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We’re continuing with our review of the Intriguers of 2013. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

Don Jon. Joseph Gordon-Levitt didn’t need to become a director. He’s already one of America’s most talented young performers in front of the camera, and he’s successfully leveraged that talent—a unique combination of movie-star charisma and aw-shucks sincerity—in a variety of ways, appearing equally comfortable in Hollywood blockbusters (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises), mid-level studio productions ((500) Days of Summer, 50/50), and scruffy mind-benders (Mysterious Skin, Brick), not to mention a particularly excellent hybrid of all three (Looper). He could have just kept on acting, and he would’ve kept us happy. Read More

So far in the Manifesto’s continuing Review of 2013, we’ve looked at the worst movies of the year, the least memorable, and the most overreaching. The films highlighted in those posts all fail in different ways, but they share a central theme: They’re all bad. (O.K., some are more innocuous than bad, but that doesn’t make them good.) The good news is that we’ve now reached the point where I can discuss movies that I actually liked. When you boil film criticism down to its essence, it’s really a pursuit designed to respond to one specific question: “Should I see this movie?” Tastes obviously vary, but going forward in our review of 2013, the answer is, happily, “yes”.

First up is what I’m dubbing The Intriguers. All of these films are flawed, not unlike those pictures highlighted in my posts on the year’s Failures. But these movies are sufficiently intriguing—some explore the boundaries of the form, others push back against typical narrative constraints—that their ambition, while not entirely fulfilled, makes them worth seeking out. Read More

Today in the Manifesto’s Review of 2013, we’re continuing with our look at the year’s failures. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

The Lone Ranger. I concede that The Lone Ranger is not a good movie. Tonally, it lurches between lifeless comedy and nostalgic neo-Western. The writing is both winkingly self-conscious and painfully earnest, but the jokes are dead on arrival, and the odes to the grandeur of the Old West feel strained and unconvincing. The typically reliable Johnny Depp seems unsure of how much humor he’s supposed to bring to his character, an uncertainty that applies equally to the film’s weird flashback structure. And the plot is both overstuffed and undercooked. It’s a mess. Read More

Earlier in the Manifesto’s Review of 2013, we looked at the unmemorable movies of the year. Those movies were lackluster not because they were bad but because they barely tried to be good; they were inoffensive and harmless, meaning there was no reason to remember them. This post will highlight the flip side of the coin and examine movies that actually strove to be good but flopped in their attempt. In a way, these are nobler pictures in that they’re failures of misguided ambition and strenuous effort rather than of complacent mediocrity. But they’re failures all the same. Read More

Philip Seymour Hoffman died yesterday at the age of 46. This is a tragedy. I say this, of course, at something of a distance—I never met the man, and I cannot pretend that the pain I feel at his passing can compare to that experienced by his family and friends, as well as the industry that knew and embraced him as an astonishing talent. Yet I am confident in stating that Hoffman’s death is a blow not only to those who knew him but to those who watched him. Thousands of fans in cinema, whether they be mainstream moviegoers or art-house cinephiles, have been deprived of a truly gifted artist, and I mourn Hoffman’s death both for the incredible actor he was and for the actor he never grew to be. I am a greedy, selfish movie fan, and it grieves me that I won’t be able to witness Hoffman’s career as it unfolds into his late period, to see how he adjusts and flourishes with age. I shudder to imagine the dozens of insular, nuanced performances he will never be able to provide. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Read More