Favorite Movies Of 2013

#1: A man, a cat, a guitar

I'm finally posting the list of my favorite movies that I watched for the first time in the last year.  I still have American Hustle, The Wolf Of Wall Street and 12 Years A Slave to catch up on but those should all be around for a while. My rules for this list are to include anything I saw for the first time in 2013, no matter when the film was first released. Saying that, I;ve obviously been making a lot of trips to movie theatres lately because ten of the nineteen films I'm listing are from this year. In fact only three of them were originally released before 2000. I still watch a lot of older films through Netflix and ClassicFlix. This particular year though most of those were things I'd seen at least once before like High And Low and Million Dollar Legs. So here are the new-to-me films that got to me the most in 2013:

#2

1. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
2. Nebraska (2013)
3. The Kids Are All Right (2010)
4. Greetings From Tim Buckley (2012)
5. Philomena (2013)
6. The Telephone Book (1971)
7. Blue Jasmine (2013)
8. Gravity (2013)
9. Amour (2012)
10. Burnt By The Sun (1994)
11. The Angels' Share (2013)
12. Trance (2013)
13. Hannah Arendt (2013)
14. Rust And Bone (2012)
15. The Bling Ring (2013)
16. Some Came Running (1958)
17. Cosmopolis (2012)
18. Life Of Pi (2012)
19. American Splendor (2003)

#12

I've written about most of these on this blog before and others like Nebraska, Gravity and Blue Jasmine have already received tons of acclaim. A few, though, seem to be getting overlooked in all the professional 2013 post-mortems. Ken Loach's wonderful The Angel's Share I've talked about. The Bling Ring was Sofia Coppola's latest and, although she can't seem to get away from making movies about rich, bored young women, she turned that to her advantage in this really funny satire about an actual gang of wealthy Hollywood teens who blithely walked into the homes of celebrities and robbed to their hearts' content.  Trance was a twisted little crime movie from the often underrated Danny Boyle about an art theft with a plot that constantly turned and twisted virtually until the closing credits. It owed some of its ideas to Hitchcock (what thriller doesn't?) and was notable for casting Rosario Dawson in the part that, in old Hollywood days,  would have been played by an icy blonde Hitchcock-like femme fatale.