2013 was definitely the year that animation took control of our
cinemas, and a little snail with big dreams and an equally aspirational family
of cave people lead the field of the top five films we reviewed this year – with links to the review published at the
time of the film’s release.
David Soren’s winning tale of a cute little snail called Theo who dreamed of breaking out of his ordinary
little garden-variety existence and winning the Indianapolis 500 with his
custom-designed shell, was a supremely entertaining race to the finish line.
With a delightful assortment of original and charmingly idiosyncratic
characters, Turbo – with its engaging ‘no dream is too big and no dreamer too
small’ through-line – was a memorable, beautifully made and often hilarious
experience.
What to watch as well: How to Train Your Dragon.
Fear, trust and generational change were the grand themes at play in
this unassuming and visually dazzling adventure about the importance of
learning from one another. As their physical world constantly collapsed around
them, the resourcefulness required to ensure the Croods could find safety from
the elements and hostile predators created some wonderful opportunities for
grand adventures – and every one of those opportunities was brilliantly
realised.
What to watch as well: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2.
Baz Luhrmann’s ambition for this film was to incise the novel’s themes
of hope, optimism and the desolation of a life-long infatuation and lay the
threads that both unite and divide us bare in scene after scene of artfully
considered cinematic mastery. With magnificent production and costume design
from Catherine Martin, the stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey
Maguire played it as though their lives depended on it, while Joel Edgerton’s
standout performance as the morally-bankrupt Tom Buchanan was one of the best
of the year.
What to watch as well: The Aviator.
Featuring a brilliant performance from Jessica Chastain as a CIA
operative whose obsession with finding and killing Osama Bin Laden became
dangerously all-encompassing, Kathryn Bigelow’s telling of Mark Boal’s forensic
screenplay was never less than entirely absorbing. By focussing on the human
cost of often futile, exhaustive (and exhausting) counter terrorism activities,
and by refusing to drown in propaganda or sentimentality, Zero Dark Thirty was
a raw and uncompromising film that, like Bigelow and Boal’s The Hurt Locker,
remains impossible to forget.
What to watch as well: The Hurt Locker.
Robert Zemeckis’s powerful and utterly engrossing study of the perils
of addiction featured career-best performances from Denzel Washington as an
alcoholic airline pilot and Kelly Reilly as a heroin addict who meet by chance
in hospital after he survives a plane crash. Under Zemeckis’s masterful
direction, the stricken airliner sequences were astonishing, but it was during
the film’s well-considered and unapologetic study of the fateful consequences
of addiction that Flight became one of the most compelling films of the year.
What to watch as well: Castaway.
This compilation was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper
Group.
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