With the Academy Awards just a few days away, here’s a list – from best to worst — of the films nominated for best picture along with links to their Big Hollywood reviews. Last year when critics called 2007 a great year for movies, I thought to myself, “If that’s the definition of ‘great’ what’s ‘lousy’ gonna look like?”
Well, that would be 2008.
1. Slumdog Millionaire – The likely winner for Best Picture is certainly a respectable, and at times invigorating and touching piece of storytelling, but it misses the quality which most defines a great film and that’s in making you want to revisit it as soon as possible.
2. Milk – Sean Penn’s performance transcends all the America hating, fascist loving, pretentious “reporter” stuff we rightly ridicule him for, and he deserves the Oscar for it (though I’m rooting for Mickey Rourke). Unfortunately, the film itself is a surprisingly run-of-the-mill biopic that gets sillier and more obvious as it rolls on.
3. Frost/Nixon – A couple strong, central performances can’t save what is the second most pointless film of the year. A liberal fantasy set to a television movie script no one will remember next week.
4. The Reader – As morally illiterate as its protagonist, but also a thematic miss more interested in touching all the Oscar bases (Holocaust, illicit romance, disability, time jumps…) than telling a focused or compelling story. In other news: It worked.
5. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – And now we come to the most pointless film of the year. A movie about absolutely nothing which uses every one of its 166 minutes to prove it. The shame of it is that lost in all the insignificance is Brad Pitt’s best performance. I can hear the pitch now: “It’s like Forrest Gump if Forrest Gump had sucked.”
Comment count on this article reflects comments made on Breitbart.com and Facebook. Visit Breitbart's Facebook Page.