2013 is over and done with. See ya later, alligator! So, instead of just throwing out my favorite movies of the year for everyone to disagree with me, I've also included a super fun list of random platitudes for your reading pleasure. In case you just want to check out my favorite films of the year, it's down there too. Please be kind.

Movie Not as Funny as Everyone Says
This is the End

Single Best Scene of the Year
Leonardo DiCaprio versus his car, The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Scene Stealer
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle

Actor That Truly Deserves All the Accolades That Follow
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave

Movie That I Can’t Stop Thinking About
Her

Blockbuster That is Actually a Good Movie Too
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Movie That Broke My Heart the Most (and Made Me Put Down My Cheeseburger)
12 Years a Slave

Movie That Should Never Have Made as Much Money as it Did
Identity Thief

Hands-Down Worst Piece of Trash I Saw in 2013
The Hangover III

Best Scene in an Otherwise Shitty Movie
The train sequence, The Lone Ranger

Most Pleasantly Surprisingly Good Movie
The Kings of Summer

The Other Quiet Movie About Teens That I Liked More Than I Thought I Would
Spectacular Now

Movie I Really Wanted to See But Still Haven’t and Feel Terrible About
Before Midnight

Movie That Made Me Cry For Reasons I Didn’t Think it Would
About Time

Movie Most Worth its 3D Upcharge
Gravity

Movie I Liked More Than Most People
The Great Gatsby

Most Underrated Performance of an Actor in a So-Called “Supporting” Role
Daniel Bruhl, Rush

Best Movie That No One Will Remember Actually Came out in 2013 and Not 2012
Place Beyond the Pines

Movie Everyone Loved that I Absolutely Hated
Frances Ha

Favorite Movies of the Year (in alphabetical order)
12 Years a Slave

American Hustle

Blue Jasmine

Frozen

Gravity

Her

Inside Llewyn Davis

Kings of Summer

Place Beyond the Pines

The Wolf of Wall Street

-- Darcie Duttweiler

“It’s never new but it never gets old — it’s a folk song.”

Inside Llewyn Davis has a lot in common with the folk music genre: It’s endearing and beautiful at times but slow and sorrowful at others. In the spirit of folk music, we’ve decided to harmonize on this review — two voices in unison. We’ll be passing around the hat afterward.

Rob: The film depicts the Greenwich Village folk scene in the pre-Dylan era, a time when the movement had lost much of its cohesiveness and was struggling to stay relevant as pop music dominated the charts. Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen present 1961 as a dark time for “serious” folk artists who were determined to keep their craft from falling by the wayside. And apparently, some of them coped with this new reality by becoming straight-up jerks.

Eric: The only thing worse than an asshole who has convinced himself he's an artist is an asshole who actually is an artist. It’s shame to see talent wasted on someone who’s such a miserable human being. That’s Llewyn Davis, a guy who shows more emotion to a stray cat than the people who (somehow) love him. Singing is the only way Llewyn can really reach out to other humans, and it pays the bills, which are pretty much nonexistent since he's homeless and lives on a diet of bummed cigarettes.

Rob: Llewyn has problems taking responsibility for pretty much anything. He drifts around New York, crashing on one friend’s couch after another. He neglects his family. He writes checks to pay for one-night stands’ abortions and just walks away without a second thought. He’s a total deadbeat, even if he sometimes means well.

Eric: We follow scumbag Llewyn around for a week of public transportation, dingy clubs, and run-down apartments. Pretty quickly it starts to seem like a male-centric Girls set in the ‘60s — not only because the lead character is young, self-important egomaniac who treats his friends like garbage and has convinced himself anyone not doing what he’s doing has sold out and those who are doing it aren’t doing it right (“What do you think of these guys?” a club owner asks Llewlyn of an a capella quartet. “I like their sweaters.”) but because two of the three gents from Girls (Adam Driver and Alex Karpovsky) show up in the first 30 minutes of the film. The supporting cast here is fantastic, and in typical Coen fashion, the kooky characters we meet for just one scene are as fascinating as the lead. 

Rob:  Let’s not forget Carey Mulligan, who turns in an enjoyable Holly Hunter-esque performance as one of Llewyn’s aforementioned one-night stands. (If there’s one thing the Coens have perfected over the course of their canon, it’s their trope of hilariously exasperated female characters who are fed up with the stupid men in their lives. God, there are a lot of dumb men in Coen movies.) 

But unfortunately the Coen personality shines through only occasionally in Inside Llewyn Davis, in a few great moments that spotlight those oddball characters. In my favorite scene of the film, Llewyn sits in on a recording session with fellow folksters played by Driver and Justin Timberlake, jamming out on a gimmicky pop song about JFK and the space race.

Eric: That was whole bit was hilarious. It’s a shame all these colorful characters but get so little screen time — it’s all about Llewyn (which, I suppose makes sense given the title of the film). But, I would have been happy to see some more from Driver and Timberlake’s characters and Stark Sands, who plays Llewyn’s exact opposite: a painfully optimistic young soldier with a potentially promising folk career ahead of him. 

We do, however, get a hefty dose of John Goodman as surly old jazz man named Roland and his silent, chain-smoking valet Johnny Five, played perfectly by Garrett Hedlund (the lead from Tron: Legacy). Their time together gives some hilarious breaks from the heartbreak that surround Llewyn and his self-inflicted suffering. There’s a perfect blend of sad and funny when Roland and Llewyn talk about the suicide of Llewyn’s performing partner.

Rob: In another of Roland’s (drunken? heroin-fueled?) rants, he points out an interesting contrast between folk singers, whose music he considers lazy and dumbed-down, and jazz musicians who “play all the notes on the scale.”

Eric: Man, I was silently cheering Roland in that scene. I tend to hate folk music — the capos and the boring chords and the uninteresting suburban kids thinking they have something to say. Ugh. But even if the genre doesn’t do much for you because every d-bag you know with an acoustic guitar has turned you off of amateur solo performers, it’s impossible not to get silenced and swept up by Llewyn’s takes on these classic folk songs. The earnest, simple songs are mimicked in the film’s visuals — muted like the calm strum of steel strings. Every frame looks like it could be the cover of a folk album. Like, say, this one from Bob Dylan.

Rob: Dylan’s shadow looms large over the film. We know he’ll soon end up breathing new life into a lot of the old standards Llewyn solemnly performs for half-empty clubs — and he’ll have a lot more fun doing it. Will folk’s looming resurgence save Llewyn from his gloomy mope-fest and break him out of his endless loop of self-destruction? Or will it just be another instance of opportunity passing him by?

Eric: Oh, I know! Or, maybe I don’t — wouldn’t want to spoil the ending. Though I’m not sure I could if I tried. It’s worth mentioning this is character-heavy stuff, so don’t go in expecting oodles of plot. Still, I think if you like the Coen Bros. and the absence of a major story doesn’t completely turn you off, you’ll agree this selection is a fine addition to the Coen’s songbook.

--Rob Heidrick and Eric Pulsifer

When Jennifer Lawrence won her Oscar last year, I rolled my eyes a little bit. Sure, she was good in Silver Linings Playbook, but was it Oscar worthy? I didn’t know if I’d go that far. But her brash performance as the bored, depressed housewife of a con man in American Hustle is practically transcendent. She lights up the screen whenever she’s around, and no one else can even attempt to meet her level of bravado. It’s truly incredible.

Does that sound like enough hyperbole for you? Needless to say American Hustle (directed by David O. Russell) is better than I thought it would be. I heard the hype, but I didn’t expect it to live up to it (I’m a cynical dame, what can I say?). It totally does! The movie is sharp, well-directed, and has amazing performances from the likes of Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Louis C.K., and more.

American Hustle is the sorta true-ish story of the ABSCAM scheme in the ‘70s that involved the FBI, some con artists, and crooked politicians. Sure, Russell has beefed up the plot and the drama here, and there’s even a disclaimer that “Some of this actually happened.” What follows is a ‘70s crime romp that harkens back to the early glory days of Martin Scorsese.

Okay, so some of the plot is kinda convoluted and can be slightly hard to follow, but the jist is that Bale is a con artist who falls in love with Adams’s character and brings her into his weird loan scheme while his housewife (Lawrence) raises his son. Cooper is an eager FBI agent who busts them and coerces them to help him catch politicians taking bribes in order to avoid jail time. That’s where Renner’s clueless mayor character comes into play. Along the way, Jennifer Lawrence mucks up some of their plans when she catches the eye of a mafioso.

American Hustle might, on paper, sound like a crime drama, but it is one of the funnier movies I’ve seen all year. Christian Bale goes for broke with his fat, paunchy belly and ridiculous combover, Jennifer Lawrence is electric, and Bradley Cooper could teach a class in manic coked-out-dom (Well, him and Leonardo DiCaprio, who also similarly shines in Wolf of Wall Street).

The movie might be a little over-the-top and a tad messy, but it’s also a love letter to the quirky and weird characters before us. American Hustle is infectiously fun and zany, and it will hustle its way into your heart.

-- Darcie Duttweiler

Saving Mr. Banks is the so-called “true” story of how the great and powerful Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) finally brought P.L. Travers’s (Emma Thompson) beloved children’s book, Mary Poppins, to the silver screen. What follows is the weaving of pre-production between Mrs. Travers, as she prefers to be called, and Disney’s team of songwriters, the Sherman Brothers (played by BJ Novak and Jason Schwartzman), along with scenes from her childhood in Australia with a super fun but destructive and drunk father (Colin Farrell), which are used to explain why Mary Poppins is so near and dear to her heart.

What cinema does that real life cannot is whitewash history and make everything tie together in a sweet little package. Saving Mr. Banks does this in spades, and it IS a nice package, but….it tries so desperately hard to put all the puzzle pieces together for you and then does a pirouette and shoves some jazz hands in your face that you can’t help but feel ever-so-slightly turned off by the whole thing.

The story is a decent one: a curmudgeonly author demands authority over the screenplay of her beloved book and learns to let go a little once overcome by the spectacle of Disney. We all know how it ends because we grew up with the wonderful Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, but Saving Mr. Banks fails to capture any magic of the musical I grew up with, save for one scene when the Sherman brothers play “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” for Travers, who finally warms up to it. Even my heart grew three sizes.

Thompson is fantastic as always. Prickly, contentious, British, and stern. I love a grumpy character more than a sunshiney one, and she does the trick. She only softens really in the presence of Paul Giamatti, who is her hired driver and says weird, schlocky things like “The sun came out to say hello to you!” and gives her a sob story to make her heart thaw a little. It’s a cinema trick that works for many people, but for me it feels forced, and that made me feel a little sad.

I wanted to like Saving Mr. Banks more. I love Emma Thompson. I adore Tom Hanks, and I loooooooove Mary Poppins. Hanks and Thompson do their best here, and they are both their usual talented selves, but even they can’t overcome the heaping spoonfuls of high fructose corn sugar that is dumped down our throats.

Go just to see Emma Thompson shine, but know that you’ll leave wanting to just read Mary Poppins (or see the movie that Travers hated so much) instead.

-- Darcie Duttweiler

Let me preface this with the statement that I actually enjoyed the first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey. Sure, it was bloated and slightly monotonous, but I thought it was mostly a good, fun time. That being said...I REALLY wish I would have revisited that film before checking out the next film in line, The Desolation of Smaug, which begins at the exact moment we left off with our dwarf, hobbit, and wizard friends.

All that being said, too, The Desolation of Smaug is better than its predecessor, perhaps marginally though. While still bloated with a somewhat monotonous pace (how many times can these dwarves really get captured and then escape?), the film does offer a truly spectacular action sequence involving barrels, orcs, a raging river, and elvish archers that is possibly one of the most exciting action sequences I’ve seen in a looooooong time and definitely elevates the movie on a whole.

But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. In case you have forgotten The Hobbit trilogy is the story of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), a solitary hobbit who enjoys his quiet life until the great wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) urges him to go on a quest with a dozen dwarves to reclaim their Misty Mountain home that was stolen from them by a greedy and scary dragon. All Biblo has to do is sneak into the mountain undetected and steal some glowing stone that will allow Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) to ascend to his rightful throne.

Well, the last film ended on the dwarves escaping some goblin hole thing (I’m going off of memory here just to again urge you to go revisit the first film) and being chased by some scary orcs, who are doing the bidding of some Necromancer, who NO ONE knows the true identity of (hint hint). Biblo has tricked Gollum out of the One True Ring, and they’re all forging ahead towards the mountain.

I appreciate Peter Jackson trying to fuse The Hobbit trilogy together with The Lord of the Rings, but, for me, it creates some slight plot holes (as someone who just battled the fires of Mount Doom on a 12-hour extended edition LOTR movie marathon). That I can overlook. It’s fine. Whatever. I can appreciate him writing in Evangeline Lilly to be a badass elvish warrior, and I definitely welcome the return of Legolas (Orlando Bloom), but it just sometimes feels too slightly pieced together in the hopes of making one giant cohesive world. And why did they have to make the lady elvish warrior have to fall in love? Bah humbug.

What I don’t appreciate? That you have a movie called The Hobbit, and there is actually very little Bilbo action. You have Martin Freeman! Use him.

The main issue with The Hobbit trilogy is that it’s largely a “heist” film broken into three bloated parts. The LOTR trilogy was a HUGE quest. Every scene mattered, whether we were following Frodo and Sam and their journey to Mordor or focusing on Aragorn and his rise to the throne or even all that jazz about Helm’s Deep. The Hobbit’s storyline just stops and starts so drastically and follows the exact same plot again and again, that you can’t just help but wish it was quicker-paced.

All that aside, the scenes between Bilbo and the stupendous Smaug (voiced by the one and only Benedict Cumberbatch) are visually incredible and fun to watch. And did I mention that, OH MAN, the barrel scene is pretty awesome?

Go into The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug knowing it’s a “good” movie but just not as GREAT as The Lord of the Rings, and that’s okay.

-- Darcie Duttweiler