You all don’t know what pain is until you attempt to vote on awards or do best of lists. 2014 in particular proved to be an incredibly difficult year to narrow down and so before I unleash my top 10 films of 2014 and personal ballot choices into the world, I wanted to pour a bit out for the stuff I had to leave off.
The wait is over, here we go again with Girls Season 4…the last time we saw these ladies; Hannah had been accepted to grad school in Iowa, Marnie was hooking up with Desi, Jessa was helping Beedie commit suicide, and Shoshanna wasn’t going to graduate on time. So let’s see what Lena and company have in store for us this season.
If there was a movie definition of the word bristling, Mommy would certainly be the representation. This movie, directed by Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, is brash, aggressive, and all-consuming, yet there’s never a moment you aren’t caught up in its spell. It’s one thing to make a movie that’s incredibly charged with energy, populated with characters who are at once repulsive and magnetic, but quite another to add the humanist element that makes you extremely invested in the movie.
Movies can often stir up emotions and speak to a current culture’s issues and climate. Often times this is a conscious choice, but in the case of a film like Selma, which comes at a time where protests and racial conditions have factored into the news cycle, a film can hit a portion of the zeitgeist. Thankfully for audiences Selma is more than just a film that people are using to explain the now, it’s a wonderfully made picture with crackling energy and a larger than life performance at the helm.
There are movies that make you happy and then there are movies that so thoroughly fill you with joy that you can’t help but burst into applause and feel giddy even weeks after seeing it. The Way He Looks, directed by Daniel Ribeiro and starring a marvelous young cast led by Ghilherme Lobo and Fabio Audi, definitely qualifies as the latter and you’d be hard pressed to find a movie more enjoyable to watch that this one.