Nathan Weinbender picks his favorite films of 2014

I knew 2014 was going to be a strange and unpredictable year for movies back in February. The late winter months are always a drag for discerning moviegoers – it’s the time when studios generally dump the products they know are rotten – and yet “The Lego Movie” dropped into theaters a week before Valentine’s Day and restored my faith in mainstream entertainment.

The surprises continued throughout the year – even blockbusters like “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” were smarter and more elegantly crafted than they had any right to be – all the way up until a Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy inspired supposed terrorist threats and inspired fervent debates about freedom of expression. Like I said, strange and unpredictable.

Looking back at the year in movies, I realize now just how many good ones there were, and how many of them boasted distinct visions and personalities. There are a handful of critical darlings and festival favorites I’ve yet to see, so consider this list a sort of first draft until those titles make their way to town. As it stands, here are the 10 best films from the past 12 months.

1. “Boyhood” Since debuting with the experimental character piece “Slacker” in 1991, Richard Linklater has quietly established himself as one of the best, most adventurous American directors of our time, though his movies rarely announce their conceptual daring. “Boyhood,” the fly-on-the-wall coming-of-age film that took 12 years to complete, is the director’s most remarkable achievement yet, an epic story of age, maturity, love and family told on a deeply personal, intimate scale. Linklater never lets the sheer enormousness of his vision overwhelm his material: What could have easily become a document of one filmmaker’s excess is instead a perceptive and sincere examination of the turbulence of adolescence. As in his brilliant “Before” series, Linklater perfectly captures the rhythms and patterns of real life, and he proves that a film doesn’t have to be a series of revelations or grand occurrences in order to be thought-provoking and meaningful. “Boyhood” is a profound and extraordinary experience precisely because it’s not trying to be one.

2. “Under the Skin” I recommended “Under the Skin” to at least a dozen friends when it was first released, and the few who actually saw it reacted with a resounding “huh?” So it’s obviously not for everyone, but Jonathan Glazer’s beguiling sci-fi fever dream is one of the most challenging and artful movies in a long while, deeply unsettling and surprisingly contemplative. It stars Scarlett Johansson as an extraterrestrial visitor preying on men in the Scottish countryside – she picks them up for a ride, they follow her into a strange house, and they disappear into a pool of mysterious black goo – but what she (or it) is doing and why are never quite revealed. What begins as a bizarre alien travelogue becomes, in its own strange way, a tragic reflection about what it means to be human. I’m not sure what it all means – I’m not sure we’re supposed to – but Glazer weaves a spell that you’ll either find impenetrable or eerily compelling.

3. “Whiplash” Although it was a success at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s debut feature was pretty much a bust at the box office. That’s too bad, because this is one of the best, most intense films I’ve ever seen about the physical act of making music, a story of rivalry and one-upmanship that makes jazz drumming as exciting as anything you’d see in a Hollywood thriller. The story centers on the bizarre relationship between a talented, driven music student (Miles Teller) and his intimidating, militaristic instructor (J.K. Simmons, in the performance of the year), who uses physical and emotional abuse as a teaching method that he (perhaps selfishly) hopes will produce the next Charlie Parker. Chazelle uses music the way action directors use ammunition, and the film’s climax, set at a make-it-or-break-it jazz competition, is a dizzying, spellbinding nail-biter.

4. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” Wes Anderson isn’t capable of making an ordinary film, and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is perhaps his most ambitious stylistic statement to date, a raucous screwball farce that evokes everyone from Michael Powell to the Marx brothers. As the frazzled, put-upon concierge M. Gustave, the great Ralph Fiennes nearly functions as a personification of the film he inhabits: Beneath his poised exterior, he’s capable of breaking loose and going mad at any moment. From a chase scene that liberally quotes Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” to a downhill ski race rendered in stop-motion animation, Anderson cheerfully empties the contents of his bag of tricks here, and it’s a joy to watch him play around in his toy box.

5. “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Birdman” is all about its own pyrotechnics. It’s shot and edited to look like a single unbroken take, it’s punctuated by an avant-garde jazz drum score (echoes of “Whiplash”), and every member of its huge supporting cast – Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Ryan – gets to chew on a big, emotional monologue. But it’s Michael Keaton’s central performance as a washed-up Hollywood actor that brings a quiet humility to Iñárritu’s crazed vision: Keaton has never been given a role this complex, and he’s more than up for the challenge. In its sheer dramatic and visual audacity, “Birdman” is a thrilling high-wire act, and it channels the electricity of live theater in a way few films ever have.

6. “Life Itself” Roger Ebert knew what made a good movie, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the documentary based on his memoir is one of the best, most vibrant film biographies of recent years. Director Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) touches on all the great relationships of Ebert’s life – with his wife, Chaz, with his onscreen sparring partner, Gene Siskel, with his readers and with cinema – and intimately profiles the late critic during his final months, capturing surprisingly candid footage of Ebert’s long hospital stay. It’s a testament to Ebert’s spirit that “Life Itself” is as frequently funny as it is poignant: He never allowed himself to be silenced by the cancer that robbed him of his physical voice, and even posthumously, his writing remains as vital as ever.

7. “Inherent Vice” Paul Thomas Anderson’s delightfully unhinged adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s gonzo detective novel merges film noir with a ’70s shaggy dog comedy, a distant cousin to Robert Altman’s 1973 Raymond Chandler riff “The Long Goodbye.” Joaquin Phoenix, never funnier, plays Doc Sportello, a perpetually stoned private investigator who becomes entangled in an insanely convoluted case involving psychics, prostitutes, G-men, hitmen, cult leaders, drug-peddling dentists, a missing jazz saxophonist and a crazed real estate magnate. The plot is a 10-car pileup of weird supporting characters ping-ponging from one baffling subplot to another, but like some of the best noir, “Inherent Vice” is more about vibe than story. You might not be able to understand everything that’s happening, but you’ll want to see it again the moment it’s over.

8. “Gone Girl” Gillian Flynn’s twisty bestseller finds the perfect ally in director David Fincher, whose clinical, unblinking style energizes a story that’s just a notch or two above a cheap airport novel. This is a slick, venomous thriller that relishes in shattering our expectations, and Rosamund Pike steals the film away from Ben Affleck as a missing woman who’s either a helpless victim or a teeth-gnashing sociopath. (Whether you buy the film’s skewering of gender politics, its gleeful evisceration of the state of modern marriage or the mechanics of its third act is a whole other can of worms.)

9. “Force Majeure” A well-to-do Swedish family is on holiday at a ski resort in the French Alps. One morning at breakfast, they notice a controlled avalanche on a nearby mountain unexpectedly intensifies and appears to be barreling toward them. A split-second decision during this moment of panic creates an immediate and irreparable rift in the family dynamic, as a carefree vacation turns into a long, torturous therapy session. There’s a darkly hilarious bourgeoisie satire lurking beneath the surface of “Force Majeure,” and it’s an especially sharp study of emasculation and gender roles that will no doubt inspire spirited post-screening discussion.

10. “Enemy” Jake Gyllenhaal turned in one of the best performances of 2014 in “Nightcrawler,” but he was also very good earlier in the year playing a pair of doppelgangers in Denis Villeneuve’s mindbender “Enemy.” Like “Under the Skin,” this is an existential nightmare that may not have a clear-cut explanation, as the lives of two seemingly identical men begin to merge in uncomfortable and puzzling ways. It’s a confounding film (either to its benefit or detriment, depending on who you ask) that’s impossible to shake, right up until the shocker of an ending, which is as inexplicably disturbing as the waking moment of a horrible dream.

Honorable Mentions: “The Babadook,” “Citizenfour,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” “Foxcatcher,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “The Immigrant,” “The Lego Movie,” “Locke,” “Nightcrawler,” “We Are the Best!”