The unmissable top 10 lists of 2014 (Part 2)

10. Mr Turner
11. The Grand Budapest Hotel
12. Inside Llewyn Davis
13. Two Days, One Night
14. Only Lovers Left Alive
15. Stranger by the Lake
16. Ida
17. Exhibition
18. Boyhood
19. Under the Skin

2014 will surely go down as a vintage year for cinema. The slight delay in release dates between the US and the UK meant that we began the year with a spate of Academy Award nominees – and eventual winners – including Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and Spike Jonze’s Her. To many it seemed like the year had peaked too early, and that nothing would live up to the films released in these first couple of months; they were wrong.

In particular 2014 was a year of return for a number of directors who had been absent for a while; the Coen brothers delighted with their sharp, pithy film Inside Llewyn Davis, which was centred around the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s; Mike Leigh made a welcome return to the screen after a four year absence with his biopic Mr Turner, in which Timothy Spall gave a performance of a lifetime as the seminal British painter, picking up a Best Actor award at Cannes; and Wes Anderson brought his trademark symmetry back into the cinema with The Grand Budapest Hotel, a snappy candybox of a film that featured a procession of celebrity cameos and taught us that Ralph Fiennes was actually extremely funny. Not to forget Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition, in which the breakdown of a relationship is explored in an unsettlingly surreal manner.

And it was not the UK/US film industries that proved successful this year. Pawel Pawłikowski’s Ida was an unforeseen masterpiece; with its monochromatic palette, jazzy soundtrack, and idiosyncratic framing style, it was like watching Poland through a Nouvelle Vague lens. From across the channel we had the Dardenne brother’s Two Days, One Night, in which Marion Cotillard cemented her reputation as a jewel in French cinema’s crown, and Stranger By The Lake, a shimmering, Hitchcockian mirage of a film that blended horror and homoeroticism.

But the main showdown this year took place between two diametrically opposite films, perhaps representing the head and the heart. On the side of the heart we had_ Boyhood_, Richard Linklater’s epic tale of a boy’s childhood and adolescence; filmed over a period of twelve years, it seemed both as intimate as a whispered secret and as broad as a Texan sky. Watching Mason grow up in front of our very eyes, from queuing up at a Harry Potter book launch to drinking his first beer, Boyhood acts both as a celebration of youth and a clear-eyed reminder of a childhood past.

However good _Boyhood _may have been, for me it was just beaten by the British sci-fi film Under the Skin, in which Jonathan Glazer had Scarlett Johansson wander around Scotland as an extra-terrestrial. With an almost clinical logic to it, Under the Skin is as cold and unforgiving as deep space; from its visuals, to its camerawork, to the acting talent, Under the Skin is nothing short of a masterpiece, not to mention its breathtaking, brutal soundtrack from composer Mica Levi. A brilliant exploration of alienation, modern isolation, and the folly of humanity, Under the Skin absolutely captivates, dragging you down into its icy depths.