Some Notes Regarding 2023

I know I’m in the minority when I say that 2023 has been a relatively weak year for movies. It’s true, the Oscars have nominated fewer movies that make me roll my eyes this year—and there are a few nominations that are making me actually excited for the ceremony—but overall, I think it has been a very predictable awards season, and a very safe year entirely. I’ve been struggling to compose my thoughts and reflections for a few weeks now. I usually post this “Best Of” page sometime around the beginning of January, even if I’ve spent the past several months revising and refining these lists.

For 2022, I created a list of my Top 50 Favorite Movies, and I wrote a little something about each one of them. I valiantly tried to repeat the exercise this year, though I could only make it to about 45 titles before I started feeling dishonest. Even amongst those 45 movies, it’s really only the top third of which that made me feel truly excited this year. I simply found myself running out of things to say! In lieu of those individual blurbs, I’ve decided to write a single piece this year as my reflection on my past 12 months at the movies.

I feel I have to begin with my favorite movie of the year (which is technically a 2022 movie because of its Cannes premier), The Eight Mountains, directed by Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. I saw this at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston last spring and was openly crying throughout the screening—I think it was myself and maybe four other people in the seats around me. I then spent the rest of the year comparing every other movie to it—was such and such better or worse than The Eight Mountains? I screened this movie for my friends at the Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference this summer and I even wrote several pages of introductory notes to hand out to the few people who came. I haven’t been this moved by a film, or just a piece of art in general, in a very long time.

The Eight Mountains is a movie about friendship, and growing old, and the passage of time which is what scares me more than anything else in the world. It’s about regretting the time you didn’t spend with your parents, and the things you were afraid to say but should have. I really can’t recommend this movie enough, and I have my Janus Contemporaries Blu-ray now, so if you’d like to come over, I’ll gladly watch it (and cry) with you!

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East were the other two movies I saw this year which I immediately felt compelled to add to my best-of-the-decade list. The Boy and the Heron is another movie about saying goodbye to your parents, that for quite obvious personal reasons, really resonated with me. If it ends up being Miyazaki’s final film, it’s quite a sendoff, and I can say now that Mahito’s story will be the one I return to most often of all the Studio Ghibli films. The Sweet East on the other hand is the most electrifying movie I’ve seen all year, and it almost defies description. I know people are kind of corny when they see a movie and say “this is the most exciting American debut feature in some time,” but I’m going to earnestly say that about The Sweet East. It’s exhilarating.

In the next tier, I would include Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which I think people have severely underestimated. It’s an incredibly challenging film but people are so quick to write off Cooper because he’s overly sincere about the project. I adored it. Likewise, we also got a new Ira Sachs movie this year, Passages, which features my favorite Franz Rogowski performance to date, as well as a terrific Ben Whishaw supporting performance. Yorgos Lanthimos’  Poor Things (and really it’s Emma Stone’s movie as well) is one that I struggled with on a first watch, but it hasn’t left my mind since I saw it last September. It really did require several months to mull it over.

Todd Haynes’ May December, Christian Petzold’s Afire, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, and Kelly Reichard’s Showing Up were the other real standouts for me this year. Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie that I think I appreciate more than I truly enjoyed—although given the subject matter, I think perhaps that’s an appropriate response. Saltburn was fun and I love seeing Barry Keoghan naked. Emily is a movie that came out really early in the year and I think maybe only 10 people saw, but it’s a brilliant work of speculative biography.

Further down the list I would like to call out certain things, like the Dolly Parton needle drop at the end of Priscilla, or Paul Kircher’s astonishingly vulnerable performance in Winter Boy, a movie by Christophe Honoré that I think is pretty flawed, but which I watched twice, so it was certainly compelling. The steel drum rendition of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” from Anatomy of a Fall is the song I’ve been humming to myself the most this year. Asteroid City is the movie I did the biggest 180 on when I rewatched it. The final scene from Beau Is Afraid is primarily responsible for it being so high up on the list. That sinking boat is an image I’ll never be able to shake.

Aside from that, the rest of the list is comprised of movies that I particularly enjoyed and would have no problem recommending to people who are looking to catch up on recent films they may have missed. And I actually saw 149 movies in 2023, so if you’d like to take a look at the complete list, you can find that on my Letterboxd.

There are a great number of films I’m looking forward to in the new year from filmmakers like Bertrand Mandico, Luca Guadagnino, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Jane Schoenbrun, Paul Schrader, Robert Eggers, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Bertrand Bonello, Atom Egoyan, Marco Berger, Robin Campillo, Brady Corbet, Terrence Malick, Lynne Ramsay, and David Cronenberg among a host of others. I just pray that I end up feeling more passionate about some of these 2024 titles than I did about the movies I saw in 2023.