Moviefone's list of the 20 best movies of the year so far is pretty good!
The 20 Best Movies of 2014 (So Far)
10. Lucy
There are a lot of claims leveled at big summer movies: there aren't enough female lead characters, they're too long, they're not about anything. Then, along comes "Lucy," starring Scarlett Johansson as a young woman who accidentally overdoses on an experimental drug and starts to utilize unprecedented parts of her brain, that wrestles with knotty existential issues and is also 88 minutes long. What is there not to love here? What makes "Lucy" such an incredible, kicky film, especially in an age of studio-mandated sequels and spin-offs, is how wildly original this is -- it's like if the "Tree of Life" was remade as a direct-to-Cinemax action movie. It's the two halves of "Lucy," the one that thinks that firing a whole lot of bullets is really cool versus the one that is pondering the entangled nature of ourselves and the cosmos, that make it so refreshing.
And Scarlett, coming off a truly incredible year that saw her dazzle in small personal projects ("Under the Skin") and large-scale franchises ("Captain America: The Winter Soldier"), is absolutely unstoppable. If you stayed away from "Lucy" because the trailers made it seem formulaic, hopefully you will visit it soon.
11. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
14. Under The Skin
For some, the movie's logline (Scarlett Johansson as a sexually omnivorous alien) was enough to get them into the theater. But once there, they watched something altogether different unfold: a dreamy, technically unparalleled marvel about the fluidity of sexuality and what really makes us human. It sounds like it could have been a direct-to-video "Species" sequel;
instead it's something that will be puzzled over and picked apart for years. Johansson, who has long been a cinematic sex icon, knowingly deconstructs her own image, turning the male gaze that's so heavily fixated upon her (even by writers in the New Yorker) into something powerful and dangerous and refracting it back upon those same men. And oh how she destroys those men. Director Jonathan Glazer, a certifiable genius who takes way too long between movies, filmed parts of the movie using tiny hidden cameras, but when he goes big (this was the guy who directed award-winning music videos for Jamiroquai, Radiohead, and UNKLE), his visual sense is almost overpowering. The sequences where Johansson marches sexually aroused young men to their doom (to the strains of Mica Levi's dissonant score) is more than unforgettable; it's the primordial, gooey stuff of nightmares.
Did your faves and fave movies make it???
