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The 20 Best Films Of 2014
By The Playlist Staff | The Playlist
十二月 9, 2014 at 12:32下午

4. “Gone Girl” 【消失的爱人】
One of the most avidly anticipated movies of the year, "Gone Girl," miraculously, didn't crumble under the weight of its expectations, managing to surprise, delight and offend in ways few may have expected. "Gone Girl" is a David Fincher film through and through: the grayscale palette, the uneasy Reznor/Ross score, the deep-seated cynicism and irony throughout. But the film exhibits a different, new layer: camp, of all things. From the arch voiceover to the fluffy pink pens of Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), "Gone Girl" is Fincher's take on a Dateline special. Disturbingly dark and deeply funny, the film strikes a tone that is completely unique: simultaneously dry, dour and utterly ridiculous — wait, is Fincher having fun? It seems that the woman's touch of Gillian Flynn's novel and screen adaptation adds a new dimension to the auteur's work — "Gone Girl" is a monster movie with a Hitchcock blonde as the antagonist, the stuff that men's right's activists' dreams and nightmares are made of. Then again Ben Affleck as the dull-as-paint husband is the stuff that intelligent, independent women's nightmares are made of too. For once, it’s the man in peril, instead of the woman, for once it's the female who acts with agency (sociopathic agency but we'll take what we can get) and honestly, it’s refreshing, all spiced up with a little media satire too. The ultimate anti-date movie, “Gone Girl” is Lifetime true crime gone high brow, masterfully and meticulously executed, with Pike's Amy an instant icon of the anti-victim.

3. “Foxcatcher”【狐狸捕手】
At once a tiny, intimate three-hander and a grand, mythic tale about America and the inherent imbalance of capitalism, “Foxcatcher” strikes a high watermark for director Bennett Miller, a filmmaker who’d already knocked it out the park twice with “Capote” and “Moneyball.” Detailing the extraordinary true story of the Schultz Brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum), Olympic champion wrestlers who fall under the sway of industrialist heir John Du Pont (Steve Carell), the film’s a spare, almost austere parable that tips into absurdity only because it is an entirely absurd, and yet bone-chilling story. And while it takes up over two hours on the screen, as ever with Miller, there’s nothing extraneous, no frame out of place (DP Greig Fraser continually wringing poetry out of the mundane) and no performance that isn’t minutely finely tuned. Each one of the director’s movies has had a titanic performance at its center, but here he’s got three: Ruffalo is as reliably great as ever, yet still capable of surprising; Tatum a revelation even by the standard to which he’s stretched his wings in the last few years; and Carell reaches a heart of darkness that surely few ever thought he’d be capable of. It’s hardly a shock that this is a film that had to go the Megan Ellison route to get made: it’s deeply sad, almost lonely in tone, and savage in the way it holds up a mirror to the rotten core of the 1%, and the callousness with which they can treat the lives of others. But thank God that it did: it might be set twenty years ago, but it’s a vital film for America in 2014, and beyond.

重点！！

2. “Nightcrawler”【夜行者】
On its blackly comic, satiric surface, “Nightcrawler” is an indictment of today’s anything-goes, Twitter-ready media landscape, but writer/director Dan Gilroy knows that one note has been played, and sustained, before. And so coiling underneath his film, prowling with survivor’s instincts and a new-age enthusiast’s optimism is the portrait of one smooth-operating sociopath. Played with gaunt-faced, all-grins commitment by Jake Gyllenhaal, Louis Bloom is Patrick Bateman raised on a diet of Horatio Alger stories and recently gorged on self-help business strategy books. He’s eager to climb the ladder, but in yet another terrifically nuanced turn by Gyllenhaal, aided by Gilroy’s layered script, we see shades of Bloom’s damaged past, one that perhaps found him abused, alone, unwanted. He’ll try anything to make a buck and certainly has, but when his attempt as a freelance video stringer starts yielding real results, what follows is a bleak portrait of achieving the American Dream through the most nightmarish of means. A slithering, steadily uncoiling examination of ambition, Gilroy and Gyllenhaal bring audiences into a Los Angeles not of sunshine, beautiful people and gleaming buildings, but of corroded aspirations and desperate measures that have curdled all morals and ethics. Ultimately, “Nightcrawler” becomes one of year’s finest films by being one of its most uncompromising.

1. "Under the Skin"【皮囊之下】
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” as Hamlet says to Horatio, “than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” And Jonathan Glazer’s bewitching “Under the Skin” may be the best expression ever of a film told from the point of view of one of those things. Profoundly, chillingly alien, Glazer’s uncanny masterpiece feels like it’s animated by an unearthly intelligence, the kind of dark, still watchfulness that is perhaps closest in spirit to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a perspective that feels simply not-human. So often, when dealing with alien lifeforms in film, we ascribe to them conventional human morality — they are good or bad, vengeful or merciful, evil or pure. But Scarlett Johansson gives an immaculate performance as a creature that simply exists outside that framework, perfectly ambivalent, unmotivated by notions of justice or revenge, only opportunity. At least at the outset, because as the film unfolds, the terrible perfection of her alien design (she is like an elaborate lure, cast by the man on the motorcycle, perhaps) is gradually compromised by the distant stirrings of a kind of humanity: pity, appetite, vanity, gratitude, fear. And all this couched within that remarkable score — all fetal heartbeats, vertiginous strings and amniotic pulsations — and some of the most striking imagery that master stylist Glazer has ever created, the more startling for being set amid the humdrum surroundings of Glaswegian high streets and gray Scottish countryside. It’s that push-pull of the beyond-our-ken and the banal that makes “Under the Skin” such a singular film (a man is bringing an alien home, but he still checks the eggs before buying them) and an example of laser-focused directorial confidence and intent, albeit loosely based on Michael Faber’s novel. Sitting at our number one spot for the year by an enormous margin, mysterious, hypnotic and completely terrifying (is there any scene more eerily unheimlich than Johansson dragging that swimmer’s body past the crying baby on the beach?) the film earns its title not so much for any thematic answers it provides (it remains, to the last, a perfectly sealed enigma) but because for its admirers "under the skin" is where it lives, now and probably forever