It was a great year for movies – after dedicating 2020 and 2021 to watching almost entirely old movies, and spending 2022 and the first half of 2023 not watching many movies at all (by my standards at least), this fall I went absolute sicko mode and saw basically all the big releases. As a result, I have a top ten list I’m really happy with for the first year since 2019. This was a great year for movies, with a lot of stuff that had been backed up by the pandemic coming out all at once – how many times in history have there been new films from filmmakers the caliber of Scorsese, Nolan, Mann, Haynes, Anderson, Fincher, and Miyazaki all in one year? And that wasn’t even all of them! Gerwig, Cooper (I SAID IT AND I MEAN IT), and Lanthimos are here too! Plus I haven’t had a chance to see the new Kelly Reichardt or the new Ari Aster – there was a new Godzilla and a follow up to Shin Godzilla. John Wick 4!
What can I say? 2023 was a year that pulled me back to the theater and then back to film as both a hobby and fascination – it certainly wasn’t a good year in the real world, and the massive strikes in the film industry reflect how things are going everywhere – but we were lucky to get some great films to watch, so lets talk about them.
10. Ferrari
Between Adam Driver’s incredible performance and Mann’s masterful presentation of the power and joy of racing, the film captures why these men cannot turn away from racing, even though it kills them and makes them killers all at once. Enzo Ferrari is a man who builds machines, and his finest creation is himself – Ferraris are machines built to build races and Ferrari is a machine built to build winning race cars. The qualities that are required in a machine that builds winning race cars do not lend themselves to being a good husband or a good father. We see Enzo in this film be given the opportunity to do the right thing, or to make amends, or to be a person – and he always wants to! We can see him knowing in his heart what he Should Do – but his decisions are not made by Enzo Ferrari with his fleshy heart, they are made by Ferrari the machine that builds machines and every choice is made for the benefit of the machine – everything must be suborned, nothing is sacred.
9. Godzilla Minus One
An excellent back to basics take on the big fella with such a tight script that it’s almost a negative – it’s a perfectly constructed machine, right out of Dan Harmon’s story circle. Nevertheless it worked for me, the romance and the family aspect were winners in my book, and the many Godzilla encounters all rock – Godzilla as T Rex in the South Pacific, Godzilla as very large Jaws, Godzilla as Godzilla (1954), and the final encounter where the “volunteer militia” throws every trick in the book at him. It’s a movie working through a bunch of different ideas both as a new iteration of a longstanding entertainment product and as a thematic patchwork of Japanese cultural tensions and anxiety. One of the most entertaining movies of the year – a roller coaster in the Scorsese use of the term (non-derogatory).
8. Oppenheimer
Ultimately lived up to its promise for me – a movie I haven’t been able to stop thinking about all year, and look forward to rewatching when I get the chance. Sitting with it for all this time, I really do think it’s a Great Film, and one that will be remembered among Nolan’s greatest work. It’s framing with the double lens of Oppenheimer telling his story and being interrogated on it at the same time kind of mimics the process of examining a historical figure associated with such a critical and horrible moment in history. The movie interrogates Oppenheimer literally, while the audience and the historian interrogate him figuratively. What did he actually believe, and what did he actually say or do? What actions did he take, and why did he take them? What events did he actually cause to happen, while what would have been done regardless of his actions? The more time that passes the more powerful and chilling the final scenes of the movie become.
7. John Wick Chapter 4
We watched the first three movies in anticipation of this, and god what a blast. The triumphant finale (regardless of whether they make more) with Keanu as good as he’s ever been, solidifying his return to the top of the industry and proving once and for all that he was always good and cool. It’s not a surprise that Donnie Yen is incredible, but it is a special treat to see him perform at this level in a major Hollywood blockbuster as the true co-lead, not a side character or a cameo. It all comes together one last time, and gives a truly satisfying conclusion to the decade long saga that no one expected when John Wick almost didn’t get a theatrical release in 2014.
6. The First Slam Dunk
Takehito Inoue adds a new incredible achievement to a long career of triumphs by compressing his legendary basketball manga into a 125 minute animated masterpiece. It uses a blend of 2D and 3D animation that’s become more popular in the Japanese industry, but it has a unique flair and style that I haven’t seen anywhere else – it looks incredible in motion. The movie weaves together the stories of the team’s starting 5 in between plays of the most important game of their lives and captures what’s so great about basketball specifically and what sport can mean and do for people in general. One of the greatest sports movies of all time.
5. Poor Things
I love it when things are big. Big visuals, big characters, big emotions, big laughs. In Poor Things Yorgos debuts a new colour film process meant to emulate the classic technicolour look and it creates one of the most gorgeous movies of the modern era. Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo give big physical ridiculous performances, and their sex comedy dialogue and antics produce big laughs. I saw this in a theater on opening night and the audience was going nuts. You’re not gonna get this kind of movie every day, so treasure it when it comes.
4. May December
Todd Haynes delivered a movie that got under a lot of people’s skins, mine included. As has been covered in depth on twitter, this is a very funny movie, and a lot of its humor comes when it spotlights the ways people work so hard to maintain normality, even the face of very strange and even awful situations. Acting gets a lot of focus in this movie with Natalie Portman’s actress character front and center, but it’s really everyone else that’s acting. Julianne Moore’s character acts just so to keep everyone in her life where she wants them, her children try to act like they don’t see the strangeness in their parents relationship even as it becomes increasingly clear that they do, people in the community act supportive, as though the family at the center of all this were just the victims of some unfortunate media controversy. The best scene of the movie brings all of this to the very front and it’s both comic and unbelievably sad – when Charles Melton’s Joe climbs out onto the roof where his son is smoking weed. He's never smoked before and so unsurprisingly gets very high and emotional – the idea of someone’s dad smoking weed for the first time and getting way too high is funny! It’s a hilarious scene, there’s a moment where he almost falls off the roof. But it’s also incredibly sad because the high removes some of his inhibitions and he lets the mask drop and reveals how incredibly lost and sad he is – he’s a grown man and yet because of the way he’s been infantilized in this traumatic relationship he seems younger than his 17 year old son. This movie is filled with moments like this that are funny, upsetting, or deeply sad and often all three at once.
3. Killers of the Flower Moon
Marty constructs some of the most powerful images of his career while telling a familiar kind of story in a new frame. While there is an argument to be made that you can’t show violence without in some way glamourizing it (like how you can’t make a war movie that doesn’t in some way glamourize war), this is the most viscerally upsetting violence has ever been in a Scorsese movie. Maybe even greater than the physical violence is the social violence – the way Molly’s family home is taken over by her white in-laws until her and her mother are made to feel like the outsiders – the fact that the in-laws, led by her own husband, are secretly massacring their family and community completes the metaphor. Incredible performances by Lily Gladstone as Molly but also Tantoo Cardinal playing Molly’s mother Lizzie and Cara Jade Myers playing her sister Anna – the character of Anna in particular broke my heart, and that’s down to Cara Jade’s powerful performance. Shout out to Louis Cancelmi (what a name) for playing possibly the single most evil character of the year, more than even De Niro and Leo who are doing their darndest. The scene where he casually discusses killing his step-children in order to secure their head-rights is genuinely shocking – these men don’t really care about hiding any of this, at least not from the other white settlers. It’s done out in the open.
2. Asteroid City
This movie is Wes’s greatest achievement, and I don’t say that lightly. Its intricate construction of frames within frames, a television special re-enactment of the making of Asteroid City, a play – we watch the film then knowing that all the substance is just a play, it isn’t real. Of course, Asteroid City is a movie – it was never real. Furthermore, the “behind-the-scenes” sections are also part of the movie – despite what the framing device may tell you, they’re no more real than anything else in the film. These different levels of reality within the film meld together beautifully, particularly for Jason Schwartzman’s various characters. As the character Augie Steenbeck in the play, he has a relationship with a famous actress while grieving his wife. As the actor Jones Hall, he becomes the lover of playwright Conrad Earp, and then must continue playing Augie after Conrad’s sudden death. Both Augie and Jones find themselves mourning a loss that has left their lives senseless, unintelligible, but still needing to go on as though everything is normal. This compounds – Augie burns his hand on a hot griddle for no explained reason, but a reason we can imagine if we put our minds to it – it confounds Jones, who finds himself begging the director for explanation – he can’t understand the play. This leads to an incredible balcony to balcony scene between Schwatzmann’s Jones and Margot Robbie playing an actress who would’ve played Augie’s dead wife in a flashback sequence but her scene was cut – she’s now performing in another play at the theater across the street. They perform their cut scene together and it’s this incredibly beautiful moment – actors playing actors playing characters in a cut scene in a fictional play in a fictional tv documentary – all the layers collapse and we’re left with this moment of exquisite peace.
1. The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki is probably my favorite filmmaker of all time. Scorsese may be the greatest living director, Tarkovsky or Kurosawa (or Bergman or Welles or etc etc) may be the greatest director of all time, but Miyazaki creates these worlds that take me places no one else has ever brought me before or since. The Boy and the Heron is a new big fantasy epic from the master of that genre, but it’s not a retread. It’s stranger, more mysterious, and more contradictory than his other works. I’ve seen a lot of readings of the film as straight allegory about his relationship to his work or to his son – these totally fall apart if you think about them for more than 30 seconds or read some of the statements Ghibli has been putting out (Ghibli stated Miyazaki sees himself as the Parrot King and the recently departed Isao Takahata as The Wizard). While the film is unquestionably about creative work and the question of recreating or perpetuating the evils of the world despite your good intentions, there’s so much more to unpack in this film, and I look forward to thinking about it for many years to come. The cemetery with golden bars. The souls of unborn children hunted by eternally starving pelicans. The birthing room deep in the heart of the world. All the different women defined by their dualities. The contradictions and frictions in this film have kept it front of mind since I first saw it, and it’s my number one film of the year.