St. Vincent

Theodore Melfi, 2014

"St. Vincent concludes with a sequence of Bill Murray singing along to Bob Dylan’s “Shelter From The Storm” on a Walkman. (The scene was released online as an inducement to see the movie.) In this lovely moment, Murray is liberated from the plot’s cornball demands and the film’s sticky sentimentality, and is free to just exist. It’s far and away the film’s best moment, and it makes everything before it seem even more contrived and unnecessary by comparison. Anyone who has watched that sequence online has already seen the best St. Vincent has to offer, and could only be let down by the crowd-pleasing phoniness of the rest." -Nathan Rabin