We are officially at that time of the year when the ‘best of’ lists start piling in.
Don’t shoot the messenger – maybe you haven’t seen one (or many) of these, and you can add them to your list of movies to watch when you finally go on year-end leave and shut the world out for a day or three.
You’ve earned that much, and don’t let anybody guilt-trip you into venturing outside.
Click on the movie title and you’ll get the trailer – you’re welcome.
In 10th place on TIME’s list is Hustlers, which received decent reviews from actual strippers.
Two exotic dancers (Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez), both single mothers needing to provide for their families after the 2008 crash, hatch a highly illegal scheme to charm clueless Wall Streeters out of their money. Director Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is lively and funny, as well as a reminder that it’s often women—and their children—who suffer most when an economic system driven largely by men collapses. When the going gets tough, the tough … hustle.
9th goes to A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring the beloved Tom Hanks as children’s TV host Fred Rogers:
it shows his ideas in practice, telling the story of an unlikely friendship between Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks) and a sour journalist (Matthew Rhys) riven with anger issues. Rogers was all about kindness, but Heller’s movie highlights another of his tenets: we have to give ourselves permission to feel everything in order to make peace with the things that threaten to tear us apart.
Coming in at 8th, it’s Dolemite Is My Name:
Eddie Murphy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, the real-life performer who financed and starred in an ultra-low-budget 1975 movie—featuring a flashy hustler named Dolemite—that became both a hit and the stuff of legend. Directed by Craig Brewer, this movie is about ambition taking flight against all odds. It’s also pure joy, and as Dolemite himself would tell you, you never kick that out of bed.
Knives Out takes seventh – “a whodunit about a family fighting over the will of an eccentric mystery writer”, with the highly-acclaimed Parasite in sixth:
Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s black comedy–thriller, about an impoverished family who scheme their way into an upper-crust household, artfully explores resentment between the haves and the have-nots. Even more striking is its deep humanity: both the scammers and the scammed earn our sympathy. Parasite is today’s answer to filmmaker Jean Renoir’s famous line, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”
Watch that.
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s evergreen 150-year-old novel, Little Women, is fifth, and Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson star as a married couple in Marriage Story, which is fourth:
To their horror, and ours, their at-first amicable split grows into a monster they had no idea they were capable of creating. This is Noah Baumbach’s most emotionally ragged movie, an acknowledgment that compromises aren’t nuisances that detract from life; they’re the stuff it’s built on.
We have written at length about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so need to revisit that right now.
Second place on TIME’s list belongs to The Irishman, where Robert de Niro benefits from some de-ageing technology.
Fancy a guess at number one, before we reveal the answer?
Last chance.
It’s rather surprising to see Pain and Glory sit atop the list. Here’s the write-up:
In any life, there’s only so much time to do all we want and need to do. In Pedro Almódovar’s Pain & Glory, Antonio Banderas gives the performance of a lifetime as 60-ish filmmaker Salvador Mallo—a stand-in, more or less, for Almódovar himself—who’s in so much physical pain that he’s uncertain whether he’ll ever work again. Worse yet, his suffering is so intense that he may not care; instead of life after death, he’s settling for death before death, a premature leave-taking that’s a betrayal not just of his gifts, but of the time on earth any of us are given….
Pain & Glory may be Almódovar’s most resplendent and moving film, a panorama of vibrant paint-box colors and even more intense emotions—and a hymn to the mysterious whatever-it-is that keeps any of us going, in the years, months or days before our bodies betray us.
Also, saved you a click – here’s the trailer:
He’s come a long way since Zorro.
Sorry, Joker fans, we had nothing to do with leaving it off this list.
May you spend at least two days in your pyjamas watching movies this December.
[source:time]
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