Nice work, @Sarzy! But...

How did Gone Girl not make your top 10?! That's a crime, and you are no longer to be trusted!

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Tuesday, January 6th, 2015 8:54am PST - promote requested by enoch.

Other *related @Sarzy videos on VideoSift (did i miss any?)

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Nicely done. Way too heavy on action/violent movies to be useful to me.

And nicely done.

Well, since I have points to spare and no shame, *promote *quality

@lucky760 Yeah, I remember you raving about Gone Girl on sift talk. I liked it a lot too -- if this were a top 20, it would have been there for sure, but sadly it didn't quite make the cut. There were a ton of movies that just narrowly missed out -- Ida, Snowpiercer, Fury, Oculus, INHERENT VICE (seriously, it breaks my heart that a new PTA movie isn't on my top 10, but I just couldn't squeeze it in).

@bareboards2 Thanks. And yep, I definitely like action a bit more than your average person (punchy/shooty action, at least -- explodey blockbuster action, not so much).

Speaking of which, where's @shuac? He'd love this list, I'm sure.

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Tuesday, January 6th, 2015 8:54am PST - promote requested by Sarzy.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Sarzy.

I was going to comment on your inclusion of a lot of action movies. Your clarification to bareboards is helpful. Do you draw distinctions around what is believable in action movies? I've found myself get a bit jaded over the years with how everything has to be bigger and now with 17% more explosions. A good example is how the James Bond movies have evolved. Part of it was how technology evolved in the movie industry. I think that the old Bond movies that included high tech gadgets were so much cooler and the newer ones became unrealistic. I appreciated the reboot of that series because they went back to the old ways, but it seems that they are already going down the bigger and bigger road again.

Honestly,when it comes to action I just go by what strikes me as cinematically interesting, and what I enjoy. There tends to be a lot of action and other genre stuff among my favourite films, mostly because I try not to draw any distinctions between so-called "serious" films, and genre stuff like action/horror/sci-fi. If a film works, it works. It takes just as much thought and craft to make a really good action film as it does to make a really good drama. More, possibly.

My problem with a lot of contemporary big blockbuster action filmmaking is the idea that bigger is ALWAYS better. Bigger effects, bigger explosions, and longer, more drawn out action set-pieces. Like, if I see one more film where the third act is entirely devoted to an enormous action set-piece where a city is rocked by a big, over-the-top battle, I'm going to jump out a window.

My other big problem with most contemporary action is the style of shooting/editing that dictates that you put the camera as close to the action as possible and then just ping pong from one split-second close-up of something happening to another. There's no real coherence, just a jumble of imagery and the hope that the viewer will be fooled into thinking they're watching something exciting.

I appreciate films like the Raid 2 or John Wick because they're clearly made by people who understand what makes a good action scene exciting. They're well paced, exciting, and they're just fun to watch.

Really liked Animal Kingdom too. Some great recommendations to check out.

Also thought Gone Girl was one of the best of last year.

Bit disappointed by Interstellar. Great setup and first half, but the ending just veered way too far into wacky territory for a movie that was grounded in plausible science fiction.

Finally someone who's talking sense!

I didn't see many movies in 2014, but Gone Girl was my #1 by far. Such a complex, intense, surprising, smart, interesting thriller.

Good list. Here's mine.

The Good: 1. The Babadook 2. Nightcrawler 3. Gone Girl 4. Guardians of the Galaxy 5. Snowpiercer 6. Blue Ruin 7. Foxcatcher 8. Under the Skin 9. The Guest

The Bad: The Hobbit 3

The Unseen: Boyhood, Whiplash, John Wick, Birdman, Citizen 4, Interstellar

Loved the list, and I will be referencing it on Saturday nights for our viewing! My only doubt was with Interstellar with its junk science.

Did you not see Birdman? Best movie I've seen in a long while.

They should have called it The Hobbit: The 2 and a Half Hour Videogame (starring Evangeline Lilly as token female character!)

Here I is.

If that's not the voice of a monkey pretending to be a man, I don't know what is.

I did indeed. I liked it, but it didn't really connect with me, for some reason. Which is weird, because I love long steadicam shots, I quite like Alejandro González Iñárritu, and I'm a huge Michael Keaton fan, so I was pretty much expecting it to be my favourite movie of the year. Maybe my expectations were too high.

Videosifts @Sarzys Best And Worse Movies Of 2015 has been added as a related post - related requested by Sarzy on that post.