K. Simmons is finally nominated for an Oscar. But the best supporting role this year, and not just a nomination missing, is the best performance this year, period. It belongs to Robert Pattinson in an overlooked Australian film called The Rover. He gives us an immature man whose faculties are very questionable, who starts as the enemy to Guy Pearce’s unnamed kidnapper, yet who quickly comes to idolize his captor and seek to impress him through greater and greater violence.

Pattinson plays a blank slate who doesn’t belong in this world, who would have been gentle and allowed himself to be weak if he’d only seen kindness, yet who is taught to see the world instead through a lens of brutality and so suffers his injuries like some dog kicked and used by his master, and all the more loyal for it. It is an awesome and staggering performance from an actor I never expected could deliver it.

BEST ACTOR

Nominated: Steve Carell – Foxcatcher, Bradley Cooper – American Sniper, Benedict Cumberbatch – Imitation Game, Michael Keaton – Birdman, Eddie Redmayne – Theory of Everything

Forgotten: Guy Pearce, The Rover
and David Oyelowo, Selma

I’m drawing from the top of my list, and that means Guy Pearce in The Rover. There’s a scene in which he’s captured by the authorities, fully expecting and seemingly wanting the release of finally being punished for his crimes. There is a look in his eyes that defines desperation. When the unlikely event of his rescue comes to pass, we don’t focus on that rescue. We hear it. But we focus on this dirty man in a chair coming to realize that he won’t be sent to jail, that he’ll be thrown back into the world and have to continue his journey in it. And those eyes…they communicate such disappointment, such a resignation to that reality. Few actors could play a protagonist so terrible, so ruthless, and yet so human.

There are many nominations I’d replace with others, not just one for each category, but here, I really do have to point out the inexplicable lack of a nomination for the #2 actor of the year on my list, David Oyelowo. We nominate not just for performance – which Oyelowo would deserve on that merit alone – but for the moment in time those performances arrive, for what those performances have to teach us. Oyelowo’s role as Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma deserves to be here for the quality of his performance, but it doubly deserves to be here for when it arrives and what it reminds us about our country.

I’d also kick a third nominee out in favor of Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, but that’s a whole other conversation.

BEST ACTRESS

Nominated: Marion Cotillard – Two Days, One Night, Felicity Jones – Theory of Everything, Julianne Moore – Still Alice, Rosamund Pike – Gone Girl, Reese Witherspoon – Wild

Forgotten: Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin

These are fine. I’m glad to see Marion Cotillard nominated again. I didn’t expect the Academy to give Under the Skin the time of day, and I was right. I’m not exactly shocked that an experimental Scottish film about an alien in the skin of a woman seducing and consuming men didn’t warrant a nomination, but Johansson delivers a brilliant performance as a predator who gradually learns to identify with her prey. Under the Skin is many things: a film that asks complex questions about identity, that embodies the relationship between urbanization and nature, and that – most astonishingly – tricks you into inhabiting the perspective of a serial rapist. It is not every actor who could anchor so many questions or communicate a worldview of sociopathy in this disturbingly plainspoken a way.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Nominated: Birdman, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ida, Mr. Turner, Unbroken

Forgotten: The Raid 2

These are all phenomenal choices, but there’s a glaring exception here. Again, I don’t expect most of the Academy to even know what The Raid 2 is, let alone know about how Matt Flannery and Dimas Imam Subhono are changing how we shoot movies. Like I wrote above for its production design, you could take away every martial arts setpiece and still have a complete, beautiful looking narrative. Comparisons to Stanley Kubrick in the production design also carry over to the dramatic cinematography.

What Flannery and Subhono do on top of this, however, is nothing less than completely change how martial arts movies are shot. No longer are we watching complex martial arts sequences shot from a series of static angles and crane shots. No longer are we watching long form choreography filmed from a handheld shakycam. Now, we weave in and out in extended shots that are comparable to the work of Emmanuel Lubezki, whose unbroken one-takes created the tension behind Children of Men, Gravity, and this year’s nominated Birdman.

There’s a sequence that demands performers and cameramen run through a muddy prison yard the consistency of pudding, complete with complex, timed choreography and opportunities for the cameras to not just witness, but to weave inside and through the choreography itself. A later fight scene involves three people in a narrow hallway. While there are edits, they are very specifically at the easiest points. The hardest choreography is not achieved through edits, but through a hidden choreography for the camera. It becomes a four-person choreography that demands precise staging so that the camera can weave in and out of actors’ full speed movements, still able to land on precise shots that can evoke the emotion of more classical, dramatic cinematography. There are rare steps taken in the technical elements of film that open whole new ways of shooting movies, that create brand new visual grammar for how we understand the language of an entire genre. This is one of those steps.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Nominated: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Inherent Vice, Into the Woods, Maleficent, Mr. Turner

Forgotten: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

While the fidelity of the visual effects in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies shouldn’t earn it a nomination in that category because of how they are used, the costume design in this third Hobbit deserves nothing less than our awe. You feel that, knowing this was their last hurrah in Middle-earth, designers Bob Buck, Ann Maskrey, and Richard Taylor went whole hog, creating an array of costumes that is the film’s true standout. From the gold leaves of the beautiful elven armor, each a complex reproduction of the last, to the individualized armor pieces that change from one orc to the next, from the fur and filigree of the dwarves’ armors to the tatters of the humans, the costuming here does more to realize the world of Middle-earth in this entry than any other technical element. The franchise has won this before, and perhaps the Academy felt like they needed to create territory for other nominees, but if The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies deserves to be nominated for anything, it’s in this category.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

Nominated: Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Guardians of the Galaxy

Forgotten: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Only three nominees, so I may not bump any of these out (Guardians of the Galaxy should win this walking away), but it’s hard to see The Hobbit ignored in this category, for many of the same reasons I list right above in the Costume Design section. If you gave the category a fifth nomination, I’d be hard pressed to ignore the work of Judy Chin’s crew on Noah.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Nominated: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Imitation Game, Interstellar, Mr. Turner, The Theory of Everything

Forgotten: Mica Levi, Under the Skin

You can always tempt me with a Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross team-up, as in Gone Girl, but the finest score this year belongs to Mica Levi and her wild experimentation on Under the Skin. There’s absolutely nothing like it, and its combination of mechanical regularity and teeming natural architectures is stunningly disturbing. Her score is also the most thematically important, turning the film’s key moment in a way no other musical cue does this year. It’s rare that I can hear a piece of music and feel as if my body’s temperature has dropped to freezing, but that’s the effect this music has.

I make fun of it, but out of what’s nominated, I’d like to see Hans Zimmer’s How to Beat a Pipe Organ for Dummies get Interstellar the win.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Nominated: American Sniper, Imitation Game, Inherent Vice, The Theory of Everything, Whiplash

Forgotten: Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

I’ll get flak for this one, but Dawn of the Planet of the Apes possesses an incredible screenplay that riffs on Pierre Boulle’s original novel, the Charlton Heston film, Biblical allegories, and contains plain, old-fashioned, incredible adventure writing. It is structural perfection, it is stylistically strong, it builds a world, entirely new cultures, and it is both patient and daring in how it gets to the places it’s going. The film’s best moments don’t involve its action scenes (although these are good, too); they involve characters trying their best to bridge differences, communicate, and avert a disaster they should know all too well is coming anyway. Strip the modern visuals and the central allegory about war and you have a brilliant 1950s historical epic. Toss on the war allegory and you’re suddenly discussing too many regions of the world where cultures seek to violently eradicate those different from them.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Nominated: Birdman, Boyhood, Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightcrawler

Forgotten: David Ayer, Fury

David Ayer’s screenplay for Fury deserves recognition as the finest balancing act of the year. The idea of using World War 2 to examine and break down the inner mechanics of how patriarchy trains violence – toward women, toward “the other,” as a way of functioning in the world – is mind-blowing. I have never seen anything like what David Ayer does here and it requires him to balance on the edge of a knife. He instills an honest admiration and respect for the heroism of soldiers while also using the training of their mindset to define the tragedy of something that is a modern, everyday, cultural problem: too many think they’re soldiers in cultural, gender-based, and religious battles that demand us-or-them victory conditions. We enable greater, everyday violence toward those with less as a rule of our culture. It is a remarkably difficult message to convey in the trappings of a war film, especially in terms of this particular war.

What Paul Webb does in Selma also deserves recognition. He creates poetry that discusses race in a way that connects 1965 to 2015. He writes characters not as celebrities or icons, but as people burdened by the responsibility of living up to the titles they’re given. As much as anything else, he deserves credit for finding a way to communicate the words of King without being able to use any of the words of King, since Dreamworks and Warner Bros. have licensed the film rights to Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches for a Steven Spielberg biopic that will probably never get made. It’s just one of the many nomination oversights for Selma that baffle me.

BEST DIRECTING

Nominated: Alejandro Inarritu – Birdman, Richard Linklater – Boyhood, Bennett Miller – Foxcatcher, Wes Anderson – The Grand Budapest Hotel, Morten Tyldum – Imitation Game

Forgotten: Ava DuVernay, Selma

I’m completely lost as to how this doesn’t get nominated. Until Selma came out, the year’s been a three-way race between Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), Christopher Nolan (Interstellar), and Gareth Evans (The Raid 2). The three Davids – Fincher (Gone Girl), Ayer (Fury), and Michod (The Rover) are in the conversation with a few of the Oscar nominees, and Angelina Jolie (Unbroken) keeps hanging around because she turned one of the most godawful scripts of the year into compelling drama, which isn’t easy.

And then Ava DuVernay came along, and then there was that moment early in Selma, when the conversation just stopped. There was no conversation to be had: Ava DuVernay is the best director of the year. And then there was that moment midway through Selma, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and you realized why. Her grasp of one of the most impossible moments in American history to translate, her ability to take the incomprehensible and help you begin to understand the texture and emotion of that moment, her ability to connect what happened 50 years ago to what is happening today…she is the director all other directors should be looking to this year. I cannot fathom what reason the Oscars have to overlook it.

BEST PICTURE….

Nominated: American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything, Whiplash

It’s really nice to see comedies like Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel recognized. I’m incredibly glad Whiplash found its way here. American Sniper I’ve mostly avoided because there is a great deal of controversy surrounding just how much has been changed to patriotize the figure at its center.

So what’s missing? The Academy gives what feels like a very cursory nod to Selma, having forgotten it in every other category but Best Original Song. I almost want to list it here again. While I’d feel pretty warm and content in my snark, it would defeat the spirit of this exercise.

You can probably guess it’s going to come down to Interstellar, Under the Skin, and something out of left field – Fury, Nightcrawler, The Raid 2, or The Rover. Those are six very deserving films, and I hate to be so boring, but it really is all about Interstellar and Under the Skin.

This is what I’ve been wrestling with when figuring out the best film of the year. Interstellar is a movie that emotionally communicates to me in a way no other film does. It makes me feel like a little kid, makes me feel like I’m going on a space adventure, but it talks about so much more along the way. Its tension and emotion are unparalleled for me as far as film experiences go. Of all the films this year, it will easily be the one I watch the most in my life.

Under the Skin speaks about important issues of identity, and it goes to terrifying places intellectually that I’ve never been taken before. On a level of experiencing and understanding the unfeeling nature of sociopathy, of being tricked into inhabiting it for two hours, of being asked to experience the world both as predator and victim, it leaves me disgusted and aghast and yet – seeing how its real, understanding all the better how that mindset operates – it makes it so very much more terrifying.

So it becomes comparing apples to oranges, or comparing apples to the guy in that shady Buick parked halfway down the block all day. Do I choose the film that makes me feel best about the world, or the one that makes me feel worst? Truth be told, that answer’s going to change day by day. It’s going to change by the successes I have and by the suffering I see in the world. I might tell you Interstellar is one of the best adventures ever put to film one day, and I might insist Under the Skin is going to change your life the next.

I hope you’ll understand that I won’t choose, that I prefer to leave it a two-way tie. Film is about the stories we need to keep on going, and the stories we need to see to better help others keep on going. To me, it’s an odd poetry that my top two films this year come down to the opposite ends of science-fiction. It might be frustrating to you, it might feel like a cop-out, but to me it feels fitting. It feels as if each film becomes more important by not winning out over the other, that one film can be the emotional heart and the other can be the intellectual reality into which that idealization walks every day thinking it can make a difference. I feel like choosing one would be denying reality, and choosing the other would be denying possibility.

Criticism isn’t just about ranking and choosing what’s best and what isn’t. It’s about finding the films that speak to you and using them to speak to others. The best films teach critics new words, new translations, whole new ways to communicate what’s inside them, to be memoir writers who point out new possibilities through the windows art gives us. These are the films that teach me the most, that make me feel like I can communicate so much more completely.

So go see Interstellar. It’s one of the best adventures ever put to film.

And go see Under the Skin. It’s going to change your life.

Before Oscar Season — The Top 10 Movies (So Far)

by Gabriel Valdez

Oscar season is upon us, and that means one thing – everyone’s opinion is about to change. When many of the best films of the year are held until the holiday season, top 10 lists will completely transform by January. Earlier movies will be seen a second or third time and will climb or fall down lists accordingly. As was the case with my top two films of 2013, The Place Beyond the Pines and The Grandmaster, I’ll even catch up with smaller or foreign films on DVD.

On the cusp of Oscar season, let’s do an experiment. I’ll list my top 10 films today and we’ll check back in with the list come January:

10. How to Train Your Dragon 2

The list is rounded out with big-budget fare that’s more ambitious than the average summer blockbuster. How to Train Your Dragon 2 might be the best American animated film since Pixar’s sadly passed golden age, but it’s not just about kids and their dragons. It possesses an epic visual streak rare in animation and speaks to the dispossessed of our society – children of broken families, the disabled, and war veterans alike.

9. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

This is our best (non-Batman) superhero film in a cinematic era overrun with them. Like many blockbusters of the last two years, it’s incredibly socially-minded, using comic book tropes to deliver a sharp critique on the oxymoron of a marriage between the Pentagon’s mandate for freedom and the rise of private military contractors.

8. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

For all its visual effects wizardry, this boasts one of the best-told stories of the year. It also challenges Noah for number of Bible references, posing original sin, Cain-and-Abel, and Jesus conceits against the backdrop of civil war in what’s effectively a third-world country. It’s rare that you could take away an action movie’s bigger setpieces and still be left with one of the best films of the year.

7. Noah

Noah is just on the outside of the top tier looking in. I’m big on its style and message, which were enough to make me forgive its unwieldy stretches on first viewing. I’m still a huge fan of its screenplay, which conflates various cultures’ flood myths, the entirety of the Old Testament, and a very meta approach to film narrative into a single story. That’s no easy feat. Darren Aronofsky’s “story of creation” is the best three-and-a-half minutes on film this year, and reveals that the film is better viewed as a postapocalypse fever dream than a direct religious adaptation. It tackles so much that I’m still putting it above much tighter films, but its unevenness can’t help but detract when we’ve had so many off-kilter masterpieces this year.

6. Nightcrawler

I just recently wrote on this film and, if you read on Monday how personally it struck me, you’ll accept my apology if I’d rather not write more on it for the time being.

5. Gone Girl

I don’t know if this is Gone Girl the movie so much as it’s David Fincher the movie. Rarely has a film been so precisely directed. You get the feeling that if there were a fleck of dust out of place on set, it would be moved into position before the camera rolled. It’s an accomplishment to be sure, and Gone Girl says a lot with a wry smile.

It’s a perfect film, essentially, but it knows it a little too much. It’s still pretty secure in the top 10, and I suspect it may move up once I see it again, but is it as important as some of the other films here? No. ‘Important’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘good,’ but it can add a certain weight to a film. Gone Girl is an artistic triumph, but it’s also like looking at a date who’s a little too perfect. Like its protagonists when they meet, there’s no messiness there, and you get the sense their personality is a put-on. It’s intriguing and you might see where it goes, but really you’re looking for someone who’s more willing to make a mistake or embarrass themselves.

4. The Raid 2

What the hell’s a martial arts movie doing this high? Imagine if Stanley Kubrick had ever designed the sets for a martial arts film with a gangland story told by Martin Scorsese and choreography that harkens back to the riskiest stunts of Jackie Chan’s youth. That might be a mess for a film without a motive, but The Raid 2 is a tight gangster story that reflects Indonesia’s frustration with powerful organized crime.

What’s most impressive is its cinematography. Quiet, emotional moments barely move, as if trapped in a snow globe. Yet you never see the most impressively choreographed stuntpeople – the ones holding the cameras, who weave in and out of the action with as much exacting complexity and artful nuance as the actors themselves. For martial arts films, this doesn’t just create a new way of filming fight scenes, it creates new opportunities for telling more story through them.

3. The Rover

Capturing the sensibility of a short story in a feature length film is incredibly difficult. In The Rover, it requires a narrow focus on character and something shrouded and immaculately protected in their souls. You feel compelled to learn more, to stick with disgusting characters because you need to know what it is that drives them toward a task so meaningless and without consequence. What makes it personal?

In a postapocalyptic world, following a character who couldn’t care whether you live or die, what makes his journey important at all? Something does, you get the sense of it haunting every moment Guy Pearce holds the screen like some cornered, wounded animal, vicious and feral about protecting himself yet already given up to the idea there’s no point left in living. Then there’s Robert Pattinson, playing the dull-witted boy who makes up his mind to be like Pearce’s nameless drifter, play-acting the part of wounded animal. Both are performances for the ages in as sparse and unforgiving a film as I know. It’s a film that – once it finishes – makes you thankful for stepping into the sunlight and hearing the noise of cars and seeing planes in the sky. The Rover is a masterpiece of what it’s like to be desolate not just in the world around you, but inside yourself.

2. Fury

And then there’s Fury. Like The Rover, it presents us with a young man (Logan Lerman) being trained to survive through developing a skill for hatred. In fact, many films this year – Nightcrawler, the villain in Maleficent, and even Lerman’s role in Noah – give us characters who demonstrate the hatred created through uniquely male pressures. These characters are taught to find strength through layers of domination, learning to abuse the “lesser” violently and sexually in order to secure a role in society. None of them communicate it like Fury, however, its metaphors stripped to the bone in as stark a depiction of war as has ever been put to the screen.

1. Under the Skin

A Scottish art film in which each artist – sound designers, composer, cinematographer – was allowed to go wild when creating their own, unique perspective of a central vision, edited into a horror film about identity and sexual consumption. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in human form whose job is to capture and digest human beings. She does so by luring drifters and other lonely men away from the public, tempting them with sex, and consuming them in some of the creepiest visual metaphors you’ve ever seen.

What Under the Skin does best is tricking us into viewing the narrative through the perspective of a sexual predator, and later using nontraditional means – inverted lighting schemes and Pavlovian musical cues – to coldly bring us out of it and make us consider what we’ve seen. It’s a mad, pulsating, unnerving film you don’t always know what to do with, sometimes frustrating but always captivating. What’s most impressive is that it doesn’t organize every artist’s contribution beneath a single directorial vision, which is usually better for a film – each perspective and artistic layer can still be seen in the final product. In truth, it’s the only way a film like this could have worked so well, as a rarity that can be viewed from so many different angles.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to interview Michel Faber, who wrote the novel on which Under the Skin is based.

What will change by January? Probably a lot, even though I have a very hard time seeing those very top films unseated. Hopefully, I’ve inspired you to go check out one of them. Is there anything I’ve missed that you feel strongly about?

Writing “Nightcrawler”

by Rachel Ann Taylor

You may not recognize Dan Gilroy’s name, but he’s been writing in Hollywood since 1992. Most recently, he wrote the story for the Hugh Jackman-starring, robot fighting Real Steel and the screenplay for Jeremy Renner’s crack at being Matt Damon, The Bourne Legacy.

It’s shocking that a movie like Nightcrawler emerges as his directorial debut. It’s a low-budget barn burner and dark comedy that focuses on character. Russ Fischer at SlashFilm interviewed Gilroy about what it’s like to write a sociopath for Jake Gyllenhaal.

The interview’s safe on big spoilers but you’ll get more from it if you’ve seen the film. Among other things, Gilroy talks about what it’s like to write without a character arc.

For our own site’s review of Nightcrawler, read here.

The Movie That Reminds Me of the Time I Betrayed Who I Am — “Nightcrawler”

by Gabriel Valdez

There’s nothing wrong with this review. It describes the film, it praises what works, it delves into its meaning, and it wraps up with a larger message about how Nightcrawler can inform a viewer’s perspective.

But…to be completely honest, I think it lacks a certain artistry I seek to incorporate in my reviews. Here’s the problem with Nightcrawler for me – it hits way too close to home. I’m deeply proud of my reviews, from turning my own experiences inside out for Gravity and Fury to waxing loquacious about why American Hustle and The Monuments Men are testaments to art itself.

If there’s a quality I feel makes me unique as a critic, however, it’s empathy – not that other critics don’t have it, but other critics might not consider it the single most crucial factor of the job. When I face a truly great film about sociopathy, it can get under my skin. I have a habit of briefly adopting little nuances from main characters, of walking out of the theater like a film’s protagonist would walk out, of absorbing a character’s perspective, because it’s one of the biggest ways to truly empathize with a film.

Films about sociopathy I hold at arm’s length as a defense. Nightcrawler isn’t exactly like There Will Be Blood, an art horror centered on a sociopath. There was nothing admirable about Daniel Plainview, nothing which won you over. That’s not the case with Nightcrawler‘s Lou Bloom. As strange and devoid of moral fiber as he is, there’s something hauntingly childlike in him. You’ll want to care for him, listen to him, despite all your better judgments. It’s a testament to Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance that I hold him at such a distance from myself.

I’ve worked jobs where I’ve had to dissociate myself from my own moral core, particularly last year. It was hell, and I changed as a person while I was in that job. I was surrounded by practiced sociopaths, whose entire livelihood was based on manipulating – their customers, their employees, each other, their families, themselves. Every morning, we met and trained in a new, precise tactic of manipulation.

It doesn’t matter how good a person you are if every day you’re trained to be otherwise; I allowed myself to begin operating in increasingly morally gray areas. I’d never cross a certain line, but that line moved from one day to the next. I quickly hit a self-destructive wall of near-constant anger about it. Thankfully, you become pretty bad at manipulating people when you’re angry all the time. The job dried up; I left. And yet it showed me a part of myself I believed I was beyond giving into. It illustrated a potential in me that I had thought I was above.

It was deeply frightening, and because Nightcrawler so specifically echoes that experience for me, I have no empathy for it. In a movie like Fury, I can understand those pressures to be a man through hate, and to teach others to be men through hate. I can empathize with the struggle of viewing the world that way because it’s a struggle that I feel I’ve faced down in myself. But Nightcrawler, that lack of empathy, that morally gray existence, that unfeeling quality of viewing others as nothing more than functions toward success or pleasure – that’s my nightmare. That’s always been what’s scared me the most.

Nightcrawler is not terrifying because of anything inside the film. It’s terrifying because of something inside me. Maybe it’s in all of us and I was just unlucky enough to glimpse it. Maybe everyone glimpses it and just doesn’t talk about it. I don’t know, I just know that I briefly, briefly recognized a capacity that’s always been there, that can always be trained, that I don’t value or like. I care so much because my adult life has been a reaction toward refuting that little bit of me, and here it was in Jake Gyllenhaal’s face, staring me down.

So my review? It gets the job done, it’s good analysis, but it lacks the one thing I try to put into everything I write and everything I do – empathy. Because I can not have empathy for this. I can never have empathy for this. I have only the sheer fright that’s driven me to be who I am instead, and that Nietzsche quote stuck in my head: “For when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

The Review

You know those rags-to-riches movies where the hero starts off from nothing and works his way to the top? He puts in more effort and longer hours than everyone else just because he wants success so badly. Now what if that hero weren’t a hero? What if we followed a sociopath instead, but he still puts in more effort and longer hours and all that dedication we’re meant to cheer ahead?

That’s the quandary we’re given in Nightcrawler. Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a young man who bounces from gig to gig (mostly petty thievery) until he gets it in his head to become a freelance cameraman. He roves the L.A. streets at night to get the best shots of car crashes and shootings and sell the footage to morning news programs. He’s also a self-help addict, quoting mantras for success and even designing some choice personal ones.

His lack of moral codes help him get ahead quickly, and he develops an exclusive sales relationship with a struggling news producer, Nina (Rene Russo). He ingratiates himself with her crew and hires a homeless man to be his assistant. Why a struggling producer? Why a homeless man? Because he can manipulate and control them more easily.

It’s to Gyllenhaal’s credit that he gives us a character so good at being evil (the Iago effect, so to speak) that we can’t help but marvel at him. As writer-director Dan Gilroy has said of Lou as a character, “he understands people the way a lion understands a gazelle.” Lou maneuvers those around him into small compromises of their ethics, until he has them backed into a corner where it’s either his way or their job, or their safety, or their life.

It’s astonishing that Gilroy and Gyllenhaal can create such a misanthropic character, yet present him in a way that elicits a hint of jealousy in his audience. A part of us admires his efficacy at getting what he wants, and understands when others concede more and more to him. Appealing to that part of us is the true horror of Nightcrawler, because we understand how easy it is for anyone to negotiate his or her moral codes little by little until they’ve given too much.

Gyllenhaal is vastly overlooked as one of our best actors working today, and Lou Bloom may just be the single best screen villain since Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. While Gyllenhaal eats up the role, Gilroy provides a movie in which there is no wasted motion or excess dialogue.

Nightcrawler increasingly suggests that in an economy where you can no longer rely on employer loyalty and a solid retirement package, where you bounce from gig to gig and the next quarter is more important than long-term stability, it’s the unfeeling sociopaths who do best, the ones who prioritize material success over helping the human being next to him.

It’s also a salient look into the news industry. 24-hour news networks (and not just one; they’re all guilty of it) regularly cut information and context from their stories, preferring instead to write and edit their own narratives. (This is one reason why I tend to support independent news over national networks.) Even when police are reporting new information, networks will hold off on it when it undermines a narrative that might earn higher ratings.

There’s a simultaneously dramatic and comic scene (and yes, for all its cynicism, Nightcrawler is deeply, darkly funny) in which news anchors riff over fresh footage of a home shooting. Their speculations run rampant as they sway wildly between stating the obvious – “that appears to be a shotgun” as we pan up to see a shotgun – and the baseless – neighbors are told to be worried whether “they’ll be next.” Even as they narrate the footage, Nina reminds her anchors over earpieces to repeat words like “terror,” “fear,” and “violent.” In many ways, Lou’s manipulation of those around him is no different from the newsroom’s manipulation of its viewers.

In essence, this is a movie about a character who doesn’t develop, but instead bends the world around himself. His successes are celebrated and the clear facts that he’s dangerous, a threat, and a liar are consciously overlooked and excused by everyone around him. His victims even begin to adopt his worldviews, repeat the mantras he’s crafted for himself, and increasingly justify his immoral actions as being part of “the right idea.”

Nightcrawler is dangerous filmmaking centered around two of the best performances of the year by Gyllenhaal and Russo.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does Nightcrawler have more than one woman in it?

Yes, in additon to Russo’s Nina, it also stars Michael Hyatt as Detective Fronteiri, Ann Cusack as producer Linda, Holly Hannula as a news anchor, and Carolyn Gilroy as a production assistant. Russo and Hyatt get a lot of screen time.

2. Do they talk to each other?

Yes.

3. About something other than a man?

Yes. They discuss news production and confront each other over legal issues.

Nightcrawler is an excellent example of a film with limited perspective (we never leave Lou Bloom’s side) that nonetheless incorporates great female characters interacting with each other as professionals. Russo has a heated scene opposite Hyatt and an insanely good scene with Cusack. Russo also orders her newsroom about, women and men included.

Considering the small size of its core cast, Nightcrawler is one of the best films I’ve seen for involving women despite following a male character exclusively. There are issues of victimization, but Bloom’s pretty equal opportunity about ruining lives. How he delineates what he wants from different people falls along sexual lines, but this has more to do with social definitions of success and mastery over others. This is where Nightcrawler is at its most bitingly satirical.

David Fincher, who has nothing to do with Nightcrawler but directed this year’s Gone Girl, is fond of saying he likes to make movies that scar. Nightcrawler is a tragedy in comic form that doesn’t just scar, it damages. It sits on a tonal knife-edge, and from an acting perspective, only Gyllenhaal could have delivered this performance.

It’s brilliant. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to visit it again.

The 10 Most Anticipated Movies of the Fall

As the summer ends and we begin shifting toward Autumn, we also change movie seasons. Gone are the glossy superhero blockbusters that ruled the hottest months. In their place will come art films, Oscar bait, and more than a few crime thrillers. There are still a few event films left. The next Hunger Games arrives November 21, and I’m sure it will dominate at the box office. It just barely misses my top 10, but this mix of films big and small captures my interest just that much more:

10. Foxcatcher

Nov. 14. While Jon Stewart’s directorial debut Rosewater is the movie that’s gotten all the press, fellow Daily Show alum Steve Carell is the one more likely to get an Oscar nomination. He portrays John du Pont, an unstable millionaire who invested considerable resources into America’s olympic wrestling program, only to kill his friend, olympic wrestler Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum). Director Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Capote) is known for getting singular performances out of his leads.

9. Men, Women & Children

Oct. 1. Director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air) is known for using his comedic eye to plumb the dramatic depths of everyday life. His latest centers on the role technology plays in our modern romantic lives. Like Carell above, Adam Sandler has hinted at a dramatic core – most notably in Punch Drunk Love – that’s rarely been tested. Jennifer Garner is one of the most underutilized actresses of her generation.

8. Inherent Vice

Dec. 12. P.T. Anderson directed There Will Be Blood, arguably the greatest American film since the turn of the millennium. With Josh Brolin, Jena Malone, Joaquin Phoenix, Owen Wilson, and Reese Witherspoon, Inherent Vice has the pedigree of a captivating, off-beat mystery. This really should be higher, but the sheer lack of information about it makes it difficult to form any expectations.

7. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Dec. 17. Who hasn’t wanted to see Peter Jackson’s treatment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s defining moment – the battle between human, elf, dwarf, giant eagle, and goblin? There’s also that pesky dragon, the One Ring, and an evil necromancer left to deal with. If any movie has ever guaranteed three straight hours of high-fantasy swordplay and magic battles, this is the one.

6. The Guest

Unscheduled. You’re Next was one of the hidden gems of 2013, a smart horror movie that was intensely frightening and profoundly funny at the same time. Director Adam Wingard’s The Guest follows a young man who claims to be the friend of a family’s dead son. He moves in to “protect” them and takes the duty much too far. Wingard puts complex psychological storytelling into his horror movies, evoking humor and empathy. Being scared is so much more fun when it’s not the only emotion you’re feeling.

5. Fury

Oct. 17. Ever since I watched Clint Eastwood command his tank crew deep into German territory in Kelly’s Heroes, I’ve had a fond fascination for tank warfare in movies. It’s not tackled often, which is why the Brad Pitt vehicle looks so captivating. The tale of one surviving tank crew left to hold off a full company of German soldiers echoes the brilliant Sahara, and what they’ve shown of the tank warfare thus far looks frighteningly realistic.

4. Exodus: Gods and Kings

Dec. 12. If anyone can tackle the epic of Moses, it’s director Ridley Scott. Christian Bale remains an odd choice to play Moses, and trailers make this look like a fantasy-hued reboot of Gladiator. That’s a lot of flavors to chuck in one pot, and Scott’s storytelling can sometimes suffer at the hands of his art. I have hope, but even if it’s a disaster, it’s going to be one of the most fascinating disasters in movie history.

3. Nightcrawler

Oct. 31. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a freelance reporter who, in the name of ratings, dresses up the crimes he reports to make them appear more fantastic. In an age of networks reporting narratives instead of news, it’s a metaphor that hits close to home for all. At some point, we’ll have to recognize Gyllenhaal in the pantheon of great American actors. This role looks to get him one step closer.

2. Gone Girl

Oct. 3. Arguably the most important director since Alfred Hitchcock, no filmmaker has changed film in the last 25 years as much as David Fincher. From Madonna music videos to Fight Club and The Social Network, he’s consistently re-invented both himself and the technology and storytelling of film. Gone Girl investigates a husband (Ben Affleck) whose wife has gone missing. We’re left to figure out whether he’s guilty of her disappearance or not.

1. Interstellar

Nov. 7. The Dark Knight. Inception. Memento. Director Christopher Nolan needs no introduction. His tale of humanity reaching out to the stars as the Earth dies looks inspirational, chilling, thought-provoking. It sparks of Golden Era science-fiction, when ideas were bigger than the people who thought them. When a two-minute trailer can completely command your emotions and attention, you know you’re in for something truly special.

Trailers of the Week — Postapocalypse Westerns & Youth Movements

YOUNG ONES
Well, this came out of nowhere. I mean, we all know that Autumn brings postapocalypse Westerns, but Young Ones was an afterthought a week ago. It was a contentious film at Sundance, and then fell off the map. And yet…this is exactly how you announce a movie. Directed by Jake Paltrow (yes, that’s Gwyneth’s kid brother), the cinematography and color choices on this look superb.

Toss in Michael Shannon and some of the best young actors around (Elle Fanning, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee), and suddenly you’ve got what looks like a young adult, sci-fi There Will Be Blood on your hands.

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN
If I was a more traditional critic, I’m sure this would be my trailer of the week. Runner-up ain’t too shabby, though.

Director Jason Reitman is a force to be reckoned with. Though his last two films failed to capture the imagination like Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up in the Air, he remains an actor’s director.

There’s a lot happening in this trailer. It’s interesting that we’ve yet to make many films that deal with the interconnectedness of the modern world in a realistic way. I suspect this will begin to change as younger directors make their way up in the industry. Not knowing exactly how Men, Women & Children will choose to comment on this, however, let me focus on the excitement I have for this cast.

It’s nice to see Adam Sandler in something dramatic again. His comedic torch has all but burned out, and I’ve been disappointed he never pursued the dramatic ability he hinted at in Punch Drunk Love. I don’t expect the guy to start reciting Shakespeare, but comedians can often play real world drama in a way that accomplished dramatic actors can’t. Steve Carrell, Steve Martin, and Bill Murray made the transition on film, while Hugh Laurie, Olivia Munn, and Ray Romano have all given us captivating dramatic performances on TV. It’s not that all good comedians have this ability – Jon Stewart pretty famously can’t act his way out of a wet paper bag – but rather that the vulnerability that comedy requires can offer a unique perspective on delivering a dramatic performance.

Reitman is an actor’s director, but unlike most he regularly prioritizes female characters. Judy Greer has been typecast as the punchline in comedies, while Jennifer Garner (who may be the most underutilized actress of her generation) has stuck mostly to indie films because they’re the only ones that include good parts for women. Combined with Rosemarie DeWitt and filled out with the kind of young cast Reitman has always used well, I have high hopes for this in terms of being a film that includes strong, unique roles for women.

NIGHTCRAWLER
In Jake Gyllenhaal I trust. Donnie Darko. Brokeback Mountain. Jarhead. Zodiac. Brothers. Source Code. End of Watch. Prisoners. Enemy. At what point do we put him in the pantheon of great American actors? Few have delivered such strong and varied work in such a wide range of roles.

Nightcrawler, the story of a freelance reporter who dresses up the crimes he reports, seems like a uniquely Gyllenhaal-ian opportunity to create a deranged yet driven character, someone we can simultaneously withdraw from for his actions yet admire for his tenacity. The film itself looks like it fits squarely into the gallows satire at which Gyllenhaal excels, and it seems like they’ve got a solid midnight, roadside look to the whole affair.

This week’s was the second trailer for Nightcrawler (though the first “official” one). It doesn’t show off the visuals as much as the first, but it delivers the set-up better.

AUTOMATA
Antonio Banderas as a Blade Runner? Yeah, we’re not done with postapocalypse Westerns yet. Clearly influenced by the stories of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick (and the films their work spawned), Automata looks…really damn good. I worry about an unproven director whose last work (Hierro) was visually mesmerizing but narratively middling. Those are the sorts of directors who can either grow into artistic powerhouses, or make a career of crafting spectacular trailers for so-so films.

Yet I’m also always on the lookout for Spanish takes on genre film. Spanish and Latin American stories often have a unique approach to narrative, defined by cultural priorities that are markedly different from other Western cultures. While Banderas doesn’t always have the best taste in American projects, often just taking a paycheck, he is far choosier with the roles he knows will be widely seen in Spain.

BE MY CAT: A FILM FOR ANNE
I’m taking a flier on what ultimately amounts to a homemade film made halfway around the world. Does this look like a good movie? Jury’s out. But as a trailer, it catches my attention.

It’s a textbook example of how to film a movie for a few bucks, yet find a hook that will keep you curious – in this case, a Romanian twenty-something becomes determined to film a movie with Anne Hathaway. He hires three local actresses to film scenes he intends will prove the worth of his production to a movie star he doesn’t know.

His obsession with women who look like Hathaway, whom he compares to pets, turns controlling and violent. There’s opportunity here to make a solid psychological horror film, even if the low-budget seams show. There’s opportunity here to make a real comment about our possessive attitude toward women and celebrity, a sort of modern-day David Holzman’s Diary crossed with My Date with Drew.

Of course, those are probably pipe dreams. This really looks like it’s going to be a homemade mess, but every filmmaker I know started out by making homemade messes, and I’ve enjoyed watching these more than I do some hundred million-dollar films. Homemade messes boast some of the most passionate filmmaking we have. Be My Cat is a film that’s on my radar now. Before I saw this trailer, it wasn’t.

Worst Trailer of the Week: OUTCAST
We’ve run this series, what, five weeks now? Already Nicolas Cage has won Worst Trailer twice. The man is an unstoppable machine. I say this as a fan of his, but Nic Cage is going to run away with this segment.

It’s difficult to identify the most nonsense part of the trailer for Outcast. Is it Nic Cage’s godawful English accent? The brilliant idea to pair him with fellow legendary bad actor Hayden Christensen? That the first half of the trailer appears to take place during the Crusades, and the second half in ancient China, with no explanation? The last third of Cage’s dialogue involving him stuck in some sort of weird, permanent wink that will haunt my nightmares?

This trailer is a landmark moment for the words “unfathomable” and “inexplicable.”