Looking back, it’s really fun to unleash this on an unsuspecting American public who just wanted to see Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White in spandex on Christmas Day. This movie taught me, at least at this point in my life, that what you want from a Christmas release is something fun. It may be a successful epic film with dark moments, but overall it’s something warm and feel-good that will heighten your good cheer. This wasn’t some relentlessly bleak Greek tragedy about inheriting generational curses that have turned me into a sobbing husk.
18. Charlie Wilson’s War (Dir Mike Nichols, 2007)
17. Babylon (Dair Damien Chazelle, 2022)
Everett Group
Part of the Christmas moviegoing experience means that there may be situations where you’re more interested in a movie than you intended to be. I don’t smoke weed anymore and I never liked taking it, but in honor of the holiday and the movie that I was told would be a numbness to the senses, I inadvertently took what I thought was a single dose of weed cake but ended up… four doses. I remember kind of melting throughout the course of this movie, which has some really wild sequences that were definitely heightened by turning my brain into a swamp. I vaguely remember planning how I was going to live in the Essex Regal for the rest of my life because I knew my legs would never work again and I would briefly die and go to hell during Tobey Maguire’s hideous ride. I could never bring myself to revisit the movie.
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. Deputy (dir. Adam McKay, 2018)
12. Munich (Dir. Steven Spielberg, 2005)
11. Matrix: Resurrection (Dir. Lana Wachowski, 2021)
This whip fell when a lot of people were still working out whether or not it was safe to return to the theater, which I suppose is part of the reason it’s not widely regarded as a great film. If you ever do this at home, I feel sorry for you. I saw this at the greatest movie theater on Earth, the Upper West Side AMC iMAX, and it was torn apart. I saw him with Jason BufordEven he, the great and hard-to-please critic, agreed. It’s an experience that I think makes a case for not only the superiority of in-theater viewing, but of in-theater Christmas viewing as a force multiplier.
10. Little women (Dir. Greta Gerwig, 2019)
Everett Group
