Sam Woolf’s 10 Best Films Of 2014

4) The Grand Budapest Hotel

By sheer attrition, The Grand Budapest morphed from being, in my eyes, another charming bit of Wes Anderson frippery, into perhaps 2014’s most purely pleasurable viewing experience. Minor imperfections don’t really amount to much when taken as part of the splendiferous pyramid Anderson structures out of a four-layer narrative, one backed by Alexandre Desplat’s indelible score. The imagination of The Grand Budapest Hotel is boundless, but its framing, staging, and editing further establish Anderson’s brand of whimsy as the product of authoritarian rigor.

At the centre of the decadent, decade-spanning matryoshka doll is Ralph Fiennes, giving a career-highlight performance as Monsieur Gustav H. Refined but garish, irascible and romantic, Gustav is a character found only in myth and movies. As the vanguard of a more dignified time that only ever existed in the minds of those struck with Golden Age nostalgia, Fiennes delivers a performance as delicately layered as the rest of the film. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s madcap requiem for an era of culture and cinema gone by, one fondly remembered not because it was perfect, but because to forget it would be wasteful. And wasteful is beneath the standards of The Grand Budapest Hotel.