A Late Review of Film in 2023
- Glendon Frank
- Mar 10, 2024
- 26 min read
It’s been a weird year.
Not to invoke the Dreaded Word, but it is fascinating to see the film world follow a similar trajectory as a lot of life has since the novel Coronavirus. 2020 was a crash. No one left their house, nothing was coming out in theatres. 2021 was this big attempt to “get back.” It was the release of all of these films that had been planned for the year prior and were delayed, it was a growing war against streaming, and this repeated desperation to prove the validity of this medium in a changing world, just as people worked to figure out what the “new normal” was. Despite some successes in that year, everyone kept fighting the same battles in 2022. Marvel began to lose its well-defended ground, and in its stead, the year was filled with big, interesting, fresh art films that did well! I talked about this a lot last year, but the year was filled with movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Nope, Top Gun: Maverick, Glass Onion, and all of these fun movies made by fresh directors with bold visions. In a way, while it felt like we were treading water a bit, 2022 was marked by bright lights that seemed to promise a more hopeful future.
In that light, I went into 2023 with ambition. If the past several years were lived in the shadow of Covid, it was finally time to stand up and move forward! It certainly looked like an exciting year for theatres – Dune 2 was promised then, which by itself felt like it would shoulder a world of excitement. We were finally getting our long-awaited sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, as well as a new and possibly final John Wick flick. Moreover, it seemed like 2023 was set to be a glut for films directed by old giants, returning to the field in one way or another. But the year has turned out far less straightforward than that, in a way I don’t really know how to describe. We’ll get to my Top 10 in a moment, but it feels like a weird list to me – there were a lot of great movies this year! But unlike years past where my Top 10 filled up with stunning artsy films like Worst Person in the World, Aftersun (which I watched after doing my wrap-up last year but is absolutely heart-wrenching), Tar, The Green Night, etc., 2023 has been a box office sensation. Even then, it’s been a very abnormal one! The comic book movie has crashed this year, with The Flash, The Marvels, Ant-Man: Quantumania, Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom and more all bombing. Not even what felt like guaranteed hits like Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny or Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (Part One) – a movie I liked! – were safe from the culture shock. Instead, movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer took the world by storm; and justifiably so! They were incredible, auteur-driven successes that played really well and could revolutionize Hollywood’s culture… but when I see Barbie and Oppenheimer at the top of my lists it feels strange. Everyone knows those movies were good, where were the quiet indie dramas? It largely feels like there is no Aftersun this year, no Banshees of Inisherin or Drive My Car, the quiet, devastating movies I will continue to hold for years to come. Past Lives was really marketed that way, and while I enjoyed Past Lives it did not do nearly as much for me as I expected it to.
So, what happened to our big auteur-driven hits? Well, it’s divisive, but it certainly feels like many of these big, grand returns quietly came and went. After nearly ten years of absence, director of Heat Michael “Masculinity is a Prison” Mann, the fiend for mojitos, came back with Ferrari, a biopic centering Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari. Sounds awesome! But instead of the vibe-driven masterpiece that movies like Miami Vice and blackhat have been reappraised as, Ferrari is mostly a contemplative character drama that spends its runtime in anticipation of a huge shift in Enzo’s life rather than tracking the fallout of it. I still really like Ferrari, and I hope it will grow on me over time, but it was hardly the big success I was looking for. It feels like a long time since M. Night Shyamalon has had a runaway win, and I heard some early buzz that A Knock at the Cabin could have been it, but it feels like that movie disappeared without much of a reaction. After Mank confused audiences in the admittedly-confusing haze of 2020, David “Masculinity is a Prison” Fincher promised to hit big with The Killer, a tongue-in-cheek hitman movie starring Michael Fassbender, back after a hiatus in his own career. But while The Killer rules, it rules in a very Light Fun way and not a “the return of the guy who made Gone Girl” way. Speaking of people living in the shadow of Gone Girl, I absolutely have to mention Emerald Fennell, who is decidedly not one of these big old-school directors but did make kind of a big spark when she made the divisive Promising Young Woman, which she followed up this year with Saltburn, a movie that sucks! Bad movie! Love Barry Keoghan being a freak but you could make it, you know, interesting whatsoever! You know what was interesting? Asteroid City! Our guy Wes “Masculinity is a Prison” Anderson, received a lot of middling review this year which makes me feel insane because that movie rules! The best depiction of grief during/about the pandemic I will probably ever see. But it didn’t land for audiences! Ridley Scott’s new historic epic Napoleon also didn’t land particularly big, but that’s not necessarily anything new. The inevitable three-hour cut will surely become legendary. No, in all of these grand epics, only one or two really struck with audiences – but I will get to those in a minute.
Indeed, it’s not fair to call this year a wash - anything but! According to Letterboxd I had 210 film entries this year, adding up to almost 397 hours. That’s more than an hour per day which is wild. And there have been a lot of first-time watches in those hours that stand out! In February of last year, which feels like forever ago, I got to see an anniversary screening of Titanic in theatres, which ruled. It feels very old-hat to say Titanic is one of the best to ever do it, but come on. James Cameron is the king of giving the audience all the building blocks - there’s a great scene towards the start where the crew basically walks the audience through how the Titanic sank in step-by-step instructions, perfectly setting everyone up so that when things start going wrong a full hour later, the crowd knows what’s going on. Just really effective bare-bones filmmaking, I love someone with a good control of the fundamentals. Speaking of, I also got to see screenings of some Hitchcock classics this year, including Vertigo and Rear Window, which are both awesome. In particular, Rear Window is a movie that manages to do so much, hitting on so many evocative themes and ideas, but does it all while just being a fun and breezy thriller! Hitchcock’s movies blow my mind because they’re so light and watchable despite having so much to digest, balancing everything in a way that feels effortless despite its obvious mastery. And while we’re talking about classics, this year I also realized that all of Buster Keaton’s filmography is on YouTube, and so I sat and watched the twelve silent comedies that he directed. Drop everything that you’re doing and watch Sherlock Jr, a 45-minute show-stopper that might be one of the best films I’ve ever seen. The majority of Keaton’s work is so shockingly timeless, despite being a silent black-and-white movie made 100 years ago, the comedy of it is so incredibly modern. Like all of his films, Sherlock Jr stacks a series of unfathomable bits together that make me ask, “how did they film this?? How would you even film this today??” Watching classics like these makes me realize just how young the film medium really is; 100 years feels simultaneously like a long time, but also a radically short one when you consider how long most art forms have been around. In only one hundred years, we’ve gone from Buster Keaton to James Cameron! Where will we go next?
I had a lot of time to kill this summer, so there were a lot of other major first watches. A few are movies that I need to rewatch and digest more, like Tartovsky’s labyrinthian Stalker, an intro to David Lynch with the ever-haunting Blue Velvet, and finally getting to the all-timer 2000’s legal thriller Michael Clayton (I did rewatch Clayton since starting this article and, yeah, it’s a thoroughly awesome movie. George Clooney in the peak of his Ocean’s era playing an attorney fixer in the middle of a moral crisis. One of the best scripts around. Tilda Swinton wins an Oscar for falling to her knees in the background. They don’t make them like this anymore). I’m still kind of lingering over A Serious Man, the Coen’s darkly comedic Job story, as well as Bong Joon-Ho’s bong-chilling Memories of Murder, where his cast scraps for any semblance of justice in a deeply unjust world. I also at long last watched Perks of Being a Wallflower which I’d kind of put off as a standard high school flick, but was instead surprised by something holding a deeply quiet and resonant depiction of teenage trauma. Speaking of, with Priscilla on the horizon, I started an adventure through Sofia Coppola’s filmography with The Virgin Suicides, a movie that rules. I’ve seen a few of her films now, but none have stuck with me quite in the way that Virgin Suicides has, a movie that depicts adolescence as kind of a surrealist fever dream. Teenage joy and misery are intermixed in an intoxicating cocktail where disaster feels like it’s waiting around every upbeat corner, and repressed depression leaks its way into everything. Think Rian Johnson’s Brick meeting Greta Gerwig’s Little Women while set to an incredible 90’s soundtrack. Virgin Suicides is a movie I need to revisit soon, and I think there’s a chance it’s a rewatch or two away from becoming an all-time favourite.
The other big project I gave myself was going through the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki. I had seen a few, obviously, but only a few - and it felt like long past time to dig through the rest. To say what everybody already knows, Miyazaki’s films are phenomenal. Whether he’s exploring childlike wonder in My Neighbour Totoro or Ponyo, or he’s delving into the depths of human suffering and the moral cost of war in Princess Mononoke or The Wind Rises, Miyazaki has this incredibly deft way of capturing the entirety of human emotion. All of his films have this delicate balance of incredibly beautiful animation and stunningly creative imagery while still carrying this deep, soulful sense of what it means to be alive. It’s difficult to describe just how all-encompassing his movies are without going into all of them individually, but he quickly shot into my all-time favourite directors.
Anyways, to start 2023, let’s go over the movies that I missed this year. I was actually able to come in at the last minute and check out most of what I had been hoping to see in theaters, but you can never get them all. In particular, there are several movies that as far as I know have yet to air in Canada - Fallen Leaves, Society of the Snow, The Delinquents and the like (Society of the Snow is actually on Netflix now so this is just on me). Some movies I just missed altogether. In the wake of Taika Waititi’s bizarre self-effacement I never did get out to see Next Goal Wins though I remain morbidly curious. He made Hunt for the Wilderpeople! Surely somewhere inside he still has the juice! I also never got to Blackberry and it is not really streaming anywhere so it’s going to sit on the watchlist for a while yet. I really wanted to see Shyamalan’s new flick but I haven’t seen any of Shyamlan’s movies so I’m not in a rush to judge the most recent one. And I have yet to catch Wonka or Iron Claw, which are (were) still in theatres and reportedly: pretty good!
But there are also all the honourable mentions I have seen but aren’t making it on the list. The most glaring of which: Killers of the Flower Moon, aka a phenomenal tour de force that I just don’t have a lot to say about. For the purposes of this write-up it is 11 on my list, I think technically I’d even put it close to 7, but despite being one of the few auteur “comeback” movies this year that genuinely paid off, and despite tackling some very intense subject matter with a lot of grace and nuance, leaving a shell-shocking picture, it’s just not a movie that hit me in the way that my top 10 did. Neither did Past Lives, a movie I kind of feel bad about not loving wholeheartedly just because it’s the exact sort of heart-shattering premise I want to love. May December and Priscilla were both stunning, complex movies with a lot going on, but were movies that I really need to sit with and watch again before I decide that I love. And then there is The Holdovers and Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret which are fantastic feel-good criers that I heartily recommend despite not being quite good enough to make the list. And lastly I will shout-out Across the Spider-Verse which is a technical masterpiece that felt a little incomplete, and probably would have made top 10 if it weren’t tarnished by learning how Lord and Miller’s poor planning and controlling nature led to gruelling work conditions and a movie that was still being edited while it was in theatres! I won’t be able to get the version of the movie that I watched opening night on a Blu-Ray, and that will always feel like a bummer to me.
…and speaking of bummers, let’s start the list out with our guy Ari Aster!
10: Beau is Afraid - Ari Aster
As I was saying, this list still kind of feels in flux - I don’t know if Beau is Afraid is fully a top 10 film, but it’s one that I simply keep thinking about. Ari Aster is a fascinating director; I watched Midsommar and Hereditary during my adventure into horror films, and his have stood out through the terrifyingly honest ways he depicts grief and fear. But I’ve never quite gotten his movies. I don’t believe that a movie can be “evil” or whatever but it can be hard not to get a sense of malevolence from these two films. Maybe it’s the enigmatic way the events are depicted, how they end with this intense, horrific imagery framed in an almost beautiful, awe-inspiring light. It’s been years and I still see people questioning how to read the end of Midsommar - has Dani been freed from the neglectful treatment of her “friends” and finally found a community who will embrace her, or has she fully lost herself, having been deluded into joining a cult that ritualistically murdered the only people she knew? Insane movie!
All that said, Beau is Afraid is the movie that finally made Aster click for me, because with this flick it’s clear that he’s not some dark puppetmaster, but a Sam Raimi-like director giggling behind the camera as scenes descend into chaos. Beau is Afraid is maybe the best depiction of anxiety I’ve ever seen, simultaneously aware that anxiety is a very isolating, paranoia-inducing thing, but also that it’s deeply bizarre and silly from an outside perspective. While his previous movies were full-tilt horrors, Beau is Afraid functions more as a surrealist comedy, journeying to the center of this man’s neuroses as the world becomes increasingly unhinged around him. Where some of Aster’s usual tricks felt a little out-of-context in his previous movies (does Hereditary present the horror of familial grief made violently manifest, or is it… a weird spooky cult running everything?) in the lens of Beau’s anxiety everything kind of fits into place. Of course the world might be conspiratorially bent to messing with you, because that’s what anxiety feels like. It came out so long ago and is so not a movie that I want to jump into rewatching that putting it at number 10 feels bizarre, and yet… it’s a strangely affecting movie and there’s something I found very cathartic about it. And there is something about this as a lens for his other films that feels very revelatory to me, like Aster isn’t just depicting surrealist horror but laughing at the absurdity of it all, finding beauty in darkness and vice versa. There was a stretch that I really thought I would write a full article on Beau is Afraid and I don’t really think that’s going to happen but I wanted to make sure the Coles notes made it in here.
9. Bottoms - Emma Seligman
At any moment I may come to my senses and rearrange the back half of this list but, I don’t know, Bottoms kind of rules. I keep trying to come back to this section and find a deep way to reflect all the things that Bottoms is doing, but in truth it’s just a ludicrously fun film.
I grew up on the hyper-literate teen comedies of the 2000s, movies like Mean Girls where the writing of top-tier comedy alums brought laughably high-stakes high school drama to life. Bottoms feels like a return to that format, a Gen Z rebrand of the teen comedy into something that feels new and fresh. Rachel Sonnett and Ayo Edebiri are an incredible duo, and meet with a stellar supporting cast to put out easily the most entertaining comedy of the year. I practically levitated during the “Total Eclipse of the Heart” section. This thing just builds on itself so well, assembling absurd set pieces and watching with glee as all the dominoes collapse on themselves. But more than that, it’s just good, earnest storytelling. Really, the only reason I feel skeptical about including it on my list is probably because I watched it at home by myself instead of in a theatre with a full crowd, this would be a phenomenal group watch. I don’t have a ton to say but screw it. It’s staying at number 9. Bottoms rules, that’s about it.
8: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - James Gunn
I’ve said it a couple of times, but this year really felt like the death knell of the superhero film. Even Marvels, an inoffensive film I thought was fun and cute and pretty well-done, the sort of movie that would have made over 600 thousand in 2013 if Thor: The Dark World is any evidence, quietly limped to 200 thousand and didn’t even make back its budget. But despite all of that, we still got Vol. 3 this year, a movie that proves these things still sometimes have the heart and character that they did from the beginning - if the director is allowed to put all their passion into the project unrestrained. If we’re talking about “movies that stuck with me the most this year,” Guardians 3’s final scene, with the cast all celebrating and dancing to Florence and the Machine’s “The Dog Days are Over,” is still emotional just to think about.
There’s a lot of “film as metaphor for trauma” in this list, and GotG 3 truly reads as a reflection of a lot of what James Gunn has been going through with Marvel. In the summer of 2018, after Gunn criticized somehow-president Donald Trump, a gaggle of far-right extremists targeted Gunn’s social media, digging up off-colour jokes he had made ten years previous. Gunn immediately spoke up about his historied regret for his past actions and the way he had long-since grown beyond them; it struck as immediately relevant at the time that the character Gunn had vocally most related to was Rocket Raccoon, a bristly, angry, wounded bag of PTSD who frequently acts out against the people closest to him. When Disney fired him from the project, Gunn took it graciously. A year later they hired him back on, but not before releasing Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, a pair of movies that treated Gunn’s Guardians oddly, to say the least, rushing forward Gamora and Quill’s relationship before needlessly killing off Gamora and then bringing her back as… an alternate self from a previous timeline?
It feels appropriate, then, that the final Guardians movie focuses on three things: finally getting into Rocket’s psyche, Quill and Gamora sorting out the bizarre events that have happened around them, and a general sense of moving on from the systems that harmed you. Perhaps the villainous High Evolutionary - in his obsessive search to create “perfection” by cutting and chopping anything he deems impure - reads as Marvel Studios, hacking creators to bits in the search for the perfect four-quarter formula. Perhaps Quill and Gamora’s tangled relationship reads as a parallel to Gunn’s tangled relationship with these characters, briefly stolen from him and returned Not Quite Right, and the very human pain of having to accept that things didn’t go quite the way you expected. And maybe Rocket, stepping out of the shadow of the loss of his old friends and into the new family waiting for him in the present, is an acknowledgement that, good or bad, you cannot hold onto the past forever. The dog days are over, the pain is behind. As the MCU and the superhero industry crumbles apart, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 feels like the releasing of a long-held breath, the permission to let go of a complicated thing that meant a lot and to run towards whatever is next.
7. Barbie - Greta Gerwig
What is there to say about Barbie that hasn’t already been said?
Greta Gerwig’s love of humanity has always been inherently infectious, but none of her filmography has gone quite so far to make that Text as Barbie does. It is a movie all about trying to figure out what humanity is. The miracle of this movie is in its wild ambition - here is a story trying all at once to be an earnest exploration of femininity and human emptiness while also aiming to be a four-quadrant all-out blockbuster comedy. And it kind of pulls it off? Barbie has gone through the exact cycle that Everything, Everywhere, All at Once did last year where I came out of the theatre genuinely in love with the movie and am now bored to tears by all the “discourse,” so it is annoying to try to hold between the extremes of “best movie of the year!!!” and “awful terrible mess!” Barbie isn’t either of those things. But it is really good! And, if anything, it’s Barbie’s failings that make it so endearing to me.
I don’t know if Barbie quite holds everything together. I don’t know if its messaging is entirely clear. I don’t know what Will Ferrel is doing here. But that earnest trying at the center of it all feels necessary to the whole thing. Barbie doesn’t quite work as an intro feminism class, but it’s trying, and people are clearly learning something from it. Barbie doesn’t quite paint a holistic and satisfying vision of potential equality, but it’s trying, and I’ve had so many conversations with friends where we talk about how far that vision can go. In a way, it’s the things that Barbie tries and fails to do that are the best parts about it, the elements where you can feel Gerwig and Baumbach stretching under the restraints of a studio blockbuster, and encouraging their audience to go the next few steps without them. In addition to being one of the funniest movies of the year, Barbie is a film that constantly makes me think, and I think that’s worth something.
6. Poor Things - Yorgos Lanthimos
Lanthimos is a weird guy, this movie is a weird hang, but that’s also kind of what life is about.
Poor Things is a nigh-impossible movie to pitch, you kind of have to just get it. It’s a movie where Emma Stone plays a baby becoming an adult, where Willem DaFoe burps out solid chemical bubbles and is named “Godwin” or “God” but never in a way that the story quite feels thematically interested in. If you get into the details, Poor Things will lose you. If you can’t get into Yorgos’ weird world of pinhole cameras and over-the-top set design, Poor Things will lose you. If you’re not into a story primarily built around the idea of joissance and sexual liberation, Poor Things will lose you so very quickly. More than most things on this list, Poor Things is not a movie for everyone!
But, it is awesome.
Partially, it’s just that movies like this only come out once a year or so. There is so little ground to hold on to here. The score, composed by first-timer Jerskin Fendrix, literally doesn’t sound like any other movie score that I’ve ever heard. It is filled with weird electronic drones and impossibly high… strings? I have no idea what that noise is. A lot of it is discordant and played in between keys. And it’s easy to listen to elements of it and be grated because it just doesn’t quite sound like music. But when you sit long enough with it, the music - like protagonist Bella Baxter - transforms. It takes on new shades and depths until by the end this weird bizarre soundtrack carries a powerful sense of depth and beauty. And that’s kind of how the whole movie works.
I keep seeing people who take this movie very literally and are deeply turned off by it. And, sure, yeah, it’s a movie where a baby’s brain is put into her dead mother’s body and that is such a hard sell. But when you step past that, you get a story that is about someone speed-running humanity, a person who is learning over the course of a 2+ hour film what it means to be alive. And that’s beautiful? There is a stretch in the middle that’s just Bella hanging out with a few philosophers and talking about whether life is worth living and whether people are truly good and, I don’t know man, that’s what I go to the movies for. I love a deeply weird movie like this because it inevitably gets the audience outside of their expectations for what anything can be, and winds up engaging with some elemental truths of life in ways that are so simple and effortless but so impossible to do in a standard narrative. Movies like this rule, and I’m so excited that it’s actually getting awards attention! I don’t think Emma Stone should win over Lily Gladstone this year but I do get why everyone’s been showering her with love. Oh, and Mark Ruffalo? Mark Ruffalo is funnier in this movie than some people are in their entire careers. Please let him be in comedies again.
5: Asteroid City - Wes Anderson
You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.
With every release, Anderson slips a little deeper into his web of artifice. I wrote a bit about this when The French Dispatch came out, and how Anderson seems increasingly interest in the fiction of art as a lens into the reality of life. Asteroid City takes this idea to another level, with a complex Russian nesting doll of framing devices that become increasingly untangleable as the story progresses. It’s a film about a stage play depicting the making of a play about a series of events set in the fictional sleepy town of Asteroid City. Are you confused? Good.
A lot of Anderson’s movies are about grief, in one way or another. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a rip-roaring story of two unlikely acquaintances becoming best friends but it is also about a man reflecting on the death of an era and holding on to the last memories of the only life he ever loved. Grand Budapest Hotel also uses a series of nested framing devices, and while that movie plays around with them a lot less, the audience still gets the sense that they are slowly stepping into the internal world of Zero Moustafa, feeling his inner joys and pains. The external veneer is all artifice hiding the aching, wounds deep within. Compounded grief can have a numbing effect, shutting out the external world through walls and walls of mental guards, putting your soul to sleep so you can cope with the nail-grinding pain of just being alive. Jason Schwartzman plays a character who seems stoic to the world, and even to the audience. Everything is happening in his eyes, his face is a rock-solid blankness. But briefly, we catch glimpses of a man who is suffering. A man who was in pain before the story even begins, whose entire world is then flipped twice over and then shunted through a quarantine and then let go and told to behave as if nothing had happened. We’ve seen this film before.
There are plenty of movies that I’ve thought of as “about the pandemic!” in one way or another, but Asteroid City is maybe the movie that I felt understood the pandemic the most, and gave me the best language to really process it. I think a lot of people now are doing everything in their power to avoid processing anything. I can hardly blame them - it’s easy to grow numb when looking at all the data and the headlines. The realization that after two years of constant trying everyone just kind of gave up, that some of our health structures are worse than ever, that we never learned anything, and that in ways things just keep getting worse now that we’ve learned how to simply ignore a global tragedy. But Asteroid City is a movie sympathetic to people who are going numb. It’s a movie filled with actors who don’t understand emotions but remember how to play them, who burn themselves to find an excuse for their beating heart. It’s a movie filled with people who don’t understand the play, but keep retelling the story until they feel it in their core. And maybe the numbness, the falling asleep, is a vital part of eventually waking up and doing something.
4. Oppenheimer - Christopher Nolan
It’s very funny that Hollywood auteur Christopher Nolan has kind of been made by some to be the villain of this awards season, especially when he may have just put out his best film yet.
I talked a bit about Nolan in an article I put out just before watching Tenet at a time when I was a little uncertain about his future career. Dunkirk had bounced off of me (which is bizarre because that’s another quiet Great in his filmography), Tenet was shaping up to be a maximalist slog (which turned out to be only half true), and despite the visual splendor of Interstellar, with every rewatch it plummets lower on my list. Was Nolan done?
I always find it fascinating to think about where guys like Nolan would go had their career not taken such giant turns. Before Batman Begins, it seemed like Nolan was set to have a similar career to Fincher, making lean crime thrillers for his whole life. But Begins and then Dark Knight after it catapulted him to a sort of fame that is extraordinarily rare among the modern director. For the next several films, Nolan would experiment with form and function and push his boundaries, creating a series of incredibly dazzling images… but was there a story there? Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet all settle for some variation of pure, elemental moviemaking, successfully making the audience feel but, arguably, never quite rising to the probing questions that Memento, Insomnia, or The Prestige asked of us. And this is where Oppenheimer feels at once like a return to form and the natural fulfillment of what he’s done recently. He returns to the sort of messy, protagonist-hating stories that he started out on, but with the benefit of the sheer scale, spectacle, and emotionality of everything he’s made since.
More than anything else, Oppenheimer feels like a uniquely American film by a uniquely American director working at the top of his game. It’s a movie about the corroding centrist temptation to try to appease all sides, to the detriment of Oppenheimer’s soul and the cataclysmic future of our existence. I know some people are sick of this movie and are going to be exhausted when it sweeps the Oscar’s tonight, and I totally get it. Especially when I’ve had conversations with people taking this movie at face-level; and maybe it’s just that we’re used to biopics liking their main character. But I think this movie is such a fascinating, incisive bite at the sort of people Oppenheimer represents. You can’t play both sides forever without devastating consequences. At some point, you have to actually act on your beliefs. And the fact that such a volatile, politically-driven film like this is coming from Christopher “Big Blockbuster” Nolan feels like a really cool new turn to his career, and I’m genuinely fine with him getting the awards recognition for that.
Plus, that supporting cast?? Hartnett? Pugh? Krumholtz? C’mon, man.
3. The Zone of Interest - Jonathan Glazer
Oppenheimer and Zone of Interest, the most depressing double-feature of the 2020s.
Zone of Interest is so hard to talk about because it is genuinely one of the most terrifying movies I have ever seen. There is no violence in it. There is no gore. There are no supernatural monsters or intense action. You don’t see any suffering. It’s just the cold, horrific substance of human apathy.
A family packs up from their idyllic riverside evening and retreats to their bright, charming home. A wall cuts them off from the world that exists footsteps beyond their yard, but every day, the smoke piles out and into the air. And the fires keep burning. A man and wife bicker, uncertain what a dream promotion will mean if it means upending the life that they’d always dreamed of building. And the fires keep burning. Children play in their perfect yard, getting any toys they want, playing typical childhood games and annoying each other. And the fires keep burning.
The Zone of Interest is a slow, soul-crushing horror movie of the depths of banal evil. There are a lot of Holocaust movies and stories that seem to ask, “how could humans be capable of this?” But Zone of Interest cuts incisively to the core - it doesn’t pretend that people are incapable of this sort of moral cognitive dissonance. It knows full well. In fact, given the time of its release, it prods at its audience and asks them to interrogate the horrors that they have comfortably let happen. We live in an age where we turn a blind eye every day to stomach-churning events so that we can live our comfortable lives. Are we any better than this family?
I really want to see this in a theatre again, but I also don’t know if I would be able to take it. It’s been nearly two months and it still has a profoundly physical effect on me. I don’t know of any other movies that have pulled that off in this way. There’s something about the way it plays with the language of filmmaking itself, something that famously came into focus during Hitler’s reign, and implicates the entire audience as passive witnesses. In a way that is beyond my limits of a writer or critic to describe, Zone of Interest calls the entire movie-making business into question. And, of course, there is its chilling sound-design, which keeps the human suffering of it all always in the back of your mind. It is a profoundly impactful film, and one that I kind of think everybody should watch at least once.
2. Anatomy of a Fall - Justine Triet
Do you like women-directed movies that are dominated by a strong central woman performance? Do you like spirited monologues about the gender divide, and the cognitive dissonance of being alive? Do you also like when those movies are written for adults and actually dive into the complexities of humanity, sexuality, or physical and mental illness? Do you want a movie like that whose primary audience is adults instead of teenagers? Do you like movies that are also about how crazy the French justice system is?
I had watched a lot of movies in 2023 but none of them really stood out as a potential “favourite” before Anatomy of a Fall. Movies like Oppenheimer and Barbie were both obviously amazing, but felt like populist choices and I simply need to stand out. But also, neither of them quite hit me in the way that Anatomy of a Fall did. I love any story that says, “being a human is just about the most complex thing in the world,” and this movie absolutely stands in that genre. The whole thing functions by slowly peeling back the layers of a marriage, revealing that everything is a matter of perspective and bias. The same events, seen at any angle, can look like a suicide or a murder, a dutifully struggling marriage or bitter exes, a loving parenthood or an abusive relationship, and so on, and so on, and so on.
It’s hard to do a deep dive into Anatomy of a Fall because the movie itself is the deep dive. I think a lot about how we don’t really have cool adult thrillers in the way that we used to; I just rewatched Michael Clayton which feels like a glimpse back into a time where “adult movies” meant deep, layered legal dramas with complex characters coming to a moral crisis of faith. Now they just look like superhero movies but rated R this time! (I’m doing the final edit of this and I love that Clayton came up twice in very different contexts at different points of my own experience with it. Screw the rest of this article, the throughline is that you should be watching Michael Clayton) I digress. Anatomy of a Fall feels like a “truly” “adult” movie - adult in the sense that it trusts you to hold a variety of moral complexities, to resist your growing temptations to make snap-judgements about these characters, and to realize that everything is a disaster and that the best way out is a bit of empathy.
1. The Boy and the Heron - Hayao Miyazaki
And there’s no better practice ground for empathy than the ever-inviting worlds of Miyazaki.
The Boy and the Heron had a lot riding on it. It is Miyazaki’s first movie in ten years, the most-recent one he’s come out of retirement for. It felt like a monumental thing, and sure enough when it came out, it felt almost impossibly big. All at once, Boy and the Heron is a tour through purgatory, an exploration of a young boy’s buried grief, a reflection on legacy and the delicacy of human life, and a final autobiography from Miyazaki. I think it was a bit overwhelming for people, because it seems like a lot of folks wrote this one off after seeing it. To be fair, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first watch either - but the second watch devastated me.
Every second of this is coated with love, with passion, with joy and sorrow. Like Asteroid City, it is a depiction of layered grief, of how locked-away emotions well up inside and come out in fits and bursts. Like GotG 3 it feels like a director wrestling with his own career, trying to figure out what kind of message he wants to leave behind. Like Oppenheimer or Zone of Interest, it is deeply interested in the complex morality of being alive. But like Poor Things or Barbie, it also contains an inherent wonder about the world, and the beauty of existing. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what my movie of the year was, and on my second watch of Boy and the Heron it felt so incredibly obvious. Of course this would be the one. Miyazaki just balances everything I love about storytelling and filmmaking in this incredibly grand, ambitious film, that is all at once beautiful and heartwrenching and imaginative and just so deeply human. Maybe part of my growing difficulty in conveying the way that I feel about these movies is the fact that they all feel so elemental to me now. What could I say about The Boy and the Heron other than it makes me feel alive? At this point, that’s really all that I ask from a movie.
And that’s 2023. This article both went way longer than I thought it would and was probably half as good as I was hoping - I started working on this in January before the Oscar nominations even went out and now it’s Oscar’s night. If you are still wondering why I don’t write here as much, that about sums it up. But there were a lot of good movies this year, and I’m excited to see who gets awarded. There’s not really any dark horses for me this time, and no one who is in position to steal everything and leave me disappointed. It’s going to be a good time! And 2024 has a lot of cool stuff in store, too. I’ve already seen Dune: Part 2 twice and it’s tempted to name it movie of the year. But we’ll see. Furiosa is on the horizon. There’s a new Planet of the Apes film. And a Twister sequel? And a new Joker movie that could be worse than the last one? Who even knows. The world keeps on spinning, and movies keep on coming out. Happy Oscar’s everyone, I will see you on the other side, and hopefully write something else soon!
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