2) 12 Years A Slave
Steve McQueen’s retelling of the ordeal of Solomon Northup, a freed man who was abducted and sold as a slave in the 1840s, is the most difficult film you’ll watch this year. It’s also an extremely important landmark in cinema, a film about slavery that’s quite possibly essential in its determination to face the horrors of the past.
The greatest triumph of 12 Years A Slave is how masterfully McQueen guides our eyes. In one scene, a horrific whipping focuses first on the individual meting out the punishment, and the audience winces just hearing the violent crack of the whip. Then, McQueen slowly pans around, to show us the results, the blood sprays and flying pieces of flesh ripped out of a slave’s back. It’s a heart-rending, stomach-churning image, one that will be forever seared into the minds of its viewers. And that’s exactly the point.
McQueen is gifted with the strongest cast of any film this year. Chiwetel Ejiofor stuns as Northup, communicating abject misery and smoldering fury with a single glance of his deep, emotive eyes. Stooped but never bowed, anguished but never shattered, Ejiofor radiates silent fortitude. Meanwhile, Michael Fassbender grounds his cruel plantation owner Edwin Epps in terrifying madness, turning in a volatile powder-keg of a performance. As Epps’ abused slave Patsey, Lupita Nyong’o is all kinds of heartbreaking, exposing slavery’s brutal, emotional toll with luminescent grace. The rest of the cast is aces as well, particularly Paul Dano as the sadistic Tibeats and Sarah Paulson as Epps’ callous, jealous wife.
One more admirable aspect of 12 Years A Slave is McQueen’s refusal to levy the blame at any one character. Despite all of the sickening evil on display, the culprit is a broken but widely accepted system, one in which complacency is the only viable option. Though Northup’s ordeal ends after a little more than a decade, 12 Years A Slave brings us closer to the nightmarish reality of slavery than any film before it. For that, it’s not only one of the year’s best films, but its most crucial.