Tag: 12 Years A Slave

Best Movies of 2013: First Take

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

bestfilmtv2013-films

Since it’s a brand new year already featuring its own share of miserable, do-I-have-to-go-out-there? weather, what better time to sit back and figure out what exactly was the year that was? Film-wise, that is.

I contributed to a few of those lists at different websites this month. Over at PopMatters, you can see their gargantuan Top 35 films list here; they’ve also produced similar lists broken out into DVDs and foreign/indie films. I also contributed to their sections on the year’s worst films, and best female and male performances.

Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell'
Sarah Polley’s ‘Stories We Tell’

Also, the writers for Film Racket published their own individual Top 10 lists here. My list is something of a first draft that I’ll be going back over and redoing for the publication (hopefully later this month) of the new edition of Eyes Wide Open 2013: The Year’s 25 Greatest Movies (and 5 Worst). Here’s the short version:

  1. Stories We Tell
  2. 12 Years a Slave
  3. Gravity
  4. Before Midnight
  5. Fruitvale Station
  6. A Touch of Sin
  7. August: Osage County
  8. Gimme the Loot
  9. Room 237
  10. Captain Phillips

Department of Awards: Online Film Critics Society

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - AwardsLeave a comment
Chiwetel Ejiofor in '12 Years a Slave'
Chiwetel Ejiofor in ’12 Years a Slave’

The Online Film Critics Society, an international group of cinematic scriveners who are kind enough to count me in their number, today announced our awards for the best films of 2013. Not surprisingly, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity took the lead, with five and three wins, respectively, and Cate Blanchett deservedly took another best actress win for her work in Blue Jasmine. Variety reported it here.

Cate Blanchett in 'Blue Jasmine'
Cate Blanchett in ‘Blue Jasmine’

We also gave a special posthumous award to the late, great Roger Ebert, “whose decades of work in criticism helped to popularize serious film appreciation to a wider audience, and whose tireless persistence in the face of cancer was as inspiring as any of the films he championed.”

Here’s the full list:

  • Best Picture: 12 Years a Slave
  • Best Animated Feature: The Wind Rises
  • Best Film Not in the English Language: Blue Is the Warmest Color
  • Best Documentary: The Act of Killing
  • Best Director: Alfonso Cuaron – Gravity
  • Best Actor: Chiwetel Ejiofor – 12 Years a Slave
  • Best Actress: Cate Blanchett – Blue Jasmine
  • Best Supporting Actor: Michael Fassbender – 12 Years a Slave
  • Best Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong’o – 12 Years a Slave
  • Best Original Screenplay: Her
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: 12 Years a Slave
  • Best Editing: Gravity
  • Best Cinematography: Gravity

 

Department of Awards: ’12 Years a Slave’ Best Film of 2013

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards1 Comment
Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor in '12 Years a Slave'
Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor in ’12 Years a Slave’

On a snowy afternoon in Manhattan, New York Film Critics Online—a group that very kindly counts yours truly in its membership—met to determine which films that hit theaters in 2013 were great, terrible, meh, or (more commonly) just not great enough.

The headline is that Steve McQueen’s harrowing real-life epic 12 Years a Slave took awards for best picture, actor, and supporting actress, while the incomparable lost-in-space thriller Gravity and French women-in-love romance Blue is the Warmest Color won in two categories. Otherwise, the awards were spread around in a fairly democratic fashion.

The Hollywood Reporter noted the proceedings, as did Variety.

Clinging on for dear life in 'Gravity'
Clinging on for dear life in ‘Gravity’

Here’s the full list of what we liked from 2013:

  • Best Picture — 12 Years a Slave
  • Best Director — Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
  • Best Actor — Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
  • Best Actress — Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
  • Best Supporting Actor — Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
  • Best Screenplay — Spike Jonze, Her
  • Best Cinematography — Emmanuel Lubezki, Gravity
  • Best Breakthrough Performance — Adele Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Color
  • Best Use of Music — T Bone Burnett, Inside Llewyn Davis
  • Best Debut Director — Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station
  • Best Ensemble Cast — American Hustle
  • Best Foreign Language Film — Blue Is the Warmest Color
  • Best Documentary — The Act of Killing
  • Best Animated Film — The Wind Rises

Best Films of 2013:

  • 12 Years a Slave
  • Before Midnight
  • Blue is the Warmest Color
  • Dallas Buyers Club
  • Gravity
  • Her
  • Inside Llewyn Davis
  • Nebraska
  • Philomena
  • Prisoners
  • The Wolf of Wall Street

New in Theaters: ’12 Years a Slave’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - NewLeave a comment
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender in '12 Years a Slave'
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender in ’12 Years a Slave’

12yearsaslave-poster1In 1853, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, was freed from the Louisiana plantation where he had been sent twelve years earlier after being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Steve McQueen’s forceful adaptation of Northup’s autobiography is as beautifully detailed and riven with pain as the book.

My review is at Film Racket; here’s part:

There are horrors aplenty in Steve McQueen’s blistering, cold-eyed epic of slavery. But amidst the cringe-inducing scenes of torture, McQueen pinpoints acts of cruelty so casual they almost hurt more. The plantation owner’s wife who tells her husband’s newest purchase, a woman just separated from her children, not to worry, “They will soon be forgotten.” Another wife, jealous of her husband’s attraction to a slave woman, raking her fingernails across the woman’s face with no more thought than she’d give to swatting an animal. In a world where people can be treated as property, humanity disappears almost as quickly from the owners as from the owned. The difference is, the owned are trying to hang on to theirs…

Here is the trailer: