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.

SNOWPIERCER Blame it on the train.
  • SNOWPIERCER Blame it on the train.

Snowpiercer
dir. Bong Joon-ho
Now available on Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, and Netflix
From the Mercury's review: "Snowpiercer is filmmaking as allegory, agitprop, and adventure, and it's also a film in which Chris Evans uses an ax to fuck up a whole lot of people."

Snowpiercer arrived in America already glowing with good reviews—leading a lot of people to expect a movie that Snowpiercer wasn't. Snowpiercer's fantastic, but it's also weird and silly and occasionally broad; Snowpiercer's great, but not the sort of spoon-fed, sepia-toned "great" that mainstream American audiences usually associate with quality films. Watching audiences react to Snowpiercer—some with silent, rapt attention, others with tone-deaf laughs and misplaced heckles—was one of the more interesting moviegoing experiences of 2014. Which is to say nothing of the movie itself, which is interesting (and exciting, and funny, and cool) in its own right.