The 10 Best Indie Films Of 2014

2014 was one hell of a good year for indie film - so good in fact, that for this year's list I'm ready to discount any pre-2014-Oscar releases in somewhat resolute confidence that I'll still have badass set of movies on my hands by the time the dust has cleared. But first, some pre-list disclaimers: I have not seen Inherent Vice. It's not yet come out on this side of the Atlantic, and though I will wait with bated breath to catch it on opening night, I cannot comment on a movie I have not gotten the chance to sit through. The same applies to Selma. Please forgive me accordingly. While I enjoyed both Whiplash and Boyhood, I was not bathed in the kind of awe that appeared pretty much unanimous with the rest of the cinema-going public (I guess I'm just a moron). I know this is a bigger ask, but do try your best to bear with me. Nor have I seen Force Majeure. I'm pretty useless at this movie thing. As already mentioned, all Oscar race films from January and February of this year are to be discounted, meaning that if it had the chance to be up for awards last March 2nd, it cannot be on this list. Filth came out a year ago in Britain (thus its inclusion in my list of last year's best indie flicks) and will thus be discounted from the running this year - though if I had my way I'd put it in this year and every year until the end of time. With that out of the way, on with the list! 10) The Duke of Burgundy Peter Strickland should be a way bigger deal than he is. The man is an innovative and original cinematic force, creating brilliant and cine-literate pieces of art that deserve a much wider viewership than they garner. Strickland's follow up to 2012's eerily magnificent Berberian Sound Studio is equal parts sensual and darkly hilarious - a bold analysis of a lesbian sub-dom relationship in a timeless and placeless patch of European picturesqueness. Beautifully shot, oddly touching, infinitely fascinating and with nary a male speaking role in sight, The Duke of Burgundy officially cements Strickland as a man at the forefront of independent cinema. His nuanced analyses of the limitations of sexuality make for a spell-binding watch, rendering the film's dialogue-heavy 100 minute runtime a delightful breeze, alternately swooning and swirling in a kaleidoscopic drama of private mannerisms. 9) Life Itself As one of those few, sad guys who actually spends a great deal of time reading and gleaning great entertainment from pieces of film criticism - much in the way a normal person gleans entertainment from watching the damn things - Roger Ebert swiftly became a bit of an icon to me. Not only was he a titan of criticism and the man who all but singlehandedly elevated it to its own niche art form, but his massive back catalogue of books and reviews provided me with days of enjoyment (and, more than occasionally, seething annoyance). I didn't always agree with Ebert, but the guy loved movies so earnestly, and wrote with such passionately measured prose that I had to begrudgingly accept the validity of his opinions - even on Titanic. Life Itself is a perfect illustration of just how phenomenal a human being Ebert really was. Steve James' heartfelt documentary interweaves Ebert's belligerent early years and incredibly personal footage of the great man's last few weeks on earth with the joyous and emotional celebration that it deserves - painting the picture of a man who lived life to its fullest, made many mistakes, and was still fully ready to laugh at them and his own predicament even when faced with his own impending death. Roger Ebert was an incredible individual, and Steve James' loving documentary delivers the exact kind of honest-yet-emotional punch that both the man and his story deserve. 8) Blue Ruin Rarely have I seen a film so beautifully and intricately constructed. Only the second feature from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, Blue Ruin is about as lean and mean as filmmaking gets. Every single shot, line of dialogue and character decision is in complete service of the plot - not a pointless love triangle or overextended visual sequence in sight. Take THAT Peter Jackson! The violence is brutal, the script a perfect combination of muted foreboding and pitch black comedy and - in Macon Blair - we have the wussiest and most endearingly useless revenger this side of Hamlet. Let's not even get started on the perfect pacing, the gorgeous cinematography and a terrific but unpretentious reversal of traditional revenge drama color pallet. In short, this small, perfectly contained, immaculately efficient explosion of a film is the most perfectly constructed movie you're going to see this year - with the exception of maybe one other film a bit higher up the list. 7) Under the Skin What needs to be said that hasn't already been chirped 100 times from every corner of the globe about Jonathan Glazer's latest opus? Under the Skin, in its creepy, intensely unnerving way, is something really, really special. Scarlett Johansson delivers the performance of her career as an extraterrestrial tasked with luring the dregs of Scottish manhood to their doom, accompanied by the most brilliantly uncomfortable score this side of Jonny Greenwood's masterful caterwauling in There Will Be Blood. Glazer's film has a great deal to say about modern society, touching on everything from immigration to nightclub culture, but even viewed solely as a piece of cinematic art, Under the Skin is a film that all but demands to be watched over and over again. Trust me, you've never seen a movie quite like this before. 6) Ida Ida is not a big film and it's not a loud film. Yet its quiet and dignified grace marks it out as something truly special. There's nothing exactly revolutionary about Ida, but indie darling Pawel Pawlikowski makes up for this lack of innovation by crafting a near perfect drama. The tale of a novitiate nun and her booze swilling aunt taking a road trip across a bleakly Khrushchevian Eastern Europe may sound like some oddball black comedy, but this is filmmaking at its most honest and human. While its performances are delicately wonderful, the film's true twin stars are actually its visuals and editing. Clocking in at a very amenable 80 minutes, most of Ida's scenes last little more than a couple of minutes, providing this otherwise measured indie drama with oddly breakneck pacing. And then there's the cinematography - oh the cinematography. Shot in gorgeous Academy ratio black and white, Pawlikowski frames every single moment of the film with an aching beauty, often placing his solemn yet hopeful characters at the very edge of the screen, as if their God or their pasts or something in between is trying push them aside - into a future where old wounds are forgotten and the horizon is just a touch brighter. 5) The Grand Budapest Hotel At this point you either love Wes Anderson or you don't. While his filmmaking style has developed - The Grand Budapest Hotel representing the latest zenith in Anderson's particular brand of choreographed eccentricity - the basic boundaries remain the same: the dialogue is snappy, the colours saturated and the whole movie filled with an oddly loving sense of contrivance. While it may not win over many anti-Andersonites, The Grand Budapest Hotel's rampant box office success opened up his work to new audiences and ended up leading the line in a boom year for independent cinema at large. Spearheaded by a barnstorming Ralph Fiennes performance, Anderson's homage to the works of Stefan Zweig ran like clockwork, its intricate and bonkers scenes punctuated by perfect touches of detail that owe a debt to everything from Buster Keaton to the classic Ealing comedies. It's frenetic, relentlessly paced, absolutely gorgeous and - above all - a whole lot of wacky fun. 4) Snowpiercer Those who were lucky enough to catch Snowpiercer during its miniscule cinematic run (Harvey Weinstein sure knows how to hold a grudge) were treated to one hell of a spectacle. An A-list cast, a steam punk pirate John Hurt and a bonkers sci-fi concept brought to you by the Korean auteur behind The Host? Count me in. There was a great deal wrong with the film - its script often clunked, its internal logic was all over the place and the sound mixing made some key dialogue rather difficult to catch. But forget all that, Snowpiercer is gloriously and all encompassingly batshit insane, to the point where I could forgive it for just about anything. There's just so much weird stuff going on beneath the hood. Is there any other film of this caliber and pedigree that would - during a particularly brutal and gorgeously shot fight sequence - have its main character collapse to the floor, not felled by another combatant, but by a poorly placed dead fish? It seems unlikely. There's a scene around halfway through Snowpiercer's messy, joyous and uncut (SUCK IT Harvey) runtime where everything comes together. It's a sequence - one involving a wheelbarrow full of eggs and a wonderfully OTT cameo from Alison Pill - that elevates Snowpiercer from pitch black zaniness to flat out insanity, one that had me clutching my head in my hands trying to contain my paroxysms of bewildered joy. Before then it was a blast, from there on in it was an increasingly mad descent into hyper-stylized madness the likes of which I've rarely seen. It's not for everyone, with the film receiving a pretty nasty backlash after an initial round of near unanimous praise, but for the kind of people who like their high-concept sci-fi big and messy and irrevocably insane, Snowpiercer is a slice of deliciously imperfect perfection. 3) Birdman Any film that threatens to bring on a Michael Keaton resurgence is alright with me. And any film that puts Ed Norton in the tiniest Speedos known to man is even more alright with me. If you couldn't already tell, I fucking love Birdman. There's just so much right with it - the universally brilliant performances, Emmanuel Lubezki's ingenious cinematography, the snarky yet loving treatment of Broadway theater and - of course - the fact that Inarritu had the cajones to call an awards-hungry, high concept indie flick Birdman. And then there's the ambition of it, the sheer ballsy abandon with which this madcap, hilarious and deeply meta piece of cinematic wonder is cobbled together. It's films like Birdman that remind me why I love movies so much. Lubezki's loose camera movement and the well-publicized wizardry behind making the majority of the film look like it was done in one continuous shot lend Birdman a sense of freedom and improvisation like few films of its caliber - a tribute to the anything-can-happen nature of the stage theater that it holds lovingly yet sneeringly to its bosom. Every actor on the roster gets their time to shine, but everyone involved in this production, from the tea lady upwards, deserves their own curtain call for this one. Birdman is special, and I mean really special. It's a movie that feels like it can go anywhere, and usually does - and who am I to question where it goes? 2) The Infinite Man In a year that saw Bong Joon-Ho's first English language film and Jonathan Glazer's first steps into the remits of science fiction, there was one film in the sci-fi crowd that stood out more than anything. The Infinite Man is not an alien exploration of the modern day and it's not a post-apocalyptic piece of bombasticism, yet in its own quiet and loving way, it managed to knock every other film I'd seen this year (save one) completely out of the park. Melding indie rom-com eccentricities and mind-boggling time loops with the kind of effortless naturalism that has me worried about what's going on in writer-director Hugh Sullivan's head, The Infinite Man's ingenious and twisting screenplay is only matched by the beautiful, aching humanity at its core. This is a film that believes in love as much as it believes in smarts, boggling the mind and the tear ducts in equal measure, a piece of independent film at its most honest and brilliant. Think of it as the sentimental but still whip-smart younger brother of Primer. Where Shane Carruth's head-fucker wore trench coats in summer and listened to Joy Division, The Infinite Man is more of a Cure kind of kid, humming "Just Like Heaven" to itself as it writes crumby but adorable poetry to the latest in a long line of earnest and beautifully messy love affairs. 1) The Raid 2 The Raid was a surprise hit a few years back. The Indonesian martial arts film – directed by a chubby guy from Wales and starring a former truck driver – delivered brutality by the bucketload, melding phenomenal choreography with blistering editing in an orgy of pure, unadulterated badass. There were high hopes when aforementioned Welshman Gareth Evans returned to the fold for a sequel, this time backed by a bigger budget and the good will of martial arts fans everywhere, and boy did he deliver. Where The Raid was a contained 90 minutes of sparse dialogue and copious violence, The Raid 2 is a sprawling crime epic – but with even more violence. Many of the fight scenes in The Raid were undeniably brilliant, but the pitched battles that punctuate its sequel are peerless. I struggle to think of the last time I saw something this jaw-dropping on celluloid – not to mention that it looks absolutely gorgeous. If The Raid turned things up to 11, its follow-up turns things up to 20, with stunning cinematography, a vast wealth of eccentric characters, picturesque locales and more punches than you could shake a million sticks at. It stands, in this guy's humble opinion at least, as the greatest action film ever made. Honorable Mentions (In Alphabetical Order) 20,000 Days on Earth Coherence The Congress Enemy Foxcatcher The Guest Joe Lilting Locke Mistaken for Strangers Mr Turner Nightcrawler Only Lovers Left Alive The Rover The Skeleton Twins Song of the Sea Still Alice Wild Wild Tales