by Jarrod Jones. 2023 was a big year for me as a writer. I quit my day job and threw myself into freelance work, pushing myself to improve as a critic under anticipated but no less stressful financial and personal strain. I’ve written dozens of reviews this year across five outlets (I’m including DoomRocket in this because why not?), excluding the essential primers, previews, and reaction pieces one writes if one hopes to keep the lights on. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been rewarding, due in no small part to this collection of films, which have made this ridiculous pursuit of mine worthwhile. Pulled from my Letterboxd feed and reviews, these are…
THE BEST FILMS OF 2023
The Killer. (dir. David Fincher) The Killer has been subject to all kinds of interpretations: it’s either a swipe at grind culture, a mask-slipping autocritique from one of modern cinema’s most persnickety filmmakers, both, or none of these things. Regardless of What It’s All About, Fincher’s latest is a tidy, blackly funny thriller that at least has something to say about our economic thresher — Michael Fassbender’s assassin character fuels up at McDonald’s and uses Amazon — and has the self-awareness to poke fun at the hustle dorks who might admire what’s being accomplished in the story. A minor work made great due to its nimble, predatory grace. Now picture a version made in 1967 starring Lee Marvin. See? It still works.
Past Lives. (dir. Celine Song) There have been other, showier films about chaotic threesomes this year that go messier with the material, but Celine Song’s decision to dial back the melodrama is the wisest course for her story, which follows a married woman (Greta Lee) who reconnects with a childhood friend (Teo Yoo) and discovers there was more to their relationship than she remembers. Past Lives is a quiet debut about missed romance and the tumult of life that becomes deafening through all the things that are left unsaid. Its final 30 minutes are among the most devastating I watched this year.
Godland. (dir. Hlynur Pálmason) Tremendous production and presentation — rarely these days is a proto-Academy ratio put to such mighty work, with at least three tracking shots that made my jaw drop in disbelief with its majestic results — with a lead whose arrogance puts him in the same camp as Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Godland is a challenging, frustrating, and (mostly) satisfying film experience. I’m not sure if Pálmason is all the way successful in conveying the many dramatic shifts in this glacial Icelandic parable, but his moral is sound: if you refuse to change, or worse, believe you don’t need to, no matter your position or intentions, you will wind up with mud on your face.
Evil Does Not Exist. (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi) A deliberate slow drip of routine, detail, lush winter forest photography, and understated but no less rich swells of feeling. Hamaguchi renders nature as a beautiful and frightening thing to be fiercely defended, and that might explain its ending, which takes the even hand he offers to both the people who advocate change and those who don’t and balls it into a fist. the final scene kills all this serenity with an abruptness that also disrupts the cool naïveté of its title — it’s rough play, but in the film’s context (which is admittedly somewhat elusive), it’s fair. (DoomRocket review.)
Poor Things. (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) A sumptuous, decadent, slightly depraved confection that dresses up topics like sexual curiosity, hostile urbanity, and female empowerment in gilded Victorian finery, yet it never becomes frivolous — even when it threatens to. Sordid opulence seems to bring something out in Lanthimos (see: The Favourite) that allows him to flex his proclivities more clearly than in his other work (see: Killing of a Sacred Deer). Here, he goes buck-wild. is that always a good thing? Truth be told, Poor Things is a feast with a few too many courses, with some harder to swallow than others. But it’s impossible to walk out of this not feeling satisfied, and full. (DoomRocket review.)
Full Time. (dir. Eric Gravel) A nerves-shredding gauntlet of anxieties, responsibilities, guilt, dread, failure, embarrassment, it goes on. The faster you run, the harder you hit the wall. Gravel constructs each frantic scene like it were a time bomb (this is one of the better-edited films I’ve seen this year) — sometimes it explodes, sometimes it diffuses, both outcomes equally exhilarating to watch. Also, can I say? Regardless of its tricky international release (this premiered in Venice in 2021, while dropping in the U.S. back in February), it’s an actual crime that Laure Calamy isn’t in the same conversation as other performances this year.
The Holdovers. (dir. Alexander Payne) An achingly hilarious Christmastime war of attrition between a smelly professor (Paul Giamatti) and a lanky student (Dominic Sessa), with the lunch lady (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) looking on with a cigarette dangling from her bemused frown. There are even more goodies stuffed in Alexander Payne’s X-mas stocking, but it’s the phenomenal performances that make this special: there’s Sessa, who makes his film debut here yet looks and sounds like he’s been hanging around the periphery of funky melodramas for years, and Randolph, who reveals such dimension to her character’s grief that I had to clean my glasses in the theater due to the tears streaming down my stupid face. As for Giamatti? This is possibly his finest hour. I laughed, I cried, I’m going back for seconds.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. (dir. Radu Jude) Appropriately enough, as long and unwieldy as its title. This articulates the frantic, racist, sexist hurly-burly of modern living, with all the attendant tangents, provisos, and nonsequiturs that come with it. It took a minute to calibrate with Jude’s scorched-earth black-and-white frenzy, especially as he kept splicing in richly colored film textures from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 Angela Moves On. Fortunately, Jude’s vision of present-day Romania — a crowded, blustery place where people drive like lunatics, COVID still hangs over everything like a thick smog, and Ceaușescu’s destructive presence is still acutely felt — is conveyed with plain-language brusqueness by the film’s star, Ilinca Manolache, another of this year’s truly great unsung performances. (DoomRocket review.)
Fremont. (dir. Babak Jalali) What an extraordinary thing this is: the asymmetrical blocking, the handheld shots that exist only when they’re meant to, the way the contrasts of black and white make every interesting face beautiful, and Anaita Wali Zada, one of the truly great faces, meandering through each scene with a command of subtlety and wit that will make you flinch, she’s so good. Gregg Turkington choking up during a reading of White Fang nearly killed me. A startlingly funny, gentle, kind, small film that’s presented at a leisurely pace and stays only as long as it needs to, yet I’d have been perfectly happy if it’d stayed a little while longer. Fremont has everything I’ve been looking for this year from movies. More.
Oppenheimer. (dir. Christopher Nolan) A monumental, earth-trembling rumination on the passing of a human age made by a filmmaker who has spent over 25 years building towards his creative apotheosis, crafting what may one day be considered to be the masterwork of the early 21st century. In the stratum of Spielberg and Kubrick, Christopher Nolan has finally entered the conversation, I don’t know how else to put it. (DoomRocket review.)
HONORABLE MENTIONS
(Top 5 movies I’m still thinking about.)
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. (dir. James Gunn) Gunn’s Marvel farewell is fittingly personal, conceptually gnarly (so much flesh), and evocative of early 80s Ninja Turtles comics and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. it might be my favorite Guardians movie even though it’s a messier outing than Vol. 2 (I dunno, still kicking that one around in my head). I genuinely can’t think of another filmmaker on Marvel’s bench who could get away with the things Gunn does with this movie, which makes his leaving the studio an actual loss — for them, and for us. (DoomRocket review.)
Megalomaniac. (dir. Karim Ouelhaj) A twisted what-if that takes a real unsolved serial killer case from Belgium and turns it into an eminently brutal-to-behold family drama that might be my favorite horror movie of the last few years, a simmering, foreboding blast of fuckery powered by an all-timer post-industrial score. If Alex Proyas kept making skinny goth-boy movies and waved bye-bye to good taste and a moral core, this would be it. (IGN review.)
Limbo. (dir. Ivan Sen) An arid Outback noir structured like a confessional, where a 20-year-old crime that took place in a small mining town leaves its people numb to hurt and disappointment. Sen harnesses a sense of cruel resignation, illustrating with precision the dull void inside where anger wanders directionless, paralleling it with Australia’s centuries-long mistreatment of the Aboriginal people, a clean contrast accentuated by an understated but perpetual ache of quiet agonies and regret. (Also: This has some of the finest b&w cinematography I’ve seen in a long minute.) (DoomRocket review.)
Sweet Dreams. (dir. Ena Sendijarević) Heat in Ena Sendijarević’s Sweet Dreams soon becomes a rich metaphor for hostility: The sun bakes color and texture into delicate white skin while mosquitoes blister it, and ceaseless humidity gives everyone a glistening sheen of exhaustion and/or hunger. You get the impression it isn’t just unrest out to do in the entitled who encroach on land that does not, and never will, belong to them. It’s nature correcting itself from capitalism’s invasive, destructive presence. (DoomRocket review.)
May December. (dir. Todd Haynes) Living in a glass cage, passing the time with menial tasks and other busy work, nurturing something that won’t grow, hasn’t grown for a long time, furtively glancing out small windows for a means of escape, all under the cold, unblinking gaze of a microscope — this gave me the good-sad shivers like crazy. Portman/Melton/Moore, an unholy trinity of bad vibes and deep stores of fury, all phenomenal, all emanating their unique powers in surprising ways, easily one of the best performance showcases of the year, no question. I’m still wrapping my head around how Haynes constructed these lush, vivid, fleshy, soapy environments/situations while conveying such emptiness and ennui without careening into full-on camp, truly a master of his craft.
MEANT TO SEE, BUT DIDN’T
(oops/whew, depending)
Saltburn. (dir. Emerald Fennell) Priscilla was more than enough Jacob Elordi for me this year, thanks.
The Iron Claw. (dir. Sean Durkin) Late release/holiday schedule kept me from this before the year’s odometer turned over.
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. (dir. Kelly Fremon Craig) I have no excuse! Excoriate me!
Fallen Leaves. (dir. Aki Kaurismäki) Watch, I’ll wind up seeing this next week and hate myself for putting it off.
Godzilla Minus One. (dir. Takashi Yamazaki) What can I say? I blew it.
More from DoomRocket’s Best of 2023:
