The Best Movies Of 2023

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Yes, 2023 was not a particularly good year all around, but it was one of the better years for movies in recent memory.

Not only did I have difficulty narrowing down a top 10 - and you'll notice that I cheated slightly on that account - but it was challenging to even whittle my list down to a top 20. 

The year's two best films were long, ambitious works about significant moments in American history - one well documented, the other mostly swept under the rug. Many of the year's best films were ponderous - at least three in my second 10 fit this description while four in my top 10 were of a cerebral nature.

There was a pervasive sense of loneliness and melancholy in many of the year's best films, and even some of the cheerier pictures had a darker undertone. The movies fit the times, perhaps.

I like to give credit where it's due and help to get good movies seen, so since this year had so much to offer cinematically, these are some of the very good movies that didn't even crack my top 20 (in parenthesis, I'll rank them by number where they fall outside the list): The Boy and the Heron (21, reviewed here), Master Gardener (22, reviewed here), BlackBerry (23), Priscilla (24, reviewed here), Lynch/Oz (25, reviewed here), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (26), Tori and Lokita (27), Menus Plaisir Les Troisgros (28), The Eight Mountains (29), and Earth Mama (30).

Here are the 10 runners up:

20. RMN (Christian Mungiu) - The Romanian director's latest is unsettling and timely as a small town is overcome by anti-immigrant sentiment.
19. Falcon Lake (Charlotte Le Bon) - This French Canadian film is a coming-of-age story and a ghost story as well as a triumph of mood and tone.
18. Maestro (Bradley Cooper) - Visually gorgeous and ambitious, Cooper's second directorial effort further proves the actor's abilities behind the camera. Reviewed here.
17. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig) - This warm and funny adaptation of Judy Blume's book does its source material justice. Reviewed here. 
16. Origin (Ava DuVernay) - DuVernay's latest is an inquisitive, ambitious, and moving blend of docudrama and investigation into systems of oppression. Reviewed here.
15. Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki) - The typically deadpan and downbeat Finnish director's latest is his best in a while and one of his gentlest. Reviewed here.
14. American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) - A biting satire on the publishing industry's interest in hearing Black stories, that is, as long as they help to ease white guilt. One of the year's funniest. Reviewed here.
13. The Killer (David Fincher) - Not the minor work that some might think, Fincher's latest enables the director to investigate some of his own obsessions, all the while delivering a darkly funny satire on late capitalism. Reviewed here.
12. May December (Todd Haynes) - Haynes' latest Sirkean melodrama asks us to uncomfortably consider how we love to hear about others' tragedies and grim circumstances, as long as we're bystanders and not participants. Reviewed here.
11. Barbie (Greta Gerwig) - The fact that Gerwig took one of the most iconic - and revenue producing - cultural objects of the past 60 years and used that as an opportunity to satirize the company that produced it, consumerism, and our patriarchal society alone makes it a triumph. The year's biggest blockbuster is also among the stranger ones to capture the public imagination. Reviewed here.

And now for the top 10:
10a. A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell) - Reviewed here.
10b. Air (Ben Affleck) - Reviewed here.
Yes, I cheated a little here. I didn't want to boot either of these films from my top 10. My rationale is that these were my two favorite films from the spring. The first is a devastating saga that utilizes the concept of the family you choose, set against the backdrop of Giuliani's New York, while the second is a superbly written and acted picture about the creation of a shoe, which ultimately becomes a captivating story about equity.
9. All Of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh) - The year's loneliest - and possibly saddest - film is a spectral love story and therapy session with an ending that is sure to spark debate. Haunting and luminous. Reviewed here.
8. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Another outrageous concoction from Greek director Lanthimos, this Frankensteinian saga of self discovery features a bold Emma Stone performance, some incredible camera work, and equal portions of the grotesque and the absurdly hilarious. Reviewed here.
7. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) - Glazer's studied take on Nazi Germany is, perhaps, the most horrifying PG-13 movie you'll ever see. Mostly utilizing the power of suggestion and observing characters discussing the unspeakable through banal workplace conversation, this is the year's most unsettling film. Reviewed here.
6. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet) - This year's Palm d'Or winner at Cannes is a stunning slow burn about the nature of truth. The picture is a courtroom drama and somewhat a thriller, but it's most fascinating when it chronicles the dissolving of a relationship and its effect on a family. Reviewed here.
5. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson) - It took me two tries before I really got Anderson's latest, which does nothing less than question our place in the universe, but in the fussily arranged manner that we've come to expect from this singular director. The picture also includes this year's most intriguing cinematic mantra: You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep. Reviewed here.
4. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne) - For a movie that covers a lot of heavy ground - death, failed career ambitions, melancholy, and familial alienation - Payne's latest is also one of the year's funniest and warmest. This is a perfect example of how to take well-trod material and make it feel fresh with great performances and writing and a fresh perspective. Reviewed here.
3. Past Lives (Celine Song) - The best debut of this year or any in recent memory, Song's film is a wistfully romantic and crushingly sad story about the roads not taken. It's a twofer love story set over a period of decades that is wise and poignant. Reviewed here.
2. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) - Over a period of three-and-a-half hours, Scorsese's historical epic painstakingly details the murder and greed by white interlopers that plagued the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. Leonardo DiCaprio (who was robbed by the Oscars) gives one of his finest performances and Robert De Niro is at his scariest here, but it's Lily Gladstone who is the heart and soul of the picture. The film's devastating coda will likely leave you speechless. Reviewed here. 
1. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) - It was a great challenge choosing between the year's top two films, both of which are epic American films that are destined to be classics. I went with Nolan's by a hair for the top spot. The picture is a fascinating dive into the past and a chilling warning for the future. This is an example of a major artist being given the creative freedom to create an ambitious work of art. On all fronts, it succeeds. Reviewed here.

Review: All Of Us Strangers

Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Andrew Haigh's "All Of Us Strangers" is a spectral love story and therapy session, and possibly the saddest movie I've seen this year. It has an ending that is likely to spark debate, but one thing that is likely to be agreed upon is that it is one of the most devastating depictions of loneliness that I've seen in some time.

As the film opens, Adam (Andrew Scott) is alone in his London apartment in a new complex that is seemingly only populated by one other person, a younger man named Harry (Paul Mescal) whom Adam will soon meet. Adam is a screenwriter, but he's seemingly given over to malaise and ennui. One night, Harry knocks on his door looking for a hookup - both men are homosexual, although they at one point have a debate over using the word queer vs. gay - but instead a connection is established.

To overcome his listlessness, Adam begins taking train rides to the town where he grew up with his mother and father, both of whom were killed in a car crash when he was 12 years old. One night while wandering in a field near his childhood home, a man in the distance beckons him to follow. It turns out to be his father (Jamie Bell), who lures Adam back to the place where he grew up and is soon greeted by his mother (Claire Foy).

"All of Us Strangers" is in many ways a ghost story - or, to be exact, ghost stories - but there's no fantastical reason to explain how Adam has stumbled upon his parents at the age shortly before they died. They recognize him as their son from a later point in time and the three take part in series of therapeutic catch-up sessions during which Adam's parents learn about the lonely life of their only son. 

Adam's mother takes the news that he is gay a little harder than his father. She seemingly can't wrap her head around it at first, tells him that he doesn't look gay (which garnered a laugh from the audience when I saw the film), and fears that he will, as a result, live a lonely life. 

Despite her backward way of thinking - Adam's parents died in the late 1980s - she is correct about her son being lonely and seemingly disconnected from others. And despite Adam being an openly gay man, he is nearly asexual, and appeared to be scared off from sex by the AIDS epidemic as a young man. Adam's father feels terribly that his son was bullied as a boy, but in a devastating moment admits that he would have likely bullied a young queer kid himself.

This is one of the loneliest feeling films I've seen in some time. The picture opens with Adam looking out of his window at the desolate London skyline, he and Harry are the only people in his building, and there's a scene near the end in which Adam and his parents eat at a diner as a ritual of sorts and the only other person seemingly there is the waitress. The only heavily populated sequence in the film is a nightclub scene and that moment is its most nightmarish. 

But it's not just the sense of isolation that makes "All Of Us Strangers" so moving. The scenes in which Adam catches up with his deceased parents could have come across as maudlin or, worse, gimmicky but instead they ring true because they feel like what it might be like to catch up with someone with whom you never had a sense of closure; there's no time for bullshitting, but simply getting straight to the point. 

There are two particular lines in the film that have stuck with me. At one point, Adam asks his mother how long she thinks their arrangement - seeing each other again - will last, and she tells him that it's not likely a choice they'll get to make. "I suppose we don't get to decide when it ends," Adam's mother tells him. Later, his father tells Adam that he and Adam's mother are proud of him. Adam notes that he hasn't done anything memorable to be proud of, and his father responds that surviving is the thing about which they are proud.

From the performances from all four actors to the film's varying tones - eerie, haunting, lonely, and even luminous - and its great use of music (the Pet Shop Boys' "Always on My Mind" is used to great effect, while Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "The Power of Love" carries a certain thematic relevance for Adam and Harry's burgeoning relationship), "All of Us Strangers" is an emotional slow burn that marks a creative peak for Haigh and is one of the year's most memorable films.

Review: The Zone Of Interest

Image courtesy of A24.

There's a jolting moment late in Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest," which is likely the most horrifying PG-13 movie you'll ever see, when a vision from the future briefly infiltrates the past. It's near the film's end as Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is walking down a dark hallway. 

Rudolf briefly appears as if he's going to vomit but then pauses and the camera takes us through a peephole. Behind the door we see women in the present cleaning up what appears to be the Auschwitz camp in the modern day and age and it is now, of course, an historic site. Behind glass enclosures, we see stacks of shoes or clothing that were taken off the Jews who were murdered at the camp. The women clean the place with vacuums. Then, we cut back to the past as Rudolf makes his way down a dark staircase.

There will be different interpretations as to what Glazer was reaching for here, but it appeared to me to signify the preservation of the truth and the historical record after having spent nearly two hours in the company of characters who not only took part in mass murder, all the while speaking about it as any person would discuss their day-to-day job, but also spend much of the film obfuscating in one way or other.

The film opens with Rudolf and his wife, Hedwig (a ferocious Sandra Huller), and children bathing in a lake not too far from where they live. Their house is on the other side of the wall from Auschwitz, so there are numerous scenes of children playing in a makeshift lawn pool or taking part in games while just feet away we see smoke rising from the camp's gas chambers and hear the sounds of barking dogs, human screams, and occasional gunshots.

Adding to the horror of the normalcy during these proceedings are the dinner table conversations during which Hedwig and her visitors discuss stealing items of clothing - at one point, she tries on a Jewish woman's stolen coat and fishes a lipstick out of its pocket - from people who were likely killed just hundreds of feet from her home. Also jarring are meetings in which Rudolf takes part where he and fellow Nazi leaders discuss the extermination of thousands of people as if they were discussing the restocking of an item at a store or some other mundane thing that office workers might talk about.

The film is a study in what Hannah Arendt once called the banality of evil. Yes, Hitler's name is invoked here several times and Rudolf and his family occasionally make a passing remark that displays their disdain for Jews - but not enough to prevent them from keeping them as help around their house or, in Rudolf's case, having sex with one of them, an act that he follows by cleaning himself off in the sink quietly in the late night hours - but "The Zone of Interest" otherwise shows a group of people going about their daily lives, which include discussing work-related minutiae or concern about the well-being of their children.

And this is what makes it so disturbing and effective. On the one hand, the film doesn't necessarily humanize these people - Glazer's approach, as was the case in his 2013 masterwork "Under the Skin," is chilly and Kubrickian - but it certainly shows them as human. And, of course, it was humans - and not literal monsters - who carried out these atrocities.

To make matters even more unsettling, Glazer includes some experimental elements in the picture, including a sequence that looks as if it were shot with night-vision goggles during which a young girl collects fruit near the camp. The film opens with a completely black screen and warbling noises that go on seemingly forever - I wanted to point this out for viewers, so they don't think there's something wrong with the screen - and there are occasional long fades to black or, in one case, red.

The Auschwitz camp is never fully seen - in fact, there's only a shot of a blazing incinerator in the background as Rudolf looks up at the night sky in one scene. There's also no violence onscreen, which probably explains the film's rating. But the film is deeply unsettling regardless.

Back to that final scene. As I'd mentioned, my interpretation of it is that it shows Auschwitz in its present day iteration as an historic site where a horrible history is preserved. Throughout the film, Rudolf and his cohorts carry out their crimes in plain sight, but the movie's characters still behave as if they are acting in secret - one of Rudolf's children counts collected gold teeth from dead Jews with a flashlight under the covers at night, Rudolf hurries his children out of a popular swimming spot after he steps on a human bone, and Hedwig's mother first appears to be impressed with the home that her daughter and husband have built for themselves but after listening at night to the horrors taking place nearby, she leaves without so much as as goodbye. 

There are discussions throughout the film by Nazi officials in which they discuss the deportation and murder of thousands of Jews in an offhand manner, and while at the time they may have believed that their backroom scheming might have been kept under wraps, that shot of the women cleaning Auschwitz in the present day shows how these crimes have been preserved for all to witness some 80 years later. "The Zone of Interest" is, perhaps, the year's most unsettling film - and one of its best.

Review: Origin

Image courtesy of Neon.

Ava DuVernay's latest film, "Origin," is an inquisitive and ambitious blend of docudrama and an investigation into systems that lead to oppression. Sort of how Spike Jonze's "Adaptation" wasn't really an adaptation of "The Orchid Thief," DuVernay's film uses Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" as a jumping-off point. The film is not an adaptation of that work, but rather an adaptation of Wilkerson's journey that led to her writing the book.

As the film opens, Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is a successful author whose life is seemingly going well. Her previous book received acclaim, she has a loving relationship with her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), and is close to her mother (Emily Yance), albeit concerned about having to move her into an assisted living home. In other words, she's not looking for a major life upheaval.

At a speaking engagement for her latest book, she runs into her editor (Blair Underwood), who asks her if she has heard of the ongoing case involving the murder of Trayvon Martin, a young Black man who was shot while taking a walk in a Florida neighborhood by George Zimmerman, a Latino man whom, her editor points out, claimed he was protecting a white neighborhood. As we all know, Zimmerman went on to defend his actions under that state's Stand Your Ground laws.

Although moved by the incident, Wilkerson isn't interested in writing anything about it. She no longer wants to take part in assignment journalism, preferring to write books in which she can immerse herself in the subject, which takes some time. But after her editor sends her a copy of the audio tape of the shooting, she changes her mind.

But she struggles with her thesis. Of course, racism resulted in Martin's death, but Wilkerson believes she has an idea for her book that links the incident with American slavery, the Holocaust, and the caste system in India, all the while throwing in tidbits involving comments made by her mother and Wilkerson's marriage to a white man. Her publisher (Vera Farmiga) doesn't see how the pieces all fit, but tells Wilkerson that writing a book is the "author's journey," and asks her to keep her posted on what she finds.

And what Wilkerson ultimately settles upon is that racism alone limits our understanding of why Martin was killed. She investigates the concept of caste systems, in which one group deems itself superior to another group - deemed inferior - and goes about creating laws and enforcing rules that reward the former while punishing the latter.

Naturally, the American institution of slavery is one of her key areas of focus, while Nazi Germany is another. Regarding the latter, Wilkerson discovers minutes from a Nazi party meeting during which German lawyers studied the American slavery system to write laws for Germany, and also follows the story of a former Nazi Party member who leaves the party to marry a Jewish woman. Another case involves a young Black American couple who are studying in Germany, only to flee after the Nazis take over and return home to join a white couple to take part in a study of oppressive systems in the American South.

Her final journey takes her to India, where she meets with a Dalit professor (Suraj Yengde, playing himself) who discusses Dalit activist Bhimrao Ambedkar with her and provides enlightenment on the caste system that dehumanizes Dalits - also known as untouchables - and forces them into a life of cruel subservience.

Not every sequence necessarily enforces Wilkerson's growing belief that caste systems are the oppressive forces that link history's great tragedies of the past two centuries. There's a sequence during which a plumber (Nick Offerman) wearing a Make America Great Again hat comes to fix Wilkerson's basement pipes. The sequence, at first tense, eventually finds the two reaching common ground on their aging parents, but the scene doesn't really add to the film's overarching thesis.

Regardless, this is a bold experiment. The film also uses Wilkerson's own personal life as a backdrop - she loses two people about whom she cares deeply early in the film, and the second half focuses on her relationship with a cousin (Niecy Nash), who during one of the film's best sequences asks Wilkerson to explain her thesis in layman's terms so that anyone can understand the links she's making between slavery, Nazi Germany, India, and ultimately, Martin's death. As she explains, it's a moment of enlightenment for both Wilkerson and her cousin as well as the audience.

DuVernay's best work has often dealt with battles against oppression, from her masterly "Selma" to the devastating American justice system documentary "13th." Her previous film, "A Wrinkle in Time," felt slight, so it's great to see her back on steady ground with "Origin," a movie that is highly ambitious and often deeply moving. I'd highly recommend it.

Review: American Fiction

Image courtesy of Orion Pictures.

Cord Jefferson's "American Fiction" is a particularly biting satire about how the predominantly white publishing industry and its readership are limited in their interest in the types of stories told by Black authors. 

It's humor lies in satirizing white people of so-called noble intention who proclaim they want to hear Black voices, but are only interested in listening to stories - primarily Black trauma narratives - that help assuage their guilt. There is a genre, perhaps, waiting to be defined that might include this film along with "Get Out" and "Sorry to Bother You."

There's a particularly telling moment late in the film. It's the type of scene that might make you laugh aloud, but also lands as a punch in the gut. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) has agreed to participate as a judge for a literary awards committee that also includes only one other person of color - Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), an author whose recent success he has mimicked. 

Ellison's work is praised by his pal and publisher, Arthur (John Ortiz), as intelligent and well-crafted, but his books just don't sell. He attends a conference where he hears Golden read an excerpt from her novel, "We's Lives in Da Ghetto," which depicts what he believes to be over-the-top stereotyped caricatures. And yet, the predominantly white audience listening to the reading gives her a standing ovation.

Out of anger - and partly as a prank - Monk writes a satirical novel depicting the foibles of a Black criminal on the run who confronts his deadbeat father and dies at the hands of the police. The novel is meant to satirize what the white establishment believes Black writers should write about - and then is shocked when publishers and movie executives nearly beat down his door to publish the novel. On top of this, Monk has written under a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh, and is pretending to be a convict on the lam who just happens to have written an autobiographical novel.

Back to the literary awards committee. It just so happens that Monk's faux novel - originally titled "My Pafology," but later changed to "Fuck" - is one of the novels being considered for the award. Both Monk and Golden say that the novel should not be considered for a prize - Golden calls it "pandering" and Monk finds an opportunity later to question her intentions regarding her own novel. However, the rest of the white board members on the committee want to award it the top prize. "We should be listening to Black voices right now," the white people tell the two Black committee members, overriding their opinion.

There's a whole lot more going on in "American Fiction," including Monk's dealing with the sudden death of his sister, the slow creep of Alzheimer's in his mother, the upcoming wedding of a long-time caretaker whom the family loves, secrets regarding his father, a romance with a spunky neighbor (Erika Alexander), and a difficult relationship with his brother, Clifford (an excellent Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon who is recently divorced, newly gay, and a hot mess.

"American Fiction" succeeds in most departments - as an often hilarious social satire about the constraints put on Black artists, a legitimately engaging and occasionally moving saga of a family's difficulties, and a great showcase for the under-appreciated Wright, who gives one of his best - and one of his highest-profile - performances to date. Its finale veers toward the fantastical, but it also feels right when measured against the film's thesis. For a feature film debut, this is impressive work.

Review: Night Swim

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

There have been movies about haunted paintings ("Velvet Buzzsaw"), haunted dresses ("In Fabric") and even one about a possessed clothing press ("The Mangler"), so a haunted swimming pool? Why not?

Bryce McGuire's feature film - based upon a 2014 short film of the same name - opens in 1992 when a curious young girl with an ailing brother is lured out to the pool and attempts to retrieve her brother's toy boat from the pool before being pulled in and drowned by some mysterious force.

Many years later, a baseball player named Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) who has been diagnosed with multiple-sclerosis moves his family to the home in Minnesota where the pool has been all but abandoned under a tarp for many years. Ray and wife Eve (Kerry Condon) are attracted to the pool because Ray has been advised by a doctor that swimming is an exercise that can act as a form of therapy for his condition.

Shortly after moving into the place and taking a few dips in the pool, family members begin having strange experiences. Sensitive son Elliot (Gavin Warren) is semi-attacked in the pool and the girl drowned in the opening scene communicates with him. His teenage sister, Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle), is similarly provoked by an entity of some sort while playing Marco Polo with her new boyfriend.

Eve has her own experience and begins to suggest to her husband that they, perhaps, should flee the house to safer environs. But Ray has been entranced by the pool - and the demon that lies within it - and things come to a head during a pool party in which the Wallers invite their new friends and neighbors over for a dip. While Ray's condition begins to improve, quite possibly due to the healing powers that the pool offers, his family continues to be terrorized.

The explanation we finally get for the pool's magical powers and possible possession is a little bit of a letdown, and the film has a finale that feels phoned in for this type of picture. In other words, whatever you guess is likely to happen probably does.

There are some genuinely creepy moments in the film, most notably the opening sequence and some well-shot underwater sequences in which the house's inhabitants float above while something clearly lurks below. That being said, "Night Swim" is a fairly forgettable horror movie that is never quite as campy as its premise promises nor scary enough for viewers to take its somewhat ludicrous plot seriously. As such, it's an occasionally passable horror movie that is never really comes together in a memorable way, spending way too much time in the - ahem! - shallow end.