The 52 Most Anticipated Movies of 2014. The #1 and #2 most anticipated movies that emerged from our staff nomination process this year are, taken as a pair, indicative of the site’s philosophy as a whole.
We’ve always worked to promote an environment where it’s okay to love both Psycho and Sound of Music, where going from the multiplex to the art house is normal, where no genre or scale are left out of conversation. In other words, we like both kinds of music: country and western. It’s not like the top choices this year offer a twist ending or anything. Both are brimming with the potential to be excellent, so it’s unlikely that you’ll throw up your arms in disgust or anything. However, the full list itself might elicit some strong reactions — particularly because it reflects a growing need to look outside of studio pictures to fill a spandex-lined void.
As usual, we’ve chosen 52 because it represents the optimism that there will be at least one great movie, on average, per week. 52. Read our review 51. When You Can See It: TBA. Erlend Lavik. Christopher Nolan: escape artist. From our August 2012 issue The Prestige At one point in The Prestige, Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film about the rivalry between two magicians in 1890s London, Borden (Christian Bale) criticises a rival who has reached the top and lost his edge: “Milton’s got success, whatever that means, and now he’s scared, he won’t take any risks at all.
He’s squandering the goodwill of the audience with these tired, second-rate tricks…” That line might be read as an open challenge from Nolan to his rivals in mainstream popular cinema – that high-wire tradition whose reputation he has been upholding since he first captured attention with his second feature Memento in 2000. Each of Nolan’s films since that breakthrough courts the mass audience, while also demanding its concentration.
The sheer ambition of Nolan’s work has forced other blockbuster filmmakers to re-evaluate their process, leaving many floundering in his wake (Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, for one, seems facile and ineffectual in comparison). Here's why you should see 'Spring Breakers' this weekend: It's the most outrageous movie of the year, and James Franco is genius in it. I’ve never had much patience for the “transgressive” avant-grunge indie-cinema noodlings of Harmony Korine.
But Spring Breakers, his movie about four college women who go on a psychotic Spring Break bender (and, in vintage B-movie cautionary fashion, pay the price), is now threatening to become a crossover sensation in more ways than one. Without a doubt, it’s the first Korine movie that could at least be mentioned in the same paragraph with the word “mainstream.” Opening today on 1,100 screens, Spring Breakers will probably make more money in one hour than all of Korine’s previous films (Gummo, Julien Donky-Boy, Trash Humpers, etc.), added up together, did over the last 15 years. Then again, that wouldn’t be too hard — Korine’s films have basically been provocations falling in the forest without making a sound. I won’t hold my breath or make any predictions. Tradeoffs. The stupidest framing of the controversy over ubiquitous surveillance is that it reflects a trade-off between “security” and “privacy”.
We are putting in jeopardy values much, much more important than “privacy”. The value we are trading away, under the surveillance programs as presently constituted, are quality of governance. This is not a debate about privacy. It is a debate about corruption. Just after the PRISM scandal broke, Tyler Cowen offered a wonderful, wonderful tweet: I’d heard about this for years, from “nuts,” and always assumed it was true.
There is a model of social knowledge embedded in this tweet. It’s obvious, of course, why this divergence occurs. I want to introduce a word into the discourse surrounding NSA surveillance that has been insufficiently discussed. Blackmail is and has always been a consequential component of our political system. I’m going to excerpt a bit from a great, underdiscussed piece by Beverly Gage: [J. Bribery and blackmail go together, of course. Steven Soderbergh's State Of Cinema Talk.