AFI Awards the Ten—No, Make That Eleven—Best Movies of 2014

Typically the American Film Institute honors ten American movies each year. This year they’ve made the highly unusual decision to honor eleven. I guess there were so many options this year, they couldn’t winnow it down to ten. It’s a cop-out if you ask me, but you didn’t ask me and neither did the AFI, and they picked the following ten 11 best movies of 2014:

‘American Sniper’
‘Birdman’
‘Boyhood’
‘Foxcatcher’
‘The Imitation Game’
‘Interstellar’
‘Into the Woods’
‘Nightcrawler’
‘Selma’
‘Unbroken’
‘Whiplash’

That’s pretty much the list of Oscar favorites, from ‘Birdman’ to ‘Unbroken,’ with a couple notable surprises. ‘Interstellar,’ predicted as a potential mainstream Oscar nominee before its release has mostly faded from awards discussion, but it garnered enough support from the AFI to earn a spot on their list. ‘Into the Woods’ is another presumptive awards contender, but it’s been ignored by the rest of the early season prizes (reviews for the film aren’t due out for another week or so).

How many of the AFI’s favorites have you seen? I’ve hit all but two so far—‘Selma’ and ‘Unbroken’—and I’m seeing them tonight and tomorrow. The nine others definitely include some of my favorites of the year, and a few others I was less high on. But we’ll get to all of those next week when ScreenCrush unveils its own year-end lists.