1. Short Term 12
2. Her
3. The Wind Rises
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. Captain Phillips
6. The World’s End
7. Stories We Tell
8. Frances Ha
9. 12 Years A Slave
10. The Bling Ring
11. In The House
12. Blue Caprice
13. The Past
14. A Touch Of Sin
15. Computer Chess

There were so many great movies this year that selecting just the top 15 was like picking one bouquet from an entire display case of gorgeous flowers; when everything’s so beautiful, the decisions become almost arbitrary. On another day or a different mood, my list could look very different from the one I submitted, and include any or all of the following films. I greatly admired the way The Act Of Killing approached the surreal aftermath of Indonesian genocide with similarly surreal visuals, and the way Alfonso Cuarón reclaimed big-budget moviemaking for ambitious risk-takers with Gravity. The more I considered J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, the more I appreciated the risks it took, and its ambiguous ending, which rewards post-screening contemplation and conversation. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska had another of the year’s great unshakeable movie endings; its final shot echoed the one in the equally unforgettable Blue Is The Warmest Color, another impressive film that narrowly missed the cut.

Robbing Audrina Patridge, The Bling Ring

In a single long take, the members of the teen robbery squad known as “The Bling Ring” break into and ransack the gorgeous Hollywood home of The Hills star Audrina Partridge. Shot from a distance so the audience can see the entire house and all of the Ringers’ activities in it without a cut or camera movement, the sequence lets director Sofia Coppola show off her ample directorial skill—but in a movie that’s all about showing off, it’s an appropriate gesture. Viewers can follow everything the burglars are doing with complete clarity because Partridge left all her shades open and her lights on, inviting voyeurism and crystalizing all of The Bling Ring’s themes into a single image: wealth and celebrity intermingling with exhibitionism, the key motivation for every character’s actions. It’s not enough to have this stuff, or even to steal it. You’ve got to flaunt it.

A Touch Of Sin

Jia Zhang-ke’s tour of modern China is structured like one of the horrible “hyperlink movies” that came out in the wake of Crash: four loosely connected stories about the economic inequalities dividing the People’s Republic. But where so much of the hyperlink subgenre tends to reduce complex ideas to simplistic platitudes, A Touch Of Sin rejects easy answers; instead of boiling things down, Jia lets them simmer until they explode. A quartet of protagonists confront mundane fiscal problems—unemployment, inequality, corruption—with fanciful flourishes of ultra-violence; the thrilling yet troubling result is the rare movie that would unite readers of The Economist and Psychotronic Video. After years of more subdued work, Jia unhinged his aesthetic from the limitations of realism. A Touch Of Sin’s unrestrained imagery complements its tales of capitalism run amok, resulting in an ambitiously comprehensive look at a country in flux.

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