CONSUME THESE FILMS 2023.
The best of the (usually) big screen in the year gone by.
I watch a lot of movies, but I’m not a comprehensive movie-watcher. I don’t force myself to watch movies I’m not in the mood for, even if they’re best in theaters or everyone’s talking about them (it took me forever to finally see both Barbie and Oppenheimer, though luckily still on the big screen). Some of the big films of 2023, like Killers of the Flower Moon, Dream Scenario, and Past Lives, I’m still working up the appropriate energy for. Other biggies, like Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, I liked but didn’t quite love. And a few, including The Holdovers and Maestro, I just haven’t had the chance to see yet.
That said, I loved all of the following films — a pretty exceptional and varied bunch for a single year. They’re grouped in pairs or bunches that I think would make fun double or triple features for those catching up on the year in movies (and making me want to do some of those features myself).
Enjoy, and let me know your 2023 film favorites that I missed and should catch up on (bonus points for recommending a double+ feature) in the comments below!
Unconventional Retrospectives
Oppenheimer
I won’t say too much on Oppenheimer — it’s been analyzed to death by fanboys like me on every platform you could possibly discuss movies. But, hey, I liked it, I liked it a lot. Cillian Murphy (especially), Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, David Krumholtz, Benny Safdie and practically everyone else are a privilege to watch on screen. The film portrays the indisputable tragedy of the bomb, the ethical murk that humans create within and around themselves to justify a creation like that, the chilling sociopathy of the government that commissioned and deployed it, and the stomach-curdling realization of the team that created it as the bomb goes from being an experimental threat of force to a tangible tool of pure annihilation — all equal-handedly. Oppenheimer as a film seems to say, “Of course the bomb was bad, terrible, horrible, never to be repeated. But these are the circumstances, the people, the forces that created such a thing; this is how far we wander in search of what we think we want, only to get it, and discover the black pit where our feet have taken us, never to surface.” But hey, we did it!
Godzilla: Minus One
We! Love! A scary! Godzilla!
I enjoy the new(ish) American Godzilla movies, from the slightly more grounded, visually-arresting Godzilla to Godzilla vs. Kong’s big boi meathead slugfest. But in the course of those films, which quickly establish the Big Liz as Earth’s Arbiter of Balance and move the destructive battling mostly out of cities and settled areas (there’s a kind of hilarious moment in Godzilla vs. Kong where a newscaster very clearly specifies that the area where the two titans are fighting was “totally and completely evacuated”), it’s deceptively easy to forget that this might be scary, you know, from a human-level.
Godzilla: Minus One makes the ground-level terror of Godzilla abundantly clear from its very first moments. It also, much like 2016’s Shin Godzilla,* successfully utilizes Godzilla as a force of critical reckoning on aspects of Japanese culture and history, in this case, WWII and the immediate postwar era, when the nation as a whole was embroiled in a turbulent process of grieving, rebuilding, and search for identity. It’s an emotional film; whether that emotion is lamentation for the lost or sheer terror at the overwhelming size and incomprehensible, animal ferocity of Godzilla, who is as much a traumatized product of war as the movie’s former-kamikaze protagonist.**
*I’d missed Shin Godzilla until recently, which also features a terrifying Godzilla, but in much different setting and style. If Minus One is a modern realization of Godzilla attacking the Tokyo of the original 50s film, Shin Godzilla poses something like a 50s realization of Godzilla against the Tokyo of 2016, and critiques the glacial, cynical, dispassionate bureaucracy that governs both Japan and the greater modern world. Both rock.
** “Godzilla” Count: 15
Fantastical Adventures
Barbie
God Barbie is so fun. More than anything it’s a movie I’m glad happened, at all — and happened in such a big way, only to be eclipsed in the box office this year by Taylor Swift (understandably). It’s a movie I’m happy people enjoyed as much as they did, because that might just translate into more movies like Barbie; not necessarily more toy tie-ins, but blockbusters with a little courage, style, zaniness, and something to say (I could also put John Wick 4 and Dungeons & Dragons in this category…maybe with a little less “something to say”). The performances, both musical and general, are an absolute blast. It reckons honestly with themes of personal identity and the way we use, even need, symbols to both draw ourselves out and to funnel our insecurities into — all in spite of its corporate origins.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
In Dungeons & Dragons (etc.), there’s a practically-effected bird-man named Jarnathan, a villainous and riotous Hugh Grant, a surprise cameo from one of this year’s major multi-category Oscar contenders, and a Bigg Dragon™. Also, a group of kooky fantastical adventurers with specific and complementary skills both magical and mundane attempt to thwart the nefarious plans of an undead wizard. How could you not be having fun?
Nimona
Nimona is the most delightful romp of the year, a movie that wraps you in a great big bear hug and keeps hugging you past the point of your sort of awkward, I-don’t-deserve-this squirming until you finally realize that someone is hugging you and that means you are loved and seen and then you’re in tears and hugging them back.
Delightful!
A knight is framed for regicide and befriends a certified monster who helps him clear his name and alter the public perception of their deceptively authoritarian society. It’s a powerfully empathetic film animated to the hilt with an electric and carefree(-feeling) abandon, that sucker-punched me with both laughter and tears more times than any other this year. A sheer, unadulterated, emotional treasure of a movie.
Straight Up Just Three Spooky Houses
A Haunting in Venice
The ‘stached sleuth is back!
While the most impressive thing about the first two Kenneth Branaugh Hercule Poirot movies might be his incredible mustache, A Haunting in Venice is a lean hunk of mystery with equal parts murk and mayhem. In it, a disillusioned and disheveled Poirot has retired to the Sinking City and given up mystery-solving altogether, despite the trail of overnighters waiting outside his door to plead their cases. However, he can’t turn away crime novelist Tina Fey (I should probably use her character name but…it’s Tina Fey) who wants to turn his lucratively discerning eye onto a popular medium, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), at a seance where she plans to contact the spirit of a murdered girl in a notoriously haunted former orphanage. Agatha Christie-ness ensues.
What makes this Poirot work in a way the other two fall flat is its innate sense of fun. There is always something interesting happening on screen; whether that’s a tense interrogation, a sinister twisting canted camera angle, or a slow-revealing background hallucination, it’s occasionally, distractingly too much — but at least something there to grab the eye and accelerate the heart. While still a mystery at its core, the film throws a lot of horror tropes into the mix, not the least of them a series of jump scares that kickstart the film (the first of which I was so unprepared for that I shook my entire row of seats at the Pasadena Regal when I rocketed briefly out of my body). It is also quite inescapably, and not always purposely, silly (there’s one death in particular that…well, it certainly has an explanation). But ultimately a satisfying and propulsive pulp thriller, executed in far more thrilling fashion than its predecessors.
You might say A Haunting in Venice is a Hercule-an good time at the movies at a far less than Odyssyean length. Wouldn’t you? Hm?
Haunted Mansion
Haunted Mansion was maybe my most unexpected delight at the movies this year — even in this section, none of which I expected too much from (though I figured Pope’s Exorcist and Haunting in Venice would at least be enjoyably bad if they turned out to be failures). It cleaves tightly to the “lore” (what lore there is) of the Haunted Mansion attraction at the Disney parks and contains perhaps more than its fair share of Easter eggs; but also has more meat on the bone than you might presume of a Disney property cash-in. The writing is solid enough, and the plot both zany and straightforward enough, that the stellar cast has a foundation to play off of, and play they do. Anchored by a stoic and cynical Lakeith Stanfield (a lapsed French Quarter tour guide) and a grounded Rosario Dawson (single mother looking for a new start), and featuring the well-honed comedic talents of Owen Wilson (an oddball priest), Tiffany Haddish (an oddball medium), and Danny Devito (an oddball professor/haunted house enthusiast), Haunted Mansion puts its ensemble through the supernatural ringer to wonderful, hilarious, family-friendly effect that had me genuinely laughing about 1000% more than I ever expected to.
The Pope’s Exorcist
You’ve seen the photos of Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe, in priest’s collar, riding his little Italian scooter. You have. That’s about 90% of what you need to know about The Pope’s Exorcist. (The other 10% being that the title implies that Russell Crowe is the Pope’s Chief Exorcist; not the exorcist for the Pope, should the Pope become possessed. Though I suppose that job would probably go to him, too.)
That’s what you’re getting. And it’s great. There’s also some possession stuff you’ve seen about a hundred other times, though done well enough here. The setting is perfectly spooky: a former Spanish monastery inherited by a luckless (and strangely American) family recovering in the wake of their own tragedy. A monastery that, woops, happens to hold buried, unsavory, demonic secrets of the Catholic Church deep beneath its foundations. Exorcisms and a surprising amount of archaeology ensue, and ensue increasingly.
Smol Bois
Blackberry
Though mentioned this year on nearly every movie podcast I listen to, Blackberry never got the wide release it deserved. The film documents, in dramedic fashion, the shockingly more-true-than-not meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of the Blackberry, the device that every businessman (and business-oriented father) had to own for a few years in the early oughts. It came out of nowhere, was suddenly everywhere, and then, almost directly due to the release of the iPhone and the transition to smart phones, immediately collapsed. What’s most surprising about Blackberry is how well its extreme blend of dramedy works; it is both ridiculously serious and seriously ridiculous, often within the same scene. But that’s the nature of a tech startup that turned a market upside-down, before being upended itself. It conveys, better than any other rise-and-fall film, the fact that no matter how heightened the scenario, or how many dollars are at play, people are still people; and will behave as humanly silly, intended or otherwise, as they do anywhere else, doing anything else.
The Killer
David Fincher’s latest, The Killer (or The K. _ ller), is a 90mph right-down-the-middle fastball of a film. It sounds like a movie well-suited to the unflinching, cynical director — a professional assassination goes south and consequences ensue — and it is. While the premise is nothing new, it is maybe the best version of the botched assassination story told on screen; both funny, in its constant undercutting of the self-narrated coolness of its title character, and grim, as the weight of each of the tallying bodies is felt, never skimmed over. It is a lean, mean, sharp-looking movie that accomplishes what it sets out to with a brutal, cheeky, gripping efficiency.
Supes That Weren’t Dupes
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) was/is a minor miracle of a movie, and one of the most exciting things I’ve watched…ever. That’s partly because it dropped at a time of absolute Spider-fatigue — we’d had Maguire and Garfield, and Holland had been recently introduced in Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). And animated? In 3D? I expected, at best, a kid-friendly romp, and at worst, the most missable Spider-Man movie since The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). Then the reviews came in, and I read them, a little disbelieving at their raving; and then I went and saw it myself. And then I saw it twice more in the next week. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a fantastic sequel, falling short of the original only in the most unfair category: it lacked that unexpected surprise, obviously. But in practically every other respect, it is just as stunning and refreshing and thoughtful and breathtaking as the first, no mean feat for any sequel to achieve. Its opening scenes in Ghost Spider’s (Hailee Steinfeld) striking watercolor-splashed world sparked the same cackle of glee that the first film’s choppy graphic-novel-in-motion did when I saw it the first time — and the adventure, through countless realms and a vastly more interesting multiverse than the actual MCU, only goes up from there.
The Marvels
It’s sad that the lasting narrative of The Marvels is that it’s the MCU’s lowest-grossing film — because it’s a better movie than a good chunk of Marvel’s catalogue. That’s partly because the film is short. At an hour and 45 minutes, it clips along speedily, thanks to its lack of ties to much else going on in the MCU (whatever else is, at this point, going on in the MCU). Its take on action also helps, with refreshingly creative and intelligible battle choreography tied into a central, comics-goofy plot device that keeps the characters (and us) constantly on their toes and forces them to work together in exciting and rewarding ways.
More than anything though, it’s the Khan family (that first delighted us in Ms. Marvel) that stand out as the heart of the film and the stars of the show. Not only do they all, individually, feel like the most real, human people in the MCU since Tony Stark at the beginning of Iron Man (a billionaire, sure, but a human billionaire); they feel extraordinarily familial, in ways that lend stakes to the conflict, a hilariously grounded perspective on the ongoing superhero/alien/space spy antics, and a genuinely touching and emotional core to the film that makes you, for once in a long while, actually care what happens to these characters. Though surrounded by some of the most invincible beings in Marvel’s vast universe, the Khans feel very vincible, and that’s The Marvels’ secret weapon.
That, and the singing planet. 🤫
‘Splosive Cinema!
Ambulance
I laughed at the end of the first trailer for Ambulance, when the title faded in: “A-M-B-U-L-A-N-C-E.” Am-byou-ELL-AY-’nce. What if there an ambulance…in LA?!
Other than that it felt a little meh, like Michael Bay was just chucking out another two hour gritty, lurid, genre piece of whatever with shouting men, one (1) pretty lady, and slow motion explosions. And…he did do that, actually. The only difference is that Ambulance is not a piece of whatever — it’s a work of art.
Ambulance works because, much like the other two flicks in this section, it knows exactly what kind of movie it is, Fury Road-goes-West, a kind of macho mid-range action thriller that’s for the most part gone the way of the dinosaur, a film designed to create so much whiplash that the G-forces it generates practically mold you to the seat. Anchored by a bombastically unhinged performance from Jake Gyllenhaal juxtaposed against a deeply humane one from Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Ambulance reopens the shuttered cinematic thrill ride for a rollercoaster romp through LA that makes only sudden and unexpected stops.
It’s the definition of “rips!”
Extraction 2
Condense all the thrill of Ambulance into a 20-ish minute, heart-in-throat unbroken take through a prison escape, to a car chase, to a train chase, and you have the unmissable reason to watch Extraction 2. The movie as a whole (which goes far beyond that sequence) is very good, and very fun, much like its predecessor but with a couple tablespoons less white saviorism, thankfully. But that scene is…I haven’t felt that breathlessly propelled by a movie sequence since Fury Road. Chris Hemsworth as specialist mercenary Tyler Rake (lol) is refreshingly gruff; refreshing for him, at least, with Thor spiraling deep into goof-mode in the MCU. Idris Elba drops in to hint mysteriously at Larger Things At Play and a sequel. Just great, explosive fun.
If you do nothing else, at least take 20 minutes to watch the prison sequence. It’s the definition of “rocks!”
John Wick 4
Listen — huge shock, but I’m a big John Wick guy. From the moment Keanu Reeves lumbers into frame in the original John Wick, shaggy, scruffy, grieving, caring for a puppy whose name really should have been Domino, I was in, riding shotgun in his equally ill-fated Mustang. Still, despite my love of the previous three movies, I was a little concerned heading into the theater for John Wick 4. Would it feel stale? Would the weight of the assassin-lore finally bog the film down? Will the series finally catch sequelitis, putting its star through the same ringer over and over again, begging disbelief even in its own absurd reality?
Nah.
Instead, I love practically everything about John Wick 4, mostly because it’s a film in conversation with all those questions and qualms, both explicitly and implicitly. That’s exemplified by the first act, which is almost entirely occupied with a fight sequence at a Tokyo hotel; an extended fight sequence, to say the least. In the theater, somewhere about 10-15 minutes into that sequence, I thought, “Ok, maybe this is too much.” But the second I thought that, it became clear that it’s supposed to be too much. Wick, barely recovered from the events of the previous film, is already beaten, bloody, dog-tired just halfway through this fight. And immediately before it, his friend, the proprietor of the hotel (played coolly by the always-welcome Hiroyuki Sanada) asks him a simple question: “Where does this road end, John?” It’s a question he clearly has no answer for. But then the fighting starts, and instinct kicks in, and keeps kicking in, and keeps kicking, and John Wick does what John Wick does best; he keeps.
I mean, it’s also a film filled with some of the most incredible action sequences…ever. It remains a privilege just to watch Donnie Yen move on screen; the man is a living whip. There’s Scott Adkins’ chef’s kiss of a brawling, gold-toothed gangster. The stairway fight, as close to a joke as the series has in itself to make. And of course, there’s the house. You know which one. With the camera. Agh.
It is the definition of: “Rules!”
All that and I still missed a lot in 2023! What were all y’all’s favorites from last year? I like to take the first few months of each year (leading up to the Oscars), usually a little slower for movie releases, to catch up on the good ones I missed from the year before that’re available at home. Give me your recs!
Thanks, and here’s to a fun-filled 2024 in film.