Clearly, since we can't raise taxes on the wealthy, what we need is a new genre of shame-inducing billionaire biopics: 'Get Christy Walton,' say, or 'The Brothers Koch.''īoth Time Out Chicago critics, Ben Kenigsberg and Hank Sartin, put The Social Network at the top of their lists (though I should note that the film shares the #1 spot on Jones's list with Debra Granik's Winter's Bone and Nicole Holofcener's Please Give). And now that the movie has won rave reviews, played for ten weeks, and emerged as a surefire Oscar contender, Zuckerberg has joined the Giving Pledge, the philanthropic campaign launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and promised to donate more than half his fortune to charity. Early arguments about the accuracy of The Social Network and whether that even mattered gave way to a series of reviews, essays and debates about Facebook, digital entrepreneurship, friendship, business, meritocracy and the Ivy League far richer and more relevant to contemporary life than Aaron Sorkin's glib script or David Fincher's elegant atmospherics.'īut the Chicago Reader's JR Jones asks: 'Can any do-gooder documentary released this year claim to have done more good than The Social Network.? Its portrait of CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a conniving little shit who elbowed his best friend out of the business was so scathing that, shortly before the release date, Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to the school system of Newark, New Jersey. It was more fun to read the impassioned, geeky arguments about Inception than to endure a second viewing of that film. An attempt at synthesis can only fail, so in lieu of a comprehensive theory of Cinema Now, I offer a handful of postulates on the Cinematic State of Things.' One of those postulates, 'The Bush era is not over,' takes us straight to his #1 film of the year, Charles Ferguson's Inside Job.Ī second postulate explains why he's not included The Social Network in his top ten, nor even in the list of 20 runners-up that follow: 'The discussion of movies is frequently more interesting than the movies themselves.

'A great year? Hard to say, and finally, who cares?. 'Was it a good year for movies?' asks AO Scott in the New York Times.

Avclub best movies 2017