Best Films of 2013: An Embarrassment of Riches

2013 was one of the best years in film since the 1970s, with so many good and even great movies that my practice of categorizing the years output into what I term the “Best of the Best” and the “Best of the Rest” is almost arbitrary. Many people who read this idiosyncratic list will love and enjoy movies on my second tier, such as Gravity or American Hustle, far more than some of those on the first list, such as Before Midnight or The Great Beauty. However, with such an embarrassment of filmic riches in 2013, I have restricted my highest accolade to the movies I consider to be the most lasting, the most important, the most “perfect.” In other words, those I deem the Best of the Best are those movies that I believe will hold up over time as true works of art, that resonate the deepest for me, that I believe have something important to say, that are truest to the journey of their characters, or that represent the height of a great artist’s work.

The Great Beauty: A movie as ravishingly beautiful as Rome itself

Even with that stringent criteria, I was unable to narrow my Best of the Best list to less than 8 movies. Most years I can come up with only three to five films I consider great or near great. If I had to say which one movie I believe to be the absolute best film of 2013 I’d be hard pressed to choose between The Great Beauty and Her, because both were cinematically stunning and deeply profound. Beauty is about nothing less than the decay of civilization and the crisis in a man’s soul as he contemplates whether he has squandered his life—yet it is a film literally pulsating with kinetic energy, great humor, and stunning visuals.

But while The Great Beauty is more of an intellectual treat, Her is deeply soulful. Its set-up may sound whimsical, even farcical: At some point in the more technologically advanced but not so distant future, a lonely guy falls in love with his Siri-like computer operating system. The OS, growing more human-like in its evolution, yearns for love and connection in return. But Her is no farce or bloodless sci-fi flick. The movie, brilliantly acted and directed, is full of heart and genuine emotion and raises so many questions about the nature of intimacy and the effect of technology on human relationships that one can endlessly contemplate the questions its provokes.

That’s why films like American Hustle, which seems to be winning every critic’s award in sight, and The Wolf of Wall Street don’t quite cut it for me as the Best of the Best. Both films were thoroughly entertaining, brilliantly acted, and directed with great panache. I enjoyed both tremendously while I watched them. But in the end, did they change my life? Make me see the world in a new and different way? Linger in my soul? No. And while Steve McQueen is one of my favorite filmmakers, whose work (Hunger, Shame) I have been championing for years on my annual best movie list, I didn’t experience 12 Years a Slave as the paradigm-shifting event it seems to be for many others. It has been perplexing to me to hear so many critics say that this movie, for the first time, shows the true horror of slavery. I never had any illusions about the true nature of slavery, and 12 Years a Slave is certainly not the first work of art to show its true ugliness. In fact, we had one just last year, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, that was just as unvarnished and as emotionally wrenching, not to mention the television miniseries Roots way back in the 1960s that was truly a paradigm-shifting event for millions of Americans. I wonder if it is the fact that 12 Years is about a free man, a person of some means and education, being forced into slavery that is actually resonating for such a wider (and whiter) audience—the fear that someone “like me” could end up in such horrible circumstances. That being said, 12 Years is a very good film and I’m glad it has so many people rethinking “our peculiar institution” and I was thrilled to see a movie with such an important message win the Oscar. And I was even more thrilled to see Lupita Nyong’o walk away with an Oscar for her searing performance as the slave Patsey, whose left-behind character has weighed on my heart since the credits rolled.

Matthew McConaughey completely turned his career around with his great work in three 2013 films:  Dallas Buyers Club, Mud, and The Wolf of Wall Street, not to mention his superlative work on TV's True Detective. The great Italian actor Tony Servillo was superb in The Great Beauty. Leonardo DiCaprio gave a bravura performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, quickly righting his career after starring earlier that year in the epic disaster that was The Great Gatsby. Joaquin Phoenix proved that he is back and better than ever after his stunt/bout with insanity with a beautifully nuanced, emotionally raw

Her: Joaquin Phoenix takes a romantic beachside stroll with
Scarlett Johansson...in his pocket.

performance in Her. Oscar Isaac and The Wire's Michael B. Jordan did star-making work in Inside Llewyn Davis and Fruitvale Station. There were even surprisingly effective performances by actors predominately known as stand-up or improv comics: Will Forte (Nebraska), Louis C.K. (Blue Jasmine, Nebraska), and, who would have ever imagined, the much maligned Andrew Dice Clay (Blue Jasmine).

For once, there were a plethora of good roles for women in 2013, with Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine), Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Color), and Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave) making the most indelible impression. Scarlett Johansson's voice-only performance in Her was amazing, considering she was cast and edited into the movie after shooting had completely wrapped. Shailene Woodley continues to demonstrate talent far beyond her years in The Spectacular Now. And Oprah Winfrey's surprisingly authentic performance as a boozy, dissatisfied wife in Lee Daniels' The Butler made one wish she hadn't walked away from acting after The Color Purple and spent all those years hosting a daytime talk show.

In many ways, 2013 can be summed up as the year of the director, with veterans and emerging talents creating works stamped with distinctive personality and vision.

Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese made two of the best films in their long and distinguished careers while continuing to explore the themes that have obsessed them throughout: the complicated inner lives of women in Allen’s Blue Jasmine and the often brutal, utilitarian world of men in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Underappreciated mid-career directors like Spike Jonze (Her), Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Richard Linklater (Before Midnight), Alexander Payne (Nebraska), and Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity) brought added maturity and enhanced technical expertise to their unique and often refreshingly offbeat storytelling abilities.

And first-time and other young directors impressed with precocious displays of talent. For the last several years I have been bemoaning a general malaise in American movies, which I attributed to weak-mindedness at the helm. It seemed in recent years even top directors were making movies that seemed half-hearted at best, empty exercises in crass commercialism at worst, without any real purpose or strength of vision. What did last year’s Academy Award winning Best Picture Zero Dark Thirty have to say about the war on terrorism other than that it is bad, dirty, thankless work? What did the usually exemplary director Clint Eastwood want us to take away from his J. Edgar Hoover biopic? That Hoover was a beaten-down mama’s boy? A closet queen? Did he have nothing more profound to express, no more important reason for making J. Edgar? What did Paul Thomas Anderson’s visually stunning and well-acted movie The Master really have to say about cults like Scientology? In the end, not much of real importance.

This year, many young and even first-time directors demonstrated a remarkable depth of talent and vision. Twenty-seven year old Ryan Coogler had only
directed a few obscure short films when he decided to delve into one of the most explosive and divisive news stories in the country, the point-blank killing

Fruitvale Station offers a deeply humanizing look at the man
behind the headlines,the late Oscar Grant of Oakland, CA

of an unarmed young black man, Oscar Grant, by a white transit police officer in Oakland, California, the city in which he was born and raised. His deeply humanizing first-feature, Fruitvale Station, sadly overlooked at awards time, was one of the best movies of the year, as was the similarly humanizing Dallas Buyers Club by the young French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée. James Ponsoldt clearly has something to say about alcoholism, capping off a trio of films on the subject with the The Spectacular Now, a film that in a just world would have vacuumed up awards for best film, director, screenplay, and at least three of its actors. Other promising directors who debuted on the scene in 2013 include first-time feature director Henry Alex Rubin with the Disconnect, who previously made the great documentary Murderball about wheelchair rugby players, Destin Daniel Cretton who directed the touching Short Term 12, expanding his 2008 short of the same name, and Jem Cohen, the Afghan born director of the quietly beautiful Museum Hours.

Former child actor Xavier Legrand’s first film, the Oscar nominated live action short Just Before Losing Everything (Avant que de Tout Perdre), is a brilliant and heartfelt look at a family caught in the grip of domestic violence. Breathtaking in its economy, clocking in at just 29 minutes, it offers a film school clinic in storytelling expertise. No film in 2013 had me more on the edge of my seat and more invested in the fate of its characters. And with its cryptic ending, no film in 2013 has consumed my thoughts more with what may have happened after the screen fades to black. Sadly, only if you lived in one of the few cities in America to screen the five nominated Oscar shorts in the week or two before the awards are handed out were you able to see this unforgettable film.

Prominent themes in movies this year reflected anxieties in the current zeitgeist, such as our increasingly uneasy relationship with technology (Her, Disconnect) and sense of powerless before the vast and uncaring forces of the natural world (Gravity, All is Lost) and the rot at the heart of the American dream (American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, Blue Jasmine). Father and son relationships and the difficulty navigating the seemingly impenetrable gulf was another topic weighing on the minds of filmmakers in 2013 (Mud, Disconnect, The Place Beyond the Pines, Nebraska).

The issue of race and racism gained great visibility this year with the critical and/or box office success of several black-helmed films (12 Years a Slave, Fruitvale Station, Lee Daniels’ The Butler), and a fourth, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, directed by a young white British director, Justin Chadwick. These films offered so many juicy, substantive roles for black actors—beyond the stereotypical “Magic Negro” role so predominant in recent years or the bit parts as “black friend/coworker to white lead” afforded to black actors—that in 2013 a black actor, director, or black-made film would be a deserving winner in all major award categories. (12 Years a Slave or Fruitvale Station for Best Picture, Steve McQueen or Ryan Coogler for Best Director, 12 Years’ Chiwetel Ejiofor

Lupita Nyong'o delivered the year's most
heartwrenching performance in 12 Years a Slave

or Fruitvale’s Michael B. Jordan for Best Actor, Nyong’o for Best Actress (or Best Supporting Actress as her part is categorized by most award bodies), Captain Phillips’ Barkhad Abdi for Best Supporting Actor, The Butler’s Oprah Winfrey or Mandela’s Naomie Harris or Fruitvale’s Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress.)

As always, this list is my humble, deeply personal corrective to the inevitable miscarriage of justice that is the Academy Awards. Without further ado, here are my nominations for best and worst in cinema in 2013. [Please note as always, films and performances are listed in the order in which I saw them during the calendar year, not ranked within each category.]

The Best of the Best

Before Midnight: An opportunity to check in with the iconic characters of Jesse and Celine is always welcome. They first hooked up on a European train trip in 1995’s Before Sunrise, then met again 9 years later in Before Sunset when Jesse

Before Midnight: Two of films most iconic characters
continue their romantic journey

returned to Europe plugging his novel—based on their brief yet memorable encounter. Now, another 9 years have passed and they are married and parents and their walking and talking brings out lots of insecurities and resentments. Because this director and his two leads know these characters so well, all three helped write the dialogue and it’s amazing, by turns touching, hilarious, and searing. Some fans may be put off by the darker, less fun tone than in the previous parts of the trilogy but Before Midnight is a honest depiction of the evolution of a relationship from romantic fantasy to real life. Here’s hoping for a fourth installment in 2022.

Fruitvale Station: I saw this movie on opening night in an Oakland theater, just a few miles from the BART station where Oscar Grant was killed a few years earlier on New Years Eve. The theater was so packed that all other scheduled movies were cancelled and all four screens were commandeered to show this one film. It happened to be the night before the not-guilty verdict was delivered in the George Zimmerman case in Florida for the killing of Trayvon Martin, another young black man needlessly killed in a racially-tinged shooting, and activists for both victims were leafleting outside the theater while the movie debuted. Watching this beautiful depiction of the life of Oscar Grant unfold was like witnessing a precious moment of grace and understanding, suspended in time. That brief moment of grace was brutally upended the next day when a jury ruled it was OK to shoot another unarmed black man point blank simply because he “looked suspicious.” It was a jarring and depressing turn of event, but it only underscored how important this movie is as a both a work of art and a social statement.

Blue Jasmine: With allusions to A Streetcar Named Desire, Woody Allen’s latest woman on the verge is a society doyenne (Cate Blanchett) brought low by the imprisonment of her Ponzi-scheming husband. Broke and emotionally at

Cate Blanchett's career-topping performance in
  Blue Jasmine made her an Oscar sure thing

wits end, she is forced to move in with her working-class stepsister (Sally Hawkins). Blanchett delivers perhaps the best performance in her storied career. While maintaining his acute sense of humor and absurdity, Allen takes his story in a darker, more serious direction and the longings and vulnerabilities, animosities and affections of both sisters are beautifully realized.

The Spectacular Now: The anti-Rom-com, a love story about two good but flawed people who maybe shouldn’t be together. Written, directed, and acted with such delicacy and honesty that you feel like you know these people; maybe you even are these people.

Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle): This movie made headlines for its extended lesbian sex scenes, but it is the aching emotional nakedness in the performance of actress Adèle Exarchopoulos and her character’s desperate

Emotional nakedness is the real highlight of
Blue is the Warmest Color, not the explicit sex scenes

search to find her authentic self that is most revealing. Its 3-hour running time may seem daunting, but it allows the story to breathe and really play out. I felt like I got to witness the entire emotional arc of this woman’s life. Looking over this Best of the Best list, I’m noticing that nearly all the movies that touched me the deepest this year were about relationships. This movie is one of the most honest accounts of a relationship I have ever seen.

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza): Both a send-up of La Dolce Vita hedonism and a madeleine bite of remembrance and regret, an aging intellectual turned hack-writer and wastrel socialite looks back on his life and his city, the Eternal one, and takes stock. One of the most ravishingly beautiful films ever made, this modern Italian masterpiece is a search for the beauty and meaning in life while also cataloging its decadence, and decay. One could watch this movie a hundred times and still not being able to fully appreciate all its dazzling camerawork, capture its deep layers of irony, or unpack its symbolism.

The Past (Le Passé): The past is prologue in the quietly beautiful domestic drama by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who directed the 2012 Oscar winner for best foreign film The Separation. Again, Farhadi looks at family: what brings people together, what pulls them apart, and how ties that bind are never truly broken. Farhadi’s characters aren’t good or bad; they’re human.


The Best of the Rest

Disconnect:  A cautionary tale about the invasiveness of technology, how the secrets and lies we share on line may come back to haunt us. Told in a Crash-like format, with disparate stories that eventually overlap, each storyline is compelling and the large ensemble cast is terrific.

The Silence (Das letzte Schweigen): In this haunting German thriller, the repercussions of an unsolved child murder resonate anew when an identical crime occurs in the exact same spot 23 years later.

Lore: A teenage girl, left alone with her younger siblings when her Nazi parents are arrested in the waning days of World War II, struggles to survive and to come to grips with her own denial, complicity, prejudices and lost illusions.

Museum Hours: At a time when people spend their lives hunched over tiny screens, oblivious to other people and the world around them, this movie is all about opening your eyes and really seeing.

12 Years a Slave: The high point of this adaptation of Soloman Northrup’s true slave narrative is the lead character’s refusal to surrender his humanity to an inhumane system, even when asked to do something that might seem merciful under horrendous circumstances.

Gravity: The technical realization of this lost-in-space tale is epic, and an inchoate spiritual dimension added depth that made the movie resonate beyond the sci-fi genre.

All is Lost: While I admired Gravity greatly as a superb technical achievement, I responded more emotionally to this movie than the somewhat similarly themed Gravity and Captain Phillips. The decision to provide no backstory and virtually no dialogue was a brave one, and Robert Redford handled the physical and acting challenges beautifully.

Short Term 12: Who has more issues, the residents at an foster-care facility for troubled teens or the young staff members in charge of their welfare? This tender story is drawn from the young director’s own experience doing working in this kind of facility.

Dallas Buyers Club: Matthew McConaughey is a revelation, as is Jared Leto, two actors previously considered lightweight pretty boys, in this affecting story of strange bedfellows brought together by the intransigent public response to the AIDS crisis.

Nebraska: Alexander Payne can get a tad patronizing on occasion (the mutant cousins in this film for example) and he tends to make the same movie (an emotional/physical road trip) over and over again. But minus the gratuitously vulgar June Squibb scenes, this film seemed more heartfelt than snarky, perhaps due to the beautiful black and white cinematography and the integrity of the performances by Bruce Dern and even more surprisingly by Will Forte.

America Hustle: Clever writing and impeccable acting from top to bottom elevates this movie above the routine crime/caper genre. Few directors handle this type of satire better than director David O. Russell, but he and his cast manage to bring wistfulness and heart to this one, too.

Inside Llewyn Davis: I feel bad leaving this off my Best of the Best list because I loved every minute of this movie, from the amazing performance by Oscar

A star is born: While his self-destructive folk-singing character may not
hit the big time, Oscar Isaac delivered a star-making performance
in Inside Llewyn Davis

Isaac to the wonderful music to the decision to make the protagonist his own worst enemy. And I never laughed so hard at the movies all year as I laughed at Isaac, Adam Driver, and Justin Timberlake singing “Please Mr. Kennedy.” But ultimately it fell just short of perfection, feeling slightly less developed than a fully realized feature.

The Wolf of Wall Street:  It’s hard to feel really great about this movie because it does, by its very nature, glorify its protagonist—despite hearty protestations to the contrary by some of those involved with it. But Scorsese romanticizes all his criminal protagonists. And I think he can’t help but bring a descendant-of-immigrants sense of awe to those who manage to get ahead, one way or another. Still it is thoroughly entertaining, laugh out loud funny, and Scorsese pulls out every cinematic device to move the narrative forward and breakneck speed.

Best Actor
Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight
Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station
Miles Teller, The Spectacular Now
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club
Toni Servillo, The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)
Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Christian Bale, American Hustle
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street
Joaquin Phoenix, Her
Ali Mosaffa, The Past (Le Passé)

Best Actress
Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
Katrin Sass, The Silence
Saskia Rosendahl, Lore
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Shailene Woodley, The Spectacular Now
Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue is the Warmest Color
Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave
Scarlett Johansson, Her
Bérénice Bejo, The Past (Le Passé)
Lea Drucher, Just Before Losing Everything

Best Supporting Actor
Kyle Chandler, The Spectacular Now and The Wolf of Wall Street
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
Will Forte, Nebraska
Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Supporting Actress
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
Melonie Diaz, Fruitvale Station
Octavia Spencer, Fruitvale Station
Oprah Winfrey, Lee Daniels’ The Butler
Amy Adams, American Hustle and Her
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Naomie Harris, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Best Ensemble Acting
Disconnect: Jason Bateman, Frank Grillo, Max Theriot, Andrea Riseborough, Colin Ford, Joneh Bobo, Paula Patton, Alexander Skarsgard, Hope Davis
Blue Jasmine: Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K., Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg
The Spectacular Now:  Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bob Odenkirk, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
American Hustle:  Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Robert De Niro, Louis C.K., Michael Peña

Sixty-Second Oscar (A small performance that left an indelible impression)
Susan Sarandon, The Company We Keep

Best Performance in a Bad Movie
Ben Foster, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

Worst Performance
Meryl Streep, August: Osage County

Best Newcomer

Miles Teller, The Spectacular Now  (I named his Best Newcomer in 2010 for his short but brilliant appearance in Rabbit Hole, but since he still hasn’t broken through I’ll give him another push)
Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue is the Warmest Color
Brie Larson, Short-Term 12

Breakthrough Performance
Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station

Best Director
Richard Linklater, Before Midnight
Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine
Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station
Paolo Sorrentino, The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)
Spike Jonze, Her
Asghar Farhadi, The Past (Le Passé)

Worst Director
Baz Luhrmann, The Great Gatsby

Best Original Screenplay
Blue Jasmine
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis

Best Adapted Screenplay
Before Midnight
The Spectacular Now
12 Years a Slave

Best Cinematography
Gravity
All is Lost
Nebraska
The Great Beauty
Her

Unexpected Charmer
In a World…

Best Documentary
The Stories We Tell
20 Feet From Stardom
Becoming Traviata
The Armstrong Lie
The Square

A tense scene from the heart-stopping short film Just Before Losing Everything

Best Short Film
Just Before Losing Everything (Avant que de Tout Perdre)

Worst Movie
The Great Gatsby: Fancy sets, showy camera shots, and frenetic editing do not make a compelling movie. You need to tell a story with insight and probity, and this cynical exercise in style over substance – sheer spectacle without a single intelligent thought or genuine human impulse --- is an insult to one of the greatest books ever written. is an insult to one of the F. Scott Fitzgerald provided one of the greatest stories ever written.

August: Osage County: The most dispiriting cinematic experience of the year. Cruel, assaultive, and ultimately pointless when it should be bracing and revealing.


Best Movie Line

From The Great Beauty (La Grande Belezza):
“What’s the matter with nostaligia? It’s the only thing left for those of us with no faith in the future.”

From Before Midnight:
Jesse, arguing with his wife, Celine:  “I am giving you my whole life, OK? I got nothing larger to give. I'm not giving it to anybody else. If you're looking for permission to disqualify me, I'm not gonna give it to you. Ok? I love you. And I'm not in conflict about it. Okay? But if what you want is, like, a laundry list of all the things that piss me off, I can give it to you.”
Celine:  “Yeah, I want to hear.”
Jesse:  “OK. Well, number one, you're fucking nuts! You are. Good luck! Find somebody else to put up with your shit for more than like 6 months, OK? But I accept the whole package, the crazy and the brilliant. I know you're not gonna change and I don't want you to. It's called accepting you for being you.”


Worst Movie Line

The great Judi Dench was forced to utter this execrable bit of dialogue in Philomena, ostensibly the true story of a mother’s desperate search for the son she was forced to give up 59 years earlier by the Irish nuns in a convent in which she was placed as a young unwed mother. In the film, Steve Coogan, co-star and scriptwriter, plays a journalist who initially seeks her out for a sensationalistic scoop, but gets drawn into the story and brings her to America to help her look for her son.

Coogan as BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith, upon the two arriving in America: “Shall we go for a walk? Get rid of jet lag? You said you wanted to visit the Lincoln Memorial.”

Dench as Philomena:  “We could go to see Mr. Lincoln or we could watch on television Big Momma’s House. It’s about a little black man pretending to be a fat black lady...It looks hilarious!”