Time Magazine: Top 10 Movies of 2013

By Richard Corliss Dec. 04, 2013

1. Gravity
When NASA travelers Sandra Bullock
and George Clooney get lost in space, all
awe breaks loose. Losing contact with
Mission Control, as
well as access to
their oxygen supply,
they are alone
together, with time
and options running out. An epic of
desperate peril and profound wonder,
Alfonso Cuar ns thrilling 3-D drama is a
testament to human grit and
groundbreaking technical ingenuity. It
deserves to be seen once for the wow
factor and a second time to try to figure
out how Cuar n and his digital savants
managed to make the impossible seem so
cinematically plausible.
2. The Great Beauty
Whats the matter with nostalgia? asks
an aging poet in this masterpiece of
divine decadence. Its the only thing left
for those of us who have no faith in the
future. Writer-director Paolo
Sorrentino, whose Il Divo blended
political bio-pic and Ovidian satire, views
modern Rome in all its excess through
the jaded eyes of the king of the
socialites, journalist Jep Gambardella
(Il Divos Toni Servillo) and, further
back, more than a half-century, to the
Eternal City as seen by Federico Fellini
in La Dolce Vita.
3. American Hustle
History remade as sparkling farce: the
FBIs late-70s Abscam investigation of
political corruption, which led to the
conviction of a U.S. Senator and seven
Congressmen,
becomes this
headlong tale of
romance and
recklessness. In
director David O.
Russells third consecutive movie about
mismatched couples and their crazy
families, after The Fighter and Silver
Linings Playbook, A New York con artist
(Christian Bale) juggles a mouthy wife
(Jennifer Lawrence) and a cunning
girlfriend (Amy Adams) while reluctantly
cooperating with the sting supervised
by a federal agent (Bradley Cooper) of
a New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner).
4. Her
In a future Los Angeles so near-Utopian
that no scene takes place in a car,
Theodore Twombly
(Joaquin Phoenix)
has a job composing
love letters for other
people. Profliga tely
romantic, bruised by the failure of his
marriage to Catherine (Rooney Mara), he
has enough sentiment left over to fall
truly, madly, deeply in love with a
computer operating system who calls
herself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).
5. The Grandmaster
Running at 2 hours and 10 minutes in its
world premiere at the Berlin Film
Festival, Wong Kaw-wais dreamy biopic
of martial arts master Ip Man was cut by
22 minutes one-fifth of its running
time by U.S. distributor The Weinstein
Company. Thats a crime akin to cutting
random holes in a Bosch or Breughel
painting; but whats left is choice. The
Hong Kong director makes superb
movies (Chungking Express, In the
Mood for Love, 2046) that ignore
narrative drive for tales of romance and
regret in a rapturous visual style of slo-
mo imagery and hazy closeups of wistful
stars.
6. Furious 6
Planes, trains and automobiles collide
spectacularly in the fourth Fast &
Furious movie to be directed by Justin
Lin and written by Chris Morgan. In a
reunion of Vin Diesel, the late Paul
Walker, their gang and girlfriends and
DEA agent Dwayne Johnson, Furious 6
vrooms from Tenerife to Moscow to
London, with astounding stunts in each
location, and hitches a ride on a military
cargo plane for the final brawl. Where
2
Fast Five heralded the New Hollywoods
exaltation of sensational action over
subtle character, Furious 6 revs
everything up, purifies and improves it to
a level even cooler and more
aerodynamically delirious than its
predecessor, if such a thing is even
mathematically possible.

7. Frozen
Princess Elsa has powers of sorcery
beyond her control: she can and does
cast a nuclear winter on her northern
kingdom. Her sister Anna is the normal
one, falling in love at the first sight of any
eligible male, yet
bound to confront
her sister and save
their realm. The
first animated
feature in the Walt
Disney studios glorious history to offer
two princess heroines, Frozen transforms
Hans Christian Andersens The Snow
Queen into a fable of modern, timeless
sisterhood. For this full-musical
enchantment, Writer Jennifer Lee and
co-director Chris Buck tapped some of
the Broadway musicals brightest lights
composers Robert Lopez and Kristen
Anderson-Lopez and actor-singers Idina
Menzel (Elsa), Kristen Bell (Anna) and
Jonathan Groff (as the gruff mountain
man Kristoff).
8. The Act of Killing
In 1965, the thug Anwar Congo was hired
by the Indonesian government to stamp
out the threat of Communism; he and his
fellow gangsters formed paramilitary
squads that tortured and killed
thousands of innocents. Nearly a half-
century later, Anwar and many of his
colleagues are still around, still protected
by the politicians in charge, and ready to
reenact their atrocities. Joshua
Oppenheimers amazing documentary
gives that opportunity to men who grew
up idolizing Brando and Pacino and are
pleased to star in their own crude
biopics. To more closely resemble his
young self, Anwar dyes his hair and gets
new teeth. He rehearses garroting a man
with a wire, to the laughter and applause
of the women watching.
9. 12 Years a Slave
Southern whites of the pre-Civil War
plantation aristocracy believed
themselves Gods
chosen, and their
slaves inhuman.
As shown in this
searing film
document an
anti-Gone With
the Wind the masters were the
madmen, inferior but in charge. Here,
working from John Ridleys script based
on the 1853 memoir of Solomon
Northup, a free black New Yorker
abducted into servitude, McQueen
immerses viewers in the magnolia-
scented hell to which Northup (Chiwetel
Ejiofor) was exiled. You will recoil at
every punishment, feel each slur, with an
immediacy that makes the long-ago,
peculiar institution of slavery sting like
a whiplash.
10. The Hobbit: The
Desolation of Smaug
Who could guess, after the meandering
first feature in a seemingly unnecessary
eight-hour
trilogy of films
based on a novel
of less than 300
pages, that Peter
Jackson had
such a vigorous
and thrilling middle episode in store?
With Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Gandalf
(Ian McKellen) and t he dwarves finally
done with introductory dawdling, they
dive into a nonstop adventure among the
noble Elves, the rough-hewn humans of
Laketown and the ferocious dragon
Smaug (voiced by Benedict
Cumberbatch.)
Jacob Meister