Though I saw almost 150 movies last year, only 36 were first released in the Twin Cities in 2023. That’s not a lot, so take my ten favorites of 2023 with a grain of salt. There’s simply a lot I didn’t see.
I did see Barbie, and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t love it nor did I find it especially insightful or liberating. Sorry. I also saw some big action films, including Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse, which like its predecessor, …Into the Spiderverse, is visually astonishing. However, like practically every multiverse film I’ve seen—admittedly not many—…Across the Spiderverse left me a bit winded, wishing the multiverse didn’t allow filmmakers to cram in what seems like any and every idea that comes to mind. That abundance of creativity led …Across the Spiderverse to be part one of a, hopefully, two-part film, a bit of a disappointment after two-and-a-half hours of almost non-stop plot.
I also saw Maestro. Given my aversion to biopics—and, really, most BOATS (based on a true story) movies—that was a surprise to me. Maestro didn’t change my aversion, though I thought Carey Mulligan gave a heartfelt performance as Felicia Montealegre.
A few noteworthy movies that were on my finalists list: Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt’s wry comedy that follows the life of Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a relatively unknown artist plying her trade somewhere in the Northwest; Godland, an Icelandic film in which a Danish pastor truly confronts himself and God in the harsh landscape of the remote portion of Iceland to which he has been assigned to establish a church; May December, Todd Haynes’s unsettling film about a self-involved Hollywood actress studying a woman she is cast to play in a movie who had been a teacher and seduced a twelve-year-old student to whom she’d gotten married; and Afire, Christian Petzold’s impish romantic comedy about a group of young artists who meet in a cabin at the edge of an immense forest fire.
Without further ado, here are my favorite ten films of last year, listed in the order in which I saw them.
Ten Favorite Movies of 2023
Walk Up
The drama of Hong Sang-soo’s films is less their subject than their environment. It’s what the characters move around in as they casually chat, the drama rarely surfacing, sometimes rippling just beneath the surface, sometimes not. The premise of Walk Up is relatively simple: famous director Byungsoo (Kwon Hae-hyo) is visiting his old friend Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-yeong) because his daughter wants to be an interior designer, and he thinks Ms. Kim, also and interior designer, can give her some advice. One senses Ms. Kim has long been attracted to Byungoo, a fact that gets complicated when she introduces him to her flirtatious friend Sunhee (Song Seon-mi). The overall structure of the film adds a wrinkle to a film that keeps getting wrinkled with each new section, the plot never getting snagged as the film suggests more than it tells.
The Beasts
Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and his wife Olga (Marina Foïs) have relocated from France to rural Galicia in Spain to start a small, organic farm and perhaps even a modest spa after they finish remodeling several dilapidated, abandoned buildings on the property. However, a neighboring family begins waging a war on them, one that escalates to terrifying degrees. For all the narrative’s considerable tension, Rodrigo Sorogoyen allows us to see and understand what might drive someone to such extremes, even if he doesn’t ask us to excuse it. He also shows how the entire community colludes with the neighbors’ threats in the way it thinks about and treats foreigners.
Trenque Lauquen
Named after a city a few hundred miles southwest of Buenos Aires City where most of the events of the movie take place, Trenque Lauquen explores themes of love, desire, and freedom with a perambulatory narrative that is broken up into two two-hour sections. The first part follows Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd) and Ezekiel (Ezekiel Pierri) as they search for Laura (Laura Peredes), who has vanished. Flashbacks of her co-worker Ezekiel reveal what may have instigated her disappearance and why Ezekiel isn’t as keen as Rafael, her romantic partner, to find out where she may have gone. The second part is devoted to Laura, who eventually befriends a biologist and her partner who have devoted themselves to a strange creature that was discovered living in a park in Trenque Laquen.
The effect of this structural approach is of two separate but related movies—one a mystery, the other science fiction—that share characters and motifs, each film in conversation with the other. By the end, the plot in the first film remains unresolved, the direction that the conclusion ultimately takes being much more satisfying, the last act of the narrative functioning like a coda, at once a detour and a moving conclusion to this rich, engaging film.
R.M.N.
Most of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s lastest film is set in Transylvania, but its opening, in a slaughterhouse in Germany, neatly establishes the economic and emotional conditions that drive the action of the rest of the film. Matthias is among a group of immigrants undertaking the unsavory, dangerous work at the slaughterhouse, while German managers hector the men to stop slacking off, which they don’t seem to be doing. It comes to a head when Matthias answers an emergency phone call, earning him a berating from one of the managers, who ends the confrontation by calling Matthias a “lazy gypsy.” Matthias violently knocks the man to the ground and flees back to Transylvania, where he is sure to find only low-paying work. As the brooding Matthias strives to reestablish an almost authoritarian grip on his life in his hometown, including rekindling his relationship with his son and Csilla, a former lover, the bakery that Csilla manages hires three immigrants from Sri Lanka to complete their workforce. The results are explosive. With his usual cinematic flair, Mungiu focuses on a personal story to expertly explore ethnic, political, and economic tensions that currently threaten the EU (and that we too recognize in the United States).
Asteroid City
There is much about Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City that is familiar: the lateral camera movements; the careful compositions; the teeming cast of big-name stars playing quirky yet haunted characters; the smart, some might also say twee, script; and the meticulous art direction. If no other praise can be lavished on Asteroid City, it can certainly be said that it looks great.
But it is also Anderson’s most elusive film, and in that, it is mysterious and surprisingly moving. It is a movie about a 1950s play adapted into a movie about a recent widower (Jason Schwartzman), who takes his children to a Junior Stargazer’s convention in the fictional Asteroid City, an event interrupted by a visit from an extraterrestrial that prompts the government to quarantine the attendees. Anderson’s film is both the adaptation of the play and a recounting of its and the play’s fictional making, with the characters moving freely among the different levels of fiction.
If, on the surface, it sounds arch, Asteroid City’s complex narrative structure allows the film to touch on existential questions—Why are we here? Why do we do what we do? Why create art? Why love?—while giving them a specificity that imbues them with genuine pathos. This is especially true when the different narrative layers of the film reach the same dramatic point, the hard questions being asked resonating in all levels of the fiction and out into the movie theater, as in the touching scene when Jason Schwarzman’s character seemingly storms off the movie in a panic that he’s not doing the part right, looking for advice from the play’s director, after which he steps from backstage onto a fire escape and discusses with a key character who had yet to appear in the film a scene that had supposedly been cut, a conversation that, at least momentarily, frees him from his guilty conscience. To say more would be to spoil a truly magical moment in a movie that has plenty of them.
No Bears
Since he was banned from making movies by the Iranian government in 2010, every film from director Jafar Panahi has been an act of political dissidence. Those he has made since 2010 have, along with their typically humanist critiques of the Iranian regime, also explored questions regarding the creation of art and its role in an oppressive society, Panahi looking hard at himself, his films, and what value his work realistically could have. He doesn’t seem to suffer from self-importance, and in No Bears, an aura of futility almost seems to creep in, even if the very existence of No Bears shows that he hasn’t caved in to it yet.
No Bears tells the story of director Jafar Panahi, who has relocated from Tehran to a village along the Turkish border to make a film. Suspicions are aroused among the villagers, and soon there are accusations that he has crossed the border, something he has been forbidden to do by the government, and that he took photos of a young couple that could be used to punish a woman for having violated the terms of a marriage arrangement made before she was born. Leavened at times with wry humor, No Bears could very well be Panahi’s fiercest, most direct critique of conditions in Iran since 2000’s The Circle.
Oppenheimer
Toward the beginning of Christopher Nolan’s masterful portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the young Oppenheimer bumbles his way through an experiment in chemistry lab before avowing to his professors his predilection for theory over lab work. Realizing the brilliance of their pupil, they direct him to study with some of the most advanced theoretical physicists of their day. The ramifications of his theoretical bent plays out later in the film, at a key moment in the development of the atomic bomb, when Oppenheimer comes to the limits of theory. At that point, he concedes that he must test his work in the real world, though the consequences could be devastating.
These scenes and all they bookend reveal the nimbleness with which Oppenheimer dramatizes how intertwined the moral complexities of creating the atomic bomb are with those of man in charge of the U.S. program for doing so. To tell his story, Nolan moves deftly across continents and time, Oppenheimer being the latest of his films to work through how time is represented and perceived in cinema, an interest that started in Memento, his first film, and continues through to the present, most notably in Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet.
Should scientists have created atomic weapons? Should the bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was Oppenheimer complicit in the deaths they caused? The answers, the film shows us, are complicated.
Killlers of the Flower Moon
Based on the book by David Grann about a series of murders of members of the Osage nation after they became rich because oil was discovered on their land, Martin Scorcese’s adaptation hews close to the story of the Osage women and the white men who married and then killed them, leaving the book’s narrative of the nascent FBI to another film. Even with the tighter focus, Scorcese’s films sprawls to nearly four hours, though it never feels like it. If Leonardo DiCaprio ultimately disappoints, playing Ernest Burkhart as a thick-skulled moron, mouth pulled into a dopey pout, brow furrowed, Robert DeNiro is chilling as William Hale, the frightening architect of the murders, whose face to the Osage is munificent and avuncular all while he is carrying out a cold-blooded, coordinated effort to steal their land. However, it is Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart who is the film’s beating heart, so much so that in the scenes when Mollie is incapacitated, and so not in the movie, the film seems to momentarily lose its way even as its treacherous plot relentlessly unfolds. In the end, the movie remains another late-career triumph for Scorcese.
Twilight (1990)
Restored and first released in the United States this year, Hungarian director György Fehér’s Twilightis the haunting tale of Detective Felügyelõ, whose impending retirement is delayed when the body of an eight-year-old girl is found by a monument, deep in rural Hungarian woods, one of a recent spate of murdered children. Felügyelõ vows to catch her killer, before retiring, a harrowing pledge that proves more and more difficult, leading him into an abyss of moral compromise.
The film is shot in suggestively murky black and white that, along with the remote setting and seemingly fantastic details of the murder, give the movie the feeling of a fairy tale, the movie expertly transporting viewers with its immersive, slow aesthetic to another world that seems to reside in the shadows of the one in which we usually live.
Roald Dahl shorts
This September, a half-hour film titled The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar appeared without fanfare on Netflix. It turned out to be the first of four Roald Dahl stories to be adapted into short films by Wes Anderson. While Anderson is often accused of repeating himself, especially in his controlled, symmetrical framings and camera movements, and his tableaux-like storytelling that gives actors a short leash to develop their characters, it seems to me that he usually explores new facets of his obsessions in every film. The Dahl shorts are no exception. While they resemble nothing other than Wes Anderson films, they also take his style in new directions, with actors reciting the narrative to the movies’ plots directly to the camera, while moving through highly theatrical realizations of what the story is describing. The effect is quite immersive. The stories themselves are pure Dahl, dark and fanciful, yet quite human despite their fancy. Of the four films, including The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison, my favorite may be The Swan. The regular cast of actors, who help give the collection of films the feeling of watching repertory theater, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Rupert Friend, Benoît Herlin, Dev Patel, and Ben Kingsley, are fully committed, giving delightful performances.
Crooked Eclipses 