Jonathan R. Lack’s 20 Next-Best Films Of 2013

As I said in my Top 10 Films of 2013 article, 2013 was more than just a great year for films – it was a year filled with movies that were themselves filled with countless cinematic riches, a year made deep by both the number of quality titles, and the boundless depth of the titles themselves. Narrowing the best of the best down to just 10 was no easy task – though it resulted in a Top 10 comprised solely of masterpieces, I feel – and in making the list, I was left with a large number of leftovers I knew merited discussion.

Jonathan R. Lack

Published: Dec 23, 2013 05:00 pm

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[h2]Spring Breakers[/h2]

Spring Breakers Movie

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It still stuns me that Spring Breakers was given a wide theatrical release. To me, this is a hair’s breadth away from being a full-on avant-garde piece, and while I found the film’s sweaty, disorientating, disturbingly excessive style exhilarating, unleashing the film on general audiences almost seems cruel.

No matter what, Spring Breakers is easily one of the best and smartest films of 2013, a movie that picks apart the myth of young adult individuality by showing how the things young people turn towards in search of making sense of the world – drinking, drugs, reckless sex, and even violence – are intensely subsuming and dehumanizing, with James Franco’s Alien, one of the year’s very best character evocations, standing in as the disturbing end result of it all.

At least, that’s one interpretation – Spring Breakers is as heavy and complex and intellectually rich as anything released this year, and when I got home from seeing it back in March, I typed 9 solid pages of notes, theories, and observations on the computer. I have tried several times to organize that all into a publishable essay, but the film keeps eluding me. Spring Breakers is an experience, one so perfectly and hauntingly realized that trying to capture what it has to say in writing is akin to bottling smoke.

Spring Breakers is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

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Author

Jonathan R. Lack

With ten years of experience writing about movies and television, including an ongoing weekly column in The Denver Post's YourHub section, Jonathan R. Lack is a passionate voice in the field of film criticism. Writing is his favorite hobby, closely followed by watching movies and TV (which makes this his ideal gig), and is working on his first film-focused book.