“Movies are dead,” the crowd shouted, “long live TV!”
“All art forms can co-exist,” the pseudo-intellectual blogger shouted back.
As I have said before, it was a great year for television, and it was almost just as good of a year for film. In fact, there are very few years I can point out as weak years for film (maybe 2005 and 2008, but that is it). This year also happened to be the year where a handful of smart, mature dramas turned a huge profit at the box office while a blockbuster starring a talking raccoon and an untested star was king.
I will admit, this was the year I finally saw some of the shortcomings of being a modern movie lover. For instance, all of the most amazing television shows are available at the click of a button. Yet, if you want to see a truly great film, you might have to travel a few hundred miles or wait a few weeks like a goon. We live in an age where everything is readily available and nobody has any patience anymore, so film distribution now seems a bit backwards. Because of this, I learned my limitations and I admit that there were a lot of films that came out in 2014 that I unfortunately missed. I hope Hollywood eventually gets the hint that there are smart people who want to watch smart things in places not called New York or Los Angeles.
Year end lists are tricky. Opinions change over the years. My top pick of 2011 was War Horse, and I have never lived it down. In retrospect, the best film of that year was Young Adult. It might be self-defeating to admit that a lot of these numbers are irrelevant. The top five probably matters the most. But let’s live in the moment and not think about ten years down the road, because by then, we will probably be working for robot overlords while two second bits of sponsored content gets zapped into our brains with clickable clickbait headlines.
So without further adieu, here are my top ten films of 2014: