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

The 10 Best Films of 2013:

1. 12 Years a Slave - Steve McQueen + Best American Movie of the Year

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. Philomena - Stephen Frears + Best True-Story Movie of the Year + Best English Movie of the Year

4. Finding Vivian Maier, documentary - Charlie Siskel & John Maloof

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

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

7. The Great Beauty/La Grande Bellezza - Paolo Sorrentino + Best Rome Movie of the Year + Best Italian Movie of the Year

8. The Past/Le Passé - Asghar Farhadi + Most Under-Appreciated Movie of the Year

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

10. Bad Hair/Pelo Malo - Mariana Rondón + Best Venezuelan Movie of the Year + Best LGBT Movie of the Year

Other great movies of 2013 (in alphabetical order)

20 Feet from Stardom, documentary - Morgan Neville

All Is Lost - J. C. Chandor + Best Survival Movie of the Year

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

The Conjuring - James Wan + Best Horror 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 Las Vegas Movie of the Year

 Lone Survivor - Peter Berg + Best War Movie of the Year

Monsters University - Dan Scanlon

Nebraska - Alexander Payne

Only God Forgives - Nicolas Winding Refn + Best Danish Movie of the Year

Saving Mr. Banks - John Lee Hancock + Best Period Movie of the Year + Best Dramedy of the Year

Side Effects - Steven Soderbergh + Best Thriller of the Year

We're the Millers - Rawson Marshall Thurber + Best Comedy of the Year + Best Road Movie of the Year

The Wolf of Wall Street - Martin Scorsese

Recommendable, good movies of 2013 (in alphabetical order) 

Anchorman: The Legend Continues - Adam McKay

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 (Arnold Schwarzenegger)

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

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - Ben Stiller

Sorrow and Joy/Sorg og Glæde - Nils Malmros

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

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

The 10 Worst Movies of 2013:

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

2. World War Z - Marc Forster

3. Stoker - Chan-wook Park

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

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

6. Sharknado, TV movie - Anthony C. Ferrante

7. A Field in England - Ben Wheatley

8. Odd Thomas - Stephen Sommers

9. The Bling Ring  - Sofia Coppola

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

Other failed, poor or mediocre 2013 movies (in alphabetic order):

The Heat
The Kings of Summer/Toy's House 
Omar
Under the Skin  + Strangest Movie of the Year
Warm Bodies
The Wind Rises/風立ちぬ [Kaze Tachinu]



[65 titles in total]

Notes

The third edition of updated 2013 lists raises the amount of reviewed films from 52 to 65.

Running through the list from the top:

2013 have given a fat 8 masterpieces (so far) in Steve McQueen's amazing, multi-Oscar-winning 12 Year a Slave, family-themed drama Like Father, Like Son by Japanese master filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda, Stephen Frears' fantastic Philomena, Charlie Siskel and John Maloof's slightly overlooked, incredible documentary Finding Vivian Maier, Joel and Ethan Coen's music drama pearl, Inside Llewyn Davis, Paolo Sorrentino's colorful ode to Rome, The Great Beauty, Asghar Farhadi's stern, brilliant drama The Past and Woody Allen's priceless Blue Jasmine.

The rest of the top 10 includes Abdellatif Kechiche's incredible French love story Blue Is the Warmest Colour and Mariana Rondón's lustrous Bad Hair. This year, J. C. Chandor's amazing lost-at-sea drama All Is Lost, Nicolas Winding Refn's strange, trippy Only God Forgives, James Wan's phenomenal horror The Conjuring and Martin Scorsese's super-charged, rambunctious The Wolf of Wall Street all leave the top 10.

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, great filmmaker Marc Forster's World War Z and Chan-wook Park's pretentious, boring and unpleasant Stoker. The worst-of continues with the dubious, befittingly titled The Last Exorcism Part 2, Danish crime adaptation The Keeper of Lost Causes by great filmmaker Mikkel Nørgaard, TV movie sensation Sharknado, great British filmmaker Ben Wheatley's psych-out, gross, borderline pretentious A Field in England, Stephen Sommers' jumbled Odd Thomas adaptation, master filmmaker 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, 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 Leto), 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.

IMDb's user-generated top 10 most popular 2013 titles:

1. Frozen
2. The Wolf of Wall Street
3. The Lone Ranger
4. The Great Gatsby
5. Prisoners
6. We're the Millers
7. Her

8. Now You See Me
9. Fast & Furious 6
10. Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1
 

2013 movies still pending on the watch-list:

Grudge Match, Black Nativity, 12-12-12, Gimme Shelter, The Galapagos Affair, The Railway Man, The Last of Robin Hood, Blood Glacier, The Sacrament, Labor Day, Visitors, Of Horses and Men, Jodorowsky's Dune, The Last Match, Adult World, All Is Bright, Mistaken for Strangers, Not Today, The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, American Hustle, Ender's Game, 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, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Lunchbox, Borgman, Monster Pies, G.B.F., Oblivion, The Croods, The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete, Upstream Colour, The Grandmaster, Helium, Iron Man 3, Cutie and the Boxer, Dirty Wars, The Square, The Phone Call, Tangerines, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Living on One Dollar, Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus, Magic Magic, Gerontophilia, Now You See Me, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Prisoners, Man of Steel, The Lone Ranger, Fast & the Furious 6, American Hustle, Thor: The Dark World, Movie 43, Kick-Ass 2, After Earth, The Purge, Identity Thief, The Hangover Part III, Horns, Tracks, Joe, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Free Fall, Venus in Fur and Big Bad Wolves.

Previous annual lists:
 
2015 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2014 in films - according to Film Excess
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
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 III]
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 II]
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2011 in films - according to Film Excess
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess  

What do you think of Film Excess' 2013 lists?

What films would comprise your lists?