The big 2014 cleanup (abridged) (part 1)

Since I still have many movies of 2014 to write about and it's now 2015 and all that biz, I'm going to take a speed dating/hot dog eating contest/Irish exit from the keg party hit-it-and-quit-it approach to the remaining films I saw in a theater and give my one- or two- or three- or four-sentence appraisal of the ones my procrastinating ways neglected. Here's the first of a few batches.

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
Psychotropic atmospheric feminist science fiction horror art film about how women are seen, not seen, evaluated, used, objectified, idealized, hated, and feared, from an alien's perspective. Maybe my favorite movie of last year. Great score by Mica Levi. Has the feel of one of those mindblowing '70s cult obscurities that falls apart in the final third, exhausted by its own strange energy, only this one doesn't fall apart in the final third.

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
Very funny, and romantic, self-critique of the aging hipster as cultural, and literal, vampire with expressive use of Detroit locations. Maybe a little slight, but maybe not. Great music. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston were born to play vampires. Don't lump them together, though. They're two very different characters, despite sharing the fangs.

Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)
Wish she hadn't appropriated the title of a great Arthur Penn movie, but this is another fascinating anti-crowdpleaser from Reichardt. Her work is hard to write about. She gives us characters and situations that, though underrepresented in American film (especially in this past decade), tap into something essentially American, but her approach to narrative makes this familiarity deeply strange. Her visual composition is subtle but lingering. I loved the first half of this film and struggled with the second half, but it's that second half that keeps coming back to me at odd moments.

Up! (Russ Meyer)
Soft-core sex, impossibly buxom women, dumb jokes, goofball visual gags, redneck violence, hilariously strange dialogue, and a twisted, delirious comic-book eye for shot composition and montage. This is real art, in my book. Cram the middlebrow rubes' condescension with walnuts. I'll take any Russ Meyer movie over almost any Oscar winner almost all the time.

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)
Nutso bit of ultra-violence on a train with an unsubtly mallet-heavy but appreciated message about the disparity of class in our rich-make-poor-devour-themselves-while-rich-accumulate-everything society we made happen. I like the structure of moving from one train car to the next without knowing what will be waiting there, the international cast, and the intensely weird approach to the fight scenes and gore. Some heavy-handed speechifying, but a lot to enjoy otherwise. The CGI doesn't even make me puke. Joon-ho's first English-language film has some studio gloss and uninspired dialogue, but his weirdness and unconventional gift of breathing fresh life into familiar genres remains.