2014 ranking

Thus ends another year in which the last movie I see is the new Hobbit film. (Actually, for 2012 I think we watched “Tony Takitani” on the last day of the year so this only applies to 2013 and this year.) It’s almost the holidays, which will be very busy for us, so I can safely say that I won’t see another film this year, and I am so looking forward to doing so next year. This year, I am also having very emotional end-of-the-year feelings, and considering how bad I have become at keeping up with films (operas are very distracting from that, to be honest), I am even more grateful for the little bunch of you who have been following this blog for years. Thank you for being my readers and, for most of you, thank you for watching movies with me.

Onto the ranking of films from 2014 and 2013, as before, asterisks denote a film I have seen in theaters:

1. Boyhood *
2. Soshite Chichi ni naru (Like father, like son)
3. Coming Home
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel *
5. The Midnight After *
6. Ship bun *
7. Calvary *
8. Fack ju Göhte
9. Only lovers left alive *
10. Einstein and Einstein *
11. Kraftidioten *
12. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon *
13. Her
14. La Vénus à la fourrure
15. Chiisai Ouchi *
16. Bai Ri Yan Huo *
17. The Two Faces of January
18. Maleficent
19. Snowpiercer *
20. Arrete ou je continue *
21. Velvet Terrorists *
22. Guardians of the Galaxy *
23. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies *
24. Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 *
25. The Wolf of Wall Street
26. The One I Love
27. Love is strange *
28. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
29. Mo jing *
30. Tui na *
31. The Wind Rises
32. Praia do futuro *
33. La belle et la bete *
34. Bushi no Kondate
35. We come as friends *
36. 3x3D *
37. Transcendence
38. The Prince *

I didn’t actually watch that many movies this year (if I am not mistaken, it’s exactly 79), especially if you didn’t count the Berlinale films, but I sure saw a lot of recent films. It’s way more than I expected and it’s even more than my 2011 list, a year in which I watched a whole lot of movies and went to the movie theater a lot. I guess you just can’t beat the Berlinale, so we will see how next year will look like. One thing is for sure: I will be there for the Berlinale, but I will also most likely go to the opera a lot. All in all, it promises to be a good year.

Actually, this list is almost garbage except for the first few and the last items in the ranking. I normally make my rankings very quickly and am typically quite satisfied with them, but this time, I moved some movies up and down the list by up to 7-8 ranks. It’s really tough to compare some of these, but overall I would say 1-6 were mindblowingly amazing, 7-14 were fantastic, 15-24 were really good, 25-28 were nice, 29-31 had weaknesses and 32+ were pretty crappy. It was a great year in films for me – I thought “The Grand Budapest Hotel” would be my favorite film in the year but then it got topped by at least 3 movies. Wow.