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9) American Hustle
Not a film so much as a collection of hairstyles in search of a story, the critical acclaim for American Hustle has been nothing short of baffling to me. It's a perfectly fine, energetic comedy that's carried by a hugely appealing cast, but beyond that, it's hard to say what the film is actually about, or why anyone would ever bother to tell this story (or why they would tell it this sloppily). It's as false a creation as Christian Bale's hairpiece, and a disappointing empty film from David O. Russell, who increasingly seems intent on making film that have nothing to say, but say it very loudly. In five years, people will look back on the way everyone went gaga for American Hustle the same way we now wonder why anyone cared about The English Patient.


8) Dallas Buyers Club
Like Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club is a film that is raised up by the quality of its performances, rather than its own intrinsic quality. With some films, you could imagine other people being swapped in for the key actors and the film still being solid, but it's pretty much impossible to imagine this film working without Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, both of whom give immensely likable and charismatic performances that just about hide the fact that the film doesn't really do much with its premise. For a Best Picture nominee that so prominently features AIDS, it's surprisingly swift and light, playing out as a caper more than a weighty drama, and that's where its success as a story lies for me. Any other performers would have tried to be too angsty or weighed down by the seriousness of the situation, but McConaughey finds a way to play the character as an indomitable shitkicker, and in the process turns a life-or-death struggle into something fun and enjoyable. Not a great film across the board, but the quality of those performances is hard to deny.

7) 12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen has only directed three feature films, but he's already established himself as one of the world's premier purveyors of punishing, brutal depictions of human ugliness. 12 Years a Slave is both his ugliest film to date - few subjects are as dehumanizing and horrible as slavery - and his most stately and accessible. That obviously paid off in terms of making the film a success, and one that attracted a fairly broad audience, but it also makes it feel more like a history lesson than a great film. The story of Solomon Northup is an undeniably powerful one, and one that fully deserves to be told, but most of the strongest moments are the ones where it illustrates the different forms that slavery took, and how it shaped every interaction in America, rather than the more conventional story of the brutality Solomon endured. It's not the best film nominated for Best Picture this year, but it's probably the most important, and as such deserves the win more than any of the others.

6) Philomena
Even though it's been nominated for Best Picture, I still feel as if Stephen Frears' Philomena is under-rated. It seems like an amiable enough crowd pleaser, an odd-couple comedy about a woman and a journalist going in search of the woman's lost son, but it's a much hardier movie than that. Without losing sight of the heart and humor of Philomena herself, the film manages to ask very angry, pointed questions about the actions the Catholic Church took in separating young children from their unwed mothers, and engages in a genuinely honest debate about faith versus atheism in a way that doesn't demonize or lionize either side. It manages a deft balance of being one of the funniest and angriest films of last year, and has some real shocking, surprising twists and turns that are best enjoyed, rather than revealed. A really strong and compelling piece of work.

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