The 65 Best Movies of 2023
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As we near the end of 2023 and I finalize this list, I’ll admit that I had trouble extrapolating sweeping narratives about the year in film. Maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent in French courtrooms, where defendants have argued convincingly against any notion of rational truth. Or maybe 2023 has simply been a year full of contradictory narratives. For instance, though it’s felt like Hollywood finally returned to its pre-pandemic form this year, it looks as though we’ll end 2023 with just over half the total releases of 2019 (and 70 percent of that year’s total box office).
Meanwhile, all the chatter about superhero fatigue didn’t preclude several big superhero successes. And where the Barbenheimer phenomenon made it seem as though movies reached peak pervasiveness this year, in other ways 2023 was clearly defined by absence—with theaters shuttering, tentpoles being punted, and writers and actors picketing rather than promoting films. There was a palpable sense of enthusiasm around movies, but also a justified sense of dread, and as many pleasant surprises as hyped disappointments. You know, best of times, worst of times.
In terms of what was actually on the screen, a few themes and trends leapt out. This year, evil was banal, wives were foregrounded, and penises were all over the damn place. There were a lot of ambitious biopics that bucked the usual formula; there were too many thinly veiled brand advertisements; and while there was only one May December, there were several films with May-December romances at their center.
On the whole, it was a great year for established auteurs leaning into their strengths: David Fincher made a taut thriller, Sofia Coppola crafted a lush drama about “privilege without power,” Martin Scorsese reunited with his two favorite actors for a three-hour epic about crime and betrayal, and so on and so forth. But there were plenty of thrilling debuts, too. I am officially in the bag for A.V. Rockwell, Alice Diop, and Ellie Foumbi. I was taken with what a rising crop of indie filmmakers did with miniscule budgets, and encouraged to see several established phenoms use their blank checks for wild, audacious swings.
I did not see every single release this year—and to the films I missed, truly, I’m sorry—but what I did see produced in me the whole gamut of emotions. (As they say, “heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”) Hell, I even felt genuine excitement for the state of the art form.
Therapy Dogs
The senior year experience chronicled by Ethan Eng in Therapy Dogs is far from extraordinary. Eng and his fellow small town Canadian teenagers are reckless, bored, awkward, and full of boundless energy. To entertain themselves they attack lockers, hang from car roofs as they drift in parking lots, and climb up a tall water tower. But in the process, Eng subtly interrogates his cohort’s budding masculinity, and paints a vivid, often exhilarating portrait of what it is to be young now—both how it’s unique to this moment and just like any other time.
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Waiting For the Light to Change
Lin Tranh’s debut feature—which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Slamdance—is set at a Michigan lake house. It’s winter, and a group of five 20-somethings—some of whom are old friends—are there for a weeklong vacation. It’s a quiet movie built on mini-dramas that feel big to the people involved. Tran, who is quite gifted at blocking, captures it all with poise and patience, finding beauty in all the fog.
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Hannah Ha Ha
Not much happens in Hannah Ha Ha, the microbudget debut from filmmakers Joshua Pikovsky and Jordan Tetewsky. Hannah (Hannah Lee Thompson), 25 and aimless, spends her summer days working on the family farm, biking around, and giving guitar lessons to children. When her ambitious brother (Roger Mancusi) comes to visit, he urges her to strive for more, and she’s left navigating what she wants with her life. But the film, shot through a hazy, impressionistic filter, is exceptionally rich sensorially, evoking the smoky smell of evening bonfires, the sticky sweat induced by the thick New England air, and the bright chirp emanating from the green trees. It’s the sort of film that lingers after you’ve seen it, like a memory that could be your own.
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Huesera: The Bone Woman
There have been a lot of Rosemary’s Baby-inspired pregnancy thrillers in recent years, some interrogating popular notions of motherhood and others flipping the script and putting the baby bump on a man. And of all these films, Huesera: The Bone Woman, the snap-cracking, bone-chilling debut from Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera, may be the best. Garza Cervera captures the bodily horror and gendered double standards of pregnancy without veering overly didactic. Her tale is inspired by Mexican mythology, and it brims with evocative imagery, potent surreality, and gripping tension.
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A Still Small Voice
Luke Lorentzen’s portrait of an aspiring hospital chaplain and her advisor foregrounds the toll of truly giving oneself to the service of others. In scenes with patients and their families, Mati, the chaplain-in-training, is calm, warm, and helpful. But in meetings with her advisor—and similarly in his meetings with his advisor—we see her strain against the vulnerability and burnout. It’s a moving look at the inner life and day to day work of people exposed to death and pain on a regular basis.
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Jethica
The bulk of the press around Pete Ohs’s Jethica revolves around the transparent accomplishment of the movie. Ohs has pioneered a filmmaking method in which he acts as his entire crew, allowing him to make aesthetically dynamic features for less money than most shorts (the bill for Jethica was $10K). But as with Ohs’s previous film working in this style, 2021’s Youngstown, you don’t need to grade Jethica on a curve to enjoy it. The film is a stylish New Mexico-set comic noir about a woman who is haunted by the ghost of her stalker. Ohs brings to the film both the playful spirit of a home movie and the rigor and eye of an auteur. He collaborated on the story with his small cast, and they take the film in several surprising directions, with Will Madden (as Kevin) giving an especially standout performance.
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Magic Mike's Last Dance
Like Ocean’s 13, Magic Mike’s third and final chapter may not be the franchise’s best, but the general tepid response probably has less to do with the movie itself than the incredibly high bar set by the first two installments. In Last Dance, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) is retired from dancing and earning a living bartending at high-end parties—that is, until he meets Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault), a rich dilettante who, after procuring Mike’s steamy services, hires him to come to London and put on an extravagant show at a historic theater. The film has its moments as a love story. But it’s at its best as a movie about the artistic process and the complications that arise when making art relies on a wealthy, mercurial benefactor.
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Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I
The first edition of the seventh Mission Impossible movie is not the franchise’s best. Like all of these movies, it is too long, treats Ethan Hunt’s love interests as comically interchangeable, and is often logically suspect. It also doesn’t quite achieve the enduring suspense of Rogue Nation or Fallout. But what it does do is send Tom Cruise motorcycling off a cliff to catch a moving train, which is among the thrilling action set pieces that make watching this MI a great way to spend a scorching summer afternoon.
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Fallen Leaves
Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves is a decidedly unromantic romance between two struggling blue-collar workers in Finland. The environs are gloomy. The news on the radio is devastating. And there’s a lot of drinking going on. But at least Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie movie, The Dead Don’t Die, is showing at the local cinema. That choice is but one amusing wink fans of the Finnish filmmaker will eat up. The movie on the whole is short, slight, and immensely dry—but charming, and even life-affirming, nonetheless.
In theaters
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Orlando My Political Biography
In Orlando: My Political Biography, Spanish-born philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado filters different peoples’ nonbinary and trans experience through Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, intriguingly, and often lightly, reinterpreting and expanding the scope of the book. The stories we hear—both personal and lifted from the novel—cast individuals’ experience as part of a larger collective narrative while maintaining their specificity.
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Mutt
Over the course of one sweltering summer day in New York City, Feña (Lío Mehiel), a young trans man, is taken on a meandering journey through the city and their pre-transition past as they’re visited by three different people with whom they have a complex history. It’s a more interesting emotional voyage than a geographical one, but director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz and cinematographer Matthew Pothier make Feña’s New York into a vibrant and lived-in supporting character nonetheless.
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American Fiction
Accomplished TV writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut weaves together an intimate family drama and biting satire about race and the publishing industry. The two pieces often fit better theoretically than practically. But when it’s working, American Fiction is incisive, touching, and very funny.
In theaters
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Talk to Me
Danny and Michael Philippou–better known around the Internet as RackaRacka–have crafted the latest A24 horror sensation, with their viral spirit conjuring nightmare, Talk to Me. The film plays with a lot of familiar contemporary horror tropes–even nodding to Get Out–but also pulls deeply from the Philippou brothers’ personal fears, traumas, and Australian upbringing. It’s that specificity, coupled with its vicious, unrelenting energy, that won me over.
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Reality
In 2018, when it was reported that Reality Winner, a 26 year-old Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor, had been sentenced to five years and three months of prison time for leaking a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, her case was notable. Winner's sentence was the longest ever imposed in federal court for a leak of government information to the media. Aside from her remarkable name, though, Winner’s story didn’t seem obviously cinematic. But in adapting the transcript of Winner’s FBI interrogation, writer-director Tina Satter–who initially brought the story to the stage–has made a film that manages to be gripping and tense while also feeling mundane and true. In this condensed peek at Winner, you get a sense of her character, motivations, and how the FBI lulled her into confessing. Sydney Sweeney gives a fantastically subtle performance as Winner. Plus, Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis are equally good as a pair of disarmingly affable FBI agents.
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The Pigeon Tunnel
David Cornwell, better known as the late, great spy novelist John le Carré, was famous for extending his fictions beyond his books, and into press appearances. So, you’re never quite sure what’s true and what isn’t in Errol Morris’s new documentary, which finds Morris interviewing the author about his life and work over the course of four days in 2019. The film is built around the themes of deception, betrayal, and performance. Though some may watch it with an eye towards the chess match between interviewer and interviewee, Le Carré is such a captivating and convincing storyteller that I was content to lower my guard and listen. Here, at least, there’s satisfaction in being a dupe.
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All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Raven Jackson’s debut is an exquisitely evocative and poetic memory piece, set in rural Mississippi, and centered around Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson). Through its intimate cinematography and detailed sound design, the film finds poignancy in small gestures and the generational repetition of rituals.
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Skinamarink
Part of the magic of Kyle Edward Ball’s feature debut is how it manages to feel both fresh and nostalgic. Another part: its slow pace and fuzzy white noise threatens to lure you to sleep, while its dimly glimmering nighttime perspective on a suburban home is the stuff of (millennial) childhood nightmares. Ball has a gift for framing, and is clearly fluent in translating analog horror to the digital age. No wonder his film has been such a viral sensation.
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Close
Perhaps it’s because of his approach to collaboration that Lukas Dhont is able to so evocatively capture the amplified feelings of early adolescence. Dhont is a keen observer of the way children are socialized out of their early emotional abandon. When 13-year-old best friends Léo and Rémi enter a new year of school, their intimate bond is broken by the growing awareness of how their outward affection is perceived by their peers. Friction mounts, and without the words or self-awareness to address what they’re each feeling, their relationship meets tragic ends. The stomach-hollowing guilt that mingles with grief isn’t shocking; but rather, its power resides in the ways it feels achingly familiar.
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Our Father, The Devil
Ellie Foumbi’s feature debut, Our Father, the Devil, is a French-set drama about an African refugee’s encounter with a Catholic priest who she believes to be a warlord who slaughtered her family. Yeah, heavy stuff. But Foumbi pulls it off—on a miniscule budget, mind you—by leaning into the complexity with immense sensitivity, empathy, and passion.
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The Adults
When Michael Cera’s Eric returns to his very gray upstate New York hometown, his plan to limit his time with his two siblings is thwarted by his compulsion to be the best poker player around. As his stay lengthens, he’s forced to confront the strain in his relationship with his sister Rachel (an outstanding Hannah Gross) and the hurt his absence has caused his other sister, Maggie (Sophia Lillis, ditto). Writer-director Dustin Guy Deffa isn’t revolutionizing the sibling drama by any means, but his characters are so specific, funny, and sad, that you’ll want to ante up.
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When You Finish Saving The World
Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut is, more or less, exactly what you’d hope for from the veteran actor: smart, wry, thoughtful, and personal. In adapting his own audiobook (based, to some extent, on his own romantic history), Eisenberg turns to Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard to play a high-minded social worker and her vapid teen musician son. Moore, in particular, gives a sterling performance—channeling a vein of lofty, humorless do-gooderism that can be off-putting as it is well-meaning.
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Master Gardener
When planting seeds, knowing what they’ll become doesn’t spoil the wonder of seeing them actually grow into that thing. The same goes for the films of Paul Schrader. Master Gardener is the final installment of his “man in a room” trilogy, and it follows a similar playbook to the previous two, First Reformed and The Card Counter. In his new entry, a troubled, solitary man (in this case, a stoic Joel Edgerton) journals and broods, dedicating himself to a monastic craft, all the while seeming poised to erupt in violence. This formula is a successful one for Schrader, who’s of course returned to it many times throughout his robust career. Without giving too much away, there is a surprise in the way this particular edition unfolds. Though by no means cheery, Master Gardener blossoms into something relatively hopeful, open to the possibility of redemption and admiring of its beauty.
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The League
Sam Pollard’s look back at baseball’s Negro leagues is informative, wide-ranging, and often quite moving. With rich period footage and spirited oral accounts, Pollard transports you back to the days before integration–which, the film reminds you, wasn’t all that long ago. Pollard explains what–and who–kept baseball segregated for so long. But rather than simply viewing the Negro leagues in relation to the MLB, Pollard depicts what made the Negro leagues special in their own right, too–from the kinetic style of play to the vital communality it fostered.
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M3GAN
Forget identifying buses or street signs. Your response to M3GAN could function as its own CAPTCHA: if you didn’t have fun, you’re probably a robot. Blumhouse marketed M3GAN as a horror movie, and yes, there are jump scares and bursts of violence to back that up. But there’s something so uncanny, and consistently hilarious, about the way this luxury AI doll—who’s played physically by Amie Donald—moves. Whether M3GAN was prancing through the woods like a demon or dancing in a hallway, she had my theater keeling over in a good sort of pain.
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Sanctuary
Of all the single-location movies the pandemic has wrought—and there have been a lot—Sanctuary may be the best. The movie is set in a magnificent hotel suite that plays home to Hal (Christopher Abbott), a submissive and ill-equipped heir to a hotel empire. But the wallpaper and carpeting aren’t what make the movie great, ornate and visually dynamic as they are. Sanctuary, which was written by Micah Bloomberg and directed by Zachary Wigon, gets its juice from the topsy-turvy power dance between Hal and his dominatrix, Rebecca (an electric Margaret Qualley). Smart, surprising, and wonderfully kinky, it’s about as fun as a modern romcom gets.
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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
I’ll admit being less enamored by the new Spider-Verse film than many critics. Clever as its meta jokes about superhero fatigue may have been, they didn’t quite ease my actual superhero fatigue, and I never truly locked into this story and its emotional stakes. But it’s hard to deny the feat of what the second Spider-Verse’s extensive team of creators pulled off. The film had three writers, three directors, and an entire multiverse worth of specialists in each department. Plus, the animation is dazzling, the villain (voiced by Jason Schwartzman) a walking work of art; the whole thing bursts with ideas and style.
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Rotting in the Sun
In this verite-style dark comedy, an abundantly depressed Sebastian Silva (director of Tyrel and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus) encounters the influencer Jordan Firstman at a nude gay beach resort. Having just watched Crystal Fairy, the sunnier Firstman thinks it’s fate—the universe telling them to collaborate on a project he’s been developing. The movie, though, has something else in mind, taking a wild and unexpected turn that transforms the film and lets other actors shine.
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Cash Cow
Years from now, if movie theaters put together pandemic-themed programs, Cash Cow should be the centerpiece. Matt Barats’s one-man, no-budget docu-essay-comedy is far and away the best film I’ve seen in which COVID looms large in the background. Here’s the story: Just before the world shut down, Barats, a stand-out comedian in Brooklyn’s alt scene, was on the verge of a breakthrough. He’d just starred in a Domino’s Pizza commercial, and was going to receive a big pay day once it aired. The lockdown, though, threw everything into flux, and the commercial idled. As Barats waited for his cash cow, he drove around the country, camping, subsisting on soggy pineapple, and learning about Mormons. The film he made is packed with lots of laughs, beautiful fall foliage, and several perfect unexpected twists and turns.
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R.M.N.
Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s latest drama can be an unbearably frustrating watch. I mean that as a compliment. The film is frustrating for how methodically and realistically it hits a potent nerve. When a bakery in an insular, economically struggling Transylvanian village hires a few Sri Lankan workers, the villagers take their long-boiling frustrations–and prejudices–out on the men and the bakery. Mungiu expertly shows how global socioeconomic forces and rhetoric find ugly root locally, culminating in an impressively staged and acted 17-minute town hall scene and a very surprising conclusion.
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Anselm
Love or hate the work of the controversial German artist Anselm Kiefer, it’s hard to deny its staggering grandeur. His dark, monstrous pieces are enveloping—and all the more so seen through Wim Wenders’s 3D lens. Wenders’s film meditates on Kiefer’s work, as well as its (and his) ideas, letting the viewer feel its power and form their own opinions.
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Past Lives
With Past Lives, Celine Song articulates a familiar feeling—the yearning for an alternative life we might’ve lived—in a way that’s both smart and fresh. Weaved through the film is the Korean concept of “in-yun,” which suggests that fate ties people together through various lifetimes. The lives in question are those of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Too), who get the first taste of a mutual crush as children—before Nora’s family moves from South Korea to Canada. The film drifts through twelve-year increments in Nora’s life elegantly and artfully, lingering in careful compositions and heightening the characters’ internal states with a detailed sound mix.
But as Nora and Hae Sung grow up and reconnect, Past Lives verges on being overly spare. The script doesn’t tell us much more about these characters than the plot absolutely demands, and as a result I wavered here and there in buying into the continued pull they feel towards each other. Ultimately, a resolution I love intellectually didn’t quite land the way it should’ve emotionally. But it came close!
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Beau Is Afraid
Ari Aster’s latest film may very well be the most polarizing movie of the year. You’ll either get down with Aster’s sense of humor and submit to this insane, punishing epic of mommy issues and paralyzing anxiety, or you’ll be alienated and put off by it. I erred more in the former camp—admiring the film’s abundance of detail, Aster’s visual imagination, and, yes, all the puerile humor. Aster’s use of a certain Mariah Carey track alone pays off the three-hour runtime.
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Alcarràs
Carla Simón’s sophomore feature is a portrait of a peach-harvesting family in present-day Catalonia that faces the end of an era: their orchard is about to be destroyed to make way for the construction of solar panels. It’s the sort of conflict that’s usually framed in stark good-versus-evil terms in movies. But what’s so refreshing about Alcarras is that Simón doesn’t judge so much as observe, humanizing—but not lionizing—the people caught in the current of progress.
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Infinity Pool
You have to admire Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgaard for their transparent willingness to go there. In Brandon Cronenberg’s third feature, what happens during a vacation at a luxury resort quickly makes the drama at a White Lotus hotel feel tame. There’s enough graphic—and hallucinatory—sex, drugs, and violence that the film just skirted an NC-17 rating. Exiting the theater, my own brain felt as though it had been chemically altered. After the come down, though, the ideas Cronenberg raises about identity, self-destruction, and tourism stuck with me—though, admittedly, perhaps less so than the wonderful absurdity of Mia Goth sitting on the hood of a moving car, taunting Skarsgaard’s James, and throwing fried chicken at him.
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Sick of Myself
Is attention-getting an art or a disease? In Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s utterly absurd, dryly hilarious debut feature, it’s a little bit of both. When her artist boyfriend gains a dash of notoriety for his stolen furniture sculptures, Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) takes an alarming dose of a dangerous Russian drug—in a deliberate attempt to attract sympathy–causing her face to break out in lesions. Borgli, whose short films hit a similar caustic tone and clinical aesthetic, is a master of threading the line between body humor and body horror, between grotesquery and beauty, a cringe and a cackle.
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Dream Scenario
Kristopher Borgli is quickly becoming the leading lampooner of the influencer age. Dream Scenario is his second film this year that satirizes viral fame. This time around, Borgli is working with more resources, the most prominent of them being one Nicolas Cage. Cage does great work as Paul Matthews, an unremarkable evolutionary biology professor who one day finds himself a character in the entire world’s dreams. And Borgli has fun with the uncanny premise—crafting funny and visually interesting dreams, and extending the setup to surreal extremes. The film mirrors well the stew of feelings stirred through an outrage cycle, but loses some steam with a slightly played-out third act turn.
In theaters
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Priscilla
If Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis didn’t impress upon you the disturbing age gap between Elvis and his eventual wife, Priscilla Presley, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla surely will. When the pair met, Elvis was 24 years old and Priscilla was 14, and Coppola’s film makes blatantly visible the stark contrast of those two numbers. Cailee Spaeny looks like a child, Jacob Elordi an imposing and powerful man. Over its 113-minute run time, the film makes you sit in the discomfort of the discrepancy—not just of age but of power—without ever losing sight of Priscilla as a person. The initial excitement of an impossible teenage fantasy coming true is palpable, as is the ultimately mundane and objectifying reality.
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Maestro
When you actually see Maestro, the much-publicized, oversized schnoz on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein makes sense: Everything in Cooper’s A Star Is Born follow-up is big. The acting. The set pieces. The lust. The music. This, for god’s sake, is a movie in which a Thanksgiving Day Parade Snoopy balloon floats past a window during a dramatic fight scene. One that separates periods with the use of color and black and white. One in which Cooper trots out three Leonard Bernstein voices. It’s bursting with energy, and it’s interested in the very notion of energy—of how a massively talented person spends it, and in the inevitable tradeoffs life requires.
In theaters
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Earth Mama
Savannah Leaf’s feature debut isn’t a heart-wrenching character study so much as it is a heart-prodding one—its drama and horror mostly unfolding in a slow, glum haze. Leaf’s subject is Gia (Tia Nomore), a young Black mother of two in the Bay who is constantly swimming against the current of the system, her responsibilities, and her past and present mistakes. As she recovers from drug addiction, her two children are stuck in foster care and she struggles to prove that she is equipped to take care of them again. Meanwhile, she’s pregnant with a third child and struggles against doing what she thinks she should: give it up for adoption. The film occasionally veers into the surreal, but even when it does, it feels all too real.
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You Hurt My Feelings
The inherent problem with giving feedback—and especially to loved ones—is that everyone wants to be told they’re special and no one wants to be lied to. Often, of course, the two things are mutually exclusive, creating a tricky situation—and one with the potential for both good drama and hearty laughs. Nicole Holofcener’s latest film achieves both. You Hurt My Feelings comes at the question of how honest we should be about others’ work from many angles. But the central conflict occurs when Beth (Julia Louis Drefuss) overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) tell a friend that he doesn’t like her debut novel. Light yet vulnerable, You Hurt My Feelings is among my favorite movies Holofcener has made—and I swear I’m not saying that to be nice!
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Blackberry
For as long as I can remember, we’ve been inundated with stories of guys inventing things in garages that will “change the world.” The beginning of Matt Johnson’s Blackberry resembles one of those stories, albeit with a quirkier tone and more jagged texture. A group of nerds, led by Mike Lazaridis (a pitch-perfect Jay Baruchel) and his bombastic best friend Doug (Johnson), has created a device—a phone… that does computing!—that the world isn’t ready for. They’re taken advantage of, and not taken seriously, until a raging, recently fired businessman named Jim Balsillie (a movie-stealing Glenn Howerton) comes on board. He bluffs, he yells, he whips the ragtag group into shape, and pretty soon their device catches fire. (Remember?)
It changes the world, yes. But what’s so beautiful about Johnson’s film—in addition to all the captivating performances and moments of hilarity—is that in spending the final act on the company’s fall, the director shows how ephemeral these sorts of products are. Blackberry isn’t a film that valorizes business, nor is it one that sinks its teeth all that deep. Instead, it’s a movie that knocks wild ambition down a peg. No matter how big these men’s invention gets, they always seem quite small, destined to be munched up by bigger world-changers.
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Return to Seoul
In Return to Seoul, Park Ji-min—a fresh face on the big screen—stars as Frédérique "Freddie" Benoît, a French adoptee who, at 25, has returned to her birth city on a whim. Ji-min gives one of the best performances of the year, creating (with help of director Davy Chou) a mesmerizingly incandescent character who is determined to mask her simmering pain through drinking, hooking up, bucking social mores, and eventually becoming a weapons dealer. As she is reunited with her birth family, she doesn’t find fairy-tale reconciliation, but rather continues to spiral—and the lack of clean resolution is all the more affecting.
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Passages
Paris is unbelievably alluring in Ira Sachs’s latest film. Love triangles are not. But as blatantly narcissistic and frustratingly erratic as Franz Rogowski’s Tomas is as the focal point of this movie’s, you kind of get it. Tomas is a force, fearless in fashion, bold on the dance floor, and quick to act. He’s the type of character who probably reminds you of someone, but feels singular nonetheless.
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Afire
For all the atrocious villains and compromised antiheroes in films this year, I’m not sure there’s been a more maddening character for me than Leon (Thomas Schubert), a grumpy writer whose work “won’t allow” him to have any fun while at a friend’s beach house. Maybe that’s because he’s what every writer fears themselves to be—someone of middling talent who’s so self-absorbed he can’t experience or even observe the world around him. By setting the film amid a nearby forest fire, director Christian Petzold elevates the stakes of Leon’s narcissism, and raises a prescient question: What were you doing when the world burned?
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The Sweet East
A dark, scabrous odyssey up America’s eastern seaboard, The Sweet East is a tough movie to wrap your arms around. Sean Price Williams’s directorial debut sends its apathetic young heroine (played by superstar-in-the-making, Talia Ryder) on dalliances with scuzzy trust-fund anarchists, intellectual white supremacists, comically vain filmmakers, and sexually repressed religious fanatics. It twists history, values shocks and jabs above all else, and generally evinces a hostile posture—and yet, there is something in its cynical view of America that rings true, perhaps not to anyone’s lived experience, but rather to the shared digital one.
In theaters
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The Civil Dead
With The Civil Dead, Clay Tatum and Whitmer Thomas have made one of my favorite comedies in… *thinks*... a long time! The film, written by the pair and directed by Tatum, finds Thomas playing a ghost only Tatum’s character can see. But this ain’t your average haunting. Rather than explore trauma or evoke fear, this is a ghost story about friendship—and how being a friend can sometimes get a little annoying. If those sound like small stakes, well, maybe they are. But the key to a good buddy movie is a good hang, and The Civil Dead delivers that and then some. Enormously funny and wonderfully idiosyncratic, it’s a very promising debut.
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Tori and Lokita
It’s hard to flat out love a movie as bleak and tragic as the Dardenne brothers’ latest, but it’s even harder not to be deeply affected by it. The film is about a pair of African migrant children trying to survive, and stick together, in modern Belgium—and about how they are failed by bureaucracy, taken advantage of by the underworld, and ignored by everyone else (implicating viewers, as well as all those who will skip this one because of its heaviness). The 11-year-old Tori and 17-year-old Lokita are forced to operate well beyond their years. Un playing them, Pablo Schils (Tori) and Joely Mbundu (Lokita) achieve the same feat. Their performances are subtle and convincing, touching and gripping; crucially, they imbue these characters with the vivid humanity society denies them.
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Barbie
The idea to make a Barbie movie did not come from Greta Gerwig, but the miracle of Gerwig’s Barbie is that it feels like it did—that Gerwig wanted to use this doll to tell this story rather than having been asked (by Mattel and Margot Robbie) to write a story for this doll. That’s mostly because of the creative exuberance infused into the film’s bright pink, highly musical fabric. But it’s also because Barbie—with her plasticity and evolving symbolism—is perfectly cast in this surreal, doll’s-eye romp about the impossible double standards inherent to life as a woman in a capitalist patriarchy. Besides being passionate in its satire, Barbie is one of the funniest studio comedies of the past few years, highlighted by Ken’s patriarchal awakening and Barbie’s run-in with Mattel executives. It might rank even higher on this list if not for one shameless element: all the naked product placement for a certain car company.
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Monster
Early on in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster you see how a building on fire can ignite people’s imaginations—about who started the blaze, who frequented the establishment, and so forth. But Yûji Sakamoto’s masterfully-woven, Rashomon-esque script continuously upends your assumptions—enough times that you begin to question them. Ultimately, the film shows how most people in life are well-meaning, but that the misdeeds—and regressive norms—of people who aren’t can ripple and ripple. Kore-eda is never didactic though, just deeply empathetic.
In theaters
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Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson’s riveting new documentary conveys the major milestones in the life of the legendary poet Nikki Giovanni. But the film is far less concerned with the facts of Giovanni’s life than the feeling of it—Giovanni’s fierce tenacity, her unwavering righteousness, and her specific lyrical style. Through its kinetic form and jazzy structure, the film enables viewers to viscerally experience the power of Giovanni’s poetry and presence.
Coming soon to HBO
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A Thousand and One
It’s abundantly evident from watching A Thousand and One that A.V. Rockwell, who directed the film, grew up in New York and has both genuine love and deserved derision for her hometown. Rockwell’s feature debut follows Inez (a revelatory Teyana Taylor) from the mid-'90s, when she gets out of Rikers, to the present. As she tries to rebuild her life in Harlem, with a son who she’s smuggled out of state custody, the threat of being discovered and the pressure of providing each loom large. Rockwell’s character study highlights the ways people define a place and a place rubs off on people. It’s clear-eyed about the toll of gentrification without being overly sentimental for a more vibrant, but still imperfect past incarnation of the city. In totality, the movie finds great beauty and pathos in a nuanced, unexpected, and drawn-out sort of tragedy.
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Godland
I’m worried that if you haven’t seen Godland—and chances are, you haven’t—almost anything I mention about the film will make you less likely to want to see it. It’s starless, set in the late 19th century, and takes a nuanced look at colonialism, religion, and mortality. See what I mean? But please, don’t be deterred. Hlynur Pálmason’s third feature is much less forbidding than the Icelandic elements he captures so breathtakingly in his third feature. This story of a young Danish priest’s harrowing journey to a remote region of Iceland is stunningly photographed, occasionally quite funny, and ultimately one of the few movies that actually warrants adjectives like “sublime” and “epic.” Herzog fans rejoice.
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Oppenheimer
Like the man himself, Christopher Nolan’s three hour-long J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic has a lot on its mind. Among other things, Nolan is interested in Oppenheimer’s contradictions, genius, inscrutability, and rationalizations—how the romance of a momentous achievement can blind ostensibly well-meaning people to their inevitable disastrous consequences. It’s a testament, then, to the potency of Nolan’s filmmaking—as well as Ludwig Goransson’s pulse-quickening score and Cillian Murphy’s magnetic performance—that Oppenheimer feels propulsive throughout. As a bonus, it will be hard for any movie this year to top the spectacle of the Trinity Test.
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Anatomy of a Fall
Little is certain in Justine Triet’s Palm d’Or-winning courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall. Least of all how the death at the center of the movie occurred. Instead, the film makes the case that truth is inherently blurry; that it looks different depending on your vantage; that a marriage, in particular, is full of contradictions and messy complexities. These aren’t radical ideas, but Triet—with the help of an outstanding cast, led by Sandra Hüller—presents them so compellingly and, well, honestly, that that doesn’t much matter.
In theaters
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Saint Omer
There is so much happening beneath the surface in the documentarian Alice Diop’s narrative debut. In depicting the trial of Laurence Coly, a woman charged with killing her 15-month-old daughter, as seen through the eyes of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and literary scholar, Diop constructs a meta-narrative about true crime spectatorship, cultural dislocation, myth, and motherhood. Where the French justice system tries to explain, and ultimately condemn, Coly for her actions, Diop works in the mode of observation. She’d rather raise interesting questions than seek simple answers. Leaning on long, expertly composed takes, she emphasizes the richness and inscrutability of human faces. Maybe we can’t ever truly understand each other, but there are ways to try.
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The Killer
David Fincher’s latest thriller follows a monosyllabic hired gun (Michael Fassbender), and when a routine job goes awry, a lot of violence ensues. And yet, it may be Fincher’s funniest movie to date. Fincher, of course, is no one’s idea of Albert Brooks, but if you’re at all aware of his buttoned-up reputation you should be able to appreciate all the ways the notoriously exacting director is poking fun at himself here. Well, himself and the motivational psychopathy of the modern gig economy. But hey, I’m losing the thread. This is a hypnotic, globetrotting thriller about an (alleged) master assassin losing his mojo—and even as just that, it rocks.
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Fremont
British Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalalia’s Fremont moves slowly through carefully composed black and white frames. The film follows Donya (a wonderful Anaita Wali Zada), a 20-something refugee and former translator for the American military, as she tries to get by in Northern California. She works in a small fortune cookie making factory, sees a quirky psychiatrist to help with her insomnia, and withstands the harsh judgment of her fellow refugee neighbors. As quiet and contemplative as the movie is, though, it is equally witty and warm, full of terrific characters and absurd situations.
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The Holdovers
To those who watch 1970s movies and say “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” I give you Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, a character-driven dramatic comedy that not only captures the period’s filmic sound and texture—it even employs a vintage rating card. But Payne’s latest isn’t mere pastiche, and it is hardly sentimental. The film follows a group of boys at a prestigious New England boarding school who have the distinct displeasure of spending winter break on campus with everyone’s least favorite teacher, Mr. Hunham (Paul Giamatti, at his best). Or, that’s the film’s setup anyway. But David Hemingson’s superb script takes a number of sharp turns that allow it to shed layers and continuously move, satisfyingly hitting notes both high and low. And miraculously, Dominic Sessa (as a student named Angus Tully) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (as the school cook, Mary Lamb) match Giamatti every step of the way.
In theaters
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How to Blow Up a Pipeline
If How to Blow Up a Pipeline were a pure popcorn thriller, it would still be one hell of a time at the movies. But Daniel Goldhaber’s follow-up to his 2018 cam girl horror, Cam, harnesses its edge-of-your-seat adrenaline for admirably audacious ends: To urge viewers to rethink what modern eco-activism should look like. Without becoming didactic about its politics, the film creates a context in which attacking oil infrastructure is a heroic act. It’s a subversive piece of pop entertainment, one that riffs on cinematic classics while having an eye to the future. It’s probably the film most likely to make you say “Hell yeah!” upon exiting the theater.
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The Zone of Interest
In The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer threads an incredibly tricky needle: He depicts a high-ranking Nazi family living their daily life at their home in Auschwitz, doing his best to understand them without ever sympathizing. His technique is crucial. He doesn’t film the family so much as surveil them; and rather than show the atrocities taking place nearby, we only hear them offscreen. The point is to show the cognitive dissonance and mundanity of evil; how suspending critical thought and reflection is at the root of humans’ capacity for atrocity. Overall, Zone is a massive technical feat—if it doesn’t take home a Best Sound Oscar, something is very wrong—but as clinical as it is, its effect is incredibly powerful, producing both sorrow and, hopefully, some reflection in the audience.
In theaters
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Showing Up
Sometimes a great piece of art smacks you in the face, other times its effect creeps up on you. Kelly Reichardt’s films tend to work in the latter mode, and Showing Up—one of her best—is no exception. The film follows Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a dour sculptor who works at a small Portland arts college, in the leadup to a new exhibition. It captures the realities of a working-class art-making process—the distractions, frustrations, and sporadic victories—better than any movie I can recall. Williams and Hong Chau (who plays her landlord and a fellow artist) are both better here than in their respective Oscar-nominated turns from last year. And as pleasurable as the bulk of the movie is, the quietly transcendent ending is what moved me from a place of simmering enjoyment to full-boiled enthrallment.
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Poor Things
For Willem Dafoe’s mad-surgeon-scientist, Godwin, an experiment is a self-justifying endeavor—curiosity is more than enough reason to place a baby’s brain in its dying mother’s body. That same ethos runs through all the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, though often it is edged with a spirit of cynicism or nihilism (or cynical nihilism). Not so in Poor Things, which is overwhelmingly jubilant—full of ecstatic performances, dazzling sets, imaginative language, and riotously funny moments—even as it faces head-on the sad cruelties inherent to existence.
In theaters
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Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese’s 27th feature film has a lot in common with much of his work that preceded it: It’s a big rise-and-fall American crime story, full of violence and betrayal, all told from the perspective of the bad guys. But this particular variation comes with the highest level of difficulty. In part, that’s because of who the victims are, and in part it’s because of the specifics of the story (an outstandingly dim protagonist; a marriage that doesn’t always make sense). That Scorsese pulls it off isn’t necessarily surprising—this is Scorsese after all—but that he does so with such humor, awareness, feeling, and grace is really something.
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Asteroid City
Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson at the height of his powers, juggling a constellation of stars, dual sides of postwar America, and several layers of fiction—and somehow pulling it all off with his usual visual flair and wit, yes, but also with a genuine sense of lostness and wonder. It’s, miraculously, both disaffected and deeply affecting. I’ve watched it twice now, and it was on the second viewing that my modest appreciation for it turned to full-on adoration. Which is to say: If it didn’t quite hit home emotionally on the first viewing, give it another shot.
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May December
There have been quite a few movies about romances between teenagers and fully grown adults over the past few years. None, though, has interrogated the taboo quite like Todd Haynes’s May December. The film, written by Samy Burch, finds a clever way into the story. It sends an actress (played by Natalie Portman) to shadow a former teacher (Julianne Moore) who, in the 1990s, was a tabloid sensation for an affair she had with a 13-year-old student. Now, Moore’s Gracie is married to that student, Joe (Charles Melton), and they’re getting ready to send their last kids off to college. With touches of soap opera camp and meta layers, the film keenly observes how we play roles, construct shared narratives, repress and delude ourselves. It is so insightful, so funny, so sad, and so expertly executed.
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