The Big Picture · Discussion · Draft · Interview

The 2014 Movie Draft: CR's Revenge

November 25, 2020/ 89 min/ Sean Fennessey · Amanda Dobbins · Chris Ryan

Sean, Amanda, and Chris Ryan snake-draft the movies of 2014 across six categories, then Sean talks to Clea Duvall about writing, directing, and moving Happiest Season to Hulu.

33 films across 3 segments.

AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.

How 2014 stacked uppre-draft reflections

Interstellar 2014

Chris hated it on first viewing, then rewatched it this year and came around; still not calling it a masterpiece.

Birdman 2014

Won Best Picture for the year; Amanda names it as one of the consensus movies she just doesn't care for.

Boyhood 2014

Amanda calls it a Linklater film she admires but doesn't enjoy; ran second to Birdman for Best Picture.

Inherent Vice 2014

Amanda's 'sour memory' of the year: her now-husband made her watch an Eagles game, then took her to the Angelika, then they fought on the subway home.

The Theory of Everything 2014

Sean calls it 'incredibly dull,' part of what he sees as the last gasp of the Weinstein Oscar-campaign era.

The Imitation Game 2014

Grouped with The Theory of Everything as prestige movies from a campaign playbook that stopped working.

Whiplash 2014

Cited alongside Selma as a newer generation of filmmakers breaking through that year.

Selma 2014

The 2014 movie draft drafting the movies of 2014

Sean Fennessey

Sequel

Captain America: The Winter Soldier 2014

Opens the draft with it; puts it in the conversation for best MCU movie and best sequel of the decade. The Russo Brothers' 'director bullshit' name-checked The Parallax View and The Conversation, but Sean thinks it's closer kin to Extraction.

Drama

Whiplash 2014

One of his five favorite movies of the last decade; says he relates to it in an unhealthy way.

Comedy/Horror

Inherent Vice 2014

Saw it at the New Beverly with Paul Thomas Anderson in the room; a woman in the front row dropped her Dr. Pepper during his remarks and PTA got her a new one. Calls it a real Easter-egg movie, not his favorite PTA film but very much in line with his specific sense of humor.

Blockbuster

Guardians of the Galaxy 2014

The only year he'd consider drafting two Marvel movies; likes the mix of comedy, action, and serialized story.

Wildcard

Snowpiercer 2014

Delayed by Harvey Weinstein's meddling before finally reaching American audiences close to Bong Joon Ho's intended cut. Calls it the movie that put Bong on the map here.

Animated/Foreign Language

Paddington 2014

His backup plan the whole draft; floats it as a question first ('would you guys consider Paddington to be an animated movie?') before taking it.

Chris Ryan

Blockbuster

Edge of Tomorrow 2014

Cleared the $100 million domestic bar by exactly $206,256. His favorite late-period Tom Cruise, better than the Mission Impossible run because it leans into Cruise's self-aware charm; also praises Emily Blunt.

Comedy/Horror

The Grand Budapest Hotel 2014

Says the whole cast 'fired on the same cylinders'; singles out Saoirse Ronan and Ralph Fiennes.

Drama

Nightcrawler 2014

Part of Jake Gyllenhaal's Prisoners-Enemy-Nightcrawler run in a 16-month span. A gritty L.A. noir about ambition and media that does the most with what it has.

Animated/Foreign Language

The Raid 2 2014

Thinks it tops the original; ties it back to Gareth Evans's later Amazon series Gangs of London.

Sequel

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes 2014

More director bullshit: Apocalypse Now and Bresson name-checks that don't really apply. Likes Gary Oldman's post-collapse, Infowars-guy performance.

Wildcard

The Gambler 2014

The pick the whole episode's cold open is built around. A remake of the James Toback/James Caan film; raves about Mark Wahlberg's largely invented Shakespeare lecture and John Goodman's 'fuck you' speech.

Amanda Dobbins

Drama

Gone Girl 2014

An easy, obvious No. 1 in the category, one of the few 2014 movies she says she genuinely loves.

Blockbuster

Interstellar 2014

Admits she barely remembers it: saw it once and it fell out of her head walking out of the theater, unlike Inception, which stuck.

Comedy/Horror

Neighbors 2014

82 minutes, no filler. Calls it close to a personality test: if someone doesn't like this movie, they're not friends.

Sequel

22 Jump Street 2014

Didn't rewatch before the draft but remembers the fake-sequel end-credits gag. Says it introduced her to Wyatt Russell.

Animated/Foreign Language

Force Majeure 2014

Probably her favorite foreign-language film of the year; likes that it works as a parlor game, since you leave arguing about what you'd actually do.

Wildcard

Beyond the Lights 2014

A Gina Prince-Bythewood film she calls underappreciated, a Gugu Mbatha-Raw character study about image-making as much as the central mother-daughter relationship.

In conversation

Clea Duvall on

Happiest Season 2020

Her second film as director, a holiday rom-com with Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, moving to Hulu after the pandemic scuttled a theatrical release. Written with Mary Holland; 29 shooting days, edited remotely for six months during lockdown.