1. Her 
2. Short Term 12
3. Inside Llewyn Davis
4. The Act Of Killing 
5. 12 Years A Slave 
6. Frances Ha 
7. The World's End 
8. The Wolf Of Wall Street 
9. Nebraska
10. Stories We Tell 
11. Prince Avalanche 
12. Informant 
13. Computer Chess 
14. Gravity 
15. Upstream Color

The year was wonderful for documentaries about obsession, a theme that found its way into a number of great documentaries that did not make my list. Room 237 is ostensibly about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 pop classic The Shining and the various theories that have sprung up around its making and its ultimate meaning. But the film’s real subject is obsession and mankind’s capacity, and apparent need, for finding a very specific form of order and meaning where none seems to exist. It speaks to humanity’s need to really believe, no matter how ridiculous the belief might be. Documentary subjects don’t come much more obsessive or committed than Lance Armstrong, the beloved American hero who turned out to be something of a sociopathic, lying bully. Armstrong’s blistering, confrontational intensity—the characteristic that made him such a terrifying rival on a bike—also makes him a riveting subject in Alex Gibney’s The Armstrong Lie, a documentary on the biker’s comeback that morphed into a documentary about Armstrong’s long history of doping, lying, and manipulating the press and his teammates. Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known was crafted from a blueprint identical to that of his Oscar-winning documentary The Fog Of War—both films are intense conversations with the architects of controversial wars—and while Morris’ conversations with Donald Rumsfeld aren’t as revealing as those he conducted with Robert McNamara, in no small part because Rumsfeld is so gifted in the art of evasion, The Unknown Known is still essential as history as well as cinema. Morris remains one of film’s most dogged, determined interrogators. 

An infinite-martini lunch with Matthew McConaughey, The Wolf Of Wall Street

If an entire system is inveterately corrupt, as are all of its players, then what do honesty or integrity ultimately mean? That question was posed by a number of films in a movie year overrun with debauchery and bad behavior. In The Wolf Of Wall Street, a master of the universe played by Matthew McConaughey (in his third remarkable performance of the year, following Mud and Dallas Buyers Club) takes a green young recruit played by Leonardo DiCaprio out for a little liquid refreshment and between rounds of beating out an inscrutable rhythm on his chest that only his own coke-frazzled mind understands, he explains the way the world works for men like them. In order to not only survive but thrive in this world of no-holds-barred financial warfare, McConaughey tells DiCaprio’s character he must masturbate regularly to clean out his system, do massive amounts of cocaine to keep his energy level up, guzzle martinis like water to help offset all that cocaine, and have sex with prostitutes throughout the week. The mentor is swaggering and posturing, but there’s also something hilariously matter-of-fact about McConaughey’s delivery, as if he’s simply laying out the law of the land, not describing the rules of a scary, exhilarating new universe whose appeal seems to be that it doesn’t have any rules—just an endless series of green lights.

Prince Avalanche

David Gordon Green didn’t ultimately spend that much time in the creative wilderness after the breakout, career-redefining success of 2008’s Pineapple Express, and he kept sharp by directing episodes of television’s wonderful Eastbound & Down. But movies like his idiotic fantasy stoner comedy Your Highness were so dire that it felt like Green had betrayed his enormous talent and spent decades making movies prominently involving a minotaur’s cock. Thankfully, the Green that bewitched fans with small-scale gems like George Washington and All The Real Girls returned with Prince Avalanche, a lovely character study and mood piece about a pair of men working a stretch of road in a burned-out stretch of land in the 1980s. With his handsomeness and charm effectively hidden behind a Ned Flanders mustache, Paul Rudd plays a would-be Walden whose code of rugged self-reliance begins to fall apart as his lofty ideals confront ugly reality. Emile Hirsch is delightful as his co-worker and comic foil, a brash kid whose principals begin and end with a furious desire to get laid. And Green’s playfulness hasn’t abandoned him: In a wonderfully loopy inside joke, the leads are deliberately stylized like Mario and Luigi from Super Mario Brothers. It’s a joy to see Green’s infectious silliness working once again in service of wonderful characters and a delicate, sustained mood, powered by Explosions In The Sky’s evocative score.

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