The Ten Best Films of 2014: #5

#5


Remember when you'd see a movie with friends and go to dinner afterward to debate it? This year, that movie is Ruben Östlund's "Force Majeure," a thinking person's entertainment that lends itself to interpretation and charged conversation. In the set piece, an apparently happily married Swedish couple and their two kids, on a ski vacation in St. Moritz, take lunch at a rooftop patio restaurant. An avalanche, rapidly gaining size and speed, appears to head straight toward them. What happens next - and how the husband and wife choose to remember it - will have lifelong repercussions. With first-rate performances across the board and several virtuoso comic sequences, "Force Majeure" keeps you awake and alive to its hilarious and nervy surprises and makes you wonder what you and your loved ones would do in its situations. No storyteller can aspire to much more than that.