The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

12. 2014 - The Grand Budapest Hotel

Grand Budapest Hotel
Fox Searchlight Pictures

Honourable Mentions: The Babadook, Birdman, Whiplash

The cinema of Wes Anderson is the cinema of joy. Vivid, colourful, and almost mathematically composited, Anderson's films are instantly definable and his aesthetic impulses have cemented him as one of the great visual storytellers of the last two decades.

At the same time, that visual rigidity has led to the occasional underestimation of Anderson's talents. There's still a broad want to label his films as "quirky", and surface-level critiques like these are at least partially responsible for all the embarrassing AI gremlins who've been churning out "Andersonised" versions of popular IP to pollute the internet with over the last several years. To them, he's all quirk, when the truth is obviously very different.

Anderson's cinema is a visual delight, but it's also raw, emotional, and frequently devastating. It can also prove unfortunately prophetic, as was the case with 2014's anti-fascist tragedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Picturesque and comforting like so many of Anderson's works, and just as crushing when it wants to be, Budapest dwells on themes of expression, pleasure, and non-conformity in a 1930s European country on the cusp of a Nazi-style takeover. Anderson's usual players are along for the ride, including the likes of Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe, but the chorus is complemented this time by Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori - the former as the flirtatious yet professional hotel concierge of the Grand Budapest, Gustave, and the latter as a young refugee-turned-bellhop, Zero.

Anderson brings these various ingredients together to create possibly his finest ever dish - a darkly comic yet whimsical tale that grows ever more bittersweet with each passing year.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.