The Best Films of 2023

 The Best Films of 2023

With two high-powered guild strikes this year, it seemed that the cinema of 2023 would be limited. Much anticipated projects, such as the sequel to Dune and a tennis menage-a-trois with Zendaya, were delayed until 2025. Without stars able to promote movies, would anyone show up to see anything over the summer? While some films did suffer this fate, Hollywood was saved by two sophisticated flicks about a nuclear physicist and a 60-year-old doll. Sequels and Marvel installments struggled at the box office, but other original films succeeded beyond expectations. In fact, Miyazaki's latest film has made more at the American box office than every other film he has ever made. The tales of cinema's demise seem greatly exaggerated, especially when we have such greater access through streaming to the magnificent cinema outside of the States. If only we could convince Hollywood to provide us with original and fresh stories, rather than remakes, retreads, and sequels. Maybe that's the task we set ourselves in 2024. 

1. Anatomy of a Fall. Dir. Justine Triet. Can a courtroom drama be innovative and fresh? After 20 seasons of Law and Order: SVU, can this seeming moribund genre be revived. In fact, yes, it can. Triet's fascinating film is exceedingly well structured, almost classically so: a virtually blind child discovers that his father is dead on the frozen ground, having fallen from an upper story of the house. Did he fall, kill himself, or was he murdered? And if he was murdered, was it his German wife, a respected novelist? It could not be anyone else, since their chalet is secluded on a hilltop. The trial proceeds to deconstruct the relationship and its petty jealousies and traumatizing tragedies. The court scenes display a French legal culture far removed from what we are used to on Law and Order. The defendant will interrupt testimony. Lawyers will talk over each other, and Americans will shout at the screen: "Objection, your honor, badgering the witness" to no avail! This window is doubly compelling for the way language serves as a framing device. The wife is not comfortable defending herself in French, so she will shift to English. The languages reveal aspects of her personality as she tries to claim her innocence and maintain her son's trust in her. Even after watching this twice, I cannot assert confidently who did what to whom, but I have not stopped thinking about this complex portrait of a marriage torn asunder behind closed doors. 

2. All of Us Strangers. Dir. Andrew Haigh. Perhaps, I should have read a synopsis of this before going off to see it. I thought it was a little gay drama where I could watch Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal make out. That was enough for me to sign up; however, that was only one small piece of this film. Instead, a gay screenwriter, while toying with a project based around his parents who died when he was 12, somehow conjures them back to life and tell them all that has happened in his life since their demise. It is devastating. It is overwrought and melodramatic, but deeply effective for audiences. It is structured as a piece of catharsis and the flood of tears—that could be heard emanating from numerous members of the audience with whom I sat—provides an emotional release that I have only rarely experienced in cinemas.   

3. The Zone of Interest. Dir. Jonathan Glazer. In the 1990s, partly thanks to Spielberg's Schindler's List, a genre of Holocaust films emerged that attempted to portray the heinous acts of the Holocaust. But what film of the Shoah is possible ethically and how does one represent those events? Glazer in his portrayal of the Hoess family, who lived next to Auschwitz as he managed the logistics of the camp for much of the war, refuses to stage any acts of violence. Rather, he portrays the mundane life of the camp manager, as he orders supplies and casually orders the highest-powered crematoria he can find, while his wife tries on pilfered fur coats and serves coffee to guests. Screams, gunshots, and the constant rising of black smoke are seen in the background, but not once do we see the grotesque things occurring behind the wall. The film argues that we can all desensitize ourselves to even the most cruel behavior in order to achieve material comforts. It is a disheartening and shocking movie. 

4. Oppenheimer. Dir. Christopher Nolan. If someone were to say to me that a three-hour biopic about a nuclear physicist would gross $950 million worldwide, I would have stared blankly. Impossible, I would say, but Nolan pulled it off. This morality tale of a peace-loving leftist creating the most powerful weapon known to man at the time struck a nerve with audiences who had grown bored with the Marvel Universe and the series of sequels that have bombarded us since the pandemic. Cillian Murphy proved that he was not simply a character actor with cheekbones that could cut glass and an Irish accent that could melt hearts, but that he is a true leading man and one of our finest screen actors. The event of Barbenheimer weekend proved that audiences do crave movies, but movies of substance and style. There need to be films of impact and import to pull us off our couches from the never-ending streams of contents on our home screens, and this film with an ensemble of sophisticated performers telling a story of history and ethics did just that. 

5. Past Lives. Dir. Celine Song. Do we all carry torches for those first loves from our early lives? And if we were given the opportunity to talk to those past loves, what would we say? Celine Song's heartbreaking meditation on the lives we could have led posits that this contemplation can lead to an emotional crisis. Anchored by the quietly powerful performances of Greta Lee and Teo Yoo, Past Lives examines how two souls separated by time and place bear a connection that can no longer be sustained when they reunite twenty years after being teenaged sweethearts. A character-driven independent like this is usually reliant upon strong writing and acting, but the cinematography here is striking and gorgeous. The attention to the camera solidifies the emotional journey through physicality. One of the real gems of the year. 

6. Barbie. Dir. Greta Gerwig. Is it a feminist treatise or an ode to a 60-year-old corporate product? Barbie's staunchest supporters and fiercest critics may claim the film does much more than it actually does, but this piece of fluffy pink cotton candy did have substance behind it and created a Barbie-centric world that clashes fundamentally with humanity. Patriarchy may be inescapable, but Barbie never experienced it in her doll house or corvette. A movie that could have been an incoherent parade of costumes and accessories, instead insisted on having a point of view on gendered relations. And last summer we all learned that we are Kenough. 

7. American Fiction. Dir. Cord Jefferson. The experimental fiction of Percival Everett would not seem terribly well suited to cinematic adaptation. His novels are weird, meta, and self-referential, but Cord Jefferson crafted a charming comedy of manners (and errors) from his novel Erasure. Centered on a Percival-like novelist, played to a tee by Jeffrey Wright, navigates his crumbling family situation as he seeks a publisher for a weighty and bloated novel that even his agent thinks will never see the light of day. After attending a reading of the publishing sensation of the year, a gritty ghetto drama that exploits the worst of white fears and desires about the Black community, our hero writes his own satire of this stereotype, only to discover that his joke becomes the celebrated novel of the year. This deeply funny account of the ways our personal and professional narratives intersect with society's expectations of our disparate identity groups exposes how intricately tied our desires are to our context.

8. The Holdovers. Dir. Alexander Payne. This anti-Dead Poets Society is focused on an uncharismatic classics teacher and his unsympathetic students. There are no rousing speeches of "O Captain, my Captain." Our story begins with Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa locked in a battle of wills during winter recess when they are trapped on their campus together alone, save for the kindly cafeteria lady, who is suffering her own lonely Christmas season. These three share an unlikely familiarity and grow into an unsteady friendship. It is a charming fable, and these deeply unsympathetic characters turn out to be some of our must charming spiritual avatars of the year. 

9. Saltburn. Dir. Emerald Fennell. While Emerald Fennell's latest does not hit cinematic highs of her previous Oscar winner, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn delights as this year's most bonkers and incoherent piece of filmmaking. It doesn't make a lot sense, and it is deeply cynical about social relations, but through a gorgeous cast of characters brimming with unintentional wit and some of the weirdest kinks, this movie constructs an undeniably compelling study of the rich and their foibles.  

10. May December. Dir. Todd Haynes. This one may hit a little too close to home for much of Hollywood. Perhaps the reason it fared poorly in much of the industry awards. A television actress with little talent visits the home of a couple who faced the scandal of an illegal love affair where a woman with a teenage lover gives birth to her paramour's child in prison (à la Mary Kay LeTourneau). This middling actress exploits the family to deepen her characterization for her low-budget TV movie. Once again, we have Natalie Portman brilliantly playing a terrible actress, as she did previously in Black Swan and Vox Lux. The glue of the film, however, is the brilliant Charles Melton, who himself had been toiling in streaming purgatory in Riverdale, as the now middle-aged husband who plays into the clutches of this C-level celeb. It is a rather searing comment on how our biopic-industrial complex exploits lived experience for entertainment. 

11. Dream Scenario. Dir. Kristofer Borgli. I loathe Nicolas Cage with a deep, abiding passion. I have hated him since the early 2000s when he continued to make trifles that belied the serious talent that he possessed. The trifles turned from inoffensive treats like Con Air and the Rock into bloated and dumb projects about ghost-riding motorcycles, snuff films, and stolen copies of the Declaration of Independence. Dream Scenario seemed to continue into this illustrious company. Oh god, I thought to myself, as I was subjected to the trailer for this films several times in the fall, here we go again with a dumb Cage conceit that he appears in everyone's dreams. That would certainly be a nightmare for me. However, I must eat my hat and confess how much I enjoyed this searing take on academia, cancel culture and social media. A struggling academic biologist discovers that everyone is dreaming about him; he goes viral but then flies too close to the sun to come crashing back to Earth when the dreams become literal nightmares and he is swiftly canceled. It's a delightful little allegory.  

12. Maestro. Dir. Bradley Cooper. Bradley takes himself very seriously and has followed up the colossal success of 2017's Star is Born with a serious piece of cinema, a biography of legendary composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. There are some real flashes of brilliance in this portrayal: the scene where he conducts Mahler's Resurrection symphony in Ely Cathedral on Easter Sunday, the luminous Carey Mulligan as Lenny's long-suffering wife Felicia, and the searing fight scene that takes place as Macy's Snoopy float lumbers in the windows of their conjugal bedroom. Unfortunately, the film suffers from an episodic quality that cannot quite capture all of Bernstein's work, successes, and failures. Nor has Bradley crafted a performance that has much of an arc: he is Lenny the witty raconteur and musical prodigy in scene one and a slightly more weathered (and sweaty) version at film's end. Carey provides virtually all of the emotional heft of the film, and she is glorious, but it is frankly impossible to capture all that was Lenny in a film like this. 

13. Killers of the Flower Moon. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Scorsese has not shot any film that he doesn't cherish. His films are growing increasingly longer in this act of his storied career. Here he has fashioned a historical crime epic, not unlike Goodfellas or the Irishman, and his posse of actors returns again. The film charts the real-life murders of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma as they became the richest per capita group in the nation when oil was discovered on their reservation lands. With this wealth circulating, a deep conspiracy to murder the Osage and steal their oil-rich lands. Shockingly, several of the perpetrators of the killings were Osage women's white husbands. Scorsese treats this material with a deft hand, and even though it does not need to be three and a half hours long, the film is a fascinating rendition of these chilling events. 

14. Passages. Dir. Ira Sachs. Oh, what tangled webs we weave. A German filmmaker abandons his gay husband for a woman he meets on a dance floor at the wrap party for his latest art house piece. When he moves in with his inamorata, he discovers that this new affair isn't all that it's cracked up to be. He then follows the stages of grief as he bargains with his ex, proposes a throttle, and simply blows up his life beyond recognition. Everyone moves on, except for him. It;s an exhausting tale, but one with a very satisfying quality. 

15. Beef. Dir. Lee Sung Jin. This year's most intense story was about a road rage incident parlaying itself into a deep feud that transmogrifies into a codependent standoff. Our two road ragers may inhabit very different social positions, but they are bonded through hatred and come to an uneasy understanding of each other, even if the violence becomes more baroque as the limited series progresses. The bloodbath culminates in an operatic ending where the blood bathes the screen and few are left standing.  

16. Napoleon. Dir. Ridley Scott. Is it historically accurate? Is it particularly good? Is Jaoquin Phoenix well cast? To all of those questions, I would have to answer no. It opens with the execution of Marie Antoinette, which is poorly staged. Napoleon is standing there watching; he was not there. She looks as if she has just come out of the Petit Trianon, even though we have famous contemporary drawings from David as to what she looked like. They can't even manage to stage the guillotine correctly. And this is the opening shot of a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie. My biggest problem with the film is that it is focused simultaneously on his political rise and his relationship to Josephine de Beauharnais, and manages to pay short shrift to both. I fear that most people after finishing this movie would wonder, "how did this Napoleon guy conquer most of Europe? He seems kind of dumb." I uttered a loud guffaw when in one scene and aide-de-camp tells Napoleon that he must leave the arms of Josephine to return to the battlefront. Joaquin quite petulantly slams his fist into a pillow and shouts: "I hate war. I am a man of peace." What is this interpretation? As Europe and America are gripped by fears of authoritarianism and strong men, Scott had an opportunity to stage this biopic as a treatise and warning to what could happen, but instead we have this withering account of a man that comes off as punch-drunk for a woman above his station and not seemingly competent. A missed opportunity. 

17. Rustin. Dir. George C. Wolfe. Colman Domingo does his fiery best to bring to life the legendary civil rights leader, who remained in the shadows out of fear that his homosexuality would reflect poorly on Martin Luther King and his circle. Wolfe's directing, however, provides a relatively lifeless account of a key figure in the March on Washington and a key interlocutor of MLK. Wolfe is a talented director and has brought to vivid life numerous landmark plays on the stage; however, he has never broken through adequately to the visual aspects of the medium. His films, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and the execrable Nights in Rodanthe, always feel as if a camera has been placed in a stage rehearsal. They feel staid and uninspired, and, sadly, Rustin is no different with its stated reverence for its character, stifling him and making him feel lifeless. 

18. Air. Dir. Ben Affleck. This was the year of the commodity biopic: Barbie, the Flamin' Hot Cheetos movie. Blackberry, Tetris. A set of films interested in the origin stories of these products. What would Marx have said about these? Are they simply the latest version of commodity fetishism? These films portray the products as inspired creations by individuals overcoming the adversity of capitalism, in order to achieve monetary gain and fame through partaking in the system. All these films, including Affleck's film about Nike's relationship with Michael Jordan, limit the portrayal of the way these corporations work, and erase the aspects of its creation that may be odious (unfair legal contracts, outsourced sources of labor, manufacturing woes, etc.), thereby achieving the fetish in a digital age. The actual capitalist origins of the product are erased to fashion a timeworn story of individualist triumph, in line with an earlier generation's films about scientists, such as Madame Curie, Louis Pasteur, and Alexander Graham Bell. A bizarre phenomenon of 2023.  

19. Priscilla. Dir. Sofia Coppola. When the most famous man in the world trains his eye on a 16-year-old girl, can she ever withstand the charisma, the fame, and the power of such a man? Coppola's film argues that it would be impossible. Not only does Elvis Presley represent a viable escape for a teenage girl living with her parents on a military base in Germany, lonely and homesick for the States, but he represents the male libido personified for a girl coming into her sexual awakening. The most desired man in America desires her. It's an intoxicating cocktail too strong to resist. Sadly, the second half of the film shifts from this fascinating negotiation of sexuality that blossoms and withers under the glaring light of celebrity to what feels like a retread of Baz Luhrman's year old Elvis biopic. 

20. Jury Duty. A man reports to jury duty and finds himself in a circus. His fellow jurors include a man who invents things that no one wants or needs (such as chair pants made out of crutches and attached to his pants) and James Marsden. Over the course of a week of a trial involving the vandalism by an employee of his employer's warehouse, our Everyman navigates the colorful characters of the trial and helps exonerate the defendant whose own attorney seems to assume his guilt. It is the feel-good show of the year, and demonstrates that reality tv can still surprise and even find some endearing individuals out there. 

21. Poor Things. dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Poor Things narrates what happened to Barbie after she left her gynecologist. Although it has created a bizarre and fascinating world of human experimentation and flying vehicles in a fin-de-siecle environment, the film with a too heavy hand crafts the figure of Bella Baxter as the vessel of male fantasies and the voice of female reason and agency. Her subjectivity is crafter through her, but her agency never feels to be an object created by her. And maybe that is the point, we are all socially constructed, but the male characters do not appear to have the same influence of their surroundings. Emma Stone has brought to the screen the skits that worked so well on SNL, but it is not as successful in this venue.