Counting Down The Fourteen Best Films Of 2014
In this totally subjective game of lists, there can only be one winner.
#14: 12 Years A Slave, dir. Steve McQueen
British director Steve McQueen and his largely non-US cast brought something unflinching yet strangely classical to the historical ordeal of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man kidnapped into slavery. The accumulated weight of the camera’s implacable gaze is intended to disconcert and distress, to push against our instinctive compassion.
12 Years A Slave doesn’t shrink from the horror of rape, the grief of separation, or the mortification of flesh by the whip. But it enfolds them in moments of extraordinary beauty and stillness. Such is the abject and arbitrary cruelty of slavery.