2023 was a wonderful year in cinema, with many of our biggest directors delivering career-best work. Here are ten highlights.

Jon Alexander

Published in Fanfare

3 days ago (fanfare.pub)

How refreshing to be treated like an adult! This is what I thought time and again after watching many of the year’s best movies in packed theaters across New York City. I expect to be challenged by the avant-garde, but whenever I line up for a Hollywood blockbuster, I brace myself for the inevitable dumbing down. For most of my life, big-studio movies have been hand-holding audiences with their simplistic themes about good and evil, superficial characters, and thin plots designed for a third-grader to follow. So what a treat it was to encounter Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a structurally complex and thematically dense three-hour talkathon about physics, politics, and the price of genius. That movie grossed over $950 million worldwide, which temporarily restored my faith in humanity.

While we’re at it, Barbie was a surprise for a movie that is, as the astute critic Amy Taubin succinctly put it, “about a fucking doll.” I’m still unable to get past the corporate branding, but there’s no denying Greta Gerwig’s talent behind the camera, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s precise comedic timing, and the reality that the highest-grossing movie of 2023 is a feminist manifesto about dismantling the patriarchy with cinematic allusions to Jacques Tati. And if you feel, as I do, that Barbie is too sanitized to be taken seriously, may I direct your attention to Beau is Afraid, a darker, more bizarre picaresque? Like Robbie’s Barbie, Joaquin Phoenix’s Beau is similarly trapped in an existential nightmare but his is filled with more sex, death, a hilarious Parker Posey, and a giant scrotum that must be seen to be believed.

This year, our major auteurs came out swinging. With Asteroid City, Wes Anderson leaned further into experimentation. The Dardenne brothers returned to form with Tori and Lokita, a brutal portrait of how immigrants of color are exploited in Europe, their bleakest movie by far. Sofia Coppola continued her fascination with the rich and famous, criticisms be damned, as Priscilla boldly depicts Elvis Presley as an abuser who groomed an underage girl and kept her prisoner at Graceland. And even though Martin Scorsese received some flack in 2019 for The Irishman being too long and slow (not my take, by the way), he returned with another three-and-a-half-hour epic that is even slower, without all of the usual stylistic trademarks that Letterboxd bros obsess over. It was a courageous late-career move and, I’d like to think, a defiant middle finger to those who are still mad that he went after their favorite superheroes. The record will reflect that Scorsese is cinema.

I was fascinated by how directors leaned into ambiguity and even denied audiences pleasure, entertainment, and escapism. Oppenheimer dismantles the great man theory and Killers of the Flower Moon forgoes the more rousing FBI manhunt part of David Grann’s book to tell a painful story about American greed and white supremacy. David Fincher’s The Killer promises the coolest needle drop of the year with The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” only to take it away, punishing us for wanting to enjoy this twisted thriller. And then there are all the thought-provoking endings that leave us with more questions than answers, like R.M.N., Afire, May December, Anatomy of a Fall, and Monster. You know it’s a rich slate when you have to see many of the year’s high-profile movies twice to appreciate them fully.

When I look back, it’s clear that 2023 was a wonderful year in cinema. Here are the ten movies that matter most to me.

10. R.M.N (Cristian Mungiu)

The Romanian New Wave may have crashed, but the directors who helped put the country’s cinema on the map in the early 2000s haven’t lost their touch. Cristian Mungiu, whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) is one of the few essential movies of the 21st century, returned earlier this year with R.M.N., a complex thriller about xenophobia in a small multiethnic village in Transylvania. There’s much to appreciate about Mungiu’s vision, including a staggering scene at the center that occurs in a town hall, captured in a 20-minute unbroken take, which reveals every tragic thing we need to know about this shattered community.

R.M.N. is tough to watch and as cold as the East European winter with a pessimistic perspective on the state of society. As it should be. In similar towns across the world, migrants are targets of extreme hate, and for too many fearmongers in power, the simplistic solution to all the economic problems is to demonize the other. Mungiu knows that the situation is more complicated. R.M.N. is a stark portrait of small-mindedness that, by the end, transforms into a rousing cautionary tale.

9. Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)

Some critics have described Showing Up as Kelly Reichardt’s most lighthearted movie to date, but that’s only if you divorce it from the larger real-world context. The story of Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor in Oregon who is constantly interrupted by the outside world and its nagging financial and familial obligations, is certainly pleasant to watch, with a cute cat and a few funny moments that any struggling artist can relate to.

The movie is a love letter to the artistic pursuit and imagines a space in which young people can learn how to use their hands to create things, not to profit corporations, but simply to make the world more beautiful. However, it’s also a crushing lament for all that is lost when these spaces aren’t easily accessible. Lizzy receives a lot of support from the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which is now defunct. In real life, the school was a sanctuary to learn, share ideas with like-minded people, and feel encouraged to carry on when times were tough. Reichardt has devoted her life to shining a spotlight on America’s downtrodden, and this time, she adds the local artists in Portland to her catalog of lost souls.

8. Afire (Christian Petzold)

Like Showing Up, Christian Petzold’s Afire is about a prickly artist who prefers to be left alone so he can work in peace. Leon (Thomas Schuber) is a writer who uses his work (he hides behind his laptop) as a shield to disguise deeper insecurities and self-loathing. He longs to connect with others but cannot, so he retreats further into isolation. This is one of several intriguing ideas that Petzold aims to explore with Afire, a breezy summer hangout movie about two friends who escape to a getaway by the Baltic Sea and encounter mysterious strangers (Paula Beer’s Nadja) and wildfires raging in the distance. The movie is charming but also steeped in melancholy, as we watch Leon self-sabotage and dig himself into one hole after another.

7. A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell)

A Thousand and One, A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature that won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance, has the makings of a New York classic. I haven’t encountered a character like Teyana Taylor’s Inez in a while, a woman of color who doesn’t try to earn our sympathy, but by her sheer determination, grows on us anyway. Inez is deeply flawed as a woman who goes to extreme lengths to maintain custody of her son, and as the movie initially unfolds, we aren’t sure how to feel about her. She is selfish and erratic, with a temper that alienates those closest to her. But scene by scene, we come to care for her scrappy survival instincts and comprehend that she means well, even if she doesn’t always make the smartest decisions.

A Thousand and One is that rare sophisticated adult drama with a beating heart, a movie that refuses to insult your intelligence and makes you cry without manipulation.

6. Stonewalling (Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji)

The movie on my list that I’m sure the fewest people have seen is Stonewalling, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t any good. While it has always been difficult for those outside of major cities to watch art-house movies in a theater, distribution has gotten worse over the past few decades. Sure, streaming makes it easier for you to catch up at home, but more often than not, the movies that demand the focused attention of the theater are the least accessible, playing at festivals and then receiving limited releases in one or two theaters in New York and Los Angeles before being dumped into the streaming abyss. Even my cinephile friends in Brooklyn missed this one, which says a lot about our splintered culture.

Running an unhurried two-and-a-half hours, Stonewalling isn’t necessarily an easy sit, but I found Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji’s portrait of a young woman (Yao Honggui) struggling to survive in China’s gig economy to be riveting. For much of the movie, she wanders from job to job, wondering what value she can offer. Then she gets pregnant and the movie turns into a horrifying examination of all that is lost — humanity, mostly — in pursuit of a paycheck.

5. May December (Todd Haynes)

May December is the kind of movie that makes you cringe at all the bad behavior on display, courtesy of the monstrous (but always watchable) women played by Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. The less you know about the premise, the better, for much of the pleasure derives from the slow reveals, which gradually color each character with shades of grey.

As we’ve come to expect from Todd Haynes, May December is about artifice, performance, and the roles people play in everyday life. Portman’s Elizabeth Berry is a Hollywood star preparing to make a movie about Moore’s Gracie, an infamous tabloid celebrity, and the cruel joke is that Gracie is the better actress. Haynes often frames the women looking at themselves in mirrors, which is a clever visual motif that conveys their obsession with appearance. However, what they choose to see is not quite what we see. This makes the movie fascinating, disturbing, and by the end, deeply sad.

4. Past Lives (Celine Song)

Both times I saw Past Lives, the majority of people in the packed theater were sobbing by the end. The unrequited affair at the movie’s center is surely the cause, but equally important are the decisions director Celine Song makes, avoiding cliches to tell a story that is personal to her and relatable to anyone else with a pulse. The will-they-or-won’t-they ending has already been praised, but the scene that convinced me of the movie’s greatness occurs much earlier.

After Nora (Greta Lee) spends the day connecting with her childhood sweetheart Hae Song (Teo Yoo) from Korea, whom she hasn’t seen in years, she returns to her New York apartment and has a frank conversation with her husband Arthur (John Magaro). A lesser movie would have portrayed Arthur as the evil obstacle who stands in Nora’s way of being with Hae Song, but here, Arthur is kind, considerate, and incredibly insecure. Which is to say, he is a real human being as opposed to a caricature. Arthur and Nora lie in bed and talk about their feelings in that intimate way only lovers can, and it was at this point that I realized Past Lives is special. In the scene between Nora and Arthur, Song shows us what love looks like in the flesh, as opposed to the fairy tale.

3. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is so meticulously designed that people often overlook how emotionally engaging it is. At its core, if you strip away the auteurist flourishes we’ve come to expect (and please, for the sake of cinema, don’t!), this is a relatable story about misfits who are struggling to find their place in society. Whether young kids who get their kicks from science or adults who seek community in the theater, Anderson pays tribute to those who don’t fit into conventional boxes, as he has done since his debut feature Bottle Rocket (1996).

With a cast this stacked, it seems cruel to single out a favorite, but I was blown away by how seamlessly Scarlett Johansson blends into the Anderson universe. The melancholy scenes of longing with Johansson and Jason Schwartzman are lovely, as is the heart-stopping climax with Margot Robbie, whose brief appearance reminds us why she’s one of our most reliable movie stars. While I’m receptive to contrary takes, they should be rooted in truth. Frankly, the claims that Anderson is a self-indulgent stylist who doesn’t care about story or character miss the mark. As accomplished as the craft is, the most memorable aspect of each of his movies is the faces of people like you and me striving to be happy and free in a world that doesn’t share their passions. Rather than succumb to despair, they carve their own space to be themselves, much like this brilliant director has done for the past thirty years.

2. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel)

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel are the stars of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, and their latest effort, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, further cements their status as the most exciting nonfiction directors working today. Released earlier this year, the movie takes us inside the body as Castaing-Taylor and Paravel observe medical professionals performing procedures in five hospitals across Paris.

The images of the invasive surgeries are graphic, particularly for the squeamish, but I haven’t been able to shake them. I’m inclined to defend experiments like De Humani Corporis Fabrica because it is the kind of innovative achievement that curious moviegoers should seek out but tend to disregard for being too strange, challenging, and unconventional. You may hate it and be bored stiff, but you may also be transfixed by it, as I was, and wonder why more people aren’t singing its praises.

1. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)

Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by David Grann, Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon recounts the Osage Reign of Terror, a series of harrowing murders that occurred in Oklahoma during the 1920s, when full-blooded Osage natives suddenly started dying. The movie, like Grann’s book, documents how and why these murders happened, and just as crucially, why they went unsolved for so long.

Scorsese, who wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth, is interested in history — who gets to tell it, why certain stories are left out of the official record, and the role that artists can play in correcting that record. The master doesn’t have anything left to prove at this point, but he continues to push himself creatively, taking more chances than other big-name auteurs working today. The coda, which ranks among the most audacious magic tricks Scorsese has ever pulled off, is both intellectually stimulating and incredibly moving, as the premier director of our lifetime looks directly into the camera and tells us why, at this point in his long career, he continues to make movies.

Honorable Mentions: Passages; One Fine Morning; Oppenheimer; Eileen; Beau is Afraid; Anatomy of a Fall; You Hurt My Feelings; Full Time; Fallen Leaves; Sanctuary

Biggest Duds: Scream VI; No Hard Feelings; Close; Bottoms; How to Blow Up a Pipeline; Palm Trees and Power Lines; Fair Play; Rye Lane; The Five Devils; Enys Men

Best Female Performances: Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One; Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall; Margaret Qualley in Sanctuary; Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning; Dylan Gelula in Dream Scenario; Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers; Mia Goth in Infinity Pool; Eliza Scanlen in The Starling Girl; Sydney Sweeney in Reality; Virginie Efira in Other People’s Children

Best Male Performances: Franz Rogowski in Passages; William Catlett in A Thousand and One; John Magaro in Past Lives; Glenn Howerton in Blackberry; Ryan Gosling in Barbie; Thomas Schubert in Afire; Eita Nagayama in Monster; Justin H. Min in Shortcomings; Matt Damon in Oppenheimer; Marin Grigore in R.M.N.

Best Ensembles: Killers of the Flower Moon; Asteroid City; Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.; You Hurt My Feelings; Mars One

2023 MVP: Steven Soderbergh for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Full Circle, and Command Z

Most Anticipated of 2024: Challengers; MaXXXine; Evil Does Not Exist; La Chimera; Green Border; In Our Day; Drive-Away Dolls; Love Lies Bleeding; Blitz; Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Written by Jon Alexander

·Writer for Fanfare

Writer covering movies, television, music, and pop culture.