Today the New York Film Critics will be announcing their winners for the “best of” 2014, but beating them to the punch already have been British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound, France’s iconic Cahiers du Cinéma and filmmaker Edgar Wright who shared his list with Esquire with a few notes on each.
Only one film spans all three lists, that being Jonathan Glazer‘s Under the Skin, while Wright’s list does have a few additional titles in common with that of Sight and Sound, those being Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman and Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash.
Wright’s list is presented in no particular order, though there clearly seems to be a theme as he tells Esquire, “We need to make more original movies and audiences would do well to support original movies, for the future of the medium… I tire of franchises, remakes, and endless sequels. All of the movies I [mention below] work great as standalone stories. More please.” It will be interesting to see what Wright thinks once we have The Lego Movie 2, The Lego Batman Movie and Lego’s Ninjago, though, I guess, all three could be presented as he says, “as standalone stories”.
Check out each list below.
Edgar Wright
- Boyhood
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Birdman
- Snowpiercer
- Interstellar
- Nightcrawler
- Under the Skin
- The Lego Movie
- Whiplash
- Edge of Tomorrow
Sight and Sound
- Boyhood
- Goodbye to Language 3D
- Leviathan (tie)
- Horse Money (tie)
- Under the Skin
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Winter Sleep
- The Tribe
- Ida (tie)
- Jauja (tie)
- Mr. Turner (tie)
- National Gallery (tie)
- The Wolf of Wall Street (tie)
- Whiplash (tie)
- The Duke of Burgundy
- Birdman (tie)
- Two Days, One Night (tie)
- Citizenfour (tie)
- The Look of Silence (tie)
- The Wind Rises (tie)
Cahiers du Cinéma
- Li’l Quinquin
- Goodbye to Language 3D
- Under the Skin
- Maps to the Stars
- The Wind Rises
- Nymphomaniac
- Mommy
- Love is Strange
- Le Paradis
- Our Sunhi
