I don’t agree with any of these “best” calls. What these films are is “not half bad in an interesting, arresting way.“

I finally half-liked Munich when I re-watched it a year ago.

Pale Rider is basically Shane as a ghost.

Magnolia is essentially a morose middle-class thing enlivened by Tom Cruise, the third-act musical sequence and the frog finale.

Casino is watchable, but is gradually asphyxiated by Sharon Stone’s noxious self-destruction and Robert DeNiro’s nonsensical attraction to her. And then Joe Pesci and his brother are beaten to death and buried alive in a cornfield.

For me Kathryn Bigelow caught glorious fire as a director when she made The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Then she got tangled up in the mania of exposing horrible historical truths (i.e., evil white cops murdering victims of color) in Detroit, and the air just whooshed out of the balloon.