The 10 Best Films of 2013:
1. 12 Years a Slave - Steve McQueen
2. Like Father, Like Son/そして父になる (Soshite Chichi ni Naru) - Hirokazu Koreeda + Best Drama of the Year + Best Japanese Movie of the Year
3. Finding Vivian Maier - Charlie Siskel & John Maloof
4. Inside Llewyn Davis - Joel and Ethan Coen + Best Music Film of the Year
5. Blue Is the Warmest Colour/La Vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 & 2 - Abdellatif Kechiche + Best French Movie of the Year
6. The Great Beauty/La Grande Bellezza - Paolo Sorrentino + Best Rome Movie of the Year + Best Italian Movie of the Year
7. Only God Forgives - Nicolas Winding Refn + Best Danish Movie of the Year
8. The Conjuring - James Wan + Best Horror Movie of the Year
9. All Is Lost - J. C. Chandor + Best Survival Movie of the Year
10. The Wolf of Wall Street - Martin Scorsese
Other great movies of 2013 (in alphabetical order)
20 Feet from Stardom - Morgan Neville
August: Osage County - John Wells + Best Ensemble of the Year
Begin Again/Can a Song Save Your Life? - John Carney + Best New York Movie of the Year
Behind the Candelabra - Steven Soderbergh
Blue Jasmine - Woody Allen + Best San Francisco Movie of the Year
Despicable Me 2 - Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud
Don Jon - Joseph Gordon-Levitt + Best Debut Movie of the Year
Enough Said - Nicole Holofcener + Best Los Angeles Movie of the Year
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared/Hundraåringen Som Klev Ut Genom Fönstret och Försvann - Felix Herngren + Best Swedish Movie of the Year
Ida - Pawel Pawlikowski + Best Polish Movie of the Year
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone - Don Scardino + Best Comedy of the Year
Lone Survivor - Peter Berg + Best War Movie of the Year
Monsters University - Dan Scanlon
Nebraska - Alexander Payne
Side Effects - Steven Soderbergh + Best Thriller of the Year
Recommendable, good movies of 2013 (in alphabetical order)
Anchorman: The Legend Continues - Adam McKay + Strangest Movie of the Year
Dallas Buyers Club - Jean-Marc Vallée
Evil Dead - Fede Alvarez
Fading Gigolo - John Turturro
Fruitvale Station - Ryan Coogler
Gravity - Alfonso Cuarón + Best Science Fiction Movie of the Year
The Last Stand - Kim Jee-Woon + Best Comeback of the Year
Mama - Andrés Muschietti
Northwest/Nordvest - Michael Noer
Nymphomaniac - Lars Von Trier + Wildest Movie of the Year + Best Poster of the Year
Oz the Great and Powerful - Sam Raimi
Pacific Rim - Guillermo Del Toro
Star Trek Into Darkness - J. J. Abrams
Stranger by the Lake/L'Inconnu du Lac - Alain Guiraudie
This Is the End - Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen
Tom at the Farm/Tom à la Ferme - Xavier Dolan + Best Canadian Movie of the Year + Best LGBT Movie of the Year
White House Down - Roland Emmerich + Silliest Movie of the Year
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 2013 movies:
The Heat
The Kings of Summer/Toy's House
Omar
Remarks
The second edition of updated 2013 lists raises the amount of reviewed films from 40 to 52 and adds two masterpieces, several great movies, some good and a couple of mediocre ones.
Running through the list from the top:
2013 have given 5 masterpieces (so far) in Steve McQueen's amazing, multi-Oscar-winning 12 Year a Slave, newly added family-themed drama Like Father, Like Son by Japanese master filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda, Charlie Siskel and John Maloof's slightly overlooked, incredible documentary Finding Vivian Maier, Joel and Ethan Coen's music drama pearl, Inside Llewyn Davis and the also newly added Paolo Sorrentino's colorful ode to Rome, The Great Beauty.
The rest of the top 10 includes Abdellatif Kechiche's 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, J. C. Chandor's newly added, amazing lost-at-sea drama All Is Lost and Martin Scorsese's super-charged, rambunctious The Wolf of Wall Street. Falling out of the top 10 this year are Woody Allen's magnificent Blue Jasmine, the sensationally stimulating space-thriller Gravity and Alexander Payne's poignant Nebraska.
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. These 'top' the Worst 7 movie list of the year, which also includes Danish crime movie The Keeper of Lost Causes, Stephen Sommers' jumbled Odd Thomas adaptation, Sofia Coppola's disappointing The Bling Ring and Ruben Fleischer's deafening Gangster Squad.
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, Stranger by the Lake and Blue Is the Warmest Colour, all of which 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.)
Notes on the 2014 Oscars:
The academy favored 12 Years a Slave and Gravity, as well as Dallas Buyers Club:
12 Years a Slave won 3 awards, for Best Film, - and is still the only Best Film Oscar winner to also be recognized by Film Excess as a year's best film, - Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong'o in her startling break-out performance) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley). Dallas Buyers Club won 3 awards, for Best Actor (Matthew McConaughey), Best Supporting Actor (Jared Let), and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The night's biggest winner was Gravity, with 7 awards, for Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón), Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki), Editing, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Visual Effects and Score (Stephen Prince).
Cate Blanchett won Best Actress for Blue Jasmine; Spike Jonze won Best Original Screenplay for Her; Disney's Frozen won Best Song (Let It Go) and Best Animated Feature; Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby won Best Costumes and Best Production Design.
Mr Hublot won Best Animated Short; The Lady in No. 6: Music Saved My Life won Best Documentary Short and 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, ahead of The Broken Circle Breakdown, The Hunt, The Missing Picture and Omar.
Honorary awards went to Piero Tosi, Steve Martin, Angela Lansdale, Charles 'Tad' Marburg and Angelina Jolie.
2013 movies still pending on the watch-list:
Grudge Match, Black Nativity, 12-12-12, Gimme Shelter, The Galapagos Affair, 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, Jodorowsky's Dune, The Past, The Last Match, Frozen (seen - great), Let the Fire Burn, Adult World, All Is Bright, Mistaken for Strangers, Not Today, The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, Kill Your Darlings, Escape From Tomorrow (seen - OK), American Hustle, Ender's Game, Her, Saving Mr. Banks, Captain Phillips, Mom (TV-series), Insidious: Chapter 2, Enemy, Prisoners, Bad Words, Wolf Creek 2, Salomé, Antarctica: A Year on Ice, Escape Plan, The World's End, A Field in England, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Lunchbox, Borgman, Blue Ruin, Monster Pies, G.B.F., Oblivion, Pain & Gain, I'm So Excited, The Croods, The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete and Upstream Colour.
Previous annual lists:
2014 in films - according to Film Excess
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2012 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2012 in films - according to Film Excess
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2011 in films - according to Film Excess
What do you think of Film Excess' 2013 lists?
What films would comprise your lists?
