FILM FRENZY

By Matt Brunson

While it might have felt like the cinema of 2023 was all about Barbie and the Bomb, there were plenty of other films that likewise made their marks, whether critically, commercially or controversially. Here, then, are my picks for the 10 best movies of 2023, followed by 10 worthy runners-up and other assorted superlatives.

THE 10 BEST

1. POOR THINGS (Yorgos Lanthimos). The best film of 2023. Working from Alasdair Gray’s same-named novel, director Yorgos Lanthimos (whose 2018 release The Favourite earned my vote as the best picture of that year; go here) and screenwriter Tony McNamara have fashioned a true oddity, a Frankenstein Meets Forrest Gump flick filtered through a feminist focus. Emma Stone, taking a bold leap up to the level of today’s greatest actresses, stars as Bella, a suicide victim who’s brought back to life in the most fantastical way by quirky scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under the tutelage of Godwin, the childlike Bella receives an education within the strict confines of home, but as she matures, she realizes she wants to explore the outside world. And thus she takes off with a seedy lawyer (a hilarious Mark Ruffalo), growing ever more bold as she samples life’s perils and pleasures and in the process discovers her true self. To say that Poor Things isn’t for everyone is an understatement, yet those willing to go along for the sometimes gross yet always giddy ride will experience a movie that, much like Barbie, illustrates how a woman who knows nothing of our world’s crippling problems and prejudices might carve her own path in pursuit of becoming fully human and fully independent.

2. THE HOLDOVERS (Alexander Payne). No stranger to my 10 Best lists — The Descendants was my #1 for 2011 while 2004’s Sideways and 1999’s Election also placed extremely high — director Alexander Payne (working with scripter David Hemingson) serves up a small-scale gem that, by utilizing a 1970s setting, manages to recall the intimate cinema of that period. Paul Giamatti is perfect as Paul Hunham, a grouchy professor at a New England prep school. Despised by practically everyone, he’s given the unenviable task of looking after a group of kids with nowhere to go over the Christmas break. When he’s not hanging out with the school cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, matching her marvelous performance in Dolemite Is My Name), he’s spending time with the most troubled of the students (Dominic Sessa, an actual New England prep school student making a remarkable film debut). Full of humor and pathos, this is one of those unassuming treats that overpowers the viewer with its enormous humanist bent.

3. ALL OF US STRANGERS (Andrew Haigh). No movie from 2022 emotionally wiped me out as much as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and no movie from 2023 emotionally wiped me out as much as Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. Paul Mescal proves to be the connective tissue: Delivering a performance in Aftersun that earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination, he’s in support here; the star is Sherlock and Fleabag regular Andrew Scott, in a performance that should have earned him (but didn’t) a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Scott offers a wonderfully nuanced turn as a gay writer who sees dead people — namely, the parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) who died in a car crash when he was a child. His time with his folks is intercut with time spent with his equally lonely neighbor (Mescal), but it’s not long before the two worlds converge. Rich in meaning and metaphor, and open to various interpretations, this is a rueful and haunting study about letting people in and letting people go.

4. OPPENHEIMER (Christopher Nolan). It was quite gratifying to see that both halves of the Barbenheimer phenomenon lived up to the hype, with the approving frenzy so ear-piercingly loud that it probably belonged in an IMAX production directed by Christopher Nolan. While Barbie offers sunshine and rainbow colors to go with its satiric and social themes, Oppenheimer understandably hangs under a mushroom cloud of darkly troubling sociopolitical issues. Cillian Murphy is excellent as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose work on the Manhattan Project led to the creation of the atom bomb — as for the all-star cast surrounding him (Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., etc.), Nolan hasn’t merely collected A-listers as if they were baseball cards but instead employs their characters to help round out Oppenheimer’s story, in the process lending greater import and understanding to the thorny proceedings.

5. ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET (Kelly Fremon Craig). Based on Judy Blume’s landmark novel, this focuses on 11-year-old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) and the circumstances that arise when her mom (a phenomenal Rachel McAdams) and dad (Benny Safdie) decide to relocate from NYC to a New Jersey suburb. With the full backing of Blume, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) has fashioned a splendid coming-of-age film that’s both sensitive and perceptive — it steers clear of condescension, mean-spiritedness, and glib humor in order to truly understand the tribulations of not just Margaret but also her friends and family. This unfortunately proved to be a commercial underachiever — given what was dominating the box office at the time, perhaps they should have renamed it Are You There Mario? It’s Me, Luigi.

6. AMERICAN FICTION (Cord Jefferson). A formidable actor who has lent his support to everyone from James Bond to Katniss Everdeen, Jeffrey Wright finally lands the (leading) role of his career in this black comedy about Black literature. Wright delivers a beautiful slow-burn performance as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an academic author whose novels are rejected for not being “black” enough. After another scribe (Issa Rae) hits it big with a book called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a frustrated Monk writes a deliberately pandering novel in the guise of a fictional former convict (“Stagg R. Leigh,” from the similarly titled blues folk song) and then is flabbergasted when it’s a success. Few films from 2023 can match this one for sizable belly laughs, but the guffaws never obfuscate the issues at hand, particularly the reductiveness and stereotyping of the Black experience in America.

7. BARBIE (Greta Gerwig). What’s left to say about this cultural tsunami, a zeitgeist rattler so potent that even the usual armies of MRAs couldn’t disturb one strand of hair on its perfectly coifed head? (Not that they didn’t try; see the FOX “News” rants as well as all those down votes on IMDb.) Writer-director Greta Gerwig and co-scripter Noah Baumbach have created a colorful confection that benefits from the inspired casting of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and just Ken. The laughs are plentiful — some of the year’s biggest nyuks can be found in its digs at film school grads, Justice League fanboys, and Matchbox Twenty — but what makes Barbie truly work is its deft tackling of themes like existential crises, toxic masculinity, feminist self-worth, overarching capitalism, and the dangers of both the patriarchy and the matriarchy (the latter a key point conveniently ignored by the whiny detractors).

8. THE TASTE OF THINGS (Trần Anh Hùng). I certainly didn’t expect a porn flick to land on this list, yet here we are. To clarify, I mean “food porn”: Like Babette’s Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, and others, this is the sort of film where one can get aroused not only by the mouth-watering shots of delectable cuisine but also by the filmmakers’ ability to allow the gastronomy and the philosophy to commingle. Think of it as the art of the meal. Titled La Passion de Dodin Bouffant in its French homeland, this lovely effort from French-Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng centers on a 19th-century gourmet (Benoît Magimel) and the woman (Juliette Binoche) who has served as his cook and lover for 20 years. I suppose the central romances in Fallen Leaves and Past Lives might hold slightly more urgency and currency, but those films didn’t offer co-starring roles to a vol-au-vent and a Baked Alaska.

9. THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE (Ilker Çatak). Movies have long employed the high school to serve as a microcosm of an ailing society at large, and this German import can proudly and profoundly be added to the ledger that also includes the likes of Election, Brick, and the underrated Teachers. A middle school harbors a thief from within, and the teachers automatically assume a student is the culprit. But when an idealistic teacher (Leonie Benesch) arrives at a different conclusion and reports her findings, all hell breaks loose. As tense as any thriller, this slowly and masterfully introduces a host of real-world problems into its storyline, including the tendency of people to offer opinions without all the facts, the employment of social media to distort and distract, and the blurring of lines between ostensible heroes and villains. The non-ending is a letdown, but everything else merits a circled red A.

10. SALTBURN (Emerald Fennell). Certainly, it doesn’t feel like this divisive effort from writer-director Emerald Fennell (whose Promising Young Woman was my pick for the best film of 2020; go here) should be placed above some of the heavy hitters cited on my Honorable Mentions list below. And those folks who groused about this largely being a rip-off of The Talented Mr. Ripley weren’t entirely incorrect. Yet there’s something to be said about movies that take root in the mind’s eye and refuse to leave, and this one has lingered more than many on this list. This story about a young man (Barry Keoghan) worming his way into an aristocratic family’s everyday existence is occasionally predictable, but the daring nature of Fennell’s approach, the spectacular visual palate, and Keoghan’s letting-it-all-hang-out (literally) performance are anything but pat. It’s Gothic stateliness by way of Goth subculture — enter at your own risk.

The Next 10 (Honorable Mentions, In Preferential Order):
11. Anatomy of a Fall
12. Maestro
13. Unicorn Wars
14. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
15. Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy
16. The Color Purple
17. BlackBerry
18. Godzilla Minus One
19. Monster
20. Robot Dreams

Best Actor:
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Barry Keoghan, Saltburn

Best Actress:
Emma Stone, Poor Things
Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall & The Zone of Interest
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Margot Robbie, Barbie
Carey Mulligan, Maestro

Best Supporting Actor:
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things
Dominic Sessa, The Holdovers
Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers
Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction

Best Supporting Actress:
Rachel McAdams, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Rosamund Pike, Saltburn
Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple
Jeannie Berlin, You Hurt My Feelings

Sleepers:
The Blackening
The Covenant
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Renfield
You Hurt My Feelings

Overrated:
Air
Joy Ride
May December
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (by audiences if not by critics)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Disappointments:
Asteroid City
Beau Is Afraid
Blue Beetle
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Wonka

2023 Movie I’m Most Sorry to Have Seen:
The Killer. I was initially going to go with The Exorcist: Believer, but since it was from the writer of Halloween Ends and Firestarter, it probably never stood a chance of being watchable to anyone but the easily startled. The Killer, on the other hand, hails from David Fincher, who’s made a few fine movies (Seven, The Social Network) over the decades. This dismal dud isn’t one of them. It plays like a John Wick flick for people who think they’re too good for a John Wick flick, and the problem with Michael Fassbender’s borderline incompetent assassin isn’t that he’s unappealing but that he’s a boring zero.

2023 Movie I’m Least Sorry to Have Missed:
Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire. Since it was made by a pair of QAnon nutjobs, I was initially going to go with Sound of Freedom, but why give them even the time of day? Rebel Moon, on the other hand, hails from Zack Snyder, who actually directed a pair of decent movies (Dawn of the Dead, Watchmen) decades ago but has been flailing since. So if even the fanboys who worshipped the silly Sucker Punch, the miserable Man of Steel, and that excruciating 15-hour cut of Justice League are turning their noses up at this one, then it must be a real stinker. For now, I guess Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver has dibs on 2024 Movie I’m Least Sorry to Have Missed.