The Best Movies Of 2023

From Walter Chaw’s “The 50 Best Films Of 2023” on Film Freak Central:

“The world is on fire. I think you could probably blame fewer than a dozen very wealthy people for that, wealthy enough that we no longer have the ability — nor indeed the will — to stop them. As soon as you allow billionaires to exist, the Rubicon has been crossed. Game over.

So in the time we have left, and as the window for our ability to express ourselves about popular genocides in public spaces closes, we still have movies: these shadows on cave walls telling whatever will be left that we were here and that we knew. We did. We were so angry and sad, and there was nothing we could do, because the people and systems that were supposed to protect us only protected them. Now it’s done.”

I’am so tired. I am so tired of explaining that capitalism and fascism want to hurt us, separate us, extract as much value as humanly possible, then discard us. Discard us by disabling us by forcing us to do back-breaking labor, then we created a healthcare industry that is so incredibly broken no one wants to engage with it unless absolutely necessary.

Then, when we’re broke and broken, they’ll discard us into the Prison Industrial Complex, where they somehow have money to provide all the accommodations they’re denying free citizens.

I am also so tired of trying to tell people that the way I engage with the world and other people, and understand it, is through media, mostly movies.

Some of the most underrated films of 2023 have connections to underseen films of the past, see if you can spot the similarities here; Harriet in 2019, Hidden Figures in 2016, The Help in 2011, The Color Purple in 2023, A Thousand And One in 2023, If Beale Street Could Talk in 2018, and One Night In Miami in 2020.

The pattern is staring and screaming at you in your face.

Many honorable mentions have been honorably mentioned over and over, by me and many people; Air, Gotg 3, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margret, Spider-Man:ATSV, You Hurt My Feelings, and Rye Lane. All of those were seen within a month of each other. Fantastic May/June.

Three fantastic gross-out comedies from August/Sept; No Hard Feelings, Theater Camp, and Bottoms.

Wes Anderson used the streaming medium to full effect with his five shorts, with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar being the longest and maybe the best of the 5.

With that, my favorite films of 2023…

10. The Iron Claw

I’ve been a fan of professional wrestling since I was 5 years old. I can vividly remember going to the local Boy’s And Girl’s Club to see The Undertaker v.s. Some-Other-Guy. It was probably terrible but it is still one of my most cherished memories of my childhood. I grew up watching the early 90s WWE, then known as the WWF, colloquially known as the end of the “Golden Era”.

This was a few years after the height of the Von Erich’s wrestling family tenure. The Iron Claw stars The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White, Triangle of Sadness’s Harris Dickinson, Maura Tierney as Doris Von Erich, Holt McCallany as Fritz Von Erich, and, in the best role I’ve ever seen him in, Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich.

Absolutely soul crushing, but a necessary document of what hyper-toxic masculinity can and will do just one American family.

9. The Killer

One day in 2000 I walked into an FYE, a store that sold physical media, and as I browsed the new releases of this new medium called DVD’s I saw one that stood out. It stood out because its outer case was designed to look like it was wrapped up in butcher paper, and wrapped with string. The cover was embossed with the words Fight Club.

From there I was off to the races, with every new David Fincher release I was there on day one. Nothing felt like a Fincher movie; they were slick and cool, but also gross and grimy and tactile and sophisticatedly grungy.

With Mank, he seems to revert to a world and an aesthetic that is much more traditional and clean. Gary Oldman carried over his Churchill paunch and bluster to deliver one of the best performances that year. But it didn’t feel like a David Fincher movie.

Which is all to say Fincher-heads, Finches? Fincher-men? Fans of Mr. Fincher felt like it was Christmas morning waking up to the news that the long-gestating The Killer project was in production, and would be dropping on Netflix in late-2023.

While not in the top third of the Finch-man’s filmography, The Killer sees much of David’s past projects, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo being the most prominent, being brought to bear here. The slickness with which Lisbeth Salander moved throughout Stockholm can very much be seen in how Micheal Fassbender moves throughout…well, the world.

Fassbender plays the titular Killer, John Killer if you will. When we meet Monsieur Killer he’s doing yoga to ‘kill’ time while he waits to kill his target. Spoiler alert: he fucks it up. Cue William Hurt in A History Of Violence, “HoOOooow did you fuck THAT UP?!?”

Throughout the next two hours, Senior Killer traverses the world, chasing and being chased, killing and trying to avoid being killed. By the end, Signore Killer makes his way to the man behind the woman behind the contract killing. What he finds is a man who is so obscenely wealthy, adorned ironically in a “Sub-Pop” T-shirt, that he doesn’t even remember financing the hit.

Herr Killer leaves the man’s penthouse sans killing, knowing that if he went through with the murder the totality of the Finance Industrial Complex, aka Blackrock, would be brought to bear on him.

In 2024, paper beats guns.

8. Anatomy Of A Fall

As you get older, the more you realize that is no true justice, and any attempt at delivering justice is almost always performative. Thus Sandra Hüller may have given the most authentic representation of justice in 2023/24.

7. Godzilla Minus One

It’s about putting others' lives ahead of your own.

6. Maestro

Bradley Cooper really wants an Oscar. Carey Mulligan should win one, but not for this role/movie.

5. Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan will go down as one the greatest directors of all time. He somehow takes incredibly heady ideas and boils them down to a simple enough package that even mouth-breathing Letterboxd-bros love them.

Cillian Murphy gives one of the great performances of the 21st century, Florence Pugh does so much given so little to do, as does Emily Blunt. The Casey Affleck jump scare is more unnerving than almost anything I have seen in a horror movie all year.

4. Poor Things

In the same way Across The Spider-Verse presented worlds and environments, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things merges the best of early Tim Burton, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of The City of Lost Children and Amélie), and Guillermo del Toros works like The Shape Of Water.

The physicality of Emma Stones Bella Baxter quite literally only scratched the surface. The comedic beats, “Somebody should punch that baby”, the gradual Flowers For Algernon-esq evolution of her psyche, from the toddler we see at the start, to the elegant, sophisticated person we see at the end, to the messages and themes inherent to the story about female bodily autonomy.

Masterpiece.

3. The Holdovers

In Walter Chaw’s review of The Holdovers, he says, “But this is what I know: The Holdovers, whatever its prickliness and depictions of the little cruelties of adolescence and well-past-middle-age, is generous, observant, and eminently kind. It says that however late it is, there is still time to make a difference in a kid’s life. There’s still time.”

My dad died when I was 31. In most people’s minds, I’m a full-grown adult at that point, fully equipped to deal with whatever the world would throw at me. He died in July of 2016, four months before the racists and fascists got their way. It was at that point that many folks, including myself, realized we were not in fact prepared for whatever the world would throw at us. I can’t help but think Dad would have had some wise words to at least buffer the impact of the orange turd.

Walter’s words meant a bit different to me, but you get what he meant.

I’ve never been a big Alexander Payne “guy”, but I have enjoyed Election and Nebraska. Yes yes, I know I need to see Sideways, the other Paul Giamatti/Alexander Payne collaboration. Here, Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a curmudgeonly boarding school classics teacher, who’s tasked with overseeing the students who don’t have anywhere else to go for the holidays. The student who is left alone after the rest go on an impromptu ski trip is Angus, played by first-time actor Dominic Sessa.

Dominic is resplendent here, giving a prickly, rudderless performance many of us will resonate with. If you didn’t think you were like this kid, trust me, you were.

Giamatti plays a character that feels so wholly crafted that it’s hard to believe that he didn’t base it off of someone he actually knew. Hunham’s cadence and manner of speaking is so metered and purposeful, it’s as if Kelsey Grammer had a beating heart, and was half as cunty.

The third person stuck here, who isn’t actually stuck by circumstance but by grief, is Mary, played with simmering grace and poise by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Her son, Curtis, died in Vietnam after joining the military to pay for college. You can imagine her grief and anger bubbling just under the surface were the first inkling of America’s feelings that “maybe we’re the baddies”.

If there is any justice in the world, which we’ve already established that isn’t much, Da’Vine should absolutely win the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award.

2. Killers Of The Flower Moon

From my Letterboxd Review:

When it’s all over, the story of America will be that we were both the cops and the robbers. The terrorists and the resistance. The perpetrators of mass atrocities and the clean-up crew. The drug dealers and the detoxifiers.

These are the types of stories Martin Scorsese has been interested in telling for his whole career and are the central ideas at the heart of his newest opus, Killers Of The Flower Moon, based on the best-selling book of the same name by David Grann. The film, which has been in various stages of production for the past seven years, stars Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth Scorsese-directed feature. He plays Ernest Burkhart, who, upon returning to the U.S. after fighting in WW1, seeks employment under his uncle, William King Hale, played by Robert DeNiro.

Burkhart is the physical manifestation of the modern-day neo-liberal American; he likes money, he doesn’t see race, and he can see both sides of any issue. And, most importantly, he’s extremely amenable, ready to lie down and obey any direction given, even if it’s to poison his own wife.

Oh, but make sure the audience knows he’s conflicted about doing it.

His uncle, William, owns an oil field, which has become the source of massive wealth for the Osage Native Americans, who were corralled into living on that black-gold-soaked land. Soon after settling in, Earnest meets Mollie Burkhart, played exquisitely by Lily Gladstone, a Native American of Blackfeet heritage, in her first major leading acting role. Soon after wooing each other, Mollie’s family members begin dying off; some of what’s referred to at the time as a ‘wasting disease’, some of gunshot wounds to the back of the head, colloquially known as a ‘suicide’, some of more natural causes such as a house being blown to smithereens.

The source of these deaths is obvious to anyone with an ounce of understanding of white supremacy; someone with a skin tone a shade darker than an Italian is generating what could potentially be generational wealth. Not on our watch. Didn’t you know? Wealth, power, and exploitative labor practices aren’t for you. The phrase “You didn’t earn this, you didn’t work for any of the things you have” is repeated over and over to many of the members of the Osage community by the white residents.

Yes. They. Fucking. Did.

They ‘earned’ it when they’re entire fucking race was almost wiped out by murderous, rapist colonizers. Call it reparations, call it luck, call it whatever you want but they were more than owed what they were given.

The film itself is very, very long. Coming in at almost 3 and a half hours, this is Scorsese’s second longest movie, only 3 minutes shorter than his last film, 2019’s The Irishman. That film, financed and distributed by Netflix, cost upwards of somewhere between $159–$250 million.

What’s a couple million dollars between friends?

By contrast, Killers Of The Flower Moon comes in at a reportedly flat $200 million. Evidently, the costs of the de-aging of DeNiro and others in The Irishmen was what pushed the budget into the quarter of a billion-dollar range. God only knows what the reason was for the similar price point of Killers. For the most part, the film looks grand, the sweeping and circling camera flourishes certainly denote a large Hollywood budget.

But $200 million dollars big? Not so much.

The pacing and editing style, brought to us again by legendary editor and frequent Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, is just as finely tuned, relaxed, and unassuming as we’ve expected from the director’s most recent work. Almost every scene has moments where the length of the cut allows for the viewer’s eye to roam around the screen, taking in every meticulously crafted nook and cranny.

Here, we have another reason to heap praise upon Gladstone’s performance, as long takes can sometimes be intimidating for younger actors. The ability to fall back on shorter takes means that mistakes can more easily be glossed over, while a longer take will lay bare any weaknesses in one’s arsenal. As of now, it appears that Gladstone has none.

On a scene-to-scene basis, the editing of Killers works most of the time, while on the whole, the movie does feel quite shaggy. In an alternate dimension where runtimes were not known, it might not have been noticeable. But, going into the film knowing full well we’d be in a theater chair, no matter how comfortable, for 206 minutes every scene that felt even the slightest bit drawn out was much more noticeable.

The script of Killers, co-written by Eric Roth and Scorsese, is mostly fine. Where it falls apart is the tone. Scorsese loves to infuse his dialogue with flourishes of humor, while dark and only briefly seen it still sticks out like a sore thumb existing alongside a deeply serious story. Some might welcome a chance to catch one’s breath while wallowing in the misery of the thing, while others would counter that that is the point.

That the people who commit unspeakable, heinous crimes deserve to be ridiculed, and making them look buffoonish removes the mystique that they may have generated. To me, breaking the tension with humor only reinforces the belief many people have that these atrocities can never be portrayed with the seriousness and accuracy they deserve when presented as entertainment. When we tell stories about acts of brutality they innately must end with some semblance of justice, lest the audience feel bad.

But it’s not justice. The Osage people have lived with the events of this story, and Tusla for what it’s worth, for almost a century. And the best we can do is to take their pain, take their suffering, take their murders, take their rapes, and their oppression and package it, smooth over the rough edges, make the whites look good, and call that justice.

It’s not justice, it’s entertainment. Maybe that’s the best we can ever expect.

1. Past Lives

One of the most sincere, organic, non judgemental depictions of lost love, longing, and the evolution of modern day relationships (platonic or otherwise) I’ve ever seen.

Like if someone mixed up in a blender the longing and long shots of Wong Kar-Wai, the quiet moments of a Sofia Coppola film, and the what-ifs and missed connection Richard Linklaters Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.