2023 was a so-so year for me, personally. A lot of good came with a lot of bad. My late 30s haven’t gone the way I wish they’d done and I’ve been way off my axis the past few years but I’m hopeful things will turn around in the near future. I went on a few trips and spent a lot of time with family in 2023 – far more than most years – and that’s been absolutely wonderful. I’m going to go into 2024 with an upbeat believe of positivity and wish for the best.
Despite everything the movies have been delightful in 2023! Cinema has kept me hopeful and alive. While the first third of 2023 belonged to AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER – saw that baby in theaters a total of seven times so I am entirely Pandora-Pilled – the movies released throughout 2023 have been exceptionally strong and have made me smile, cry, laugh and just feel alive. Movies are great. Don’t ever forget that!
The following list contains my favorite 15 films that I saw THEATRICALLY in the year 2023. I didn’t include films I saw on streaming and there are MANY films released that I haven’t seen yet – I’m a stickler for rules so I’m writing this list even though I haven’t yet seen films like FERRARI, THE ZONE OF INTEREST, POOR THINGS, or ANATOMY OF A FALL yet – but I’m very happy with this list and wholeheartedly recommend each one of these films to the three – maybe two or likely none – people who will read or skim this.
I put a lot of effort into these articles and don’t know why – I’ve already decided this will be one of, if not THE, last years I do this – so I’ll try to keep it short and sweet. First off, the Honorable Mentions, the films or shows that I completely loved but weren’t theatrical releases:
Honorable Mention #1 – ATTACK ON TITAN.
I didn’t see a lot of anime this year – I have a list of a bunch to check out and can’t wait to visit them all soon – but I was finally able to set aside time to properly watch what may have been the biggest anime of the past decade, ATTACK ON TITAN. I avoided a binge and watched one batch of episodes a month and stretched the whole series over a period of seven months and had a delightful time with the entire epic series. I’ll admit the first season while fun – loved Annie Leonhart – felt a little too basic with one dimensional characters and a very slow pace. I had similar criticisms about the second and first half of the third season really didn’t work for me and I started to figure this show was just extremely overhyped. But then the second half of the third season turned things around drastically with a batch of some of the strongest episodes I’ve ever seen in any show ever. I became enthralled. But, it was the fourth season, with a time-skip and massive tonal shift, that got me hooked! Suddenly I struggled against binging the entire last act of the saga cause the character conflicts and allegiances that had been built over the previous three seasons of pretty classic Good Vs. Evil narrative were all being challenged by the morality of dividing people into good and evil. The simple themes of the first three sections came to the forefront in the final act in a way you rarely, if ever, see in mass audience storytelling. That Final Season of AOT is a masterpiece of storytelling and visual filmmaking and well worth the slow buildup!
Honorable Mention #2 – THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL. (Dir. William Friedkin.)
William Friedkin, the legendary director most known for THE EXORCIST, passed away in 2023 at the age of 87. He had delighted the world with a wide array of fascinating movies over a 50+ year career and was responsible for some of my favorite movies. Despite his passing, Friedkin had left one last gift to the world in one final movie. True, it wasn’t a theatrical release but a TV movie dropping on Showtime but it was a real movie nonetheless. A new version of THE CAINE MUTINY! I’d never seen the prior versions of this story before so I got to experience Friedkin’s rendition of the tale with fresh eyes. Despite the inherent staginess of it all – the entire movie except for the final sequence takes place in one room – I was hooked! It was a thrilling watch! Friedkin luxuriates in the greatest tools in filmmaking – talented actors given a great script creating incredible performances – to make one last final thrilling filmmaking statement! It’s great is what I’m saying. If you have Showtime, check it out!
THE TOP 15 FILMS OF 2023
And here we go:
A HAUNTING IN VENICE. (Kenneth Branagh.)
As I said once on Twitter, I just vibe with everything Kenneth Branagh has been doing with his Hercule Poirot franchise and this third entry in this mustache saga is by far my favorite. A HAUNTING IN VENICE is the smallest film in this series of far – the epic vistas, splashy production design and 70MM of the first two films are replaced for dark constrained interiors and shooting digitally – and yet Branagh going full Gothic with genuine sincerity, pathos and sadness has yielded one of his strongest films. The story template, taken from Agatha Christie’s books, is an exceedingly simple one: a bunch of characters are locked up somewhere when a murder happens thirty minutes in, then Poirot spends an hour interrogating every suspect individually – giving each actor their moment to shine – and following that Branagh gives a lengthy monologue in his delightfully wacky accent where he explains who the killer is and why they did it. It’s not really a setup full of surprises, but damn if it is not a totally enjoyable one and the fun is in how Branagh plays with that setup. The previous two entries had the budget to go for big splashy production design but this one leans all into horror with jump scares, high contrast lighting, dark corridors, tons of Dutch angels and I vibed with it entirely! I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Branagh as a director but I adore his Poirot films and if he wanted to do a half-dozen more of these I’ll be there for every one of them!
THE HOLDOVERS. (Alexander Payne.)
Movies are magical. Someone recently pointed out that there hasn’t really been a great new Christmas movie in years. A new Christmas movie so good and so tied in to the holiday season that you know you’ll revisit or want to revisit it once every December going forward. THE HOLDOVERS is one of those movies! Payne’s newest work hits that magical holiday movie sweet spot where it’s both the most depressing thing you’ve ever seen AND the most heartwarming. There are scenes in this that I know will always destroy me – huge props to the work of Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph who I feel should win Best Actor & Best Supporting Actress – just like there are scenes that will always brighten my outlook on life. A true stunner on all aspects. Beautifully shot, magically edited, an incredible script by David Hemingson, and with flawless acting and directing, THE HOLDOVERS is the total magic movie package!
THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLD OF SONGBIRD & SNAKES. (Dir. Francis Lawrence.)
I’m confident enough now in who I am to share a dark secret: I love THE HUNGER GAMES movies. All of them. Not just the original movie or the much beloved second film but the third and fourth as well. I think all four of them are excellent. Happy to get that secret off my chest. I hope this won’t change how you see me. Still, even with that strong love for the series I couldn’t get up any real excitement or interest in a THG prequel. I mean do we really need an origin story for Donald Sutherland’s vicious dictator character? Surprisingly, yes we do! Even hotter take: This may be my favorite entry in the franchise! The first few moments are a little off but once the movie finds itself – happens about the moment Peter Dinklage & the wonderfully going-for-it Viola Davis show up – everything soars. The last hour of the film is much quieter than the opening 90 minutes but I appreciate how the filmmakers made one complete and fulfilling film instead of dragging this all out to be a tedious two-parter. It’s a rich and complete story that, for Hollywood at least, has one of the strongest narratives of a morally good person turning to bad that I’ve seen. The main character wasn’t born an evil man and he doesn’t think he’s a bad person, but throughout this movie we see him slowly, through choices he can find ways to morally justify, fall from being a likable protagonist to the villain we knew he would become. This series has found a way to more closely comment on and engage with our world than almost every other current franchise can and I’d welcome another surprising trip to Panem if they ever come up with a new story to tell.
THE KILLER. (Dir. David Fincher.)
David Fincher needs to escape Netflix. The film business has been going through some drastic shifts this past decade and it is abhorrent that even Fincher, a director whose last proper theatrical release was an R rated thriller that made $369M globally on a $45M budget, had to move to Netflix in the early 2010s just to keep making the kind of work he likes doing. I’m sure he’d disagree with me because Fincher has gotten to make some real passion projects but my issue is Netflix never supports these works. THE KILLER is a Grade A thriller that would’ve been one of the most talked movies of 2023…if only people knew it existed. I caught this at one of the only theatrical showings it got and seeing it with a packed audience as we all laughed at Michael Fassbender’s cold-but-goofy voiceover was a treat! This should have been experienced by millions of people on a big screen in a theater! But, it’s a Netflix movie and they don’t want you watching anything but Netflix. A big name director working with them has always been a trade off; they’ll give a filmmaker more money then they need BUT the final product is likely going to be dumped on streaming one day and that’s exactly what happened here. Thing is 2023 was the year Apple got big into the streaming game and they’ll support their big name directors with a proper theatrical release. Fincher should take that to heart when he sets about on his next movie. Either way, THE KILLER is great and another exquisitely made dark work of genre art.
MASTER GARDENER. (Dir. Paul Schrader.)
I’m loving this final chapter of Paul Schrader’s career and I’d argue it’s his richest era yet. True, he has not – nor could anyone – made a work that equals TAXI DRIVER but he’s finally making those “Lonely Man In A Room” movies that have been the source of his greatest works and has been doing so with almost complete artistic freedom. Ever since DOG EAT DOG he’s taken to working with a tight knit young crew and shooting fast on digital to keep budgets down so he can tell stories that are purer expressions of what he’s hoping to achieve artistically his entire career. This has led to three of his greatest works, an informal trilogy, coming out back-to-back in a relatively short period of time and while FIRST REFORMED by far is the best of the trilogy I find MASTER GARDENER to be the most impressive because he set himself some tough goals on this project and pulled it off! Schrader set out to write the most inflammatory story with the most grotesque protagonist possible and find a way to still have the audience feel some empathy. And it works. It would have been so easy for this to be an angry, disgusting, lowbrow shocker of a project but Schrader goes for forgiveness instead of anger and has made one of the softest films of his dark career. It’s certainly not for everyone but MASTER GARDENER is a late era work of art from one of the greatest writer/directors. Every project since FIRST REFORMED has felt like it could have been Schrader’s last but he has been finding ways to keep making stellar art films that I vibe with and I hope he continues to direct for as long as he can. Excitingly, he’s already shot and has edited another feature so with any luck I’ll be seeing a new work of his in 2024!
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING. (Christopher McQuarrie.)
The best pure Hollywood action franchise is back! M:I 7 ranks as like the fourth or fifth best entry in the epic franchise but that still means it’s one of the best big budget Hollywood movies ever made. I love these movies so freaking much! Mega never-ending franchises with diminishing returns are all the rage right now and there’s really no reason M:I-7 should be as good as it is but Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie and their team of artists have risen their game time and time again! The biggest issue with this flick is that it’s a Part One and this movie is clearly doing A LOT of table-setting so Part Two – MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 8 currently in production and set for 2025 – can fly! And fuck will M:I 8 fly! The action set pieces in 7 are some of the greatest these Sicko Kings have ever produced but there is a lot of lengthy scenes between the action that establishes and re-establishes who The Entity is and on first watch that could get a little much. But on my many revisits I’ve warmed up to the weird Metal Gear Solid tone and pace this entry is going for. It’s not an immediate masterpiece like ROGUE NATION or FALLOUT but I can see this becoming a personal favorite once I can marathon it with Part Two in the near future. It’s got flaws but I’ll take this over every entry in the MCU, Star Wars and DC Whatever Universe and I really wish all Hollywood action franchises tried half as much as Cruise do to entertain audiences.
NAPOLEON. (Ridley Scott.)
Old Man Ridley can’t quit! Film Twitter – obnoxious as always – routinely tries to knock Ridley Scott as a lesser filmmaker because he treats the art as a profession but he’s been on a roll lately and I think modern Ridley – despite a shift from painterly visuals done in single camera to more well-done multi-camera work – has been the best era of his incredible career! Since PROMETHEUS he’s basically been on an (almost) nonstop run of sicko projects that I’ve adored on a spiritual level! His films this past decade have all been a lot weirder than expected and when matched with their polished, controlled visuals have been some of the richest big-budget movies in recent history. NAPOLEON, which was sold to audiences in exciting trailers as a hagiography about one of the most important figures in history, is actually a study about how world leaders can conquer the world while still really being weird insecure little freaks. Joaquin Phoenix is a delight playing Napoleon as an odd creature who is at his most comfortable commanding thousands of men on the battlefield but can’t show an ounce of charisma when it comes to his personal relationships. Vanessa Kirby, regal and wonderful as Josephine, dominates every scene she has with Phoenix and you understand why she’d always be his most illusive conquest, the thing he wants most but could never truly control. NAPOLEON is a wonderful film and not in the way I expected cause while the big action sequences are a thrilling delight, it was the small funny moments between Napoleon and Josephine that truly captivated me. Ridley has a longer Director’s Cut of NAPOLEON ready to go when it drops on AppleTV+ and I must say, if that new cut is at all comparable to what he achieved with his KINGDOM OF HEAVEN Director’s Cut we may have a new Ridley Masterpiece!
SHIN KAMEN RIDER. (Dir. Hideaki Anno.)
Hideaki Anno is finally done with Evangelion. But, Evangelion is Hideaki Anno so that masterpiece work of his is all over SHIN KAMEN RIDER, his first directorial project since finishing his epic saga with EVANGELION: 3.0+1.0 – THRICE UPON A TIME. I have zero prior experience with the Kamen Rider character so I went into this solely as an Anno fan and the master did not disappoint. While this is on the low end of his feature film work – which is fair cause I’d argue at least five of his projects are in my top 50 movies of all time – this is by far my favorite superhero film of 2023 and has some of the coolest visuals I’ve ever seen! There’s a fight in this where how Anno envisioned super-speed in live action is so ingeniously simple and awe-inspiring to look at! Aggressively shot and edited, this slick little sci-fi beast opens with a wicked car chase and just follows its own mojo throughout before coming to a surprisingly uncool and emotional climax. While the first two acts of this are delightful episodic adventures it’s in the third act when Anno dives into the emotions of the piece and takes some daring risks – there’s a very lengthy monologue given directly to camera that destroyed me – that shows why he’s one of my favorite artists of all time! Anno has somehow, through what crazy science I do not know, found a way to work almost exclusively in already established popular franchise brands and still be an artistic smuggler where he does his own thing in incredibly unique ways. He’s making franchise films but they don’t feel like franchise films! They’re all 100% Hideaki Anno projects! Can’t wait to see what the master cooks up next!
SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE. (Dir. Joaquim Dos Santos. Kemp Powers. Justin K. Thompson.)
Multiverses suck. They’re all the rage right now in big pop culture storytelling cause it’s a new way for studios to milk existing (ugh) IP but almost every story involving the Multiverse concept has blown. And then there’s the Spider-Verse films. The team of artists involved found a thrilling way to embrace the worst aspects of Multiverse bullshit and make them colorful flourishes in what the series is really about: the central drama of Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy and who they are. Seriously, as incredible as the hyper-detailed and inventive animation is – and it is incredible – the best parts of ACROSS are the quiet moments between Miles and Gwen and them with their respective parents. It’s just lovely to see an American animated film that has lengthy, character driven dialogue scenes between people that feel real. The movie isn’t perfect; it’s very much a Part 1 of 2 and some story elements are oddly put on ice until the second film – like how the Spot is the driving force of everything for the first hour and then when he becomes the biggest unstoppable threat in all the universe he just … takes a nap for the rest of the movie, I guess – but that first hour is close to flawless and the movie does end on a thrilling cliffhanger. While SPIDER-MAN 2 is still the Spider-Man flick, both of the Spider-Verse movies are superlative and if BEYOND THE SPIDER-VERSE can stick the landing – and I see no reason why it won’t – this Trilogy will go down as a timeless classic.
YOU HURT MY FEELINGS. (Dir. Nicole Holofcener.)
I’m not currently in a relationship nor am I married – shocker I know – so I haven’t had firsthand experience with the central hook of this insta-classic which asks “What if you found out your lifelong romantic partner hated your art?” but wow did I deeply enjoy and connect with every second of this little wonder. I haven’t had a chance yet to revisit this since catching it in theaters but the understated power of it all has often been on my mind since seeing it. I strongly remember being a giggling fool for the entirety runtime of this lovingly done flick. Highly recommend!
The Top 5!
05. PAST LIVES. (Celine Song.)
I loved PAST LIVES. I went in knowing as little as possible and was crushed by how relatable it was to my life experience. We all have those what if people in our lives. People we knew and have wondered how different our life would be if we’d pursed and had a different relationship, whether romantic or otherwise, with them. At least I have a couple of those. Because of my parents work I grew up moving all across the globe and had to change my entire world pretty regularly every three or four years. Each of these moves I made growing up, moves done in the pre-internet days, came with entire friendships, potential future friends and possible romantic relationships getting cutoff and ended immediately. Someone was there in my life one day and then the next day they weren’t. It hurt. A lot. And you never really get over these what if thoughts & feelings. Or at least I haven’t. So, having heard how great this was I went into this, Celine Song’s FEATURE DEBUT, without really knowing a thing and then found myself a wreck for the next two hours at how relatable Hae Sung’s story was. Just a debilitating movie really. Not one I feel I’ll revisit often – it hurts too much and I am lonelier now than I’ve ever been before – but as an emotional experience it was the film I felt the most in 2023. Absolutely powerful filmmaking.
04. SHOWING UP. (Dir. Kelly Reichardt.)
Quietly powerful. Not the type of film I see myself regularly revisiting but certainly one I imagine myself checking back in with once every couple years and having a vastly different reaction towards it as I become a different person. I’ve never been to Portland, Oregon but experiences are universal and Kelly Reichardt’s lovely film took me back to my days as an art student in Richmond, Virginia. All the beauty and joy and frustration which comes with making personal art. The pain of having to witness a peer achieve all the attention and praise you want. The drive to spend hours, days, your entire life dedicated to something that means the world to you and is a pleasant trinket to everyone else. The quiet moments of wonder from just creating. The realization that while you were deep into the act of creating someone “close” to you has been struggling. All these very human experiences are in SHOWING UP and all are done in such a quietly effective way. I saw this back in April and it really wasn’t until the end of the year when I started to think over “What movies really did a number on me?” that I realized this was one of the most powerful experiences of 2023! A quiet, magical movie with flawless performances that really struck a chord with me.
03. OPPENHEIMER. (Dir. Christopher Nolan.)
The most movie of 2023! This is the film Christopher Nolan has been building towards his entire career. There’s been a huge stylistic shift in the way he made movies starting with THE DARK KNIGHT. While shooting some sequences on IMAX was the key thing people took notice of in that movie, the real shift was in the tone and flow of his filmmaking. The editing in TDK was faster, scenes were aggressively intercut with others with some scenes lasting only seconds, the score was louder and more omnipresent and the audio effects booming. Every film Nolan has done since has only furthered that style with each picture being more aggressive in style than the previous. I figured this had all reached a peak in TENET, one of the most aggressive studio films ever made, but I was so gloriously wrong. With OPPENHEIMER, Nolan utilizes the aggressive storytelling style he and his collaborators have perfected through almost 20 years of collaboration to make the most kinetic 3 hour movie about people sitting in rooms ever made! It’s an actors dream project and this is an impeccably cast film with no bad performance and a career best from Cillian Murphy as the haunted father of the atomic bomb. This picture simply flows like nothing else and seeing this on 70MM was truly the most movie-Movie experience of the year!
02. THE BOY AND THE HERON. (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki.)
Hayao Miyazaki is the world’s greatest living filmmaker. I’ve long anticipated THE BOY & THE HERON and I’m so happy to say Miyazaki and his team of skilled master animators at Studio Ghibli went above and beyond my expectations. Tonally, this might be the riskiest and most mature masterwork of his incredible career. THE BOY & THE HERON’s first hour is quiet, reserved and internal in ways I never expected in a Ghibli film. The internal pain of the lead, Mahito, and the way it is always oppressively present and weights on every interaction actually reminded me more of the work of his protege, Hideaki Anno, and what he did on EVANGELION. We spend almost a full hour locked in Mahito’s isolation and pain – there’s even self-inflicted violence in a Ghibli film! – then, just when we’re accustomed to this quieter than expected Ghibli tale, we’re taken away to the magical dream worlds Miyazaki is renowned for and we are treated to the visuals, creatures and wonders we anticipated and couldn’t ever dream of ourselves! Except … this magical world is not as joyous as we’ve expected… we’re being shown a dying world. The unique magic of this world, while seemingly strong, is on its final days and will soon fade away and while there will be imitators there will never be another universe like it. This dying universe is just like the master filmmaker himself who has just turned 83 and one day will actually have made his final film. When that happens Ghibli will topple and there will never be another like it. If this is Hayao Miyazaki’s final film – and I hope it isn’t – then he will be closing his career with a masterpiece!
01. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. (Dir. Martin Scorsese.)
Hot take: Martin Scorsese is currently in his greatest period as a filmmaker. This is incredible because he’s been continually shaping and reshaping the art of American cinema for over 50 years now without ever having taken a real break and any period of his would put the entire career of any other director, even some of the greatest, to shame. So when I say he’s in his greatest period as a filmmaker that’s not something I take lightly. Since HUGO I’ve noticed a real shift in the types of films he’s been doing and each one has almost been crafted from conception as a final artistic statement and that has given each movie a real go-for-broke richness. Scorsese has taken everything he’s learned and perfected from decades of filmmaking to craft every single shot and edit in this final era of his to end his illustrious body of work on masterpiece after masterpiece. HUGO, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, SILENCE and THE IRISHMAN, any of these films would have been a perfect closure to the Masters’ career. Thankfully none of them were and we can now we can add KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON to that impressive list. Scorsese with his team have crafted a 206 minute horror epic about the bloodshed, greed and great lie our country is built on and how to this day these lies are resold, embellished and celebrated in our established law, government and the arts… this film included. Every second of this 206 minute masterpeice is in dialogue with American history and the arts and it does this while somehow being as entertaining as is it horrific. It’s common knowledge now, but when Scorsese & screenwriter Eric Roth first began adapting David Grann’s novel they were making a more traditional Western where the white hero comes to town and saves the day but when that wasn’t working they made the masterstroke decision to switch the narrative’s focus. Instead of making a safe Western about the riding into town to save the day they’ve made a twisted love story about how people will commit the worst acts against those they proclaim to love for greed. They took the famous template of Scorsese’s gangster films but there’s no allure or excitment in this crime film because they’re committing genocide. This is the most damning horror masterpeice of 2023 and one of the strongest films of Scorsese’s career! Martin Scorsese has always been my favorite filmmaker and for the entirety of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON the viewer is in the hands of a master like no other.
And that’s that.