I love contributing to year-end lists! I wrote a few blurbs for PopMatters' list of best films of the year.
The Best Films of 2014
No. 29: Only Lovers Left Alive
Vampires are overused. Scrubbed up and prettified to the point they can
be nonthreatening romantic partners for teenagers, today’s cinematic
vampires are, well, pretty toothless. With Only Lovers Left Alive,
director Jim Jarmusch has managed to salvage the vampire mystique. His
vamps are sexy, mysterious, brooding, and dangerous in equal measures.
Adam (Tom Hiddleston, proving he deserves the admiration of a thousand
Tumblrs) and Eve (Tilda Swinton, in one of her many standout
performances this year) don’t do much throughout the course of the
film—the two reunited lovers mostly bum around Adam’s Detroit home—but
throughout their conversations, Jarmusch manages to slip in
elbow-to-the-ribs jokes about history, ruminations about marriage, and
most importantly, a meditation into the creation of art itself. And Hiddleston and Swinton make it look so, so cool.
No. 22: Whiplash
In Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, music student and jazz drummer
Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) tells his girlfriend that he strives to be
one of the greatest performers of all time. In reality, it’s actor
Teller and his co-star—J.K. Simmons, playing Terence Fletcher,
Neiman’s teacher and bandleader—who really seem to be making a play
at greatness. The film is about their conflict, and how Neiman believes
he deserves greater acclaim as a drummer, with Fletcher arguing Neiman
needs to pay more dues. Their back-and-forth brings the movie to a fever
pitch—whiplash, indeed—with Teller and Simmons portraying the
extremes of anger, frustration, and ambition without being afraid to
show the egoism and callousness that go with them. It all builds to a
climax that’s nothing short of virtuosic, both musically and
cinematically.
No. 5: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson has a reputation for being constricting. His shots are so
composed and his aesthetic so specific that his stories barely have room
to breathe. The Grand Budapest Hotel refutes this
generalization. Anderson pulls back and widens the scope of his film,
spanning multiple time periods (with different casts of actors for
each), countries (imagined ones, at least), and even aspect ratios (with
frame sizes changing to denote the different timelines). Along with the
broadened scope comes a certain looseness not normally associated with a
director as controlling as Anderson; the actors, for example, each
speak with their own accents, whether or not it makes sense in the
context of the film. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pack the same
emotional punch as Anderson’s other films; it subtly moves from
sequences of light farce to moments of real grief, sadness, loneliness,
and anxiety about an approaching war. It adds up to a masterpiece on par
with Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger’s Boy with Apple.
No. 4: Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance
If there were a theme to 2014’s best movies, it would be about the
struggle of creation. From the generation of music, as seen in Whiplash and Only Lovers Left Alive, to the art of Mr. Turner, the year was full of characters fighting to get something out into the world. Birdman
is no exception. Not only is Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) trying to
mount a play (a stage adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love”), he’s also trying to complete an
act of self-invention. Along the way, director Alejandro González
Iñárritu completes his own metamorphosis, from a director known for
cross-cutting to one crazy enough to make a movie that looks like it was
all one take. The subtitle of the movie is “The Unexpected Virtue of
Ignorance”, but it should instead be “The Unabashed Joy of Ambition”. 
Click through to read the full list at PopMatters
