'Whether as a gift to yourself or an extremely covetable stocking filler, Tom Shone's monograph Martin Scorsese - A Retrospective (Thames & Hudson) is a must for fans, combining enviable access with memorable insight. So while the archive of stills and behind-the-scenes shots is a gold mine, there's plenty of Shone's prose to savour, too. (Surely only Shone could write - of Goodfellas and The Wolf Of Wall Street - that Scorsese "seems fascinated by characters as spiritually dead as they are galvanically alive, rotten with their own ripeness, like apples in Dutch still lives".)' — Olivia Cole, GQ

BEST FILMS OF 2014

1. Selma
2. Interstellar
3. Under The Skin
4. Birdman
5. Leviathan
6. Boyhood
7. Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Foxcatcher
9. A Most Wanted  Man
10. Ida

BEST TV SHOWS of 2014

1. True Detective
2. Silicon Valley
3. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
4. The Americans
5. Veep

And.... one more

"This is the best kind of coffee table book. It fulfills the brief of being picture-led with rare and telling images, but it's Shone's prose that sticks; a bravura high-octane sprint that adroitly mixes up biographical detail and aesthetic judgments... a smart engaged tracking shot of a book." — Teddy Jamieson, The Glasgow Herald

BEST FILM PERFORMANCES OF 2014

1. Steve Carell — Foxcatcher
2. Phillip Seymour Hoffman – A Most Wanted Man 
3. Chadwick Boseman — Get On Up 
4. Angelina Jolie — Mailificent
5. Naomi Watts — St Vincent 
6. J K Simmons — Whiplash
7. Ralph Fiennes — The Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Kristen Wiig — The Skeleton Twins
9. Mark Ruffalo — Foxcatcher
10. Edward Norton — Birdman 

Mesmerized by this video for Nils Frahm's Says, created by visual artists Romain Assénat and Ana Silva:—

"We had the visual idea during a show of Nils in Germany, two days after, we’ve created a device for capturing this idea: a video-feedback with ink on glass captured in one take, in a very analogue way and without any post-production."

BEST SOUNDTRACKS OF 2014

I. Interstellar —Hans Zimmer
2. Birdman — Antonio Sanchez
3. Under the Skin — Mica Levi
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel — Alexandre Desplat
5. Gone Girl — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
6. The Theory of Everything — Jóhann Jóhannsson
Boyhood — Various Artists
7. Palo Alto — Various Artists
8. Lost Themes — John Carpenter
9. You And The Night —M83 

BEST SONGS OF 2014

1. Morning — Beck
2. Hero — Family of the Year
3. Do You — Spoon
4. Rather Be — Clean Bandit
5. Small Window — Luluc
6. Head Underwater — Jenny Lewis
7. Afraid of Nothing — Sharon van Etten
8. Waitress Song — First Aid Kit
8. The Long Way Around — Jackson Browne
9. Seasons (Waiting On You) — Future Islands
10. Airwaves — Ray La Montagne

BEST ALBUMS OF 2014

1. Morning Phase — Beck
2. Passerby — Luluc
3. Stay Gold — First Aid Kit
4. GIRL — Pharrell Williams
5. Are We There — Sharon Van Etten
6. Four — One Direction
7. After the Disco — Broken Bells
8. Lost in the Dream — The War on Drugs
9. The Voyager — Jenny Lewis
10. Benji — Sun Kil Moon