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In another rough year for the film industry, one which saw both writers and actors on strike for fairer terms in an increasingly streaming world, Hollywood needed some good news. It came last summer, summed up by one portmanteau: Barbenheimer. The opening-day confluence of two very different blockbusters, Greta Gerwig’s smash-hit “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s historical epic “Oppenheimer,” gave studios and theater owners hope that there was still life to be found in movie theaters, thanks in no small part to an ingenious viral marketing campaign, a rising tide that lifted both boats. Both films delivered as art and commerce in another year that spread cinema across theaters and home theaters.
2023 saw some intelligent and finely crafted franchise films, like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” by which director James Mangold gave the titular archeologist a surprisingly effective sendoff; trilogy-capper “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”; the reinvigorating kaiju picture “Godzilla Minus One”; animated sequels “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget”; Kenneth Branagh’s best-yet Poirot mystery “A Haunting in Venice”; and the darkly antiheroic “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” as well as the latest “Mission: Impossible” and “John Wick” pictures, and the superior reboots “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.”
“M3GAN” and “Cocaine Bear” were anointed new stars, and Michael Keaton returned to the role of Batman in “The Flash,” while Marvel took a big loss with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels.”
Beyond these attention grabbers, micro-budgeted independent films continued to find ways to flourish. It’s not too late to seek out uncut gems like the gender-bending comedy “Biosphere,” the artful meditation “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” the outrageously explicit Hitchcockian comedy “Rotting in the Sun,” domestic opioid drama “Stay Awake,” and the soon-to-expand culinary romance “The Taste of Things.”
Cupertino-based AppleTV+ backed Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” while Los Gatos-based Netflix posted what could be its best-yet crop of originals, including David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Disney animation castoff “Nimona,” wild-ride race-based comedy “They Cloned Tyrone,” civil rights drama “Rustin,” and the fascinating, fact-based “Nyad.” In short, cinema is alive and well.
The top 10 films of 2023 (in alphabetical order)
‘About Dry Grasses’ (in area theaters February 2024)
Taking a leisurely pace, “About Dry Grasses” establishes harsh, meager eastern Anatolia; introduces us a cast of characters managing “the weariness of hope;” then ambles toward poetic, painful profundity about the impacts of our choices. Along the way, director/co-writer Nuri Bilge Ceylan and leading man Deniz Celiloglu finely etch the character of an arrogant, depressed cynic who teaches at a rural elementary school but idly insists he plans to escape to Istanbul at first opportunity. Ceylan’s thoughtfully composed character study organizes banter (with men, women, and children) to challenge and reform its protagonist’s sense of self and meaning.
‘American Fiction’ (in theaters)
Cord Jefferson makes a confident feature filmmaking debut with this adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” Finding a cinematic analog for Everett’s meta narrative, Jefferson satirizes the stranglehold “Black trauma porn” has on Black excellence in storytelling and the ability to market Black stories through channels of prestige. Through the character of frustrated novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright, never more natural), “American Fiction” contrasts the clichéd images of Black life audiences have prevailingly been fed (depicted here in parody) to a satisfying dramedy of Black humanity often too quotidian to make it past cultural gatekeepers.
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ (on AppleTV+ & VOD)
American master Martin Scorsese offers a commanding take on author David Grann’s true crime account of 1920s white elites re-colonizing the Osage people by means of marriage, murder and plunder. Lily Gladstone warily holds the quiet eye of the storm as Mollie, while Scorsese regulars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro skulk. Beyond the disturbing and still-relevant story of cultural and fiscal domination, there’s great pleasure to be had in the film’s impeccable craft: the editing of Thelma Schoonmaker, the production design of Jack Fisk, and the final musical score of Robbie Robertson.
‘May December’ (on Netflix)
The great Todd Haynes takes an unconventional approach to a notorious, button-pushing true-crime story in this film à clef meditation on Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. Julianne Moore and Charles Melton play the roles of a middle-aged woman and the now-grown child with whom she had an extra-marital-affair-turned-20-year marriage, while Natalie Portman plays an actor researching her starring role in an upcoming film about the scandal. Deliberately awkward and unsettling, the astonishingly performed “May December” considers the psychological particulars of the central relationships but also crafts a funny and disturbing meta-narrative about the ethics and approach to docudrama.
‘Monica’ (on VOD)
Andrea Pallaoro’s unassuming drama tenderly explores paired domestic tragedies — aggressive dementia and an LGBTQ child’s loyalty to the parent who betrayed her — through the deceptively simple premise of a transgender woman (Trace Lysette, in one of the year’s most deeply felt performances) returning home for the first time since her now-ailing mother (pitch-perfect Patricia Clarkson) rejected her in her teens. Beautifully photographed and attuned to the subtle ironies of real life, “Monica” gets under the skin to explore resilient identity and spiritual transcendence.
‘Oppenheimer’ (in theaters & on VOD, 4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, & Digital)
Christopher Nolan’s epic reconstruction and deconstruction of the Manhattan Project and the man who organized it. In concert with the film’s historical verisimilitude, Cillian Murphy’s innate ability to project brooding intellect and raw, wounded feeling keeps us fascinated by Oppenheimer’s brilliance, his arrogant capacity to be his own worst enemy, and ultimately his guilt-wracked devastation at opening the scariest Pandora’s Box science has yet known.
‘Poor Things’ (in theaters)
Prime surrealist Yorgos Lanthimos creeps into the territory of Jean-Pierre Jeunet with this steampunk adaptation (scripted by Tony McNamara) of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Drs. Frankenstein and Moreau come to mind in the Victorian home laboratory of Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist “God,” where resurrection and creation meet in the stitched-together Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, in an oddball tour de force). Unethical science is just the tip of the iceberg in this fish-out-of-water science-fiction satire about discovering life after death in the bad company of humanity.
‘Showing Up’ (on Paramount+, Showtime, & VOD)
Co-scripting with novelist Jon Raymond, writer-director Kelly Reichardt delicately fashions a bone-dry comedy from low stakes microdramas: whether a hot water heater will ever be fixed, the recovery of an injured pigeon, the perhaps unnecessary but somehow unavoidable maintenance of one’s family members, and the daily preoccupations of the art life. In her fourth team-up with Reichardt, Michelle Williams plays grumpy hangdog to Hong Chau’s annoyingly serene, good-natured foil for a buddy comedy whose action moves at the slow motion of daily drudgery.
’20 Days in Mariupol’ (PBS & free on YouTube)
Pulitzer Prize-winning Ukrainian journalist Mstyslav Chernov assembles a feature documentary from his war photography captured from within the Russian invasion of Mariupol, adding his own first-person narration to round out our understanding of life under siege and the obstacles and mortal risks facing journalists who dare to dispatch the truth. The material takes on added resonance since the siege of Gaza; Chernov’s imagery of obliterated hospitals, dead and severely injured children, and other civilian horrors sadly finds in the specifics of Mariupol a universality of war crime.
‘The Zone of Interest’ (in theaters)
With global fascism conspicuously howling at our doors, Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of the 2014 Martin Amis novel chillingly depicts the compartmentalization that allows genocide to occur — if not in our own backyards, as is near-literally the case for Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his happy-homemaker wife (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), still uncomfortably close. How can we enjoy creature comforts while others suffer and have their lives cut short? In the absence of moral responsibility and courage, only through willful ignorance.
Runners-up (narrative drama)
“Afire,” “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.,” “All of Us Strangers,” “The Eight Mountains,” “Godland,” “Godzilla Minus One,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “The Killer,” “Monster,” “Nyad,” “Pacifiction,” “Passages,” “Priscilla,” “Rustin,” “Society of the Snow,” “The Taste of Things,” “They Cloned Tyrone.”
Runners-up (narrative comedy)
“Asteroid City,” “Biosphere,” “Bottoms,” “Rotting in the Sun,” “Theater Camp,” “You Hurt My Feelings.”
The bottom five films of 2023
‘Expend4bles’
A whole lotta shootouts, exploding heads, throat-slittings, car chases and explosions, all rendered in horrible special effects. Dumb, cheap and larded up with macho banter from characters that might as well be G.I. Joe action figures.
‘Pet Sematary: Bloodlines’
This origin-story prequel to the 2019 remake of the 1989 film of Stephen King’s novel meanders through its intellectual property, grasping for franchise potential but succeeding only in wasting a capable ensemble.
‘The Retirement Plan’
Nicolas Cage makes two kinds of movies: good ones and really, really bad ones. Guess which kind this action “romp” is. Cheap-looking, with horrendous writing and interminably slack direction.
‘Retribution’
Action movies with limited settings can be ingenious (think “Speed” or “Phone Booth”). Sadly, ‘Retribution,’ which sticks Liam Neeson behind the wheel of his car for 95% of the run time, ain’t. A thrill-less thriller.
‘The Secret Kingdom’
This feckless family fantasy shoots for “The Chronicles of Narnia” or “His Dark Materials” but lands closer to “The Room” in its acting, and script, which makes for a seemingly endless string of talking animal encounters.
The best heroes
Bayard Rustin in “Rustin”
Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in “Poor Things”
Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”
Monica (Trace Lysette) in “Monica”
Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) in “Priscilla”
The worst villains
The Devil (various) in “The Exorcist: Believer,” “The Pope’s Exorcist,” “The Devil Conspiracy,” etc.
Dracula (Nicolas Cage/Javier Botet) in “Renfield”/”The Last Voyage of the Demeter”
Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) in “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”
William King Hale (Robert De Niro) in “Killers of the Flower Moon”
M3GAN (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis) in “M3GAN”
More top documentaries
“De Humani Corporis Fabrica”
“The Disappearance of Shere Hite”
“The Eternal Memory” (Paramount+, VOD)
“Kokomo City” (VOD)
“Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros”
The animated winners
“The Boy and the Heron” (theaters)
“Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” (Netflix)
“Nimona” (Netflix)
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (in theaters & on VOD, 4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, & Digital)
“Suzume” (Crunchyroll)