The 10 Best Films of 2014

An actor taking one last shot at redemption. A young woman realizing that we all have to look back to move forward. The arc of boy to man. The best films of 2014 took viewers on unpredictable journeys that somehow still felt universal and emotionally resonant. The diversity of this unique year in film is reflected by a top ten that spans the globe from San Francisco to Poland to New York to Detroit to an imaginary place called Zubrowka, but that always draws the viewer back toward universal concerns. You didn't have to have grown up in Austin to see some of your childhood in Richard Linklater's cinematic experiment "Boyhood." You didn't have to be alive during the marches in Selma to feel the electricity in the air as protestors march in Ava DuVernay's "Selma." You didn't have to be stoned to feel the buzz of P.T. Anderson's addictive comedy "Inherent Vice."