- Tired of Top Ten lists and best-of polls? Too bad! Some of the best and most anticipated have hit the internet in the past week, including Senses of Cinema's epic World Poll featuring countless contributors the world over including myself and our own Daniel Kasman.
- Reverse Shot has published their Best of 2014 featuring eloquent annotations from various contributors. Meanwhile, Movie Mezzanine does the same but with a Top 50.
- On the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, Peter Labuza and Keith Uhlich discuss their favorites of the year.
- The latest issue of Film Comment is on shelves now and you can find some of the articles online now.
- The National Society of Film Critics selected Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage as their Best Picture. Jason Bailey writes on the controversial choice for Flavorwire.
- Above: a New Year's message/poem/film from Apichatpong Weerasethakul via our official Tumblr.
- Head over to Sight & Sound to see "Auteur in Space", kogonada's new video essay on Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.
- Michael Koresky writes on Teri Garr in Tootsie for the Criterion Collection:
"Tootsie is an idea, and it hovers over all the women in the film. It's intriguing to note, then, that the actor who appears in the center of the frame, facing the camera, when the film's title appears across the screen is not our star but Teri Garr. In this film about one man's gradual realization that women's experiences are indeed very different, even in our seemingly enlightened world, Garr's Sandy may have it the roughest."
- For Fandor, Michael Pattison writes on Nuri Bilge Ceylan:
"More than any other filmmaker today, he seems closer to taking the medium to another level—to something that is literary as well as cinematic, that is poetic as well as theatrical, to something that isn’t merely concerned with being “pure cinema” or other some pseudo-radical medium by which to conduct aphoristic half-thoughts to the enlightened few who get it."
- Above: 16 minutes (!) of behind the scenes footage from the set of Michael Mann's Blackhat (via The Film Stage).
- Patrick Kennedy writes on his friendship with the late Luise Rainer for The Guardian:
"It’s probably not possible to learn how to act by talking to an actor, not over champagne and cheesecake anyhow, but it seemed to me that her strength, which contradicted her demeanour, protected something very delicate inside her. Her eyes expressed a very refined sensibility. Her personal style was simple, almost tomboyish, but her emotions on screen were ornate. To some her acting seems overexpressive or too fraught, but her imagination led to overwhelming identification with the women she played and there was a hard core of truth to it. She would say simply: 'You must be inside the person.'"
- The Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York will be showcasing a new exhibition by John Waters from January 9th-February 14th. More info here.
- Above: our friends at The Seventh Art have made a video essay on Xavier Dolan for TIFF.
- On his blog, Sean Gilman writes on Tsui Hark's new film, The Taking of Tiger Mountain (which is playing NYC and select cinemas in the U.S. right now!).
- Lastly, on the latest episode of WTF, Marc Maron has a lengthy chat with Paul Thomas Anderson.