December, 2014 › Ragne Selis | UI/UX Design & Product Strategy Portfolio

16. December 2014 - No Comments!

Year 2014 In Movies & Music

This is my year 2014 in movies and music.

Best Movies

10. Clouds of Sils Maria (IFC Films)

Director: Olivier Assayas
Country: France, Germany, Switzerland
124 minutes| Drama
Rotten Tomatoes: 89%, IMDb: 6,8

Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is an actress at the peak of her international career who is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years earlier. Back then she played the role of Sigrid, an alluring young woman who disarms and eventually drives her boss Helena to suicide. Now she is being asked to step into the other role, that of the older Helena. She departs with her assistant (Kristen Stewart) to rehearse in Sils Maria, a remote region of the Alps. A young Hollywood starlet with a penchant for scandal (Chloë Grace Moretz) is to take on the role of Sigrid, and Maria finds herself on the other side of the mirror, face to face with an ambiguously charming woman who is, in essence, an unsettling reflection of herself. (C) Sundance Selects

9. Dallas Buyers Club (Focus Features)

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Country: USA
117 minutes| Drama
Rotten Tomatoes: 94%, IMDb: 8,0

Matthew McConaughey stars in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB as real-life Texas cowboy Ron Woodroof, whose free-wheeling life was overturned in 1985 when he was diagnosed as HIV-positive and given 30 days to live. These were the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and the U.S. was divided over how to combat the virus. Ron, now shunned and ostracized by many of his old friends, and bereft of government-approved effective medicines, decided to take matters in his own hands, tracking down alternative treatments from all over the world by means both legal and illegal. Bypassing the establishment, the entrepreneurial Woodroof joined forces with an unlikely band of renegades and outcasts - who he once would have shunned - and established a hugely successful "buyers' club." Their shared struggle for dignity and acceptance is a uniquely American story of the transformative power of resilience. (c) Focus Features

8. Force Majeure (Magnolia Pictures)

Director: Ruben Östlund
Country: Sweden ,France, Norway, Denmark
120 minutes| Art House & International, Comedy, Drama
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%, IMDb: 7,3

A critical favorite and word-of-mouth sensation at this year's Cannes Festival, where it took the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard, this wickedly funny and precisely observed psychodrama tells the story of a model Swedish family-handsome businessman Tomas, his willowy wife Ebba and their two blond, pre-teen children-on a skiing holiday in the French Alps. The sun is shining and the slopes are spectacular but, during lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche turns everything upside down. With panicked diners fleeing in all directions, Ebba calls out for her husband as she tries to protect their children. Tomas, however, makes a decision that will shake the family's world to its core. Although the anticipated disaster fails to occur, his marriage now hangs in the balance as he struggles to reclaim his role as family patriarch. (C) Magnolia Pictures

7. Risttuules / In the Crosswind (Allfilm)

Director: Martti Helde
Country: Estonia
90 minutes| Drama
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%, IMDb: 7,8

"Risttuules" is very emotional and tragic movie about mass deportation to Siberia based on memories of Erna. It all started 14th of June 1941 when trucks came for the innocent families with their children where they headed to train station and later by animal wagons to Siberia. "How to survive hunger, cold, humiliation, losing friends and freedom, but still keep living on, when almost all hope is lost?"

6. Nebraska (Paramount Pictures)

Director: Alexander Payne
Country: USA
115 minutes| Drama
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%, IMDb: 7,7

Director Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) takes the helm for this black and white road trip drama starring Bruce Dern as a tempestuous Missouri father who's convinced he's won a million dollar magazine sweepstakes, and Will Forte as the son who grudgingly agrees to drive him to Nebraska to claim his winnings. Bob Odenkirk and Stacy Keach costar. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

5. Her (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Director: Spike Jonze
Country: USA
126 minutes| Drama, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Special Interest, Romance
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%, IMDb: 8,0

Spike Jonze takes the helm for this comedy about a withdrawn writer (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his computer's highly advanced operating system. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

4. 20,000 Days On Earth (Drafthouse Films)

Director: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
Country: UK
97 minutes| Documentary, Musical & Performing Arts, Special Interest
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%, IMDb: 7,5

Drama and reality combine in a fictitious 24 hours in the life of musician and international cultural icon, Nick Cave. With startlingly frank insights and an intimate portrayal of the artistic process, the film examines what makes us who we are, and celebrates the transformative power of the creative spirit. (c) Drafthouse

3. Interstellar (Paramount Pictures)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Country: USA, UK
169 minutes| Action & Adventure, Science Fiction & Fantasy
Rotten Tomatoes: 71%, IMDb: 8,6

With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars. (C) Paramount

2. La vie d'Adèle / Blue Is the Warmest Colour (IFC Films)

Director: Abdel Kechiche
Country: France, Belgium, Spain
187 minutes| Drama
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%, IMDb: 7,8

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR centers on a 15-year-old girl named Adèle (Exarchopoulos) who is climbing to adulthood and dreams of experiencing her first love. A handsome male classmate falls for her hard, but an unsettling erotic reverie upsets the romance before it begins. Adèle imagines that the mysterious, blue-haired girl she encountered in the street slips into her bed and possesses her with an overwhelming pleasure. That blue-haired girl is a confident older art student named Emma (Seydoux), who will soon enter Adèle's life for real, making way for an intense and complicated love story that spans a decade and is touchingly universal in its depiction. (c) IFC

1. True Detective - Season 1 (HBO)

Director: Nic Pizzolatto
Country: USA
187 minutes| Crime, Drama, Mystery
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%, IMDb: 9,1

New Orleans native and novelist Nic Pizzolatto ("Galveston") wrote and created this crime drama that focuses on a pair of homicide detectives in Louisiana and a trail of murder, mayhem and mystery that spans 17 years. Featuring the music of T Bone Burnett and directed by Cary Fukunaga, the series opens in 1995 as good ol' boy Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) and his brooding, Texas-born partner, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), are called to the scene of a gruesome, ritualistic killing of a young woman, who was posed by a tree, adorned with deer antlers on her head and accompanied by strange symbols. Fast-forward to 2012, Hart and Cohle are grilled by another pair of detectives (Tory Kittles, Michael Potts) who are investigating a case that bears striking similarities to the one before. In between is a glimpse of 2002, when Hart and Cohle struggled to deal with their inner demons in separate but equally destructive ways.