Some 2023 Movies, in descending order of preference
Not my best-of list, mind, as I have yet to see The Zone of Interest, Perfect Days, Fallen Leaves, Poor Things, Past Lives, The Taste of Things, All of Us Strangers, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, or (now) Beyond Utopia, The Adults, or The Covenant (!). Although, for a preview, you can start with the top part of this list. As a bonus, I will also say that it likely will contain several movies you pretty much loathed!
Pacifiction (Albert Serra, 2023): 4/5
Louche discontent in an exotic location (here Tahiti)—Graham Greene would be proud. It fails to get around to doing much of what a movie is more or less required to do (in terms of plot and pacing). Still, this is the year’s most beautiful movie and does have a kind of mesmerized movement forward for an interesting character.
The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023): 4/5
A very Miyazaki movie, packed (too?!) full of jaw-dropping sights. And indeed my jaw was on the floor. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. A more insightful take on The Wizard of Oz than any offered by Lynch/Oz, below.
Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023): 4/5
Always dynamic, swift, moving from high point to high point, entertaining, broad, rewatchable, and middlebrow. I’m sort of annoyed at how much I liked this, packed as it was with awards-pandering shmaltz. Cooper is having fun with the adenoidal accent, and it IS fun. Who, indeed, abandoned Snoopy in the vestibule? It’s a strange choice to spend so much time with Bernstein’s wife (in a way that Bernstein himself didn’t seem to), but I think Cooper wanted to foreground the conflicts that arise from Bernstein’s bisexuality (!), and the best way to do that was in opposition to the wife. On the other hand, Bernstein’s bisexuality is just (another) example of how he wants to be it all: conductor and musician, celebrity and the serious maestro, composer of the popular and classical. As Bernstein says, being an artist demands a split between the interior /creative/original and the exterior/collaborative. (And he did say it! You can watch the original interview on YouTube).
The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch, 2023): 4/5
Quite a long movie that takes its time following two boys who meet in a small village in the very high Italian alps and go through their several fates over the next 30 years or so. Some very beautiful mountain landscapes and wise observations about what one is compelled to do and why. At this length and pace, one had better like the characters and want to hang out in this milieu—and I did.
May December (Todd Haynes, 2023): 3.5/5
Three of the best performances of the year in a movie about performance. We’re all putting one on! Moore’s character (very much the starlet of her own world) performed to get the boy (lisp affectation to signal a powerlessness that she certainly doesn’t actually have), and Portman is acting the nice movie actress part until she plays the next part. Melton perfectly embodies the 13-year-old in a 32-year-old’s body.
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023): 3.5/5
Featuring the most passive Best Actress-winning character of all time; at first this really bothered me. She would have to be MORE dumb than DeCaprio’s character to not know her husband was poisoning her. OR! Did she know the whole damn time that he was killing her and was deliberately dying as a test of his love, which he failed over and over again? Upon reflection, one can see these not as mistakes but as writerly choices. Both Ernest and Mollie seem to be just passive drops in a wave. As DeNiro’s character says at one point (something like) “The white man is going to take the place of the Indian. It’s just going to happen.”
A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell. 2023): 3.5/5
“There’s more to life than fucked up beginnings.” A towering lead performance, portraying a lower-class woman in a completely convincing, non-actorly way. (Although, the actor who portrays the son in the last third is almost disastrous.) How does our main character look so hot in the beginning (marching out of Rikers) and so heavy and worn in the end?? Acting!
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023): 3.5/5
Sensitive, emotional and realistic feeling. Lots of emotional beats that I remember and recognize. Terrific lead performances from a realistic, luminous and relatable 12 year old as well as (future wife) Rachel McAdams. Builds to a perfect climax that had me sobbing at something I never would have guessed I would have sobbed at.
Priscilla (Sofia Coppola, 2023): 3/5
I actually love directors who make the same movie over and over (Ozu, Anderson). Here is another autobiographic poor little rich girl, girl in a gilded cage, girl who sees a lot but doesn’t say a lot—with lush and specific production design and carefully coded modes of dress. The things revealed here about Elvis’ controlling nature and madonna/whore complex are astonishing beyond anything dreamt by Baz Luhrmann.
The Starling Girl (Laurel Parmet, 2023): 3/5
A hot (hot, hot) young priest messes with the mind (and loins) of an (decreasingly) innocent 17-year-old girl in a religious community. Familiar but well-told (although obviously it doesn’t come close to Fleabag, Season 2).
Full Time (Eric Gravel, 2023): 3/5
Like Good Times or Uncut Gems in terms of high tension, but it’s just a mother of two commuting into town during a transportation strike to get to her job as head maid at a hotel. Not sure it’s worth what it puts you through, but it kinda points out that we’re all the star of our own thriller. This review from AA Dowd pretty much nails it: “Like if the Dardennes made Speed, but instead of a bus, it's a woman racing to catch a bus, and if she slows down, her bank account explodes.”
Theater Camp (Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman): 3/5
The best Christopher Guest movie in 20 years, with a tone directly between loving and grating.
Birth/Rebirth (Laura Moss, 2023): 3/5
A gross and emotionally disturbing Frankenstein story about the maternal urge. I watched it on Christmas Eve and mostly regretted it.
Afire (Christian Petzold, 2023): 2.5/5
Funny for Petzold to wait 19 movies to make his adolescent summer movie—a character who just watches and can’t engage in the world. The central fire metaphor is weak sauce.
Fremont (Babak Jalali, 2023): 2.5/5
A tale of a young Afghan immigrant, deadpan and slow like early Jarmusch or like any movie with 2/3 of a script stretched to a full-length. Unusually, I liked it better as it got more conventional.
Lynch/Oz (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2023): 2.5/5
Six video essays about Lynch and Oz by filmmakers David Lowery, John Waters, Karyn Kusama, Rodney Ascher, and Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, as well as critic Amy Nicholson. More interesting as a view into the essayists than into Lynch.
Incredible but True (Quentin Dupieux, 2023): 2.5/5
Amusing but slight film skewering humans’ obsession with masculinity and youth. A bit too long at 71 minutes (!).
Dream Scenario (Kristoffer Borgli, 2023): 2/5
Quite a disappointment after the queasy and funny Sick of Myself from earlier in the year). This is another example of a movie (like Incredible but True, above, and Linoleum from earlier this year), where the audience is just trying to discover the rules. When it doesn’t happen quickly enough for me, I begin to resent that they are parsing out the 411 so slowly and padding it out with nonsense. I have a similar reaction to many documentaries. Just tell me what happened. Don’t wait the movie-endorsed 30-minute mark for the first twist, etc.
* Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (James Wan, 2023): 2/5
I think it’s really interesting that Aquaman is obviously from a different class from most superheroes (who tend to be scientists and other squares). He has long hair, drinks beer, drives a big Harley, and wears skull rings and four inches of bracelets and bandanas on his wrist. He’s a superhero for the rest of us, man! Lots of punching on land and sea!
Earth Mama (Savanah Leaf, 2023): 2/5
Frustrating, Inarticulate lead character who makes a long, long series of bad choices. I don’t love movies whose subject is female powerlessness and suffering. Just because she makes bad choices, it doesn't mean good choices weren't available to her!
To Catch a Killer (Damián Szifron, 2023): 1.5/5
Poor Shailene Woodley had to produce this to get a lead role (I assume), and she’s absolutely the wrong person for it—mousy when she should be quietly intense. Quite a fall-off for Szifron after the decently entertaining and inventive Wild Tales.
Good Burger 2 (Phil Traill, 2023): 1/5
A healthy recalibration of what a bad movie really feels like. It’s a YouTubeKids style/tone in a “film,” and suddenly I understand how people felt when (horrible) SNL movies started invading our screens.
Sibyl (Justine Triet, 2019): 3/5
A different style than Anatomy—more fractured. But there is the same issue of blending fact and fiction, and there is the same sense of being a bit outside of the heads of these characters. I’m not sure we ever understand them emotionally—or perhaps what they are feeling about a person or situation just changes rapidly and fluidly.
Victoria/In Bed with Victoria (Justine Triet, 2016): 3/5
A Frenchy screwball comedy about a modern, professional, overwhelmed girl with many balls in the air. Involves a court case between a couple that hinges on the testimony of a Dalmatian (!). “The pleasure you take in your job has nothing to do with enjoyment.”
Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970): 4/5
An extreme masterpiece, a rare America film about class, and a discussion we need to have. Relevant to Jan 6 and the various receptions to it. Like Mandingo and Dirty Harry, this movie is provocatively inviting careful interrogation of our feelings about the different generations and their value systems, with a shifting perspective from hippy/junky to professional class to blue collar. The best Schrader script not written by Schrader. Avildsen goes on to direct Rocky and The Karate Kid.
The Outfit (John Flynn, 1973): 3.5/5
In his (hugely entertaining and insightful) book, Cinema Speculations, QT avers that The Outfit is better than Point Blank (he’s wrong)—in comparison to one another because they’re both based on one of Donald Westlake’s (great) Parker novels (along with, supposedly Godard’s Made in U.S.A.). Robert Duvall is good but is easily outacted by an easygoing Joe Don Baker. Robert Ryan and Timothy Carey have probably two days of work apiece as the Big Baddy (looking ancient) and a slimy henchman (what else). Elisha Cook Jr. shows up to literally answer the phone at a restaurant twice, looking terrified, as usual. Tone is gravely serious.
Rage (George C. Scott, 1972): 3/5
Asks and answers the question: what if you made a revenge quickie but what the person is getting revenge about is not just a random heinous murder or rape but instead the systemic horror of (1) the military, (2) chemical weapons, (3) government secrecy and cover-ups. The result is damned little catharsis but instead prolonged and profound suffering, here eventually elevated by sainthood (and that’s a death trip, baby!)
Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971): 3/5
Languid, unfocused, and emotionally tempestuous. Prized, I’m sure, for putting a bisexual character as the lever of a romantic triangle (which ain’t nothin’).
Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970): 2/5
A shaggy and fitfully amusing survey of recent history with a naive protagonist/narrator—in the vein of Forest Gump, and just as facile.
The Italian Connection (Fernando Di Leo, 1972): 3.5/5
Every mafia goon in Milan—plus (underused) American hit-men Henry Silva and Woody Strode (invoking low-IQ Travolta and cool-ass Sam Jackson)—are after small-time hood and pimp Luca. Broad but feral, with a couple of really good action sequences, including a prolonged car and food chase.
Mister Scarface / Rulers of the City (Fernando Di Leo, 1976): 3/5
Visually dynamic, empty gangster mumbo jumbo with some minor homoerotic undercurrents (or maybe it’s just me). Jack Palance in the titular baddy role as well as a long shootout conclusion in an abandoned slaughterhouse with car and motorcycle make it worth the price of admission, despite the flabby Italian comic relief.
45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015): 3/5
Carefully tuned to the emotional currents running between this couple. Still, I found it a bit hard to care deeply about these cranky, self-centered melancholics.
Local Legends (Matt Farley, 2013): 3.5/5
A genuine micro-budget, amateur movie (about a director making micro-budget, amateur movies, of course). Radically sincere: About 40 minutes in, actor/director Matt Farley gives his phone number, and Letterboxd reviews attest that if you call the number, he answers and is indeed a really nice guy.
The Loved One (Tony Richardson, 1965): 2/5
Co-written by Terry Southern and obviously in the mold of Strangelove, with lots of sex/death. After a brief, acid look at Hollywood, it settles down to long and unnecessary piss-take on the funeral and pet funeral industries (!?).
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, 1958): 3.5/5
A German soldier on leave for three weeks looks for his family and falls in love. Bitterness, irony, despair and the merest flashes of love, all in glorious Technicolor.
Manhandled (Allan Dwan, 1924): 3.5/5
As her quack inventor boyfriend pursues his dreams, the cute and lively girlfriend (Gloria Swanson, great!) starts running with a richer crowd where the men can afford to buy her attention—but grow tired of her and try to pass her down the line. She takes this journey of disillusionment, but in the end is allowed to return to Kansas.
Three on a Match, 63 mins (Melvin LeRoy, 1932): 3/5
A story of heroin addiction disguised as a Beaches-like multi-decade story of three female best friends. Here, three girls graduate middle school as the wild one (later, Blondel), the smart one (later Bette Davis) and the popular one (later, Ann Dvorak, not famed). The popular one, to whom everything has always come easy, soon marries, has a child, gets bored, leaves on a ship, immediately gets addicted to heroin. Then the rest is an amazingly sordid view of her swirling the drain, while Blondel and Davis take care of her kid.
Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968): 3.5/5
Very modern in the sense that it’s an admirably unpsychological text. We just see the characters do what they do. Indeed, Orlof/Karloff’s assertion of retirement is as unexplained as the killer’s deeds. It’s the end of Hammer-type horror—and indeed the end of meaning and art itself. Also say goodbye to drive-ins as well as the Van Nuys of this movie: we look west across the 405 at Burbank Blvd and see nothing but open fields.
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982): 3/5
The story of a black couple. She’s a professor of philosophy studying “ecstasy” (from far away) and he’s a semi-successful painter/libertine. Full of discussions of philosophy, aesthetics, mythology, religion and other intellectual affairs. Certainly, a corrective or at least a supplement to Blacksploitation. “One of the very first fictional features by an African-American woman.” (?)
Little Stabs at Happiness, 15 min (Ken Jacobs, 1963): 3.5/5
A series of shorts that move from silly to nostalgic to a silent sea of gestures to the joy of dumb creation. Lovely and abstract.
Tootsies in Autumn, 12 mins (George Kuchar, Mike Kuchar, 1963): 3/5
Very Guy Maddin in its love for and reclamation of the visual tropes and rhythms of older (let’s say silent) cinema.
I, an Actress, 9 mins (George Kuchar. 1977): 3.5/5
Funny and incisive. Kuchar coaches an actress through a scene, knowing exactly the tone that he wants, which is a heightened, melodramatic line reading that is nevertheless more real-feeling than her so-called naturalism. We can handle the stylization and call it recognizably human, but the actress’ attempt at sincere emotions is embarrassingly fake.
Wild night in El Reno, 6 mins (George Kuchar, 1977): 3/5
A storm passes through a backwater Oklahoma town—big sky country for Kuchar, an NYC boy. Uses music like a movie or advertisement from the 50s. Is Jimmy Rush a pussy, as the graffiti insists? We will never, never know.
The Mongreloid, 10 mins (George Kuchar. 1978): 3/5
A man talks to his dog, reminiscing about the dumps the dog has taken as they drove to San Francisco. A naive and sincere tone. Bocko is a good boy.
