Editor’s note: Selma, Inherent Vice and a few more award season films will not open in Minneapolis until early 2015, and are thus not considered for this list.

This was a good year at the movies. These were the best.

Honorable Mentions:

Guardians of the Galaxy

The year’s highest grossing movie is also the year’s best piece of Hollywood Franchise Entertainment. GOTG is a funny and charming sci-fi romp, unlike anything Marvel has done thus far.

Guardians has much more in common with Firefly or Return of the Jedi than Iron Man or Captain America. It also provides a glimmer of hope (even the faintest glimmer is worth holding on to) for the next 6 years and 20 movies that DC and Marvel have announced.

Obvious Child

I have this theory that Hollywood movies are among the most conservative environments in America regarding sexual politics. The easiest way to make this case is to look at movie depictions of abortions. Films that feature unplanned pregnancies usually are allowed a line or two about abortion (Knocked Up). Sometimes women even get to a clinic (Juno). But rare is the film that actually provides abortion as an alternative to having a child.

Not so, however, in the calm, hilarious Obvious Child. Not only is abortion a choice, it’s presented as an actuality. Donna Stern, played amazingly by Jenny Slate, gets an abortion. Okay. That happens. Then, in a perhaps radical decision Obvious Child moves on. It is hilarious and very good.

The Top 10:

10. 22 Jump Street / The Lego Movie

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller released two films this year: 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie. Both are very funny and expertly written. Both achieve total buy-in from everyone involved, and the pay-off from this commitment is undeniable. And both are little intro-to-film courses, too, lined with references and smirking winks to the audience.

Surveying the list of films I saw in 2014, including many of the more recent “award season” releases, I recalled few films that I just straight up enjoyed as much as The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street.

8. The Overnighters

This is how you tell a true story on film. Writer/Director Jesse Moss’ documentary about Williston, North Dakota in the oil boom focuses on the pastor of a small church who opens his doors to incoming workers who need a place to sleep. The film provides audiences with a rare look at American life, society, economic hardship and individual compassion.

Everyone knows about the booming North Dakota oil days. But too rare are the stories of actual men and women living somewhere in the plains.

7. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
6. Snowpiercer

In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, humans are fighting for survival in a world destroyed by a flu developed by scientists in a laboratory. In Snowpiercer, humans are fighting for survival against a world destroyed by scientists trying to solve climate change. Each is an adaptation of previous works, and each is set in one of the most over-used genres of the decade: the post-apocalyptic sci-fi story.

Which goes to show just how incredibly lively genre films can be. Dawn and Snowpiercer are both exciting cinematic experiences. Vivid and unusual and wonderful.

5. The Babadook

Hands down the best horror movie of the year; The Babadook is also one of the best directed films of the year. Jennifer Kent’s debut as a writer/director shows her confidence in story and execution.

This movie is very scary; it is also an emotionally conflicted portrait of parenting, grief and depression. Can’t wait to see what Kent does in the future.

4. Wild

That Wild succeeds is mostly to the credit of Reese Witherspoon. The film, adapted by Nick Hornby from the book by Cheryl Strayed, is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée as a traditional Hollywood weeper. But Witherspoon’s performance refuses to let the film become emotionally overwrought. On film, Cheryl Strayed’s solo hiking of the Pacific Crest Trail could easily have been a one-trick show: flashback-based redemption story of a lost and lonely woman.

Instead, Witherspoon puts the film on her back along with her over-stuffed pack, and forces audiences into a fascinating exploration of memory, loss, recovery, and adventure. Vallée and his photographer Yves Bélanger do only as much they need to engage the audience. But they understand, wisely, that this is Reese Witherspoon’s show.

3. Under the Skin

Visually stunning and thematically confounding, simultaneously narcotizing and gripping, Under the Skin is an observational experiement that also contains the best performance of Scarlett Johansson’s career. The movie is weird-in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word-in its subject matter and its direction from Jonathon Glazer, which is minimalist in every sense of the word.

Watching the film is like banging on an impenetrable wall, behind which is the answer to all the mysteries of human behavior. It is frustrating and too much for some viewers to take. But for those who stick with it to the end, Under the Skin offers great, surprising rewards.

The previous three installments on this list also highlight one of the best years in recent memory for female roles in the movies. The women who anchored these three movies all gave brilliant-and very different-performances: Essie Davis’ manic, near-murderous anxiety, the haunting nature of Scarlett Johansson’s alien silence, and Reese Witherspoon’s mumbling in the wilderness only scratch the surface of a year dominated by incredible performances.

2. The Tale of Princess Kaguya

The Tale of Pincess Kaguya is the story of Takenoko, a magical girl found in a bamboo shoot who becomes the famous and unattainable Princess Kaguya. It took Isao Takahata eight years to hand-draw the animated film, but in another sense, he has worked on the project for a lifetime. Takahata first began work adapting the Japanese folktale “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” back in 1955.

It is possible that Princess Kaguya will be the final film from the master animators of Studio Ghibli (Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were co-founders of the animation company). If so, Princess Kaguya represents a fitting end to an inspired, imaginative era in film. Kaguya mixes the innocence and beauty of childhood with the all wisdom and gravity that its 79-year-old creator can muster.

1. Boyhood

Richard Linklater’s 12-year long project has gotten a lot of accolades since it was released in July. And all of them are deserved. It is as ambitious a film project as one can conceive (just think of the pitch to financers for a 12-year commitment on a movie starring a 6-year old kid). The risk that Boyhood would fall apart at any point was real, but Linklater has said that one of his chief collaborators on Boyhood was ‘the unknown’, and that spirit of adventure more than paid off.

Linklater’s films have long understood that the everyday activities of our lives is the substance that comprises who we are. Throughout his career, Linklater has shown he is incapable of condescension or emotional manipulation. Here, his steady interrogation of life and time is combined with actual passage of more than a decade of human change and the resulting film is truly special. Boyhood is a rare work of cinema art, and the year’s best.

What did we miss? Let us know.

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