The Top Forty-five Films of 2023, and supplementary notes

John Ralston and Mia Goth in the num­ber four film.

I thought that this year I would not half-ass it and just throw up a whole bunch of films but rather do a PROPERLY RANKED list, only long, because I wanna laud a lot of movies. I don’t know if this was a great idea, only because I’m not sure how truly and well I executed it.  I mean, when it’s forty-five films how import­ant is the rank­ing any­way, or maybe I should say how potently does it sig­ni­fy? I mean, as far as I’m con­cerned the top sev­en are each in their own way equally great. And as it hap­pens, the rank­ing of Poor Things plummeted after I saw it a second time but it still made the cut, in paart because it’s forty-five films. The year began pretty much abysmally but it did pick up, so let’s just get on with it, 

1) Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese)

In addi­tion to my Ebert.com best-of-year cap­sule, I wrote about DiCaprio in the movie here. 

2) Asteroid City (Anderson)

3) Fallen Leaves (Kaurismäki)

4) Infinity Pool (Cronenberg)

A crit­ic friend after the screen­ing: “That was a very wet movie.” 

5) Oppenheimer (Nolan)

6) The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)

Well don’t you know/about the bird

7) Tori and Lokita (Dardennes)

I did not review, but Manohla Dargis did, and she speaks for me here. 

8) The Killer (Fincher)

My Venice notice is, on reflec­tion, a trifle inad­equate. In con­ver­sa­tion a friend called it the “best film about the American busi­ness eth­os” in recent memory, and that’s apt. And as my wife observed about Fassbender’s appear­ance about three-quarters of the way in, “So much for being incon­spicu­ous.” It’s a film that truly under­stands the concept of the unre­li­able nar­rat­or. It’s kind of scary that so many film crit­ics do not. 

9) Priscilla (Coppola)

10) The Holdovers (Payne)

Ostensibly a com­edy, but what won me over here was a con­sist­ent, near-blanketing melancholy.

11) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and three oth­er Roald Dahl Films (Anderson)

12) Perfect Days (Wenders)

It’s true that Wenders takes a pretty scrubbed and san­it­ized approach to toilet-cleaning. But giv­en Kings of the Road, I don’t think he owes us any­thing in the shit depart­ment. (N.b.: after I pos­ted this it occured to me that some might mis­in­ter­pret this com­ment, espe­cially if they haven’t seen Kings. Which is a great movie and if you’ve seen it you know what I’m talk­ing about. If you haven’t seen it, do watch! It’s fll of sur­prises!) But bey­ond what he does not show, there are a few crit­ics I’ve seen who can­’t abide the con­com­m­it­ant atti­tude. Which I took to be “accept­ance is the key.” For some the dis­tinc­tion between accept­ance and com­pla­cency is non-existent, and I get that. Nevertheless, I was rather moved by this pic­ture and the serenity sought and often found by its prot­ag­on­ist. It’s not without its dark­ness, but it instructs us to find it in the mar­gins of the dieges­is, as when the niece speaks of her admir­a­tion of the cent­ral char­ac­ter of Patricia Highsmith’s story “The Terrapin.” Look it up! And also remem­ber that Wenders adap­ted Highsmith almost a life­time ago. The movie reminded me of what Bogdanovich said of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: that it “is not a young man’s movie; it has the wis­dom and poet­ic per­cep­tions of an artist know­ingly near­ing the end of his life and career.” One may counter that Valance reaches far dour­er con­clu­sions than this pic­ture does, but there’s more mixed in with those con­clu­sions, to wit: “I sort of have a hanker­ing to come back here to live; maybe open up a law office.” “Rance…if you knew how often I dreamed of it. My roots are here. I guess my heart is here. Yes, let’s come back.”

13) Pacifiction (Serra)

Oh that Albert!

14) Passages (Sacks)

15) Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Soderbergh)

I have no busi­ness put­ting this on a best-of list, as I was pretty close to its pro­duc­tion (it gave me the pre­text to vis­it London for the first time!), but I have to stand up for my friend Steven Soderbergh’s fas­cin­at­ing attempt to at least par­tially Losey-ize a “let’s put on a show” music­al. Owen Gleiberman com­plained, when nam­ing this one of his five worst films of the year (yeah, he’s no longer on this house­hold­’s Christmas-card list) (okay we don’t have one any­way), that he did­n’t recog­nize the Mike Lane of this movie rel­at­ive to the Mike Lane of the pri­or two. I com­mend his invest­ment in the char­ac­ter of Mike Lane, I guess, but for me the film is delight­ful because it’s more or less as if Mike Lane went to Hollywood and got cast in the Gene Kelly role in this music­al of the sort they don’t make any­more and maybe nev­er made in the first place. 

16) Poor Things (Lanthimos)

“I must go punch that baby.” 

17) Barbie (Gerwig)

It’s a real film, all right. And Gerwig is to be com­men­ded for a num­ber of things, includ­ing fit­ting a shit­load of con­ceits coher­ently under one umbrella. One the oter hand, while I’m sure it was­n’t easy for Agnes Varda to get One Sings, The Other Doesn’t made, at least she did­n’t have to shake hands with an IP to do it. 

18) Beau Is Afraid (Aster)

Whoa!

19) Master Gardener (Schrader)

20) Afire (Petzold) 

21) The Zone of Interest (Glazer)

Not per­fect, but with­in its pur­view — which is phe­nomen­o­lo­gic­al rather than philosophical/epistemological — largely impress­ive and unsettling. 

22) John Wick Chapter 4 (Stahelski)

Spoiler alert: the dog lives in this one. 

23) La Civil (Mihai)

24) It Ain’t Over (Mullin)

25) Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd (Bogowa and Thorgeson)

26) Spider-Man: Across The SpiderVerse (Dos Santos, Powers, and Thompson)

The new best Spider-Man movie.

27) Ferrari (Mann)

28) A Thousand and One (Rockwell) 

Probably the most form­ally con­ven­tion­al movie in this group­ing, but a vital story, well-told, bril­liantly detailed. 

29) Anselm (Wenders)

30) The Sweet East (Williams)

My friend and occa­sion­al audio com­ment­ary part­ner Nick Pinkerton wrote the script, and he’s a fan of Amos Vogel and his motto “be sand, not oil.” So I don’t get quite why he objects to Richard Brody’s sub­ject­ive sum­ma­tion of what makes this movie abras­ive, except maybe it’s that he’s now in the pos­i­tion of a film­maker involved in get­ting his movie mar­keted more than he is of a critic-turned-screenwriter. In any event, this movie actu­ally irrit­ated me no end on ini­tial view­ing. But once I settled down I remembered that it wanted to irrit­ate me, and then appre­ci­ated that it irrit­ated me in some poten­tially intel­lec­tu­ally con­struct­ive ways. And it’s nev­er bor­ing. (And I’m eager to read what I hope is a forth­com­ing review from a major crit­ic who abso­lutely flipped for it at NYFF.) At one point Talia Rider’s char­ac­ter is instruc­ted that smoking is a filthy habit, and her response is Pure Pinkerton, and I appre­ci­ate that. 

31) Napoleon (Scott)

Well, I was entertained. 

32) Thanksgiving (Roth)

I am sorry I did­n’t have the stones to give this a Critics Pick des­ig­na­tion, I really ought to have. 

33) Silent Night (Woo)

34) May/December (Haynes) 

Not camp. Not melo­drama. Haynes. 

35) Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)

Not once is the phrase “It’s Godzilla” uttered. 

36) Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 (McQuarrie)

Tom Cruise isn’t Buster Keaton but he’ll do. 

37) Raid on the Lethal Zone (Xiao Pang)

Car chases in ava­lanche and flood zones. Unique! 

38) A Haunting in Venice (Branagh)

Sir Kenneth gets his Bava on. 

39) Streetwise (Jiazuo Na)

40) Showing Up (Reichardt)

Johnny Boy: “I met them in the Village.”

Tony: “Bohemians.” — Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973)

41) Anatomy of a Fall (Triet)

Not a patch on Anatomy of a Murder but it’s got some juice. The whip-pans and zooms are a dumb dis­trac­tion. The polit­ic­al dimen­sions of its char­ac­ter­iz­a­tions are actu­ally non-existent. 

42) The Iron Claw (Durkin)

I don’t trust Sean Durkin or any of his friends, so I was expect­ing this to be some kind of “check out these rubes” fest. Having main­tained such dis­tance from Durkin as I pre­ferred, I there­fore (my bad) had no idea he was a wrest­ling head, and his enthu­si­asm both enhances and com­prom­ises what he does here. But it’s a better-than-decent pic­ture, often wrench­ing, and the act­ing is con­sist­ently superb.

43) Mister Organ (Farrier)

44) Joyland (Saim Sadiq)

45) Return to Dust (Ruijun Li)

Potential con­tenders not seen due to time constraints

Wiseman, McQueen

Restorations

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)

Maybe the grim­mest pic­ture I’ve ever seen. Aiiiiieeee.

The World’s Greatest Sinner (Timoth Carey, 1962)

Magnificent eccent­ri­city. 

Well-liked at NYFF and the Venice Biennale, and unre­leased in the U.S. as yet

Kidnapped  (Bellochi0)

Martin Scorsese, take heart; this guy’s a couple years your seni­or and still kick­ing out the jams. 

Evil Does Not Exist (Hamaguchi)

A bit more enig­mat­ic than I might have liked

Coup de Chance (Allen)

It’s good!

Hollywoodgate (Ibrahim Nash’at)

Yikes!

Hesitation Wound (Selman Nacar)

An enga­ging novella-like Turkish picture. 

Aggro Dr1ft (Korine)

Both fun to watch and fun to watch the walkouts. When they tell you some­thing is shot in infrared, believe them. 

 The Beast (Bonello)

It’s com­ing around and it’s not entirely what you expect.