2013 Denver Film Critics Society Award Winners Announced - "Gravity" Takes Top Prize

Today, the Denver Film Critics Society, of which I am a voting member, announced the winners for its awards in the best of 2013 cinema. The nominations were released last week – read them here – and overall, I find myself pleased with the winners. Very pleased, actually, in some cases – my only major regret at this point is that we don’t, as of yet, give awards for Cinematography and other technical categories, which I think is a fairly large oversight (especially in a year so rich with technical accomplishments). Oh well.

Below is the press release as sent out by the DFCS, and after the jump, you can read about the award winners, with my own personal commentary included. 

Denver, Colo. - The Denver Film Critics Society honored director Alfonso Cuaron’s space-based saga “Gravity” as 2013‘s best movie.

The film snared the coveted Best Picture award as well as honors for Best Director, Best Sci-Fi/Horror Film and Best Score.

"Even critics who thought other films were more deserving of Best Picture status saw how ‘Gravity’ will influence a generation of filmmakers on how to fuse storytelling with special effects," said DFCS co-director Christian Toto.

“Dallas Buyers Club," the true story of an AIDS patient who refused to stop looking for a cure, earned two key actors’ awards for Matthew McConaughey (Best Actor) and Jared Leto (Best Supporting Actor).

The group’s two new categories - Best Comedy and Best Sci-Fi/Horror Film - gave overdue praise to genres often overlooked during awards season, while the crowd-pleasing “Frozen” earned Best Animated Film and Best Song honors.

The Denver Film Critics Society includes members from across Colorado working for print, radio and web outlets. Final voting was conducted from Jan. 9-12, 2014.

Continue reading after the jump...

Announcing my departure from We Got This Covered, and looking toward the future at www.jonathanlack.com

A screenshot from We Got This Covered on the day I started writing there

As you may have already heard on Twitter earlier this week, I have made the decision to leave my post at the entertainment website We Got This Covered, where I have served as Associate Editor and film critic since May of 2012.

Nothing sinister is going on here – this was a completely amicable departure I made on my terms, for my own reasons, and without any malice towards the site or its staff. I had a fine time at We Got This Covered. I remember fondly the day its Editor-in-Chief, Matt Joseph, asked me to come on board, and I am extremely grateful to him for the many, many opportunities I was afforded by writing for his publication. I cannot say the entire experience was perfect, from beginning to end, but I can say that, on the whole, it was an extremely satisfying stretch of my career, one that I will always cherish.

But now it is time for me to move on, mostly for personal reasons, and I want to fill my readers in on at least some of those reasons right now, as well as explain my plans for the future – most of which are centered around this very blog, and many of which I think are rather exciting.

Continue reading after the jump...

2013 Denver Film Critics Society Awards Nominations Announced

Today, the Denver Film Critics Society – of which I am a voting member – announced its nominees for the best of 2013, with 12 Years a Slave earning the most nominations. Close behind that film were American Hustle and Gravity – each with six apiece – while Captain Phillips came in third with five nominations.

It is a nice set of nominees overall, though I think my colleagues are a bit too in love with American Hustle. They’re not alone, of course, as the film has been picking up nominations left and right, and while Hustle made my Top 30 for the year, I think it has for the most part been vastly overrated in a year that offered so many deeper, richer films. But that’s just me – some of my pet nominees made it in (others didn’t – despite putting it up in every category I could, The World’s End got only a single nod), and there are very few places where I would take real issue with any of these nominees. 

Continue reading after the jump to read the full list of 2013 DFCS award nominees, with commentary...

Read my "Top 10 Films of 2013" list at We Got This Covered

Every year, my favorite article to write is my year-end Top 10. I just love the feeling of looking over all the great experiences I had with cinema over the past 12 months, and I love how trying to concentrate all that into a qualified list of 10, stressful as it may sometimes be, invariably increases my appreciation for and understanding of the movies I choose. 2013 was a very special year for movies, though, and the titles on my Top 10 list this year are more remarkable to me than ever before. I explain all of my thoughts on this in my actual Top 10 list, of course, which means that if you want to see what I thought about the year in film, and want to read all about the movies I thought best represented this insanely great year for cinema, you'll want to head on over to We Got This Covered and give the full list a read.

Read my Top 10 Films of 2013 list here, at We Got This Covered.

As I say in the full piece, this is the first top 10 list I have ever made where I believe everything on it may well be a masterpiece, and as always, I hope readers are encouraged to check out all of these films for themselves.

On Monday, I will be posting an addition "Next-Best" list for We Got This Covered, which shall encompass 20 more titles and cover all the great, great movies I had to leave off the final Top 10. And there may be some more end-of-year celebrations after that as well. We shall see.

In any case, follow me on Twitter, @JonathanLack, for all updates, and enjoy The Top 10 Films of 2013.

Review: A free-form analysis of Spike Jonze's radiant "Her"

It is rare I feel completely stumped when sitting down to write a movie review – usually, while watching a film, I can at least get some hooks in the material, the foundations of a thesis that will take me where I need to go – but when it came to Spike Jonze’s Her, I found myself literally speechless. This is a great and complex film, and one that also bowled me over so completely that figuring out exactly what to say about it was a real challenge.

In the end, I did what I usually do in these situations, which is to write some free-form, stream of consciousness notes on the film until I feel I have exhausted all I have to say, hoping that an actual structure will come to me somewhere along the way. Usually, one does. This time, it didn’t. Perhaps I will be able to write more collected and coherently about Her one day in the future, but for now, in the interest of sharing my thoughts on this incredible film as quickly as possible, I took a different approach for this review. I have taken my free-form notes as I first wrote them, extending and expanding them into complete thoughts and sentences, and let the results stand as my formal review. Whether or not the finished product is at all coherent shall be up to the reader, though I think this stream-of-consciousness style actually fits the film rather well.

In any case, the review follows after the jump. It has no plot summary, so please refer to the film’s Wikipedia page or theatrical trailer if you are unfamiliar with the premise. There are no overt spoilers in this review, though it is possible my thoughts will make more sense after one watches the film. Read the review after the jump...

Review: Coen Brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis" is an impossibly rich triumph

Inside Llewyn Davis is at once both a painfully honest portrait of what it feels like to be artistically spent, and a beautiful artistic masterwork impossibly rich with greatness. It tells the story of a frustrated folk singer in what may be the last week of his struggling career, but seems to exist at the height of creative ascendency for filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, who always seem to me to have nowhere to go but down before coming back and maintaining, if not climbing even higher still. Llewyn Davis finds them in particularly fine form, for the film is so absurdly packed with cinematic riches that I suspect any one of them could be isolated, extended to feature length, and would leave an impact just the same. Had it only Oscar Isaac’s remarkably lived-in lead performance to sing the praises of, that would be enough. Had it only he and a number of other musically talented cast members performing emotionally resonant renditions of wonderful folk songs, mostly old but sometimes new, that would be enough. Had it only Carey Mulligan spewing strings of increasingly creative profanities at the title character, I would be satisfied. Were it comprised entirely of the seemingly aimless car trip Llewyn Davis takes with a hilariously stoic Garrett Hedlund and a marvelously surly John Goodman, I would still be overjoyed. And were it only a string of comic set-pieces revolving around Llewyn Davis’ misadventures with a mistakenly-gotten cat, I would love it just the same. Inside Llewyn Davis is astonishing because it is all of this and so much more, its seemingly endless supply of artistic treasure contained in one delicate, poignant, stunningly affecting package.

Continue reading after the jump...

2013 Movie Review Round-up #2 - "Blue is the Warmest Color," "Thor 2," "The Hunger Games 2," & "Frozen"

As explained in this post, I'm playing catch-up with the films of 2013 after a very busy fall that kept me away from my reviewing responsibilities, and I'm chronicling that process with a multi-part feature, extend over the next few weeks, wherein each post shall offer mini-reviews for about four or five movies. Since the last regular review I wrote before my long break was in late September, and published in early October – for Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity – I decided to start this project by recapping all the films I saw in theatres during that period, new releases I had been to see relatively close to their debuts. This has been split into two columns – the one you are reading now, focusing on the films of November, and the first installment, on the films of October – and in the next column, we shall cover some screeners I have finally gotten around to catching up on. A mix of full reviews – published over at We Got This Covered – and more mini-review columns like these should bring us to the end of the year in good fashion.

Read on after the jump for mini-reviews of Blue is the Warmest Color, Thor 2, The Hunger Games 2, and Frozen...