2014BEST MOVIES

In Hollywood boardrooms, this may be remembered as the year of the great comedown.

Box office, which soared to $11 billion in 2013 and was declared the American film industry’s best year ever in sheer dollar terms, tumbled in 2014. The summer cinematic season, when the industry rakes in so much of its loot, may not have been a complete disaster movie, but it was something of a tearjerker, coming in 15 percent behind the previous summer. Let’s not even mention what the hacking of Sony, and the company’s subsequent capitulation, portends for the future of filmmaking.

But that didn’t mean there wasn’t quality out there, even if you had to dig hard to find the gems underneath the rubble that was Transcendence and Transformers: Age of Extinction. Notably, it wasn’t just arthouse/indie films providing the pleasures. The makers of 22 Jump Street, Chef, The Guest, Guardians of the Galaxy, Edge of Tomorrow, or the cagey subversion that is The Lego Movie need not apologize to anyone for making satisfying movies aimed squarely at the mainstream.

And Hollywood’s blues should change to a happier tune in 2015, even if audiences may see it as the same old song. On deck for next year is “Revenge of the Franchises” with such expected blockbusters as Avengers: Age of Ultron, Mad Max: Fury Road, Jurassic World, and a little project called Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens. But, for now, let’s look back at 2014, and my favorite films.

1 Selma

Rarely has a film set 50 years in the past felt so relevant to what’s going on today, but that’s exactly the case with Ava DuVernay’s powerful, engrossing Selma. Unlike Mandela, last year’s holiday-season civil-rights-icon biopic, Selma doesn’t make the mistake of trying to cram too much life into too little time. Instead, it concentrates on the months leading to Martin Luther King Jr.’s transformative 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. More to the point, it shows not only King’s oratory skills but his smarts as a politician. Portrayed with depth and nuance by David Oyelowo (Interstellar, The Butler), King is both magnetic and vulnerable, his personal and political struggles the centerpiece of a moving, smartly realized film. Opens Jan. 9 in North Texas.

2 Boyhood

Richard Linklater’s masterwork, 12 years in the making, follows a boy through childhood and adolescence in Texas suburbia, crafting a story that is at once uniquely American and widely universal, pointedly timely and artfully timeless. Funny, warm, moving, and feeling like real life — and revolutionary in the way it was filmed — it’s a movie to be cherished. On DVD Jan. 6. Original review.

3 The Raid 2

As electric as a lightning strike, Gareth Evans’ sprawling, 2 1/2-hour skull-cracking fusion of The Godfather, Quentin Tarantino, The Bourne Identity, and Bruce Lee is a candidate for the title of the best action movie of all time. The Indonesian martial-arts drama, in which a cop goes undercover with a vicious crime family in the midst of a gangland war, is not for the squeamish, but it’s a marvel of kinetic filmmaking. On DVD. Original review.

4 This Is Where We Live

Boyhood wasn’t the only deserving Texas family drama this year. Unlike that movie, this beautifully written and acted film, set in the Hill Country, received little exposure and even less promotion. But this tale of a loner handyman who finds himself welcomed into a family living a hard-scrabble life — complicated by the adult son’s cerebral palsy — is absolutely wonderful. Filled with strong performances (especially C.K. McFarland as the matriarch, Diane) and more than a few poetic moments, TIWWL is that rare film in which friendship blooms between an able-bodied and disabled person where it doesn’t come off as movie-of-the-week mawkish. Directors/writers Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca (who also co-stars) manage to gracefully walk that emotional tightrope. Available on streaming services. Original review.

5 Wild

This adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about her life-changing hike along the Pacific Crest Trail could have been just a glory grab for producer/star Reese Witherspoon or merely a well-made story of wilderness survival, like Tracks. On the surface, Wild is indeed both of these things but with a script from Nick Hornby (About a Boy, An Education), it goes deeper than that, exploring the family issues that pushed Strayed to the point of wanting to pit herself against nature. Like 127 Hours, it features a subtle sense of spirituality, as well as a persuasive performance from Witherspoon. In theaters now. Original review.

6 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour has made a glorious, culture-crossing, East-meets-Western debut that blends whispers of cowboy cool with vampire horror and a classic Iranian-cinema sense of beauty and tragedy shot through with pop-culture smarts. Filmed in luminous black and white, it’s set in the fictional, nearly empty Persian-speaking town of Bad City — where a girl in a chador glides down empty streets on a skateboard. It tells the story of two lonely people (one of whom is a vampire) looking for a connection. There really is nothing else quite like it. Opens Friday at the Texas Theatre.

7 The Skeleton Twins

Screenwriters Mark Heyman and Craig Johnson took home the Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it’s easy to see how their story of two unhappy adult siblings bowled everyone over. The movie is packed with humor and heart, but it’s the head-turning performances from Kristen Wiig and, especially, Bill Hader who turn this bittersweet battle of wills into more than clever words on a page. On DVD. Original review.

8 Locke

Tom Hardy has been in some big movies — including Inception and The Dark Knight Rises — but he’s still not a face everyone knows. That may change next year with the Mad Max reboot but, for now, he has turned in one of this year’s most striking performances in Locke. A one-man movie filmed entirely inside Locke’s car as he’s in the midst of a series of life-changing phone calls on a highway drive through England, it’s absolutely gripping. On DVD. Original review.

9 Coherence

So often, contemporary science-fiction movies lose their way in the third act. Not so with this low-budget indie that, like such earlier films as Moon and Primer, takes a clever conceit and turns it into a suspenseful brain-teaser. In this case it’s a dinner party gone wrong thanks to quantum physics. If The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling were still alive and collaborated on a script with Neil deGrasse Tyson, they might have come up with something like this. On DVD Jan. 20. Original review.

10 Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal is riveting as an ambitious, amoral freelance videographer who sells his increasingly shocking images to a ratings-hungry local news station. At once a sly send-up of our often crass media age and a showcase for a rangy, scary Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler is a bracing thriller. On DVD Feb. 10. (And this wasn’t Gyllenhaal’s only notable entry this year. Check out the undeservedly overlooked Enemy, which is now out on DVD.) Original review.

As usual, there are always a laundry list of films that almost made the cut (Belle, Blue Ruin, Citizenfour, The Drop, Force Majeure, Whiplash, Frank, A Most Violent Year, The Babadook) and those with stellar performances (Birdman, The Imitation Game, American Sniper, The Theory of Everything, Get on Up, St. Vincent, A Most Wanted Man, Low Down).

Kudos to the two Andersons — Wes (The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Paul Thomas (Inherent Vice) — for getting their idiosyncratic visions on screen, even if their films left me cold. (Paul Thomas gets extra credit for being the first to put the difficult work of author Thomas Pynchon on film.) And to first-time filmmaker Justin Simien for dealing with the important and incendiary topic of race in Dear White People, even if the film itself promises more than it delivers.

We can’t say goodbye to 2014 without mentions of the year’s worst — all painted in various shades of woeful: The Expendables 3, Sabotage, Sex Tape, Sin City: A Dame to Die For.

See you next year.

Cary Darling, 817 390-7571

Twitter: @carydar

This story was originally published December 23, 2014 at 11:07 AM with the headline "2014BEST MOVIES."