Last Year: 2022 Best/Worst

Next Year: 2024 Best/Worst

Nate’s Highs and Lows of a Very Barbie Year at the Movies

Welcome back, dear reader, for my once a year look at the best and worst and everything in between in the year of cinema. This was the year of Barbenheimer, the big pop-culture behemoth that brought people back to the movies and got them talking and got them going back again and again. It was also an excellent year for foreign films and animation as well. As a whole, I saw fewer movies this year than prior years thanks to some job and lifestyle changes with only so many hours in one’s day. I had a good time with my best movies of 2023 but I can’t help but look more fondly on my top films of 2022 with envy; oh, the ecstatic feelings those movies gave me. Hopefully, as I continue seeking out some of the holdovers from the year (but not The Holdovers) I might discover a few gems.

But before going into all that 2023 had to offer at the theater, let’s turn back the clocks once more as I take another crack at my top ten list from 2022.

2022 Top Ten List 2.0

10) Nope (formerly unranked)

9) The Outfit (unchanged)

8) Glass Onion (unchanged)

7) Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (unchanged)

6) Emily the Criminal (unchanged)

5) Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (unchanged)

4) RRR (formerly 3)

3) Babylon (formerly 4)

2) Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (unchanged)

1) Everything Everywhere All at Once (unchanged)

Now, ladies and gents, it’s on with the big show from the year 2023.

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PART ONE: BEST/WORST FILMS OF 2023

BEST FILMS

10)  American Fiction

Who exactly gets to qualify what constitutes the black experience? Certainly not I, a 41-year-old white guy writing on the Internet. Even though the source material is over twenty years old, the struggles of identity and acceptance and the lens of which we subject others’ experiences through are still relevant in an increasingly hostile cultural environment for different attempts at diversity. American Fiction is hilarious and smart and produces as many thought-provoking questions as solid belly laughs. American Fiction is hilarious and smart and produces as many thought-provoking questions as solid belly laughs. It’s a cutting satire but with characters that are compelling beyond their connection to larger satirical points. This is more than a message movie, and it’s a statement debut film for Cord Jefferson as a filmmaker and primarily as a storyteller.

9)  Aporia

In writer/director Jared Moshe’s low-budget indie film Aporia, the Trolley Debate, killing one person in order to spare the lives of, presumably, more people or a greater number of people, gets its own movie in a thoughtful and provocative little indie. The thorny ethical questions are given their rightful due, and this is where Aporia really shines for me, as a small-scale sci-fi story with Big Ideas and the understanding to give them adequate space for satisfying contemplation. It bowled me over. What the characters have created is essentially a magic gun that can shoot into the past, which means the only use for this time travel device is to take life, and so it becomes a question over under what circumstances would it be permissible to utilize this weapon. I’m glad this movie emphasized its ideas and provided the time to really dwell in them, even if the movie is only about 90 minutes altogether. Aporia is a deeply engaging movie that worked on all levels for me, enriching emotions and satisfying intellect, and is definitely worth the discovery.

8)  Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

I have no prior understanding of anything relating to the world and lore of D&D, and I found it to be extremely accessible and engaging. I appreciate that here is a major work of IP for a studio that is attempting to tell one very good and accessible story for the masses rather than set up a cinematic universe and ready it for possible sequel bait. The very concept of Honor Among Thieves helps to keep things light-hearted and moving. The set pieces are also tailored to the character arcs while still being memorable and entertaining. This is a movie that doesn’t get complacent over its 134 minutes. Each sequence must stand out, whether it’s because of creative and intuitive fight choreography that makes keen use of geography and circumstance, or a graveyard Q&A with very constrained magical rules to follow that leads to a lot of digging to find the right corpse with the right information, or escaping from an obese dragon (with its “widdle wings”) that resembles a chonky cat, or a dangerous trip through a maze that abruptly reconfigures itself. It’s a reminder how enjoyable and escapist blockbusters can be when you have the right artists using the expansive box of paints. It’s great for all ages and families too. I don’t have any personal connection to this sword-and-sorcery universe but now I want many more adventures if this is kind of quality they’re offering.

7)  John Wick: Chapter 4

I was beginning to worry that by the time of John Wick 12 he would have killed the entire world’s population and forgotten it all started because of one dog. Another undervalued aspect of the Wick franchise is how damn good looking these movies are. Director Chad Stahelski can frame some beautifully lit sequences to make all the subsequent carnage and fisticuffs that much more pleasing. We’ve been settling for far less for far too long, folks. There’s no reason our grungy, dank, overly gray action movies cannot look as pristine and striking as the John Wick series. Stahelski has an intimate understanding of his star’s physical capabilities, having served as Reeves stunt double for years, and he and his team stress the fidelity of visceral realism with their overtly preposterous movie. The action is displayed in long takes, wide shots, and gloriously accessible visual arrangements to allow the audience to truly enjoy the splendor of the moment. This philosophy stretches to car chases, like an exciting roundabout of the Arc de Triomphe, and even horseback chases, like an opening evoking Lawrence of Arabia. There were several moments that made me giggle in giddiness, like a woman relentlessly stabbing a man she rode piggyback up the stairs, and a sustained high angle where Wick clears room after room of baddies with fiery canisters that turn each target into a burst of flames, and a fight ascending many flights of stairs that has echoes of Wile E. Coyote slapstick. John Wick: Chapter 4 is action movie nirvana.

6)  Dream Scenario

Dream Scenario tackles the rise-and-fall of overnight celebrity and sudden fame and adds an intriguing sci-fi spin as well as some arty yet accessible meditation and fun satirical social commentary. It asks us to contemplate the nature of our dreams and how we might behave under this extraordinary scenario, whether as one of the people befuddled by the dreams or the even larger befuddlement of the person appearing in all those millions of dreams. It asks us to reconsider perception, as well as how well others may know us, as well as what we look for with our own dreams. There’s an obvious and easy parallel between what Paul is experiencing and general celebrity, where members of the public have an individual relationship to a person but divorced from the reality of who that person may or may not be, as well as one-sided. These are strangers to Paul but so many feel like they know him, like a neighbor, or a lover, or a threat to someone’s mental stability. There’s a very funny and also deeply uncomfortable sequence where a young woman tries to recreate her erotic dream with the real Paul, and of course the real Paul fails to measure up to the fantasy mystique. I was also intrigued by the question of why Paul does not appear in his wife’s dreams. For me, this is the most interesting satirical broadside yet exploring the concept of “cancel culture,” a term often so overblown to the point of being a nonsensical catch-all for consequences.

5)  Rye Lane

What an immensely charming movie Rye Lane is and it’s one that reminds you about the innate pleasure of the rom-com genre when paired with characters we want to get to know better. Thank goodness the screenwriters keenly understand how to develop our protagonists but also make them imminently winning. The writing is so quick-witted and charming that simply listening to these revealing and often hilarious conversations is a pleasure. I’m reminded of Richard Linklater’s famously talky Before trilogy, another all-in-one-day whirlwind romance of two characters exploring a locale while also exploring one another. This is the joy of rom-coms, finding characters you simply want to spend time with because they’re so charming, interesting, and deserving of finding happiness of their own making. Dom and Yas are wonderful characters separately but the right combination together. He’s more nerdy and awkward and she pushes him to be more assertive and confident. She’s less sure of her worth and sets herself up for sabotage in landing a job she might love, and he refuses to let her let herself down. It’s genuinely amusing and heartwarming to watch these two help one another in their time of need.

4)  Poor Things

In many ways, Poor Things serves as a fish-out-of-water fairy tale that invites the audience to question and analyze the Way Things Are. Bella’s childlike perspective allows her to strip away the assumptions of adulthood and the cynicism of disappointment. Everything is new and potentially exciting, but she can also cut through the cultural hang-ups and repressive rules of polite Victorian society. This movie would not work nearly as well without the fearless performance from Emma Stone. She gives everything of herself for this role and rewires the very movements of her body to better portray such a unique melding of a character at so many crossroads. Life can be decadent, it can be confusing, it can be ridiculous, it can be heartbreaking, it can be terrifying, but it’s an experience worth savoring and embracing, and this ultimately is the message of Poor Things. Stone is brilliant as she confidently carries us along for every moment of an exploration of what it means to be human. For those squeamish from the heavy amounts of sexuality, Poor Things is at its core a very pro-life movie. May we all see the world with the voracious hunger and curiosity and boldness of Bella Baxter with her second chance at this one life.

3)  Anatomy of a Fall

As Anatomy of a Fall played, and the criminal case became ever more complicated, shedding further light upon the characters and their stormy marriage, I found myself sitting closer and closer to my TV, finally sitting on the floor right in front of it. Part of this can be explained by trying to better read the subtitles, though truthfully half of the movie is in English, but the real reason was that I became absorbed, waiting anxiously to see where it could go next, what twist and turn would further reassess our fragile understanding of the events, the people, and the possible circumstances. The original screenplay is so thoroughly engaging, and with supremely talented acting and clever directing, that I knew I was in good hands to ensure my investment of 140 minutes wouldn’t be wasted. The movie is an anatomy of a criminal investigation, a prosecution and personal defense, but it’s really an anatomy of people and the versions of themselves that they selectively present to others and themselves. Anatomy of a Fall is such an easily accessible movie that draws you in and reveals itself with more tantalizing questions. It has supremely accomplished acting, directing, and writing. Anatomy of a Fall is a spellbinding, twisty movie and one of the absolute best films of 2023.

2)  Barbie

Who would have guessed a movie based upon a ubiquitous doll that dates back to the 1950s would become not just a cultural force and reclamation project but also the biggest moviegoing event of the year, as well as the highest-grossing movie in Warner Brothers’ history, even outpacing The Boy Who Lived? In 2023, it turns out we are all, every one, a Barbie girl living in a Barbie world. I came to this experience late, wondering if writer/director Greta Gerwig’s movie could live up to the lavish hype, the fawning praise, the hilarious offenses that many fragile males have levied against it. Barbie is a shining example of what vision and passion can do to elevate any story. With just three movies, Gerwig has established herself in a league of her own as a director. Anyone who can turn the Barbie movie into a hilarious, poignant, and meaningful meditation on our times, on the relationships between mothers and daughters, and on life itself is a talent that deserves every creative latitude to achieve her vision. The voice and vision behind this, even to the smallest detail, is so impressive and fully committed and fabulous. Barbie is proof that studio blockbusters can indeed be more.

And the best film of 2023 is…..

1)  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 

The 2018 original is a hard act to follow, and while Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t quite overrule its predecessor it is a more than worthy sequel that has everything fans loved about the first trip. The visual inventiveness has been taken even higher, with the mixture of even more different animation and art styles. I loved seeing each Spider person and how they fit into their unique art style of their world, like the living water colors of Gwen’s world and the punky paper collage style of Spider-Punk. Simply put, this is one of the most gorgeous looking movies of all time, animated or live action. It’s bursting, thrumming, nearly vibrating with life and love stuffed into every nook and cranny, and it’s exhilarating to just experience a vivid, thriving world with animators operating at peak talent. We see a relatable struggle from both sides, the parents trying to connect with their growing child and give him enough space to find himself, and the child who clearly loves his parents but doesn’t fully appreciate or understand their concerns. Across the Spider-Verse makes sure we care about the characters and their personal journeys. Even with the unlimited possibility of jokes and silly mayhem, the filmmakers keenly understand that it doesn’t matter unless we care about the characters and their fates. It’s a movie that is full of surprises and thrills and laughs, all in equal measure, and a blessed experience for a film fan. In the crush of comic book multiverse madness, Across the Spider-Verse is a refreshing and rejuvenating creative enterprise, one that builds off the formidable talent of its predecessor and carries it even further into artistic excellence that reminds us how transporting movies can be.

Honorable mention: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Godzilla Minus One; The Holdovers; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

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WORST FILMS

10)  Sound of Freedom

As an action drama chronicling the ills of human trafficking, it’s pretty mediocre genre stuff and indulges too often in wallowing in the danger of these innocent children under the guise of raising awareness of a pertinent problem that too many may unfortunately misconstrue. Nobody needs much persuasion to believe that sex trafficking is a definite bad thing, and yet the movie spends so much time wallowing in the grotesque terror of its captive children. It’s one thing to highlight the harsh reality of real-world trauma, but it’s another thing to keep going back for dramatic weight not provided through the rest of the movie. Too much of Sound of Freedom is watching a grief-stricken dead-eyed Jim Caviezel gravely intoning, “How can we let this happen?” intermingled with prolonged scenes of terrorized children. It feels too exploitative and gross. I recognized it as a cheap emotional cudgel, and one I didn’t appreciate considering the film’s intended message about the well-being of children. As a genre exercise, it’s kind of dull. As an expose on human trafficking, it has potential but skirts complexity for the finality of a feel-good mission with clear cut heroes and villains. There are obvious good intentions here wanting to highlight a worthy cause, and that might be enough for many viewers who can coast on the slick production values and overall stoicism.

9)  Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire

Creating an original sci-fi/fantasy universe is hard work. It involves bringing to life an entire new universe of characters, worlds, back-stories, rules, conflicts, cultures, and classes. I can see why Zack Snyder would have preferred Rebel Moon as a Star Wars pitch, because they could attach all the established world-building from George Lucas and his creative collaborators as a quick cheat code. The entire 124-minute enterprise feels not just like an incomplete movie but an incomplete idea. The fact that Rebel Moon is derivative is not in itself damaging. Science fiction is often the sum of its many earlier influences, including Star Wars. Rebel Moon cannot transcend its many film influences because it fails to reform them into something coherent of its own. Even with all the money at Netflix’s mighty disposal, Rebel Moon can’t make up for its paltry imagination and thus feels like an empty enterprise. I’m reminded of 2011’s Sucker Punch, the last time Snyder was left completely to his own devices. I wrote back then, “Expect nothing more than top-of-the-line eye candy. Expect nothing to make sense. Expect nothing to really matter. In fact, go in expecting nothing but a two-hour ogling session, because that’s the aim of the film. Look at all those shiny things and pretty ladies, gentlemen.” That assessment seems fitting for Rebel Moon as well, a movie that can’t be bothered to provide compelling characters, drama, or world-building to invest in over two to four hours, once you consider the approaching Part Two. You’ll prefer the void.

8)  Heart of Stone

Heart of Stone is pre-molded for the Netflix formula of star-driven action vehicles and spy thrillers that are meant to pass the time and do little else to stimulate your thinking or entertainment. These expensive and generally disappointing genre movies feel remote and mechanical, as if the almighty Netflix algorithm thought, after housing and documenting thousands of action movies, that it too could make a competent spy thriller. You’ve seen bits and pieces of this movie before, so the viewing experience becomes a personal guessing game of how long it will take for Heart of Stone to utilize this genre cliche or that cliche. There’s no surprise or verve or quirk to be had here. Everything is pulled from a big bucket of cliches and then reassembled to best simulate a genre movie that you mostly remember seeing before. I read that Netflix intended for this to be the start of a franchise, and without an intriguing world, lead character, spy agency, or set of ongoing conflicts, it’s hard for me to envision anything Heart of Stone could offer that people would request a return visit. If you need something loud and derivative to take a drowsy nap to, then Heart of Stone is the next The Grey Man.

7)  Fool’s Paradise

Charlie Day is a very funny guy who works with lots of funny people, so why isn’t his directorial debut, Fool’s Paradise, well, funnier? It’s about a mute simpleton (Day) with the intelligence of a five-year-old, or a Labrador retriever we’re told, who is mistaken for an acting savant. The intended joke is that this industry projects what it wants to see and is full of shallow, insecure, greedy idiots chasing anything that might be popular or career advancing. That’s a fine start but there is a shocking lack of jokes and funny scenarios to be had here, so the 93 minutes just creaks on by in protracted and pained awkward silence. It was a mistake to have Day, a comedian with such a distinct voice and often prone to hilarious outbursts, play a character who doesn’t talk at all. It’s a movie about non-stop mugging to the camera and hoping to evoke some overly generous pity laughs. The movie is chock full of stars, many of them friends and colleagues that Day has accumulated over a decade in comedy, but nobody has anything funny to do. There’s just so little to hold onto with Fool’s Paradise, with a boring nothing of a character that never seems to uncover or reveal anything on a tour through Day’s many famous friends.

6)  Skinamarink

This kind of minimalist tone poem movie is just not for me. I was hopeful that eventually the different mysterious pieces might start forming a more cogent picture of what was happening, or even an understanding of the new rules within this enclosed nightmare universe, but it never materialized. Because nothing really adds up with Skinamarink you could have rearranged any scene without having a deleterious effect. There is no structure, no discovery, nothing to warrant this movie being 100 minutes when ten would have given the same artistic impression. It feels like one of those movies that someone else would watch in another movie that was cursed, a la The Ring. Imagine watching the strange imagery of The Ring cursed video but for two hours. Wouldn’t that grow tiresome? You’re right. It does. I congratulate Kyle Edward Ball and his minimal crew for making a shoestring budget horror hit. It’s just too experimental and lacking narrative traction and substance to be a hit with me.

5)  Ghosted

Joe Russo has bleakly predicted it’s only a matter of time before studios lean into A.I. programs to help them write bankable screenplays. When that dark day arrives, if we haven’t already crossed that Rubicon, I imagine those A.I. ghostwritten scripts will feel a lot like Ghosted, a movie that feels like it was constructed from imperfect observers. The jokes generally feel off (“He expected a hottie not Mata Hari,” womp womp), the rhythm and tone feel a little too much, too forced, like the actors are desperately trying to compensate. It’s the comedy that made me most depressed, as no character talked like a semblance of a real human being, nor was their fast-paced, quippy dialogue truly zingy and entertaining. t was like watching a desperate person try and prove they are not, in fact desperate, but with every word only proving more and more their desperation.

4)  Bama Rush

Rarely have I watched a feature-length documentary that felt so stretched out that it felt like the movie equivalent of messing around with the margins of an essay to try and maximize the shortage of viable content. For a movie that can explore the questions of race, class, privilege, tradition, and sexual identity, it instead is a poorly composed movie that neglects to scrutinize any topic for more than fleeting glances. There’s a reason that a solid tenth of this movie is simply made up of TikTok videos supplied by the Bama Rush hashtag. In fact, even that angle, examining the vicarious entertainment and investment of adult strangers over whether or not these women broadcasting their sorority applications could be a worthy topic to touch upon social media’s strengths and ills, a voyeuristic hunger for manufactured realities. Instead, Bama Rush gives you a little of everything and a lot of nothing beyond the director’s unrelated experiences.

3)  Love Again

I don’t understand Love Again, like at all. I understand what happened on screen in a literal sense but the reasoning behind it, the storytelling choices, are so bizarre and foreign to me that it feels like a group of aliens who only learned human behavior through the worst direct-to-streaming rom-coms tried their hand at recreating human interactions and falling in love. The very premise seems almost like an afterthought, so why even go through the trouble of this labored conceit? The fact that Rob has been receiving this sad woman’s grief texts could present a real ethical conundrum, beyond the fact that he knows her private thoughts and feelings and he doesn’t even know who she is. Love Again is bad in ways that are despairing while also being mind-numbing. You get a sense early on how little feel for the material the filmmakers have, at how poorly the scenes are at disguising their creaky plot mechanics from the viewer.

2)  Lady Ballers

To say this movie is transphobic goes without saying and from people who don’t deserve any misspent assumptions of good faith about “starting a dialogue.” In this world, trans people are a confused liberal scam, something that can be solved by kicking a guy who says he thinks he’s a girl in the balls and telling him to get over it. The movie feels like a proverbial kick to the balls for all genders. For the reported defenders of women’s sports, the entire premise of Lady Ballers is deeply sexist. The film posits that any man, no matter how out of shape, could competitively destroy a woman in sports. It’s a dumb sports comedy that wishes it was a second-rate Zucker-Abrahams movie. The bar is considerably low, infinitesimally low for this movie considering its target audience and targets, and yet this movie trips over even the mildest of expectations. Lady Ballers only confirms that a comedy made by people who don’t understand comedy can only ever be limited in its funny, especially when it’s built upon a premise radiating ignorance.

And the worst film of 2023 is….

1)  Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

To say this movie is creatively lacking is an understatement. Blood and Honey isn’t just a bad B-movie, it gives a bad name to enjoyably bad B-movies. The only reason this movie exists is for the novelty of its existence, so that younger horror fans, and those with a healthy appreciation of irony and bad movies, can say, “I watched a killer Winnie the Pooh movie.” No other thought was given to this entire enterprise after that first one. Even if you were turning into Blood and Honey for the ironic yuks, there’s nothing to really laugh at here. This is a bad movie rather than an enjoyably bad movie. It’s a movie that only exists because somebody thought enough people would be curious to watch a killer Winnie the Pooh movie. That’s the reason I tuned in, but from the second minute onward, there’s no reason to bother watching the remaining mess. Just imagine a low-rent slasher film with unimaginative kills, boring characters, a lack of any subversive connections or reframing of its source material, and an ending that doesn’t so much conclude but simply give up for a sequel, and you’ll have replicated Blood and Honey. As one saving grace, I will say that the movie has more polished cinematography than most of its low-budget ilk. The startling lack of imagination of everything else is depressing, as is the fact that this movie has earned over four million at the global box-office, hoodwinking enough rubberneckers looking for a good bad time. The problem is that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is only a bad bad time.

Dishonorable mention: Retribution; Pain Hustlers; Robots; 80 for Brady

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PART TWO: VARIOUS AWARDS AND ACCOLADES

Best titles of the year: Cocaine Bear, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, A Tourist’s Guide to Love, They Cloned Tyrone, No One Will Save You, Leave the World Behind

Worst titles of the year: Plane, 80 for Brady, Master Gardener, Ruby Gilman, Teenage Kraken, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Skinamarink

Titles that could be confused with porn: Craving, Flamin’ Hot, The Flash, Shortcomings, Bottoms, Old Dads

Biggest Disappointment of 2023: Saltburn. Look, Promising Young Woman was easily one of my favorite films of 2020. It used the structure of a rape-revenge genre movie to tell a hard-hitting drama and pitch-black comedy. It was, in short, pastiche elevated into something jarring and relevant and daring. With her follow-up Saltburn, she has taken the British class drama of an outsider trying to fake their way in the world of the rich and powerful, a Vanity Fair or Brideshead Revisited if you will, and attached a whole lot of salacious campy nonsense. If Promising Young Woman was elevating a trashy genre movie with vision and daring, then Saltburn is taking the soapy costume drama and degrading it with cheap shock, and “degrade” is quite the appropriate term. It’s like if The Talented Mr. Ripley was made by the auteur of tawdry trash Larry Clark (Kids, Bully). It’s trashy nouveau camp that works as a sour class comedy until it becomes too sour and most definitely doesn’t work as any sort of engaging character piece or legitimate thriller.

Runners-up: Oppenheimer’s critical ascendancy; Timothee Chalamet as Willy Wonka

The “I Get It, But Now What?” Award: The Zone of Interest. I understand artistically what director Jonathan Glazer is going for here. It’s the ironic juxtaposition of the ordinary and the awful, asking the viewer to think about how many millions of Germans went along with the mounting anti-Semitic and racist policies of Nazi Germany out of self-interest and/or willful ignorance, the banality of evil. That becomes the challenge of the movie, watching this family tend to the garden, host a birthday party, and read bedtime stories while watching the gloom of the chimneys, listening to the constant soundtrack of scattered gunshots and the screams of victims. Every scene is elevated by the dramatic irony of the context that it is happening next door to a concentration camp. We watch them plant flowers, and it just so happens to be next door to a concentration camp. We watch them invite the mother-in-law to make her new bedroom her own, and it just so happens to be next door to a concentration camp. It gets tedious as a viewer because without the irony, we’re just watching a family live their life. I get that’s the point, this example of one family trying to ignore the terrifying reality literally at their very doorstep. I understand that message and I understand why that is even more relevant to our troubled modern times with an alarming rise in anti-Semitism and the celebration of fascism and repressive strongmen and worldwide genocidal actions. However, I don’t think we get real insights into these characters because they’re more just general ideas intended to forward the critical thesis of the power of self-delusion and excuse-making. That’s fine as a starting point for a provocative movie, but don’t make me watch a family do their laundry for an hour and then tell me it’s an Important Statement because they happen to be next door to the horrors of history.

Runner-up: The “no duh” revelations of Sound of Thunder, The Killer

Did You Want Clarity? Because This Isn’t That Kinda Movie: Anatomy of a Fall, Leave the World Behind, Aporia, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Fast X

The Best 10 Minutes of 2023: “I’m Just Ken” song and dance sequence. My wife informed me that she heard levels of laughter she was heretofore unaware of coming from me during this sequence.

Runners-up: Taking the stairs, John Wick 4; magic heist, Dungeons & Dragons; the big fight in Anatomy of a Fall; “Memory” with space cats, The Marvels

Best Time I Had in a Theater in 2023: Seeing Barbie with three generations of women in my family, something I will privilege.

The Solid Movie But Now I’m Uncontrollably Crying Award: The Iron Claw

Most Understanding and Chill Husband Award: Past Lives

Ohio Indies Reviewed in 2023: Free to a Bad Home, Three Quarters Dead, Obstacle Corpse, Spencer + Penny, Forever

This is a Comedy, Right? Award: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Scott went to elaborate lengths to make fun of the little general, right? How else to read scenes where Napoleon and Josephine argue at the dinner table where he accuses her of being infertile, she accuses him of being fat, and he agrees that he heartily likes his food and says, “Fate has brought this lamb chop to me.” How else to read a scene where he throws a hilarious hissy fit before the English ambassador, who Napoleon feels has been rude and less than deferential, and he screams, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” How else do you read a montage of Napoleon seizing power with the military pushing out the old figures of power and one of them, aghast, shouting, “This cannot be. I am enjoying a succulent breakfast!” How else to interpret the scene where Napoleon is going to achieve his coup from the French parliament and he’s run out of the chamber, falling and scampering out like a child caught playing tyrant. It’s moments like these, as well as the acting choices, that push me in the direction of interpreting this movie less as another handsomely mounted biopic of The Great Men of History and more tearing down the lockstep reverence for this figure glorified through centuries of back-patting.

Runner-up: Beau is Afraid, also starring Joaquin Phoenix; David Fincher’s The Killer

Most Gratuitous Moment of 2023: Three-way tie for Saltburn: 1) the bathtub slurp, 2) the messy oral, 3) the graveyard goodbye.

Most Ridiculous Plot Element of 2023: The rain of babies in the opening of The Flash. Barry is trying to help clean up a crumbling hospital when it collapses and literally sends a rain of babies falling through the air. I was beside myself when this happened, horrified and then stupefied that this absurd action sequence was actually happening. Barry goes into super speed to save the day, which more or less reverts the world into super slow-mo, though he needs to power up first, so we get a quick edit of him stuffing food into his face to load up on calories. We go from Barry breaking into a falling vending machine, stuffing himself in the face with snacks, getting the green light from his suit which I guess measures his caloric intake, and then grab a baby and literally put it in a microwave to shield it from danger. Just describing this event makes me feel insane. I figure the filmmakers were going for an over-the-top approach that also provides light-hearted goofiness to separate the movie from the oppressively dark grist of Snyder’s movies. However, this goes so far into the direction of absurdity that it destroys its credibility. It’s hard for me to fathom many watching this misguided and horrifying CGI baby-juggling sequence and say, “Yes, more please,” rather than scoff and shake their head.

Runners-up: the entire ending of Hypnotic; literal Nazi costume for Space Nazi Bad Guy in Rebel Moon; the ongoing justification for Project Greenlight after five duds

Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar Award: Cocaine Bear, Skinamarink

Sometimes a Cigar is Really Two Additional Framing Devices: Asteroid City

Sometimes a Cigar is Just an Excuse to Talk About Your Alopecia: Bama Rush

The Ending for Scream We Deserved: There is an ongoing thread where an Internet subculture has re-framed the Carpenter sisters as the real villains of their own horrendous story, and it’s an intriguing element that brings the echo chambers and confirmation bias and novice sleuths-in-the-making of the Internet to further examination. It’s reminiscent of any bottom-feeding conspiracy that asks people to pick apart their reality for “the real story” magically hidden in plain sight. The Scream franchise is famous for its fun guessing game of who the real killers could be from our gallery of suspects, and Scream 6 is no exception. However, the subversion that could have really separated this Scream from its elders is by having the killers actually be… nobodies (the Rian Johnson twist). What if the mask comes off and it’s a brand-new character? I’m sure many viewers would feel like they had been betrayed, but then the point emerges that it’s simply some conspiracy theorist who has gone full-tilt crazy into the cult and taken matters into their own hands, attempting to hold “the real killers” to account or to prove they were truly guilty. And the larger point is that the “fake news” has already won out. It doesn’t matter what happens from here, what news coverage should stamp out ignorance, because you can’t pull every cult member out of their self-inflicted cocoon of delusion, which means there will always be more to take their place. That’s the legacy of what has transpired, that there will never be a real escape any longer. I thought that would be such a jarring and thematically intriguing and summative ending.

Best Onscreen Death: Beau is Afraid’s coital cautionary tale. Just when you think we’re safe from a controlling mother’s made-up stories to dissuade her son from ever leaving her care, wham! It all comes back in the worst of times. Kudos to you, Parker Posey. The fact that the whole scene is set to Mariah Carrey makes it even more macabre.

Best Villain of 2023: The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. A mad scientist with a god complex who likes to hurt animals. Yeah, this guy sucks and it sure felt good to watch him get his due from Rocket Raccoon.

Runner’s-up: Godzilla in Minus One; Robert DeNio in Killers of the Flower Moon; Jude Law as Captain Hook; M3GAN

Favorite Line From a Review in 2023: ”

 

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PART THREE: OVERALL MOVIE GRADES

I have reviews and mini-reviews for almost all of the graded movies listed below.

A

—

Anatomy of a Fall

Barbie

Poor Things

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

A-

—

American Fiction

Aporia

Dream Scenario

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

John Wick: Chapter 4

Rye Lane

B+

—

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

BS High

Godzilla: Minus One

The Holdovers

Past Lives

Spencer + Penny, Forever

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

B

—

Air

The Boy and the Heron

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

Creed III

Elemental

Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3

The Iron Claw

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Little Mermaid

Leave the World Behind

M3GAN

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning

Nimona

No One Will Save You

Oppenheimer

Scream 6

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Talk to Me

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

Tetris

B-

—

Beau is Afraid

Eileen

It Lives Inside

Joy Ride

Knock at the Cabin

The Killer

The Marvels

Missing

No Hard Feelings

Obstacle Corpse

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Three Quarters Dead

Totally Killer

Wonka

C+

—

Ant-Man and the Wasp in Quantumania

Asteroid City

The Blackening

Maestro

May December

Napoleon

Peter Pan & Wendy

Reality

65

Slotherhouse

The Zone of Interest

C

—

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

Bottoms

Cocaine Bear

80 for Brady

Five Nights at Freddy’s

The Flash

Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia

Gray Matter

Hypnotic

The Meg 2: The Trench

Robots

Saltburn

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

C-

—

Ghosted

Pain Hustlers

Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire

Retribution

Skinamarink

D+

—

Bama Rush

Free to a Bad Home

Love Again

D

—

Lady Ballers

D-

—

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey