At this time, I offer a mere list, except for a note on “Ida.” I’ll return to the list and annotate it once my fingers recover from premature ribbon-tying and tree-dressing, as well as the other “paralyzing joys of the season” (to quote James Agee).Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” is by far the best movie of the year. “I’m not emotionally excited by the power of cinema’s tricks anymore,” Pawlikowski has said, and, at first, the stillness and concentration of his images (the move is set in Communist Poland, in 1961) is startling; then fascinating; then awe-inducing. Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), the young novice ordered by her Mother Superior to investigate her past
before taking orders, has a mysteriously blank oval face and wide-open eyes upon which the joys and miseries of the world play. Ida, as it turns out, is Jewish. Her aunt and real-world tutor, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza), now a minor state judge, formerly a big-shot in the Communist regime, has been twice betrayed—by the slaughter of the Polish Jews, abetted by many Poles, and by the devolution of post-war Communist idealism into Stalinist fraud and oppression. The film portrays the meeting of innocence and knowledge, of course, but so much more as well, and displays one of the most expressive uses of black-and-white cinematography in the history of the medium.
The others, in alphabetical order:
“American Sniper”
“A Most Violent Year”
“Birdman”
“Boyhood”
“Get On Up”
“Mr. Turner”
“National Gallery”
“Selma”
“Snowpiercer”
BY DAVID DENBY
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/2014-year-review-ten-best-movies-denby
