7. Begin Again
Originally titled Can A Song Save Your Life? when it debuted back at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival, Begin Again is one of those smaller films that almost everyone likes but no one includes when it comes to making the "best of" year end lists. Directed by John Carney, the Irish director behind the critically acclaimed Once, Begin Again stars Mark Ruffalo as a washed up music executive who is forced out of the record company he started. When he meets a down-on-her-luck girl, Kiera Knightly, who is looking to break into the music business, the two team up and help each other out in more ways than either could have expected. While some critics lambasted the movie for being overly sappy, there is nothing cheap about Begin Again. Yes, the film is very sentimental, however this tenderness is never formulaic or cheap. In terms of the film's plot, Begin Again actually avoids many romance genre stereotypes and goes to places you wouldn't expect. Most of all though Begin Again has an incredible sense of the cinematic. From the scene where Ruffalo's character imagines instruments playing themselves to the orchestration of Knightley's song he hears in his head, Begin Again has some of the most memorable scenes of any movie in 2014. If you leave your 21st century cynicism at the door for a moment and open up your heart, the old fashion charms of Begin Again are impossible not to appreciate.
Christopher Lominac
Contributor
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
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Christopher