Wesley Morris: 3. “The Paperboy”
When adults lament that the studios no longer make movies like they used to, Lee Daniels’s trashed-up roller coaster ride must not be what they had in mind. Nobody saw it. But it’s the kind of exhilarating mess that American movies usually achieve by accident. Daniels has really thought about the mess he was making, about how inside-out you can turn a crime-thriller. The movie presents the late-’60s deep South as a cauldron of racism, psychopathology, and sexual insanity. It gives us three or four scenes that collapse eroticism and hilarity, and gets two very different but equally fierce performances from Macy Gray and Nicole Kidman.
Millennium Entertainment
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- Ty Burr: 1. “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
- Ty Burr: 2. “Amour”
- Ty Burr: 3. “Zero Dark Thirty”
- Ty Burr: 4. “Moonrise Kingdom”
- Ty Burr: 5. “Holy Motors”
- Ty Burr: 6. “Lincoln”
- Ty Burr: 7. “Argo”
- Ty Burr: 8. “Django Unchained”
- Ty Burr: 9. “This is Not a Film”
- Ty Burr: 10. “Oslo August 31st”
- Ty Burr: Honorable Mention: “Bachelorette”
- Wesley Morris: 1. “The Master”
- Wesley Morris: 2. “How to Survive a Plague”
- Wesley Morris: 3. “The Paperboy”
- Wesley Morris: 4. “Amour”
- Wesley Morris: 5. “Django Unchained”
- Wesley Morris: 6. “Moonrise Kingdom”
- Wesley Morris: 7. “Polisse”
- Wesley Morris: 8. “Holy Motors”
- Wesley Morris: 9. “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”
- Wesley Morris: 10. “21 Jump Street”
- Wesley Morris: 15 more excellent movies in no particular order
- Wesley Morris: Runners-up
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