In retrospect, truly sick to unleash this on the unsuspecting American public who just wanted to see Zach Effron and Jeremy Allen White in spandex on Christmas Day. This film taught me that, at least at this stage in my life, what you want from a Christmas release is something fun. An epic blockbuster with dark moments, maybe, but generally something warm and feel-good that will be heightened by your good cheer. This—a relentlessly bleak Greek tragedy about the inheritance of generational curses that reduced me to a sobbing husk—was not that.
18. Charlie Wilson’s War (dir. Mike Nichols, 2007)
17. Babylon (dir. Damien Chazelle, 2022)
Everett Collection
A part of the Christmas-moviegoing experience means there may be situations in which you are more fucked up for a film than you intended to be. I don’t smoke weed anymore and never really liked ingesting, but in honor of the holiday and a film I was told would be a bacchanal for the senses, I inadvertently had what I thought was one dose of a weed cookie but ended up being four doses. I remember just sort of melting throughout the course of this film, which does contain some truly wild sequences that were certainly elevated by my brain being reduced to marshland. I vaguely remember planning how I was going to live at the Essex Regal for the rest of my life because I knew my legs would never work again, and briefly dying and going to hell during the grotesque Tobey Maguire excursion. I’ve never been able to bring myself to revisit the film.
16. American Sniper (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014)
15. Gangs of New York (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2002)
14. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (dir. David Fincher, 2011)
13. Vice (dir. Adam McKay, 2018)
12. Munich (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2005)
11. Matrix: Resurrections (dir. Lana Wachowski, 2021)
This ass-whipper dropped when a lot of people were still working out whether or not it was safe to go back to the theater, which I assume is part of why it isn’t widely regarded as a great legasequel. If you day-and-dated this at home, I feel sorry for you. Saw this at the greatest movie theater on Earth, the Upper West Side AMC iMAX, and it fucking ripped. I saw it with Jayson Buford, and even he, a great and hard-to-please critic, agreed. It’s an experience I’d argue makes a case not just for the superiority of in-theater viewing, but for in-theater Christmas viewing as a force multiplier.
10. Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2019)
Everett Collection
