The Year In Cinema: 2014 Edition (Part I)

The Year In Cinema: 2014 Edition- Part I

 Each January, we at The Gaze gather together our favorite critics, curators, and cinephiles to review and revel in the past year in film. From the vastly overrated to the criminally under-appreciated, we gather the new discoveries, the endearing masterworks, and the personal moments that make cinephilia so vital- and share them with you.

This segment finds critic Amy Menell (of Cinemynx and Screen Relish); cinephile Kit Marcy (of the cinema program at the Boedecker Theater); Crested Butte Film Festival Screening Committee head Scott Aigner; journalist and critic Chris Harrop (of Denverflicks); and our own author and critic Jack Hanley (of The Gaze and the Alone in the Dark Film Blog) venturing boldly into the celluloid Thunderdome that was 2014.

The Most Overrated Film of 2014:

Jack- Richard Linklater’s BOYHOOD proves merely ambitiously earnest at best- and cloyingly formulaic and derivative at worst. Once you strip away the narrative gimmick (far more brilliantly employed by Michael Apted in the UP series) you are left with a rather pedestrian (if not well intentioned) François Truffaut for Dummies.

Scott- If we are talking the independent film festival circuit, then I am leaning toward THE SKELETON TWINS. I have no idea how this won a Sundance Screenwriting award. THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING would be next on the list.

 Chris- David Ayer’s FURY was an insipid and unnecessary entry into the war films canon, and I still don’t understand what so many people found compelling about it beyond the opening shot lensed by Roman Vasyanov.

Amy- LOCKE. Tom Hardy alone in his car for 85 minutes heading towards an act of nobility which will destroy his family and potentially his professional life has all the promising elements of a Shakespearean tragedy. Sadly his sense of ethical and moral duty to his target falls flat and whatever conflict he may be feeling in regard to his family fails to be communicated. I kept asking (like a 5 year old) ‘When do we get there?’

Most Underrated Film of 2014

 Amy- OBVIOUS CHILD. This small, intimate and very funny film is one of the smartest takes on one of the most timeless stories around. OBVIOUS CHILD presents the most personal and true female friendships ever shown on screen, and Jenny Slate is imperfect, beautiful, pained and every woman.

Jack- LOCKE. This “Hamlet with a Bluetooth” tour de force might have proved disastrous with any other director- but it would have proved disastrous with any other actor in that BMW besides the magnificent Tom Hardy. Director Steven Knight manages to stoke the minimalism of stagecraft into the most devastatingly suspenseful film of the year. In a year of cliche, LOCKE proves the most innovative, daring, and most criminally under seen bit of art of the year.

 Scott- Such a tough category. Do I go by “should have a had a larger release so more people could see it” or by “had a large release and still didn’t do commercially well”? I lean toward two films (yet again). LOCKE, and FRANK  — both films I knew little about going into them, and both films I did not watch until they appeared on Netflix. Both fantastic — for very different reasons.

Chris- David Gordon Green’s JOE gave us Nicolas Cage providing an impromptu lesson on field-dressing a deer among its numerous memorable scenes. It’s hovered in and around my Top 10 of 2014 list all year and remains criminally underrated.

Film That Surprised You The Most in 2014

 Kit- GOD HELP THE GIRL by Belle and Sebastian’s own Stuart Murdoch. I got to show this five times at the Boedecker Theater, and I fell in love with it more each time. Amazingly catchy soundtrack (in theory, the film’s a musical), and it’s impossible to not fall in love with Hannah Murray.

Chris- With CHEF, Jon Favreau offered perhaps the most-personal film he’s ever directed and made it genuinely enjoyable, going beyond its food-porn visuals to give us a cloy-free parable for artists.

 Jack- BLUE RUIN. A minimalist masterpiece reworking of red-state ne0-noir and the classic revenge parable. Brutal, harrowing, and heart-wrenching, it manages top notch filmmaking in the Coen Brother’s tradition with a crowdsourcing budget. Perhaps the single best advert for Kickstarter donations EVER.

Amy- ENEMY. One of my Top 5 films of the year. Jake Gyllenhaal doing what he does best — being an accessible man with a deep dark edge- ENEMY is cryptic, haunting, brilliant and disturbing. This was VERY hard for me because I could just as easily put BLUE RUIN here.

Best New Personal Discovery of the Year

 Scott- Courtney Marsh, writer and director of the short film ZARI. An absolutely breathtaking short film that is gorgeously shot and fantastically subtle. More young film makers should aspire to create films (stories) as good as this one- I expect amazing things from her to come.

Chris- Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS (first viewed in February) stands even stronger in my opinion than his other masterworks, LE CERCLE ROUGE and LE SAMOURAI. Perhaps my disdain for FURY stems in part from its absolute failure to be anywhere near as bleak and nihilistic about war in the way that ARMY OF SHADOWS so masterfully is.

Amy- Director Bong Joon-ho. Writer and Director of many acclaimed South Korean films, his first English language film SNOWPIERCER was remarkably intelligent as well as exciting with exquisitely choreographed fight scenes as well as a ‘message.’ Having seen his previous film MOTHER and having been highly impressed, I look forward to his future films and their unique meld of action, intelligence, quirkiness and conscience.

Kit- Best new personal discovery of 2014 in cinema- that I no longer take joy in disliking a film. Maybe I don’t understand the question…

Your Favorite Film of 2014

 Chris- Jonathan Glazer adapted UNDER THE SKIN in a uniquely cinematic way that distilled the novel down to its most universal themes while providing one of the most-enthralling avant-garde visual experiences of 2014 (apologies to Godard and Reggio).

Scott- I hate calling ties — but UNDER THE SKIN and ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE take the cake here. UNDER THE SKIN for it’s unabashed love of the expressive, weird, profound, and haunting. ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE because I dislike most Jim Jarmusch films and this film made me forget that I came in with a huge bias and left overwhelmingly satisfied.

 Amy- WHIPLASH. This dark pas de deux between professor and student encompasses all we question about talent, practice and the ability to inspire another to greatness. With unforgettable career defining performances by Miles Teller and JK Simmons WHIPLASH does not pander to its audience and will drill into your psyche.

Kit- VISITORS. Must be seen on a big screen, in a theater, in the dark. Truly a movie as a mirror.

Jack- UNDER THE SKIN. Perhaps the most polarizing masterwork of this- or any- year. Eerily nuanced, daringly visionary, and visually mesmerizing, Glazer’s brilliant Kubrickian deconstruction of sex, power, and the gender construct will long haunt the reviews of the more pedestrian critical strain as its critical appreciation rockets over time. UNDER THE SKIN is simply a masterpiece and is unequivocally the best film of 2014.

Amy Mennell is a Manhattan bred, Boulder based life-long lover of film, student of film (hailing from the University of Colorado/Boulder under the epic Stan Brakhage), and film critic. Her musings, rants and searing insights can be found at Cinemynx.com, on Twitter, and as a contributor for ScreenRelish.com.

Scott Aigner is a midwestern at heart and a long time cinephile. Currently a higher education fine art studio instructor in Washington State by trade, he is an artist by passion, and a cinematic obsessive by blood. When not teaching and creating he can be found watching, pondering, and writing about film and heading up the Screening Committee for the Crested Butte International Film Festival. A wide range of his studio practice can be found at thelumierebrothers.com.

Kit Marcy pushes popcorn and the play button at Boulder’s own arthouse cinema, the Boedecker Theater, in the Dairy Center for the Arts.

When not running a newsroom of three weekly community newspapers, Chris Harrop writes about film at DenverFlicks.com and spends entirely too much time making movie lists on Letterboxd.

Jack Hanley is a critic and academic based in Boulder, Colorado. Should you have the stomach for it, you can read his cinematic and cultural musings at the The Gaze, the Alone in the Dark Film Blog, his Twitter page, and Mile High Cinema. He can occasionally be found in musty academic settings, usually savagely ruining films for his friends and family.