Top Movies of 2014

Our film critics take their picks.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Night Crawler

Locke

Blue Ruin

A Most Wanted Man

The Babadook

First features don’t come any more fully realized than Jennifer Kent’s debut, a morbid children’s fable that doubles as an essay on single motherhood and grief. Drawing on the techniques of early cinema, and fears thousands of years older, she made a masterpiece as moving as it is terrifying. —Sam Adams

Blue Ruin

Jeremy Saulnier’s captivating throwback thriller could carve out a second career as a kidnapper — it comes up behind you quietly, grips you by the neck and doesn’t let go until it says its piece. As a meek drifter dealing with the release of the man who murdered his parents, Macon Blair is criminal magic, and Saulnier matches his work with gorgeous movement behind the lens. Who knew vengeance could look so pretty? —Drew Lazor

Boyhood

Its much-ballyhooed 12-year shooting schedule could be seen as a stunt, but Richard Linklater’s time-lapse view of one boy’s entire adolescence is only the latest in a career-spanning interest in the impacts and effects of time as it unfolds at its inevitable pace. Boyhood is at its best when it focuses, as it mostly does, on banalities, realizing that every individual ultimately has to ask the same questions and discover the same truths. —Shaun Brady

Enemy

Creepy and circuitous, Denis Villeneuve’s doppelganger tale is a small movie with large aspirations. What those aspirations actually are is on the table for obsessive-compulsive debate. You’re as put off as the clueless protagonist the moment Jake Gyllenhaal’s listless lecturer spots his exact double acting in a film. And as his mission to track down and confront his mysterious twin twists and bucks in the most unnatural ways, all you can really do is try and hold on. —DL

Force Majeure

Are we most ourselves when we’re at our worst? A freak accident puts a marriage to an unexpected test in Ruben Östlund’s brutal black comedy, which only makes a good date movie if you’re prepared for there not to be another. See it with someone you like to argue with. —SA

Foxcatcher

In the hands of Bennett Miller, the sensational John du Pont murder case becomes a morbid comedy with glacial timing. Its pace is dictated by the dull-witted interactions of du Pont, a monstrous creation by Steve Carell working a fake proboscis and a sociopathic haughtiness; and Mark Schultz, whose constricted intellect is perfectly captured by Channing Tatum’s perpetually confused stare. The final act of violence is just one inexplicable collision among many. —SB

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson always makes grand surfaces, but he dug deep beneath in a frothy farce that also managed to incorporate the horrors of World War II in a stylized allegory that was like Grand Illusion if it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch. —SA

Happy Valley

Although it’s shorthanded as a movie about Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary is really about the culture that enabled them, the see-no-evil stance that allowed Sandusky to prey on young men for decades, and the saintly image to which Paterno himself fell prey. At issue is less who they were than who Penn State and its fans needed them to be, and how some still fight against letting go. Over the course of the movie, you can see the denial crumble as the symbols that propped them up are altered and finally removed, a semiotic shift playing out in the shadow of a football stadium.—SA

Ida

Shot in severe black and white and squared-off Academy ratio, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is an art-film throwback, something that could be passed off as a Criterion Collection rediscovery rather than a newly minted feature. The director’s off-center asceticism mirrors his subject, a young novitiate confronted by the modern world of 1960s Poland, discovering carnal thoughts, John Coltrane and ugly truths about the Nazi occupation. —SB

Interstellar

Haters to the left, and fanboys to the right: Christopher Nolan’s overwhelming space opera had a heart of pure corn, but its eyes were trained securely on the heavens. The bigger the screen, the more the movie’s images of deep space seared themselves into your brain, and on the Franklin Institute’s IMAX screen, the progressively worn 70 mm print added a layer of poignancy to its paean for a dying dream. —SA

Jodorowsky’s Dune

A behind-the-scenes doc on a film that never was, Jodorowsky’s Dune allows psychedelic-surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to lay out his frustrated plans for a world-changing adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic. As tantalizing as a film starring Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali with designs by H.R. Giger and music by Pink Floyd may sound, the daunting logistics suggest that we may be better off imagining it in tandem with Jodorowsky’s vivid descriptions. —SB

Life Itself

Steve James’ affectionate portrait of Roger Ebert becomes a moving study in facing death with dignity as the famed critic heads into his final days. Just as importantly, the film captures Ebert’s passion for the cinema, revealing the beating heart that longtime readers knew was there behind the thumbs. —SB

Locke

Spending gobs of time stuck in traffic is a good way to get your blood up. But that class of annoyance pales in comparison to what Ivan Locke puts himself through in Steven Knight’s sparse but domineering single-setting story. Locke, played in that magnetic oddball manner only Tom Hardy can achieve, reveals everything about his past, present and very shitty-looking future behind the wheel, through a series of painful phone calls. It’s short, but not even remotely sweet.—DL

A Most Wanted Man

John Le Carré’s weary German intelligence officer was one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s finest performances, but after Hoffman’s death, it’s impossible to watch this portrait of a man ground down by the world’s fading decency and not think of his tragic end. Anton Corbijn’s post-9/11 Hamburg is gray on gray with morals to match, perhaps the most lyrical evocation of futility since Coppola’s The Conversation. —SA

Nightcrawler

More juicy weirdo bait from Jake G! Unlike Enemy, which sees Gyllenhaal operating in an oppressive world of sinister design, Nightcrawler is 100 percent his movie. And he murders it. Skinny, spooky and smiley, with an answer for every question and a sure-footed end around for every roadblock, his Louis Bloom might be the creepiest character of 2014. As he slices through the violent world of blood-and-guts TV journalism like an oar through water, you just know something very bad is bound to happen — and this anticipation, and exhilaration, is what makes it great. —DL

Only Lovers Left Alive

As preposterous as the phrase “realistic vampire movie” sounds, that at least half-describes what Jim Jarmusch has achieved with Only Lovers Left Alive. No sparkling torsos or CGI decapitations — just immortal ennui, baby. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are Adam and Eve, neck biters with endless talent, immense influence and very little love for where humanity’s headed. Their observations of the way us peons do things, dripping with Jarmuschian humor and insight, remind us why we’re so obsessed with vampire lore. —DL

The Overnighters

American values are put to the test in Jesse Moss’ gripping documentary, where the residents of a tiny North Dakota town rise up against an influx of newcomers bent on reinvention. Moss doesn’t press facile judgments, but the cumulative picture of how far the country has strayed from its stated principles is sobering, and not even those who defend them are free from taint. —SA

Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer’s polarizing sci-fi experiment has Scarlett Johansson as a deadpan alien luring horny Glaswegian men to their mysterious demise. It’s in part an attempt to take an outsider’s perspective on the human condition, but more compellingly, it’s a hypnotic sensory experience, rife with startling, repellently seductive images and an immersive soundtrack. —SB

Wetlands

An endearing coming-of-age tale about a heroine who goes out of her way not to seem endearing, David Wnendt’s film is rude but heartfelt, like its heroine burying its emotions beneath biological, gynecological and scatological obsessions. At its core, Wetlands is simply another story of a teenager lost in a confusing world, just one with an unusual amount of chronic hemorrhoids, anal fissures and neglected hygiene. —SB

Whiplash

Damien Chazelle’s chronicle of the disturbing connection between a music student and his sociopathic instructor was a festival hit thanks to its ruthless, almost gleeful dedication to psychological torture. It’s a shocking career performance from J.K. Simmons that makes this conceit take shape. Miles Teller is a jazz percussionist with aspirations to be “one of the greats.” And Simmons, as his terrifying teacher, recognizes potential, coaxing it out with some truly fucked-up tactics. It’s far from a flawless movie — the scope is so narrow that Chazelle sacrifices quite a bit — but Simmons’ sickened turn alone makes it worth it. —DL