(This article is part of our Best of 2023 series.)
2023 was an odd year for me. Much like the previous year, my love of cinema had diminished to the point where I could no longer muster the energy to watch anything. I would go weeks without wanting to put something on and even then, it wasn’t a guarantee I’d even watch something when the mood struck me. If I couldn’t find a thing to watch within 30 minutes, I’d give up and go back to YouTube or video games. It felt like I watched nothing and yet, this holds the record for the most amount of new releases I’ve watched within a year. I watched every single movie I wanted to see minus Zone of Interest. Watched all the Oscar contenders, the critically acclaimed horror movies and indie darlings. Since I saw so many films, I’m going to be splitting this up into three parts and like always, they’ll be ranked worst to best.
These are my five favorite films of 2023 (plus 67 honorable mentions). Check out Part I here.
46. Extraction 2
I’m really rooting for Kmart John Wick to succeed. This franchise has nothing but potential but can’t seem to push that rock up the hill. The action is great and well choreographed, Hemsworth is perfectly cast for this type of role and does his best despite having very little to work with and the premise lends itself to sequels. This could go on forever like Mission Impossible or have a clear end point like John Wick. It all depends on whether Hemsworth gets tired with them or not. Netflix desperately wants a franchise exclusive to their streamer and this is their best shot at one. But if the sequel is as poorly written as this one, I’m out. If it wasn’t for one character, this would probably be about fifteen slots higher on this list. I haven’t hated a character as much as the son in this in a very long time. I can’t remember the character’s name, but if you’ve seen the movie, you know which character I’m talking about. He’s not a character, he’s a MacGuffin. He’s the type of character that if he didn’t do the worst possible thing at every moment, the movie would be ten minutes long. The plot only happens because the kid is a fucking idiot and I loathe movies that are that lazy. It takes five minutes to write another reason for the main character to still be involved in the plot but the writers couldn’t be bothered. All that matters is the action and if that’s all you care about, it delivers. But I need a little more from my movies than simply having keys dangled in front of my face like I’m a baby.
45. Merry Little Batman
It’s impossible to talk about this film without comparing it to cotton candy. It’s cute, sweet and utterly disposable. Changing Damian Wayne from a badass uber assassin into a kid desperate to follow in his father’s footsteps, is a fun take on the character. I’m also a fan of the animation style. It looks like a children’s book come to life. The character designs are unique but it didn’t take long for me to accept them. What took longer to gel with were the voices. Most are great (James Cromwell stands out as Alfred and David Hornsby is an inspired choice for Joker) but some stick out like a sore thumb. Luke Wilson has a great voice for a warm, parental figure which is half of this character but he is not right at all for the other half which is Batman. His voice never drops down an octave to be intimidating when he’s facing off against his rogues gallery, so it just sounds like Luke Wilson. And Like Wilson is no one’s idea of Batman. He is the one negative in an otherwise solid little film.
44. The Killer
I read a review on Letterboxd that praised this film for feeling like a debut. “Fincher still has the energy of a brand new, much younger director”, it basically said and I agree. It does feel like a debut but I don’t see that as a positive. Fincher is one of those directors who’s name instantly makes whatever they’re working on and event. Because of the high bar he’s set for himself, I want to be blown away every time he decides to make a movie, not think about regressing. Debuts are rarely great. Once in a blue moon we’ll get a director who’s already fully formed. Fincher definitely wasn’t. He was shaggy and rough around the edges as a storyteller but he made up for that in style. Since he got his start in commercials and music videos, he knows how to make shit look slick. Once he had a couple of films under his belt, he was able to marry that style to substance and he’s been delivering bangers ever since. The Killer doesn’t feel like the next step in his evolution but a huge step backward. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a solid movie but at the end of the day, it’s a simple “hitman wants revenge” story and I’ve seen that a million times already. He doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with the premise and the cliche riddled dialogue doesn’t help. It’s fine but I don’t go to Fincher for fine.
43. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
The Mission Impossible franchise is in desperate need of some new blood in the director’s chair. Don’t get me wrong, I think Christopher McQuarrie is obviously talented and knows how to deliver the goods but outside of Cavill in Fallout, there’s not a single thing I remember about these last three movies. In five months, I’m not going to be able to recall the plot of this film on a bet. Each one of these feels the exact same. I feel like there’s a new head boss in all of them that doesn’t trust Ethan and labels him a traitor and then after the IMF saves the day, they realize they were wrong. I’m not saying that happens in this one but the fact that I can’t remember whether or not it does, speaks volumes of its forgettableness. I’m pretty sure there’s a MacGuffin they have to get and somehow a thief is involved. It’s already sliding off of my brain and I saw it two months ago. Thank God Pom Klementieff is in this to give my brain something to hold on to. Not even the major stunt in this is that impressive. This franchise is in desperate need of a great villain and a new director to shake things up and until they get both, they’re all going to feel like this.
42. Saw X
Saw X has the distinction of being the best sequel in the franchise and also one of the worst written. Everything involving John Kramer and his battle with cancer is top notch. For about 30 minutes or so, it actually feels like a movie. You’re rooting for him to find a cure even though you know he doesn’t. It’s weird being invested in the arc of a mass serial killer but the film does a great job of creating sympathy for a monster. It’s everything after the cancer business that the film falls flat on its face. If you’re into these films for their nonsensical soap opera level storytelling, this will be cat nip for you but for me, I was immediately taken out of the film every time a new game was played. The traps are so comically impossible to solve, it contradicts its own lore. In one of these films, Jigsaw punishes one of his apprentices because they made traps that were unwinnable. They probably got the idea from watching this unfold. Here are a couple of examples of how poorly thought out these traps are. In one, a character has 3 minutes to not only cut off their own leg but to shove a sharp needle like suction tube into her bone to extract a certain amount of bone tissue. Cary Elwes has a whole ass movie too cut off a foot and this chick has to do that and suck out bone marrow. In another one, a dude has to cut into his own head, remove a piece of skull cap and cut out some of his brain to dissolve in acid. The jar needs a bit of brain to work, so he has to immediately get to cutting. And predicably both he and the previous player don’t make it. But the thing is, they absolutely could’ve if they just had one more minute. If the difference between living and dying and learning a lesson and proving you want to live by doing impossible tasks is just 60 seconds, you don’t want to teach them anything and you certainly don’t want them to live. If that was the only thing wrong with it, that would be one thing but it also has a twist so fucking stupid, your brain will start to melt if you think about it for five seconds. It’s a movie with almost nothing but giant flaws but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a great time with it.
41. Moon Garden
Does a mood piece have to be original? If a film is explicitly aiming for style over substance or rather, prioritizing creating a vibe over focusing on a narrative, do its obvious influences matter? Remove Švankmajer, Gilliam, Gaiman, and Del Toro from this film’s DNA and all you’re left with is the credits. Moon Garden doesn’t have an original bone in its body but dismissing it for merely being derivative is missing the forest for the trees. The director knows you know the references they’re pulling from; pointing them out is about as pointless as trying to use Tarantino’s homages as ammo against him. Moon Garden *is* its references. The film is every fantasy you’ve ever seen smashed together. Even the plot is reminiscent of a million other plots: a comatose five-year-old girl (the director’s five-year-old daughter Haven Lee Harris) journeys through an industrial wonderland to find her way back to consciousness.
You’ve seen this movie before but the director knows this and uses that to his advantage. Because you’re already intimately familiar with the film’s Alice in Wonderland-esque structure and the obvious visual nods to other films, the director’s job is really just to ladle as much style onto every frame as possible and that’s exactly what he did. Moon Garden is a phantasmagoria of horror and fantasy filled with practical effects and miniatures and a Slenderman-looking monster (who’s got teeth!) and more aesthetically pleasing images than you can shake a stick at. It’s a love letter to the entire genre of grimdark fantasy that you won’t soon forget.
40. Dumb Money
The GameStop stock story from a couple of years ago was a fascinating example of the underdogs sticking it to the man. I just wish a better director was handed the material. Actually, that’s unfair. Craig Gillespie is a consistently solid director who rarely misses, so it’s not him. Nor is it the cast, who’s filled with great characters and scene stealing comedic heavy weights. It’s the script. It’s not engaging in anyway. I kept thinking while watching this “man, this would’ve made a helluva documentary”, which is usually the exact opposite thing I think when I watch similar documentaries. The hook is great and the bait is about as appealing as you could get, it just never manages to reel me in.
39. Theater Camp
I can see this being someone’s favorite movie of the year. If you have a theater background or just love that scene, this is probably the funniest version of that since Waiting For Guffman. If you don’t and have an aversion to children, especially theater kids, this will be an endurance test. I fell somewhere in the middle. I could care less about theater, so I felt like I was at arm’s length throughout the entire movie but the jokes that worked for me, really worked. Like all films about amateur theater, a group of campers must band together to save their camp/theater program. Except no one knows what they’re doing and almost everyone is awful at their jobs. The counselors have a vision but no funds, the one in charge is a drug addict who’s mainly doing this for social media clout and the child actors are all amateurs and are just going with the flow. It’s probably an accurate depiction of that community but I can’t speak to it’s authenticity. I can only speak to how funny it was and it made me chuckle a couple of times. That’s it.
38. Wonderful World of Henry Sugar (And Other Short Stories)
When Netflix spent almost a billion dollars acquiring the rights to the Roald Dahl Story Company, everyone assumed they just wanted to franchise out Wonka, Matilda or The BFG (which they might still do), so it was a pleasant surprise when the first projects they announced were four relatively obscure short stories. What was an even bigger surprise, was that Wes Anderson was going to direct them and that they were all going to drop within weeks of each other. The first one, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a compulsive gambler who, after reading a book about a man who could see without using his eyes, develops super human abilities. The short is structured not unlike The Grand Budapest Hotel where stories are built upon other stories like a series of Russian nesting dolls. It is by far the best of the four, with Cumberbatch and Kingsley giving great performances. The Swan is about a boy who’s tormented by bullies. They force him at gunpoint to lay on the path of an oncoming train and even force him to act as their retriever dog. After the bullies kill a swan, they rip off it’s wings, tie it to the young boys arms and make him “fly” off of a great tree. Its about as dark as any Dahl story gets. Since I’m more a fan of his fantasy work, this one didn’t quite click with me. The Rat Catcher is basically one long monologue delivered by Ralph Fiennes and its great and lastly, Poison is about a man in a hospital bed who believes an incredibly venomous snake is on his stomach. Individually, I don’t think any of them outside of Henry Sugar are particularly great, I mean they’re fine for what they are, but taken as a whole, I think it’s a great experience I’d love to see more directors tackle. Imagine Tarantino or any other high profile director releasing four shorts within a month of each other. That would be incredible.
37. Smoking Causes Coughing
Quentin Dupieux is a mad man. He makes WTF movies for an audience hungry for the bizarre. His most famous movie is Rubber, about a sentient killer tire that goes around blowing up people’s heads. And it’s not even the weirdest thing he’s done. Smoking Causes Coughing (I almost said his latest but apparently he’s released two movies since then and it came out last year) is about the oddest version of a superhero film you’ll ever see. It’s a Mighty Morphing Power Rangers type group called Tobacco Force that all represent a deadly chemical in cigarettes. They use their powers to fight alien lizards sent by Lézardin, Emperor of Evil on his quest to annihilate the planet. If that sounds like a wacky action movie to you, you’re about to be bitterly disappointed because they fight exactly *one* alien and spend the rest of their time at a company retreat to strengthen their decaying group cohesion. While there, they tell various stories and those stories make up the bulk of the film. These stories have nothing to do with them or crime fighting and have zero action in them. I bet you didn’t think this was an anthology film based on that plot synopsis, did you? But that’s Dupieux for you, always keeping you on your toes. I thought the segments were strong and the bits between them weird and engaging (a lot of inner conflict between the female team members and their boss, who’s a rat puppet), so I was engaged throughout. I love his brand of filmmaking and will watch whatever he puts out.
36. Suzume
If you told me in the beginning of 2023, that one of my favorite characters of the year would be a chair, I doubt I would’ve believed you but if you told me it would be in a film by Makoto Shinkai, I wouldn’t have questioned it at all. The man is a titan of animation, who’s works sit alongside other notable heavyweights such as Miyazaki, Kon and Hosoda. Before he released his masterpiece Your Name, he was already known for making the best looking animated movies on the planet, so it’s no surprise the next stage of his evolution as an artist would be focusing on plot over images. His last three films perfectly marry the photo realistic backgrounds he’s known for with his new brand of storytelling. Which is magical realism. Suzume is the most overtly fantasy of the three and arguably the most charming. It follows a 17 year old girl and her companion, a talking chair (a magical cat turned a young wizard into a chair. Don’t ask) on their quest to shut magical doors that when opened, create devastating earthquakes. It doesn’t have the emotional heft of Your Name and as far as I know, isn’t a political allegory like Weathering With You. It’s just a simple story told with tons of charm and heart.
35. Skinamarink
The most divisive movie of the year. Which essentially means its the biggest victim of hype. If just one well known critic says a horror movie is the scariest of [insert timeframe here], it’ll eventually find its way into the marketing, effectively killing that movie. The last time a pull quote actually helped a movie, was Stephen King and The Evil Dead. Not to say other movies haven’t deserved them or even lived up to them but in the day and age of the internet where everyone is a critic and everyone has access to everyone’s opinions on everything, they do more harm than good. Because it sets an expectation that no film can live up to. Skinamarink is not the scariest movie of the year or the decade or of all time. No film should be saddled with any of those titles. What it is, is one of the great cinematic nightmares. This perfectly captures what it feels like to be a kid staying up way too late in a pitch black house where every shadow is a monster and every noise you hear is insidious. It’s far too long (it would be amazing at 30 minutes) but the big scare moments kept me engaged for the most part. When the mom tells the kid to look under the bed, or when she tells him to stick the knife in his eye, I legitimately got the chills. And sometimes a couple of strong reactions and some ambition is all I need.
34. Project Wolf Hunting
It feels as if there’s a trend amongst some directors within the horror community as of late to make the ultimate splatter epic. While films like Terrifier 2 and The Sadness are desperately trying to one-up the video nasties they’re clearly inspired by, Project Wolf Hunting has its sights set on Riki-Oh. A mash-up of Con Air and Predator, the film is about a cargo ship filled with the worst, most violent South Korean criminals who are forced to team up with the cops tasked with transferring them against a much more dangerous threat. While it’s not the perfect action movie (the plot does start to get unnecessarily convoluted due to its franchise baiting and the runtime is a bit too long) nor is it really a horror film, it does excel at satiating the bloodlust of gore hounds looking for their next fix. It caters to a very specific demographic that can’t get enough of parades of violence and fountains of blood, and if you consider yourself a fan of either, Project Wolf Hunting delivers.
33. Oppenheimer
In 2022, I declared The Batman the best made average film of all time but I think I was a bit premature with that award. Oppenheimer might have it beat. Just like that movie, every single element of this works and yet, I could never find an entry point. The entire cast is on fire, with Murphy, Downey Jr., Blunt, Damon and Safdie giving stand out performances. It’s a visual feast of a film with some of the best cinematography of the year. The score is great and it was fun playing spot the actor (this might have the biggest cast of any film ever made) but I just wanted a couple of scenes of nerds just sitting in a room talking about the goddamn bomb. The movie is about a man that changed the course of human history by creating the most devastating weapon ever devised and I swear there’s more time dedicated to Pugh being naked than there is about the bomb. I understand and to some degree agree with the choice to not show the aftermath of the explosion but to not dedicate at least fifteen minutes of your 3 hour ass destroying epic to the nuts and bolts of the bomb’s creation is a huge miscalculation. There’s a scene towards the middle of the film where Edward Teller (Safdie) is mad at Oppenheimer because he’s too busy to talk to him about math and science and other such things, and they come to an agreement to make time every week just to chat and I was so disappointed it never happened. In a movie where everyone talks non stop, all I wanted was for them to talk about the bomb and it never happened. Now that I know what to expect from it, I need to give it a rewatch for it to maybe click for me but I’m in no rush to revisit it.
32. The Creator
This movie works a lot better if you pretend it’s a video game adaptation. Since video games aren’t known for their complex plots and usually prioritize action set pieces and world building over intricate stories and well written characters, you could excuse a movie based on a game to do the same. The Creator is filled with cliches, has stock characters you’ve seen in a million movies and the lead is bland and forgettable. But what I think it excels at are its visuals and the small details that help flesh out its world. I love the running robot bomb and the device that can bring you back from the dead for about 90 seconds. A couple of things may sound like the faintest of praises but those details and a handful of other things have stuck with me more than the entirety of at least 20 other movies I saw this year.
31. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
What a delightful surprise. I had zero faith in this movie. Illumination makes animated trash that kids love because they’re bright and colorful and noisy. The minions are about as grating as characters can get and the fact that there’s like six movies with those things is insane to me. Nintendo giving them the keys to their biggest property felt like a bigger mistake than picking the duo that made Max Headroom to direct the previous Mario film but somehow they actually delivered a solid little movie. Against all odds, they, of all studios, broke the video game movie curse. This isn’t the first good video game adaptation but it made so much money, it set a precedent. Hopefully Sony continues the trend with their Zelda adaptation. Honestly, the only negative that stood out to me was Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong. I fully expected to hate Pratt as Mario but he didn’t bother me. Nor did the story, which a lot of people had an issue with for some reason. Good job Illumination, you finally did it.
30. Evil Dead Rise
The Evil Dead might be the most consistent horror franchise of all time. The Ash trilogy was great, the reboot captured the spirit of the original while cranking up the violence and Rise does a great job of moving the series in a new direction. Focusing on a family trying to survive a deadite infested apartment complex is a much better approach to the material than bringing back Bruce Campbell for another Ash adventure. I liked the family unit in this. The sister was a fuck up but she was never annoying, the mom made a great villain and there’s a kid in this that’s not awful. Which might be the film’s greatest achievement. I hope the next one is sequel to this but with new characters. I want to see what happens when the deadites finally get out into the wild. A World War Z style epic with a mass herd of infected fucking shit up. I guess that’s The Sadness minus the fun now that I’m thinking about it.
29. Beau is Afraid
The brain of Ari Aster is a magnificent thing. I don’t know from what part of his cerebellum he pulled this thing from, whether its from his creative imagination or pieced together from actual memories and childhood trauma but it’s a wild ride that only he could come up with. Beau is Afraid is a 3 hour panic attack that’s equal parts funny, horrific and surreal. I don’t think it will works (the section in the forest grinds the film to a halt) but what does work, is about as good as cinema got this year. The no fucks given attitude towards his audience’s attention span, is truly awe inspiring. He wants you to tap out. Its an endurance test that weeds out the week from the strong. If you can’t handle Phoenix freaking out for 90 minutes, you don’t deserve to see what’s in the attic towards the end of the film or Nathan Lane stealing every scene he’s in or the paint guzzling scene or the funniest sex scene in ages or Patti LuPone shredding for ten minutes or the trail. There’s a ton of gold in them hills. You just have to be willing to mine for it and not everyone has the proper pickaxe.
28. Bottoms
This is not at all what I thought the follow up to Shiva Baby would be but I’m delighted it is. Bottoms is what Fight Club would be if everyone in it were teenage girls and the tone was like Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. This movie does not take place in our universe. The rules of our reality do not apply to the characters of Bottoms. I love a cartoon reality where almost anything is possible and reality can bend to whatever the joke needs to be. Not to an absurdist or surreal way but certainly heightened. One of my issues with the film is that it takes a long time to introduce this heightened reality and it also scarcely utilizes it, so it takes a minute to figure out the rules and the tone. And by the time it settles in, the film is almost over. I wish it would’ve pushed its comedy a bit further but the more “grounded” aspects of its jokes work wonders. Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri continue to slay as the new queens of indie cinema and Marshawn Lynch is a comedic revelation as the coach. It’s not perfect but in a land of zero comedies, I’ll happily take an interesting misfire over nothing at all.
27. Asteroid City
I think one throwaway line uttered by Matt Dillion right before the Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven) song really encapsulates the entire movie. “Everything is connected but nothing is working.” I’m positive Anderson meant for that to be a reference to the themes of the movie but for me, it perfectly sums up my experience with this film. It’s a beautifully constructed diorama with a great cast that are all bringing their A game but it suffers from the same problems I think his last film The French Dispatch suffers from, which is that it’s suffocatingly Wes Anderson. This is the kind of experience people who hate his style think all of his films are. A film drunk in love with its own construction and confection and color grading and script construction. It’s the kind of film Peter Griffin would say “insists upon itself.” Having said that, I still enjoyed the experience. I love his style, so I’m fine being suffocated by it but that’s how I have to look at this film, as an experience. Not as a film. Because as a film, it just doesn’t work. Since the film is technically a televised documentary about the creation and production of a play called Asteroid City that then breaks from that structure to go backwards through time to the creation of the play itself, it’s nearly impossible to have anything to latch onto. Since nothing I’m watching is technically “real”, with every character being a character in a play, the film has no center. No heart. No real meaning to me. There’s definitely a meaning to it but I think it would’ve worked better for me stripped of its artifice and was just about the junior astronomy convention.
26. Nimona
When Disney acquired 21st Century Fox, they absorbed all the studios Fox owned and killed them. One of them being their animation studio Blue Sky Studios. Which effectively killed this movie. Annapurna Pictures and Netflix swooped in and saved it and thank God it did because it’s the kind of movie Disney could never make. Progress and inclusion to them means subtly including hints of gay or having so little amount of gay, that they can easily trim it for Chinese censors. There will never be a gay Disney princess. They’re far too afraid of losing a couple of dollars and getting conservative parents upset than inspiring actual change. Nimona is the closest we’ll ever see to a gay Disney princess and Disney doesn’t fucking deserve her. They’re shitting out garbage like Elemental and Pixar sequels literally no one is asking for, and here’s this thing that’s so fresh and unique, it’s almost punk rock in its attitude towards the mainstream. It truly doesn’t care what your opinions of its themes are. If you’re not down with its message (which honestly, why in the fuck wouldn’t you be), go watch Disney trash.
25. Talk To Me
Ghosts as a metaphor for drug use and peer pressure is a novel one and while I do wish the filmmakers did a bit more with it, they still delivered a haunting, dread-inducing future classic. A group of friends discover how to conjure spirits with an embalmed hand and then become hooked on the new thrill and high-stakes party game — until one of them goes too far and unleashes terrifying supernatural forces. Like most A24 horror films, Talk To Me is a slow-burn character study that periodically sprinkles in the spooks and is more concerned with a couple of showstopping set pieces than being a jump scare machine. Like most A24 horror films, it pulls off this structure flawlessly. Even if I walked away wishing it was scarier, the big moments will stick with me for years to come.
24. The Boy and the Heron
The second this was announced, it became, for some, their most anticipated upcoming movie. Because for cinephiles (or animation nuts), this was an event. The last film from acclaimed auteur Miyazaki was reason enough to get excited and the end result didn’t disappoint. It doesn’t have the same magic of his earlier films and it suffers from an overstuffed plot like Howl’s Moving Castle, but scene to scene/moment to moment, there’s so much here to recommend. The film is, in many ways, a retelling of Alice in Wonderland. A curious child follows a talking animal down a hole into a fantastical world filled with magic and danger and all sorts of weird things. When the film hooked me, was when I realized it was going to subvert the Caroll story. The first hint of this is the introduction of the Heron. He’s the White Rabbit analogue in the story but instead of instantly following him to the hole, the titular boy immediately makes a bow to kill it. He isn’t bewildered or bewitched by the talking creature. He sees it as a trickster demon and he ain’t having any of his silver tongue. It’s a far cry from Alice and even the protagonist of Spirited Away. He’s intelligent, resourceful and proactive. He’s a strong character, which is rare in a children’s fantasy. His chemistry and dynamic with the Heron is great and I wish the film had more of it but the rest of the world makes up for it. You never know where he’s going to end up next and what new things you’re going to see. Miyazaki is the king at creating unique looking creatures and beautiful landscapes and this film is filled to the gills with both. I saw the subtitled version and I can’t wait to hear the dubbed because from what I’ve heard, the English cast is excellent.
23. The Artifice Girl
This film flew under far too many people’s radar and that’s a shame because it’s one of the best-written sci-fi films in decades. It’s a two-location, three-act play that only has five or so actors in it and it’s more engaging than the vast majority of films I saw this year. The first act involves an organization (I believe it’s the FBI) interrogating a man over his use of a child as bait in his successful project to catch child molesters in an online video chat sting operation. They want to know who the child is and for him to shut it down. It is revealed that the child isn’t actually real and is an artificial construct created by the man who is now gaining sentience. To reveal what the second two acts are would be revealing too much of the story, but they deal with autonomy, the rights of artificial people and the moral and ethical dilemmas that would arise from such a creation. Just because I’m avoiding spoilers, don’t go in expecting huge mind blowing twists. It’s not that kind of movie. It’s an engrossing little character drama with rich dialogue and hard questions that aren’t easily answered.
22. Dream Scenario
Nic Cage says he only has a handful of movies left in him before he retires and while I find that hard to believe, I do understand why he’d want to retire. I honestly think he’s tired of being overlooked for his great performances with his Oscar snub for Pig really hurting him. He’s been a joke in the business for so long, the joke has turned into a meme and that’s all he is now to people. The truth of the matter is, he’s the most interesting actor living today. The man always (well not always but the films in which he phones in a performance are few and far between) commits 100% to every role, whether the film deserves that commitment or not. He’s at his best when the material matches his energy like Dream Scenario. He gives a performance as dialed in and nuanced as any of the best actor nominees this year. At his core, he’s a loser. His family tolerates him, his friends ignore him and his students couldn’t care less about his existence. Watching his evolution throughout the film is the true highlight. He makes all the wrong decisions and yet, at the end, I was still heartbroken for him. It’s a performance only Cage could deliver in a movie that couldn’t be more A24 if it tried. Their films tend to have a look or a smell about them, you can always tell just from the trailer its by them. Which isn’t a bad thing but if you’re over their brand of filmmaking, this movie definitely won’t win you over. It’s a high concept premise filled with weird acting characters played by fearless actors that moves at a deliberate pace. It’s a movie you’ll swear they already made like five years ago but they didn’t. It just has that feeling. Which is the best compliment I can give this movie. It feels like the dream you’d have after an all night A24 marathon.
21. Maestro
I know I claimed Oppenheimer was the best-made average film of the year but I only made that claim because I honestly forgot this existed. I really feel bad for Cooper. If he would’ve put as much work into the screenplay as he did with every other aspect of this film, it would be an undeniable home run but alas, it’s that one flaw that undoes the rest of the film. Much like Oppenheimer, I adore everything around the story it’s telling. I could honestly watch five more hours of Cooper and Mulligan acting. They’re giving this movie everything. They’re the reason this movie is as high as it is for me. I love watching actors tear it up and they’re a couple of pitbulls attacking this material. If you don’t walk away impressed by their performances, we want different things from cinema. I also think its a huge step forward for Cooper as a director. The damn thing looks fucking incredible. It easily has some of the best cinematography in ages. It looks like a book of the best photographs come to life. But ultimately, all of its strengths feel like they’re in service to nothing. I don’t know anything about Leonard Bernstein before I started watching this and I don’t know anything about him after I finished it. This film hardly makes the case for him being one of our great composers. It sure says it a lot but there’s no evidence to support this. Nor does it give me a reason to be invested in his story. It just kind of meanders from scene to scene until it decides to end. It’s a shame how close he got to making a masterpiece. Next time he really needs to hire a talented writer because he’s clearly talented in every other department, just not that.
Part I | Part III
What do you think of my ranking so far? Are you surprised some of these didn’t make my Top 20?
