The Best Movies of 2023
From Argentina to Tahiti to Tunisia, the greatest films of the year present a world of revelatory voices.
The movies of 2023 resurrected (at least for me) an age-old debate in film history: that between form and content. Ever since the silent age, writers and critics have discussed the relationship between form (visual style, abstraction, material and aesthetic properties) and content (narrative, characters, political insights, Big Themes). Is one more predominant than the other in cinema? Are they actually inextricable? In a way it all boils down to whether you agree with Wittgenstein’s quote: “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.” But in movies, I would argue, revolutionary content can be defused by tepid formal conventions, just as groundbreaking style devoid of insight can feel hollow and unsatisfying.
You’d think this debate would be moot by this point, over a century after the discourse entered film conversations; but in many ways the push-and-pull between form and content is still with us. A large number of viewers and critics still believe that story and character are what matter most in movies, even though the art form was initially built on such purely formal properties as light, shape, and movement. Too many filmmakers believe they can focus almost myopically on narrative, content to develop a bland and tedious aesthetic, overconfident that audiences won’t care about the formal style at the film’s core. Still other filmmakers try to astound the audience through extravagant aesthetics in an effort to disguise the lack of ideas within.
On one end of the spectrum, we have a film like Origin, Ava DuVernay’s unique “adaptation” of Isabel Wilkerson’s vital book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The movie at times has an intellectual adventurousness that’s easy to appreciate, though its most compelling ideas—about how caste and class stratification across the world lead to brutality, oppression, and subjugation in different manifestations—are lifted from Wilkerson’s book. But Origin also has a formal style that ranges from atrocious to nonexistent, complete with flat, washed-out cinematography (by Matthew J. Lloyd) and some of the most treacly music you’ll hear in any movie this year (courtesy of Kris Bowers). A good example is a scene in which Wilkerson visits some colleagues in Berlin and has a condescending German woman Frausplain to her how the Holocaust and slavery are entirely different beasts. This conversation is loaded with compelling ideas, but the scene itself pays no attention to shot setups, editing, lighting, any of the aesthetic concerns through which cinema is constructed. This scene cuts after almost every line of dialogue, switching arbitrarily between medium shots and close-ups; some wider compositions and different angles might have bolstered the themes in the conversation, but Origin is unconcerned with such formal considerations. Even worse—unforgivable, in fact—is a montage of suffering near the end that pairs images of the Holocaust, slavery, a lynching, shit-covered workers in India, and Trayvon Martin’s confrontational stare with maudlin, swelling strings, slow-motion choreography of violence, and the other trappings of Oscar bait that comprise some of the worst modern filmmaking. Origin’s content—its political and social foundation—is absolutely vital, but the film cheapens it (and Wilkerson’s book) by adopting the most banal formal style imaginable.
On the other end of the spectrum is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which brings the director’s opulent stylistics to (once again) the Holocaust. In another singular adaptation of a literary source (in this case, Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, which is significantly different from the movie), The Zone of Interest concerns the comfortable bourgeois family of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Just outside the camp’s barbed-wire gates, Höss and his family live in a beautiful manor, concerned with their wealth, security, comfort, and the pulchritude of the flower garden lovingly maintained by Höss’s wife, Hedwig (played by the fearless Sandra Hüller). Meanwhile, screams and gunshots on the soundtrack indicate the terror going on nearby. The theme of how easy it is for people to go along with absolute barbarity as long as it benefits them will sadly always be relevant, but it might have been more effective if it had been placed in a modern context—say, Americans living close to immigrant detention centers, or Israelis occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Otherwise, The Zone of Interest doesn’t have much political or thematic insight, aside from an audacious ending that violently conflates the past with the present. What it does have is an astounding aesthetic comprised of cold but immaculate tableaux, impeccable sound design by Maximilian Behrens and music by Mica Levi, and arresting sequences like a series of close-ups of ravishingly blooming flowers (with overheard atrocities taking place offscreen) and solarized images of a Polish woman leaving fruit for the camp’s prisoners. These stylistic flourishes feel like overzealous attempts to make the film’s thematic points seem more complicated than they are, especially in a context as monumental as the Holocaust. This is putting it too bluntly, but if Origin is all content without form, then The Zone of Interest is all form with distressingly little content.
It’s no coincidence that the Holocaust (and other atrocities) are prevalent in both these movies. This is the kind of fare that typically makes critics and awards voters salivate, purporting to make grand comments about the human condition. But are the filmmakers who focus on such content bringing anything urgent or complex to their work? I think about the writing of Susan Sontag on an almost daily basis, but especially so after watching movies like Origin and The Zone of Interest. Sontag wrote often about the ethics of mediating pain and suffering through photography, and her theories are more relevant than ever today. “What is the point of exhibiting these pictures?” Sontag asks in Regarding the Pain of Others.
To awaken indignation? To make us feel ‘bad’; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don’t they actually just confirm what we already know (or want to know)?
In this passage, Sontag is writing about still photography, but it applies just as much to cinema. I increasingly feel like atrocities at the level of the Holocaust or America’s centuries-long practice of slavery and segregation are unrepresentable on film, at least in the direct and sentimental way that most filmmakers opt to employ when presenting such material. Turning human suffering into visual content necessitates mediation and consumption, which can arguably dull our minds and souls to such cruelty instead of inspiring critical reflection.
All of this might sound irrelevant to a recap of cinema in the year 2023, but I don’t think it is. The question of how and why to represent unthinkable violence onscreen relates to such movies (good or bad) as Pacifiction, Killers of the Flower Moon, 20 Days in Mariupol, Master Gardener, Oppenheimer, El Conde, Godzilla Minus One, and more. Some of these films tackle difficult ideas head-on, with complexity, insight, and an element of human compassion. Others exploit the Grand Events of history to gain an element of prestige in artificial ways.
More generally, though, my favorites of 2023 find an ideal way to blend form and content—to present truly fascinating subjects in ways that are as lively, original, thoughtful, and profound as their themes demand. An obvious conclusion, maybe—but a lesson that more people who make, watch, and review movies could take to heart.
1. Trenque Lauquen
For those who believe movies are something to get lost inside of, Trenque Lauquen provides a euphoric escape. This four-hour, two-part Argentinian film from Laura Citarella harkens back to the wildly imaginative epics of Jacques Rivette and Raul Ruiz, though Trenque Lauquen brings a welcome sense of liberation and transcendence. It also recalls L’Avventura in its basic plot setup, as the film begins with two men searching for a woman who may or may not want to be found. The missing woman, Laura (played by Laura Paredes, who cowrote the screenplay with Citarella—so many Lauras!), is a reporter in the titular Argentinian city who, as flashbacks gradually reveal, became enraptured by the story of a schoolteacher in the 1960s who instigated a torrid affair with an Italian nobleman. The plot only grows weirder and more elaborate from there, focusing on the connections between humanity and nature, the transformative power of desire, and the irresistible allure of storytelling.
I know what you may be thinking: a four-hour epic with a sprawling, surreal narrative sounds like an enervating slog. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trenque Lauquen is the most entertaining movie of the year throughout all of its 260-or-so minutes. (It’s also about one-third as long as Citarella’s 2018 picture La Flor, which I’m dying to see.) And while Trenque Lauquen exists in a parallel world mostly devoid of gender politics, it’s hard not to see Citarella’s work as a feminist response to the majestic but overtly masculine arthouse directors mentioned above—especially with a wondrous conclusion that pays homage to motherhood and the connections that exist between women of the past, the present, and the future.
2. Pacifiction
The horrors of colonialism are unforgettably conveyed by Albert Serra’s haunting Pacifiction. Set in the former French colony of Tahiti, the film follows the island’s “High Commissioner,” a French official named De Roller (Benoît Magimel), who learns that France may intend to resume nuclear testing near the island—an atrocity the country has committed in the past, leading to devastating health consequences for the islanders. At the same time, a shady American agent may be fomenting a revolution among the local population to distract from some mysterious political machinations. In order to deal with this maelstrom of intrigue, De Roller employs the services of a gender-fluid hotel employee named Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau); their intimate but deluded relationship hints at the ways in which the past continues to impact both the colonizers and the colonized, judging from De Roller’s sense of entitled paternalism and Shannah’s lack of mobility outside of their dubious partnership.
There’s a lot going on here, and it’s all presented through eye-popping cinematography by Artur Tort (proof that digital camerawork can be stunningly beautiful if carefully utilized). These Tahitian landscapes are edenic, but they also provide the backdrop for an amoral playground in which the most banal evils are allowed to wage war, courtesy of the world’s superpowers. Serra immerses us fully in this setting, epitomized by a horrific, darkly comic scene that somehow posits the history of colonialism as a hellish nightclub—hedonistic, proudly inhumane, everyone dancing their days away in a sweaty, meaningless march to destruction.
3. Orlando, My Political Biography
Orlando, My Political Biography definitely has a message—in fact, it’s stuffed to the brim with them, overflowing with political and social insights—but it presents them in the most joyous, exhilarating, humane, unmessagey way possible. The concept is both simple and profound: director Paul B. Preciado (himself a trans man whose academic work focuses on sexuality, biopower, and architecture) cast an ensemble of transgender actors to adapt Virginia Woolf’s landmark Orlando: A Biography, whose eponymous character is seen as one of the first gender-fluid protagonists in literary history. While portraying Orlando and some of the book’s other characters, the actors simultaneously convey their own life stories, which do contain elements of ostracism but also a great deal of empowerment, liberation, and catharsis.
Among many other admirable achievements, Orlando, My Political Biography proves that art, philosophy, politics, trans rights, and a sense of comic playfulness can go hand-in-hand. A proudly queer musical number set in a psychiatrist’s waiting room? Sure, why not! An absurdly funny scene set in a modern-day gun store in which “Orlando” buys weapons to lend them a sense of masculinity? But of course! A surgical procedure, presented through humorous solemnity, consisting of an organ transplant performed on a book? Let’s do it! Placed alongside these flights of fancy are archival footage of trans figures throughout history and candid interviews to remind us of the seriousness of the underlying topic. And yet, it all ends with a celebratory climax that radiates hope and humanity—a fantasy, perhaps, but entirely within the realm of possibility, if only the brittle wall of transphobia could be broken down.
4. Four Daughters
From Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania—whose work constantly straddles the line between fact and fiction—comes a pseudo-documentary that explores the fascinating middle-ground between the self and the state, the subject and the actor, the past and the present. It follows a woman named Olfa, whose life is predominantly marked by patriarchy, lack of mobility, and state oppression. She gives birth to four daughters, the two eldest of whom, Rahma and Ghofrane, eventually and abruptly leave home to join the Islamic State, swayed by their government’s shifting attitudes toward religious devotion and the role of women. In Four Daughters, Olfa and her two younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir, play themselves, while the missing Rahma and Ghofrane are played by professional actors (Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar). Thus begins a bewilderingly dense film that recalls the work of Abbas Kiarostami—particularly Close-Up (1990) and Ten (2002), which blur the lines between reality and cinematic artifice to comment on Iranian society as boldly as Ben Hania comments on her own.
In the West, presumptions about the intersection of politics, religion, and femininity in the Arab world abound, which makes a film like Four Daughters—made by a Tunisian woman, exuding both outrage and compassion, unwilling to make broad, sweeping generalizations—all the more vital. The younger generations, represented here by Eya and Tayssir, make their own decisions about their bodies, their sexuality, their relationships; they forego the hijab and are immensely skeptical about their government and the pious institutions that are supposed to provide salvation. Therein lies the film’s guarded sense of hope, a political fervor that’s inextricable from Four Daughters’ compassion toward its human subjects. The movie’s formal style mirrors this ambivalent approach: both austere in its geometric, static compositions and intimately personal in its frontal, close-up interviews. As she did with her scathing pseudo-documentary Challat of Tunis (2013), Ben Hania confronts her country’s political fissures with an audacity that’s almost unthinkable in American cinema.
5. Skinamarink
The best horror movie of the year is Skinamarink, which (like all the best horror movies) is perched on the border between the mainstream and the avant-garde. The concept has a pleasing childlike purity: a young brother and sister wake in the middle of the night to discover that their father is missing and the windows and doors in their house are disappearing. While I tend to be dubious about DIY projects that gain a viral online following, in this case such a background has seemingly introduced a truly original voice in the world of horror: writer-director Kyle Edward Ball asked YouTube users to describe their nightmares on his channel, Bitesized Nightmares, then posted filmed recreations of their dreams. This project led to the creation of a short film called Heck (2020), which then grew into the crowdfunded Skinamarink, which was shot on digital video in Ball’s childhood home for about $15,000. If film lovers really want to champion independent work, you can’t do much better than this.
Featuring heavily altered footage that’s awash in digitally manufactured grain, morphing shadows and light, and weird, glitchy shapes that always imply the presence of some lurking body (human or otherwise), Skinamarink is a horror movie that becomes more terrifying the closer you look. That’s one of the closest links between the film and the experimental work of Michael Snow and Chantal Akerman, whom Ball admits he was emulating. It’s a rare feat to be able to conjure Jeanne Dielman while inspiring the viewer (this particular one, anyway) to turn on the lights in every room before going to bed, scanning the corners for unseen monsters.
If all the movie had going for it were its distinct aesthetic and its slowly mounting terror, it would be worth watching. But I think there’s more here beneath the surface. It’s a horror movie about nostalgia: the inability to retrieve the comfortable spheres of our childhood, the sense that our rose-colored memories almost always hide ominous figures in the shadows. Ball is almost a decade younger than me, but both of us came of age at a time when the digital world was overtaking reality, when cable channels were funneled into our homes nonstop, the internet became ubiquitous, and cell phones constantly linked us in to cosmic satellites. The fuzzy cable transmissions in Skinamarink make the connection clear: if you grew up in the late twentieth century, the rapidly shifting contours of our world and the childlike nightmares that persist across generations make it impossible to ever go home again.
6. Dry Ground Burning
The most Marxist film of the year is the Brazilian Dry Ground Burning, another pseudo-documentary that comments upon reality by dramatically altering it. Helmed by Joana Pimenta and Adirley Quierós, the film proceeds from an ethnographic impulse: the directors teamed up with the residents of the Sol Nascente favela in Brasília, who play fictionalized versions of themselves. The story around them, though, is closer to a Mad Max post-apocalypse than the gritty realism of Pedro Costa. It focuses on a woman named Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), who has commandeered the oil pipelines beneath their soil to sell gasoline to the community’s residents, including a crew of revolutionary motorcycle riders. Chitara’s half-sister, an androgynous woman named Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), joins Chitara after being released from prison. Meanwhile, their compatriot Andreia (Andreia Vieira) starts her own political group, the Prison People Party, to combat the militaristic, capitalistic presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.
The overlaps between reality and fiction in Dry Ground Burning are multiple: Léa Alves da Silva really did join the production after she was released from prison (and her re-imprisonment becomes a major plot point), while the Prison People Party was registered as an official political campaign in order to clear the streets for a motorcade scene. The specter of Bolsonaro’s doomsday presidency lurks over the entire film, a sign of how vital and revolutionary these women’s political actions really are. These aren’t the only things that make Dry Ground Burning an explicitly socialist film: much attention is paid to quotidian labor, the churning machinery and flexing bodies that allow the oil to be pumped from underground pipelines. It’s reminiscent of Marx’s theory about the true value of labor, divorced from capitalist exploitation—the immense value of human labor devoted to self-fulfillment or political action. Aside from these subtexts, Dry Ground Burning is an explosive, exciting vision of resistance at the most grassroots level. You can’t take your eyes off it.
7. Anatomy of a Fall
The Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall explores the mysterious terrain of one particular fractured marriage, suggesting that any human relationship can be the source of irreconcilable intrigue. Sandra Hüller (giving one of her two stunning performances of 2023; the other is the greatest aspect of The Zone of Interest) plays Sandra, a German novelist whose husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), dies in a suspicious accident at their snowbound home in the French Alps. When she’s forced to defend herself in court, the considerable tensions in their marriage—compounded by their son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who was struck blind in a childhood accident—are laid bare.
The title seems to be a nod to Otto Preminger’s classic courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), but its legal proceedings are wedded with an emotional rawness reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1974). As the film goes on, the greatest mystery is not whether Sandra killed her husband, but how their relationship devolved to its lowest point, shortly before Samuel’s death. This is unforgettably conveyed by a long argument scene (presented via flashback) that’s the greatest cinematic sequence of 2023—any viewer will probably feel like they need therapy afterwards. But there’s something tender in the film’s deconstruction of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage: we can never fully know another human individual, so any relationship is based on trust and faith—and when those basic tenets fall apart, tragedy may only be a moment away.
8. Walk Up
Hong Sang-soo may have the most dauntingly prolific output of any director working today: with thirty feature films over the last twenty-seven years, it’s hard to be a completist with his work. This obstacle is compounded by the fact that some of his films have received little to no American distribution, not to mention the talky, minimalist vibe of his filmography, which is admittedly not the aesthetic I typically gravitate toward.
Walk Up, though, is my second favorite of the director’s films, after 1998’s The Power of Kangwon Province. It’s the kind of film whose depth and emotional fallout sneak up on you. At first, the movie seems to be a modest piece of auto-fiction focusing on a celebrated Korean director named Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo), who travels with his daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so) to the home of an old flame, Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young). When Byung-soo has to leave for a meeting with a film producer, Jeong-su and Ms. Kim have a chance to get to know each other. But their conversation quickly becomes dark and painfully intimate. The sense of mildly surreal confusion only grows with the next major cut in the film, which flashes forward many years as Jeong-su disappears and the relationship between Byung-soo and Ms. Kim takes on a wildly different form. This recurs throughout the movie: each cut throttles us forward or backward in time, as new characters come and go, shifting their dynamics in unexpected ways.
The first comparison that came to mind was Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010)—one of my favorite films and a befuddling exploration of how strange and unknowable any person is when they exist outside our orbit. (Shades here of Anatomy of a Fall as well.) A second comparison—an emphatic contrast—is the films of Christopher Nolan, who approaches filmmaking like a jigsaw puzzle, in which the structural pieces are more significant than any legitimate concept or human emotion. Walk Up is a puzzle in its own right, but it attempts to piece together the fragments of a life, leaping through time in an attempt to convey the regrets, hopes, and heartaches that accompany growing old.
9. Fallen Leaves
No film in 2023 wielded simplicity quite as effectively as Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. A belated continuation of the Finnish director’s “Proletariat Trilogy”—Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and The Match Factory Girl (1990)—Fallen Leaves makes good on that label by following two characters on the lowest rung of Finland’s economic ladder. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works at a supermarket where she receives glares from an overvigilant security guard; Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) toils at a construction site that’s slowly giving him black lung disease. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine rages overseas (news reports are ubiquitous on the radio) and Holappa deals with his despair by plunging into alcoholism. A lesser director would be content to emphasize the misery of the current state of things, but Kaurismäki, ever a guarded optimist, spins the tale of Ansa and Holappa into an unlikely romance—a glimmer of brightness in a world that can be soul-crushing.
Fallen Leaves soars because of its subtle touches: the way Ansa buys a single plate, fork, and knife when she has Holappa over for dinner (then throws the dishes away when the date doesn’t work out); a gesture of affection between two women as they leave a thankless job, their friendship a much-needed expression of humanity; the moment when Ansa turns off all the lights in her apartment after receiving a hefty electric bill. Kaurismäki’s understanding of the precarity of poverty seems effortless, as do the director’s other familiar and amiable traits: rockabilly music, cinephilia, rich and colorful imagery that radiates light in a way few other modern movies do. At barely more than eighty minutes, Fallen Leaves is simple on the surface but also unexpectedly profound—a love letter to human connection at a time when it’s needed most.
10. Poison
I’m not shy about my distaste for most of Wes Anderson’s recent movies. His 2023 feature Asteroid City is a self-repetitive gag that reveals how out of touch he is with most people’s lived experience. The French Dispatch is extravagantly stylish but seems to have nothing to say about journalism, the art scene, political resistance, or any of its other supposed subjects. Isle of Dogs has the potential for political commentary but totally dismisses it in favor of weird Asian exoticism. I wish he would occasionally direct another writer’s screenplay and experience constraints at the hands of producers: here’s an auteur who might benefit from deviating from his insular worldview just a little bit.
I think that happens with Poison, one of the four short films that Anderson adapted from Roald Dahl stories for Netflix in 2023. (I don’t care for most Netflix productions, but the corporate behemoth’s ability to pay $686 million to acquire the rights to Roald Dahl’s work did at least have some benefit.) Poison stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Harry Pope, a British officer in India during the period of colonial occupation in the 1950s. When he awakens in fright and believes that a venomous snake called a krait is lying curled on his stomach, he calls his Indian friend Timber Woods (Dev Patel), who in turn calls Dr. Ganderbai (Ben Kingsley) in a frenzied attempt to rescue their British “compatriot.” Over the next seventeen minutes, Anderson, aided by Robert Yeoman’s acrobatic cinematography and the razor-sharp cast, hints at Pope’s arrogant paternalism and the long-suffering patience of his Indian friends, all while indulging Anderson’s usual droll humor and opulent stylistics. Imagine my surprise! In about one-fifth the time of his usual features, Anderson displays more thematic depth and political insight than he’s normally able or willing to incorporate.
The Next Ten
Leave it to Todd Haynes to make the most mischievous American film of the year: May December offers a sly dissection of cryptic human nature and the ethics of acting, disguised as a tawdry melodrama. The movie follows Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who, at thirty-six years old, was convicted of having sex with her thirteen-year-old coworker, Joe, at a pet store. Flash-forward twenty-three years: Gracie and Joe (Charles Melton) are now married after her prison stint, raising three kids in Savannah, Georgia. The arrival of an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who is set to play Gracie in a made-for-TV movie, threatens to expose the fault lines that have been lingering beneath this family for decades. Who, after all, is Gracie—a shameless sexual predator, a naive socialite, a woman driven to desperation by domestic tedium? Maybe more interestingly, who is Elizabeth—an actor trying to do justice by her role, or a predator in her own right, trying to exploit those around her for personal gain? Haynes pays tribute to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), a classic example of a psychologically torturous relationship between two women. But I think May December has just as much in common with Haynes’s own Safe (1995), an icy and alienating drama about how American institutions of domesticity and success can’t be trusted.
Pietro Marcello made one of my favorite films of the last ten years: Martin Eden (2019), a heady Jack London adaptation stuffed with class commentary and jaw-dropping found footage from Italian history. I had high expectations for his follow-up, Scarlet, which can’t match the splendor of Marcello’s previous film—but its modesty is one of its greatest charms. Scarlet follows a gruff woodworker (Raphaël Thierry) whose wife dies during childbirth; from then on, he exudes undying love toward his daughter, Juliette (Juliette Jouan), leading to many marvelous images of her tiny infant hands nestled in Raphaël’s immense, calloused mitts. When she grows older, Juliette hears a prophecy that her one true love will arrive bearing scarlet sails to take her away and show her the world—a destiny that may come true with the arrival of an aviator played by Louis Garrel. Scarlet is a fairy tale for adults as well as an homage to Jacques Demy, with a few bittersweet musical numbers reminiscent of Donkey Skin or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Marcello’s newest may seem slight on the surface, but it presents a gorgeous ode to the 1920s: a decade of wonder and romance that was short-lived at the dawn of the twentieth century’s calamities.
Recalling the cryptic horror movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ashkal: A Tunisian Investigation (the second Tunisian film on my list) blends political commentary with terrifying ambiguity. Near a towering housing complex that was meant to accommodate political dignitaries (until the 2011 revolution put a halt to its construction), a series of mysterious deaths have occurred: the victims have been burned, apparently from self-immolation, though witnesses report that they’ve seen a shadowy man approach the victims, “giving them fire.” For Tunisian audiences, the obvious correlation would be Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor who set himself on fire in 2010 to protest the government—thus giving rise to the Tunisian revolution and inspiring the Arab Spring movement. In Ashkal, is the bringer of fire a symbol of resistance, a ghost of the former regime, or a metaphor for political terror? The movie focuses on the investigation of two detectives—a young woman (Fatma Oussaifi) and her older male partner (Mohamed Houcine Grayaa)—but be forewarned: explicit answers will remain out of reach, tantalizing the audience not only with genre thrills but also with the realization that we’ll have to come to our own conclusions about what we witness.
Yorgos Lanthimos is a love-him-or-hate-him director, an absurdist who’s never met a fish-eye lens he doesn’t like. What can I say? I generally like his work: it’s visually opulent, admirably bizarre, but also empathetic, commiserating with the plight of baffled humans who don’t know how to comprehend our wayward existence. Poor Things is a wild rush of uncomfortable fantasy, distressing down to its very concept: a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) discovers a suicide victim (Emma Stone) and decides to resurrect the body—but not before implanting the brain of the woman’s unborn baby inside her fully grown head. I understand viewers who are made queasy by this plot setup (Bella, as the creation is known, seemingly doesn’t have the mental maturity to make the rash adult decisions she repeats throughout the film), but where else can we encounter uneasy, existential questions but in hyperbolic art? (There’s a certain Freudian logic here—infants, like Bella, are obsessed with genitalia—and even a feminist undercurrent: she’s only able to gain agency, to control her own narrative, by wresting her life and her body away from the men who “control” her.) Our responses to movies are always autobiographical in some way, and the main thing I remember about Poor Things is the awful day I had before seeing it—a day filled with personal and professional disappointments. Lanthimos’s over-the-top vision, unabashedly stylized and aggressively peculiar, was exactly the balm I needed at the end of such a day, an escape from the constraining harshness of reality.
Those who proclaim Godzilla Minus One to be the best monster movie of the year are missing out on what’s really the greatest kaiju film of 2023: Shin Ultraman. Directed by Shinji Higuchi and written by Hideaki Anno—the pair who made 2016’s incredible Shin Godzilla—Shin Ultraman is also a reboot of a massively popular kaiju franchise. The hyperkinetic story includes extraterrestrial superheroes, a gaggle of kaiju beasts, a black-cloaked villain with glowing red eyes, shapeshifting, intergalactic travel, and alternate dimensions; part of the thrill of the movie is just seeing where its relentless imagination will take you next. There may not be a lot of depth to it, but given the hackneyed sentimentality of Godzilla Minus One’s “depth,” that may not be a bad thing. Colorful and invigorating, with an abundance of practical effects alongside its decent CGI, Shin Ultraman is what kaiju mayhem should look and feel like.
Cynicism is the reigning mindset of the 21st century, so it’s refreshing to see a film that loves its characters as tenderly as Past Lives does. In South Korea, twelve-year-olds Na Young and Hae Sung experience puppy love—but their burgeoning connection is interrupted when Na Young and her family emigrate to Canada. Over the years, the two of them reconnect sporadically, typically over spotty Zoom conversations, with thousand of miles between them. When they do reunite in person many years later, their lives have diverged—a reminder of the fact that time alters all things, leading not only to regret but also to compassion and understanding. Celine Song’s ardent film succeeds by stressing its human element more than its philosophical platitudes. With its gorgeous cutaways to the simple beauties of everyday life, Past Lives aspires to the transcendent wisdom of Yasjiuro Ozu. It can’t quite reach the level of the Japanese master, of course, but the fact that Past Lives even comes close is somewhat miraculous.
Spectacle is still alive and well in cinema, thanks largely to movies like Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Is it ridiculous that this nearly three-hour action flick is only the first part of the franchise’s newest installment? Of course—but not unpleasantly so. With car chases that constantly try to outdo themselves, stunts that are achieved through actual choreography rather than CGI, fight scenes that will make you wince, and a doomsday scenario involving the rise of sentient A.I., the newest Mission: Impossible takes you right back to the cinema of attractions, when wowing the audience was the foremost priority. Asked why he continues to perform his own stunts while at the Cannes Film Festival, Tom Cruise passionately rebutted, “Would you ask Gene Kelly why he does all his own dancing?” The amazing thing is, it’s an apt comparison: if musicals were classical Hollywood’s own version of unabashed opulence, then these Mission: Impossible movies are the modern-day iteration, with Cruise’s motorcycle jump off a cliff in Dead Reckoning acting as an echo of Kelly hanging from a lamppost in Singin’ in the Rain.
One of the best movies I saw at this year’s Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival was Riceboy Sleeps, which unfortunately seems to have gotten little attention otherwise. Written and directed by Anthony Shim (who partly based the movie on his own upbringing), it follows a Korean mother and son who move to Canada and struggle to assimilate to Western life in the early 1990s. Boasting impressive performances by Choi Seung-yoon and Ethan Hwang, the film is steeped in period detail and subtle touches that immersively convey the difficulties of the immigrant experience—for example, the way that the mother, So-Young, immediately forms a friend group with fellow Koreans at her factory job, or the way that her son, Dong-Hyun, dyes his hair blond in his teenage years. Gorgeously shot on 16mm, with a shifting aspect ratio to visually represent the characters’ changing worlds, Riceboy Sleeps is compassionate, meticulous, complex work. Now if only it could get American distribution . . .
Killers of the Flower Moon is a flawed epic, but even with its weaknesses it harkens back to an age of magisterial Hollywood filmmaking, when directors like Scorsese—arguably among the last of the studio greats—made ambitious, challenging fare that sought to provoke rather than placate viewers. While David Grann’s nonfiction novel focuses on the FBI investigators who were called to Osage country in Oklahoma to investigate a series of murders of Native American women, the adaptation wisely shifts the focus to the people most intimately involved in the violence that rages there. The weak-willed Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) has ventured to Oklahoma to gain employment with his wealthy uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), who’s gained his money and power in large part by stealing land from Osage Indians made rich after oil was discovered on their reservation. The true extent of Hale’s villainy only becomes apparent when he pushes Ernest toward marriage with an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone)—a ploy to gain even more oil-rich land after her imminent murder. Long stretches of the film seem bland and unnecessary—specifically a courtroom sequence in which Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow inexplicably show up—but this is still complex, formally astounding work that confronts our country’s history of genocide, oppression, and exploitation head-on. It transcends to the level of greatness thanks to its ending: an audacious moment of self-reflexivity in which Scorsese questions his own role in telling this story, though it’s still the Osage community that takes precedence in the final frame.
Nicolas Cage wanders, dumbstruck, through random strangers’ nightmares in Dream Scenario, an impressively dexterous horror-comedy from Kristoffer Borgli. A mild-mannered, schlubby biology professor (he specializes in the collective “hive minds” of ant colonies), Cage’s character, Paul Matthews, is initially a benign presence in people’s dreams; he becomes an unlikely celebrity thanks to his inexplicable oneiric visitations. But that’s when things really go haywire: Paul experiences a moment of sexual humiliation, his behavior in people’s dreams turns from meek to ultraviolent, and he’s cancelled as a pariah due to circumstances (partly) outside his control. Only occasionally does Dream Scenario feel like empty provocation; for the most part, its poking and prodding at our current political climate (particularly its censorious views of masculinity) is troubling and insightful. What’s most impressive about Dream Scenario is how it moves from one register to another with ease: horrifying one moment, hilarious the next, until it becomes unexpectedly, shatteringly sad—the human costs of this bizarre phenomenon ultimately making themselves fully felt.
Honorable Mention
The Boy and the Heron; See You Friday, Robinson; Passages; Kokomo City; Showing Up; Stone Turtle; Suitable Flesh; Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny; Mami Wata
Most Overrated
The Holdovers; Oppenheimer; You Hurt My Feelings; De Humani Corporis Fabrica; Asteroid City; All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt