Let’s make this about the movies. I have written about the world (a mess). I have written about the industry (a shambles). I have written about the experience of going to the cinema (unparalleled). All we have left are the movies themselves, and what a fantastic year for movies it was. From massive blockbuster comedies to little-seen indie dramas. From the excellence of international cinema to wildly controversial streaming hits. Great films came from every corner of the movie business this year, and it was a privilege to seek them out.
In a sense, films have never been easier to see, and many of the films on my list this year are available right now across various streaming services or for on-demand rental. If it means the democratization of film, I am all for it. In my post-college years, I lived in a small, Northern California town with just two theaters playing only the biggest hits. I would have given anything for access to the treasure trove of cinema on offer to folks in places like Los Angeles and New York. Now, people all over the world can pop on the latest festival hit from a world master in the comfort of their own living rooms.
On one, very real level, this is great for the art form. For what we do here at Last Cinema Standing, of course I would prefer we all see movies together in the theater. But, in so many ways, the pandemic permanently altered the act of movie watching, and we have to adjust expectations to meet that new reality.
In 2014, I moved to New York City. In 2019, I moved from there to Los Angeles. I write from a place of privilege when it comes to seeing great movies on the biggest screens. In some ways, I am the person I wished I could be in those small-town days. The movies on my top 10 lists over those years included many movies I saw at festivals, in limited-release advanced screenings, and at three-screen art-house cinemas. They were movies my younger self could only have dreamed of seeing in the theater. I was living that dream.
Every one of those years, every movie to make my top 10 had been seen in a theater. Then, the pandemic hit. I caught First Cow and Sorry We Missed You in the final week before all theaters closed. I saw Sound of Metal at a drive-in. The rest of my 2020 top 10, though, I saw at home. Things got better in 2021 with the vaccine and the re-opening of most theaters, but we weren’t all the way back. Even in 2022, I was unable to catch everything as streaming further took over the landscape and movies like All Quiet on the Western Front came and went at the cinema in the blink of an eye.
All of which makes me happy to report that for 2023, I saw every one of the top 10 movies listed below in the theater, most in sold-out or nearly full screenings, surrounded by fellow movie fans, basking in the glow of the projector light. So, I embrace the duality of the moment. I am so pleased that most of these films are available to people living all over the world, but I am equally happy that I was able to catch every one of them in the cinema. I hope you’ll catch a few with me in 2024.
Before we get to the list, here are five more great films from 2023 that deserve recognition (listed alphabetically): El Conde, Pablo Larraín’s wildly imaginative, boldly staged tale of vampires and fascists; How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Daniel Goldhaber’s riveting sophomore feature about stopping the coming disaster by any means necessary; The Iron Claw, Sean Durkin’s epic true-life tragedy about the Von Erich wrestling clan; Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ fable about womanhood and self-determination, featuring career-best work from Emma Stone; and Theater Camp, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s knowingly self-aware and blissfully unapologetic ode to the experience of being a theater kid.
Last Cinema Standing’s Top 10 Films of 2023:
10. Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig
Some movies reflect the culture. Some movies tap into the culture. Some great movies even change the culture. For four months in the middle of 2023, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie simply was the culture. There was nowhere you could go, whether in public or online, where the film had not left its big, pink heel prints. We have talked in this series about the phenomenon of the thing, and we talked about the experience of seeing it with a crowd of devotees. But, at the end of the day, the film’s success lies mostly in being just so damn good.
Bad movies can make a billion dollars. Great movies, however, do so while making a lasting impact. In Barbie, Gerwig has crafted a megahit film that is built to last. The political core of the story strikes at evergreen conversations around gender that are unlikely to change any time soon. Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s satire is razor sharp and cuts across a broad swath of the cultural landscape, taking on topics as diverse as corporate feminism, intersectional allyship, and gender normativity. I should also mention that in tackling all of these ideas, the script is also flat-out funny.
Every performance is pitched to the exact right level to exist within this heightened reality, beginning with producer-star Margot Robbie’s born-to-play-it turn as Stereotypical Barbie. The set design is immaculate, bringing Barbie Land fully to life in ways only Gerwig could have imagined. The costumes are spot on. The cinematography is gorgeous. And, not for one moment does it feel like Gerwig is coasting on the good will afforded to the IP. She makes every frame uniquely her own, infusing it with her own brand of genius. And, for a glorious few months there, she bent the culture to her will.
9. Fallen Leaves, directed by Aki Kaurismaki
Aki Kaurismaki was one of my most watched filmmakers during the first year of the pandemic. Trapped inside with nothing but a subscription to the Criterion Channel, I familiarized myself with the Finnish master’s most lauded works: The Match Factory Girl, Ariel, and Le Havre, among others. Leningrad Cowboys Go America is a particular favorite, but every one of them hit me on a deep, personal level. A bleak worldview filtered through a rye sense of humor, it’s the epitome of “You gotta laugh so you don’t cry.”
After a fairly prolific start to his career, Kaurismaki has slowed down considerably in recent times, releasing just four features in the past two decades. Their rarity, however, only makes them that much more precious. They are jewels to be treasured, and Fallen Leaves, the director’s first film since 2017, deserves prime placement in the treasure box.
It is a romantic comedy about romantic comedies, owing a great deal to Nora Ephron, ‘30s screwball comedies, and Charlie Chaplin. However, it is also about two lonely people looking for any kind of connection as their world teeters on the brink of destruction. Every radio broadcast brings news of the war in Ukraine, the fate of which means a great deal to the future of Finland. As the threat of destruction looms and a dreariness settles all around, the two people at the center of Kaurismaki’s film are searching for anything to hold onto, to give the darkness meaning. If it is love, so much the better.
8. May December, directed by Todd Haynes
This is the kind of film that has you cringing and laughing so hard right from the beginning that you hardly notice the moment it stops being funny. Or, maybe it’s not a moment. Maybe it’s the way the script, by Alex Mechanik and Samy Burch, drops you into a world that is all too easy to judge, then slowly pulls you into becoming a part of the world. You believe somehow that you are better than these people, so you keep a detached, ironic distance from them. Then, bit by bit, the director, the script, and the performances pull you in until they have your empathy and your full, honest engagement.
There is an irony in May December coming out at a time when it feels like we are at peak “prestige trash.” By which I mean: Every week it seems there is a new miniseries or made-for-TV (or straight-to-streaming) movie about some true crime scandal or overhyped business collapse or some other tabloid tale of greed and murder. The culture seems obsessed with sanitized, easy-to-consume versions of true-life garbage. It’s the artistic equivalent of rubbernecking a fatal accident. Todd Haynes’ film has no patience for that kind of obsession and pulls no punches in dismantling it.
Natalie Portman plays an actress – a bad actress – who hopes to exploit the criminal love affair between Julianne Moore’s and Charles Melton’s characters for her “art.” She keeps telling her director she feels like she is getting close to the truth, but she will never find the truth because she is not interested and neither is the film she is making. I have seen Portman’s character called a critique of the profession of acting, and it is that, but she is also us, a rubbernecker at the accident.
Moore’s character is no better. She is a delusional liar who has perpetrated a crime that she cannot admit was a crime, neither to herself nor to anyone else, so she must draw everyone into her web of deceit. Melton’s character is the victim in all this, and he is the one who finally draws you in, earning your empathy. It’s so subtle you don’t even notice, and by the time you do, it’s too late. That’s when it stops being fun because no one wants to feel bad when looking at the car wreck.
7. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, directed by Radu Jude
I kept waiting. Waiting for the sequence that would take a great film into the stratosphere. Waiting for that moment when Jude’s experimental fervor would take over and give us something we had never seen before. Being familiar with the Romanian director’s previous work, I knew it would come. He has never disappointed, and he did not here.
Around three quarters of the way into the film, he transitions to a series of images of crosses on the side of the road, real tributes to those who have died on a dangerous stretch of highway. Everyone knows this is a problem, but no action is taken. The longer the sequence goes, the more crosses we see, the greater our understanding of the human toll ineffectual government and profit-first corporatism take on us all. It is quietly devastating, building in power with each passing image. This is what we expect from Jude’s films and what he has never failed to deliver.
None of this is to say the rest of the film is a study in rigid formalism. It is anything but. The film follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked film PA who also drives for Uber, as she schleps around Bucharest attempting to cast a corporate safety video with real victims of corporate negligence. Jude also intercuts passages from a 1981 Romanian melodrama about a woman driving a cab in Bucharest and even includes Manolache’s own Andrew Tate-style TikTok parody of a “men’s rights activist.”
It all blends seamlessly into a vision of the end times that does not seem so far from where we are now. In a capitalist society, human life is cheap, Jude argues, and only valuable in the labor it provides. To them, we are all cattle marching toward the slaughterhouse. It behooves us to keep our expectations low for what we will discover on the inside.
6. Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan
When I say Oppenheimer is the best film Christopher Nolan has ever made, I do not mean to damn it with faint praise. As you may be aware if you have followed the site over the years, rare is the Nolan film that works for me. I like the Dark Knight series just fine, but the timepiece preciousness of his original films has always bugged me. They largely feel clever for the sake of being clever, and there is a hollowness to them, a human element missing at their core. This film turns that inside out.
Here, Nolan starts with the human element – J. Robert Oppenheimer – and builds his beautiful puzzle box around that. By grounding his atomic-age tale around the doubts and weaknesses of a single remarkable man, the writer-director is free to explore the grander themes of man’s tendency toward self-destruction and humanity’s smallness in the face of infinity. Through Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy’s knockout lead performance, we can directly connect to the point Nolan is trying to make.
On top of that, the crafts are impeccable as always. There is no Nolan film that is not well made, but this is the first where all of that technical bravado feels in service of something greater than the sum of its parts. We get the wonderful cinematography and the deft editing and the propulsive score, just as we always have, but here they actually mean something. All that imagery and sound and fury adds up to leave us with the portrait of a man who could see the world at a subatomic level but was still too blind to see how that world actually works.
5. Saltburn, directed by Emerald Fennell
From Best Picture winner Parasite to horror comedy Ready or Not and any number of other films in between, a relatively common thematic refrain in modern cinema is: Eat the rich. Given the current state of the world, it’s not hard to understand why this might be appealing. Well, the latest film from Academy Award winner Emerald Fennell not only eats the rich, but it licks the plate – and a few other things for good measure.
Fennell is the premier pop provocateur of our time, in that she wraps her films in a candy-colored sheen that allows her to smuggle in some of the most transgressive ideas we are likely to get in the popular cinema. Given this, it is hardly surprising Saltburn has proven divisive across a number of lines. A movie like this was always bound to inspire consternation and debate. As Fennell said at a Q&A for the film Friday at the Aero Theater, which I attended, the film is made for the people who like it. The people who don’t? That’s not Fennell’s problem.
Saltburn is a phantasmagoria, so much so that the climax takes place during a Midsummer Night’s Dream-themed party. Nothing here is real because the fabulously wealthy people who inhabit this castle do not live in our reality. Their money allows them to buy shelter from the storms of the world the rest of us must endure, which is why it is so satisfying to see this interloper insinuate himself into their home, then huff and puff and blow their house down.
4. The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer
Around 30 minutes into The Zone of Interest, Hedwig’s (Sandra Hüller) mom comes to visit the family at their palatial estate. They stroll through the garden, and Hedwig shows off the work she has done to make this place an Eden for her family. This used to be just a field, she tells her mother. Now, it is teeming with life. We hear bees buzzing, birds chirping, children playing … and over the garden wall, guns firing. Hedwig’s paradise exists because over that wall, her husband operates hell.
As you may have heard, Jonathan Glazer’s brutal, terrifying film is about the banality of evil. It is perhaps the final word on the topic, and there is no more chilling scene this year than a group of women gleefully discussing the diamonds they found hidden in toothpaste by the people their husbands rounded up for slaughter. This happens while in the other room, their husbands discuss plans for an even more efficient slaughter.
So, yes, these people are evil, and they approach their circumstances with a degree of banality bordering on psychosis. But, I see this primarily as a film about complicity. The brilliance of the scene between Hedwig and her mother is that neither has any delusions about what’s going on on the other side of the wall. They embrace it. They allow it. They directly benefit from it. The only difference is that Hedwig’s mother does not want to be confronted by it. She departs in the middle of the night because she can no longer stand the gunshots and screams. Note that she does not want them to stop. She just doesn’t want to hear them.
We have seen films about Nazis and films about Auschwitz and films about the Holocaust before, but in focusing on the domestic life of this family, Glazer makes it clear how many people must consent to this level of evil for it to take place. We are used to seeing our movie Nazis goose-stepping and heiling and committing blatant acts of terror and violence, but this is also what fascism looks like. It is a beautiful garden, a newly renovated home, and children playing in the pool. It is a family engaged in an atrocity.
3. Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet
The tagline for Anatomy of a Fall is “Did she do it?” If you have seen the film, you know it doesn’t matter. It is obviously a fun talking point and surely one of the first questions you are likely to ask your friends upon exiting the theater, but it’s not the point. The tagline itself is somewhat reflexively tongue-in-cheek because ultimately, the movie doesn’t even know if Sandra (Hüller, again) murdered her husband. Because the movie doesn’t know, the audience can never know, and to live in that uncertainty, that is the point.
Justine Triet has crafted a courtroom drama like none other. While more traditional legal thrillers ring tension out of uncovering truth, Anatomy of a Fall is about the nature of truth and its unknowability. Few films have ever been as comfortable living in the space between, thus forcing the audience to live there, too. This is not what we have been trained to want from this kind of movie. We want justice, we want the guilty punished, and we want to feel good about knowing a wrong has been righted. Well, that ain’t life, argues Triet, and she’s right.
In insisting that the audience sit with the discomfort and accept the mystery, Triet is asking us to question why we need easy answers to our stories. This need seems to grow by the day. Just look at the preponderance of true crime podcasts and murder-of-the-week miniseries and the growing army of armchair detectives who believe that they will solve the case, that there must be a clue everyone else missed. We want the world to make sense, and if it doesn’t, then we are damn well going to make it make sense.
The frequent cuts to the gallery at the trial are no accident. They are meant as a mirror, reflecting our own morbid curiosity back at us. It is an indictment of a society that has turned murder and its aftermath into a spectator sport. We demand a show, and we demand satisfaction. We insist upon justice and define it as whatever meets our own preconceived notions. Anatomy of a Fall is a rebuke to the whole thing. It says truth and justice are for the movies. Real life is a mess. Deal with it.
2. Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese
No filmmaker ever has been more devoted to exposing the dark heart of the American experiment than Martin Scorsese. From Goodfellas to Gangs of New York to The Wolf of Wall Street and much of the rest of his filmography, Scorsese has argued that nothing gets accomplished in this country without the powerful preying on the oppressed.
At one point in The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) says, “Their money was better off in my pocket. I knew how to spend it better.” This is capitalism in a nutshell and the underlying ethos of the villains in most Scorsese films. This can be generalized as: “I deserve what you have because I want it, so I’m going to take it.” So, they take it, and it doesn’t matter who has to suffer or who has to die because the money, the power, and the privilege mean more than any human life ever could. But, that’s not just a Scorsese movie anymore, is it? It’s American life.
Ultimately, all of our lives are built on this lie. As I type this, I sit in a house that sits on land that once belonged to the Chumash and Tongva people, indigenous groups who lived here long before Hollywood was speck on the horizon of time. It was stolen and people were forcibly removed and in many cases murdered. And, there’s not even any oil under my feet.
There has been much debate about whether a non-indigenous filmmaker was the right choice to tell the story of the Osage murders. I understand those concerns and recognize them as valid, as does Scorsese, who by all accounts, went to greater lengths to consult with the indigenous communities he was depicting than any filmmaker before him. The stunning final scene of the film also attempts to address the limitations of storytelling when it comes to a tragedy as great as this.
I would never invalidate the concerns of any members of a community who feel strongly that Scorsese should not have made the movie, but for me, I come down on the side of being grateful the movie exists at all. As the film’s star, Lily Gladstone, alluded to in her best actress speech at the Golden Globes, sometimes it takes allies with privilege like Scorsese and DiCaprio and Robert De Niro to make sure these stories get told at all. It can be hoped that the success of this film will pave the way for more indigenous stories, told by indigenous filmmakers.
As it stands, Killers of the Flower Moon is a gut-wrenching examination of the true meaning behind manifest destiny. It shows the white men who saw money and power in the hands of people they deemed inferior and the methods they used to steal it all. It also shows the dignity and honor of the Osage, who are handcuffed by an unjust system, unable to stop the calculated destruction of their people.
Over the years, Scorsese has also (wrongly) taken a lot of flack for glamorizing the villains of his stories. That’s a debate for another day, but there is no chance of such misreading here. The white criminals at the center of this film are depicted as corrupt, bungling racists. There is no question about their crimes or the magnitude of them, but they are allowed to carry on because the system is just as corrupt and just as racist. As Scorsese makes clear in that knockout ending, though the figures depicted in this film have long since departed, the system remains in place, protecting the privileged and preying on the powerless.
1. All of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh
My rule of thumb is to try not to evaluate a movie until it is over, until I have a chance to comprehend the full weight and breadth of whatever the filmmaker is trying to say. It’s a good rule, but it’s not always the easiest to follow. With Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, it was nearly impossible. It was probably around the hour mark that I started to wonder if this would be the best film of the year. By about 15 minutes later, there was no doubt, and I began to consider whether it could be the best of the decade. It’s a little early for that conversation, but this film inspires that kind of appreciation.
All of that idle wondering came before a final shot and music cue that left me absolutely breathless. I have never seen a movie this sensitive, this smart, and this knowing about the ways we interact with the ones we love and the things we wish we could say. It will, perhaps, not make sense when I tell you this film is sad and it will make you cry, but they will not be tears of sadness. They will be tears of identification and recognition and loss and regret and hope and everything that goes there.
Without a doubt, All of Us Strangers will break your heart, like so many films before it could, but few have ever had the grace to mend that broken heart the way this one does. To experience this film is to confront the limits of human connection and to push past them and strive for something deeper. It is about reconciling the people we are with the people we could be, accepting that the past cannot be changed, and forging ahead with a deeper understanding of the people around us and the world we all share.
There is tragedy in this film because there is tragedy in life, but there is also a wellspring of love and tenderness unmatched by any film in recent memory. Haigh is unafraid to be nakedly emotional, and in that raw emotion, there is beauty and truth and understanding. Maybe we can never comprehend who our parents were, and it is likely they will never comprehend who we are, but that does not mean there cannot be forgiveness. It does not mean we cannot embrace the contradictions inherent in letting go of what was in order to make room for what could be. And, it does not mean we have to do it alone.
In the final accounting, All of Us Strangers is about the singular threat posed by loneliness. There are a thousand reasons for a person to feel lonely, and in a modern society where so much of life is lived at a distance from others, the loneliness only spreads. Because loneliness requires disconnection, it necessarily creates further loneliness, which expands outward like a web, trapping us all. To avoid this fate, Haigh’s film argues that we must reach out. We must take the leap of faith to connect. We must make love our goal.
Thank you for being a part of the Last Cinema Standing 2023 Year in Review. Check out the links below to look back on any of the previous pieces in this series.
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