2014十大最佳电影 下

 

In a banner year for 84-year-old visionaries, Jean-Luc Godard issued his first 3-D feature, a skeptical phantasmagoria that proves the unstoppable innovative verve of the auteur who set movies on their modernist course with his 1960Breathless. When most other directors stopped modernizing, Godard went further, into a film-essay form that lays his cantankerous ideas about life, love, politics and film history over the smidge of a story -- here, the romantic debates of a youngish, often nude couple (Héloise Godet and Kamel Abdeli). As if he were making the first 3-D movie experiment, Godard shows nature in violent, supersaturated colors and, in one scene, plays with overlapping images: close one eye and see a man in the foreground, close the other and see the woman in the back. The real star is Godard's dog Roxy, a mournful observer and a great natural actor who embodies Darwin's observation that "A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself." This latest Godard may be hard to love, but it probes, confounds and exhilarates in equal and unique measure.

 

 

Most big summer movies are handsome, muscular and dumb; in a word,Transformers. Luc Besson's globe-trotting thriller, about a woman empowered and imperiled by the infusion of a powerful new drug into her nervous system, is different: it kicks assandtakes brains. Besson provides his usual fights and car crashes, before swerving toward a climax of Mensa movie madness in the spirit of a berserk2001. The French writer-director, who has often put women at the center of his action movies (La femme Nikita,The Professional,The Fifth Element), here creates a heroine whose rapidly expanding abilities make her the world's most awesome weapon -- in the process, promoting Scarlett Johansson from an indie-film icon and Marvel-universe sidekick to the movie superwoman she was destined to be. Taking place in less than a day, while simultaneously synopsizing three million years of human evolution in a hurtling 89 mins. of screen time,Lucyis the year's best, coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

 

 

The challenge to directors and cowriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller: transform the blocky LEGO figures, with painted faces and no arm or leg mobility, into charming or rapacious characters a viewer can instantly accept and believe in. That they did. Worker drone Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt ofParks and RecreationandGuardians of the Galaxy) gets mistaken as the Special One, the Neo of the LEGO matrix, by a cadre of underground rebels bent on overthrowing the evil President Business (Will Ferrell). "Anti-capitalist" was the phrase that Brietbart.com applied to this comedy about the nightmare merger of big government and predatory commerce -- somehow ignoring that it's also a feature-length commercial for the world's largest toy company. Politics aside,The LEGO Movieis a hoot, and a beaut. Shot in a CGI format that mimics stop-motion animation, it has an aptly rough, faux-primitive look, as if some brilliant kid had made a madly elaborate home movie the whole world could love. The sequel comes in 2018.

 

 

In what might have been a gimmick but was really a stroke of genius, Richard Linklater began shootingBoyhoodwhen its leading actor, Ellar Coltrane, was a first-grader and each succeeding summer shot a new segment involving Coltrane's Mason and his Texas family: mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) and elder sister Samantha (the director's daughter Lorelei). Mason's evolving life has its difficulties but few extremities; it unfolds rather than exploding in reality-TV's manufactured traumas. A home movie of a fictional home life, an epic assembled from vignettes,Boyhoodshimmers with unforced reality. To watch it is to page through a family album of folks you just met, yet feel you've known forever. This is life as most of us experience it, and which few movies document with such understated acuity. Embrace each moment, Linklater tells us, because it won't come again -- unless he is there to record it, shape it and turn it into an indelible movie.

 

 

Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) flawlessly executes his job as concierge at the Grand Budapest Hotel in the Republic of Zubrowka during the political upheavals of the 1930s. Intoning romantic poetry he may have made up on the spot, he attends to the sexual whims of his rich old-lady clients; or, as he says, "I go to bed with all my friends." Amour and mortality, romance and horror, comedy and tragedy duel to a sumptuous draw in Wes Anderson's richtorteof a movie -- perhaps the most seductively European film ever made by a kid from Houston, Texas. A dizzyingly complex machine whose workings are a delight to behold, the movie has a wry smile for frailties, a watchful eye for tyranny and a heart that, under the circumstances of this dark, fanciful tale, must be called heroic. This is not just an amazing contraption, though it is that; it's a real, funny, sad movie, whose performances (from Fiennes, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton and dozens of others) are as alert and elegantly composed as the décor. Grand isn't good enough a word for thisBudapest Hotel. Great is more like it.