This was a strange and encouraging year for cinema, namely for the possibilities it suggested of what audiences might still accept from entertainment. A three-hour movie about a chilly intellectual helping to invent a weapon of mass destruction was a runaway blockbuster. A remake of “Elf” repurposed as a toy commercial and taken seriously for its feminism-for-dummies platitudes (“Barbie”), was an even bigger blockbuster. Even weirder, these two films became a joint meme that seemed to speak for a public longing for a consensus obsession. Pop culture has become so tediously niche. My blockbuster is your thing that you’ve never heard of and vice versa. There occasionally needs to be the one work that can still command most of the airwaves, symbolically reminding us that we’re all in this thing called life together. Somehow, Taylor Swift has cracked the code on monolithic command of a medium in this age of splintered demos, but few others have.
While “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” satisfied a yearning for a unified cultural event, a bit of perspective: these are both the fruits of powerful corporations. They are not the “people’s movies” in the homegrown sense of the phrase, especially “Barbie,” but they aren’t superhero pictures either. Speaking of which, the bloom fell off of Marvel’s rose this year. Even regular audiences are beginning to find the company’s salad of in-jokes and awful special effects to be untenable. And sex returned to movies, art-house and mainstream divisions; I didn’t see that one coming. Surprisingly realistic, emotionally revealing sex, too. To find such a scene in an Ira Sachs film (“Passages”) is one thing; to find one in a Jennifer Lawrence comedy (“No Hard Feelings”) aimed at the general populace is, in 2023, authentically shocking. The erotic frenzies of “Poor Things” initially felt freeing in a Ken Russell sense, showing sex to be something pursued for pleasure, devoid of the baggage we like to attach to it. Then the film politicizes the sex and out the window goes its sense of subversion.
The biopic was the genre of the moment, as auteurs reconfigured its form to suit their needs. Filmmakers fashioned chronologically-splintered splatter paintings, liberating themselves to plumb the portions of the subject matter that compelled them, rather than shackling themselves to completism. “Oppenheimer” was the highest profile example of this kind of biopic, but “Maestro” and “Napoleon” also felt empowered to bend narrative structure, eliding context in favor of the “high points.” “Maestro” was a swing for the fences that felt incomplete, while “Napoleon” was unwatchable. Meanwhile, “Priscilla” elided so much of its subject’s life as to cease to exist. There were also the smaller “BlackBerry” and “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game,” the latter an interrogation of the biopic form that was too playful and fun to be taken seriously by a lot of people.
I could go on about trends, particularly the willingness of studios to follow eccentric artists down rabbit holes. I’m amazed that “Beau Is Afraid” exists. I hated it, but I’m emboldened to see a studio trust a filmmaker enough to see that project through. Ditto Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” I think it’s the most disappointing movie of the year, in which the volatile and nuanced Scorsese finally succumbed to sermonizing for Oscar, making a film that’s less about the murder of the Osage than the guilt he felt while reading a bestseller about the murder of Osage. Thanks in part to a brilliant marketing campaign, and to critics’ willingness to accept any film with a patina of importance, Scorsese got away with it. All that said, it’s still astonishing that the film exists in this form; that an aging legend was given this sort of carte blanche.
Do any of these occurrences mean anything in the broader sense? Are we swinging back to an era of wilder cinema, or, more disconcertingly, are monopolistic corporations getting better and better at selling pre-fab originality as particularly ironic demonstrations of power? I’m not sure, though there were times when this year at the movies had the adventurous energy of the 1990s. For the moment, let’s celebrate the bounty, particularly the voices that broke through, and the iconoclasts who braved the noisy cultural storm to honor themselves at any cost.
- “Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse” (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson) and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” (Jeff Rowe, Kyler Spears)
These films respected comic books as contemporary myths. They were not only fun but inspired, embracing lively and varied pop-art aesthetics. Playtime meets art class.
- “The Taste of Things” (Anh Hung Tran)
A kitchen in a gorgeous French countryside is presided over by Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche, and their hearty cooking is of course an elaborate metaphorical act of lovemaking. Bougie food porn is a staple of art-house cinema, but Tran’s sensual long takes and Magimel and Binoche’s charisma are irresistible. I will say more about this one in February, when it hits theaters and you have an actual chance of seeing it.
- “White Building” (Kavich Neang)
This Cambodian film is among the debuts of the year, following residents of an apartment complex that’s on the verge of being condemned. Neang mixes anthropological, slow cinema film grammar—the apartment is real, and he lived there—with a shrewd sense of humor and character, which is to say that he drinks in his setting without boring the audience to death with his good intentions.
- “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” (William Friedkin)
The legendary William Friedkin went out on a high note, turning this oft-adapted play into a taut showcase for Kiefer Sutherland in the performance of his career.
- “Memory” (Michel Franco)
Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard embark on a tentative romance freighted with taboo baggage, and Franco continues to prove that he is a blossoming master of the pared-down character study.
- “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game” (Meredith and Austin Bragg)
A funny, personable story of how people lost in life sometimes accidentally make a difference, their actions rippling in minute fashions across time. Part of a recent trend of biographies that are small and compact, elucidating particular moments in time rather than cradle-to-grave cliches.
- “Afire” (Christian Petzold)
An insecure schlub of a writer attempts to keep life from interfering with his work, when interference is exactly what his work so desperately needs. A disarming mixture of character study and political parable from the consistently audacious Petzold.
- “John Wick: Chapter 4” (Chad Stahelski)
Action-movie gymnastics served up hot and spicy. This film’s stylishness shames most blockbuster eyesores, and the set pieces are a new Mount Olympus of timing and choreography.
- “Palm Trees and Power Lines” (Jamie Dack)
Dack springs a disturbing chamber piece that uses many cliches of the American indie against us, lowering our guard for a series of personal perversities. An empathetic look at sexual exploitation, with a career redefining performance by Jonathan Tucker.
- “Full Time” (Eric Gravel)
This French film treats economic desperation for what it is: a survival thriller governed by a terrifyingly vast series of interlocking social mechanisms, many beyond our control.
- The Roald Dahl Quartet: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” “Poison,” “The Rat Catcher,” “The Swan.” (Wes Anderson)
Four short films, adaptations of Roald Dahl stories funded and distributed by Netflix, find Wes Anderson continuing to flex his singular and confrontational aesthetic, suggesting nothing less than a new blend of theater, spoken verse, and cinema. They are also emotionally thorny, socio-politically astute, and, especially in the case of “The Swan,” devastating.
- “In Water” (Hong Sang-soo)
This is a portrait of an emerging, unformed filmmaker that’s been deliberately shot out of focus, so the images come to suggest his lack of definition. This potentially ham-handed gimmick is handled by the South Korean master Hong with his usual subtlety, compassion, and fine-grained detail.
- “Rewind & Play” (Alain Gomes)
At the end of his European tour in 1969, Thelonious Monk appears on a French interview show and is pestered and manipulated until he produces answers that the show favors, evading the realities of a Black artist’s life in white showbiz. Quickly realizing the deceptions of the show, Monk tries to play along to get through it, and the negotiations between subject and filmmakers become a grueling, revealing ordeal that was hidden at the time. Gomes drags it all into the merciless light, testifying to Monk’s resilience and brilliance.
- “Rotting in the Sun” (Sebastián Silva)
Silva’s meta satire is a volatile parody of influencer culture, with Silva and Jordan Firstman, as variations of themselves, plunging into a mystery that reveals fault lines of class, sex, and gender. Last year’s “Triangle of Sadness” wishes it was this nervy and empathetic.
- “The Zone of Interest” (Jonathan Glazer)
Praising arty Holocaust movies near year’s end is something of a cliché of movie reviewing, but Glazer’s relentlessly pragmatic vision of the domestic life of a high-ranking S.S. officer is unshakably … normal. It shows how we can rationalize away any brutality given the right circumstances. Doubt it? Remember this movie the next time you ignore a homeless person on the street. I’ll have more to say about “The Zone of Interest” when it opens in general theaters in February.
- “The Killer” (David Fincher)
Fincher doing what he does best: taking what sounds like airport fiction and turning it into a gorgeous and visceral motion coffee-table book of alienation and malice. There’s subtext for the eggheads and the most accomplished action sizzle of the year for folks who merely want a movie.
- “Asteroid City” (Wes Anderson)
Yes, it’s Wes Anderson doing his thing. But there are quite a few variations within the Anderson model, and this is one of his most beautiful films. An existential art object that suggests a 1950s saucer invasion movie by way of Antonioni and Jarmusch.
- “The Plains” (David Easteal)
This 3-hour fusion of fiction film and documentary follows a Melbourne man as he drives to and from work every day, and his driving becomes a metaphor for braving life with serenity. This man is alive to things: he needles people and reveals his own disappointments and sources of transcendence. Slow cinema is often a wank, but “The Plains” shows how more deliberate cinematic rhythms can foster the impression of relationships forming in real time.
- “Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros” (Frederick Wiseman)
The singular, 93-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman continues his study of institutions, settling this time on a legendary French eatery. Over the course of 4 hours, Wiseman offers a family drama, as well as a survey of all of the microsystems and privilege that are necessary for turning real, non-processed food into works of art. The despairing, unspoken comment is: If only more people could eat this way.
- “About Dry Grasses” (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
A teacher stuck in an under-funded school in Istanbul daydreams about more prosperous circumstances, while entangling himself in a variety of psychodramas with a young female student, one of his friends, and a woman new to his life, among others. The closest any movie has come this year to a classic Russian novel: dense, sprawling, and absolutely unbending in its resistance to moralizing. As the teacher, a bitter manipulator in do-gooder’s clothing, though it’s muddier than that, Deniz Celiloglu gives one of the performances of the year.
- “The Outwaters” (Robbie Banfitch)
The closest that cinema has come in a long time to splashing pure madness across the big screen—a mind-screw that suggests nothing less than a redefinition of horror cinema. Think Lovecraft helmed by Dennis Hopper at his druggiest and most adventurous.
- “Showing Up” (Kelly Reichardt)
Kelly Reichardt’s best film to date is one of the definitive explorations of how artists balance their work with the rest of their lives, and of how that balance is, itself, the manna for said art. With another superlative performance by Michelle Williams.
- “Passages” (Ira Sachs)
One of the sexiest and most electric romantic triangles ever put on film, one that locates and detonates the self-mythologies that allow us to play games of love and lust.
- “Walk Up” (Hong Sang-soo)
Another film about art-making, in this case utilizing an apartment as a symbol of artists’ psyches. Art-making is Hong’s master subject, which he explores in two or three movies a year somehow, without either exhausting the theme or his creative intuitions. One of his drollest and most suggestive films, “Walk-Up” would pair well with “Showing Up.”
- “Ferrari” (Michael Mann)
In his best film in decades, Mann follows Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) as he’s pushed towards multiple planes of disaster that could ruin his business as well as his relationships with his wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz), and longtime mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley). Where most prestige films blather about their themes endlessly, Mann stages “Ferrari” as a lean and tactile poem of emotional compression. Those sleek, gorgeous, powerful cars are a man’s ferocious instruments of will as well as an unexpected symbol of his vulnerability. Rendering a man’s soul in physical terms, “Ferrari” is the “Raging Bull” of Mann’s cinema.
