The San Diego Film Critics Society and the Phoenix Film Critics Society have presumably seen Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, and yet they’ve excluded it from their best-of-the-year lists. In my book this suggests a lack of insight and sophistication. I’m presuming they’ve rejected Wolf because of the debauchery — too vulgar, sleazy, outrageous. Did a portion of the San Diego and Phoenix voters equate it with The Hangover Part III or something? Because this is an extremely moral film that operates in the realm of Fellini Satyricon with a nod towards any scholastically respectable study of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The debauchery is a metaphor. The Phoenix and San Diego film connoisseurs are entitled to vote for whatever and whomever they want, of course, but there’s no legitimate excuse for not at least acknowledging Wolf as one of the year’s finest.

Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor doesn’t belong in a discussion of 2013’s worst films because it was far and away one of the most cunningly written, the most perverse, the most succinctly edited, the ballsiest and…well, probably the most unconventional film of the year, hands down. It was certainly the finest 2013 film that received a failing grade from Rotten Tomatoes (35%) and Metacritic (48%).

I hated Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives, which I saw in Cannes, more than any other film I saw this year…down on my knees, howling with disgust. Amat Escalante‘s Heli is a respectable, highly disciplined Mexican art film, but it was easily the ugliest thing I sat through all year — sorry. Everyone seemed to agree that Adore, the Australian drama about a pair of moms (Naomi Watts, Robin Wright Penn) banging each other’s sons, was a miscalculation for the ages. I found Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s moderately diverting. And I worshipped the black-and=white 3D section of Sam Raimi‘s Oz The Great and Powerful, even though the rest of the film more or less blew. I didn’t find Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons to be all that good, but it wasn’t deplorable. Jobs was a plodder for the most part, but I wasn’t grossly offended.

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HE salutes New Yorker film essayist Richard Brody for selecting Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street as tied for first place among his Best Movies of 2013. Good man! On the other hand Brody has chosen Terrence Wackadoodle‘s To The Wonder as the other top-of-the-list champ…the fuck? Wait, it gets worse. Brody is declaring that All Is Lost and Before Midnight are among the four shittiest films of 2013 (along with Gravity and The Great Beauty). Brody doesn’t literally mean they’re the pits — he means that that in his head, they delivered “the greatest disproportion between the emblazoned ambition and the mediocrity of the result.”

The excellence of John Michael McDonagh‘s The Guard, which everyone liked or loved, all but assures that the Sundance-bound Calvary, which also stars Brendan Gleeson, will deliver the goods. Sardonic Irish dramedy, “a priest tormented by his community,” guns and religion and perhaps a little sex. Co-starring Chris O’Dowd, Aidan Gillan, Dylan Moran and Kelly Reilly (Flight). Calvary opens in the UK and Ireland on 4.11.14.

If anyone at Warner Bros. or Legendary had been stupid enough to ask the above question or even use the word “metaphor” they would have been fired off the film in a heartbeat. But if you had to choose a metaphor, what would it be? C’mon, think of one. The simultaneous starvation and poisoning of good-movie culture (or what’s left of it) by corporate-minded zombie execs and their original-idea phobia and embrace of CG-driven remakes and franchises?

To put a cap on it, here’s the final tally of HE’s Best Films of 2013 (but only numbering twelve): (1) Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street — the year’s finest film and the most audacious Fall-of-the-Roman-Empire metaphor flick of all time; (2) Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave; (3) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis; (4) Spike Jonze‘s Her; (5) Jean Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyer’s Club; (6) J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost; (7) Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color; (8) David O. Russell‘s American Hustle; (9) Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity; (10) Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past; (11). Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight; and (12) Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha. Add Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color for an even 13.

A few days ago Marshall Fine was attending the opening-night party for the Dubai International Film Festival (12.6 to 12.14) “and I run into Avatar villain Stephen Lang who, as you may recall, was killed at the end of the first film. What are you up to? I asked. About to start shooting the Avatar sequels, he says. ‘But your character died,’ I said. He just laughed and said, ‘Yeah, well, we’ll see.’

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A couple of hours ago I wrote a tidy little riff about Jack Clayton‘s Room At The Top (’59), and then it was accidentally erased. The point is that I finally saw this sharply-written, very cleanly composed film last night for the first time and was seriously impressed by it. The first belch of British kitchen-sink drama (resentful, self-destructive working-class blokes and their birds + lots of drinking, smoking, arguing and shagging), Room opened in the U.S. in May 1959. It was followed four months later by the film version of John Osborne‘s Look Back in Anger with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, and a new genre was off to the races. When the late Simone Signoret won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Laurence Harvey‘s somewhat older love interest, she became the first non-integrated, foreign-based actress to do so. I’d forgotten she was fairly hot at the time. But it wasn’t long after her Oscar triumph that Signoret decided to (is there a p.c. brownshirt way to put this?) let herself go and become a character actress. She died at a relatively young age, 64, in 1985.

We definitely need another futuristic, CG-driven, inter-planetary, mythical-minded, grandiose sci-fi adventure involving a freelance assassin (Channing Tatum), a Han Solo-type adventurer (Sean Bean) and a lowly main character (Mila Kunis) who learns she has “a great genetic destiny,” which is more or less what Luke Skywalker realized when he was told that the midi-chlorians in his blood allowed him to harness “the Force.” We also need another film of this sort in which a main character drops off a very tall skyscraper at night.

The last Nymphomaniac update was that (a) the Danish distributor would be screening Lars Von Trier‘s film for local critics on 12.17 and that (b) the British distributor was thinking of screening it for London critics the same day. Soon after I was told by a top Magnolia guy that his company wouldn’t be screening it stateside “before the [12.25] Denmark opening.” This morning a friend told me I could slip into a special Munich screening of Nymphomania this coming Friday — too far, too sudden, too costly. Today another Magnolia guy told me that the company’s policy has changed from “no U.S. screenings this year” to (and I quote) “the only U.S. press that the film is being screened for this year are the trades.” To which I replied, “Does that mean critics for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and The Wrap? Or just the two ‘print’ trades?” I could still see it commercially in Copenhagen starting on 12.25, which would cost me around $1750 or $1800, all in. But you know what? The hell with it. This film isn’t worth it. I don’t care anymore.

I have a very slight problem with this LAFCA-vote discussion on James Rocchi‘s “The Lunch” podcast. Rocchi’s contributors — LAFCA members Alonso Duralde (The Wrap), Amy Nicholson (L.A. Weekly) and Karina Longworth — are obviously bright and knowledgable, but their observatons are too measured and political. I wanted a snippy, resentful, sour-grapes discussion about why this winner didn’t deserve to win and why that winner did, etc. I wanted the real nitty gritty. I wanted occasional expletives. I wanted undercurrents and hidden agendas exposed.