The Hunger Games - Catching Fire (2013)
The second Hunger Games hands the franchise to a new director and comes back sharper, angrier and more political than the first. A rare sequel that improves on the original. 8.5/10.
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Archive
2013
Articles published in 2013.
Gravity (2013)
Alfonso Cuarón strands Sandra Bullock in orbit and builds ninety minutes of pure tension out of silence, vacuum and falling debris. As a piece of cinema engineering it is close to flawless, though the story underneath is thin. 8/10.
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Captain Phillips (2013)
Paul Greengrass turns a real 2009 hijacking into a procedural thriller that screws the tension tighter for two hours, then lets Tom Hanks fall apart in the last five minutes. 8.5/10.
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Prisoners (2013)
Denis Villeneuve's first English-language film is a long, grim abduction thriller carried by Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Roger Deakins. Punishing to sit through, hard to shake off. 8.5/10.
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Rush (2013)
Ron Howard turns the 1976 Hunt-Lauda season into a two-man war of temperament, and it is one of the most purely entertaining true stories in years. 8.5/10.
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Elysium (2013)
Neill Blomkamp follows District 9 with another grubby, inventive piece of science fiction, and pairs a knockout world with a blunt message. The design carries it where the script does not. 8/10.
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The World’s End (2013)
Edgar Wright closes out the Cornetto trilogy with a pub crawl that curdles into an alien invasion, and finds something sadder under the gags than either Shaun or Fuzz dared. Funny, clever, and quietly bruised. 8/10.
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The Wolverine (2013)
James Mangold takes Logan to Japan for a smaller, sadder, more grown-up superhero film, and for an hour it is the best one the X-Men franchise has made. 8/10.
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Pacific Rim (2013)
Guillermo del Toro hands the summer a love letter to giant robots and giant monsters, built with real conviction and very little cynicism. The story is thin and the spectacle is enormous, and it knows exactly which one you came for. 8/10.
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World War Z (2013)
A troubled production turns out a lean, frightening pandemic thriller that races round the globe one outbreak ahead of the dead. It throws out almost everything that made the book good and gets away with it on pure momentum. 8/10.
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