It surprises you?

Everyone's heard of Prisoners. Nobody's heard of Big Bad Wolves. That's why certain people from this forum prefer it, obviously.
Plus it's foreign. Slap some subtitles on Jack and Jill and people will consider it an insightful, profound examination of gender inequality.

I am interested to see where your list goes.
Eight of the remaining twelve should be favorably received. The other four not so much.

I had planned on getting through this thing pretty quickly, but I've been too busy shaking hands and kissing babies and delivering speeches on my worldwide campaign tour.

I like American Hustle, but I can't help but feel like it is less than the sum of its parts. You have Jennifer Lawrence, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and an uncredited Robert DeNiro, in a movie that's written and directed by David O. Russell. It basically combines the talents of The Fighter (great film) and Silver Linings Playbook (better film), but fails to live up to either of its forebearers. It simply wasn't as exciting, endearing or entertaining as the films it was chasing. And although it was a good film in its own right, it was probably the biggest disappointment of the year for me.

But seeing how your initial reaction seemed to have been nearly identical to my own, I might have to give it another chance. I love being proven wrong about a bad / disappointing movie.
Definitely give it another chance. I caught the second half of it yesterday on one of the movie channels and found myself wishing that I hadn't already posted that write-up so I could bump it up a couple of spots. It's definitely the type of movie that gets better and better on multiple viewings, as the best movies always do.

With movies like American Hustle, where the strength of the movie lies in the characters, I find that the plot sometimes gets in the way on a first viewing. When you re-visit such movies, however, you can just put your feet up and hang out with the characters, much like you can with Tarantino's movies, for example.
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