We grumble on over the Oscar nominations, but there are other ways of slicing up 2014. Reverse Shot, for example, has followed up its best-of list with its annual list of offenses—eleven this year. “From award-trolling pabulum to multiplex garbage to films by directors we once praised, these were movies that made our beloved medium seem like the seventh art we’d ever spend time considering at all.” And RS has wrapped the year with “Two Cents,” a rich collection of miscellaneous notes presented as one-off category awards, e.g., “The ‘She Wuz Robbed’ Award for 2014: Joanna Hogg,” “Worst Scene in a Good Movie: Boyhood,” “Scariest Movie: Closed Curtain,” “Most Exciting Breakthrough: Tom Hardy in Locke” and “Hardest to Watch (in a good way): It Felt Like Love.”
“At least in certain circles, nonfiction film has been thoroughly disentangled from journalism, and can now be safely cast as Art, free to play by the rules of fiction. This is good, right?” For Sight & Sound, Robert Greene has notes on each of his top 25 nonfiction films of 2014.
At the Talkhouse Film, Jeff Reichert argues that the “Most Overlooked Documentaries of 2014” are Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me, Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan and Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture.
Don’t believe I’ve yet mentioned that Peter Labuza and Keith Uhlich have wrapped their two-part discussion of their lists at the Cinephiliacs (116’02”).
“I’m not much for year-end listmaking,” admits Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker, “I’ve laid out ten arbitrary categories that allow me to tout some titles.” For example: “Best DTV Casualty” (Joe Johnston’s Not Safe for Work), “Best Comparatively Wide Release of a Semi-Avant Garde Film” (Ben Russell and Ben Rivers’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness) and “Best Five-Year-Old Film Finally Seeing Nominal Release” (Alain Guiraudie’s The King of Escape).
Kent Jones’s Top 10 of 2014: pic.twitter.com/G6Hz0aD2dU
— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) January 17, 2015
Topping Ray Pride‘s list of 40 is Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, “perfectly imperfect, and surely not the last exploration of feature filmmaking as the ideal form to encapsulate duration and unities of location to come from the dogged, invaluable 53-year-old writer-director.”
Designer Sam Smith: “While exploring a new character illustration style, I needed some subjects, and decided to take a crack at the heroes of my Top Ten Movies of 2014.” #1: Boyhood.
Kimberly Lindbergs‘s list of 15 at Movie Morlocks is in alphabetical order.
Lukas Foerster breaks down a year of ravenous viewing.
Michael Smith has begun counting down his top 100 films of the past five years.
Topping Cine Mexicano‘s ten: Alonso Ruizpalacios’s Güeros.
Nearly 1600 people have participated in Metacritic‘s poll. #1: Boyhood. Followed by Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. “Most Overrated”: Interstellar, followed by Boyhood.
“Never before in the history of cinema was there such a line up of movies, high and low, going after the critics,” writes Richard von Busack at the Evening Class. “Movies as relatively unambitious as Chef and as eclectic as Birdman weighed in on critical perniciousness.”
AWARDS
The Directors Guild of America has named its five nominees for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2014: Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Clint Eastwood (American Sniper), Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman), Richard Linklater (Boyhood) and Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game).
The Cinema Audio Society and the Visual Effects Society have also announced their nominations.
“Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Director’s Cut is the frontrunner for Denmark’s Robert Awards, which the Danish Film Academy will announce for the 31st time on February 1,” reports Jorn Rossing Jensen. And: “Bille August’s Silent Heart and Niels Arden Oplev’s Speed Walking are both being considered in five categories—including Best Film—for the Danish Film Critics’ Bodil Awards, which will be presented at Copenhagen’s Bremen Theatre on February 28.”
Also at Cineuropa, Martin Kudláč has the full list of nominees for the Czech Lion awards. The clear frontrunner is Andrea Sedláčková’s Fair Play.
By all accounts, everyone had a pretty good time at Thursday night’s Critics’ Choice Awards.
Best Film and Director for the Alliance of Women Film Journalists: Boyhood and Linklater. But there’s a tie for Female Icon of the Year: Ava DuVernay and Laura Poitras.
The Georgia Film Critics Association also goes for Boyhood. Best Actor and Actress: Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler) and Marion Cotillard (Two Days, One Night).
The Houston Film Critics Society‘s picked its winners and, as Joe Leydon notes, “not entirely unexpectedly, home-town boy Richard Linklater’s Boyhood picked up a passel of prizes—including the Texas Independent Film Award for outstanding indie shot in the Lone Star State.”
The Denver Film Critics Society breaks things up a bit by going for Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper.
The 2014 Lists and Awards Index. For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily. Get Keyframe Daily in your inbox by signing in at fandor.com/daily.
