CINEPHILES! TIGHTEN YOUR MONOCLES! Here are my favorite movies that played in Portland in 2014. It was an excellent year for film—while most critics crank out a top 10, I had a hard time whittling it down to 15. Each day I'll highlight one of those, going alphabetically, because fuck that ranking nonsense.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL One of these characters is a lobby boy. We aren’t sure which.
  • THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL One of these characters is a lobby boy. We aren’t sure which.

The Grand Budapest Hotel
dir. Wes Anderson
Now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD
From the Mercury's review: "The film is set largely in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, and just outside the hotel's doors lies the barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity."

We've debated how to order Wes Anderson's films, quality-wise, but that was before we saw The Grand Budapest Hotel, which in some dark ways feels like a culmination of everything that Anderson's done before. And Grand Budapest feels like a movie about Anderson's movies, too: A heartbreaking, earnest, and convincing argument for why Anderson's films are the way they are, and why they remain so important, even after we've become (or think we've become) used to their charms.