Holivud reporter top 10 2014 i top 10 box office :: Film ~ Pozoriste ~ Televizija

Todd McCarthy's Top 10 Films of 2014

THR's chief film critic Todd McCarthy gives nods to independent projects and international hits as he wraps up the year with a look at the best films of 2014.

Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel makes the cutoff at No. 10., with Selma just one rank above at No. 9 (though both films are equally vying for four Golden Globe awards). The inspiring Martin Luther King Jr. biopic boasts the list's one and only female filmmaker, Ava DuVernay.

Selma's lead David Oyelowo and cinematographer Bradford Young also have one other thing to boast about. Both had a part in the list's eighth top film A Most Violent Year, a 1980s set drama directed by J.C. Chandor that follows one immigrant's fight to survive in crime-ridden New York City.

Wild Tales (originally released in Argentina) and Ida (originally released in Poland) rank at No. 7 and No. 4, respectively. The foreign language films represent two out of three of McCarthy's picks for the best international releases of the year.

Weighing in at sixth place is the chilling biographical drama Foxcatcher, carried by convincing performances from an all-star cast consisting of Steve Carell, Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum. Director Richard Linklater's rare 12-year chronicle Boyhood settles in the top half of the list at No. 5, two ranks below Birdman. The Michael Keaton starrer, which is currently up for seven Golden Globe nominations (the most of any film competing at the awards), takes the No. 3 spot.

Vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, applauded for its artistically haunting mood and tone, takes second place behind Russian drama Leviathan. At No. 1, Leviathan, a powerful feature on corruption in modern Russia, is McCarthy's top pick for best film of the year.

1. LEVIATHAN

The film that should have won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Andrey Zvyagintsev's lengthy and corrosive mural of corruption in modern Russia is a full meal — bold and rich thematically, visually, dramatically and politically. A Russian friend argued that the film chickens out by not including Putin in its list of targets, but the critique seemed implicit. Even by Russian standards, this has the weight of a masterpiece.

2. ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

As movingly close to an autobiographical testament as Jim Jarmusch likely will ever make, this narcotically moody, atmospheric work is a portrait of a marriage and a proclamation of aesthetic priorities disguised as a globe-trotting, centuries-leaping vampire tale.

3. BIRDMAN

I'm still not sure about the multiple endings, and that talk with the New York Times critic never would have happened in the real world, but Alejandro G. Inarritu's Broadway-set drama bursts with such cinematic and thespian zest that you feel the creative juices flowing from all involved — behind and in front of the ever-mobile camera. Has any cinematographer in the history of cinema ever emerged so far ahead of the pack as Emmanuel Lubezki has right now?

4. IDA

What an unexpected achievement: a boxy-formatted black-and-white film by a Polish-British filmmaker (Pawel Pawlikowski, whose career prior to this had gone into something of an eclipse) that concerns a prospective nun who learns she is Jewish. This would have been a first-rate art house item 50 years ago, and is so today.

5. BOYHOOD

A magnum opus more than a decade in the making, Richard Linklater's spectacle of growing up unfurls before our eyes in a fittingly prosaic, naturalistic manner, shot through with stuff-of-life drama. The history of U.S. independent cinema during the past 25 years is full of promising first and second features, but this is a rarer feat: an enormously accomplished payoff film.

6. FOXCATCHER

It was daring to imagine that a compelling, even remotely palatable drama could be made from a story as creepy as this upper-class/lower-class tale of unspoken impulses and eventual murder. But Bennett Miller, in his third consecutive biographical drama, found a way with the help of a thoroughly remarkable cast (Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) and controlled doses of ambiguity.

7. WILD TALES

The biggest domestic hit of all time in its native Argentina, this malevolently humorous breakthrough feature from writer-director Damian Szifron clearly struck a nerve. Each part of the multisegment film draws upon domestic discontent in distinct and often uproarious ways, leading one to suspect that the young filmmaker will be heard from again in the near future.

8. A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

Setting his story 30 years ago, in a time most New Yorkers would probably prefer to forget, J.C. Chandor resurrected the gritty, Sidney Lumet-style cinema of the time for a compelling tale about the long odds that decency, good intentions and composure face against pervasive corruption, moral decay and a climate ultimately defined by brute force.

9. SELMA

Normally, I resist films I suspect will be overtly socially conscious and emotionally button-pushing. So I really have to hand it to Ava DuVernay and screenwriter Paul Webb for doing something else: illuminating and making credible the human moments between Martin Luther King Jr. and those in his inner circle, especially his wife, as well as those on its periphery, from Lyndon B. Johnson to Malcolm X.

10. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

There's never a dull moment — narratively and especially stylistically — in this semi-nostalgic but clear-eyed tragicomic drama, which infuses director Wes Anderson's trademark idiosyncracies with the wise, between-the-wars melancholy of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, whose work inspired the film.

HONORABLE MENTIONS
Not wanting to cut back on the number of narrative features in my top 10, I left out the numerous documentaries that otherwise might have made the list. Three of them stand a bit above the others this year: Wim Wenders' and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado's The Salt of the Earth, Laura Poitras' much buzzed-about Citizenfour and Steve James' Life Itself (about late film critic Roger Ebert).

On my next-10 list of dramatic works would be the three most notable debuts of 2014: Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, Gillian Robespierre's Obvious Child and Justin Simien's Dear White People; plus Stephen Knight's Locke, Gareth Evans' The Raid 2, David Ayer's Fury, John Ridley's Jimi: All Is by My Side, Volker Schlondorff's Diplomacy, Matt Reeves' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner.

Box office winners:

Female Films
It was a strong year for movies starring women or aimed mainly at female audiences. Lucy, the action film starring Scarlett Johansson, stunned many when it out-muscled big-budget actioner Hercules for the top spot at the box office when it opened in July. The Universal movie, which was watched by both men and women evenly, had a stellar $43.9 million debut and went on to earn $458.9 million worldwide, a stunning number for a movie costing $40 million. Fox's adaptation of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars proved that young women are a desirable moviegoing demographic when they turned out in droves to watch the tearjerker. The Shailene Woodley-starrer saw females make up roughly 82 percent of its opening weekend audience, and earned a stellar $304.2 million worldwide. And a female-led movie took the title of the No. 3 movie of the year. Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie as the evil witch, cast a spell over audiences worldwide to earn $757.8 million worldwide. Jolie finished off her stellar year with her directorial project Unbroken, which won over the hearts of moviegoers when it began hitting theaters in December. Based on the life of WWII prisoner of war Louis Zamperini, Unbroken earned a strong $30.6 million in its domestic opening weekend, and will continue to thrive into the new year. Jolie's 2015 is also looking promising: her next directorial project By the Sea, in which she stars alongside husband Brad Pitt, will hit theaters this year.

Marvel

Marvel had the top movie of 2012 with the star-studded ensemble pic The Avengers, but its accomplishments in 2014 may be even more admirable. Instead of resting on the safety of its already-successful Avengers characters, the studio launched a new franchise with Guardians of the Galaxy. Based on a relatively unknown comic about a ragtag group of space heroes, Guardians starred Chris Pratt, an actor who, at the time, was not considered a movie star, best known for his work on the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation. But the film, directed by James Gunn, rocketed to huge success, earning $772.5 million worldwide to become the No. 2 film of the year (behind Transformers: Age of Extinction's $1.09 billion). Marvel also launched the next installment in the Captain America series, with The Winter Soldier earning a hefty $714 million worldwide, making nearly twice as much as the first Captain America film ($370.5 million).

Fox
The studio had quite a year between strong tentpole performances and surprise hits, and will top the domestic box office for the first time in several years. In 2013, Fox placed sixth domestically with a tally of $1.064 billion; its 2014 total is estimated at $1.769 billion. Worldwide, its biggest moneymakers included the star-studded X-Men: Days of Future Past which earned $746 million; sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which earned strong critical acclaim and a huge box office cume of $708.3 million worldwide; animated sequel Rio 2, which soared to $498.8 million worldwide; and DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon 2, released by Fox, has earned $618.9 million worldwide. And then there were the overperformers. The adaptation of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl had amazing staying power at the domestic box office, remaining in the top 10 for 10 weeks. It became David Fincher's top-grossing film when it earned $356.8 million worldwide. Another book adaptation, tearjerker Fault In Our Stars, also stunned at the box office, with a worldwide total of $304.2 million. And another YA film, The Maze Runner, launched a new franchise when it sprinted to $339.8 million worldwide.

China
The world's second biggest film market surged 36 percent in 2014, raking in $4.76 billion (29.6 billion yuan) at the box office. The moviegoing power of China helped boost Transformers: Age of Extinction, the only film to cross the $1 billion mark, to the No. 1 spot at the worldwide box office for the year. The film, which featured custom Chinese elements in that market, earned $320 million from China.

Kevin Hart
Hart proved his box office power with three successful movies in 2014. He kicked off the year with Ride Along, a $25 million comedy that topped the domestic box office for three straight weekends, a rare feat mostly accomplished by big tentpoles. After a $41.5 million U.S. debut, Ride Along rolled along to a total domestic tally of $134.9 million. Then, he won over Valentine's Day couples with About Last Night, which had a $25.6 million U.S. debut (with African-Americans making up 72 percent of its opening audience) on its way to $48.6 million domestically. In June, Think Like a Man Too debuted No. 1 domestically with $29.3 million on its way to $65.2 million. Hart's star will likely continue to rise with two more comedies hitting theaters in 2015: The Wedding Ringer in January and Get Hard, starring Will Ferrell, in March.