The end of the year is fast approaching, which can mean only one thing – sweet, sweet lists, and lots of them. There’s nothing more fun than ranking your favourite stuff in an orderly fashion, then loudly insisting that your list is better than everyone else’s.
On our days off, we at Pedestrian spend an inordinate amount of time staring at flickering images on big screens as choc tops melt and run down our fingers. That’s why we put our heads together and came up with this list of our Favourite Films of 2014.
Although we like to think our taste is pretty solid, this should not be read as a list of the best, artiest or most high-brow cinematic experiences of the year. These are merely the films we enjoyed the most, ranked according to a highly scientific office ballot.
We hope some of your favourites made it on to this list, and if they did not, we eagerly await your outraged, all-caps response. Enjoy!
The Lego Movie was one of the year’s big surprises – writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller took what could easily have been a cynical kiddie flick cash-in and turned it into an inspired and irreverent comedy. The combination of slick visuals, self-aware humour and a top-notch voice cast, including the likes of Chris Pratt and Elizabeth Banks, make for an unashamedly fun movie experience.
The stylish psychological thriller Nightcrawler saw star Jake Gyllenhaal undergo a huge physical transformation, to portray a ruthless cameraman in L.A.’s seedy tabloid news underground. A darkly humourous satire that continually raises the stakes to ever-more grisly levels, it also features a stunning performance from Renee Russo as a morally compromised TV news director.
Easily one of the most underrated films of the year, What We Do In The Shadows is a mocumentary about a group of vampire mates sharing a house in Wellington. Co-written by and starring Jemaine Clement of Flight Of The Conchords, the deadpan sense of humour, the vampires’ surreal interactions with everyday people, and yes, the Kiwi accents, give this horror comedy real bite (sorry/not sorry).
In Guardians Of The Galaxy, Disney and Marvel took an obscure group of heroes that very few people knew or gave a shit about, and turned them into an all-conquering success. There’s no shortage of superheroes on our screens, but Guardians found the right balance of wit and action, and featured an incredible cast, in Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Vin Diesel and the ever-present Pratt.
Lord and Miller are the unsung heroes of this list and maybe this year. The directors behind The Lego Movie also gave us 22 Jump Street, a knowing, winking sequel that actually managed to match if not improve upon its predecessor. The movie played on a heightened sense of its own ridiculousness, and its stars Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill have some undeniably great chemistry.
Jim Jarmusch’s eccentric and beautiful Only Lovers Left Alive imagines vampires as cool, ageless hipsters, collecting dusty cultural artifacts, pondering the mysteries of philosophy and hanging out in Detroit dive bars. Stars Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, at least one of whom may actually literally be a thousand-year-old mystical being, are totally weird and totally wonderful as the lovers of the title.
In Obvious Child, Jenny Slate plays a twenty-something who decidedly does not have her shit together, but uses her life as fuel for her stand-up comedy. When she finds herself simultaneously dumped, fired and pregnant on Valentine’s Day, the pressures of adulthood can no longer be ignored. This low-key, witty, warts-and-all indie film proved to be one of the most moving and funny of the year.
Wes Anderson’s films are living doll houses for him to play around in, and The Grand Budapest Hotel is no different. It features his usual, impeccable production design, and is populated by beloved veterans (Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum) as well as newcomers (Ralph Fiennes, Saorise Ronan). The plot, revolving around art thefts and daring escapes, finds the director as animated as he’s been in years.
Love him or hate him, and there are plenty of highly passionate individuals in both camps, Christopher Nolan knows his way around big screen spectacle. Interstellar starts off in the American dustbowl, then travels to the far side of space before looping back on itself, and features some indelible images along the way – those mountain-sized waves, the look on Matthew McConaughey’s face as he watches his family age decades in a few hours, the … *BOOMING HANS ZIMMER SCORE INTERRUPTS*
Nolan’s film is as much about human relationships, and a daughter’s love for her father, as it is about travelling between stars. You might find this a little corny, but the movie acknowledges as much by placing the bulk of its first act in the middle of an actual corn field. In fact, we don’t even care if Interstellar is corny at times – it made our spines tingle, and like many of the best space exploration films, made us wish we ourselves could see all the cool stuff that’s waiting for us out in the stars.
While the ballots this year reflected a lot of different tastes, the top spot was pretty much unanimous. Gone Girl is basically a perfect storm of a movie – adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own wildly popular novel, directed with incredible style by The Social Network‘s David Fincher, and perfectly cast with Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck as the leads.
Nick and Amy Dunne are a pair of unreliable narrators and awful people who lie to each-other, to everyone around them, and to you. It’s no mean feat to turn a good book into a good movie, but Gone Girl manages to do so with deft structure and mounting suspense. Alternating between pulpy, thrilling, gory and darkly hilarious, Fincher’s movie kept us totally riveted.
