2014's Best Movies: 10 Years Later

I wonder how many of the people at the time who were crying "Why is it 'BOYHOOD?' Why not a movie called 'GIRLHOOD,' huh!?" ended up seeing Girlhood.

especially since in the States Girlhood got a spring '15 release.

This was pretty easily Boyhood for me.

(I’ve only seen three of the choices.)

I’ve seen all of them (not usually the case for me with these retrospective polls). My five favorites are

The Wonders =
Leviathan

The Grand Budapest Hotel
Inherent Vice
Goodbye to Language

The Wonders by Alice Rohrwacher is a beautiful pastoral film about teenage yearning. It features a girl, Gelsomina, who is starting to assume responsibility for her family and their apiary in the dusty Tuscan countryside, but who becomes distracted. IMDB describes the family as “a household disrupted by the simultaneous arrival of a silently troubled teenage boy and a reality TV show intent on showcasing the family “, which is as good a description as any.

Her new film opens here next week

Leviathan for me, I love PTA but IV was a shaggy dog. Dunno what the previous posters were referring to with "the wrong Leviathan" - a fishing documentary? Anyway the Zvyagintsev film has stayed with me and I've watched it several times. I love the major scene toward the end (no spoilers for a decade old movie).

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Andrey Zyagintsev’s Leviathan is a story about a fisherman who fights back when a corrupt mayor tries to seize his ancestral home, which brings even more misfortune to him. It’s funny and tragic, and has amazing images

The Return (2003) is shockingly good as a first feature film about a dangerous father who resurfaces in the lives of his two sons. It takes place in a remote area of Ladoga Lake near St. Petersburg.

His film Loveless (2017) is about a child who goes missing in the middle of a bitter divorce, and is also amazing

Yeah I know Z's films and agree with much of your assessment (altho disliked Loveless) - I just wondered what NV's comment upthread about "the wrong Leviathan made the list" meant.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel made a fishing documentary in 2012 through the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard called Leviathan. It was a very avant-garde film that experimented with waterproof cameras aboard a fishing ship to capture raw, wordless, hallucinatory images and occasional fragments of dialog.

It is a beautiful film as far as it goes, but there is no story

you say that like its a flaw

It's not a flaw as such, just that ultimately the film doesn't have a greater meaning for me.

I know there are other films I have loved where the images matter more than the story,Satyricon may be one

Sounds interesting nonetheless!

The fishing documentary is called Leviathan (which may confuse some people given the excellent Russian film by that name which was released a couple of years later). I caught the premiere at Alice Tully Hall for the NYFF and thought it was great, but it's not a film that'll appeal to everyone - there were famously some walkouts during its initial theatrical run as some people claimed it was actually physically hard to watch, inducing something like real sea sickness.

Here's Jim Hoberman's rave.

It's been too long for me to recall where exactly I saw those reports of sickness, but FWIW, here's a recent report published last fall:

The film uses an experimental filmography style, including the use of multiple GoPro cameras. This technique offers a unique perspective, ranging from the depths of the ocean to breathtaking bird’s-eye views. To some, this technique was disorienting. Several attendees of the screening even reported feeling sea sick.

Senior Emily McAllister, a film and media studies major with concentrations in sociology and philosophy, was among the audience members who left feeling dizzy.

“I felt the absence of a narrative or plot dissolved any possibility of the romanticization or glorification of this line of work, leaving viewers with the bare authentic reality of deep sea trawling. If the filmmaker had used any other mode of communication to describe life on the trawler, it would not have been as impactful or immersive. The camera work represents a wet, disorienting and dizzying existence, successfully inducing these sensations upon the viewers. When I stood up to leave the theater, I felt myself wobble a little,” McCalister said.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I'm happy that Boyhood is the winner. I can see that it is a film people really connect to, and I think it is one of the great films ever. It definitely deserved to win the Oscar for Best Film over Birdman in 2014

I also like seeing that every film got a vote

I demand a Boyhood-Girlhood double feature.

Triple feature with Boyz N The Hood

Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in Boyhood

voted godard, though hill of freedom is the actual best film of 2014

And the last two pieces of the puzzle:

1924's Best Movies: 100 Years Later
1934's Best Movies: 90 Years Later