8) Boyhood
The first time you watch Boyhood, it’s hard to argue that Richard Linklater wasted his time by filming the story of an average kid from Texas over the course of the 12 years it took star Ellar Coltrane to age from adolescence to adulthood. Boyhood is both a science experiment and an astounding artistic achievement, a still frame look at each of the formative years of a young man’s life. Played in sequence, these glimpses into the lives of Mason Junior and Coltrane blur together to create the kind of life in motion film has always captured, but rarely from such a macroscopic level.
Watch Boyhood a second time, and its merits as an actual film are more open to debate, with peaks and valleys revealing themselves as they do in life itself. The real power to Boyhood isn’t in the decade-spanning conceit, but in how that conceit makes the viewer filter Mason’s growth through their own. The fact is, most teenagers aren’t very interesting people, which is why Boyhood isn’t really Mason’s story so much as it is your own. Like any good time capsule, the magic of first opening up to Boyhood won’t repeat itself until you yourself have something new to bring to it. As such, Boyhood may not be 2014’s single best film, but it will undoubtedly be among the year’s most enduring.