Films of 2023

A few years back, when my Brattle Film Podcast co-hosts and I did our first annual "Some of the Best of the Year" episode, Brattle programmer Ned Hinkle made the convincing case that every year is a good year for movies. I agreed, with the caveat that some years you have to dig deep to find those great movies, while some years, they're just sitting there waiting for you at your local movie house or multiplex, with critics and awards bodies accurately pointing to them saying, "Look, this great thing is right there—go see it!" For me, this second pattern sums up 2023. I'm not claiming that this year had more good films and fewer bad films than any other year—or fewer over-rated movies or fewer false prognostications by entertainment journalists and the Twittersphere. I am saying that 2023 was an exciting year for movies because of a unique combination of big swings that paid off, made by filmmakers, actors, studios, and others, and because the inevitable overly familiar "comfort fare" designed to give us nothing more than what we expect, still showcased excellence. The year 2023 also saw a resounding rejection of the same-old-same-old corporate offerings that seemingly posed no risk yet failed to pay off, as often as not.

It is usually a positive sign when the first movie released in January is a decent film. The early Winter months are traditionally reserved for silly, disposable, sub-par crowd-pleasing genre-fair that can make money when offered as a contrast to all the prior year's Oscar bait, which are then in wide release. January 1, 2023, saw the release of M3GAN, a small sci-fi horror film produced by low-budget genre stalwarts Jason Blum and James Wan, which had been recut to get a PG-13 rating when a video of its titular artificially intelligent killer doll doing a dance became a viral hit with kids on TikTok. M3GAN was an example of a movie that delivered the familiar goods exactly as promised but in ways that felt just fresh and inventive enough to make jaded middle-aged guys like me enjoy it as much as its younger target audience. By February, however, the studio offerings were becoming more of the now-traditional dumping ground we have to endure while waiting for the good movies to come out later in the year. Bad films that overtly pandered to their target demographic, like 80 for Brady, or attempted to manufacture a cult following, like Cocaine Bear, came and went. They generated the desired amount of positive and negative discourse to keep distributors, entertainment publications, and theater owners happy and were then quickly forgotten.

The movie industry was still struggling to recover from COVID-19. With audiences not yet returning to theaters at pre-pandemic levels and fewer new releases to screen, savvy programmers doubled and tripled down on the amount of repertory cinema that filled their schedules. Casual film lovers—less excited about seeing a new release they could just wait a couple weeks or months to watch at home—found themselves excited to come out and watch old movies on the big screen with a celebratory live audience, even though these films are available any time to watch at home. And the social media platform Letterboxd coaxed more and more young folks to see older movies, especially if these movies could be experinaced in a cinema with friends as a fun night out.

New franchise pictures that studios had high hopes for, notably Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Little Mermaid, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Magic Mike's Last Dance, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Scream VI, Fast-X, and The Flash, all performed far below expectations. Slightly more original, non-franchise intellectual property offerings, like Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, The Locksmith, Air, and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, did not even break even. So many “tent-pole pictures” were deemed failures that the term "flopbuster” was coined. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the Spring’s biggest hit, with John Wick: Chapter 4, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Creed III, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Elemental doing decent business but hardly the type that was going to "save cinemas.:

What changed the paradigm completely was the year's biggest cinematic occurrence, BARBENHEIMER, which marked a return to movies generating one of the year's biggest cultural phenomena. The simultaneous July 23rd releases of Greta Gerwig’s neo-feminist comedy fantasy, Barbie, about the world of Mattel's iconic fashion doll, and Christopher Nolan's epic, 70mm IMAX, historical, biographical thriller, Oppenheimer, about the "father of the atomic bomb," seemed like a simple act of counterprogramming by Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures respectively. But when the idea of going to see both of these radically different pictures as a double feature on the same day became an Internet sensation, the Barbenheimer “joke” became a cinematic movement.

The term was first used by Matt Neglia, editor-in-chief of the entertainment website Next Best Picture, back in a Spring 2022 Tweet. Neglia was mocking the seemingly endless number of Hollywood stars announced as having been cast in either Barbie or Oppenheimer. But on January 1, 2023, when David Ehrlich, Head Film Critic at IndieWire, tweeted, "7 months and 21 days until Barbenheimer," the meme really got started. His post gained roughly 4,300 likes in seven months and caused people to get excited about seeing both movies, asking which they'd see first, and exploring possibilities for dressing up like the characters in Barbie and even those in Oppenheimer.

I was dismissive of the Barbenheimer phenomena when it arrived. Everyone was speculating and writing think pieces about what it meant for the film industry. While I was happy it would mean an infusion of cash to some of my favorite cinemas, I didn’t believe it meant much of anything for cinema in general. I viewed Barbenheimer as little more than an international flash mob that happened to be organized around two movies, but that could have just as easily occurred if a new sushi chain was opening all over the world and many of them happened to be located near an Arby’s. In such an imagined parallel, kids on the internet might have thought it would be hilarious if everyone ate a double meal of sushi and Arby’s on the same day, but their dining double feature wouldn't mean anything long-term for the restaurant biz.

I was proved wrong. The phenomena was not a weeklong flash in the pan. It lasted throughout the summer and stretched well into awards season and even into the early months of 2024. It's difficult to say if Barbenheimer convinced the public that it was time to return to cinemas or if the timing just happened to coincide with audiences finally being ready to return to movie theaters after years of being cooped up in their homes. In any case, there is no doubt that these two pictures reminded people why they love going to the movies, even more than the prior year’s Top Gun: Maverick, RRR, and Everything Everywhere All At Once jogged their memories. Both Barbie and Oppenheimer exceeded box-office expectations (Barbie became the highest-grossing film of the year) and were rightly rewarded with Best Picture Oscar nominations. Oppenheimer won the Academy's top prize as well as the awards for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. People genuinely liked both movies, thought about them, talked about them, and returned to them over and over.

Of course, I would have been more excited about the whole thing if I thought they were better films. I found both Barbie and Oppenheimer to be sub-par pictures, but I was still excited about what they did for cinemas and attitudes around movie-going. For Oppenheimer to not just be a big awards contender but to be a huge box office juggernaut as well was exciting. It's a long film, it's a serious film, it's an R-rated film geared towards audiences over 16 years old; none of these usually spell major monetary success anymore. Barbie made one of my favorite art-house filmmakers into the most profitable female film director of all time and proved that films ostensibly aimed at women can regain top positions at the box office, as they did in Hollywood's golden era.

As another example of ladies topping the box office, 2023 also saw pop singer, songwriter, and mega-celebrity Taylor Swift set a new record for the highest-grossing concert film of all time. Swift chose to bypass the traditional distribution model of Hollywood in favor of dealing directly with theaters and cinema chains. Her decision not to partner with a studio coincided with the Writers Guild of America going on strike over labor disputes with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The Screen Actors Guild soon followed suit and went on strike around many of the same issues. The grievances were largely driven by the lack of residuals from streaming media platforms that studios were paying artists. The WGA and SAG felt they had been highly cooperative with the AMPTP during the shift to the streaming model, waiting as the companies figured out how to navigate this new business platform. But the guilds quickly came to see how the big distributors had cut the shares of incomes to writers and actors compared to what these revenue streams had been just a decade ago. Artificial Intelligence was another major bone of contention. Writers did not want AI tools like ChatGPT to replace many of their jobs, and actors wanted legal protections around how digital representations of their likenesses and identities could and could not be used.

The bottomless-pocketed AMPTP figured both unions would cave once their members started to feel the sting of poverty, but both guilds held firm during negotiations, emerging months later with much of what they had wanted. The strike lasted from the day of release for Oppenheimer and Barbie to well past the start of the Awards season. With actors unwilling to promote their movies, many distributors delayed the release of certain major films, including Dune: Part Two. For cinemas, having the film industry all but shut down again so soon after the lethargic rebound from COVID-19 was crushing, but the bookings of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour helped fill their auditoriums with excited fans once again. The strikes came to an end with just enough time to not have to delay the Oscars. The fact that most of the year's nominated pictures were popular, accessible, and just plain good movies also helped theaters stay in business, as audiences lined up to see the nominated films in ways that they hadn’t since 2019. 

On a personal note, another film-related thing that occurred in 2023 was the release of Matt Singer's terrific book Opposable Thumbs, about the original TV film critics Siskel & Ebert. It's a great read, but it was especially meaningful to me coming out this particular year. For all of my life, I've always identified with Roger Ebert over Gene Siskel. Roger was a fat guy with glasses whose opinion of himself just might have been the tiniest bit excessive, and I related to him on all those levels—but first and foremost, he was someone who seemed to go to every movie wanting to like it and wanting to see the things that were good about it, whereas Siskel seemed to go to movies looking to find fault and things to critique. In recent years, especially on my podcast, I felt like I was constantly coming off as a Siskel rather than an Ebert. So it was thrilling and a relief to experience so many films this year that I went into with my arms crossed, not expecting to like them and being surprised and delighted by what they turned out to be.

That welcome pattern started with ME3GAN and continued on through Flora and Son, No Hard Feelings, Maestro, Passages, Orlando, My Political Biography, and The Iron Claw, along with dozens of other examples. I thought Poor Things would be all style over substance, but it delivered one of the most profound yet simple societal takedowns I've ever seen. When I settled in to watch Blackberry at a film festival, I believed I was about to watch a tedious mockumentary about wacky real-life events. Instead, I got one of the year's most astute comedies. I braced myself for a contemporary version of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that would be a cynically self-aware modern update of a beloved childhood book from the 1970s. In reality, it was a perfect cinematic telling of a timeless story of adolescence. American Fiction was marketed as yet another simple-minded satire of modern culture—a culture too ridiculous to require the exaggeration of satire. It turned out to be a good, old-fashioned, substantive comedy about family, working, and finding success in the face of the various absurdities of modern life. The Unknown Country promised to be one of those pretentious indies where the filmmaker's approach is more significant than any story they might be telling, but it was a lovely and distinctive road movie.

Also in 2023, I saw a partially animated documentary that I actually liked, Aurora's Sunrise; an archival documentary that used the widescreen format artistically rather than just because it "looks cool," The Disappearance of Shere Hite; and a documentary that featured dramatic reenactments, that I not only thought wasn't a disgrace to the form, it was one of the year's best movies, Four Daughters. 

The often-tedious Wes Anderson made two of his most Wes Andersony movies yet, but they were also two of his best: the feature Asteroid City and the short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti attempted to capture the same lightning in a bottle they got in their 2004 hit Sideways and pretty much pulled it off with The Holdovers. And Ari Aster looked like he was on track to become the latest overpraised indie auteur to be given carte blanche to make whatever self-indulgent, ostentatious, overlong piece of crap he wanted for his third movie, except that his Beau Is Afraid was terrific. There was even a good Godzilla movie in 2023, for crying out loud!

I took some pleasure in the under-performances of so many of the year’s failed blockbusters, especially those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels—and DC Studios—The Flash, Blue Beetle, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. For more than two decades, the interchangeable superhero industrial complex has dominated movie screens, with an entire generation having now grown up with little more than these films defining what Hollywood cinema is for them. Watching these simplistic, corporately engineered adolescent fantasies finally start to falter provided me with a solid injection of schadenfreude. No blockbuster epitomized the bankruptcy of commercial cinema more than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Not a single choice made during the creation of this fifth and (supposedly) final installment that nobody wanted was a good one. The story, characters, visual style, and overall vibe of the movie were so far removed from its 1981 progenitor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, that it became a mark of shame for everyone involved—all of whom should have known better.

It was also a terrible year for animated movies, epitomized by Wish, which was intended as a film celebrating Disney's centennial with an animated feature that tied together a theme in most Walt Disney films: wishes coming true. It bombed in theaters, hasn't made much of an impression on Disney+, and couldn't even get nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar in a year where the competition was dismal. Only two films in this category fared well: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the year's only superhero movie not to under-perform financially or critically, and Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, which became the legendary Japanese animator's biggest international success.

It was, however, a terrific year for documentaries. The many traditional biographical films about cultural figures, both living and dead, ranged from outstanding, like Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, Anselm, and The Disappearance of Shere Hite; to excellent, like Being Mary Tyler Moore, Squaring the Circle, and Judy Blume Forever; to disappointing but still noteworthy, like Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, The Eternal Memory, The Pigeon Tunnel, and American Symphony. In general, however, these were overshadowed by powerful issue-driven docs like 20 Days In Mariupol, Bobi Wine: The People's President, To Kill a Tiger, and docs that brought something new to the way non-fiction films are told, like Four Daughters, Subject, and Orlando: My Political Journey. 

Despite everything going on in the world, most movies that waded into political or social commentary did it in artistic ways rather than the didactic preaching to the choir that epitomized too many releases from the previous four years. Many of the most popular films of 2023 asked audiences to look within ourselves to recognize our roles in causing or perpetuating the ills of contemporary society on a collective scale rather than with a simpleminded singling out of bad actors. Sometimes, this theme was subtle, sometimes it was direct, and sometimes it seemed inadvertent, but it was distinctly present. On a grand scale, Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon called out the ways white Americans turn a blind eye to the atrocities done for our benefit. Giorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things served as a more backhanded call to sanity for everyone participating in society. The final film by legendary director William Friedkin, a contemporary update of Herman Wolk's The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, spreads a metaphorical blame for all the terrible leaders we seem to find ourselves saddled with amongst us all, especially those of us living in democracies.

The films How to Blow Up A Pipeline, The Zone of Interest, A Thousand and One, Master Gardener, The Teachers’ Lounge, Four Daughters, Io Capitano, Subject, Afire, Blue Jean, Earth Mama, The Royal Hotel, Bottoms, and The Sweet East all got us to think about contemporary issues from outside our usual vantage points. It is perhaps not a surprise in a year that gave us so many innovative pictures with fresh perspectives, that 2023 saw the largest number of major films directed by women: Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives, Priscilla, A Thousand and One, Showing Up, You Hurt My Feelings, Scrapper, Bottoms, The Royal Hotel, Joy Ride, Amanda, The Burial, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Reality, Blue Jean, Earth Mama, Saltburn, Fair Play, Polite Society, Rye Lane, How To Have Sex, Slow, Birth/Rebirth, Origin, Four Daughters, To Kill A Tiger, Beyond Utopia, The Eternal Memory, Aurora's Sunrise, The Disappearance Of Shere Hite, Body Parts, Joan Baez: I Am A Noise, Subject, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, The Unknown Country, Shayda, What Happens Later, She Came To Me, The Pod Generation, and, of course, Barbie.

It was also an outstanding year for first-time directors.  Michael B. Jordan with Creed III and Eva Longoria with Flamin’ Hot were actors who crossed over to the director’s chair. Celine Song with Past Lives and Tina Satter with Reality became directors after having been playwrights. TV writer Cord Jefferson with American Fiction—and cinematographers Sean Price Williams with The Sweet East and Molly Manning Walker with How to Have Sex—also became directors, as did stage actor Laura Moss with Birth/Rebirth, former Olympian Savanah Leaf with Earth Mama, music video director Charlotte Regan with Scrapper, and YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou with Talk to Me. In addition, there were A.V. Rockwell's A Thousand and One, Georgia Oakley's Blue Jean, Raven Jackson's All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Chloe Domont's Fair Play, Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography, D. Smith's Kokomo City, David Easteal's The Plains, and Raine Allen Miller's Rye Lane—just to name the ones that flew within my radar.

The now decades-long trend of outstanding juvenile performances in movies continued in 2023. I happened to watch the 1990 film Three Men and a Little Lady this year and, not to knock the kid who played the titular little lady in that film, but it served as a startling reminder of the difference between the standard child performances in a feature film thirty-five years ago versus the caliber of what we see today. In 2023, we saw phenomenal turns by pre-teens Milo Machado Graner in Anatomy of a Fall, Sōya Kurokawa and Hinata Hiiragi in Monster, Lola Campbell in Scrapper, Aaron Kingsley Adetola in A Thousand and One, Gracie and Willan Faris in Asteroid City, and all the young classroom students in The Teachers' Lounge. Then there were the teenage leading actors—Abby Ryder Fortson in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Seydou Sarr Moustapha Fall in Io Capitano, and Andrew Barth Feldman in No Hard Feelings. Also deserving credit are young supporting actors Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, and Piper Curda in May December, Josiah Cross in A Thousand and One, Orén Kinlan in Flora and Son, and all the teenage journalism students in The Teachers' Lounge.

All of this stand-out work occurred in a year that, because of the strikes and other factors, still saw far fewer film releases than what we had before the pandemic. A few more movies did come out than in 2022 or 2021, but it felt like there was an explosion of movies because of the availability of screens for smaller films. Such films used to get crowded out by major studio releases or blockbusters that took over multiple cinemas within a multiplex. The “lack of content” enabled movies like Poor Things, The Holdovers, American Fiction, May December, and Asteroid City to play far longer in cinemas than they would have in other years. It also meant Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron could be the first original anime film to reach number one at the American box office the week of its release. And it enabled a movie like Godzilla Minus One, which, like so many films in the last few years, was only slated to have a token one-week American theatrical release before getting dumped onto a streamer, to play for many weeks in cinemas and build up positive word of mouth, just like the old-school model of film releasing used to work. 

I would say that 2023 saw the perfect amount of film releases. Literally dozens of outstanding movies were released for every conceivable demographic, but the number was not so overwhelming that you had little chance to catch many of the terrific offerings in cinemas. In 2023, we saw the American release of not one but two films by master Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda, Broker and Monster; the major theatrical 40th anniversary reissue of the greatest concert film of all time, Stop Making Sense, alongside the newly crowned highest grossing concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour; six movies featuring Willem Dafoe (Poor Things, Asteroid City, Inside, Finally Dawn, Pet Shop Days, Gonzo Girl), and seven with Nicolas Cage (Dream Scenario, Butcher's Crossing, Renfield, Sympathy for the Devil, The Retirement Plan, The Old Way, and his cameo in The Flash).

One amusing trend of 2023 was the abundance of “business biopics”—movies about commercial products or recent disruptive business phenomena. These ranged in quality and significance from the lively Blackberry to the lifeless Tetris, with similar offerings in between, ranging in quality from Air, Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, and The Beanie Bubble to Dumb Money, Spinning Gold, and Flamin’ Hot. The recent trend of shooting contemporary movies in the Academy ratio reached full maturity this year, with some of the best cinematography of the year found in movies shot within the boxy 1.37:1 frame. Saltburn, Godland, The Teachers' Lounge, Perfect Days, The Eight Mountains, The Sudbury Devil, Enys Men, and Maestro all seemed to benefit from the 3:4 frame as if their directors and DPs were forced to think about composition in new and interesting ways.

Sex and nudity made a welcome return to big-screen movies. The success of R-rated films ranged from Oscar winners like Oppenheimer and Poor Things, to the dark dramas Master Gardener and Beau is Afraid, to the stories of obsession Passages and Saltburn, and to the comedy romps of No Hard Feelings and Dicks: The Musical. These movies seem to have undone the prohibition on male and female flesh from American mainstream cinema. Perhaps this shift is due to the industry-wide adoption of intimacy coordinators, a hiring practice discussed in the 2023 documentary Body Parts. Or maybe studios are no longer basing creative decisions on certain overseas markets that have taboos about nudity, nor are they attempting to placate a segment of a young generation that believes love scenes and nudity are always gratuitous, exploitative, and unnecessary to advancing a narrative. Whatever the case, many 2023 films reminded audiences that stories about human beings should not exclude the bodies, passions, and physical ways of connecting that make us human.

All of these trends seemed to signal a return to complex, innovative, and diverse cinematic offerings. This wealth of options was available not only at little arthouse cinemas in major cities but throughout the country and in the multiplexes that have managed to weather the various industry-wide storms. The range of movies in 2023 felt a lot more like it did before the advent of streaming, which relegated so many types of stories and storytellers into little corners of curated platforms and helped turn mainstream cinema into a blander and blander monoculture. The major streamers show no sign of going away, but big production companies, financiers, and shareholders have woken up to the fact that the streaming model can not grow much beyond where it currently is, as there aren’t all that many more subscribers left to capture. As home viewing begins to look more and more like the broadcast television days of old—with many major streamers now interrupting movies and TV shows to air commercials—going out to newly spruced-up cinemas, with their improved ventilation systems, new screens, better projection, renewed sound systems, and comfortable seats, starts to feel more and more special in many of the ways it used to.

So, may every year forward be such a good year for movies. I can't predict if the future will be quite as rosy as 2023, but I'm here for it!