Putting together a year-end film list is pretty easy for me. 1) I keep up with most of what I want to see in any given year as the films come out. There’s sometimes a bit of a backlog around Christmas, maybe four or five late releases I want to catch up with. Not always--this year, Inherent Vice is the only thing that I know I need to see. (Rather optimistic, seeing as I haven’t unreservedly loved a Paul Thomas Anderson film since Boogie Nights. But there’s always that chance.) 2) There’s an ILX thread called “Last (x) movies you saw” that functions as a running log of whatever I see throughout the year--new releases, DVDs, everything--and I’m able to search back through that for a pretty complete list. Occasionally something will slip through-- I wrote a bit about Particle Fever on ILX’s running documentary thread, but for some reason didn’t mention it on the “Last (x)” thread. Also, like most people who post there, I attach ratings to what I see, so I can use it as a rough guide to how I felt about the films.
I seem to have seen between 30 and 35 new films this year, about my usual number. I think last year’s list was a little stronger than this year’s. I feel about equally enthusiastic about my two #1s--Room 237 in 2013, Boyhood this year--although Boyhood will probably become part of film history, while Room 237 is largely forgotten. Boyhood is about as predictable a #1 as any film of the past few years. I’ve got to put it there, though; it’s the film that most affected me this year, and the one I’ve thought about the most.
My ILX ratings for the 20 films I’ve listed ranged from a low of 6.5 for Palo Alto (which seems a little better in retrospect...its mood lingers) to 8.5 for Boyhood. Actually, I gave Boyhood 7.5 the first time I saw it, then moved that up after a second viewing. The ratings are very general. If a film holds my interest and is reasonably well done, I give it a 6.5 or 7.0. Anything I really like gets 8.0 or higher. The 10.0s I give out during the year are all old favourites from previous years. Looking at the full list of 30+, the only thing I really hated this year was Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. I gave that a rating of “ordeal.” The rest of what I saw:
Love and Terror on the
Howling Plains of Nowhere, The
Grand Budapest Hotel, The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,
Ida, Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, Fed Up,
Citizen Koch, Begin Again, Rich Hill, Goodbye to Language,
Nightcrawler, St Vincent, Mock-Ups in Close-Up: Architectural
Models in Film.
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