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10. Whiplash
Damien Chazelle's riveting jazz psychodrama is set at an elite New York music academy. But the moment that JK Simmons' abusive, perfectionist instructor starts to square off with his new protege/victim (Miles Teller), we know that we're really watching a drill-sergeant melodrama with drum solos instead of forced calisthenics. There's a tension between the apparent realism of the staging and the artificiality of the film's Oedipal mind-game rivalry. Yet Whiplash is an homage to showmanship in every sense. It's there in each dynamic shot, in Teller's remarkable ability to turn drumming into acting, and in the layers of Simmons' wily fury. (Sony Pictures Classics)
9. Birdman
Even if you didn't know that Michael Keaton had played Batman, there's a thrillingly ravaged, lived-in ferocity to his performance as Riggan Thomson, a washed-up star of '90s superhero movies staging a down-and-dirty Raymond Carver adaptation on Broadway. The way director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu keeps his camera moving, hurtling from decrepit dressing rooms to snaky hallways, up on stage and off again, is no stunt: it captures how every moment of Riggan's life has become a performance. I'm not so enthusiastic about Birdman's dimension of over-the-top magic realism, but that's because the drama is so strong that the movie didn't need it. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
8. The Lego Movie
More imaginative – and delightful – than the last four Pixar films combined, this animated vision of a world turned into plastic is also the most subversive comedy of the year. It takes theconformist culture of the US, in which junk-fed masses are brainwashed into believing that ‘everything is awesome’, and satirises it more scathingly than Wall-E and Idiocracy combined. The film also wittily features a rebel hero who possesses all the personality of a Pez dispenser and it makes his one-dimensionality a joke that keeps on giving. He's surrounded by a chatty menagerie of Lego figures, from Gandalf to Abe Lincoln, and thanks to them there isn't a moment that stops surprising you. (Warner Bros)
7. Boyhood
Richard Linklater's beguiling coming-of-age epic, in which we literally watch the young actor Ellar Coltrane grow up on camera, has been all but canonised, so forgive me if I praise the director's feat yet dispute the view that it's any sort masterpiece. Boyhood evokes the Zen of youth, with one moment flowing into the next, but that achievement contains a limitation: the film's poetic naturalism doesn't gather force as it ambles along. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette are moving and scalding as the divorced parents, but this giant curio of a movie is rooted in Coltrane's intuitive performance as a boy who becomes a man by learning not just to be but to act. (IFC Films)
6. A Most Wanted Man
Whenever you watch a spy movie – it might feature Jason Bourne, it might be a crackling John le Carré adaptation like the 2012 version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – the action always feels heightened. But Anton Corbijn's splendidly lifelike le Carré adaptation may be the first thriller to screw down the rusty nuts and bolts of what espionage looks and feels like in the real world. It captures the randomness of the spy game. As a German agent tracking a Chechen refugee who may or may not be a terrorist, Philip Seymour Hoffman gives his last great performance: shrewd, puckish, slyly mournful and humane. The film makes an exquisite case that in the post-9/11 world fighting terror with equal brutishness is a loser's game. (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions)
5. Guardians of the Galaxy
This rare sci-fi blockbuster evokes the original Star Wars – not with galactic bombast, but by fusing spectacle with man-on-mutant drama. As the half-human, half-alien hero who must stop an all-powerful object from falling into oppressive hands, Chris Pratt is a wide-eyed rock ‘n’ roll knight, like Luke Skywalker merged with Han Solo. He gathers up a motley band of extraterrestrials, and the hook of their interplay is that they really don't like each other. The relative novice filmmaker James Gunn juggles it all – battles, eye-boggling effects, a story that actually makes you care – like a born virtuoso of fun. (Disney/Marvel Studios)
4. Selma
How can a movie get us to look at Martin Luther King Jr with new eyes? By portraying his 1965 fight for the black vote in Selma, Alabama, not simply as a ‘moral crusade’ but as the radical – and politically calculated – act of militant audacity it was. Directed with a new-style classicism by Ava DuVernay, the entire film is framed as a battle of wills between King and President Lyndon B Johnson (Tom Wilkinson, missing the accent but nailing the aura). To force LBJ's hand, King stages protest marches that he knows will turn into racist bloodbaths, for only then will the national media elevate the violence into drama. David Oyelowo, his almond eyes revealing a haunted gravitas, makes King an agent of change with a fascinating whisper of reticence. (Paramount)
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson's whole approach to cinema – stylized, confectionary, terminally ironic – finally finds the perfect vehicle in a storybook chase thriller as enchanting as it is preposterous. Set on the eve of a fanciful version of World War II, the film stars Ralph Fiennes as the rascally concierge and gigolo Monsieur Gustav. Tossing off witticisms like verbal hand-grenades, he races through a landscape of crumbling central European grandeur to escape a sinister family who are out to steal the painting he's inherited. Unlike most Anderson films, Grand Budapest Hotel doesn't pretend to be about much of consequence, and that, in a funny way, is what liberates the director. He has made a magical contraption in which the twists and turns inspire not just surprise but a kind of giggly wonder. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
2. Foxcatcher
Bennett Miller's true-crime drama of sport, wealth and obsession has been made with such a subtle voyeuristic charge that it achieves a gripping resonance and power. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, as wrestling-champion brothers, show you the hidden desperation of athletes struggling to triumph. And Steve Carell gives a performance of creepy magnetism as John du Pont, a cadaverous nerd who buys himself the right to be their wrestling coach. Du Pont is fixated on victory and patriotism, but really, he's a crackpot praying on his charges like a repressed Nosferatu. Even as the story builds toward the lurid and the violent, it remains a penetrating parable of the ‘haves’ using the ‘have-nots’ for sport. (Sony Pictures Classics)
1. Get On Up
More uncompromising than Ray, more electrifying than any musical of the last 20 years, Tate Taylor's seismic drama about the life of James Brown is a stunningly authentic biopic that captures how Brown's funk-soul rhythms changed not just pop music but the world. Chadwick Boseman, in the greatest performance by an actor this year, shows us how Brown built those rhythms – and a whole empire – over the void in his raging, passionate, stunted heart. In the thrilling concert scenes, Boseman does a miraculous job of channeling Brown the whirling dervish, baptised in sweat. But the glory of the movie is the complexity with which he embodies a shaman of American energy who was also a tragic megalomaniac. (Universal)