DHAKA: The list of ten best Hollywood movies of 2014, prepared by Vanity Fair, is presented for the readers of banglanews24.com.
10. X-Men: Days of Future Past
Though the Avengers ensemble dominated the superhero conversation in 2014 with all their sleek, snappy antics, the good old X-Men delivered a dark, time-skipping adventure that resonated like no other blockbuster spectacular this year.
9. Pride
Sure this charming, effervescent film has moments that are sloppily saccharine, or a bit too quaint and convenient. But when a film is otherwise this big-hearted and gamely, brazenly progressive, it’s easy to overlook its indulgences. A based-on-a-true-story film about a group of London gay-rights activists taking up the cause of Welsh miners on strike during Thatcher-era pit closings, Pride is, yes, about tolerance and whatnot.
8. Mr. Turner
As is often the case with Mike Leigh movies, not much seems to happen in Mr. Turner, a gentle, episodic, lovingly filmed look at the life of 18th- and 19th- century British painter J.M.W. Turner. Sure there is death and romance, but they mostly happen as hushed and simple as anything else. Leigh beautifully simulates the textures of everyday life, all the little graces, failures, wishes, joys of it.
7. Snowpiercer
A startling, inventively realized class-struggle allegory, Bong Joon-ho’s first English-language feature is somehow both gritty and elegant. Set on a high-speed train circumnavigating the globe in the aftermath of an environmental apocalypse, the film is composed of a series of striking set pieces, as the have-nots in the back of the train make their way to the privileged cars in the front.
6. Selma
Director Ava DuVernay’s film is no staid, boring, lifeless biopic. In crafting an account of the 1965 Selma marches led by Martin Luther King Jr, DuVernay has made a film of genuine muscle and tenacity. Anchored by a sterling David Oyelowo as Dr. King, and populated by a wonderful supporting cast, Selma teems with life, bringing an urgency and a clarity to seismic events that are too often occluded by a hazy mist of inexact reverence.
5. Boyhood
Unclassifiable as either comedy or drama, Richard Linklater’s wise, enriching film experiment is a genre unto itself. Filmed over 12 years using the same actors, Boyhood gives us a fascinating glimpse of the quotidian, but no less interesting for it, life of a Texas family.
4. Citizenfour
Taking us right into the heart of the Edward Snowden affair, Laura Poitras’s beguiling documentary is a very rare thing indeed. Both a reflection on events and a primary-source document, Citizenfour illuminates not just the content of Snowden’s massive leak of intelligence information, but the mechanics of the leak itself.
3. Force Majeure
The year’s hardest-to-watch film was also one of its most unexpected pleasures. A scalpel-sharp Swedish comedy about a couple coming unraveled after a split-second betrayal, Force Majeure sports a wonderful, whirring mind, but also has a deep emotional intelligence, telling a piercing story about love, gender, and family with merciless but never cruel honesty.
2. Mommy
A vivid, exuberant gush of cinematic poetry about a scrappy Montreal mother and son duo, wunderkind director Xavier Dolan’s smashing fifth film bounces and swoons with youthful verve, but also exhibits the nuance and careful construction of a maturing filmmaker.
1. Love Is Strange
Giving particular, intimate life to a massive political issue, Ira Sachs’s achingly poignant film is ostensibly about gay marriage. After an older couple, played by the superb John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, finally tie the knot, Molina’s character loses his long-held job at a Catholic school for violating its morality clause. The film that follows, though, is far more complex than just a story about that fallout. Love Is Strange, as it turns out, is about all kinds of love, and about time, and about living in a city.
BDST: 1806 HRS, DEC 30, 2014
