My 10-best movies of 2013

Despite a mostly woeful summer, the usual stream of bland romcoms, a ton of shriveled comedies and some less-than-stellar animation, 2013 turned out to be a good year for movies, so good -- in fact -- that I had difficulty narrowing my year-end list to the 10 best movies.

Moreover, any of my honorable mentions could have replaced several of the films that made my cut.

At the recently concluded Starz Denver Film Festival, I moderated a panel about the ways in which the best of TV seems to have surpassed so many movies. It's true: We seem to be living in a Golden Age of television, at least when it comes to the finest work.

Still, this year's best work made me wonder if maybe the movies still can hold their own. Heading toward 2014, I'm hopeful.

1. Gravity

Director Alfonso Cuaron's deceptively simple space adventure earns the top spot on my list because it not only builds tension, but reintroduces us to the experiential wonders of moviegoing. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts who find themselves cut off from Earth after being bombarded by debris from space junk. Cuaron, who wrote the screenplay with his son, Jonas, makes room for a subtle emotional subtext about a life reborn, but the movie also can be appreciated as pure, pulse-pounding adventure.

2. American Hustle

Director David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) may not make the most penetrating movies ever, but he sure makes some of the most enjoyable. Christian Bale -- as New York con man Irving Rosenfeld -- headlines a terrific cast that features stand-out performances from Bradley Cooper, as an ambitious FBI agent, and from Amy Adams, as Rosenfeld's mistress. Jennifer Lawrence scores big as Irving's aggressively vocal wife. Loosely based on the Abscam scandal of the 1970s, Russell's comedy finds a bit of good in all of its sleazy characters -- and is all the better for having looked.

3.12 Years A Slave

Director Steve McQueen makes the most disturbing movie yet about the South's so-called "peculiar institution." With Chiwetel Ejiofor starring as Solomon Northrup, McQueen brings the brutal reality of slavery into a big-screen culture that too often has been guilty of avoiding hard truths. Ejiofor gives a bravura performance as Northrup, a free man who was sold into slavery during a visit to Washington, D.C. Based on the book Northrup wrote after his escape from slavery, 12 Years a Slave has undeniable, frightening and essential authenticity.

4. Inside Llewyn Davis

The Coen brothers seldom fail to push boundaries. As a consequence, their movies almost always display an abundant supply of cracked originality. Musically, Inside Llewyn Davis -- the story of an aspiring folksinger laboring to make it in the 1960s -- isn't as good as the Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but it boasts the kind of bitter trenchancy that makes the Coen Brothers a treasure for those of us who admire their sometimes grim humor and their always idiosyncratic voice. A bitter pill of a movie, but one worth swallowing.

5. The Great Beauty

If you're going to squander your life, there are worse places to do it than Rome. Director Paolo Sorrentino's astonishingly gorgeous movie follows the exploits of a dissolute writer (Toni Servillo) as he parties his way through a life in Rome. Sorrentino pays homage to Fellini, but his movie proves to be a highly engaging look at a man who is unapologetic about never reaching his potential. Most importantly, Sorrentino's amazing imagery proves a refreshment for eyes tired from too many special effects and too much banal moviemaking.

6. The Past

If you're a fan of the Danish movie, The Hunt, you can substitute it for The Past. The Hunt is a terrific study of what happens when a falsely accused man is subjected to a town's bigotry and hysteria. I opted for Asghar Farhadi's The Past because the Iranian-born Farhadi(A Separation) has a knack for putting characters into complicated situations without compromising their humanity or drowning them in melodrama. In The Past, Farhadi looks at an Iranian man (Ali Mosaffa) who returns to France to complete his divorce from his estranged wife (Berenice Bejo). Mosaffa's Ahmad has been gone for four years, and Bejo's Marie has taken up with another man (Tahar Rahim), a dry cleaner whose wife is in a coma. Farhadi displays a rare ability to create informed empathy for characters who never seem anything less than real.

7. Her

Director Spike Jonze adds to his gallery of oddball films with an odd, often whimsical look at a young man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his computer operating system, voice supplied by Scarlett Johansson. Set in the near future, the story gives Jonze an opportunity to examine the way solipsism undermines romance. Jonze's sweet, sometimes funny movie leaves you with plenty to mull - like what the world may be like when artificial intelligence becomes a little too real.

8. Fruitvale Station

First-time director Ryan Coogler's sad and powerful film focuses on Oscar Grant III, an unarmed, 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit cop on Jan. 1, 2009. Coogler's movie, which left me speechless and stunned, derives its power from the ways in which the director brings us close to a troubled young man, making sure we understand both Oscar's strengths and weaknesses. Michael B. Jordan (Friday Night Lights and The Wire) makes it heartbreakingly clear that this young man was trying to listen to his better angels. Had he lived, he might have heard them singing.

9. Blue Jasmine

I wouldn't call Woody Allen's entry into the 2013 cinema parade a masterwork, but Allen riffs on Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire without sinking into parody. Allen tells the story of a woman (Cate Blanchett) made desperate by the arrest of her finagling Wall Street husband (Alec Baldwin). A supporting cast that includes Sally Hawkins, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K. and Peter Sarsgaard adds interest, but Blanchett's performance as the mentally unstable Jasmine is nothing less than an Oscar-worthy wonder.

10. The Act of Killing

This startling and original documentary makes the stock phrase "man's inhumanity to man" sound like something from a Hallmark card. Director Joshua Oppenheimer asks some of the worst offenders of a year-long Indonesia killing rampage to tell their stories. The 1995 genocide resulted in the murder of a reported one million people, most of them accused of being Communists. Some of the killers stage reenactments of their crimes while imitating what they've seen in American movies. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this deeply disturbing but undeniably powerful movie.

Honorable mentions: Before Midnight, Cutie and the Boxer, Short-Term 12, The Spectacular Now, The Square, and Wadjda.

'The Great Beauty' is aptly named

An Italian film that dazzles the eye -- and doesn't neglect the mind, either.

Like a beautiful river in spring, director Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty overflows with sights that re-awaken our sense of what cinema can accomplish, the way it can startle the eye and activate the senses.

Some critics have viewed The Great Beauty as a descendant of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), a look at debauched Roman life that takes place 53 years after Fellini assayed the same subject. Comparisons with Fellini are further fostered by the fact that the main character in both movies is a disaffected journalist.

Sorrentino must have been aware of his film's kinship with La Dolce Vita, but it would be irresponsibly wrongheaded to view The Great Beauty as wannabe Fellini. The movie speaks in its own voice and has its own concerns.

The Great Beauty centers on Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a writer who started his career as a novelist and shifted to journalism, a craft he seems to practice only sporadically.

Jep might be the living embodiment of squandered potential: He wrote one high acclaimed novel, and never wrote another. Instead of developing his art, Jep devoted his life to Rome's near-decadent social scene: He's an unashamed party animal, a man for whom parties can equate with power.

Early on, Jep says that he aspired to be king of the socialites, a man with the power to make parties fail should he choose to do so.

Fittingly, the movie's first party is a doozy. To celebrate his 65th birthday, Jep organizes a teeming gala replete with throbbing, infectious music that seizes the revelers, including his editor (Giovanna Vignola), a dwarf who's as savvy as Jep and who can be as unsparing in her assessments of others.

Jeb may not appear anguished, but he knows he's reached an existential dead end. At one point, he says that his crowd knows how to do the best train dance in Rome. Why the best? Because it goes nowhere.

As the movie unfolds, Jep learns that the woman he first loved has died. He then begins an often wry examination of what many might regard as a wasted life. He also meets two women. Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli) is a stripper who continues to work even though she's in her 40s; Giusi Merli plays a woman many regard as a saint, an impoverished, toothless nun who sleeps on floors and who has a startling otherworldly presence.

Servillo makes a charming host; at moments when the movie feels a bit confusing, he's there to remind us that we're watching a meditation about Rome, about the city's strange juxtaposition of ancient ruins (Jep's apartment overlooks the Colosseum) and chic modern design, about the city's sensory appeal and about the sybaritic pleasures to which Jep has devoted much of his life.

No matter what else you get out of The Great Beauty, it will reward your senses with carefully chosen music (from techno pop to Henryk Gorecki), with the ravishing imagery cooked up by Sorrentino and his cinematographer Luca Bigazzi and with Serville's engagingly worldly performance.

In a way, Jep's a connoisseur of the senses. Servillo doesn't so much walk as he glides. He makes it clear that Jep wears his sophistication easily. There doesn't seem to be an ounce of strain in him.

Sometimes, I forgot about trying to make anything much out The Great Beauty, but feasted on imagery that continues even through the movie's end credits. In an age of 3-D and comic-book blockbusters, I'd almost forgotten what magnificent visual imagery can do for a movie.

The only special effects in evidence here are Sorrentino's and Bigazzi's incomparable eyes, their unsurpassed sense of composition and color. The Great Beauty is a cinematic temptation: The movie plays like a brilliant, witty conversation that's loaded with intriguing asides.

I was once on a train in Italy; the man sitting next to me asked where I was headed.
"Rome," I said.

"Ah, Roma,'' he responded, putting much color and commentary into the word. There was admiration, cynicism, respect, perhaps even a touch of world-weariness in his tone.

After watching The Great Beauty, I thought about that voice again.
"Ah, Roma," indeed.