Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!: 2013 in films

11/18/2014

2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

The 10 Best Film of 2013:

1. 12 Years a Slave - Steve McQueen

2. Finding Vivian Maier - Charlie Siskel & John Maloof + Best Documentary of the Year

3. Inside Llewyn Davis - Joel and Ethan Coen + Best Music Film of the Year

4. Blue Is the Warmest Colour/La Vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 & 2 - Abdellatif Kechiche + Best French Film of the Year

5. Only God Forgives - Nicholas Winding Refn + Best Danish Film of the Year

6. The Conjuring - James Wan + Best Horror Film of the Year

7. Nebraska - Alexander Payne

8. The Wolf of Wall Street - Martin Scorsese

9. Blue Jasmine - Woody Allen + Best San Francisco Film of the Year

10. Gravity - Alfonso Cuarón + Best Science Fiction Film of the Year

Other great movies of 2013: (in random order)

Ida - Pawel Pawlikowski + Best Polish Film of the Year

Enough Said - Nicole Holofcener + Best Los Angeles Film of the Year

Don Jon - Joseph Gordon-Levitt + Best Director's Debut of 2013

Begin Again/Can a Song Save Your Life? - John Carney + Best New York Film of the Year

Despicable Me 2 - Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud

Monsters University - Dan Scanlon - Best Animated Film of the Year

Side Effects - Steven Soderbergh + Best Thriller of the Year

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone - Don Scardino + Best Comedy of the Year

Behind the Candelabra - Steven Soderbergh

Recommendable, good movies of 2013: (in random order)

Tom at the Farm/Tom à la Ferme - Xavier Dolan + Best Canadian Film of the Year + Best Queer Film of the Year

This Is the End - Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen

Stranger by the Lake/L'Inconnu du Lac - Alain Guiraudie

Fading Gigolo - John Turturro

Dallas Buyers Club - Jean-Marc Vallée

Anchorman: The Legend Continues - Adam McKay + Strangest Film of the Year

Nymphomaniac - Lars Von Trier + Wildest Film of the Year

Star Trek Into Darkness - J. J. Abrams

Oz the Great and Powerful - Sam Raimi

The Last Stand - Kim Jee-Woon + Best Comeback of the Year

White House Down - Roland Emmerich + Silliest Film of the Year

Pacific Rim - Guillermo Del Toro

Evil Dead - Fede Alvarez

The 7 Worst Films of 2013:

1. A Good Day to Die Hard - John Moore + Worst Poster of the Year

2. Stoker - Chan-wook Park

3. The Last Exorcism Part 2 - Ed Gass-Donnelly

4. Keeper of Lost Causes/Kvinden i Buret - Mikkel Nørgaard

5. Odd Thomas - Stephen Sommers

6. The Bling Ring - Sofia Coppola

7. Gangster Squad - Ruben Fleischer + Most Expensive Flop of the Year

Mediocre film of 2013:

The Heat (2013) or, Prissy and Offensive in Boston

Remarks:

The first updated 2013 list raises the amount of reviewed films from 17 to 40, making the new list much more qualified as a stamp on the year in movies.

Running through the list from the top:

2013 have offered 3 straight masterpieces (so far) in Steve McQueen's amazing, multi-Oscar-winning 12 Year a Slave, Charlie Siskel and John Maloof's slightly overlooked, great documentary Finding Vivian Maier, and Joel and Ethan Coen's music drama pearl, Inside Llewyn Davis.

The rest of the top 10 includes the incredible French love story Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Nicolas Winding Refn's strange, trippy Only God Forgives, James Wan's phenomenal horror The Conjuring, Alexander Payne's poignant Nebraska, Martin Scorsese's charged, rambunctious The Wolf of Wall Street, Woody Allen's magnificent Blue Jasmine and finally the probably most talked about film of the year, the sensationally stimulating space-thriller Gravity.

2013 had many other great and wonderful films, as well as some painstaking duds, most prominently Die Hard 5, A Good Day to Die Hard, Chan-wook Park's pretentious, boring and unpleasant Stoker and the dubious, befittingly titled The Last Exorcism Part 2.

2013 was characterized by a jump towards almost ruthless realism in some of the year's most interesting films, from the biggest winner (12 Years a Slave) to the more arthouse-bound European films like Nymphomaniac and Blue Is the Warmest Colour that both feature explicit sex scenes galore. Film Excess warmly welcomes this new trend, which only heightens already good films, (but will hardly save films that are already shabby.)
The 2014 Oscars favored 12 Years a Slave and Gravity for technical awards, as well as Dallas Buyers Club, and gave single Oscars for Blue Jasmine and Spike Jonze's Her. Disney's Frozen and Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby also took a couple of prizes each. Anders Walter and Kim Magnusson won the short film Oscar for Helium. Twenty Feet From Stardom won Best Documentary, and Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty won Best Foreign Film.

Film Excess still has tons of 2013 films to watch and digest: Films that are especially high on the watch-list radar are; Grudge Match, Black Nativity, 12-12-12, Gimme Shelter, The Galapagos Affair, August: Osage County, The Green Inferno, The Railway Man, The Last of Robin Hood, Blood Glacier, The Sacrament, Labor Day, Visitors, Of Horses and Men, The Butler, The Wind Rises, All Is Lost, Jodorowsky's Dune, Like Father Like Son, The Past, The Last Match, Frozen, Let the Fire Burn, Adult World, All Is Bright, Mistaken for Strangers, Not Today, The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, The Kings of Summer, Kill Your Darlings, Escape From Tomorrow and Twenty Feet From Stardom.

What do you think of Film Excess' 2013 lists?

What films would comprise your lists?

No comments:

Donald Sutherland has passed away

Born in Canada, Sutherland battled polio as a child. His first credit was in Suspense (1963, TV-series) and his first film was The Castle of the Living Dead (1964). Later credits in his remarkable career include The Saint (1965-66), The Dirty Dozen (1967), M*A*S*H (1970), Kelly's Heroes (1970), Klute (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), 1900 (1976), Casanova (1976), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Ordinary People (1980), A Dry White Season (1989), JFK (1991), Outbreak (1995), Fallen (1998), Virus (1999), Fierce People (2005), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Lord of War (2005), The Hunger Games (2012), The Undoing (2020, miniseries) and many more. He passed away at age 88. R.I.P.

Roger Corman has passed away

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Corman had a sprawling, intellectually hungry life as a youth and young man before arriving with his first film in 1955, Five Guns West. He would follow that with titles such as Apache Woman, It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Cave Man, A Bucket of Blood, House of Usher, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Intruder, The Raven, The Terror, The Masque of Red Death, The Tomb of Ligeia, The Wild Angels, The Trip, Bloody Mama and many more. As a producer he was behind almost 500 films. Arguably among the most important filmmakers of the 20th century, Corman passed away at age 98. R.I.P.

William Friedkin has died

Born in Chicago, Friedkin accrued TV credits prior to his advance to the big screen as the director of Good TImes (1967), The Birthday Party (1968), The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970) before his major breakthrough, The French Connection (1971), for which he won his only Oscar. He followed it up with the even bigger smash, The Exorcist (1973), arguably the best horror film of all time, for which he was Oscar-nominated. Later credits include Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Rampage (1987), Rules of Engagement (2000), Killer Joe (2011) and The Devil and Father Amorth (2017, documentary). Friedkin passed away at age 87. R.I.P.

Louise Fletcher has passed away

Born in Alabama to deaf parents, Fletcher got her first credits in late-1950s TV-series.She took a 10 year-long sabbatical to devote her time to motherhood after the release of A Gathering of Eagles, but then came back and soon saw her career's most important part, as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), for which she won her sole Oscar. Later credits include Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), The Lucky Star (1980), Brainstorm (1983), Two Moon Junction (1988), Cruel Intentions (1999), A Perfect Man (2013) and many more. Fletcher passed away at age 88. R.I.P.

Jean-Luc Godard has passed away

Born in Paris, France, Godard lived much of his life in Switzerland. He wrote for French film criticism magazine Cahiers du Cinema and became foundational for the New French Wave that inspired new waves in scores of other countries across the world with his Breathless (1960). Later credits include A Woman Is A Woman (1961), Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Le Petit Soldat (1962), Contempt (1963), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), Weekend (1967), Every Man for Himself (1980), King Lear (1987), Century of Cinema (1995, documentary), Goodbye to Language (2014) and many more. Godard died of assisted suicide at age 91. R.I.P.

Wolfgang Petersen has died

James Caan has died

Caan was born the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany in New York. He got his start on TV in the early 1960s. His credits include El Dorado (1966), The Rain People (1969), Brian's Song (1971, TV movie), The Godfather (1972), - for which he earned his only Oscar nomination, - Slither (1973), The Gambler (1974), Funny Lady (1975), Rollerball (1975), Silent Movie (1976), Hide in Plain Sight (1980), - the only film he also directed, - Thief (1981), Misery (1990), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Bottle Rocket (1996), Eraser (1996), Dogville (2003), Elf (2003), Las Vegas (2003-07), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) and many more. Caan passed away at age 82. R.I.P.

Jean-Louis Trintignant has died

Born in Vaucluse, France, Trintignant's theatrical debut as an actor was in If All the Guys in the World... (1955). Later credits include ...And God Created Woman (1956), The Seven Deadly Sins (1961), Inferno (1964), A Man and A Woman (1966), My Love, My Love (1967), A Man to Kill (1967), The Great Silence (1968), Z (1969), The Assassination (1972), Three Colors: Red (1994), Amour (2012), Happy End (2017) and many more. He also wrote and directed two films in the 1970s. Trintignant passed away at age 91. R.I.P.

Ray Liotta has died

Adopted from an orphenage at a young age, Liotta got hooked on acting in high school. He had various TV credits in the late 1970s and early 80s, with his film debut in The Lonely Lady (1983). Later credits include Something Wild (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), Goodfellas (1990), Cop Land (1997), Hannibal (2001), Blow (2001), Narc (2002), John Q (2002), Identity (2003), Observe and Report (2009), Youth in Revolt (2009), The Details (2011), Killing THem Softly (2012), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), Shades of Blue (2016-18), The Simpsons (2018, TV-series), Marriage Story (2019), The Many Saints of Newark (2021), Black Bird (2022, TV-series) and many more. Liotta passed away at age 67 in his sleep while on production in the Dominican Republic. R.I.P.

Philip Baker Hall has died

Born in Ohio, Hall didn't start acting until he was 30. His long list of credits include Zabriskie Point (1970), Miami Vice (1987, TV-series), Midnight Run (1988), Ghostbusters II (1989), Cheers (1993, TV-series), Hard Eight (1996), The Rock (1996), Air Force One (1997), Boogie Nights (1997), Seinfeld (1991-98), Rush Hour (1998), The Insider (1999), Magnolia (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Bruce Almighty (2003), Dogville (2003), The Zodiac (2005), Zodiac (2007), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2004-09), Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011), Modern Family (2011-12) and many more. Hall passed away at age 90. R.I.P.

Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!

Eagerly anticipating this week ... (17-24)

11/18/2014

2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

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Eagerly anticipating this week ... (16-24)

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