Scott Harvey

The year 2013 in movies was like a championship thoroughbred. Out of the gate, it started slow. For critics, it was nothing new or surprising. My concern soon vanished. Like two-year-old Secretariat, 2013 came roaring down the stretch with a stampede of superb films. And, as always, there were new discoveries to make.

It seems remarkable that a novel as popular and influential as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game has taken almost 30 years to make it to the big screen. But it’s also no surprise that director Gavin Hood decided that now would be an opportune time to adapt Card’s novel, given the recent spike in interest for the sort of young adult, sci-fi action that is at the core of Ender’s Game, as well as recent hits like Divergent and The Hunger Games.

The Way, Way Back, recently released on DVD, is a 2013 film that you may have missed while it was in theaters.

Nowadays, it seems like more and more filmmakers are relying on visual spectacle to carry lackluster storytelling to the finish line. Take Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (or any of Luhrmann’s films, really), a paramount example of a film that stresses style over substance. Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is a film that certainly had the potential to follow this trend, but, although it is not a complete success, it cannot be dismissed as just a visual showpiece.

One thing I can guarantee you about Denis Villenueve’s Prisoners: it’s not the movie you think it is. If you’ve seen the trailers for this film, you may have already labeled it as a clone of Death Wish and every other violent revenge movie of the last three decades. But Prisoners is a far more thoughtful film than pretty much any other in its genre.

Director Ron Howard is known for making some of the most critically acclaimed yet accessible films of the past two decades, including “Cinderella Man,” “Frost/Nixon,” and “A Beautiful Mind.” This fact makes the subject of his latest film, “Rush,” the chronicle of a long-standing rivalry between two Formula One drivers, somewhat curious, as Formula One has not garnered the kind of fanfare in the United States that it has in Europe, where it is one of the most popular professional sports.