On 2023

The year is coming to a close, and it was quite the year, huh? A movie year marked by strikes, Disney eating dust at the box office, and a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer being among the highest-grossing films of the year. Truly surreal. So, as awards season looms closer and closer, and the takes on twitter dot com get more and more aggresive and nonsensical, I am undergoing the arduous task of talking about my favorite movies of the year. This will update if and when I watch some of the stuff I haven´t seen.

And before you yell, these are my personal favorites. This is my list. Write your own.

ON MY WATCHLIST

Movies I am dying to see but haven´t because I can´t or I just haven´t got around to watching for one reason or another. We all have lives outside of entertainment. Well, not all of us.

• Priscilla (Sofia Coppola)
• Saltburn (Emerald Fennell)

HONORABLE MENTIONS

• Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet): an incredibly tense, dextrously directed court drama. Loved the dialogue.
• Barbie (Greta Gerwig): thought it was an incredibly intelligent comedy that is unfortunately limited by the fact that it is a commercial.
• Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster): an exciting, disturbing journey into Ari Aster´s parental issues. Turns anxiety into an epic odyssey. Still digesting it.
• Bottoms (Ella Seligman): Absolutely hilarious sex comedy and an instant Superbad-like classic.
• El Conde (Pablo Larraín): a mystifying piece of film. A lot of the satire goes over my head. Wish I had more context.
• The Creator (Gareth Edwards): a kinda generic story with really awesome effects and production design.
• Creed III (Michael B. Jordan): a great directorial debut. Love the Rocky and Creed movies, and this is no exception.
• Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein): What a surprise! I could watch a million of these.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. III (James Gunn): a great MCU movie. Super fun, full of pathos.
• The Holdovers (Alexander Payne): a great new Christmas classic with an Oscar-worthy Paul Giamatti.
• John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski): absolute God-tier action movie.
• The Killer (David Fincher): a super interesting, fun movie.
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold): I´m partial to Indy, so...
• Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie): I’m also partial to M:I, so…
• The Pale Blue Eye (Scott Cooper): A super entertaining thriller that flew under the radar in January.
• Past Lives (Celine Song): a sweet, heartbreaking "what if?" story.
• Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos): A unique, hilarious, stylish as hell film.
• Society of the Snow (J. A. Bayona): an epic and massive yet incomplete-feeling (to me) historical film.
• Suzume/すずめの戸締まり (Makoto Shinkai): I really like this film and the animation is stunning, but it’s unfortunately a victim of high expectations due to the fact that Your Name is one of my favorite films in the world.
• Talk To Me (Danny and Michael Phillipou): great horror movie.
• They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor): a movie juggling a lot, a super fun, thought-provoking comedy.
• The Three Musketeers: D´Artagnan and Milady (Martin Bourboulon): absolutely amazing and instantly my favorite adaptation of the book.
• Tótem (Lila Avilés): a slow burn of a movie that manages to capture the energy of a family coming together to celebrate in the face of impending tragedy.
• The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer): disturbing and uncomfortable yet hypnotizing.

THE LIST

ASTEROID CITY

Dir. Wes Anderson

I am not the biggest Wes Anderson fan. I love how his movies look, but there´s something in the performances and tone that doesn´t fully connect with me. I feel like he treads familiar ground too much. And yet, Anderson yielded what is undoubtedly my favorite movie this year. Asteroid City is an ambitious, unusual, complex piece of film about our perception of reality and our use of narratives to structure, understand, or give meaning to our environment. It features incredible visuals, an insanely talented ensemble, some very funny moments, and a lot of thematic subtext to mentally deconstruct. It´s not incredibly commercial, or even particularly palatable to a general audience, but it´s so delightfully weird and illustrated...I absolutely love it.

THE BOY AND THE HERON/ 君たちはどう生きるか

Dir. Hayao Miyazaki

This film is embedded in my head for the forseeable future. It looks absolutely stunning. It has great music, sound design, and voice acting. It´s as complex and deep as you´d expect a Miyazaki movie to be. However, this one diverts from the themes of nature, folklore, tradition, and industry that are normally centric to Miyazaki films (though it includes them), but rather dives deep into the struggles of grief, the pitfalls of sheltering oneself in one´s imagination, the value of interpersonal relationships, how artists are capable of disconnecting from reality, etc. Miyazaki delves into the perilous wilderness of a grieving boy´s mind, his younger self´s mind, all to give his grandson (supposedly) a dark and somber cautionary tale told with grace and depth.

GODZILLA: MINUS ONE/ゴジラマイナスワン

Dir. Takashi Yamasaki

I find this movie to be a blockbuster that is, without a doubt, a labor of love and sincerity. This isn’t to say that other blockbusters aren’t (every movie is the result of passion, money, and luck), but this movie drips with the sense that the priorities of the filmmakers were never in the wrong place and they put their best foot forward in every aspect of its construction. The characters are great, the production design is wonderful, and the VFX are awesome. Godzilla is TERRIFYING, the pacing of the story is exciting, and the themes of guilt and human survival were emotionally powerful. Literally cannot ask for more in a movie.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Dir. Martin Scorsese

Similarly to Wes Anderson, Scorsese is a filmmaker who I admire and respect as a figure, but his filmography is not immediately among my favorites. I love movies like Silence, Last Tempation of Jesus Christ, and Taxi Driver, which feel like deep, powerful contemplations of the spirit rather than the "guy narrating how cool he and his crimes are" films (admittedly an incredibly reductive statement) that Scorsese is normally associated with. And yet, this film is interesting to me just because of the simple idea that Scorsese, a filmmaker that contributed to defining modern and contemporary American cinema, tackling a Western, the quintessential American film genre, for the first time in his career; and choosing this particular story and approach, an effort to demonstrate how First Nations were systematically destroyed by the white establishment that later branded them as savages and infantilized them in media, to do so. And then there´s the actual film itself. Over two and a half hours of heartbreaking acts of cruelty, greed, hatred, and injustice, rendered with incredible artistry in photography, sound, production design and music, portrayed by the standout talents of Lily Gladstone and Robert de Niro, and full of compassion for the victims of these horrible crimes, the vestiges of which are still present today in the descendants of these proud, dignified, noble people that were attacked by the machine that is white American imperialism. Dear God, what a film.

OPPENHEIMER

Dir. Christopher Nolan

This movie, to me at least, is a cast and crew operating at the best of their abilities for an entire movie. Every single performance feels like it´s perfectly done: Murphy, Downey, Blunt, and Pugh straight-up MURDER in their roles and every single one-scene cameo is people knocking it out of the park, zero notes. It looks gorgeous. It sounds amazing. The score and visual effects are absolutely phenomenal. It´s haunting and comprehensive in a way a lot of biopics aren´t, and it is easily Christopher Nolan´s biggest achievement since implanting the term "Inception" into the global lexicon. I´m glad Barbie gave it the legs it needed for people to watch and celebrate this masterpiece in a theater, and even if it´s not my favorite movie of the year, it´s a good Best Picture winner.

MAY DECEMBER

Dir. Todd Haynes

May December is a movie that is disturbing and uncomfortable yet incredibly magnetic. There is nothing about this film that isn’t fascinating and memorable, and I can’t think of a movie that arrived at a more appropriate time in the zeitgeist, where grooming and May-December relationships are so prevalent in the conversation. Even if you’re not as chronically online as many of us are, this story of abuse, love, and morbid curiosity is engrossing and excellently made. My God, is Julianne Moore good at being this sort of cruel, fragile character. Also, this movie is very funny in ways that are both welcome and unexpected in a film with this central conceit. 

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson

I mean...jeez. As a guy who studied animation, this film and its predecessor feel like impossible tasks. These films are massive undertakings, juggernauts of  visually innovative,  heartwarming, immediately connective, well performed storytelling. This movie does feel like a one-up from Into the Spider-Verse, both in the sheer amount of plot content and the ambitions of its animation team. It´s truly phenomenal, epic, and dark in ways I was not expecting. The only note I would have is the following: TREAT YOUR ANIMATORS WITH THE RESPECT THEY DESERVE. Animators are people and they deserve to be properly compensated and they deserve to work in environments that are safe, dignified, and compliant with basic decency. 

MONSTER (怪物)

Dir. Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Kore-Eda made one of my favorite films of last year, Broker, so I was quite excited to see his most recent one. My excitement grew once this film won Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at Cannes. And finally seeing it on the big screen was a great experience! This movie is full of humanist, hopeful statements among the horror that is mistruth, misunderstanding, and personal biases. Wonderfully written and scored, masterfully performed and incredibly engaging. 

DREAM SCENARIO

Dir. Kristoffer Borgli

I’m a big Cage-head, so I was gonna enjoy this regardless. However, I found this movie to be incredibly thoughtful, hilarious, and light on its feet, and a great satire of the modern cycle of online fame and success. It’s incredibly well written and directed, and the Nic Cage performance is so, so good. It’s a gear I didn’t know he had. No spoilers, so I’ll just say that the satire pays off in the endgame of this movie, and it’s effective indeed, but the human story of this character and his family is equally engrossing and effective.

THE IRON CLAW

Dir. Sean Durkin

Just like Oppenheimer, this is a movie that thinks of its emotional, narrative core first and then unfolds the story with real-world pathos and context. And man, does The Iron Claw deliver on the emotional gut punches. Even as a non-wrestling fan, I found this story haunting and compelling. I loved the photography, I loved the sound design, I loved the needle drops, and I loved the wrestling sequences. I liked all the performances, especially Harris Dickinson´s as David Von Erich, but Zac Efron squeezes a lot out of his very quiet character with an imposing physical presence. I cried at the ending. Give this a few months, and it could give Asteroid City a run for its money.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

A lot of stuff I wanted to see this year straight-up vanished due to the strikes or because David Zaslav is a big dum-dum. And yet, I got so many things I truly enjoyed and deeply connected with, and I even got to catch up with gems that came out last year and I didn´t watch or couldn´t watch. I hope you are all happy, I hope you get to see movies you love with people you love, and I wish you an even better 2024. 

Here´s to life and having fun at the movies!