Blanked by critics in New York and Los Angeles and finishing in second place five times in Boston, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is emerging as a surprising awards-season underdog. The fact that Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker were late delivering the film nearly pushed it into 2014, but even though it’s been completed, Paramount is largely keeping the film under wraps, screening it only for small groups of critics as year-end deadlines come and go.
But Glenn Kenny, at least, has seen it, and places Wolf third on his eclectic Top 10 list. The RogerEbert.com/Cinephiled critic keeps going to 30 films, with such standout inclusions as The Bling Ring, Greetings From Tim Buckley, Bastards, Prince Avalanche, Pacific Rim, Room 237 and The Purge (the last of which he follows with “That’s right”).
Glenn Kenny’s Best Films of 2013:
1. Inside Llewyn Davis. “Or, The Story of My Life, With Added Impregnation and Musical Talent.”
2. Something in the Air. “Or, The Story of My Life, With Added Radical Politics, Frenchness, House Fires.”
3. The Wolf of Wall Street. “One thing: it is really not a GoodFellas retread.”
4. You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
5. Upstream Color. “I was amused by the way some of the skeptics reacted to this: ‘Yes, we want more radical narrative cinema, but not this.'”
6. Nebraska
7. The World’s End. “With Inside Llewyn Davis, the most beautifully and audaciously constructed narrative mainstream picture of the year. And ceaselessly funny”
8. 12 Years A Slave
9. Post Tenebras Lux. “As with Upstream Color, this got a lot of ‘We want more films of personal vision, but not like this.’ Why not?”
10. Like Someone In Love
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