NOTE: Newcomers interested in seeing previous rankings from the 2000s should start from the beginning of this thread before jumping into the post below.
2013
It was a great movie year but, boy, it didn't start out that way. By the end of March, I had four "F"-rated films (including a top 5 all-time worst candidate) and nary an A-rated film to balance things out. Indeed, it wasn't until the one-two mega punch of
Prisoners and
Gravity in mid-September that I saw anything better than the shockingly not-terrible summer tentpole
World War Z.
When the turnaround came, it came with a vengeance. Oscar season was particularly kind this year. Sure, there were a few pretenders:
Philomena was trite;
The Book Thief played the maudlin violin far too often; and sorry, Cohen brothers lovers, but not a damn thing of note happened in
Inside Llewyn Davis. These were the exceptions to the rule, though. You can feel good about watching the Oscars this year - assuming you're cool with
Ellen DeGeneres - because most of the nominated films are truly deserving.
It wasn't just Oscar fare that made this year so good, though. The aforementioned
World War Z improbably beat
expectations of disaster to become both a commercial and critical hit. Another tentpole,
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, did something you almost never see happen: it trumped its predecessor in every way. (I probably should clarify that this was
good trumping. Plenty of sequels trump their predecessors for awfulness - I'm looking at you,
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.) And there were a trio of "E-bombs" -
Ender's Game,
Elysium, and
Escape Plan - that died at the box office but definitely deserve your VOD time.
You can't expect nothing but roses, of course. It took both Sly Stallone and "The Governator" to lend
Escape Plan a fun 80s-era action vibe; when the pair split up, we got flops like
Bullet to the Head and
The Last Stand (and the less said about Bruce's
A Good Day to Die Hard, the better). The horror genre is still stagnating; nothing trumped the "C"-level
The Conjuring, and both
You're Next and the
Evil Dead remake were major disappointments. And whatever deal Stephanie Meyer struck with the Devil to sell all tweens on
Twilight expired upon the stillbirth release of
The Host.
But why harp on the bad when there was so much good? Over half of the 52 films I saw in 2013 were above average, in my estimation. At least a couple have the potential to be thought of as classics one day. That's nothing to sniff at, folks. Hooray for Hollywood in 2013!
As always, the following ratings only considering films that I have seen. That means touted films like
Nebraska and
Dallas Buyers Club aren't candidates for my top 5, just as
RIPD and
Grown Ups 2 are (thankfully) ineligible for Worst of the Year.
Top 5 Films
- Prisoners - Use the fact that you didn't see this film to your advantage (and you didn't ... don't lie). You're friends didn't see it, either. Get them together. Watch it in a group. You're going to need everyone to piece together all the clues. I promise you that you'll have missed connections at the end, which is where your friends will come in handy. You'll be saying, "Ah ha!" for hours, if not days, after the film is over. That's the mark of a great mystery movie, but Prisoners is so much more than that. It's a dark exploration of how far a man will go for his child. Hugh Jackman's journey takes us for a ride as we, the viewers, must decide if this father has gone too far in his pursuit. Would we do the same if the endangered child was our own? Is such brutal ugliness ever justified? The best movies make you question your own values; Prisoners certainly succeeds there.
- American Hustle - David O. Russell is just freaking brilliant. Three Kings, The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook ... has this guy ever bombed? No. He gets the most out of his actors. Sure, he works with talented performers, but having good ingredients is only half the battle for making a great dish; you still need to have the talent to put those ingredients together in a way that makes the dish sing. Russell clearly knows how to do that. Someday, I would love to see him direct a film with Kellan Lutz and Kristen Stewart; then we'll really know that Russell is a miracle-worker.
- Her - The premise is creepy; the product is beautiful. What I love most about Her - even more than the haunting soundtrack by Arcade Fire - is that you're left wondering if you're watching a glorious vision of the evolution of human relationships or a dystopian future that is the inevitable endgame to our increasingly self-segregated techno-lives. I'm still not sure I know the answer, but I love that I'm still thinking about it a month after watching the film.
- Gravity - This one's a winner just for being a true technical marvel. If David O. Russell is the director who maximizes his performers, Alfonso Cuarón is the one who maximizes the visual potential of the medium. If you see Gravity on your big-screen non-3D TV, you simply aren't experiencing the film the way it demands to be experienced: in glorious IMAX 3D with the biggest damn sound system money can buy. Try not being impressed in that environment when you watch that 17-minute-long opening shot (and yes, I know there is a cut or two hidden in there, but they're nearly invisible so they don't count).
- The Wolf of Wall Street - You don't like F-bombs? Then you probably want to steer clear of Wolf, which sets the record for F-bombs in a non-documentary (though the exact tally differs by source). You also should steer clear if you disapprove of midget-tossing, rampant drug use, graphic sexuality, drug use and sexuality combined in frightening and disgusting new ways, or a filmmaker courting controversy. Everyone else should enjoy the most uproariously funny movie of the year and then sit and think what it means that we laugh in the face of such decadence.
Worst of the Year (TIE) - The Host and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Pick your poison. Technically,
The Host is the worse movie. Who in the world thought that a film where the protagonist spends the entire runtime emoting at the camera while conducting a voice-over argument with the alien in her head was a tenable idea?
Stephenie Meyer, apparently. She was dead wrong. I hadn't walked out of a film before its conclusion in memory until I walked out of
The Host. I was halfway into demanding that the theater manager reimburse me when I remembered it was a free screening. Yes,
The Host was
that bad.
And still, I think I hated
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug that much more, for it utterly collapses under the weight of expectations. Even if it is a more technically competent film from an audio/visual standpoint, it is so damn soulless, so bereft of sound storytelling principle, such a transparent cash-grab, and such a turd dump onto the proud Tolkien estate, which has honored their father's memory and deserves so much better than this Nintendo 64 game masquerading as film. This is billion-dollar fan fiction. It's also the very worst film I have seen in the 2000s when put into context (yes, expectations matter). No wonder
Christopher Tolkien hates The Hobbit films.
Don't Call It a Comeback - The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I almost skipped the second
Hunger Games film after
the first one left me so unimpressed. Not that
the book was in any way deep, but give Suzanne Collins her due: she hit on a genuinely interesting premise.
The Hunger Games failed to convey any of the deeper philosophical points that bubbled beneath the book's surface. I expected
Catching Fire to be just as shallow, but color me surprised. New director
Francis Lawrence found and highlighted the subversive edge to the story. Not only that, but he was kind enough to film action scenes without jiggling the camera every which way. The result is a sequel that is superior to its predecessor in every way. It actually got me to read
Catching Fire after I had sworn off the rest of the series, and it has rekindled my interest in the two-part finale hitting theaters in late 2014 and 2015.
.
John, let me be the first to thank you for your sacrifice in sitting through so many mediocre offerings that the rest of us might save ourselves the trouble. 
Seriously, I think I saw maybe one or two films this past year at most. 
