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Is it Kenough to say that if you're curious where I am, mentally and emotionally, you can catch me openly weeping at the ninja turtle movie?
Long-time readers and eagle-eyed fans will notice that I've been starting every one of these for a few years alluding to some kind of general malaise, either covid-caused or connected to life, the movies, and everything. And every year I hope and/or promise that this will be the year wherein that malaise will have been replaced with something big and new in my life. Well, dear reader, I regret to inform you that the ill-formed and hovering aforementioned malaise continues to malaise all over me, and I find myself largely in the same place as last year. Rejoice!
That same stage of in-the-middle wobbliness that I can't quite seem to shake from the general scaffolding of my life has been compounded by what has probably been my most movie-isolated year since, like, middle school, maybe? Since the start of 2023, I (deep breath) 1) injured myself in a way that kept me from going to movie theaters for a couple months, 2) sold my car and moved to a little town two or more hours from a good theater--and one that frequently experiences the kind of weather that keeps you from traveling at all, 3) took a summer job at an even smaller and more remote location where going to the movies at all was entirely impossible, and 4) had computer issues for the past month or two that I haven't had the funds or wherewithal to resolve which have more or less kept me off the internet for longer than five minute bursts, which has made catching up on movies online frustrating at best and impossible at worst (heck, even writing and publishing this is gonna be a whole-ass effort).
And where does all that leave us? I can't speak to how my minor inconveniences have affected your life (gravely, I'm sure), but it leaves me with a pretty paltry 74 movies from the 2023 calendar year and a slightly less than standard level of enthusiasm for writing these annual text-and-movie-marathons (as evidenced by my leaving things to the last possible second before the Oscars). Probably also not a boon to my productivity or enthusiasm that I'm pretty off-consensus this year. I keep reading that 2023 produced a real bumper crop of stellar movies, one of the best Best Picture lineups in Academy history, etc. There's a lot of passion out there for 2023 releases. And I'm sure it doesn't help that I just didn't see very many, but I can't say I find myself in the same boat--hell, I am not sure if I can scrape together unmitigated passion for every movie in my top 20 (a number that is itself maybe silly to do when you've only seen 74 movies, but silliness is both my nature and my profession, and nothing will stop me).
So all of that is to say that I am gonna be re-embracing my streamlined format from last year. While last year I at least had the solid-enough excuse that typing was hard because my fingers weren't totally working yet (a choice quote from that intro: "it doesn't even hurt to do a thumbs up anymore!"), this year my (poor) excuse is that I'll streamline because I want to, and hope/promise/assume that next year will be a return to wild-eyed and glorious form. In practice, this means shorter blurbs and more pictures (which, honestly, is probably better for us all to begin with?). It also means that I'm going to just reproduce my letterboxd review for this list, if I have one and it says what I want it to say. This is a major bummer for all of you who spend time on letterboxd (and a still a minor bummer for all those who read and respect the English language), but I'll use it instead as my yearly advertisement to come join the rest of us monsters on letterboxd, aka the only good social media site left on the internet. It's just movies and pictures and bad jokes! And really, if you enjoy reading these posts (and god help you if you do, but you may be lurking out there), then know that you could read me doing this sort of thing year-round and in a much more deranged way than on here. So find me here if that's the sort of thing that interests you!
So here's the deal: 74 movies seen (feel free to ask me what I have and haven't seen, if you're curious!), the 20 best movies of the year, the 5 worst ones, the 10 best scenes of the year, and a truly punishing number of words, bad jokes, feelings, and typos between now and the end. What's not to like? I'm excited--and I'm sure you're either excited or glancing nervously at your clock--so let's jump into it!
Honorable mentions: though they didn't make my top 20, I'm still grateful for the astounding visuals and energy of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the museum-glass dreaminess of Priscilla, and wondrous stupidity of Theater Camp.
20. Bottoms (dir. Emma Seligman)
I'll never get enough of movies that sprinkle little baffling details around the edges (like the out of focus caged football player in the background) and then let them stay there. Also here for any movie claiming that all teenagers are inherently feral. Triply here for anything that embraces pure nonsense and the occasional sword gag. Ayo Edebiri fireman-carrying Nicholas Galitizine through a slow-motion tableau of horrendous violence really is the energy we all needed this year.
(on Amazon Prime, rentable)
19. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (dir. Jeff Rowe)
Look, I told you in the first sentence that this movie made me tear up--what did you expect? Absolutely thrilled that the dominance of the Spider-Verse is inspiring a rush of lookalikes and hoping that still feel like their own thing. 2023 was absolutely the year of movies that had no business being good (or existing at all) that turned out spectacular. Silly, fun, gleefully gross, with real chemistry between the four leads (helped by the fact that they actually hired teenagers to be the leads in a movie with 'teenage' in its title) and a strong enough emotional core to make me wipe dainty tears into my pillow.
(on Amazon Prime, Paramount+, rentable)
18. The Boy and the Heron (dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
Beautiful and inscrutable in equal measure--and maybe it can only be one because it's also the other. Feels like I'd need three or four more viewings and some cliff notes to really grab everything I can or should from this movie, but then again I feel like I could spend another four or five rewatches not wanting to force my way into the tower. Maybe some things are better left baffling?
(not currently available online)
17. Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
I love how committed Kelly Reichardt is to showing how no one is always wonderful, neither in their best nor worst moments, in a medium that tends to make suffering look noble and joy look easy, and I love how committed she is to staging smallness without trying to make it Something Bigger. This is a minor film in the most complimentary sense--a few days pass, some very small lessons are learned (but maybe not applied), and then there's nothing to do but put your hands in your pockets or see if your hot water works.
(on Showtime, rentable)
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16. Rotting in the Sun (dir. Sebastián Silva)
God, the giddy absurdity and walls-caving-in horror of almost drowning an then waking up to a forest of disinterested dicks while Jordan Firstman pitches you his show about Instagram without even pausing to cough up the seawater in his lungs. Bits of Psycho plus Apocalypse Now plus the kind of hell that Mike Huckabee fantasizes about and the kind of queer hedonia that social media promises us all rolled in to one, and all for the wrong (or right) reasons.
(on Mubi, rentable)
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15. The Eight Mountains (dir. Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch)
There are so many people, places, and things to love that it's sometimes easier to opt out of loving any of them at all--and who's to say if that's better or worse than loving too many of them at once, or too much. Maybe it's simpler to embrace things only in the past tense, like writing a novel, as though the only way to hold onto the things that want to disappear is to make sure that they do.
Really lovely movie, full of sections so gentle and grand that they ache. Sent me scurrying to Youtube as soon as it was over to look up Daniel Norgren's whole discography.
(on Criterion, rentable)
14. Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki)
Kaurismäki movies are like if Bresson were a sarcastic little shit who spent a *lot* of time in front of a wall of paint swatches, dreaming about the possibilities, and this one's no exception. Funny in a brutal way (or brutal in a funny way?), a one-dry and transient attempt at romance in the proverbial desert, like watching plants grown in the cracks of the sidewalk outside a karaoke bar.
(on Mubi, rentable)
13. The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer)
The Zone of Interest wants nothing but your boredom and your illness. We watch insipid people having the same dull conversations while listening to something unimaginable and unavoidable happening until finally we get to go home having felt nothing much beyond a dull pounding horror. There's nothing else to feel or imagine, because the only people who can communicate the fullness of that experience can't speak. We can talk about the banality of evil, but it's worth (in this context, at least) talking about the banality of Holocaust films as well. What can be dramatized, seen, or heard, that isn't an empty imagining or a crass attempt to turn unimaginable horror into entertainment? How can anyone walk into a movie about genocide hoping for a nice enjoyable cry without throwing up in the back of their mouth? This movie is a dull and empty shell because it has to be--because any effort to fabricate the world on the other side of the wall--to make it exciting, compelling, cathartic--is something of an aberration.
(in theaters, rentable)
12. Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)
Probably the most I will ever be able to like a Christopher Nolan movie? And all it took was him fulfilling cinema's true promise (filming Josh Hartnett being vaguely annoyed about math). I'm afraid this one's already in danger of becoming wildly overpraised, but hey, if it's a Christopher Nolan movie that even
I like, then it must be something. And there's plenty to like (Robert Downey Jr.'s performance notwithstanding) in this three hour breakneck scream into whatever the opposite of the abyss is.
(rentable)
11. Red, White, and Royal Blue (dir. Matthew López)
Ok look--don't go watch this movie. It's absolutely not one of the best movies of the year, and you will be burned if go in looking for it to fit in with its present company. But I, uh, had a bit of a moment with this movie this year (and may have watched it 12 times in two weeks), and I'd be remiss--and dishonest--if I didn't include it on my list. And it's charming as hell--the kind of movie that Bros wanted to be, but Bros spent too much time congratulating itself on being revolutionary to figure out that the real revolution is being unabashed and winsome basic trash. And for better or (mostly) worse, this is probably the movie that I've felt the most of myself in some time; it finds me where I am, holds my hand, and walks me through the process of creating myself from scratch, climbing out, falling in love, and then repeating those motions as many times as I need to. An endless series of firsts that feel like a kind of superheated bubble located somewhere between my heart and my throat. Actually yeah, why not, go watch this instead of Oppenheimer, you'll be better off.
(on Amazon Prime)
10. Knock at the Cabin (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
Surprised by how taken and moved I was by this small-scale spin on what it feels like to have the world breathing down your neck. I'm frequently not a fan of Shyamalan's deeply weird and arch dialogue--written and delivered like aliens above need to both understand it and be able to hear it from where they are--but sometimes, when paired with his increasingly (and aggressively) out there camera placement and image creating, it coalesces into a kind of dreamy sub-reality with its own quiet logic, and I can't help but give in. It doesn't all work, but it all works anyway, and the ending scene feels exactly right.
(on Amazon Prime, rentable)
9. Saltburn (dir. Emerald Fennell)
I'm aware this is a deeply uncool choice, but really leaning hard into embracing the uncool choices this year (see above, re: me objectively proclaiming that Red White, and Royal Blue and Knock at the Cabin are better than The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer). Some of the criticisms I struggle to see, and some of them I don't but end up not caring. I'm a sucker for spectacle empty facades and hollow rage and even hollower joy, and especially for a good session of gargling runny jizz out of an antique bathtub drain. Sure, it's throwing plenty at the wall, but the desired reaction looks to me like laughter. I don't think this movie wants to show us its lurid belly and then look directly into the camera, shaking its head at the depravity of the world. I think it wants us to laugh at how embarrassing all these people are, and how embarrassing it is to deeply want anything at all. Everyone in this movie is a riot and an embarrassment, but only a couple of them are anywhere near being aware of that--and those are the ones who (for a little while, at least) can make a play for the house (and the people in it), while everyone else fails to imagine, again and again, that anything could ever be wrong with anything around them, or anything they've done. What can I say--you can't make an omelet without fucking a few graves.
(on Amazon Prime, rentable)
8. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (dir. Kelly Fremon Craig)
So thoughtful, deliberately paced and emotionally balanced, with time to spare to try and meet every character where they live. Rachel McAdams luminous, obviously. This was an especially wonderful film to see with my mom, who kept leaning over throughout the movie to tell me about the dresses she had that looked like Margaret's, or the ways her junior high was just the same, or the parts that made her remember her own childhood. Absolutely stellar 4D experience for an absolutely stellar (and overlooked) movie.
(rentable)
7. Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justin Triet)
A real bag of hammers kind of movie--quiet, brutal, and tough to pick up and run with but you're going to try to do it more than once. And it's certainly a bag of hammers that rewards on rewatch, facets and faces folding and re-folding to fit whatever concept of you reality you decide to adopt this time around. A long and lonely trek to an end where the only thing to do, as the characters say, is to make up your mind and then go home. Fantastic work on all counts, plus the added semiannual bonus of getting to rubberneck at the French judicial system.
6. Godzilla Minus One (dir. Takeshi Yamazaki)
Beginning to sound like a broken record, but chalk up another 2023 release has no business being what it turned out to be. Nothing quite as visceral as the kind of survivor's guilt that follows you home and swallows your city whole. Some legitimately intense and upsetting moments, and a stellar sound design that allows silence to weigh as much as the monster waiting outside it. Feels corny to throw around a phrase like life-affirming, but sometimes corny is the right choice.
(not currently available online)
5. Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig)
A totally ludicrous movie from every angle. Glorious and monstrously dopey (in the best possible way); the banner child for 2023 movies with no business being any good at all turning out better than everything else around them. Had not expected to tear up through multiple doll epiphanies, but that's where we are. I hope that Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu have the courage to fulfill their one true path after this (playing feuding dancers/lovers in an off-broadway production of Shrek the Musical).
(on HBO Max, rentable)
4. All of Us Strangers (dir. Andrew Haigh)
Understands, deeply and profoundly, that pieces of your life can be warm because they are a little poisonous, or are a little poisonous because they are still warm. All the pieces that fit together to define and enrich you while simultaneously shedding some light on why you might choose to spend the rest of your life in an empty tower. Really beautiful and painful work. The tears I expected, but I went in unready for how ugly and unsettled parts of this movie would be--though, in retrospect, I suppose the ugliness shouldn't have surprised me at all.
(As an aside, this movie is an fucking oasis for Jamie Bell lovers who've been side-eying his recent filmography and praying for something better)
(on Hulu, rentable)
3. Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson)
The kind of movie that made me wish I'd written it, a big jumble of nonsense opacities pointed upwards so you can try to look at something impossible without burning it into your eyes forever. The sudden chaos near the end, followed by a balcony scene that cuts through all the garbage without ever saying anything at all is a quiet stunner. Bless Wes Anderson for putting things like the the unfinished on-ramp into this movie and then never mentioning them again.
(on Amazon Prime, rentable)
2. May December (dir. Todd Haynes)
Walks a perfect tightrope, all the while clutching a box of tissues with one hand and flipping off that box of tissues with the other. If you're not sure whether to laugh or cry, the answer's both, or maybe neither. A perfectly constructed and contrived house of carnival horrors from the get-go. Everyone's great, obviously, but for me, Julianne Moore's the whole show.
(on Netflix)
1. Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)
I think what sticks with me the most is how mundane the violence in this movie is--how utterly unimportant it is to all the people committing it. Deeply hideous movie about the annihilating power of stupidity and confidence, and how much room is made for both in systems that benefit from letting stupid, confident men do exactly what they want. Dicaprio, Gladstone, and De Niro doing career-best work, as are Schoonmaker, Prieto, and Robertson--a pretty mind-boggling statement considering all those careers. Astonishing and upsetting, with a perfect ending; this one's going to live in my head for a while.
And there's that! ('There's that,' he says, like 'that' didn't just take roughly two hours of your day.) I'm just going to keep trucking along (mainly because I need to have this done within the next 80 minutes and am starting to panic), so let's dive right into the best scenes of the year!
Note: I'll try to link to a clip where possible.
Note note: I generally avoid choosing endings for this category, but I'll mention which scenes might contain spoilers.
Best Scenes of the Year
10. First Demo Session-M3gan
I should probably have this movie show up more in my lists, shouldn't I? This scene is a perfect summation of the movie's intelligence and meanness, any real emotion undermined by the chance to make a buck, and by the movie's own camp theatricality.
9. Escaping the Castle-Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Turns out all you need for a great chase scene is a shapeshifter, a castle, and a convincingly stitched together long take.
8. On the Balcony-Asteroid City
Spoilers for Asteroid City, I guess? Though I'm not sure I know what spoiling this movie would even look like. A moment of fourth wall-breaking introspection becomes a seemingly throwaway conversation between the main character and someone we've never met, and it somehow ties the whole movie together while also making us all teary-eyed at dialogue that mostly isn't important to hear.
7. Phone Montage-Red, White, and Royal Blue
Probably the best representation of becoming friends over the phone that I've ever seen in a movie, the way someone goes from a string of words on a screen to someone that shares space in your life. (Also, I really need to rewatch this movie, because I didn't have every second of it memorized like I did in August, what is the world coming to)
6. Avalanche-Society of the Snow
The most harrowing scene of the year, maybe? Disaster/survival at its best/worst.
(This clip is only like the middle third of the scene, but you'll get the idea)
5. I'm Just Ken-Barbie
Who am I to turn down a massive theatrical power ballad featuring Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu in a dance-off and also a recreation of D-Day, for some reason?
4. Austerlitz-Napoleon
Ridley Scott is pretty hit or miss these days, but every now and again he hits like a train, and this battle/massacre/lesson in winter safety was one of those times.
(The clip is like 10 minutes long, but I'll link to the part that got everyone talking)
3. Boat Attack-Godzilla Minus One
A nigh-unbearable exercise in tension and Godzilla-sized minimalism: just four characters, one small boat, two mines, and one very large and very upset lizard intent on swallowing all of those other things whole.
2. Trinity Test-Oppenheimer
I know, everyone and their nuclear explosion enthusiast parents are talking about this scene, but rightfully so: the kind of swirling combination of editing, score, and sound to both heighten reality and take a stab at actually conveying the emotion of one very real moment, something that cinema does better than any other medium.
(How is this scene the one without any version on Youtube whatsoever? I'd have thought that that Nolan bros would be all over that.)
1. The Radio Show-Killers of the Flower Moon
Significant spoilers for Killers here, as this is the ending scene, but how could I choose anything else? A sudden cut to a future that contextualizes and retextualizes the events, provides knowledge without closure, refutes (again) any hope for anything that looks like justice, and implicates both the audience and the filmmakers in their desire (or attempt) to make any of this entertaining. A staggering ending--one of the best endings I've seen in quite a while--and one that'll stick with me.
(it's a poor quality version of the scene, but)
And finally, the worst movies of the year! While I don't want to dwell on negativity or end on a down note, there's some catharsis to be found in pushing the things that wasted your time right off directly into the fiery pits of Hades. So let's push away! Note that I generally avoid movies that are supposed to be awful, so this can just as easily be seen as a list of most disappointing movies.
5. Maestro-Almost comforting, in its own way--here I was thinking that I was going to go an entire awards season without deeply disliking one of the very successful movies, and then Maestro swooped in at the last possible second to save me from my own contentment.
4. The Creator-largely thoughtless and uninterested in its trotting out of or creating piles of bodies, except to generate spectacle. And the spectacle certainly works--it's a spectacular watch in every aspect of its design. Just a shame that the work of such obviously talented artists and craftspeople was in service of such a trash fire of a movie.
3. The Super Mario Bros. Movie-Spent most of the movie thinking about how they didn't show Diddy Kong, the most beloved video game protagonist of all time, and then they did, so that's egg on my face.
2. Next Goal Wins-Saw this because it was the only thing playing between two movies I wanted to see, and I couldn't move my car. Would have been better served by aimlessly wandering the streets for two hours.
1. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania-Everybody talks about how the MCU's allergic to stakes and emotions and how every serious moment is undercut by a one-liner, but fewer people tend to mention that the rest of the runtime has a body count in the millions, and half your experience of watching any of these movies lately will be passively enjoying stock characters and digital extras screaming, imploding, being ripped into atoms, having their heads explode while their loved ones look on in horror, or generally having every kind of agony casually visited upon them while a blurry CG Paul Rudd wiggles in the background, I mean who even remembers when the climax of a Marvel movie didn't inevitably look like b-roll for a children's primer on crimes against humanity.
And that's it for today! I'll be back every day this week (hooray and/or horror of horrors) to wrap up my best of the year lists and then toss off some Oscar predictions, and then I'll recede quietly into the swamp to sleep under the mud until next year's late winter blogging onslaught. So check back for the next couple days if that sounds like something you're into! In the meantime, which of my (terrible) choices did you agree with? Where did I go wrong? How wildly did you clap when you saw that I ranked Saltburn, Red, White, and Royal Blue, and the Ninja Turtles movie over almost every best picture nominee this year?
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