Now Playing: A Ridiculous Number of Great Movies. We Rank the Top 10
Even by holiday movie season standards, there’s a surfeit of great movies in theaters right now.
If there’s anything we all know about the film business, it’s that too many movies—most of them potential prize-winners—open during the final ten days of every year. 2014 is no exception. Only this year, nearly all of these big movies are at least pretty good, and well over half are much better than that.
Photo: Courtesy of © Paramount Pictures1/10Selma
**Ava DuVernay’**s moving and engrossing historical film is like **Steven Spielberg’**s Lincoln seen through the looking glass. Rather than focus on how a heroic white president pushed through the Emancipation Proclamation, this film is about how heroic African-American people pushed a white president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to support the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is a film at once epic in its historical meaning and intimate in its portraiture—just check out the marital scenes between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo, excellent) and his wife Coretta (an elegant Carmen Ejogo). It claims the top spot by being so profoundly relevant to what’s happening in our streets right now.
Photo: Courtesy of © Entertainment One2/10Mr. Turner
How do you make a film about a genius who doesn’t remotely seem like a genius? **Mike Leigh’**s extraordinary portrait of the great English painter J.M.W. Turner—superbly played by Timothy Spall as an encyclopedia of grunts—answers the question by plunging you into Turner’s nineteenth-century life with his peculiar relationships with women, canny dealings with the art world, and his constant search for proper light, a quest perfectly rendered in **Dick Pope’**s ravishing cinematography.
Photo: Courtesy of © Sony Pictures Classics3/10Leviathan
If you think the American Dream is going badly, just check out the Russian Dream in **Andrey Zvyagintsev’**s darkly funny story about what happens when an ordinary citizen (Aleksey Serebryakov) and his lovely second wife (Elena Lyadova) try to stop the sleazy local mayor from seizing his home. Beautifully shot, novelistically told, and marvelously acted—with the most convincing drunk scenes you’ll ever see—this is the most entertaining movie yet made about the nightmare of Russia under Vladimir Putin.
Photo: Courtesy of © Adopt Films4/10Winter Sleep
Set amid the falling-snow beauty of Cappadocia, **Nuri Bilge Ceylan’**s slow, deliberately Chekhovian film centers on a self-satisfied actor turned innkeeper (Haluk Bilginer) and his tricky relationships with his lovely but disillusioned wife (Melisa Sözen), his divorced sister who sees right through his pretensions to being an enlightened man, and a Uriah Heepish imam (Serhat Kiliç, fantastic). Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, this film gives you a snapshot of the soul of modern Turkey with its gaps between smug and questioning, rich and poor, Westernized and Islamic.
Photo: Courtesy of © Warner Bros.5/10American Sniper
Just when you think Clint Eastwood will never make another good film—Jersey Boys, yeesh—he directs this taut, measured, occasionally too-conventional story about Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who is said to have had the most confirmed kills in U.S. military history. Played with great discipline by Bradley Cooper—who bulked up 40 pounds for the role and never gets showy—Kyle emerges as both a classic no-nonsense war hero and, most notably in his relationship with his wife (a very fine Sienna Miller), a classic Eastwood example of how even righteous violence takes its toll on those who do it.
