12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
2013
The first Best Picture from a Black director, and the least evasive film ever made about American slavery: McQueen holds shots long past comfort and refuses to look away.
★ 8.3
Browse by time · year
2013
Showing 14 films from 2013
Before Midnight
Directed by Richard Linklater
2013
The third film is the one that hurts: Linklater and his two actors let nine more years pass, then take it somewhere the first two politely refused to go.
★ 8.0
Inside Llewyn Davis
Directed by Coen Brothers
2013
The Coens made the saddest film about failure that anyone has managed to make funny: a folk singer plays beautifully, sleeps on couches, and gets absolutely nowhere at all.
★ 7.5
The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2013
Three hours of pure excess that never once slow down: Scorsese was seventy-one years old, and it moves faster than films made by directors a third his age.
★ 7.5
Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2013
Nothing else has made space feel this physically dangerous: Cuaron opens on a shot running almost thirteen minutes, and ninety minutes later you notice you stopped breathing.
★ 7.3
The Great Beauty
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
2013 · Italy
The closest anyone has come to remaking La Dolce Vita and surviving it: an aging Roman journalist drifts through parties and ruins, and the city has never looked better.
★ 7.2
The Wind Rises
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2013 · Japan
Miyazaki announced his retirement with it, a retirement he later took back: a young man designs beautiful aircraft that become weapons, and nothing about that is resolved.
★ 6.8
Captain Phillips
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2013
Barkhad Abdi had never acted and was cast out of a Minneapolis open call: he holds the screen against Tom Hanks through the last hour on a lifeboat off Somalia, and never blinks.
★ 6.4
Nebraska
Directed by Alexander Payne
2013
Payne wanted monochrome and the studio fought him over it: an old man believes a sweepstakes letter and sets off walking toward Nebraska, and his son drives him rather than argue.
★ 6.0
Blue Jasmine
Directed by Woody Allen
2013
Cate Blanchett plays a Manhattan wife whose husband's fraud has taken everything, arriving in San Francisco with nothing but luggage and manner: Allen's harshest film, and she is unsparing in it.
★ 5.4
Rush
Directed by Ron Howard
2013
Ron Howard made the best racing film by making it about two men who need each other: James Hunt and Niki Lauda in 1976, and the engines were recorded from the actual cars.
★ 4.8
American Hustle
Directed by David O. Russell
2013
David O. Russell rebuilt the real Abscam sting as a comedy of terrible hair: two con artists are pressed into working for the FBI, and everyone in it is lying about something.
★ 4.7
Dallas Buyers Club
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee
2013
They shot it in twenty-five days for five million dollars and won two acting Oscars: a Texas electrician starts importing unapproved drugs for himself and ends up supplying half the city.
★ 4.5
20 Feet From Stardom
Directed by Morgan Neville
2013
The backing vocals everyone can sing were recorded by people nobody could name: Darlene Love, Merry Clayton and Lisa Fischer finally get the camera, and the singing is extraordinary.
★ 4.2