Flims of the Year - 2013

I've waited for a week before putting this up because I wanted to see The Act of Killing.  I've not reviewed it yet, but it was easily good enough to go into my top 5 films of 2013.

5 - The Stone Roses - Made of Stone

Bit of an indulgence for me at number 5 here.  Shane Meadows' documentary following the reunion of the Stone Roses is a film made by a fan for the fans.  As a film it's not that much, it's mainly a lot of behind the scenes footage of the Stone Roses practising edited together with fans telling the camera how much it means to them to be able to watch them live again - so many years after they split up.  I am a fan though, and so it was a film for me, which I bloody loved.

4 - Captain Phillips

A film that certainly has no difficulty establishing itself as pro-America, Captain Phillips is a brilliantly-made action thriller.  The performances from Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi were outstanding.  Expect it to do well at the Oscars when they roll around in a few weeks' time.

3 - The Act of Killing

Only watched this last night, but looking back over the films I saw last year I've got no problem putting this straight into my top 5.  It's a documentary that invites a group of men who were self-confessed murderers during the Suharto purges of 1965/66 to recall and re-enact their murders.  The results are incredible, as the men go into shocking details with very little apparent regret or remorse.  They even go so far as to recreate entire episodes of them burning.  The film is a terrifying look into the realities of a civil conflict born from the cold war, it invites us to look at the humanity of serial murderers, and wonder how our society might react if similarly provoked.

2 - Stoker

Definitely the most interesting film I saw in a cinema last year, Stoker is a film I have since re-watched on DVD and it left me just as bewildered.  From the moment I saw the trailer I was entranced by what the movie would be about, having now seen it twice I'm still convinced that something of the undead is being hinted at in the subtext.  Park Chan Wook needs to make more films, and Mia Wasikowska needs to do more horror.

1 - Silver Linings Playbook

A close call between the final two here, but in the end I decided that Silver Linings Playbook deserved it.  Not only is it a film that's entertaining and deals with an often-overlooked subject matter, it showed us that Bradley Cooper can do proper acting, gave Jeniffer Lawrence a stage on which to win a deserved Oscar and provided Robert Deniro with a good role to play (so rare for him these days).