Top 10 Movies In 2013
10.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
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| warner_bros |
Who could guess, after the
meandering first feature in a seemingly unnecessary eight-hour trilogy of films
based on a novel of less than 300 pages, that Peter Jackson had such a vigorous
and thrilling middle episode in store?
With Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Gandalf
(Ian McKellen) and the dwarves finally done with introductory dawdling, they
dive into a nonstop adventure among the noble Elves, the rough-hewn humans of
Laketown and the ferocious dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch).
This time, Andy Serkis has not lent
his presence to Gollum, but his work as second-unit director is spectacular.
Each complex encounter, especially a flume-ride escape of the dwarves, boasts a
teeming ingenuity of action and character.
A bonus: the budding romance of the
warrior Elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the dwarf hunk Kili (Aidan Turner).
In all, this is a splendid achievement, close to the grandeur of Jackson’s Lord
of the Rings films.
9. 12 Years a Slave
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| fox_searchlight |
Southern whites of the pre-Civil War
plantation aristocracy believed themselves God’s chosen, and their slaves
inhuman. As shown in this searing film document — an anti-Gone With the Wind — the masters were
the madmen, inferior but in charge.
The first two feature films of
Anglo-African director Steve McQueen, whose first two features, Hunger and
Shame, proved him a picture poet of physical degradation. Here, working from
John Ridley’s script based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black
New Yorker abducted into servitude, McQueen immerses viewers in the
magnolia-scented hell to which Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was exiled.
You will recoil at every punishment,
feel each slur, with an immediacy that makes the long-ago, “peculiar
institution” of slavery sting like a whiplash. To this hot content, McQueen
applies cool imagery. The movie has the eerie impact of a museum exhibit; it is
a diorama of atrocity, populated by varying forms of monstrosity (Michael
Fassbender and Benedict Cumberbatch as the main slave-owners) and benevolence (Brad
Pitt as a Canadian abolitionist), and humanized by the smoldering restraint of
Ejiofor’s performance.
8. The Act of Killing
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| drafhouse_film |
In 1965, the thug Anwar Congo was
hired by the Indonesian government to stamp out the threat of Communism; he and
his fellow gangsters formed paramilitary squads that tortured and killed
thousands of innocents.
Nearly a half-century later, Anwar
and many of his colleagues are still around, still protected by the politicians
in charge, and ready to reenact their atrocities. Joshua Oppenheimer’s amazing
documentary gives that opportunity to men who grew up idolizing Brando and
Pacino and are pleased to star in their own crude biopics.
To more closely resemble his young
self, Anwar dyes his hair and gets new teeth. He rehearses garroting a man with
a wire, to the laughter and applause of the women watching. Making the movies,
which vault from film noir to bizarre musical, eventually gets under Anwar’s
skin and into his dreams; the pearly killer is finally afflicted with
nightmares. For any viewer, the effect is no less haunting.
7. Frozen
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| disney |
Princess Elsa has powers of sorcery
beyond her control: she can and does cast a nuclear winter on her northern
kingdom. Her sister Anna is the normal one, falling in love at the first sight
of any eligible male, yet bound to confront her sister and save their realm.
The first animated feature in the
Walt Disney studio’s glorious history to offer two princess heroines, Frozen
transforms Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” into a fable of modern,
timeless sisterhood.
For this full-musical enchantment, Writer
Jennifer Lee and co-director Chris Buck tapped some of the Broadway musical’s
brightest lights — composers Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez and
actor-singers Idina Menzel (Elsa), Kristen Bell (Anna) and Jonathan Groff (as
the gruff mountain man Kristoff) — and poured all comic inspiration into the
snowman character Olaf (voiced with irrepressible enthusi-woozy-asm by The Book
of Mormon’s Josh Gad).
6. Furious 6
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| universal_pictures |
Planes, trains and automobiles collide
spectacularly in the fourth Fast & Furious movie to be directed by Justin
Lin and written by Chris Morgan. In a reunion of Vin Diesel, the late Paul
Walker, their gang and girlfriends and DEA agent Dwayne Johnson, Furious 6
vrooms from Tenerife to Moscow to London, with astounding stunts in each
location, and hitches a ride on a military cargo plane for the final brawl.
Where Fast Five heralded the New
Hollywood’s exaltation of sensational action over subtle character, Furious 6 revs everything up,
purifies and improves it to a level even cooler and more aerodynamically
delirious than its predecessor, if such a thing is even mathematically
possible.
This adrenaline-stoking series is
addictive, for its chases, crashes, crushes — and for its poetic limning of the
closest camaraderie many men can ever know: with their cars. Owning one, some
auto-holic says, is like a marriage.
“Yeah,” another guy replies, “but
when you break up they don’t take half your shit.”
5. The Grandmaster
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| the_weinstein_company |
Running at 2 hours and 10 minutes in
its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Wong Kaw-wai’s dreamy biopic of
martial arts master Ip Man was cut by 22 minutes — one-fifth of its running
time — by U.S. distributor The Weinstein Company.
That’s a crime akin to cutting
random holes in a Bosch or Breughel painting; but what’s left is choice. The
Hong Kong director makes superb movies (Chungking
Express, In the Mood for Love,
2046) that ignore narrative
drive for tales of romance and regret in a rapturous visual style of slo-mo
imagery and hazy closeups of wistful stars.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who looks like
a more beautiful Obama, plays Ip Man as a poet of gestural precision, in combat
scenes choreographed by the great Yuen Wo-ping (The Matrix, Kill Bill).
Leung’s partner in reverie is a
female doctor, daughter and martial artist played by Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon); she
exudes a goddess’s solemn grandeur and is given a diva’s final aria — a
fittingly elegiac climax for a world-class filmmaker who’s always in the mood
for lost love.
4. Her
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| warner_bros |
In a future Los Angeles so
near-Utopian that no scene takes place in a car, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin
Phoenix) has a job composing love letters for other people.
Profligately romantic, bruised by
the failure of his marriage to Catherine (Rooney Mara), he has enough sentiment
left over to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with a computer operating system
who calls herself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).
Their virtual affair might be the
springboard to satire, but writer-director Spike Jonze instead creates a
splendid anachronism: a modern rom-com that is laugh-and-cry and warm all over,
totally sweet and utterly serious.
If you will, utterly Siri. Phoenix
corrals the dulcet melancholy of a man whose emotional pain finds refuge in Samantha’s
embrace, in a love that, to misquote Phillip K. Dick, is “more human than
human.” Phoenix and Jonze show what it’s like when a mourning heart comes alive
— because he, Theodore, loves Her. And I, Richard, loved her.
3. American Hustle
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| columbia_pictures |
History remade as sparkling farce:
the FBI’s late-70’s Abscam investigation of political corruption, which led to
the conviction of a U.S. Senator and seven Congressmen, becomes this headlong
tale of romance and recklessness.
In director David O. Russell’s third
consecutive movie about mismatched couples and their crazy families, after The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, A New York
con artist (Christian Bale) juggles a mouthy wife (Jennifer Lawrence) and a
cunning girl friend (Amy Adams) while reluctantly cooperating with the sting —
supervised by a federal agent (Bradley Cooper) — of a New Jersey mayor (Jeremy
Renner).
“Some of this actually happened,”
reads the movie’s opening text; but Russell and cowriter Eric Warren Singer
aren’t going for verisimilitude. This portrait of the ’70s revels in the
decade’s gaudiness — its disco dancing and casino dreams, its ugly coiffures
and facial hair — and in the eternal abrasion of sexy women and covetous men.
The five stars form a fabulous
ensemble cast, in the year’s most knowing explosion of flat-out fun.
2. The Great Beauty / La grande bellezza
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| janus_films |
“What’s the matter with nostalgia?” asks an
aging poet in this masterpiece of divine decadence. “It’s the only thing left
for those of us who have no faith in the future.” Writer-director Paolo
Sorrentino, whose Il Divo
blended political bio-pic and Ovidian satire, views modern Rome in all its
excess through the jaded eyes of “the king of the socialites,” journalist Jep
Gambardella (Il Divo’s Toni
Servillo) — and, further back, more than a half-century, to the Eternal City as
seen by Federico Fellini in La Dolce
Vita.
This profligately cinematic
achievement shows an affection for nearly all of its outsize characters, and a
melancholy that the flaming creatures of Jep’s acquaintance will soon burn out.
Giving even the cynics a faith in the vibrancy of movies, The Great Beauty is the year’s
grandest, most exhilarating film that takes place on Earth.
1. Gravity
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| warner_bros |
When NASA travellers Sandra Bullock
and George Clooney get lost in space, all awe breaks loose. Losing contact with
Mission Control, as well as access to their oxygen supply, they are alone
together, with time and options running out.
An epic of desperate peril and
profound wonder, Alfonso Cuarón’s thrilling 3-D drama is a testament to human
grit and groundbreaking technical ingenuity. It deserves to be seen once for
the wow factor and a second time to try to figure out how Cuarón and his
digital savants managed to make the impossible seem so cinematically plausible.
No one had dared even to imagine
this stuff — like the astounding 13-minute take that opens the movie — yet here
it all is, vividly and sumptuously realized. In depicting the fearful,
beautiful reality of the space world above our world, Gravity reveals the glory of cinema’s future; it thrills on so
many levels. And because Cuarón is a movie visionary of the highest order, you
truly can’t beat the view.