Many of the movies that ranked among my favorites this year were things that, for one practical reason or another, I didn’t get a chance to review at length when they came out. I’ve rectified that with new pieces you can access below, along with my ten runners-up and a year-end list from Ben Sachs. —J.R. Jones
4 Two Days, One Night In this drama by Belgian social realists Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, a young wife, mother, and factory worker (Marion Cotillard) learns that her coworkers have voted 14-2 to lay her off rather than forfeit their annual bonus of a thousand euros. After one of her friends prevails on their supervisor to schedule another vote, the heroine spends a long, tense weekend tracking down her coworkers one by one and asking them to reconsider. The Dardennes have always been preoccupied with predatory capitalism, and this movie is no different, exposing the endless uphill battle of getting workers to look out for each other rather than themselves. Read the long review »
9 Everyday I thought I’d never hear the end of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, filmed periodically over 12 years to capture a boy’s maturation from first grade to college, yet this heart-rending drama by Michael Winterbottom accomplishes much the same thing with its story of an English family struggling to stay together as the father serves out a five-year prison term. Like Linklater, Winterbottom shot his movie periodically in real time, capturing the growth of the children, yet in contrast to Boyhood, which wound up being mostly about its own process, Everyday is a sharply focused story about the preciousness of each moment. Read the long review »
2 Rambleras One of the most inspiring trends today is the rise of a new, distinctly female-centered art cinema all over Latin and South America. This casually profound comedy from Uruguay (which screened in May at the Chicago Latino Film Festival) not only exemplifies the trend, it feels universal and timeless like few other recent movies. Three women of different ages, all lower-middle-class and desperately lonely, befriend each other and slowly take control of their lives. Writer-director Daniela Speranza presents the “little” story as though it were the stuff of an MGM musical, decking every frame with eye-popping color and staging balletic camera movements. (This is a movie that would have made Jacques Demy proud.) Speranza spent ten years refining the script as she struggled to get the movie financed, and her effort shows: even the simplest gestures hint at years of experience, and the gentle surface tone, rather than distracting from the sense of disappointment, conveys a hard-won acceptance of human foibles.
7Breakfast With Curtis
