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Jonathan R. Lack’s Top 10 Films Of 2013

This is the Top 10 list I have been waiting my entire critical career to write. I have been reviewing movies since 2004, and compiling Top 10 lists since 2006, and while the latter task has become increasingly stressful with each passing year – maybe because I see a greater number of movies each year, and maybe because the industry has been on a general upward trend in recent times – I have never had the pleasure or challenge of compiling such a dense collection of cinematic brilliance for my year-end countdown. It is always tough at first, whittling the list of contenders down to the actual ten titles, but if I am being honest, I also find that most Top 10 lists I make are made up of a few films I might call legitimate masterworks, a bunch of great movies I love intensely, and, at the bottom, a sentimental pick or two that most clearly reflects my own obsessions and interests. And that’s perfectly fine, because a Top 10 list constructed like that still represents a whole lot of very meaningful cinema.

[h2]10. The Wolf of Wall Street[/h2]

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46 years after his first feature film, and still nobody makes a Martin Scorsese movie like Martin Scorsese. The Wolf of Wall Street is a masterstroke, a return for this great director to the highly influential, now-ubiquitous stylistic roots of GoodFellas, but which takes and evolves those cinematic principles to have full weight, impact, and shock again in 2013 America. If GoodFellas was the perfect window into the life of the modern American gangster, The Wolf of Wall Street is an equally impeccable examination of modern America’s most notorious (and destructive) kind of crook – the white-collar financial criminal.

Backed by committed, go-for-broke performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, the film is the most damning and all-encompassing narrative feature made since the financial collapse about the sorts of monsters responsible for America’s economic meltdown. Exactly the crime epic we need for this day and age, the film bottles our national anger, buries it just below the surface, and lets it simmer to a terrifying boil as we watch the arrogance, selfishness, and unchecked debauchery of the central characters unfold around us in one of the most vibrant and energetic pieces of filmmaking this year. The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t pastiche, or homage, or a filmmaker resting on old tricks to tell a new story – this is Martin Scorsese making the next benchmark Martin Scorsese movie, taking his influential bag of gangster-movie tricks and making it all seem new again.

The Wolf of Wall Street opens December 25th in theatres nationwide. Read my full review of the film here.

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