Looking at Hollywood’s best and worst of 2013

The Great Gatsby was my favorite movie of the year when it came out, and despite all the critical carping (mainstream critics just love to hate director Baz Luhrmann), I feel the movie is a cinematic masterpiece. The story hews close to the source material, but the critics hated Luhrmann’s excessive excess … something the original story was definitely disparaging … but it looks great on film. Luhrmann used all the tricks at his disposal, including the inspired use of actual text from the book as part of Tobey Maguire’s narration of the story. Leonardo DiCaprio makes a fine Gatsby, but Joel Edgerton really shines as Tom Buchanan. The star of the show however is Simon Duggan’s gorgeous cinematography, and Luhrmann’s visually stunning 3D composition. Love it or hate it, The Great Gatsby was the best 3D movie of the year.

The Conjuring was a total surprise, and has become one of my favorite haunted house movies of all time, living up to the benchmark set way back in 1963 by Robert Wise’s The Haunting. I’m not a huge fan of director James Wan’s Saw (the original) and I was disappointed with his last horror film Insidious, mainly because it relied on cheap, overly loud sound effects and music cues to scare you when his visuals were strong enough on their own to send chills down your spine. It seems he’s learned a lot since then, and uses a lot of restraint with The Conjuring, letting the visuals – and relying on physical effects instead of CGI – and clever editing make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. He’s also served well by some great actors, including Lili Taylor, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, and his skill at delivering good, honest scares made me excited to see Insidious: Chapter 2 (and what Wan learned here carried over to that, making it a much better movie than the first one). I don’t know what Wan’s going to do with the Fast & Furious franchise, but I hope he continues scaring us with the Conjuring and Insidious franchises.

Another horror film makes my list simply because it was so surprising … and badly marketed. You’re Next seemed like it was going to be another of those typical horror films where a group of people are stranded at an isolated location and picked off one-by-one by unknown killers for unknown reasons. I saw The Strangers and I hated it, and I was really expecting this to be much the same. But it wasn’t! Turns out, You’re Next started out exactly like that type of movie but after the first act became more of a satire of the whole home invasion genre, giving a reason for the targeting of this particular home and revealing that not everyone inside is a target, but rather an accomplice. The film certainly made you cringe at some of the gruesome killings, but it made you laugh as well as you slowly realize what’s going on. Horror movie aficionados were already in on the joke with some of the film’s casting, with AJ Bowen (Chillerama, Hatchet II), Joe Swanberg (director, V/H/S), Ti West (director, The ABCs of Death), Simon Barrett (writer, V/H/S) and scream queen Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, From Beyond) on board. If you overlooked You’re Next because of what you thought it was, you did yourself and the film a disservice.

I’m putting this last one on my list just to be the lone voice of support for The Lone Ranger. The film had a huge target on it from the get-go with its tortured pre-production history, mega budget, and creative team from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It also had to deal with the issue of younger audiences who had no idea who The Lone Ranger was, and old-timers who were offended by the changes made to the beloved TV character. Except, those “changes” were actually based on the character’s radio origins and this story stuck fairly closely to that early beginning. The other problem that people seemed to have was that while the movie was called The Lone Ranger, it was more about Tonto, who narrated the story as an old man, leaving viewers to wonder if the events of the film actually happened by the time the credits rolled. It was an interesting device, but it didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Despite that, the film was put together very well (even if it did have one too many subplots) and the action scenes were off the charts. And they built two real locomotives to minimize the use of CGI! That realistic approach paid off and, for me, the movie was one of the best thrill rides of the summer.

Other movies that stood out this year include Mama, Oz the Great and Powerful, Evil Dead, Oblivion, Starbuck, Iron Man 3, The Hangover Part III, Now You See Me, Man of Steel, World War Z, The Heat, Pacific Rim, We’re the Millers, Elysium, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Thor: The Dark World, Bad Grandpa, and Dallas Buyers Club.