Movies of 2014 Part 2: 50-21

So here I get into my proper write-ups, which I largely haven't edited so they might be complete gibberish, or they might be sensationally insightful. Or more likely they will fall somewhere in the middle, as the coherent but completely pointless ramblings of an egoist. These films were good enough to warrant writing up, but not good enough to rank higher on the list. And in other redundant statements, this is a blog post, and you're reading it.

50) Talk to Her (Hable con Ella, 2002, Pedro Almodóvar)

This probably has the longest lag-time of any film between me saying “I want to see that” and actually seeing it, and I have no idea why. I think I missed it at the cinema, and then Napster got taken down, and then 12 years passed (at some point I saw a blimp!), and then it turned up in my local library.

It was also part of a bit of an Almodóvar binge I went on this year kicked off by What have I done to Deserve This? (see 150-51, above) and also the culmination, although given how much I absolutely adored some of the other Almodóvar, this one couldn’t quite live up to 12 years of expectations.

The story blends his typical melodrama and sinister mystery but, in a fairly radical departure, deals primarily with male protagonists – although the crux of the story still revolves around their interaction with the females in their life. There’s plenty of heart, and plenty of unnerving awkwardness in this film, yet somehow the ending just didn’t completely click with me, and I felt a bit unsatisfied at the end.

49) Sabrina (1954, Billy Wilder)

I think my only Billy Wilder this year, and while it’s a somewhat mediocre effort by his standards there’s still plenty to like.

Speaking of 12-year gaps, I’m pretty sure it’s been about 12 years since I’ve watched anything with William Holden in it and it’s been far too long. He’s at his most charismatic here as the lothario David Larrabee who ends up competing with Humphrey Bogart for the affection of the poor-but-looks-like-Audrey Hepburn-and-is-therefore-desirable chauffeur’s daughter (played by Audrey Hepburn).

It’s really just another hit on the Billy Wilder hit parade of light comical romances, not up there with Roman Holiday or Some Like it Hot but plenty of spark nonetheless.

48) The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor)

A bit forgotten in the realm of film history, this still has a significant claim to fame in that some believe it surpassed D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the then highest grossing film of all time (dubious).

More importantly, it has a better claim to fame in that it’s an enjoyable, well-told film about friendship and love in the First World War.

A bit lengthy and a lot silent, the cast led by John Gilbert brings an immense amount of gravitas and enthusiasm to the action and there are some genuinely memorable scenes, most notably the farewell sequence where Gilbert’s character Jim receives his orders to advance and he must abandon the French farmgirl he’s fallen in love with. Renée Adorée puts on one of the best silent-era performances I’ve seen (possibly beaten only by Virginia Cherrill in City Lights) and steals the movie as she runs desperately through the crowd to find him.

47) Barney's Version (2010, Richard J Lewis)

This was a great surprise for me. It’s one of those classic Oscar bait films that manages to get a tiny amount of attention during awards season but without winning anything, gets swiftly forgotten forever after and donated to local libraries by people who bought it on a whim. That’s where I found it.

And it was genuinely good. I’m a sucker for Paul Giamatti in general, but when he’s given the vista of light and shade that he portrays in this film it’s an absolute tour de force. He’s funny, absolutely pathetic in the way only he can be, but in the end really likeable as the brash and impulsive Barney Panofsky.

Anyway, I can’t avoid characterising the film as Oscar bait, but at the heart of it remains a very warm, charming story.

46) Le Trou (1960, Jacques Becker)

I saw this film purely on the repeated recommendation of my brother, who had it really high up on his list from last year.

I’ve discussed with him, so really I’m just repeating my thoughts on this film to anyone who isn’t him reading this (Hi, Mother!). I think this film has as its big high point its ending, which is a wonderful apogee of the slow-burn, procedural build-up the story presents.

At the same time, I’m not a huge advocate of slow-burn, procedural stories in general - I like them well enough, but since I saw this after Bresson’s quite similar A Man Escaped (which is incidentally well below this in the list), the majority of this film didn’t really excite me.

45) Prisoners (2013, Denis Villeneuve)

I felt a little tentative going into this film, knowing that Villeneuve was seen by most to be on a steep downward descent from the highs of Incendies in 2010 (my #3 film of last year, incidentally) to this year’s Saramago-adaptation Enemy, which I’m yet to see.

But there’s plenty of meat in this taut, dark thriller about an irascible father – the uncharacteristically not-meltingly-charming Hugh Jackman – who gets a bit peeved when his young daughter is kidnapped and possibly murdered.

There are shades here of the best Korean thrillers, as Villeneuve plays with the dichotomies of hunter/hunted and perpetrator/victim, but the director’s heavy handedness begins to show itself here and while the film abounds in suspense, it sadly lacks in subtlety.

44) Spring Breakers (2012, Harmony Korine)

OK so I haven’t been able to wrap my head around this film. In fact I’m a bit embarrassed to have it so high on my list, given the way it was marketed as a Skrillex-scored Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez-vehicle. With bikinis.

Despite all of this, I defer to my favourite film critic and go-to apologist for the downtrodden, Adam Kempenaar of Filmspotting, who unashamedly put this as his number 8 film of last year, on whose persistent high opinion my viewing rested entirely.

The thing is, this film is about little more than four girls going crazy for the best spring break of their lives. It does rely for atmosphere very heavily on the sultry tunes of Skrillex and the ample busts of the four PYTs and nameless (often faceless) others.

Then enter James Franco, disappearing entirely into the role of Alien, a sleazy drug dealer who embodies the spirit of what we Aussies would call a ‘Tooly’. Although Spring Breakers starts with an armed robbery, it ends down a very dark rabbit hole that I just didn’t expect, and the impact of that culmination has left me pondering far longer than any normal bikini-party-dubstep adventure should have.

43) Gone Girl (2014, David Fincher)

Here we go, possibly the most talked-about movie of the year, or at least one of the three most talked-about movies of the year, but the one that has had the most accusations of misogyny thrown at it.

I’m not going to weigh in on the debate, for a very simple reason: although I knew about the claims of misogyny going in, I’d completely forgotten about them at about the five minute mark. Obviously I’m a white privileged male, but I think throwing epithets like misogynistic at a film like this is frankly overanalysing.

Because all this film is is just superb entertainment. Without wanting to sound like the voiceover guy doing the latest Vin Diesel trailer, I feel this is full-throttle suspense and enjoyment from start to finish. There’s tension, plenty of satire, and a huge amount of humorous irony.

I haven’t read the bestselling novel, so I can’t draw comparisons or really talk about what Fincher does with this film that isn’t just part of the source material. But I just had a mountain of fun with this.

42) The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, John Cassavetes)

It’s taken me a long time to go through my John Cassavetes collection. Such a long time, in fact, that I still haven’t finished. The main reason is that each time I watch a Cassavetes film, I’m so overwhelmingly depressed that it takes me about a year to work up the courage for another.

True to form, he delivers a dour and upsetting masterpiece here, in his trademark improvisational style. Ben Gazzara puts in a gutsy performance as the strip club owner forced to deal with the mob due to his gambling debts, and the dirty wash of the images - so typical of Cassavetes’ camera -provide the central atmosphere.

Gazzara’s spirit carries not only the film, but also the heightened sense of tragedy, as he is forced to face up to the fact that he’s become a failure as both a business owner and a man. I would call this film the antithesis to Atlantic City (see a few films below), and given how much I enjoyed that film this became a bit of a sore point for me.

41) Crumb (1994, Terry Zwigoff)

A film that has been on my list for very many years owing to its presence in the book 1001 Films to see before you die, I can finally tick this one off my bucket list. So there’s only about 930 now still to go, hooray!

Providing evidence that a documentary is often only as good as its subject matter, Terry Zwigoff has here made a film that is exactly as fascinating and somewhat disturbing as its central figure, the cartoonist R Crumb.

Knowing nothing about Crumb or his work going in, I enjoyed the way Zwigoff uses Crumb and his dysfunctional, competitive family to give us a very thorough, warts-and-all portrait, while addressing all the necessary questions surrounding his work. He’s presented variously as troubled genius, one of the most significant artists of his century, and deviant pervert, which in the end all add up to the same thing.

40) Brother from Another Planet (1984, John Sayles)

I went through a small John Sayles binge earlier in the year, but basically this and one other film (which we’ll hear about) was all I could find through my channels at the time.

This is a funny little film, essentially a Blaxploitation parody, in the same way that Jackie Brown could be. Joe Morton stars as the unexplained extra-terrestrial presence whose resemblance to an African American gets him taken in by a Harlem community and whose unexplained knack for fixing gadgets gets him employed as a repairer of arcade machines.

At the heart of it, this is quite a silly film, but one whose unpretentious roots in satire and film pastiche keep its fantastical feet firmly on the ground. A nicely eclectic supporting cast helps make this an interesting world and lend it a surprisingly warm vibe.

39) Certified Copy (Copie Conforme, 2010, Abbas Kiarostami)

Feel like this one was a long time coming as well, given how much critical and intellectual jizz was spurted all over this film when it came out a couple of years ago. Given as well my esteem for all of Kiarostami’s work, it was very necessary for me to catch what I think was his first effort working outside his native Iran.

This was recently referred to as a Linklater-esque film, which was my first thought during it as well. It’s very talky, and very meandering in both its aesthetic and its vision.

At the same time, the central conceit of the film – the relationship between its two central characters played by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, and the mysterious ambiguity around its nature – is unmistakeably Iranian. The blurring of reality and fiction comes out both in the way Binoche plays with Shimell, and the way the film plays with us.

Among Kiarostami’s work I would still rate Taste of Cherry his masterpiece, but this is most certainly the most accessible his philosophy and style have been.

38) The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman)

As with most people who have sense, I have a like-hate relationship with Robert Altman. I hate his films that are shit and overrated (like MASH and A Prairie Home Companion) and like well enough his films that aren’t shit and overrated, and this is one of these.

I felt I needed to catch up with this one because it was brought up a lot on Filmspotting, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Elliott Gould plays Raymond Chandler’s famed sleuth Philip Marlowe, in an older and more settled form than we saw in The Big Sleep. In fact the pre-credit sequence (basically, his cat is hungry and he needs to go to the store for more food) is one of the most off-puttingly weird and uneventful film openings I can recall. However, as Marlowe gets more and more swept away in a complex and corrupt criminal plot, it starts to make sense of the cat sequence as it becomes clear he’s kind of getting over this shit and just wants to be left alone.

The storyline is noirish but the aesthetic isn’t. Altman seems to play with the genre here – playing a nonchalant hand with dialogue and an unexpectedly bright palette – in the same way he does in McCabe and Mrs Miller (still to come) with the western genre. While I don’t think there’s any great revolution here, it’s an enjoyable film with the right amount of cynicism and the right number of twists.

37) Atlantic City (1980, Louis Malle)

So a few films ago I referred to The Killing of a Chinese Bookie as the antithesis to this film. I’ll get to that in a second, but firstly I have a confession to make. I’ve fallen in love this year. No, it’s not a pretty young girl that’s taken my fancy; and no, it’s not a little furry critter that I want to look after. What I've fallen in love with is ‘old Burt Lancaster’. As a young bloke, he was a creditable leading man, and he has a filmography to be immensely proud of up to about his 50s. But beyond that point, he is downright adorable.

Here he plays Lou, a small-fry criminal with delusions of grandeur, who gets caught up in a drug deal gone wrong by being flattered into being a fence. Although this and Chinese Bookie have a similarly gritty feel, and lots of people get killed in both, there’s a wry sense of humour throughout this film as it lampoons the criminal mentality that it seeks to portray. Where Ben Gazzara finds himself having to betray his own sense of moral courage, Burt Lancaster here finds himself acting more reprehensibly than he ever has as a huckster – and feeling more alive than ever.

I’ve found Louis Malle an oddly eclectic filmmaker, and this is some of his best work – entertaining and unsettling and humanistic all at the same time.

36) Super Fly (1972, Gordon Parks Jr)

Personally I wouldn’t count Brother from another Planet as Blaxploitation – unless you also include Jackie Brown – so this is the only real Blaxploitation film that I’ve seen.

Initially I have to admit I was a little confused by what I was watching, simply because the main protagonist here, played by Ron O’Neal, basically doesn’t look very black. But once I realised that he was our Blaxploitation hero, I was completely taken in by his pimp’s quest to break the shackles of his existence, while at the same time aiming to take vengeance on the white establishment that put him there.

Curtis Mayfield’s music is possibly the real star here though, doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of atmosphere and scene-setting. It’s all a big part of this film’s super-fly vibe, which is basically all I can say about it. It’s a real pleasure.

35) La Moustache (2005, Emmanuel Carrère)

Another film I watched purely on the insistent recommendation of my brother, and a very strange one.

It’s strange even just outlining the story. One day a man on a whim decides to shave off his moustache, and is a little perturbed by everybody’s failure to comment on it. Then it enters an unsettlingly Kafkaesque downward spiral as the people around him insist that he never had a moustache. Then basically he starts to go insane.

There are still far more questions than answers surrounding this film to me, but its blurry focus on reality is compelling, and Vincent Lindon’s performance in the lead role is strangely empathic. One doesn’t expect a film called ‘The Moustache’ to be so unrelentingly nightmarish, but even in the throes of its silly conceit it manages to throw up a hundred unsettling images that make you doubt the truth of the world.

34) Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, John Carpenter)

I caught this one on the tail end of my John Carpenter binge towards the end of 2013, and have to admit it made a huge impression on me.

It strikes early and it strikes big with a bit of a sucker punch as we see – well, I hate to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it so just see it before you read the next bit – a gang member just murder a little girl buying icecream. It’s kind of hilarious, because it’s so unremittingly black and white in terms of who’s good and who’s bad. You can kill all the cops, innocent civilians and heroes you like, but kill a little girl getting icecream? You’re a cunt.

So the ensuing two hours of tension and adrenaline are fuelled by an artificial sense of moral outrage at these really over-the-top villainous guerrillas who isolate and besiege a small town police station. It’s all just a bit of popcorny fun, but when it’s this well done I make no apologies for liking it, or for ranking it higher than high-brow stuff like Certified Copy.

33) The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012, Felix van Groeningen)

One of the few films I actually caught at the cinema this year, owing to some free Dendy tickets we had late in its run.

I feel like a lot has already been said about this film and its merits, because they should really be self-evident to anybody who watches it – its power, its heart-wrenching message of love and loss – but I will talk about what didn’t quite work for me.

It’s a film that’s split into sort of three parts – backstory, immediate past and present – and I found the tone of the different parts of the story as it wove its way through them to be so different that I found trouble reconciling them all. That’s not to say it’s not effectively done, but I felt such an overwhelming sense of pessimism that I started to lose sympathy for its characters. And that was a shame, because the story, the performances, the love of music that’s at the heart of the story and the backbone of the film, are all very moving. I just came out feeling a bit rubbish.

32) McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971, Robert Altman)

So back we go to the Robert Altman well of like-him-well-enough-or-hate-him-for-being-shit-and-overrated. And this is probably the closest he’s come to being actually loved by me.

This revisionist western is probably the best example of the sub-genre, having a very unglossed image of the old west and the frontiersmen who really made a go of it. Warren Beatty is at his unhinged best as the naïve McCabe who decides to open a whorehouse, while the wonderful Julie Christie provides a rare example of a fully-fleshed female character who is the primary source of both antagonism and wit.

Altman’s winter aesthetic here as well provides a winning formula: in stark contrast to the sparse and heat-ridden cinematography of your average western, he manages to capture a still and silent beauty of the snow-covered plains, while maintaining the genre’s focus on the unforgiving nature of both the landscape and the men who inhabit it.

31) Blue Valentine (2010, Derek Cianfrance)

After my enchantment with thefirsttwopartsof The Place Beyond the Pines last year, Derek Cianfrance’s earlier Ryan Gosling vehicle was a very high priority for me this year. And it didn’t disappoint.

Really telling a very similar story in a very similar way to The Broken Circle Breakdown, I guess this one worked a bit better for me because, in spite of the dark mood that surrounds it, it left me feeling just a spark of ambivalent hope for the future.

I love Ryan Gosling in practically anything (except a blender, amirite?) and while I don’t share the world’s love affair with Michelle Williams, she is truly excellent here as the young nurse caught between her work and an irascible boyfriend. There’s a pervading sense of frustration and injustice throughout this story, and while it didn’t quite captivate me like thefirsttwopartsof The Place Beyond the Pines, it certainly foreshadows the sober drama of Cianfrance’s next effort.

I am eagerly anticipating the upcoming The Light between Oceans.

30) Local Hero (1983, Bill Forsyth)

So I mentioned earlier in regard to Atlantic City that this year made me fall in love with 'old Burt Lancaster'. This is the film that did it.

Although he’s largely absent throughout the middle of this film, Lancaster is so unbelievably adorable as the ageing businessman whose fixation on stargazing seems to be detracting attention from the lucrative landgrab of isolated Scottish seaside that his company is partaking in.

Most of the heavy lifting is done by Peter Riegert and an absurdly young Peter Capaldi as, respectively, Lancaster’s company representative and the young impressionable Scot charged with the task of looking after him. It’s an extremely sweet, funny and human film, elevated beyond comprehension by Lancaster’s just… I don’t know, he’s just so fucking adorable. Don’t you just want to hug him?

29) Stories we Tell (2012, Sarah Polley)

As with most years, I’ve watched various excellent documentaries this year, some of which (Gimme Shelter; The Act of Killing) you saw in the previous sludge-in-the-middle post, but some of which were just a cut above.

Sarah Polley’s autobiographical documentary uncovering her family past is certainly one of those; it’s buoyed largely by the fact that her family history and personal story is extremely interesting, and the members of her family that she interviews to tell the story all charismatic.

It’s a very personal story, and everything is laid out bare for us to take in, but as per the best modern documentary filmmaking, the way in which Polley edits and constructs the story here is what makes it so compelling. It’s like we’re reliving the twists and turns of the story ourselves at the same moments when the family themselves are encountering them. Sweet and poignant, this is ultimately just a very likeable film full of very likeable people.

28) Blue Jasmine (2013, Woody Allen)

Wow, so I was a bit surprised at how high this ended up landing on my list, but at the same time I can’t really argue with it.

I think Woody Allen has made some of his best work in recent years turning his inventive and humorous idea on time-worn stories. Match Point was still, to me, his best post-2000 work, but possibly now pipped by this wonderfully subversive take on A Streetcar Named Desire.

Cate Blanchett largely carries this film on her towering shoulders, in an amazingly powerful but nuanced performance that rightly got her a long, long-overdue Best Actress Oscar (as an aside, can we please FINALLY admit that Gwyneth Paltrow winning in 1999 was just an abhorrent, unfunny joke and give the award back to Cate?).

What carried me through though was the tricks that Woody plays with the familiar story in order to subvert expectations, in particular the unexpected twist for the Stanley character and his relationship with Jasmine’s sister. As with the unexpected diversion from Crime and Punishment that Match Point takes, I was sucked in again and I enjoyed it immensely.

27) Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer)

And here we are with the most underseen but talked-about film of the year, and also one of the most weird and unsettling experiences I’ve had with a film, not just this year but ever.

No setup, no explanation is given in this film to why an alien creature who looks like Scarlett Johansson is scouting the streets of Glasgow to find single men and lure them into her lair. No clear storyline is apparent behind its sequence of sketches and no remittance is given from the screechily brilliant score from Mica Levi (robbed at the Oscar nominations, as an aside).

But for all its unnerving weirdness, there’s something scintillating about this elusive film. It goes through many memorable bumps before it arrives, again with no exposition, at its unforgettable conclusion. There are certainly more accessible films out there, including David Lynch’s entire oeuvre, but this is a mystery worth pondering.

26) Le Samouraï (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)

I sourced and watched the good bits of Jean-Pierre Melville’s filmography this year after years of hearing their merits espoused on Filmspotting. While I very much enjoyed Le Cercle Rouge, it fell sadly into the realm of middling sludge on my rankings, and this one pips it for a proper write-up.

Falling into a similar criminal milieu though, Le Samourai again stars the inimitable Alain Delon as a hitman who gets on the wrong side of his employers when he is spotted leaving the scene of a hit. Delon really charges the film forwards in his unflappable way, maintaining an inhuman levelheadedness as every step he takes seems to be mined.

This is just very effective thriller making, that relies heavily on the ‘thrill’ rather than any kind of dark aesthetic or heavy-handed message. Melville understands, and demonstrates adroitly here, that the first purpose of filmmaking is to entertain, and this journey is definitely one of the most exciting ones I embarked on this year.

25) Short Term 12 (2013, Destin Daniel Cretton)

Right, well while I talk about this film I might be a bit…

…um, distracted, as I’ll be having to…

…fight off the angry hoards of indie film-lovers trying to…

…set fire to me for having this down as low as number 25.

Honestly I did really like this admirably subtle yet powerful look at the residents of a halfway house for troubled youths. Brie Larson was excellent in a well-rounded performance as the supervisor of the facility who is trying to come to terms with her own past as well as steer the kids in her care onto the right path.

But somehow - and I don’t know how - it just didn’t click for me in the way that it seems to have for everybody else without exception. Mainly it just didn’t surprise me, I think. While it carries itself with aplomb throughout, it went into only the places I expected it to from the plot description, so no matter how well it does all of that, it just won’t blow me away.

24) La Bête Humaine (1938, Jean Renoir)

I’ve had a similar relationship so far with Jean Renoir as the one I’ve had with Robert Altman, albeit with only two films prior to this point. I got absolutely bugger all from La Grande Illusion, while Regle du Jeu I liked well enough. So where does La Bête Humaine fall into this tableau?

It’s at the top, actually. I found myself really drawn into this strange, slightly noirish tale of love and murder on the railways of France. As with other films from this sort of era and movement, there is a very slow build-up until we’re fully exposed to the key players of the story, but from there is a wonderful drawing out of moral ambivalence and a blurry sensation of justice.

Jean Gabin is esoterically brilliant as the Human beast of the title, an otherwise placid man prone to uncontrollable fits of rage, who falls in love with the young lady he witnesses in a compromising position following a murder aboard his train.

As with Renoir’s other films, there’s a sense of humour underlying much of this that I can’t quite explain, nor even confirm that it’s there, but it’s a really interesting story told with just the right amount of ambiguity.

23) Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)

Yes, well you knew this was coming. I’ve defied expectation, though, by not having it as my number 1 film of the year. Unfortunately, since of course my list is not films from this year but all films I saw for the first time this year, and looking down at my list, I’m forced to admit that I have, in fact, made the predictable and clichéd choice of this as number one film of 2014.

The truth is that I’m generally pretty quickly drawn into a Linklater talkie such as this – he has an effortless way of casually strolling into your head and leaving a little nugget behind – and when it also manages so deftly to paint such a profoundly moving coming-of-age portrait, you know you’re onto a winner.

Having heaped all that praise on it, the thing that troubles me about this film is quite simply that I don’t feel Linklater needed to make this a 13-year project. He really could have achieved the same level of humour, meaning and profundity with a few different young actors and some creative ageing makeup effects for everybody else. That’s not to say that the long drawn-out filming process is at all a hindrance here – it’s another part of his miraculous effortlessness – but simply that the deceptively simple story we get here doesn’t quite measure up to the enormous ambition of the project itself.

Going in not knowing, I could easily have believed that it wasn’t filmed over 13 years but with makeup and different child actors, but it would still have been a thoroughly enjoyable and meaningful film. I’ll have more to say about the measure of ambition in a couple of films’ time.

22) Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätte Komma In, 2008, Tomas Alfredson)

I picture some people reading this – well, I don’t really picture anyone reading this except you, Mother, but if they did – occasionally just perking up at the mention of a hugely popular film such as this that was all the absolute rage for a while and has since dropped a little out of consciousness.

Yes, it took me a long time to get on this particular bandwagon, largely because I was trying to find this through my illegitimate streaming channels, and couldn’t find a subtitled version, but it was worth the wait.

This is the sort of film that only European filmmakers could produce (I haven’t yet seen the remake, Let Me In, but my point still stands regardless). It’s a gritty, dark, actually quite disturbing horror flick that somehow manages the impossible feat of being at the same time warm and even romantic.

Tomas Alfredson already had a large international following when he made the first of his that I saw, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so having enjoyed his work in that later effort it was really a revelation to go backwards and see where his reputation came from. It’s extremely well-earned – this is just chilling, atmospheric filmmaking.

21) Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater)

There, didn't I tell you that you wouldn’t have too long to wait for me to talk more about Linklater and the measure of ambition? There you were complaining about how much you wanted me to talk more about Linklater and the measure of ambition immediately, and you couldn’t wait, but that wasn’t such a bad interlude while we dissected Swedish vampire movies, was it? There, there.

So Before Midnight, the third in Linklater’s Before trilogy and its complete culmination at this point, is an extremely ambitious effort and, to my mind, completely equal to that ambition. Set another nine years on from Before Sunset, this film sees Celine and Jessie as the couple that we always dreamed they would become through the first two films, but also the couple that romantic films always seem to expunge from the possibility of existence, one whose relationship is becoming frayed and worn with age and life.

This is an astutely mature and intelligent film, something that could only be produced over a long thought process by a number of incredibly creative minds. It’s a sobering reminder of the nature of human relationships, but one that retains a profound romanticism and sense of hope.

The funny thing is I think I’d get shouted down if I were to loudly declare in the shadow of Boyhood that this is Linklater’s most ambitious and most successful masterpiece, and yet it was only twelve months ago that everybody was saying those very words. I’d say what a two-year period he’s been having, but yeah, this one was really in the works for a full 18 years since 1995, far longer than even Boyhood can claim. But in terms of film releases, the last two years have been very kind to Linklater, and he's been very kind to us.

So that's my write-ups, part one. Just to confuse everybody further, I will next be leaping back to count 'up' my bottom 31 films of the year before we get to delve into my top 20.