10 Movies From 2014 The Academy Must Not Forget

4. Begin Again

Originally titled Can a Song Save Your Life? when it premiered at last year's Toronto Film Festival, the simpler titled Begin Again is that rare romance film that hits all the right notes. The film stars Kiera Knightly (in one of her finest performances) as a struggling musician in New York City trying to get over her recent breakup with her boyfriend (Adam Levine) after his meteoric rise to stardom tears the two apart. At the other end of the equation is Mark Ruffalo, a divorced, once-successful music producer whose life has hit rock bottom. As you might have guessed, the two meet up and help each other grow as both human beings and musicians, although the film adroitly avoids the cliché romantic route you expect it to take. There are few films you will see this year that are imbued with as much pure love, for both people and music, as Begin Again. Some moments in the film that can only be described as cinematic gold. Whether it is the scene when Mark Ruffalo first sees Kiera Knightly singing in a bar and as he imagines his arrangement of the song, we see the instruments magically begin to play themselves, or the scene where the two use a headphone splitter to walk the streets of New York to the sounds of Stevie Wonder's For Once In My Life, it has been some time since a movie so memorably captured the spirit of love. Some critics have maligned the film for being overly schmaltzy, and it will always be true that director John Carney's previous music related film, Once, will always be the more "cool" film to like. However, anyone that tells you Once is a more fun film than Begin Again is simply a bold face liar.