Best of 2023

I know that 2023 isn't over yet I'm just busy and I wanted to get this out of the way please don't worry about it too much it's supposed to be fun

I know you all subscribe for my scalding hot takes on 1960s Disney movies and not for current/zeitgeist-y/actual film criticism, but seeing as the year is coming to an end and I’m a film bro Serious Lover of Media, I wanted to do a little write up of my faves this year.

Despite 2 strikes and me watching nothing in June because I was busy on set making my own feature (I am contractually obligated to mention it once in a while and boy has it been a while), I did manage to watch a whole lot of movies this year. From the 50 new releases I saw, I will choose, in honor of my 12¹ subscribers, my top 12.

12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem - Jeff Rowe

There is so much animation can do that live action can’t and will never successfully ape, and this film is a perfect example of why turning out for animated features is worthwhile. The plot was fine, but the images were sumptuous. It is okay to watch movies just because they make your eyes wider.

11. Bottoms - Emma Seligman

I think there is worth to taking big swings and this is a movie that swings for the fences. It builds a hyper-specific world and follows through with confidence. In the hands of a more self-conscious team it could have been cringey and horrible but the sense that everyone genuinely likes each other pervades the movie, and makes it work. It’s fun to watch people have fun! I was scared I wouldn’t get any lesbian movies on this list and I needed to have at least one. Also a lot of friends of mine worked on Bottoms and I love them very much.

10. Mamacruz - Patricia Ortega

The story of a devout Catholic woman coming to terms with her sexuality and desire. Told with affection and admiration, it says, better than nearly anything I’ve ever seen, that you can “have it all.” All of course meaning the specific things you want and are willing to work for. A slow, beautiful, sincere joy. A small, personal drama, but each moment of it is treated with respect. Even nearly a year after seeing it, it still makes me smile just thinking about this sweet film.

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse - Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers

Once in college I didn’t write a conclusion to my paper because I felt it was concluded already and my professor gave me an A and wrote “first things first you need a conclusion.”

8. Reality - Tina Satter

My mother is a litigator and as a kid I used to read the transcripts of her trials and depositions because I was apparently incapable of having fun like a normal child. But now I write scripts, so. Reality, which is adapted from the stage play which is lifted from the actual transcript of the day Reality Winner was arrested, spoke to my childhood in an eerie kind of way. It made me want to read the actual transcript (I did, you can find it here).

This movie is exactly my kind of experimental. I was sad I didn’t get to see the play and glad the filmed version took some different risks. It feels fundamentally important because it’s real words she actually said. Also she obviously did a genuinely heroic thing, and unlike the other fictionalized whistleblower features, Reality makes the incredibly smart choice to let the audience decide for itself if the choices she made were right, what she expected from them, their eventual impact, and how much they mattered.

7. Killers of the Flower Moon - Martin Scorsese

You don’t need to love a film to criticize it, but I don’t waste my time deconstructing trash. Criticism is an honor, a recognition that art can and should be better, a way to see through what is to what could be, a peephole into the world you were told to expect but that never manifested. Killers of the Flower Moon is a film I expected more from at every moment and which never quite followed delivered. But I enjoyed it. But I also hated it. I keep taking it off this list and putting it back on. I don’t know. I don’t think it was good? But also I have thought about it a lot since seeing it.

I read the book before I saw the film and I wish I had done it the other way around. The book is great, by the way, but it’s a piece of investigative journalism and focuses on the whodunnit aspect of the story, which Scorsese chose to abandon entirely. The film focuses on our villains, and while I think it’s exactly the perfect sort of story for Scorsese — exploring why bad people do bad things and what the consequences say about humanity — there is a lot lost from the source material, which is told almost entirely from Mollie’s perspective. Lily Gladstone turns in an absolutely astounding performance, one where you’re never sure how much her Mollie knows and how much she’s hiding, where her desires and her self preservation instincts are at odds nearly all the time. But you never get to see her do anything, and in the book — in real life!! — she instigates the entire takedown of the murderous scam. It is Mollie’s story. Scorsese denies her this.

Also, hot take for the day, I did not like the ending. I did not think it worked at all. I thought it was done better in Wolf of Wall Street, I thought it was disingenuous to “call out” the audience for enjoying a piece of sensationalized storytelling when there is already an unsensational, journalistically inclined version of this that exists. I think it’s ridiculous because presumably the entire point of those changes was to make it work as entertainment, and then you’re going to say fuck you for being entertained by something I made to entertain you? That’s one thing in a fratbrostocktraderfinancewhatever narrative, but this really happened and Scorsese changed a lot of the narrative to make it a better movie and then he’s calling out the audience for being entertained by his changes? It just completely missed me. Tell me how wrong I am, I’d love to fight about it.

6. Fancy Dance - Erica Tremblay

Another Lily Gladstone performance for the ages, Fancy Dance is an intimate story that does not pull punches, but does not linger on violence. It clings to the exact moment it’s in whenever it’s there. It’s a crime thriller, a road trip movie, a family drama — it’s got it all. Additionally, the cinematography is stellar, Carolina Costa adds so much to every moment of this movie. Big Reservation Dogs vibes, in a much more concise story. While many steps on the journey are wild choices, they never feel anything but completely earned.

Happy or sad, any story about sisters makes me cry; this is no exception.

5. Passages - Ira Sachs

I saw Passages with a friend on a summer night in Brooklyn and it just hit. The choice to avoid showing faces in confrontational moments got to me at first, but by the end it absolutely worked. Big swings were taken in the edit here, and I was glad to see them on screen. The performances are naturalistic to an almost Baumbachian degree, which is my jam. Much of their lives go unexplained, and I always appreciate a movie that doesn’t feel it has to hold my hand. I kind of wish I’d been sober when I saw it.

4. Anatomy of a Fall - Justine Triet

This meditation on fault and blame and what we owe each other, ourselves, and our offspring was superb. Sandra Hüller! The linguistic choices are so fun and French court is bonkers. The screening I saw in LA had a bunch of unemployed writers who all audibly groaned when they used her book as evidence in court.

3. The Holdovers - Alexander Payne

The Holdovers is calibrated specifically for my interests and tastes (vibesy, plotless, angsty teen movies with Paul Giamatti) and so I absolutely loved it. These top three are so leaps and bounds, so heads and shoulders above the rest of my list this year, and The Holdovers is one that’s been living in an itchy place in my brain since I saw it. I love the atmosphere, the specificity, the way the 70s are coming, but not quite here yet. There’s so little growth in this film. It’s really about three people learning to navigate a specific situation. When that situation is over, everything goes back to normal, and that return to normalcy is the point. We can have a reprieve, but at the end of the day, life is not going to change unless we’re forced or we force ourselves. I like that the adults seem to learn this lesson but the kid doesn’t. One thing The Holdovers nails is how for Angus adulthood is both just around the corner and miles away. It is coming fast and also it will never be here soon enough. Lots of movies about teens miss that aspect of high school, that feeling of wanting to be out while being scared shitless of having to exist as an actual adult in the actual world. In The Holdovers all our characters feel that way, which is why they have hidden themselves in a school. And it’s why being without the safety of that school for two weeks forces them to change, and why when safety returns they are glad. Change is hard.

2. Oppenheimer - Christopher Nolan

I’ve seen Oppenheimer twice in theaters, once on opening night and once on Yom Kippur, the two nights one should see Oppenheimer in theaters. Both were transcendent. A blockbuster about atonement, of all things, I think it both asks and answers the question of whether or not (not) we can ever truly fix our mistakes, make right our wrongs, survive our choices. Maybe more than any other filmmaker working today, Nolan understands the cinematic necessity of juxtaposing big and small, wide vistas and tiny rooms, and the final third of Oppenheimer works so well because it is such a tiny microcosm of the same questions haunting the big bang of the atomic bomb. I will be rewatching for a long time.

Also I can’t wait to see Jen win her Oscar, it is so far beyond deserved.

1. Fremont - Babak Jalali

My favorite movie of the year, every time I think about it I smile. I knew it when I saw Fremont that it would stick with me, and I was right. It’s such a funny, lovely portrayal of loneliness and connection and self-awareness and confidence (or lack thereof) and the choices we make when we’re desperate and what desperation even means. One of the only modern black and white movies I’ve ever seen where the choice to forego color feels timeless and additive. This year has been really hard for the film/TV industry, but also it has shown us some hope, and I think Fremont perfectly captures how I feel about 2023. If you can see it, you must.

Movies I Haven’t Seen Yet That May Have Made the List If I Had Gotten My Shit Together:

In order of most likely to least likely to be my favorite:

• Poor Things

• Eileen

• Dream Scenario

• May December

• The Boy And The Heron

• Maestro

• Monster

• Renaissance

• Napoleon

• Pricilla

• Next Goal Wins

1. I actually have 16 subscribers now, but thinking of a top 12 was hard enough