Top Movies of 2023: Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff

Okay, let's wrap this up. Got games to do come February. I have a lot of Honorable Mentions this year, I'll try to be as quick as I can.

Honorable Mentions:

Talk to Me, dir. Danny & Michael Philippou

I'm upset with myself that I could not find room for this one on the Top 15. Maybe I still should go back and dump Oppenheimer, actually. After all, that's just a biopic and this is a movie where a dude nearly blinds himself while possessed by ghosts. Talk to Me is a really solid horror movie about being young and stupid and playing dangerously. Only instead of the usual fun kids stuff like drugs, sex, mild vandalism, shoplifting (you know, victimless crimes), these Australian kids are summoning shambling corpses to take over their bodies. It seems like a harmless, spooky time, until Talk to Me gets very very nasty. It starts gross with a dying kangaroo on the side of the road, then keeps going down that way as our protagonist, Mia (Sophie Wilde) keeps playing with worse and worse fire. Heck of an ending too.

All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh

 This very easily could have made the list, and might have ranked extremely high, maybe Top 3. I loved 99% of All of Us Strangers. I was really blown with the tenderness and love depicted with all the characters. The magical realism gimmick of lonely adult Adam (Andrew Scott)'s time travel is clever, but the cleverness is less the point than the emotions it stirs. Adam can travel back to his childhood home to be comforted by, and eventually confront young versions of his parents (Claire Foy & Jamie Bell). Meanwhile, he is falling in love with a man in his building, Harry (Paul Mescal). It is a beautiful, sometimes delirious battle between trauma of the past and the possibility of a better future. Lots of great male facial hair - I grew a short beard because of this movie.

And yet... one of the worst fucking endings of the year. I'm furious with that choice. Furious. And yet, Andrew Haigh ends it on a gorgeous final shot, that maybe redeems the sudden swerve to horror tropes.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

One of the most fun movies of 2023 and audiences largely didn't care. Maybe this simply had bad luck, if Dungeons & Dragons had released a year later, everybody would still be horny for Baldur's Gate 3 and this movie would have killed. Or maybe not, I can never understand mass audiences. This is a great adventure movie full of fun characters, Chris Pine remains the S-Tier Chris into 2023. And while it never gets meta, you can see the meta plot of a Dungeon Master intervening in the story to make it keep moving. "Here, I'll give you an over-leveled NPC to help you through this dragon fight." "Okay, here's a teleportation devise." And then when the players start asking "wait, can we use the Portal Gun like this", the DM thinks and says "sure, you know what? That's cool". There's a gelatinous cube, there's an owlbear, there's death magic, Chris Pine sings, what more can you want? I'm impressed by the remarkably mature and serious scene featuring a hilariously tiny Bradley Cooper. Cooper is a better actor as a little Hobbit homewrecker than he is in Maestro.

Jawan, dir. Atlee

2023 was the big comeback year for Shah Rukh Khan, one of the great Bollywood stars. He had two huge action blockbusters, this and Pathaan, both extremely worth seeing. Jawan is the more ambitious movie, a play on SRK's 2007 film, Om Shanti Om, which also starred Deepika Padukone. This plot is full of twists, so I'll try not to give too much away. Let me just say that in the first few scenes, SRK appears as some kind of super human mummy in a small village and murders several attacks. Then we cut to an elaborate Taking of Pelham 123 train heist where SRK is now a bald Joker supervillain. And it only gets more bizarre from here. This is a also very relevant Indian work of social commentary, deploring recent Indian corruption scandals and government incompetence, and solving them with ridiculous Lupin III heists. SRK speaks directly to the audience, begging them to vote for their interests, not petty ethnic squabbles (very dramatic statement from a Muslim star during Prime Minister Modi's Hindu nationalist era). I wish Jawan ended with SRK punching Modi in the face, it definitely hedges the politics, but it's fun along the way.

Priscilla, dir. Sofia Coppola 

I really liked Elvis in 2022. Still, I was not pleased how little attention was given to Priscilla Presley, his wife. So Priscilla was an extremely necessary movie. Priscilla's actress, Cailee Spaeny is actually almost the same age as Elvis's actor, Jacob Elordi, in real life. But they have a a foot and a half difference in height. The way Sofia Coppola films them, Priscilla is a tiny little girl in her mom's make-up around leering horny fully-grown men. It is a very disturbing picture of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, even while Coppola shows the life at Graceland as exciting and glamorous. She buys in with the fantasy of rock'n'roll icon power at times, if only to make all this make sense, to show why anybody would do this to themselves. There's a lot of attention given to the technology and technique of femininity. Being Priscilla Presley is not an identity, it requires a lot of maintenance and staged decisions. Every part of this queen's life was manufactured by the King.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, & Justin K. Thompson

Yes, this is one the all-time great achievements in animation. I rewatched this movie recently and actually liked it more the second time. Maybe the multiverse jokes and Sony transmedia synergy were over-done. That Venom joke sucked. But I was glad to see Miles and Gwen back on another adventure, this time so much bigger and more absurd. The problem is that this is half a movie. Some Part 1s can at least be a complete story setting up a sequel, this is not. It ends on a cliffhanger. So in 2025 or 2026, Across the Spider-Verse 2 might rank very highly.

Saltburn, dir. Emerald Fennell 

I was literally halfway through writing the 2023 list when I finally saw this. No idea why Saltburn got such a weird backlash on social media. I guess some people think they're too good for licking tub drain water or sticking their dicks into grave soil. Saltburn is a gorgeous movie shot in the thin Academia ratio. That's a choice I usually find pretentious, not this time. Really great framing on a lot of shots. But the important thing is that Saltburn is a gruesome thriller, even it's social commentary is more tepid than that bathwater. And it ends on a nude dance scene that finally introduced Americans to Sophie Ellis-Bextor's pop jam, "Murder on the Dance Floor".

Suzume, dir. Makoto Shinkai 

This is the third time Makoto Shinkai has made basically the same movie since Your Name. I really like that movie, so he can doing it. Suzume is still a sincere magical romance across modern day Japan with some eco-commentary. The plot does get messy. Suzume is really too different movies, one about a girl running away from home with a college boy turned into a chair. The other is a road trip with her aunt where they listen to classic Seventies J-pop. I don't think the pieces fit together here any better than do in The Boy and the Heron, but who cares?

Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer 

A movie about the life of the Nazi with the worst haircut of them all, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel). Höss built his sprawling, idyllic family home right up against the walls of Auschwitz concentration camp. He could have made his little colony anywhere. However, he was so desensitized to his actions, he legitimately could not see how raising his children right next to the machinery of death would be a problem until they are swimming in bone fragments and Zyklon B runoff. Most of Zone of Interest is the normal every day life of this German settler family, while low in the sound mx is the screams and gunshots of the genocide happening next door. It is an extremely disturbing and impressive concept. Zone of Interest is also very boring. The boredom might be the point. I simply do not want to watch Nazi Home Movies, sorry. Respect it a lot.

Huesera: The Bone Woman, dir. Michelle Garza Cervera 

Easily the most obscure movie on this list. I think everybody missed out on this Mexican horror movie. Valeria (Natalia Solián) is a young woman in Mexico City about to have her first child. Then she is possessed by a creepy crawling demon woman. There's plenty of great movies about the body horror of pregnancy, which is fitting. It's an experience that sees your flesh radically transformed for the pleasure of a male partner and off-spring you may not even want. Glad that's not ever happening to me. Huesera combines that with themes of bisexuality, class, race, and indigenous black magic. I really should have covered this for my October demons series, just like Talk to Me. Dang.

Beau is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster 

I appreciate the attempt, man. Certainly nobody has felt more anxieties than Ari Aster did in 2023. He's replaying the same themes of intense generational trauma and hopelessness that he put into Hereditary, only this time it is a comedy - of sorts. There's a lot going on in this movie from dystopian visions of modern society to fantasy journeys to a giant kaiju penis. Beau is Afraid is a three epic of a guy being extremely not okay. At least 3/4ths of this movie is one of the most interesting theatrical experiences of 2023. If your movie reminds me of both The End of Evangelion and Synecdoche, New York, you're doing something right. 

On the other hand... this is also making the Worst List

Dishonorable Mentions:

There's like 20 more movies I really recommend from 2023. It was a really good year for movies, so good even the new Saw sequel was fun. But now we have to talk the other side of the coin:

The Flash, dir. Andy Muschietti  

This is how the Snyderverse ends, not with a bang, but with an empty theater. Yeah, this was really bad. The most promising part is the scene where our super-fast hero puts a baby in a microwave. The rest is forced, awful comedy, until it is inexplicably melodrama. The Flash also has the ugliest special effects of the year (after MODOK) in its time travel kaleidoscopes. Ezra Miller is a deeply unpleasant person, and this movie needed to have two of them. Andy Muschietti as a creator feels desperate to impress while having no style of his own. He's trying to be Zach Snyder, he's trying to be James Gunn, he's trying to be Tim Burton, and he's none of these people.

Shazam: Fury of the Gods was also terrible.

Knock at the Cabin, dir. M. Night Shyamalan 

I am not sure how you can watch this gross movie about awful things and believe that the world is worth saving. Enough people legitimately believe that God wants to murder gay people without us needing to make a movie about it, just feels tasteless. Knock at the Cabin even has the temerity to end on a vaguely hopeful note, as if this experience was worth it just by inspiring faith. Fuck you. If the entire balance of reality depends on the blood of a really nice family, then reality is fundamentally vile and should be destroyed. "The lives of billions outweigh the lives of a few" - I am not engaging in this kind of math, leave that for the fascists. We must dethrone and overthrow the deranged God of this film.

The Exorcist: Believer, dir. David Gordon Green 

I reviewed this one already. David Gordon Green has been fired for the sequel, and that's a good decision. I don't envy whoever is tasked trying to clean up this mess. In fact, just cancel that sequel.

Beau is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster

I respect this movie a lot. I also find the conclusion to be such an intense pile of misery as to be completely useless. This should be everything I love about a movie, a director's painful self-loathing represented on the screen. And instead, I'm left with this loathsome hollowness. A movie where better things are not possible. I can't love a film that depicts Jewish family roots as an inescapable cruse. Just not something I need right now - and it goes on for twenty minutes too long. I get it, already, Ari! I know it sucks, dude!

End with the giant dick, dude.

Best Performances of 2023:

Ryan Gosling as Ken in Barbie - Lol, I'm cancelled. He was the main character of the movie, and his song is the best part. Not even going to put Margot Robbie here. At least not for this movie.

Margot Robbie as Herself(?)/Actress/Wife in Asteroid City - Has only one scene, she killed it.

Sandra Hüller as Sandra Voyter in Anatomy of a Fall

Alyssa Sutherland as Ellie in Evil Dead Rise - "mOmMy'S wItH tHe MaGgOtS nOw."

Natalia Solián as Valeria in Huesera: The Bone Woman

Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon - This would have been a great movie if it were about Mollie. I think DiCaprio is awful in this movie.

Marshawn Lynch as Mr. G in Bottoms - The Academy were all cowards for not nominating Beast Mode, he's so damn funny in this.

Greta Lee and Tae Yoo as Nora and Hae Sung in Past Lives - John Maggaro as Arthur was also really good, but these are the stars.

Ji-Min Park as Freddie in Return to Seoul - Best performance of the year, I stand by it.

Mia Goth as Gabi in Infinity Pool - I'm a simple man, Mia Goth goes nuts in an exploitation movie, she's on the list.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Wright as Monk Ellison in American Fiction

Charles Melton as Joe Yoo in May December

Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre Bernstein in Maestro - Bradley Cooper made this whole movie begging and screaming for an Oscar, and well, give it Mrs. Bernstein instead, please.

Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things

Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal as Adam and Harry in All of Us Strangers

Sōya Kurokawa as Minato Mugino in Monster

Jason Mamoa as Dante Reyes in Fast X - Aquaman playing the Joker, it rules. He saves this movie.

Amie Donald and Jenna Davis as M3GAN in M3GAN - I don't think this movie is a masterpiece but M3GAN was the breakout star of 2023.

And Shah Rukh Khan for just being Shah Rukh Khan in two good movies.

Massively Inaccurate Prediction List of Best Movies of 2024:

If you check my lists from last year, I correctly named four of the fifteen movies that would eventually make my Top 15, which is actually not bad. (Also I had already seen Skinamarink by that point, so I cheated). Dune 2 is now the Hollow Knight: Silksong of movies, I'm sure it will come out one day.

15. Madame Web, dir. S.J. Clarkson - The trailer for this movie is so bizarre. It is a horror groundhog's day superhero movie. I think AIs are already running studios, because what the fuck is this? This could not make any sense to a human.

14. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, dir. George Miller

13. Alien: Romulus, dir. Fede Álvarez

12. Nosferatu, dir. Robert Eggers

11. Challengers, dir. Luca Guadagnino - One of several movies I saw trailers for in theaters only to learn they were going to be delayed into 2024 because of the strikes. Really annoying but life has gone on.

10. MaXXXine, dir. Ti West - Kinda weird news about this one since Mia Goth is being sued for allegedly kicking an extra in the head. Hmm.

9. Drive-Away Dolls, dir. Ethan Coen

8. The People's Joker, dir. Vera Drew - People might be hyped for the wrong Joker movie this year.

7. Megalopolis, dir. Francis Ford Coppola - Or maybe this is the Hollow Knight 2 of movies.

6. Blitz, dir. Steve McQueen

5. The Taste of Things, dir. Trần Anh Hùng

4. The Shrouds, dir. David Cronenberg - Can the Cronenberg Family pull off a hat trick on my Top 15s?

3. Love Lies Bleeding, dir. Rose Glass

2. Mickey 17, dir. Bong Joon-ho

1. Dune: Part 2, dir. Denis Villeneuve - HYYYYYYYYYYYPE!!!

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 1 - Asteroid City

1. Asteroid City, dir. Wes Anderson

It was inevitable. Wes Anderson was bound to make the Best Movie of the Year one of these years. And I think Asteroid City might be the single best movie he's ever made. Maybe the only out-and-out comedy on this Top 15 list too. Way out of character for me.

Nobody else is out here doing it like Wes Anderson. There are plenty of directors making strange, experimental, very formalist films. But they are not getting wide releases and being a reliable a money-maker while doing it. Anderson has only gotten weirder since the main criticism of him became "oh he's just so twee". (Whatever the fuck that means.) I think every time somebody claims his style too affected, he doubles down yet again on his aesthetic. Mainstream American filmmaking has been painfully realist for a century now, especially with a focus on "naturalistic" dialog. Meanwhile, Anderson has invented a very retro yet also timeless patter in his conversations. Everybody is under-acting yet hamming it up. Why would you not love that? Even the critics might be getting tired of Wes Anderson at this point. Asteroid City had a mixed reception for him. But ultimately, it does not matter what the audiences or the critics think, the fact of the matter is: everybody wants to work with this guy. Wes Anderson has all-star casts of incredibly diverse actors, young and old, from Tom Hanks to Maya Hawke. People want to be a part of these. Maybe because these are their last chance to do something bonkers that audiences actually will see.

There is a crushing density to the layers of cultural reference at play in Asteroid City. That could be exhausting, you rarely see so much cross-connection happening in a movie, versus say, high literature. Thomas Pynchon can go from a Batman pun to experimental physics in the span of a page in Gravity's Rainbow - it is much rarer to see that happen on the screen. I'm going to struggle to do Asteroid City complete justice. That Slim Whitman song in the soundtrack is not just Fifties flavor, it's a nod to Mars Attacks!, a great Tim Burton movie that seemingly nobody but this author likes. I caught that reference at least

Also, Asteroid City is a jumble of a thousand ideas, somehow being about extremely contemporary issues while a period piece. If I cannot grasp all the meanings, well, that may be fitting, since Asteroid City has a running theme about the lack of easy, singular resolutions. How even an artist can get lost in their art. And maybe getting lost is great, you can learn a lot while making a mess.

Definitely the most striking thing about Asteroid City is its art style. Anderson has had a lot of inspiration over the years and made some really fun decisions, yet I don't think his work has ever looked as good as it does in Asteroid City. The intense saturation of color, the thick teals and oranges, the whole movie feels like Norman Rockwell fused with Chuck Jones. It is a Wile E. Coyote vs Roadrunner universe of vibrant inviting landscapes, staged so perfectly as to be both sumptuous and as radioactive as the perfectly plumed atomic tests landing just in the background (with exact comic timing). The mushroom clouds are just one of several running gags, one being Asteroid City's own roadrunner. It's a fun little puppet that dances over the end credits. Meanwhile, the frame story is a crushing black and white, a stark and bleak in comparison.

In the Wes Anderson universe, the artifice has increasingly become the point. Asteroid City is continuing a trend that he's been building up in previous works like The Grand Budapest Hotel and especially 2021's The French Dispatch where the stories are dense and confusing layers of metafiction. The plot part of these stories only exist four or five layers into story-within-a-story, a kind of Scheherazade of mediums within mediums within mediums. Asteroid City's "Asteroid City" part exists as a Fifties live broadcast of a documentary about the making of a stage play. So it is a televised non-fiction behind-the-scenes of a theatrical work of fiction that we are seeing as a movie. Feel free to uncross your eyes after working that out. Asteroid City finally shatters the order of reality by going recursive and increasingly experimental. The frame story can no longer hold. Anderson's style of perfect mathematical symmetry makes you think he is in absolute control. Yet Asteroid City is shaking and quaking, ready to collapse into meta chaos due to tough, impossible to answer questions.

The "central" Asteroid City part of this movie is about a group of genius adolescents and their guardians traveling out to Southwest for a science contest. This allows for a typically Anderson-y collection of character actors to play odd roles, as these people wander around, ponder philosophy, and get embroiled in nonsense. Our central leads are Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a newly widower-ed war photographer, who enters a fling with Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a beautiful Marilyn Monroe-esque actress. There are dozens of other Anderson regulars like Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, and Edward Norton. Bill Murray barely missed being in this movie thanks to coming down with COVID. (Which is fitting.) Suddenly the pleasant blues and yellows of this desert landscape are interrupted by an alien landing in one of greatest choices of non-realistic special effects ever. You will cheer seeing how this is pulled off. It is as delightful as when Hayao Miyazaki gave his bird big gnarly teeth. The alien invasion causes the government to crack down and seal the town up, and suddenly Asteroid City is a pandemic metaphor.

It is interesting that the main romance between Augie and Midge takes place with shot-reverse-shot of them staring out each one's respective cabin, framed within their square of communication, talking at length and falling in love because there is simply nothing else to do. In today's world we do a communicating at a distance, framed within our digital rectangles, especially during the pandemic years. Years that paradoxically tore us our wider communities to pieces but made us closer to each other in our bubbles. Meanwhile, everybody else from the MacBeth-ian trio of adorable little girls witches to the singing cowboy to the motel owner selling land speculations out of a vending machine are just here. They merely hang around, waiting for something. It is very funny, but waiting for what?

There is a sense of nervousness and tension as the entire world has been changed irrevocably, yet in some ways, not at all. The tension eventually breaks, and they all stare around, blink a few times, and mostly they meanders back to doing what they were doing before. It was the most important moment of all these characters' lives and also, just an unplanned relaxing holiday in the sunny desert. Out in the distance these unspeakable terrors of modern science keep exploding, as Asteroid City is yet another sequel to Oppenheimer. But there is no clear revolutionary answer in the alien or the mushroom clouds. How could all this happen to change our fundamental understanding of our place in the universe and yet nothing "happened"?

The shot-reverse-shot framing will recur later when Jason Schwartzman, maybe playing himself now, violently breaks the entire movie to storm out, demanding some kind of great meaning. Only he finds Margot Robbie on a balcony outside the theater. She was playing his wife until her role was deleted. And they have a deeply meaningful conversation with again, that rectangular distant communication. This is an incredibly beautiful scene, which has profound meaning for all these characters. It is this missing piece of the story inserted as externally as it can be outside "Asteroid City" the play, outside the "movie", and indeed, outside the frame story's structure, literally and figuratively. But even this is not really an answer. It's pathos, but so what?

I think I know what this movie really is. Asteroid City could be a useful way of processing the grief of loss or the existential horror that these last four to eight years have been. At times it is just a weird comedy movie about horny people in the desert and even hornier people in the frame story. "YOU CANNOT WAKE UP IF YOU DON'T GO TO SLEEP" chants the entire cast to a confounded star. That does not make any sense, or does it make all the sense?

Well, David Lynch always has seen film as a dream. In some ways, Asteroid City's preposterous universe full of smoking pipes, precocious children, bored generals, Silver Age science gizmos, and who knows what else, is the dream Wes Anderson has had. Ultimately, this is what art is. If you just know the answer, you don't need to invent an entire town full of weird people to explain it. Just say it. But that's the thing, you don't always know the answer. We need imagination to process the parts of our world that do not make sense and might never make sense. You cannot suffer the indignities of reality for too long. Sometimes you just need to sleep and let the irrational parts of your mind deal with the mess of consciousness. Maybe along the way, maybe somewhere in the dream, those pieces can fit together into a coherence that a waking person can never find. And hey, a movie is a lot of fun. Why not dream the cinematic way?

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 2 - Return to Seoul

2. Return to Seoul, dir. Davy Chou

Am I alone out here? I have not seen this on any other Top 10/15/whatever list for 2023. I guess Return to Seoul got lost in shuffle somehow. Many critics got to see in it 2022 at festivals, it released very early in 2023 for anything close to a wide audience. Maybe it has a more difficult task in finding its exact "lane" to market itself. Return to Seoul is a French film about a French woman of Korean descent, often using English as a neutral language in what is to her a foreign country. Also, it was made by a French-Cambodian director, so this was Cambodia's entry for Best International movie at the Academy Awards last year. All that confusion of identity and place in terms of marketing might be fitting actually.

Return to Seoul follows Freddie Benoit (Ji-Min Park) across three visits to Korea over the course of five years. This is the country of her birth but not her country, since she was adopted by French parents and thinks of herself as a French woman. She claims the first visit is a complete accident, merely a result of a mix-up after her planned flight to Tokyo was cancelled. While she acts like just a tourist out for a good time of Korean hot pot, Soju, sex with a guy she met that night, she is also searching for herself. Tena (Guka Han), the young manager at Freddie's hostel, helps Freddie connect with Korean adoption agencies and eventually meet her biological family. 

Freddie's father (Oh Kwang-rok) and his family take her in with aggressive speed, which pushes Freddie away. Meanwhile her mother does not answer the message at all. Meanwhile Freddie is not making the best life decisions either. She is stuck between identities and things are moving way too fast. The sudden switch to "just out for a good time" desperately dancing at a bar alienates her new friends. Each time we meet Freddie in each subsequent visit to Seoul, she seems to be in a worse place, in relationship she torpedoes on a sudden whim, in an arms-dealing job, and still unsure of herself.

Obviously the comparison has to be made with yesterday's movie, Past Lives, which is also a movie about conflicts between Korean and Western identities. It was a hard call choosing between the two, one is a movie about a Korean woman living in the West, one is a movie about a Western woman in Korea, both feeling intense cultural pulls by their ethnicity. Return to Seoul is more about the feeling of being "owned" by your ethnicity, which is a disturbing concept in a way, especially when you're young and do not want to be defined by anything other than yourself. Everybody wants Freddie to be Korean, Freddie just wants to be Freddie.

I do need to talk about Ji-Min Park, whose performance as Freddie is my single favorite in all of 2023. Best Actress of the Year, the Academy already got it wrong. She is incredible in this movie. At times shes is coolest person who has ever walked the Earth. Then at other times, she's intensely vulnerable, growing more and more quiet not just because of the language barrier. Her great strength as an actress is that smile, pictured above. Slightly crooked, slightly cocky, trouble-making, perfect expression for Freddie when she's at her strongest. Of course everybody falls in love with her in Korea, how could you not? When her face is neutral, she becomes guarded, just another face in the jumble of a Seoul street, anonymous to everybody, even herself. I want to see Ji-Min Park in a million movies now, she should be a super star.

Return to Seoul is a great view of South Korea. It's beautifully-shot, both in the hot chaos of nightclubs and the still cool tranquil air of a morning after. This is kind of movie that makes you want to get really drunk on Soju. (Never a bad choice, until it's really a bad choice.) I need to go to Korea one day.

I also need to compare Return to Seoul to one of my favorite movies of 2022, The Worst Person in the World. Both films about a young person struggling for identity and refusing to be owned by the men or nations in their lives. In retrospect, I should have made that MOTY 2022. I may regret not giving the prize to Return to Seoul too. I really love Return to Seoul's ending, is a terrible rejection, it should be a heartbreaking nihilist non-answer. But also, we see Freddie one last time, now on her own, backpacking across the country, finally seeming content with herself. Somehow at peace in the stillness and quiet, finally able to live with herself as herself. Nothing in particular happened, there was not a great lesson or moment of clarity. She seems like she just grew up. And the only thing that can make that happen is time. Luckily, for most of us at least, there's always more of it.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 3 - Past Lives

3. Past Lives, dir. Celine Song

This hurts. I am in agony picking one movie over another for this Top 3. In a year I could be screaming at myself that I did not rank Past Lives No. 1 overall. Choices are brutal sometimes.

I love all the people in Past Lives. This movie is all about the crushing difficulty of choice when every option is good. This is a love triangle with one woman and two men, classic structure. That triangle is either a choice between two lives you could lead, or an attempt to win back the love of your life, or it is trying to keep a girl. In all cases, these are lovely, kindhearted people wanting to do the right thing. They are all struggling with the onset of middle age, and the realization that their lives now have more closed doors than open ones. Usually just living your life is not so brutally tragic, but Past Lives is a less fantastical Everything Everywhere All at Once. There is this understanding that in every moment, increasingly more branches are torn off from the lives you could have. Until your existence is a denuded tree, just the trunk, moving linearly in time towards the end. Maybe that twig is a very happy life. Hard to not to mourn the multiverse of lumber littering the ground around it though.

Past Lives begins with Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), a twelve-year-old Korean girl whose family immigrates to North America, separating her from Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), a boy in her class she has a crush on. Na Young, eventually changes her name to more the English"Nora" (now played by Greta Lee) and becomes an author living in New York. Hae Sung grows up in Korea (now played by Teo Yoo), and reconnects with Nora twice, once on Skype in college, then again in the present day. In college, the realities of a long-distance relationship meant it could just never work, they could never meet in person. Instead Nora made a life with Arthur (John Magaro). The conflict of the movie is around Hae Sung taking a vacation to New York, "shooting his shot" as it were, one final time. 

The man looks great in that button-up shirt and has a solid haircut. Tough call, Nora.

I have to say that Past Lives is probably the single-best directed movie of 2023. This is a gorgeous movie. There is a six-minute long take at the end of this movie all shot along a street in the Village for the final "confrontation". The moves with the block left and right, from Nora's front door and then back again. It is amazing they were able to get all this done, NYC was nice enough to play along with the drama. There are some really beautiful shots in all the places Past Lives was filmed. I love the playground they found for preteen Na Young and Hae Sung to have their "date". I have to go to this carousel they visit in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Celine Song frames awkward three-way conversations with our lead trio, across two languages, with both men barely able to understand each other, and it somehow all works. That takes an intense empathy for everybody involved. It is the kind of filmmaking you have to admire.

(Could maybe this have been solved with a three-way? Probably not, but I think it was worth a shot.)

This is an achingly sincere movie. Past Lives is shot immaculately and yet it is overwhelmed with emotion. It is full of long conversations with pregnant pauses, because these are all people who love each and love being around each other. And as long as this night, this one visit to a bar, or this one meandering excursion out to a pretty part of the East River continues, the difficult questions the story asks never needs to be answered. Nobody needs to cheat on each other in a love triangle, nobody needs to be the cad or the slut or the tyrant. Past Lives just has people together in a moment, and it is heartbreaking when the moment ends.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 4 - Infinity Pool

4. Infinity Pool, dir. Brandon Cronenberg

Are these lists getting too tasteful? All these important movies with deep commentaries, and only one horror movie so far. Way too many Best Picture nominees in the Top 15. What am I, Barrack Obama here?

Anyway, here's the nastiest movie I saw in 2023, Infinity Pool. Obama would never put this on any list, unless he wanted to bomb it.

Infinity Pool starts off as a pretty broad commentary on the shittiness of tourism as cultural exploitation. Then it just keeps going with that thought all the way until it is a nightmare of excess and hedonism. Just when you think this movie has truly gone off the rails and lost whatever point it was making, it keeps going into another level of Hell. Maybe that initial point never mattered at all. Instead Infinity Pool returns to a running theme in Brandon Cronenberg's work, the destruction of the self. His previous film, Possessor was an equally brutal and unrelenting movie, that time how violence leads to the annihilation of identity. Infinity Pool is like the SciFi Spring Breakers, a party that never stops until you're completely hollowed out, a husk of what you once were.

We open with frustrated novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman) on vacation in a non-existent place called Li Tolqa. Other than Infinity Pool being shot around a lovely stretch of Croatia's coastline, the concept of Li Tolqa is that it is no place. "Li Tolqa" sounds like a mixture of Chinese and Romance languages, linguistically nonsensical. The resort staff offer every kind of international cuisine and belly dances. It is a nation of exoticization, without a history and only here to serve the whims of rich foreigners. The only thing the Li Tolqa people have is a local festival where they wear these horrible, very upsetting masks. We see the resort is a heavily-guarded compound, much like several third world resorts. You can take cruises to Haiti right now and see barbed wire ringing your beaches. But the resort is just the first layer of the exploitation Cronenberg Jr. has imagined for us. Really the entire country is a playground for your pleasures.

At first, it seems like Li Tolqa has an extreme and unusual form of justice. James meets Gabi (Mia Goth, an ever-reliable scream queen), a fellow tourist and the rare fan of his writing. She leads him out of the resort and into increasing danger. After a drunken hit and run, James is dragged off by the police. He then gets to watch the murder of his own clone, a scapegoat for his sins. Turns out, this is a new expensive titillation, a suicide by proxy, an eroticism of self-annihilation. Em is on the first flight home, James is on the wild adventure with Gabi into new and more depraved forms of pleasure. Quickly he learns that tanks to the cloning, laws effectively do not exist. All lives are just another consumptive thrill. And I'll admit, Mia Goth is on another level of sexy intensity here versus even her great performances last year in X and Pearl. She could lead anybody down some very dark places.

Except eventually hits there limit. When everything is a joke, every person is just a thing to be exploited, where does the exploitation end? Well, it doesn't. There are no safe words in Li Tolqa. This is going to end very badly for James.

Infinity Pool can compete well with Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid in being a movie all about the utter decimation of its protagonist, top to bottom, in complete humiliation. (Personally, I like this one a lot better.) Infinity Pool goes way more extreme into orgies and terror and B. Cronenberg's increasingly beautiful and surreal hallucinations. He has a very unique vision of horror, distinct from the Elder Cronenberg. 

I have to admire how hardcore this movie goes. You have Mia Goth just shrieking at the end, in full monster-mode, doing all she can to tear the world down for a gag.  Infinity Pool starts with a weak nagging of the privileged, to open the door to an utterly sadist fantasy. Infinity Pool is gratuitous to the point that the snake eats its own tail. Let us all enjoy our fetishes on our way down to oblivion.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 5 - Godzilla Minus One

5. Godzilla Minus One, dir. Takashi Yamazaki

I have to put cards on the table. I love Godzilla more than life itself. Huge fan. So maybe some bias creeps in here. But also, this was the fifth best movie of 2023.

Sometimes a giant monster is just a giant monster. But Godzilla's thirty-eight features, nearly seventy-year-long filmography also covers many metaphors. He can be the terror of the atomic age (Gojira), environmental catastrophe (Godzilla vs. Hedorah), governmental incompetence in the face of crisis (Shin Godzilla), or the lingering guilt of Japan's crimes in the Second World War (Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack). He's a very flexible performer: villain, antihero, or superhero depending on need. Japan's champion or the embodiment of its destruction. Godzilla Minus One needs the Big G-man to be as mean as he's very been before. This is not a sequel (in fact the opposite) but Minus One is following the tone previously set in Hideaki Anno's Shin Godzilla. In the Reiwa era, our kaiju icon is a complete nightmare, an awful force of punishment, so awesome as to be a surreal terror.

The "Minus One" in the title tells us this is Godzilla's first period piece, set nine years before the series began in 1954, right around the end of World War II. Our protagonist is Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot unable to complete his mission. His failure to die "honorably" or even open fire torments him. However, his survivor's guilt is only the second-most pressing piece of baggage from the war, the bigger problem being a rampaging giant radioactive monster that follows Koichi home to Tokyo. Two years pass, Koichi has just put his life back together with his partner, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), while Japan rebuilds and life feels normal again. And that's when Godzilla shows up to ruin everything, to demand answers for all the uncomfortable questions left unanswered by WWII.

There are uncomfortable tensions at the heart of Godzilla Minus One. For one, Koichi's "crime" is in fact, the correct choice. Dying for a cynical and cowardly, if not even criminal Emperor, would be a pointless act of nothing. The Axis Powers were trapped in a death cult, their actions after 1942 having no logic other than to kill as many people as possible, including many of their own citizens. 1945 is a year of many tragedies, the self-extermination by the Germans and Japanese is no less a horror than those they inflicted upon others. Every pilot who killed himself in the air was a victim, murdered for a war effort everybody knew was no longer in doubt.

The survivor's guilt of a World War can be a terribly negative thing. WWII was launched by men who refused to believe WWI really was for nothing. Here in America our misadventures in the Middle East were pointless replays of the disasters of Vietnam, attempting to rewrite history in the blood of another few countries. Japan also has struggled to make clear sense of its past. Yukio Mishima, one of the greatest Japanese writers post-war, turned towards a quixotic fascist coup. In his suicidal stunt, he could not accept any reality other than one where his country betrayed the Emperor, rather than the other way around. Mishima admired the kamikaze pilots and in a way died with them, decades after the war ended. Koichi could easily be another body on the pile, Godzilla being his excuse.

And that left me very worried watching Godzilla Minus One. Especially as Koichi starts flying around, with private plans to take on the big monster. He's flying a J7W Shinden fighter, an unused WWII prototype jet fighter. This leaves the movie with a very important choice to make. Will Godzilla Minus One choose to reject the death cult? Could it give these victims a final battle, one about life instead of death?

I also should mention that Godzilla Minus One is a fucking amazing special effects blockbuster. I'll never be 100% happy with a CG Godzilla, there is a magic lost by moving beyond miniatures and suits. But accepting what we have, this is a movie that can recreate all the greatest thrills of Steven Spielberg creature features. There's a Jurassic Park T-Rex attack and Godzilla plays Jaws. The finale is a spectacular thriller. The big attack on Tokyo is terrifying. The atomic ray only gets closer and closer to a replay of Hiroshima, and only more nightmarish. It takes a lot for me not to root for Godzilla, I think he's a nasty guy this time. Deserves an L.

Speaking of Ls, I feel awful for the next American Godzilla coming out this year. Minus One is not an act to follow.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 6 - Poor Things

6. Poor Things, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Let me be clear: I respect Yorgos Lanthimos as a director and an artist. However, I would never let him around my children. Just like I wouldn't want to date Charlie Kaufman, and I don't want to be a mother to Ari Aster. These directors might be very nice people in real life, their artistic output is great, but they also legitimately disturb me. Yorgos Lanthimos is blossoming as a creator. He's becoming more and more Yorgos Lanthimos with every movie, much like Wes Anderson how has kept doubling-down on the Wes Anderson-y-ness over the last decade. On the other hand, Lanthimos is obsessed with a pre-pubescent sexuality, especially our discomfort with such topics. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is completely intolerable if you do not want to hear preteens talk frankly about their body changes. I have not had the courage to watch Dogtooth, that might be too much for me.  

Poor Things is also a heck of a lot.

Lanthimos actually made an extreme swerve towards "normalcy" with The Favourite, a mostly-lucid period piece whose strangest details were a goose chase and some wacky dances. Poor Things feels like the punchline to The Favourite's set-up. "Oh, you thought I was transitioning into respectability? Oh no no no no no, here's a naked Emma Stone getting fucked by an ugly French man." Poor Things is another film set in the stuffy elegance of European high society, only now the psycho-sexual issues are louder and prouder than ever before. The artifice is also much more apparent than before. Most of the movie is shot on sound stages before fantasy backgrounds with airships and impossible paintery backgrounds. The whole cast is American actors cast trying on posh British accents. Frankenstein's monster is here as Dr. Godwin (Willem Dafoe), with a horrifying cubist face. Yeah, no, Lanthimos is not getting boring on us.

Also, Poor Things is effectively a Robert A. Heinlein SciFi concept, asking "what if you put an infant's brain in an adult body, and it got horny?" This sounds fairly reprehensible, maybe it is. I think Lanthimos handles this better than Heinlein would have. Poor Things makes a compelling argument in its favor, and it wants to shock. I would not recommend you go to the movies with your mom to see Poor Things, let us say that much.

Godwin is the second-generation of a family of experimental surgeons, who have a talent for grafting things together. His home is full of little duck-goats and dog-chickens wandering around. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is "God"'s latest creation, a young woman with the brain of her own unborn child implanted in her skull. Around the time Bella learns to masturbate with an apple, Poor Things is off to races with its explicit content and never stops. The sexual awakening is played just like Dorothy crashing into Munchkin Land, with an opening black and white section traded for color. That's when Poor Things fully unleashes its wild imagination of world full of unreal majesty, and also many unflattering nude men.

Bella is too adult to not act out her urges, but also too childish to know shame. So the entirety of Victorian - or really any era's - sexual politics are just fully illogical to her. Sex, it turns out, is her passion in multiple ways, it becomes her art. She confounds her foppish cad of a first lover, Duncan Wedderburn (a very hammy Mark Ruffalo) by simply not allowing him any possession over her and refusing any responsibility for his emotions - which are all his, after all. Prostitution, promiscuity, bisexuality, why not? Nobody has a good answer, except their own discomfort. Bella is in some ways, more adult about these issues than even we are. "Shame" is a negative emotion, it is bad. In basically every way it is self-destructive, allowing fear of judgment to eradicate parts of yourself. Bella is free from that. So she fucks her way around Europe, learns many things, and comes home wiser for the experience. Poor Things is like if Terry Gilliam made an Emmanuelle movie, only better.

Bella gets to be God's loving daughter and successor. And Poor Things ends on a very Lanthimosian conclusion of putting a goat's brain in a jackass human's body. Lanthimos is gonna keep getting weirder, you better watch out.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 7 - Anatomy of a Fall

7. Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet

"Murder" as a action verb has a very definitive reality. But the absolute truth of any event can only be 100% known by the universe and God. Information is never fully retrievable, it is terrifying how little we actually know, despite the brutal certainty by which we deal out punishments in the justice system. "Murder" as a legal term is much more fluid, much more up to interpretation. A trial can only have the pretense of being a fact-based enterprise. It is really only a battle between two narratives: guilty and not guilty. Especially in this case, where the physical evidence is completely inconclusive (not that forensic science is 100% trustworthy either). All the state really has in its case is a theory about what this marriage was. So was it murder? Should she go to jail? That depends on you more than the suspect or the victim.

Anatomy of a Fall will not answer the central question of what happen. It does not show the deadly fall that killed a man. The victim, Samuel (Samuel Theis) only appears in flashbacks. As a living presence he is only felt as a loud radio up in a attic while his wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller) conducts an interview downstairs. During the time frame during which Samuel falls from the third floor of his house, we follow their blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), as he walks the dog around the hills outside. Daniel has a very specific memory of hearing a conversation between his parents. However, this memory becomes so confused and litigated so heavily, even I cannot remember what Anatomy of a Fall actually showed us, if anything. Which is fitting, because the faultiness of memory is going to become a major plot point. Sandra claims to have been napping when the fall takes place. Anatomy of a Fall might frustrate some who need the closure of a definitive answer, or even a hint of an answer. But ultimately the drama is not about who did what, but how society need to punish somebody over a completely unanswerable question.

Anatomy of a Fall becomes mainly a courtroom drama, with Sandra on a stand defending her innocence versus a very aggressive prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz). Sandra's lawyer is her friend, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), a kind quiet man who is developing romantic feelings during the course of this ordeal. I cannot tell you how accurate any of this movie is to real French courtroom experiences. (It is wild how just wanting to talk about movies keeps revealing my own ignorance about so many topics, from basketball, eco-revolutionary praxis, now the Napoleonic Code.) The court that Anatomy of a Fall portrays is much more open and direct than the strict rules of who is allowed to speak in American law. This place is a half circle with defense and prosecution staring directly at each other, with the judge facing the audience. And instead of the slow, agonizing process of testimony, cross-examination, follow-ups, with each side handing off the ball in courts I've experienced, a French trail is an ongoing conversation. It is more chaotic and difficult, but also feels more human, with the accused actually encouraged to be a central part of the discussion. The case ultimately is all about her and her life, less about proof, so Sandra is effectively defending her life and her choices.

There's a lot of baggage at play here with plenty of details that would make the public resent her. Sandra is a German woman in a French court. There is the issue of choosing to speak English in a country proud of its native tongue. She's a successful writer to an artistically-frustrated husband. She's bisexual and has affairs in a sexless marriage. Daniel's blindness is core to the couple's unhappiness. The prosecution even digs into Sandra's writing to ponder if her work points to being a murderess. Eventually even the adorable family dog, Snoop, is a core piece of evidence, suddenly reminding Daniel of a major event that changes his perspective on the entire case.

I really like a lot of details in Anatomy of a Fall. Daniel could be growing apart from his mother thanks to the trial and the dirt he is learning about her. I love the very quiet romance between Sandra and Vincent. They're going through some puppy dog love, unconsummated since both know this would be a disaster, yet their final goodbye is very powerful scene. Justine Triet is using a lot of very dramatic zoom-ins (just like May December, I guess the zoom-ins is back in 2023), long-takes. This is all shot on some very handsome film stock too, great grain. Anatomy of a Fall could have been a William Friedkin movie.

Also to lay out my cards personally: Daniel's entire testimony at the end is made-up. Sandra did not kill her husband. The state's case was crap from the start. Also, the princess totally chose the tiger to eat that dude. He is lunch.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 8 - May December

8. May December, dir. Todd Haynes

Look, if I'm gonna talk about May December, I need to talk about the most important scene first.

"I don't think we have enough hot dogs..." says Gracie (Julianne Moore) looking into her fridge. The soundtrack blares a melodramatic sting. The camera zooms in, as if this was the most shocking plot twist of the soap opera that is their lives. We cut to an overhead shot of an outdoor BBQ with dozens of uncooked hot dogs on a plate, enough to feed both this outdoor party and probably the entire 101st Airborne Division as well. Considering the circumstances of this family's life, one would expect intense drama in every single decision. Instead, it is just empty fretting, a harmless miscalculation. Everything is normal - even when to outside observers, nothing can be normal. Or it is an instinct to nag, to control, when there's no reason to interfere, to remain the one adult in the family. Maybe these hot dogs really are as awful as we first thought. There's a lot of layers to hot dog politics.

May December is a take on the scandal of Mary Kay Letourneau, a notorious Nineties tabloid story involving Letourneau raping her sixth-grade student, who she eventually married. The whole thing was lurid and horrible, not helped at all by the media frenzy around it. The movie versions are Gracie and her husband Joe (Charles Melton), having been married for decades, they are facing down the prospect of an empty nest. In May December, they are visited by an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who is making an indie movie about the case. She gets to get closer to the family and everybody they know in the pretext of "discovering" something profound about the family, and to better imitate Gracie's mannerisms. It is a clever construction, where Elizabeth gets to play detective and uncover the details of this family, while her own motives are questionable. 

May December keeps playing with the sleazy angle "is Elizabeth getting too enraptured in her fantasy?", "is prestige art worth exploiting these people?" while deflating those questions at every turn. We see Elizabeth seemingly in ecstasy as she probes the "scene of the crime", then laughing to herself because in the end, she is an actress and this is play. (And not even a good actress, the lispy accent Natalie Portman puts on to match Julianne Moore is a disaster.)

The real protagonist of May December is not Gracie or Elizabeth, but Joe. That hot dog scene comes just after Gracie has scolded him about too many beers. Their family is picturesque in some ways: nice house in Savannah, Georgia, three shockingly well-adjusted kids, a daughter in college and another about to graduate high school. The daughters even know how to cope against their mother's passive aggressive barbs. But the problem is, while Joe is the center of the family and he's doing all kinds of emotional labor to help Gracie through her depressive episodes, he's not really a father. He's the biggest kid, whose childhood was stolen while he was never allowed to grow up. He sneaks weed with his son, is blind-sided by the idea of casual sex. 

Elizabeth probably ends the movie having learned nothing of significance except surface details. Joe, however, realizes he has been deeply in denial about everything that happened to him.

There's also that interesting tension of exploitation, which May December seems aware of. This movie is one of Netflix's big awards swings for 2023. Todd Haynes is no slouch when it comes to prestige drama directors. Yet this source material is on its face disgusting. Even the characters in May December lament the terrible Lifetime made-for-TV movies made about their lives. Elizabeth struts around like she's making real art and this is her big swing. But where Haynes was smart enough to make a movie about the aftermath of the abuse, not the abuse itself, Elizabeth is not. We have horrible scenes where Elizabeth is looking at young Asian boys' headshots and saying to her director "no, they're not hot enough".

It would be very easy to walk away from a story like this and see Gracie as the predator that she is (she is a hunter, Joe is a nurturer with his butterflies), even under the veneer of suburban pleasantries she has created. However, May December is complicating that further by making its own project feel gross through the eyes of Elizabeth. We end with just a few takes of Elizabeth's movie-within-a-movie, and to answer the question of "is great art worth exploiting and manipulating lives?" The answer is: "no".

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 9 - Oppenheimer

9. Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan

I think the details of my theater-going experience is essential to my reviews of these movies. I like the idea that a movie can be a platonic ideal, of the same quality and purity regardless of how you saw it. But I know that's not true. Movies exist in our world, they have mass, they take energy to produce and maintain. The art itself is not the end of the object, the object also includes its material history, its effect upon the world, for better or worse, and also the medium by which it gets to my eyes and ears. I'm going to enjoy a movie more in a cinema versus at home, especially if the theatrical experience is unique and special in some way. And isn't "unique and special" what we're after here in the first place?

I saw Oppenheimer twice in the largest screen possible, the IMAX at AMC Lincoln Center. The screen was so large that the atomic test might have been at full 1:1 scale. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in close-ups could have cradled Godzilla in his arms. There were little cigar marks on the film bigger than cars. I hurt my neck looking up for three hours, because I was sitting in the front row - the only seats available. This was an event, a pilgrimage of film consumption. 

Then I did it all over again! All three hours. Still in the front row. You cannot have a better presentation of a movie. I wish could watch every movie on that screen with people that excited. They came to that place for magic, just as Nicole Kidman says, and Oppenheimer delivered.

Oppenheimer is not the epic thrill-ride you'd expect with these massive cameras, massive screen, and drawing blockbuster crowds. Mission: Impossible 7 tried so hard to entertain with never-ending train crashes and tossing its star off an actual cliff. And yet - Oppenheimer drew the buzz. It was a more exciting and entertaining movie, despite being mostly white guys in suits in meetings suffering petty bureaucratic revenges. Sure, this is a biopic about the guy who led the team that built the atomic bomb. You're gonna big a kaboom, an earth-shattering kaboom in Oppenheimer, and it is thrilling. But after that is another hour of guys, suits, and meetings. This is Christopher Nolan at his most dull and Oscarbait-y, no Batman, no spaceships, no time travel, and yet he's filmmaking, man. This is great stuff. It's impossible to look away.

Oppenheimer is doing most of the things I hate in being prestige biopics. We go from college-aged Oppenheimer in dusty classrooms full of nerds crunching numbers to the Second World War in about an hour.  We're racing past decades of this guy's life, keeping the details of the math simple for the audience, dropping a few references to Enrico Fermi and wave-particle duality for the people in the audience who actually have read a physics book before. Yet it's never too complicated, you can cheer for hearing the name "Robert Feynman" but this movie is not too concerned with showing its work in the calculations. There are thhe complications of socialism and the war, Oppenheimer's womanizing, it is all glossed over. Two really good actresses in Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are given crap roles as the movie unhappily goes through the motions of remembering women exist. 

Yet, Oppenheimer never stops. The right filmmaking can make anything thrilling. Oppenheimer has one of the best edits of a movie I've ever seen, solving the problems of exposition and simplification by turning the Manhattan Project into a tense heist, racing to full off the caper before time runs out. And even getting experimental and surreal once Oppenheimer realizes the terror he's unleashed.

Still I would not recommend people make movies like this, unless you are as good as Chris Nolan. And even Nolan should not do this again. Please make a movie about cyborg dinosaurs or something next.

There's also an entire B-plot involving Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in black and white with his Senate confirmation hearing for a Cabinet post in 1959. It ends up a mirror image of Oppenheimer's own struggles in the back-stabbing world of Washington politics. But Oppenheimer struggles to find this post-game vindication as any of kind of pleasant resolution. Oppenheimer points out that in WWII, there was another through the atomic nightmare maybe in the mind of idealists, but were the idealists wrong? America did not need to conquer the world with a zero sum atomic game with the fate of humanity at stake. There was a real chance to make a better world, instead warmongers and technocrats grabbed everything they could. They won, the rest of us are just acceptable losses if and when the missiles launch. For way too long, nobody understood what a mistake letting out the atomic genie has been.

At least the kaboom looks really cool.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 10 - The First Slam Dunk

10. The First Slam Dunk, dir. Takehiko Inoue

Yes, three Japanese movies in three days. Japan had a really good 2023. We got nine movies to go after this, and who is to say Japan is done winning?

I did not know anything about the Slam Dunk manga from the 1990s by Takehiko Inoue. (Hm, that name sounds familiar!) But even with complete ignorance, a very buzzed-about anime production is rarely a bad decision. I've heard that sports anime is a great genre of shonen. So I went into a theater blind one Saturday mid-afternoon, knowing only some that movie called The First Slam Dunk had won the Japan Academy Prize for Best Animation. It beat Makoto Shinkai's new movie, Suzume, and two anime musicals I loved from 2022, One Piece Movie: Red and Inu-Oh. The audience was full of young kids and their parents excited to see young men play some cartoon basketball. They were all cheering, we were all cheering. The First Slam Dunk is one of the best sports movies I have seen.

Frankly, this was the single best sporting event, fiction, non-fiction, whatever, that I saw in 2023. Maybe just behind the Broncos upsetting the Bills in Buffalo, which I got to see in person. But that game was a sloppy farce. The First Slam Dunk was the real deal. If you wonder what a good game looks like, examine the game shown in this movie, all the twists and turns, all the dramatic shifts in score. We have two great teams with very different styles and personalities playing their hardest and at their best in a high school basketball championship. It is the underdog misfits, Shohoku High School taking on the powerhouse Sannoh Kogyo High. Classic tale of the scrappy fun team versus the cold, unyielding steamroller. By the end of The First Slam Dunk, my audience might have forgotten all this was fiction, it was not a movie anymore, it was sports magic.

The First Slam Dunk follows a great documentary structure of cutting from the present to the backstories of our heroes. Think of things like The Last Dance or Secret Base's history of The Cleveland Cavaliers. In the early minutes of the championship game, Shohoku's hopes are dashed when Sannoh Kogyo's attack goes entirely to plan, methodically building a brutal lead. Meanwhile, we cut back to our protagonist, Ryota Miyagi (Shugo Nakamura)'s early life learning to love basketball as a little brother to a rising star. Ryota is a short king, but has been the little guy on the court all his life, he knows how make up height with speed and quick judgment. Unfortunately, for most of the first half, Sannoh Kogyo has Ryota completely boxed out and beaten. Our hero should shine thanks to his tragic history and determination, but he is not the core of his team tonight. Is this ever going to turn around? Will any of the boys on Shohoku, including the ex-thug or the pretty boy figure anything out?

There is an interesting choice to mix CG and 2D animation in The First Slam Dunk. I could understand not liking this choice. But I'm sure the director, Takehiko Inoue, consulted with the mangaka, Takehiko Inoue, on how best to bring his work to the screen. The online screenshots do not do the movie full justice. The ultimate goal is fluidity and realism. The First Slam Dunk captures how a basketball play develops, and how a one-on-one match-up unfolds better than any other movie I've ever seen. This is movie clearly made by people who have studied this sport and how bodies move while playing it down to every detail. All the players in the championship, even the opposing team, have unique technique, physicality, and personalities reflected in their play. Basketball media has generated superhuman heroes that overshadow everything, the Chicago Bulls are less famous than Michael Jordan. Yet, this is a team sport, and team synergy and strategy is what really makes things work. So eventually, Shohoku, once they finally recover from their early defeats, can start matching Sannoh Kogyo, even with on-paper less talented players. It just takes the right guys for the right moments, the right adjustments, and, to be lazy and use a sports cliche, momentum.

I think I understand basketball better having seen this movie. I appreciate the art and technique now, the beauty of it. That's the biggest compliment I can give to any movie, that it makes the audience love its obsessions. The First Slam Dunk nails it.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 11 - Monster

11. Monster, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Monster will keep you guessing as who the titular monster is. This a three-act mystery film, switching POVs in a twisty fashion. It is the same thriller structure as one of my favorite movies, The Handmaiden (this blog's Movie of the Year, 2016). It invites you to question the motives of its protagonists, to wonder about everything you've seen. Is this all going to be a con within a con? How many layers of con is there really? It's a very slick concept for a movie. So who is the monster? Is it a creepy shifty teacher? Is it a school bully? Is it a wicked principal? Maybe the biggest twist of all is that Monster is not trying to trick you. The audience and the characters are so busy looking for the monster, they miss what's really happening until it is too late. We can all sense that something is wrong, just some monsters are too ingrained and too fundamental to ever be named.

The wildest place a thriller could go is where Monster goes - to not being a thriller at all. I'm going to have to tip-toe carefully here because this is a very under seen movie from 2023 and I don't want to spoil everything. (Forgive me if I do it anyway, just stop reading here if you're worried. SPOILER WARNING.) We get clever reveals, such as how a photo was posed for dramatic effect, revealing one character to be utterly cold-blooded. But the final act is not building the tension to a grand reveal, complete with a flashback of every point were the movie's sleight of hand misled us while the Saw theme plays. The final act switches genres entirely to a bubble of freedom and light, outside all the accusations and politics of the world we have seen so far. Monster has a horror title yet becomes very sweet.

Monster is set in a lakeside city in Japan, a place urban enough that our protagonists live in high-rise apartments, but their community is still closely-knit and gossip spreads quickly. It opens with the local brothel burning down, with rumors spreading that a middle school teacher, Michitoshi Hori (Eita Nagayama) was seen leaving with an escort. All the mothers of the students relish this juicy detail. Our first POV is Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō), a single mother raising Minato (Sōya Kurokawa), one of Mr. Hori's students. Weeks after the fire, Minato begins to exhibit strange behavior. He's old enough that he's developing a separate life away from his mother for the first time, and it is complicated by the boy's many secret worries. He's asking strange questions, he's collecting odd things, and he's going to abandoned places in the woods. Eventually Minato reveals to his mother that he's being hit and mocked by Mr. Hori. This is the first we hear of a recurring delusion in Monster that he believes his brain has been replaced secretly by a pig's brain, which Mr. Hori told him.

At first, Monster is more a bureaucratic drama with Saori stepping into the school, demanding an explanation. She is then met by an intense wall of over-dramatic apologies and politeness, none of which answer anything. It feels like a uniquely Japanese cultural concern, that you can bow so low in contrition that you can hide the truth written on your face. However, Saori's crusade against Mr. Hori will turn out to be a complete misdirection. Our next POV is Mr. Hori himself, who is a ridiculous, almost Ichabod Crane-like man, all skinny awkwardness. He's a harmless dope, trapped in the gears of a very public scandal. He's actually an interesting comparison to Saori, a child-like man unwillingly made the villain to a woman uncomfortable dressing in adult clothes, who acts more like a big sister with her son, Minato. These people are not villains, yet their search for one brings about a disaster.

In Monster is that the adults play the roles like children, and our main child actor Sōya Kurokawa, plays Minato very serious and stern. In some ways, that's what makes him the most child-like, he's trying to not be a kid. Whereas the adults might be imperfect people, they at least can be who they are. Minato is terrified of who he is. It is only in his the third act, Minato's POV, that Minato can be truly Minato, with his classmate Yori, (Hinata Hiiragi). They are together away from their parents, away from their classmates, finally free to be kids, and express emotions that they cannot otherwise dare say.

Monster is an extremely impressive movie. It is gorgeously shot. It achieves masterful performances from its entire cast, especially its two child leads. They have to carry a wide variety of feelings, probably ones they're too young to fully understand themselves. Selling a companion that could become even more is a lot to ask actors that young. Monster sees that the world needs monsters, and if there are none, it can engineer exclusions to create them. It has very important things on its mind about the limits of Japanese social norms. Something is very wrong even in well-meaning about their assumptions about queerness, and that is going to create harms that they'll never understand.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 12 - The Boy and the Heron

12. The Boy and the Heron, dir. Hayao Miyazaki

The Boy and the Heron might be a complete mess. I left this movie not really sure if any of its pieces fit together. There's a lot of movie in The Boy and the Heron. It is a dazzling fantasy adventure and also a bittersweet work of nostalgia. It combines dark memories of WWII, black magic, alternate universes, grief and loss, a cycle of life and rebirth, and also Seven Dwarfs of miniature grandmas. I am not sure how anxieties of a step-mom connect with Japan's failing war effort, or how all those work as a narrative with a lush magical landscape full of monster birds. At best I can do is imagine the movie as a metaphor for Hayao Miyazaki's own sense of self as an artist. Much as The Wind Rises was about the destructive consequences of being a creator, The Boy and the Heron might be about the terror of finally not creating. Finally retiring.

...Maybe.

It ultimately does not matter if anything in The Boy and the Heron fits together or "works". Sure, it is great when Miyazaki nails a direct commentary. But he's just as often making surreal dream-like movies whose set pieces are not paragraphs to an essay. Each one is their own conclusion. The Boy and the Heron feels like four or five different movies, each one beautiful and amazing, and it really does not matter if the movie about the Parakeet Kingdom does not conclude things that the 1945 Japan movie set up. Who cares what the birds "mean" when the birds are extremely cool as just being birds? Why does everything have to mean something? Can we just sit back and enjoy the greatest anime director of all time nail it at his craft for (probably) the final time?

There is a scene halfway through this movie where our titular Boy, Mahito (Soma Santoki) has traveled to another world, and discovers a race of tiny white inflatable balloon creatures. They're these ghost-like babies bouncing around and being the cutest little guys the film screen could ever conjure. They're pure cartoon, all smiles and buoyant and happy emotion. I loved these little things so damn much, I was never happier in a movie in 2023 than I was looking at these great Pokemon that Miyazaki had gifted us. I actually started tearing up, I was so pleased. We get an explanation as to what these babies were, how they fit into the life cycle of this fairy world and our own. None of that makes any sense based on what we learn later about the true nature of this Otherworld. The babies never come back in The Boy and the Heron. They are ultimately irrelevant to everything plot-wise. 

But who could ever complain about them? You want the movie to be less joyous?

The fact is that The Boy and the Heron is a glorious showcase of what happens when you let Miyazaki cook. Also, how great the meal can be when he allows other cooks in the kitchen. One of the most striking visual moments is the opening scene during a firebombing of Tokyo. This was done entirely by long-time collaborator, Shinya Ohira. The animation style shifts entirely to this feverish nightmare, where Tokyo is full of greasy silhouettes, barely human anymore before the flames, further twisted by the speed of our hero's desperate run. There's an equally fluid scene involving paper craft tearing as a kind of magical defense, which becomes as intense and exaggerated as a city on fire. I'm not sure who made that sequence, but Miyazaki assembled at hell of a team to pull off one of his most visually impressive movies ever. I could give up any pretension of insight right now and just gush about the amazing things The Boy and the Heron has to offer. Like the most dripping and erotic food porn jelly sandwich in anime history.

It would be very difficult to actually write a plot summary of The Boy and the Heron since the plot is so unbalanced. It ultimately comes down to Mahito trying to rescue his aunt/step-mother, Himi (Aimyon) from another dimension that steals them both from their idyllic Japanese pastoral estate. There's also an annoying bird that turns out to be the disguise of a nasty little man (Masaki Suda). (I had to cheer when the heron revealed its big gnarly chompers, Miyazaki is fucking doing it again, boys. Bravo.) The grand climax ends up being Mahito choosing between a world full of wonders and the deeply-flawed real world. It is something like a more confusing, if you can believe it, Evangelion 3.0+1.0. Ultimate both alluring fantasies that just want their audiences to go outside. The cartoon grass looks delicious but touch real grass, Miyazaki says. I think.

It is interesting that Mahito's life is semi-autobiographical for Miyazaki himself. Like the director, Mahito's father is a fighter manufacturer for the Imperial government. But Miyazaki might actually be identifying with Mahito's great-uncle (Shōhei Hino), the aged master of the fantasy land, who is looking for a successor. He has this wondrous empire full of goofy Parakeet militarists. But the empire must fall, for the real world matters more. There will not be another Miyazaki. The parakeets must return to their realistic proportions in Showa-era Japan and poop all over everybody. We must except reality, even in the face of fictional splendor.

I think. The parakeets might just be parakeets. I'm not sure I even care. I just really like this movie.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 13 - How to Blow Up a Pipeline

13. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, dir. Daniel Goldhaber

I am not actually saying you should do environmental terrorism.

There is a dangerous allure to How to Blow Up a Pipeline. This movie is willing to dance a lot closer to the flame of revolutionary violence than this author is. And the movie is based on is a non-fiction book by Andreas Malm of the same name, directly advocating sabotage as an effective tool for change. We all would prefer a world where we could just march and vote our way out these problems. However, thehre is a discussion to be had about the limits of non-violent protest. Do Gandhian strategies work when facing uncaring state violence and their radicalized political cheerleaders? Somebody should be running the numbers here, what is the cost-benefits analysis when dealing with climate oblivion? That answer might be gruesome. And even are the liberal bounds of "acceptable" political action so important that we'd be willing to sacrifice our very civilization or species for it? Hell, do those acceptable bounds even exist anymore in 2024, when we've seen the police assassinate activists, state governments charging protestors as domestic terrorists, and using RICO laws against organizers? If you're going to jail for 20 years for just sharing the names of cops who murdered a man, what else do you have to lose? If just daring to speak out is terrorism now, well, might as well go all the way with it.

But again. I'm not saying anybody should blow anything up. I will say the entire US police force should willingly disarm themselves and stop fighting for capitalist masters who are destroying what is ultimately their planet too. Seems like a fair trade for not actually needing a full revolution. But How to Blow Up a Pipeline is all a fantasy. The grim reality is that revolutionary violence is unlikely to work because we're not winning that fight. Once upon a time I'd tell you not to blow things up because the current political deal was a decent one. Now I'm saying don't do it because the bad guys have all the guns and reckless willingness to use them, you're gonna lose.

And if I knew the answer to solving all these problems, I'd be writing that right instead of reviews of movies about superhero movies. So until then, all we have is a movie.

Now How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a very good movie. (Some would argue it was the thirteenth best movie released last year!) How to Blow Up a Pipeline is entirely fiction unlike Malm's essay. It is a thriller set out in the desserts of Texas. The movie fits most in the heist genre, complete with third act reveals of the entire master plan. Only instead of Danny Ocean and his team of Hollywood stars, we have a cast of very young unknowns. And instead of stealing from Vegas, they're stealing back their futures.

How to Blow Up a Pipeine was one of two films last year that I felt captured something authentic about this next generation of young people, Gen Z is what I think we call them now. The other being the horror movie, Talk to Me, I'll discuss that one eventually. There's an awkwardness to these interactions. This is not a movie full of well-timed patter and movie star charm. It's a very diverse collection of young people, both ethnically, sexual orientation, and in personality. They're coming for a dirty, no money sleepover that ends in radical action. Some of them have decades of friendships complete with the baggage of familiarity. Some of them are total strangers. Logan (Lukas Gage) is doing some party boy punk thing and he's off in his own movie. Dwayne (Jake Weary), is an older Texas native fighting for his home, a rugged cowboy through and through. These actors have no chemistry together and they shouldn't, people like these would never fit together. Then there's Michael (Forrest Goodluck), who seems so withdrawn and insular that his character does not seem like he would have much chemistry with anybody. This is a friend group that feels like it has mostly only function before online. They've never had the time to build up an IRL rapport yet. And now they gotta do the opening to Final Fantasy VII, only probably without a robot scorpion.

This is a really good cast, I hope to see these people in more things. Lukas Gage has already having a decent run on Fargo Season 5.

This is a very effective thriller. There's multiple points of failure with the plan. It all feels so dusty and slapdash, there is no way to do a dress rehearsal of this caper. We have moments like Michael quietly telling another kid that he's going to build blasting caps in a shack, and please do not run in unless he sees. This is played so matter-of-fact, not even gallow's humor, just "I might die over there in a minute". There's a big plot point involving trying to lift an extremely heavy barrel, which is tough since these skinny boys and girls do not have the upper body strength. How to Blow Up a Pipeline lets you imagine your unimpressive, untrained, uncharismatic self out on the front lines, making change with fire.

Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 14 - Skinamarink

14. Skinamarink, dir. Kyle Edward Ball

Skinamarink is scary as all shit. If it is nothing else (and it is indeed not very much at all), it is terrifying. Skinamarink is one of the most spare, simple, largely plotless horror movies I've ever seen. It is just one singular sensation pounded into you endlessly, expertly, but it is only ever that one thing. You'll know if Skinamarink is for you within only a few minutes. It's either going to be one of the greatest horror nightmares you've ever seen in a movie, or it is going to be an exhausting bore.

What we have is a Creepypasta Movie. Skinamarink is set in 1995, and actually is shot in its director, Kyle Edward Ball's childhood home. Skinamarink was shot on digital cameras but Ball wanted a more VHS-look, so he purposefully filmed it in low light to warp the visual information as much as impossible. And on top of that, Skinamarink has a very intense artificial film grain superimposed over every frame. In many scenes, that digital grain is the only thing you can see. The effect goes beyond just playing with the technical limitations of home video, the movie is bubbling and oozing in entirely unreal ways. It feels like the very film stock is infested with maggots, writhing just under the flesh of the image. It not just "retro so its creepy", it's more. Ball has discovered a whole new concept of making movies that I've never seen before. He has remade his early memories as captured on home video, only the memories are impossible nightmares as captured in a video format that never existed.

The memory Skinamarink wants to exploit for fear is one we all know. Do you remember ever being a small child, still awake late at night, later than you've ever been awake in your short life, surrounded by a thick darkness, feeling protected only by the unearthly glow of a television set the only light in the entire house, while knowing that something is out there waiting for you in the shadows, just beyond the shifting bounds of the light projecting out from the TV set. That sensation is the entirety of Skinamarink. It is about two children, stuck in a house where the night never ends, where all the doors and windows have disappeared, and they dare not ask where their parents are. They sit in the living room, watching cartoons, playing with their toys, while surrounded by the blackness. Ball has this entirely unique filmic language, where he never shoots the movie as POV, but keeps the camera low to the ground, often pointing up at the ceiling or corners. You never see the children's faces, yet their bodies are often in the shot. You're inhabiting their perspective while they are vulnerable in the frame, it's an impressive idea. The children are not safe, and neither are you.

I'm not sure if the adults reading this also wake up in the middle of the night too scared to get out of bed and pee. Do you ever wake up and know something is on your ceiling, or under your desk, or just on the other side of your bedroom door? Or even waiting for you on your way back to bed? I am scared a lot at night in my house when I'm alone, so Skinamarink worked extremely well on me.

I spent much of the 100 minute runtime contorting myself into a pretzel in my theater chair, as if wrapping my limbs in a ball would somehow keep me safe from the overwhelming and unrelenting horror. I realized watching this movie that fear is the emotion closest to physical pain, because I felt so scared that it actually became painful at one point. Other horror movies will eventually relieve the tension with a traditional scare. Skinamarink never lets go. Jump scares are fun moments because immediately after them, you know the gag has happened, and you've jumped, so all the terror has finally found an outlet to express itself. In Skinarmink, there is no outlet. Long shots of empty rooms remain disturbing, even when nothing happens, in fact they're disturbing because so little happens. I felt like I was losing my mind watching this thing.

Meanwhile, other people left the theater after twenty minutes. For them, Skinamarink is just boring, too weird to even be scary. If the central affect does not land, there is not a lot that Skinarmarink will offer. This is a very cheap movie that goes nowhere and is largely without characters. There are not many "gags", only one jump scare (but a good one!). There's more shots of ceilings than there are of humans. The plot never makes any sense. The ghost, or possession, or whatever, follows no rules or logic. We spend long stretches of the movie without any people left at all. At a certain point, the children are hiding even from even us, the audience, so nothing can happen. I'm not sure if the ending is even worth it. Skinamarink has no punchline, no pathos, no explanation, no justification.

The nightmare simply consumes everything, and the movie is over. We're safe now only because the end credits have rolled. Are we safe? Maybe the darkness is still out there, waiting for us tonight, ready to take us away.