Showing posts with label best of 2023. Show all posts
Showing posts with label best of 2023. Show all posts

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Best of 2023, Part Three: Craft Categories

Well, shall we just say that a nefarious conspiracy exists to keep me from writing these at full power? And maybe rightfully so, since me writing movie lists at full power is (according to all my movie-related employers) something that no one is ready to see. 

While I wish I could deliver on the promised thousands of words singing the praises of the robot sounds in The Creator or the sunburn makeup in Society of the Snow, enough things have gotten in the way that I'll have to truncate things a bit (though, because it's me, 'truncated' still means something along the lines of 'like 38,000 words'). Because I procrastinated starting this series and because I'll be traveling soon, I've only had a few days to write everything and have to finish today. So there we have it! If anything below feels rushed, less spirited than usual, or carrying some wild-eyed scent of panic, it's because all of those things are true! Still, wild horses couldn't keep me from waxing poetic about the crafts categories (and they keep trying, despite my many strongly worded letters to the Horse Council). None of the movies you love, and none of the movie moments that have moved you, could exist without hundreds of artists and craftspeople working to bring them into reality. So let's talk about the important stuff! Anyone can applaud Robert Downey Jr. and then reflect ruefully on what they've done, but not everyone can spend the better part of two days deciding which clip from Napoleon best encapsulates its sonic approach to battlefield violence. And if there's one (very dumb) reason I was put on this earth, it's to do exactly that. So let's dive in!

(Note: all the pictures should enlarge if you click on them.)


5. Production Design

5. Wonka


Frozen cities! Wonky confections! Human trafficking, but in technicolor!

4. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes


Evil Laboratories! War-torn dystopias! Lavish sets for all your kid-killing needs!

3. Asteroid City


Meticulous pastel desert oases! Furious right angled wastelands for little green men to float over!

2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse


Exciting and distinctive world for every character, some of which are the most amazing things you've ever seen in your stupid, hollow life!

1. Barbie

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Your childhood memories brought to person-sized life and ready to think about death! Aqua warned us about this!

Honorable mention: The Creator

Costume Design

5. Passages

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All the see-through knitwear you need to ruin someone's life with!

4. Bottoms

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High fashion for anyone's who's ever wondered what it'd look like to fall clothes-first into a thrift store and then beat up a football player!

3. Saltburn

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Lifestyles of the rich and famous! Clothes to consume their various fluids in!

2. Barbie

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More pink than you can handle, spiritually! So many different eye-popping fashions that you will eventually give up on having eyes!

1. Poor Things

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Architectural gowns birthed by the end of the world! Obscene power-clashing! The only wedding dress you'll ever want to wear (to the wedding you don't want to go to)!

Honorable mention: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
(or Killers of the Flower Moon--what stacked category this is this year)

Visual Effects

5. Oppenheimer

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All practical effects! Atoms and explosions!

4. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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Wacky creatures! Massive cities and underground hellscapes! All the things your dnd group could totally do, probably, if they really wanted to, but just leave it alone, ok!

3. Napoleon

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Brutal battles! The even more brutal process of walking slowly into 19th century Russia! Lots of ways to watch horses die! An upsetting lack of gifs online that I could use here!

2. The Creator

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Robot-human hybrids and all the various ways they can be ripped limb from limb! Evangelion-style floating death platforms! Ethical filming practices (for VFX artists, if not for the aforementioned robots)!

1. Godzilla Minus One

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The meanest Godzilla since 1954! City-sized destruction on a human scale! Spectacular images on a tiny budget!

Honorable mention: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Makeup and Hairstyling

5. Barbie

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Did staring longingly at your Barbie's slovenly and unkempt hair inspire you to cosmetology school to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again? If so, you might have made this movie!

4. Poor Things

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Long hair! Rebuilding Willem Dafoe from scratch (again)! Someone probably had to apply foundation to Mark Ruffalo's skyward ass!

3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

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Human-animal hybrids (who all perish in a world-sized apocalypse)! New aliens! Will Poulter's entire body is painted gold, for some reason, but why look a gift golden horse in the mouth!

2. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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Clever character details for all the leads! Long-dead pranksters who want to share their zombie humor! The entire zoo near you came alive, started walking on two legs, and wants you to roll initiative!

1. Society of the Snow

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The very grim process of spending months on a snowy mountain! The even more grim process of dying there! I don't even have jokes, it's just really strong and upsetting work!

Honorable mention: Cocaine Bear

Film Editing

5. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
4. Anatomy of a Fall
3. Priscilla
2. Oppenheimer
1. Killers of the Flower Moon

Man, I am so bad at describing what I like about film editing. Clearly I love giving some kind of organic and fluid shape to unbelievably large projects, which applies to everything here but Priscilla, which also does that in its own way. Points to Spider-Man for stringing together more images than can be legally processed by the human eye, to Anatomy and Priscilla for fashioning their own prisons out of time and other people's glances, and to Oppenheimer for managing to be watchable (and intense) across the decades. But the obvious win is Killers, for turning hours of footage into a 3 1/2 experience that never once makes you conscious of its runtime.

Honorable mention: Fallen Leaves

Cinematography

5. Cassandro

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Dappled sunsets! Flattering key lighting for slapping other guys around a ring! The aquamarine romance of sneaking off to your married lover at twilight!

4. The Eight Mountains

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Using mountains and white light to frame your friendship (or more?), your father, and your flight from reality!

3. Fallen Leaves

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Colors and shadows for everyone who ever wondered whether purgatory would share colors with the Easter aisle at CVS!

2. Saltburn

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Sparkling facades! Divine decadence! Framing and lighting Jacob Elordi like a sunbathing-based demigod, because why not!

1. Killers of the Flower Moon

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Worlds turning from welcome to ugly in a heartbeat! Characters isolated in their own heads! Flights of nature and fancy that never feel quite how they might!

Honorable mention: Oppenheimer

Original Score

5. The Boy and the Heron-feels cheap to just say "it's Joe Hisiashi," but that's kind of the case? Hisiashi doing what he does best, which in this case is cinematic excellence.

4. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse-like the movie itself, the score is moments of stillness punctuated by total, skin-peeling chaos. Very few moments in the movies this year got me more turnt than when the linked track below suddenly switches between those registers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIl_VaWGyGE&list=PLRW80bBvVD3XsSk0eXKIQW_kZMMsQtlz-&index=2

3. Poor Things-puts the 'grand' in grand guignol, going for broke in the most expected-but-right ways (like the organ/voice fanfare below) and some not so expected ones (the rest of the movie, which is largely atonal burbling).

2. Society of the Snow-does any movie this year owe more to its score than Society of the Snow? Giacchino's work builds an entire world (or, uh, society) in the wilderness, toggling between stomach-churning harmonic violence and sculptural melodies carving space into the air.

1. Oppenheimer-the obvious choice, but sometimes that's the right one. Ludwig Goransson's proved time and again that he can hollow out a unique space in which a movie can live, and here's no exception. Would any of Oppenheimer's (many) montages work without his sweeping rhythms, or could the Trinity test even exist without him hiring a whole roomful of people to scrape their fingers against a chalkboard? I'm not sure that they would or could.

Sound Mixing

(note: for first time I'm linking clips that demonstrate what I dig about the movie in question's sound, because how have I been doing this for 15 years and it's only just now occurred to me to do that?)

5. Godzilla Minus One-the holy repulsiveness of an entire city coming apart at once, the whisper-thin tension of a monster casually swimming behind your boat, and sheer horror of everything that's covered in silence.
(the clip has an awful watermark all over it, but hey, it's supposed to be showcasing sound anyway)

4. Society of the Snow-lotta horrors this year! This one, specifically, in which the movie uses every trick in the book to create something immersive so that the audience can be like oh, hey, it turns out I am fine not being immersed in snow-related disasters.

3. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse-like with so many elements in this movie--the design, the editing, the score--the sound mix takes an unimaginable number of moving parts and cajoles it into something resembling comprehensibility.

2. Oppenheimer-I'm sure we'll all get tired of praising Oppenheimer eventually, but it deserves a spot on this list just for that *one* moment (linked below), where, instead of doing the expected, the whole world disappears except the sounds of disbelieving breaths. 

1. The Zone of Interest-difficult to explain or display (or make a joke about) what qualifies this movie for this spot, but it's the right choice. Two hours of something dying somewhere inside your inner ear while everyone smiles at you.
(it's a tiny clip, but it gives you a tiny idea)

Honorable mention: The Boy and the Heron

Sound Editing

5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem-is it possible that I'm just easily impressed by the soundscapes of citywide destruction? Maybe, but like I also think weird mutant sounds are fun too.
(some spoilers here)

4. Napoleon-hard to convey this in one clip rather than by watching a three hour movie but Napoleon deserves credit for crafting a sound environment that we're pretty used to by now (battle scenes) and making them sound wetter, punchier, more chaotic. When was the last time a movie cannon made your diaphragm resonate?
(theoretically spoilers here too, if whether or not Napoleon conquered the known world hasn't been spoiled for you yet)

3. Godzilla Minus One-look, I'm a simple person: if someone--anyone--releases a kaiji movie, my eyes turn into little hearts and I spend the next three years thinking about getting to make sound effects.

2. The Creator-maybe it's easy to see my genre biases here (at least for sound/sound editing) but listen to it! Click that link and listen to that scene and tell me this movie doesn't desire a pile of awards for giving all those elements such unique and expressive voices.

1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse-a glorious exercise in maximalism. The sheer amount of work alone (just watch that clip below knowing that every character or object you see on screen needed a sound, and literally every sound needed to be created by a hard working sound team) would put this in the running, but the quality carried along in this massive avalanche just helps it grab the top spot.
(some spoilers here as well)

Honorable mention: Society of the Snow

Original Song

5. "Spinning Globe"-The Boy and the Heron-I'm sorry, did you say weepy bagpipes backing a power ballad playing at the end of a Ghibli movie? I'm not made of stone.

4. "Wings of Time"-Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves-in a very similar vein, did you say a Blue Öyster Cult-esque jam session full of good vibes and power chords playing at the end of a DnD movie? However strong you thought I was, subtract this from that amount and find your new total.

3. "Camp Isn't Home"-Theater Camp-ok look, I will try and find some strength somewhere, but did you say a big-hearted summary broadway-style closing number that unites all the main characters in their love for their art and each other and also has a key change into the final chorus? Hope my fainting couch was made in Australia, because I am going down under.

2. "I'm Just Ken"-Barbie-ok so I may be knocked out on my fainting couch, but did someone say a power ballad parody that for some reason plays during a bizarro-world restaging of D-Day sung by Ryan Gosling that includes a dance-off with Simu Liu? Hope someone has a flexible life insurance policy out on me, because I have been dead for several days.

1. "What Was I Made For"-Barbie-ok I may be dead, but did someone say a teary-eyed, piano-heavy Billie Eilish number whose primary purpose is to give us a chance to look at the people in the audience and silently mouth "I love you" while we gently clasp hands, finding for one moment a common resonance on which our constituent molecules can vibrate? Reader, I may already dead, but my body is has now totally liquified and is melting into the earth to nourish the worms and gnomes and whatever.

Honorable mention: "Can't Catch Me Now"-The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes


And that's it for this years lists, vaguely truncated and lackluster as they might have been! I'm running a hot streak of doing this in a way/energy level that doesn't totally thrill me, but I am on an even hotter streak of being glad that I did them, and feeling grateful for everyone who stopped by to join me in some movie-related suffering. Thanks for your support, your time, and your mildly interested eyeballs! I'll be back today or tomorrow (or Saturday? no idea) with final Oscar predictions, but that's it for the big lists.

For those playing along at home, these were the movies that showed up the most on my lists:

Barbie-10
Killers of the Flower Moon-8
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse-7
Saltburn-6
Godzilla Minus One-6

As for wins, Killers of the Flower Moon dominated, taking Picture, Director, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, and Cinematography, with only Barbie being able to claim more than one award (Supporting Actor, Production Design, and Original Song).

And that's it! As always, thanks much for reading!
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Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Best of 2023, Part Two: Acting, Directing, Screenplays



If we're being real, the hardest thing I've ever had to experience--and, by proxy, surely one of the hardest things you'll ever have to experience--is that I'm just no good at being fun and compelling while writing about all the big, flashy movie categories--acting, directing, and writing. Now I've won a Pulitzer (and expect a Nobel, as well as some modest property on Mars) for the wild epiphanies I've had about, say, what the fish sounds in Avatar mean for human civilization or why the big collars on the costumes Eiko Ishioka designs are the most important invention known to humanity (yeah, vaccines are cool, I guess, but have you ever seen a bird wearing a hat designed by Eiko Ishioka? It'd rearrange your priorities too). And if you want to be here to watch me collect my Nobel/deed for my tract of land on Mars, to which I am only inviting Eiko Ishioka's birds, then feel free to pop in tomorrow where I'll be writing all about the movies crafts I dug during the 2023 cinematic year.

But alas, we find ourselves stuck in today, which means I am gonna continue my newfound love of (sort of) streamlining. I'll do quick writeups for the best of the year in acting, directing, and writing, and with any luck, both you and I will get some kind of respite from the hours-long punishment of yesterday's best of the year post. Hooray! Looks like that double hand transplant I was planning on will have to wait for another day (...probably Thursday).

So without further ado (I ran out of ado days ago and honestly don't know where to get more), let's dive in!

Note: I'll include some clips for the acting categories, but there won't be any rhyme or reason to who gets them or why--just whatever I feel like, whatever can be found on youtube, whenever I feel like it.


Best Actress
5. Margot Robbie-Barbie
4. Greta Lee-Past Lives
3. Carey Mulligan-Maestro
2. Sandra Hüller-Anatomy of a Fall
1. Lily Gladstone-Killers of the Flower Moon

Honorable mention: Emma Stone-Poor Things

Strong lineup, totally defined by balance: Margot Robbie embodying an ideal and a real person in Barbie, Greta Lee wanting the past and not wanting it at the same time in Past Lives, or Sandra Hüller keeping her thoughts to herself, until she doesn't in Anatomy. I don't have any love in my heart for Maestro, but who am I to deny the perfect 50/50 split of enthusiasm and weariness that Carey Mulligan brings to it, every moment in that movie worth watching belonging to her? It was tempting to give Hüller the top spot for any one of her broken silences, frustrated stares, or quiet (and loud) defenses, but this year has to belong to Lily Gladstone, who can say more with the slightest movement in her face or hands than most performers could shout.

Actor
5. Barry Keoghan-Saltburn
4. Colman Domingo-Rustin
3. Leonardo Dicaprio-Killers of the Flower Moon
2. Gael Garcia Bernal-Cassandro
1. Andrew Scott-All of Us Strangers

Honorable Mention: Cillian Murphy-Oppenheimer

Came this close to having Murphy in the top five, but what can I say? I can never turn down whatever wacky goblin antics Barry Keoghan has cooked up for us. Domingo carries his entire movie in his fast and fluid hands, elevating a pretty paint-by-numbers biopic, and Dicaprio gives arguably the best performance of his career as a particularly stupid and violent bulldog who can't quite wrap his head around his own ugliness. It was extremely tempting award the top spot to Bernal for the career-defining joy, energy, and blank-screen hurt of his eyes in Casssandro. Still, the right choice is Andrew Scott's (literally) haunted work in All of Us Strangers, a man (and performer) constantly thrown into impossible situations and doing his best to pretend that they don't matter that much.

Supporting Actress
5. Da'Vine Joy Randolph-The Holdovers
4. Taraji P. Henson-The Color Purple
3. Rosamund Pike-Saltburn
2. Rachel McAdams-Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
1. Julianne Moore-May December

Honorable mention: Jodie Foster-Nyad

Absolute treasure trove of a category, with Foster or Catalina Saavedra in Rotting in the Sun or Hong Chau in Showing Up or Scarlett Johansson in Asteroid City all worthy contenders that could have easily cracked the top five in a weaker year. But I'm pleased with these choices, from Randolph's too strong and too brittle by half work in The Holdovers, Henson's brass and verve, as though ported in from a different universe, in The Color Purple, to Pike committing to the bit way harder than anyone else in Saltburn, to absolutely ridiculous results. McAdams is stellar, exuding this lived-in warmth and a tinge of regret that's head and shoulders above anything else in her(already great) career. But the top performance here (and probably my performance of the year) has to be Julianne Moore--a totally impossible, upsetting, infantilized and infantilizing chimaera of a woman, hiding behind a pastry or a pair of sunglasses.

Supporting Actor
5. Jacob Elordi-Saltburn
4. Jamie Bell-All of Us Strangers
3. Charles Melton-May December
2. Robert De Niro-Killers of the Flower Moon

Honorable mention: Josiah Cross-A Thousand and One

Weirdly hunky category this year. I love Elordi's gormless and brutal niceness in Saltburn, and the fact that I'm arguably the biggest Jamie Bell fan in the world (hopefully) doesn't change the fact that the tenderness he brings to All of Us Strangers transforms every scene he's in. It's deeply stupid that Charles Melton--former Riverdale hunk, current star on the apparent rise--was left off the Oscars shortlist, but I'm not gonna make that mistake. De Niro is great (something he has rediscovered how to do in the past few years, which is neat), but come on, is any of that (k)enough to take #1 from Ryan Gosling? One of the funniest and most creative performances we've all seen in a hot minute.

Director
5. Andrew Haigh-All of Us Strangers
4. Greta Gerwig-Barbie
3. Takashi Yamazaki-Godzilla Minus One
2. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson-Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
1. Martin Scorsese-Killers of the Flower Moon

Honorable mention: Justine Triet-Anatomy of a Fall

Lots to love and admire here: Andrew Scott making the simultaneously loveliest and queasiest family reunion movie you've ever seen, Greta Gerwig marshalling actual armies, finding a way to make a Barbie movie tonally plausible while still intentionally ridiculous, and Takashi Yamazaki conjuring the scariest Godzilla (and the most effective cast) in 70 years. It would have been make me-related awards history by giving this award to an animated movie for the first time--and the Spider-Verse crew would have deserved it for bringing a movie of that scale and ambition over the finish line at all, much less with as much pep and panache as they managed. But Scorsese crafted a real work for the ages--a three and a half hour long movie that never makes the audience feel its weight, a movie about deeply evil men that never lets the audience tire of them or misunderstand them, an immaculately crafted epic that never forgets its own sense of scale.

Original Screenplay
5. Rotting in the Sun
4. Anatomy of a Fall
3. Barbie
2. May December
1. Asteroid City

Honorable mention: The Holdovers

Totally bizarre and unique array of movies here, being rewarded for their camp and their hideousness (May December, Rotting in the Sun), their high-concept buffoonery and wirework world-building (Barbie), or the labyrinths they build out of tension and suspicion (Anatomy of a Fall). But hey, why not give it to Asteroid City, a movie that does camp, high-concept buffoonery, world-building, labyrinths, and some real beauty to go along with it?

Adapted Screenplay
5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
4. All of Us Strangers
3. A Knock at the Cabin
2. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
1. Killers of the Flower Moon

Honorable mention: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The Turtles return! Cannot tell if my awards have gone a little wonky this year because I missed most of the indie/international fare, and as such am filling the lists with what I readily get online, or if the big mainstream stuff this year just hit all the right marks. Either way, I'm happy to see Turtles, Knock, and Margaret represent the kind of adventurous and interesting studio fare that should still be getting shot out of Hollywood like cheap merchandise out of a t-shirt cannon. And I suppose Killers qualifies as well, in some regard, if only because a not-studio (Apple) shelled out an incredible amount of money to support something as thoughtful, quiet, and inquisitive as this.


And that's that! Once again, my promises of brevity were horrible, horrible lies. Honestly, I've been doing this for about 15 years now--at this point, if I tell you that I'm going to write something quick and streamlined and you believe me, that's as much on you as it is on me. Next year, one of us should probably hire someone to sit on top of my computer until I've cried myself to sleep and the possibility of posting movie lists is long gone. But in the mean time, what are your thoughts? I'll be back tomorrow to wrap up the best of lists with the crafts categories, and then again on Thursday to run through my Osar predictions.

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Monday, March 4, 2024

Best of 2023, Part One: The Top 20

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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.

(source)

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)

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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)

(source)

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)

                                                                                (source)

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)

                                                                               (source)

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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98bbGJgWVfU

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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EVRaNF4XnY

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.
https://youtu.be/CTQIbFtAnDI?si=y3Lctf0Wai8e3ThJ&t=110

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)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCHG_SursqY

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)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CiTXgXyyTc

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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDCnJHyMuyU

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)
https://youtu.be/A3Cg5_NxsIU?si=6PF_QlPq9ZQl-Fal&t=420

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.
(only 40 seconds worth of the scene, sadly, but here you go)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmbQmQ17X3E

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)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8LyF-4Bbw


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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