Everybody knows these lists are subjective. Incomplete. Dumb. Necessary. Even for people whose job it is — or, you know, whose tenuous freelance gig it is — the idea of having seen everything, and being able to weigh in with authority on everything, at the end of the year or ever, is silly. You shouldn't trust us. Yet how the hell else are you supposed to at least begin narrowing down your list of must-sees?
For starters, "everything" means 50,000 movies, which is about how many get made around the world each year. Of this year's crop, The New York Times is reported to have reviewed nearly 1,000. Assuming an average running time of around 90 minutes, the most efficient way for any one person to see them all would be to place him or herself in front of a screen every minute of every day for more than two straight months. That's hard when you've still got a few hundred from last year to catch up on, more than 10 of which, surely, are great.
A little cravenly, perhaps, I call mine "favorites." I prefer to list them alphabetically. Not all of them were made in 2014, or even available for most people to see in 2014, but that's when I saw them. Release dates are shiftier than ever in these crazy abundant times. Last January in these pages I included Kumiko the Treasure Hunter and Winter Sleep in a list of films to be "Excited About in 2014," and whoops, it turns out neither was released locally this year. Of course, delayed releases don't prevent a person from still looking forward to things. Kumiko did play at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and I saw it, and now I can say for sure that you should see it too, whenever it comes back to town next year, assuming you have time.
Meanwhile the studios have dug into their risk-avoidance strategy, planning spinoffs and superhero sequels for the rest of your life. It is at least statistically possible that some of those will be good, maybe even good enough to wind up on an end-of-year list somewhere. But then there's all the other stuff. Recently announcing its 2015 lineup, the Sundance Film Festival reported that for the third consecutive year it's had at least 12,000 submissions. Send a film to just about any festival nowadays, and whether it's accepted or not the programmers probably will tell you they've had a record year for submissions. Never mind the embarrassment of streaming riches available for reasonable subscription prices at any given moment from the likes of Netflix, Mubi, San Francisco's own Fandor, or newcomer Vyer Films.
We live in a movie-lover's paradise, and also a tyrannical dystopia. In such a world, any given top ten list is at the very least an organizing principle. And although increasingly at the mercy of marketing-dollar Darwinism, any given list still manages to serve as a cultural compass. All you have to do is cross-check it against all the other lists.
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