The 15 Best Films of 2014 – A Final Opinion

 

Well, this sure has been a weird year for making a Top 10/15 list. Movies that I originally ranked highly didn’t quite make it, but movies I ranked a tad lower stayed with me all year. In some cases I was deliberately conservative earlier in the year. I needn’t have been. It was the year of the music movie, as three of my picks are movies that feature music prominently but are not musicals per se. There is a bona fide musical but it’s not one of the ones you’ve probably heard of. It certainly was a great year for soundtracks.

Of course there have been plenty of quite good films that just aren’t my favorites of the year. Selma, A Most Violent Year, Wild, Rosewater and Nightcrawler were all well done. Guardians of the Galaxy and The Raid 2 were good fun but you won’t see them on my list either. Inherent Vice just wasn’t for me, and I had issues with American Sniper. Some years I include festival movies that haven’t actually released yet. I didn’t have to this year, although if you’re curious, those would have been 99 Homes and The Tribe, but both have secured distribution and will be ready to rank in 2015. 

 

Check Out: CraveOnline’s 14 Best Movies of 2014

 

Most interesting to me are that a number of films on my list, numbers 13 and 10 specifically, are favorites because of what they say about the way we view films, what we expect from them and what that says about our needs. I suppose after 37 years of film viewing, 15 years professional analysis and the rest of my amateur practice, I seek out those sorts of cinema experiences. The rest are just damn powerful, creative works of art. 

 

Fred Topel’s 15 Best Films of 2014:

 


Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.

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