Top 10 films of 2014: complete US chart

by Guardian Film

The complete list of the Guardian’s top 10 films of the year, as determined by US release date

Read the UK cut

Under the Skin.
Our number one of 2014 … Under the Skin.

10. The Lego Movie
    What we say: Everything is awesome. And forever compromised. The Lego Movie is a $60m (£38m) advert that’s clever, smart and extremely funny. It’s marketing as art, art as commerce, and commerce as fun. It’s also an attack on corporate mono-culture. And a deconstruction of stupid Hollywood. You leave it feeling exhilarated and utterly conflicted. Thrilled by a branded film.

9. The Grand Budapest Hotel
   What we say: The Grand Budapest Hotel opened its doors in the depths of winter. A select few had a sneak peek at Berlin in February. Then, the following month – the first Friday after the Oscars in fact – the place was immediately packed out (best screen averages of the year so far).

8. Ida
   What we say: Some films are so delicate you are afraid they will collapse in the first puff of wind, or disintegrate like a soap bubble. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida is one such: an achievement so subtle and intangible, it’s hard to understand precisely why it’s so powerful, and why it leaves such a lasting impression. Pawlikowski has described Ida as a “miracle”. He was talking about a luckily timed snowstorm that held up production long enough to allow a rewrite, but the film itself could be considered a kind of miracle.

7. Nightcrawler
   What we say: Past the oil pumps and billboards, up through the hills and out in the suburbs, you’ll find Lou Bloom, camera in hand, filming LA’s dying for profit. Lou is a modern-day success story. A TV newsman racing through the night to get the gore first. Come the morning his footage is on breakfast news. Pixelated, occasionally, for decency’s sake.

6. Two Days, One Night

What we say: Hollywood trades in car chases and shoot-outs, worm-holes and tornadoes to distract us from the pure white-knuckle thriller that is everyday life. The cinema is our sanctuary, our palliative. It is where we go to escape the high-stakes horror of the working day or the churning drama of the domestic hearth. There is nothing quite so scary or galvanic as everyday life.

5. Leviathan
   What we say: Has 2014 given us any more full-blooded a film than Leviathan? Even the best of the rest feel watery lined up beside the 70% proof sucker-punch of this. Andrei Zvyagintsev’s contemporary Russian epic is a one-stop shop for those in search of love, sex, adultery, an exploration of the role of the man in the state, of faith and freedom, institutional corruption and insidious patriotism. And a lot of vodka.

4. Whiplash
   What we say: “There are no two words in the English language,” says JK Simmons’s music teacher in Whiplash, “more harmful than ‘good job’”. So we won’t use them. After all, they’d be inappropriate. It’s fitting a film that bangs the drum so hard for bloodshed in the service of excellence succeeds so soundly the regular set of superlatives are redundant. “Job”, too. This is not a job. This is something you choose to do every waking moment. To which your dreams are also devoted.

3. Inherent Vice
   What we say: Inherent Vice is a legal term, used in marine insurance, which acknowledges that everything contains its own seed of disaster and that what can go wrong probably will. Eggs break, glass shatters and 1960s hippie dreams eventually run aground on the rocks of Altamont and the Manson trial. The denizens of Gordita Beach make antic hay amid the ruins.

2. Boyhood

What we say: With so many movies contriving to be dumb, formulaic and yet messily over-complicated, the pure simplicity and clarity of Richard Linklater’s masterly Boyhood makes a glorious change. It is a marvel, particularly its refusal to bend itself into any traditional screenplay-seminar narrative structure. Like life, like old man river, it just keeps rolling along.

1. Under the Skin
   What we say: Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is a film about a beautiful, scary alien that is itself beautiful and scary and alien: it’s an entirely extraordinary, outrageously sensual film that Glazer’s previous excellent work had really only hinted at, partially and indistinctly. His Sexy Beast (2000) was a visually accomplished, exciting and intelligent crime thriller that was way ahead of the woeful mockney-geezer mode of the time. Birth (2004) had Kubrickian ingenuity and chill, with some remarkable moments; it was a movie that deserves cult-classic status but has yet to achieve it. Then a decade went by, and it seemed that Glazer might be a stylist for whom a sustained cinema career would perhaps not be achievable (and heaven knows, it can happen to the most talented).