'Boyhood,' other top films already available at home

Sunday's Golden Globes winners and Thursday's announcement of the Academy Awards nominations gave us plenty of moviegoing ideas: "Selma," "Birdman," "The Imitation Game," "The Theory of Everything" and other awards-season favorites are still exclusive to your local movie house.

But many of 2014's most acclaimed and underseen films are already available to home viewers, beginning with the Globes' big winner, "Boyhood."

Writer/director Richard Linklater's unique coming-of-age story, filmed a little bit at a time over the course of 12 years, is available on all major digital platforms, DVD and Blu-ray, and should be the top priority for anyone who wants to catch up before Oscar night.

We may not all relate to Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) and his experience as a child of divorce in Texas, but it is indeed thrilling to see an actor grow up before our eyes - Coltrane was 7 as filming began, and 19 when it wrapped - in a relatively brief 162 minutes.

• So often we are left scratching our heads when we read the nominees for best foreign language film, but thankfully two of the most-talked-about candidates are readily available.

Now streaming on Netflix, "Ida" is a beautifully photographed black-and-white film from Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski about a young nun who ventures outside the walls of the convent for the first time to learn about the family that left her behind as an infant. Set in the '60s, the film tackles the Holocaust, the Stalinist regime, jazz's creep into Europe and a family's terrible secret - and does it in less than 90 minutes. (It could make for an intriguing double feature with "Philomena," one of 2013's best and most underrated films.)

Family strife figures heavily into another foreign favorite, Sweden's "Force Majeure," available for rental on all major digital platforms. Though the movie was hailed by a critic in one of its trailers as "screamingly funny," I found nothing funny about what happens after a husband and father commits a cowardly act in the face of tragedy at a ski resort. I was, however, fascinated by its discussions about what it means to be a man, set amid a gorgeous, wintry background. I'd like to see this again with a group of friends just for the conversation it would spark afterward.

• Just released to digital and physical platforms, "Love is Strange" casts the idiosyncratic, wonderfully talented John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as lovers who finally marry after 39 years together. But their same-sex union gets George (Molina) fired from his job as a Catholic school music teacher, a situation that may sound familiar to Inverness parishioners and readers of the Daily Herald.

Molina, an acclaimed stage and film actor who is probably best known to mass audiences as Dr. Octopus in "Spider-Man 2," gave a wonderful interview to Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast in support of this film, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the art of acting.

• Unfortunately, we have to wait to see the best film of 2014 (just ask Dann Gire) at home: "Whiplash," featuring J.K. Simmons' incredible performance as an unhinged band director, arrives on Feb. 24. Mark your calendar.

• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald copy editor and a tireless consumer of pop culture. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.