Let's Talk About The Year in Movies: 2023

As the year draws to a close, it's time to have a loose conversation about what it all meant.

Next week, we will publish our individual Best of the Year ballots on the newsletter, but unlike typical outlets, which push writers to post their lists in early-to-mid December, we’re giving ourselves a little more time over Christmas to get caught up on screeners and make sure we give 2023 the fairest shot possible. In the meantime, we wanted to take a step back and look at another fascinating year for movies. 

Scott: It seems like every year, I worry that we’re reaching some sort of tipping point where Hollywood’s obsession with recycling I.P. and investing heavily in franchise behemoths will send cinema into a dark place. And those fears have not been allayed completely in 2023: I often worry that Hollywood is teaching a generation to expect a narrow type of experience with a movie, and kids might grow up without an appetite for stories that aren’t geared toward mashing their pleasure receptors so predictably. (This is a long-winded way of saying that I’m having a hard time getting my 15-year-old to watch dramas with me.) And yet, I always go back to this quote from our friend (and Revealer founding member), the Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri: “Every year is a good year for movies.” 

And so it was. We can argue over standout years for movies—1999, my first year as a full-time critic, seems to be a popular touchstone, along with 1939, though I’m on the record as a 1955 guy myself—and I’m not convinced 2023 qualifies as a watershed moment, but when you look back over 12 months of films from all over the world, you realize that it only seems like Hollywood is the engine propelling the medium forward. Looking at the influx of favorites from big-time festivals like Berlin, Cannes, Venice, New York and TIFF or the gems that pop up on the American independent circuit (some from Sundance, some not), that’s still a reliable accumulation of fine work. This year alone, Cannes brought us Asteroid City, Anatomy of a Fall, Fallen Leaves, May December and The Zone of Interest, just to name a few competition titles. That’s definitely a muscular year by Cannes’s high standards, and we haven’t even seen a few others, like Tran Ahn Hung’s The Taste of Things and Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, that are going to trickle out in early 2024. 

But I think we should start by giving Hollywood its due. I’m not sure how you felt about the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon going into it. I appreciated the memes, of course, but worried about Barbie and Oppenheimer, my two most anticipated blockbusters of the summer by a long shot potentially canceling each other out. There wasn’t much of a question about Barbie’s high box-office ceiling, but if it didn’t work as miraculously as it does—if it even fell short in a way that America Ferrara’s big monologue warned—then we might have had another Ghostbusters situation, where an army of Ben Shapiro types flooded the zone with one-star reviews and sexist snipes. On the other end, a difficult three-hour epic like Oppenheimer could have been dwarfed by Barbie and other, more reliably commercial summer fare. I just shared my fret in the opening paragraph about young people perhaps having a narrow idea of what movies should be. You’d hate to see Oppenheimer die on that hill. 

And yet neither of them died. They both thrived, together. The single most successful box office weekend in America this year was the weekend that Hollywood released its two best films. How could you not feel anything but delighted over that? To me, moviegoers were sending two encouraging messages to studio honchos at once: We want to see thoughtful, sensibility-driven, original (in their way) entertainment from talented directors, and we are willing to spend money to see them at movie theaters. A cynic might say that the Barbenheimer phenomenon is an anomaly, never to be repeated. A cynic might also say that the studio heads of today lack the imagination and will to change course, even as certain surefire models, like Marvel and Disney animation, are showing signs of erosion. But it cannot be denied that two genuine artists, Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, were entrusted with a lot of money to make ambitious films as they saw fit and the public responded. 

I can’t think of anything better that happened to movies in 2023, at least on the studio end. What about you, Keith? Where does Hollywood go from here? Recent news about a possible merger between Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount seems terribly grim to me—behold two legacy studios joining forces to still be smaller than Netflix in the streaming wars!—and I’m not convinced that major studios can so easily lose their addiction to once-certain cash cows. But if we’re talking about greatness in movies overall, perhaps we don’t need them. What do you think? 

Keith: But Scott, think of the crossover possibilities presented by a Warner Paramount Discovery Bros.: We can finally see Captain Kirk meet Green Lantern! What if the Yellowstone ranch had to deal with a varmint named Bugs Bunny? And who’s guesting on South Park this week? Why it’s none other than Alex from A Clockwork Orange!

I think, like you, I’m leaving 2023 with a mix of hope and the cautiousness of someone who’s spent years watching movie trends. The takeaway from Barbenheimer should be, as you suggest, “Let talented filmmakers make the distinctive films they want to make.” But I’m afraid the real takeaway will be “What other old toys can we turn into movies?” and the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy’s suggest video games will also very much be back on the adaptation menu. (That Lena Dunham is working on a Polly Pocket movie at least suggests some intent to keep putting interesting creators on some of these projects.)

That said, 2023 also seems to be a year in which the franchises-above-all mentality has undergone a series of stress tests. Marvel has sputtered. DC’s filmmaking ventures have essentially shut down and put out an “Opening Soon Under New Management” sign. Star Wars remains MIA on the big screen and less of an event on the small screen. A not-bad Indiana Jones movie flamed out spectacularly. Even a new Disney animated feature can’t seem to move the needle anymore. (That Wish looked unappealing probably didn’t help.)

On the other hand, it was a pretty great year for movies! We can get into specifics about what movies made it great next week, possibly in list form, but my theatrical moviegoing year began with M3GAN and is currently bookended by Godzilla Minus One. Sandwiched between the bread of two good-to-spectacular genre films is a sandwich voluminous and varied enough to put a smile on Dagwood Bumstead’s face. (I could take this strained and dated metaphor even further by talking about the aged roast beef of The Holdovers and the crisp greens of Showing Up, etc., but I’ll stop.)

To get back to your original question, it’s heartening that summer releases from big studios are very much part of the best-of-the-year discussion months later but worth noting how few contenders have come from such a source in this or any recent year. Do you sense that might change as current trends start to run their course? I was struck by some of your previous comments about The Holdovers, which you rightly likened to an early 1970s movie and noted that such a film would have played more widely then. I think it would have seen a more muscular release earlier in Payne’s career. If we can’t roll the clock back to the early ’70s (an era, it’s worth remembering, dominated by nonsense disaster films at the box office) maybe we can revisit the early ’00s, when studios’ “independent” arms tried to find a wider audience for non-franchise movies. 

Whatever mixed feelings you have about streaming services, they at least back a few great movies that wouldn’t otherwise get made each year. That they largely get lost in the mix alongside Heart of Stone doesn’t seem right. It feels like Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio barely got noticed last year, for instance, and that’s a movie that should have stirred strong feelings and conversation. I loved it, but can see why others might not. But instead of becoming a big deal, it just sort of appeared and disappeared.

I may have wandered off the trail a bit. Scott, do you see any signs of hope that a great movie year like 2023 can feel like it has a wider relevance? That films of substance beyond Barbenheimer can start to feel like the films that define a year rather than just appear within it?

Scott: Well now you’ve got me feeling pessimistic again. I’m honestly thrilled to see the Marvel/DC/Star Wars brands flounder, because as physicists and Blood, Sweat & Tears will remind us, what goes up must come down. I can remember a time—the Bush era, basically—where it felt like American Idol was going to be the driving force in American television and pop music forever until it finally wasn’t. Audiences will eventually lose interest, enervated by the formulas that once were energizing, and there’s little that can be done about it. (Witness Andor, the best of the Disney+ Star Wars TV series, winning critical acclaim without capturing the zeitgeist.) I have to confess here that I skipped Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in theaters, despite a certain degree of trust in James Mangold as a craftsman, and then couldn’t bring myself to finish it when I watched it on video. It’s not like anything was particularly out of place about it—Mangold does his job, and certainly has the contours of an Indy film—but there wasn’t even the faintest spark of inspiration. It was just going through the motions. 

I’m not confident that Hollywood’s answer to this creative malaise will be to pivot into the early ‘70s and hand the reins over to a new generation of film-brat auteurs. But if I’m being optimistic, I think there are signs that audiences are craving something different. I was cheered, for example, to see a sleepy December weekend in which two Japanese films, The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One, topped the box office. What an interesting world we could live in if imported films could colonize American multiplexes as blockbusters have done for years overseas. I have mixed feelings about the ubiquity of people watching TV of any kind with subtitles, but the positive side effect is that you never encounter a young person saying, “I don’t go to the movies to read.” 

The streaming landscape is always funny to me, because a company like Netflix offers such weird variance between the algorithm-driven product and its yearly bankrolling of prestige pictures from known auteurs. A film like Heart of Stone—which, I must emphasize again, stars Gal Gadot as Rachel Stone and is about the battle over a quantum computer called The Heart—is the idea of a blockbuster, a weird facsimile of a studio tentpole that people would not pay to see in a theater, but seems like a great value as a subscriber. Then, on the other end, money gets poured into a film like Pablo Larrain’s El Conde, a black-and-white allegorical oddity about Pinochet as a vampire. You get the sense that Netflix wants desperately to court major directors and those directors are using the opportunity to fund projects no established studio would ever touch. Kind of a win-win.

To shift gears a bit, Keith, I wanted to ask you about some of your favorite performances of the year, because that’s something we only touch on lightly in our Year In Film pieces. For me, I have to start with Sandra Hüller and Milo Machado Graner in Anatomy of a Fall. At bottom, Justine Triet had made a did-she-or-didn’t-she courtroom drama about a woman accused of striking her husband with a blunt object and making it appear as if he fell from the balcony of their chalet. All the ambiguity has to come from the characters, chiefly Hüller’s Sandra, who was indeed in the middle of a fraught marriage, even if the death was accidental. Graner’s work as her son, the legally blind “witness” who discovers his dad’s body, is as good a performance as I’ve ever seen from a young actor. His character has to process so many emotions at once—grief for his father, followed by revelations in court that shake his understanding of his parents’ marriage—and Graner is just devastatingly vulnerable, especially on the day he’s asked to appear in court. (Between this and Saint Omer, I’m blown away by French criminal court proceedings. A dramatic powder keg!)

Other standouts: The trio of May December performances is outstanding, but it’s Natalie Portman who impressed me most as an actress who inserts herself into this marriage and wildly alters its dynamic. I was hot-and-cold on the summer comedy No Hard Feelings, but realized how much I missed Jennifer Lawrence as a blunt, sexy, out-of-control comic heroine. She’s willing to do anything for a laugh, and that absence of A-list vanity is winning. On a more obscure front, I’d like to shout out John Magaro as the third wheel of sorts in Past Lives, a happily married man who has to wait out his wife’s reconnection with a man from her past. Magaro never goes big, despite the feelings of hurt and concern that must be going through his character’s head, and his quiet, steadfast presence is one of the most touching aspects of that movie for me.

I’d love to hear from you on other outstanding artisans this year, too, Keith? Who dazzled you? Off the top of my head, I can’t get over Ed Lachman’s work on El Conde, a film I didn’t love, but one filled with haunting landscapes and lighting effects. And the sound design on The Zone of Interest is next-level, creating an ambience of off-screen horror outside Auschwitz  as unsettling as what we might have seen inside. What have you got?

Keith: Performance-wise, I’m glad you mentioned Magaro. I think he and Teo Yoo are fantastic. But when I rewatched the film the other night, I was astounded all over again at Greta Lee’s performance. She oscillates between expressiveness and opaqueness beautifully, sometimes moment to moment. Take, for instance, the scene where she describes the concept of in-yun to Magaro’s character, then suggests it’s just something Koreans talk about when they’re trying to be seductive. What does she truly believe? And is it the same as what she believes at the end of the film a few years down the line, when her experiences might have made in-yun feel more real than in her youth? Lee has a long filmography, but this was a breakthrough in every way. I look forward to seeing her in her next movie, let me check… Tron: Ares. Sigh. OK. 

Cillian Murphy’s work in Oppenheimer shares some of the same qualities. We’re deep in Oppenheimer’s head through most of the movie, and that includes learning to read the gaps between what he says and what he feels and between the emotions his face can’t hide and those we know he’s keeping to himself. The same could be said for Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, which asks her to play a lot of conflicting emotions but convey them subtly, sometimes suggesting the sense that she knows her husband is no good but feels bound by love for him anyway. (That tension’s there, in various forms, from the beginning of the film to the end.)

I also loved a bunch of far less opaque performances this year, too. The trio of Abby Ryder Fortson, Kathy Bates, and (especially) Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret comes immediately to mind. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in Barbie, too. But I’m not sure anyone was operating at a level of difficulty — and succeeding as brilliantly — as Emma Stone in Poor Things. Stone takes her character from infancy to sage adulthood, evolving how she expresses herself and carries herself physically. And she’s hilarious, too. I’m a huge fan of Emma Stone’s let’s-just-go-for-it phase. I could keep going: Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen’s deadpan perfection in Fallen Leaves; Hong Chau and Michelle Williams in Showing Up; Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction (not sure the film’s entirely successful but he’s amazing); and everyone you mention above and more.

Technically, though I have to admit being puzzled by the infrared segments of The Zone of Interest, the sickly pall Łukasz Żal casts over the rest of the film is incredible. From the opening scene of an Aryan family straight off a propaganda poster enjoying a day in nature, there’s an almost palpable sense of rot to the images. Almost all the way over on the opposite end of the visual spectrum, you’ll find Philippe Le Sourd’s hazy, dream-like Priscilla cinematography. On the score front, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross killed it again, if you’ll pardon the phrase, in The Killer. I’ll also never forget the film’s perverse use of the music of The Smiths, cutting from non-diegetic to diegetic at the least opportune moments, muffling the pleasures of each song’s hook just as they kick into gear. Like much of the film, it’s deliberately frustrating but creatively satisfying.

Remember The Killer? I feel like it’s already been subsumed into the streaming ecosystem. So maybe we should take a moment to single out a few films that might have been forgotten at year’s end. I’ll start off with A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, starring Teyana Taylor as a woman who grows to great lengths to hold on to custody of her child over the course of several decades in New York. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It zigs when you might expect it to zag and features a bunch of remarkable performances. Also, I’m no anime expert, but I’ve learned to keep an eye out for the emotional, visually stunning films of Makoto Shinkai. This year’s Suzume is no exception and features the single best performance from a sentient three-legged chair you’ll ever see (most likely). Scott, what about you? 

Scott: Every year, there are some films that nag at me. Remember Edward G. Robinson talking about “the little man” inside him that introduces doubt in cases that seem cut-and-dried on the surface? It’s that feeling. The Killer is one of those films I feel reasonably certain I underrated, even though I did give it a strong review overall. When I was asked to update my David Fincher ranking for Vulture, I placed it at #8, one above Mank and one below Panic Room, and it does seem rather basic on the surface and even a little exhausting in its detailing of an assassin’s habits and hollow inner life. Yet it seems, in retrospect, like a distillation of Fincher’s sensibility, a personal film that works through themes from past work like Zodiac and Fight Club with cut-to-the-bone refinement. Other “little man” movies: I’m pretty certain I underrated Christian Petzold’s Afire, due mostly to my resistance to its drip of a main character, and my appreciation for Poor Things was enhanced by our conversation about it on The Next Picture Show, which is one of the great benefits of doing a podcast with smart people. 

To stay on Poor Things, I second your appreciation for Emma Stone’s work in that one. It’s a bit of a joke in the critic world that actresses are referred to as “brave” for having a lot of nude scenes in a movie, and that’s certainly the case here, but Stone goes so far out on a limb in every other way, too. Starting with an infant brain in an adult body, her character undergoes a physical, verbal and emotional progression that evolves slowly throughout the movie, as she learns more about herself and the world around her. She has a hilariously Frankenstein-ian gait in the early-going, along with a child’s mimicry of daddy’s language and behavior, which is also funny when dad (or “God”) is Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist. She proves herself to be an expert comedienne—here and in The Curse, too—but her character’s growth in response to the inputs of the wider world is touching in its way. She has a fresh awareness of age-old injustices. 

As for films I hope are not forgotten, I really admired Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, which feels like an extension of the women-in-the-workplace tension of her previous film, The Assistant, and a clever evocation of the Australian cult classic Wake in Fright. She is once again collaborating with Julia Garner, here playing an American vacationer who takes a temp job with a friend at a roughneck bar in the Outback when they run out of money. The threat of sexual violence is more overt in The Royal Hotel than it was in The Assistant, but Green allows the tension to linger without breaking, which counters our expectations without limiting the film’s power. I also want to plant the flag for a complementary duo of medical documentaries: Our Body, a three-hour French doc by Claire Simon that explores the gynecological wing of a Paris hospital, and Di Humani Corporis Fabrica, which also embeds itself in a Paris hospital, but covers surgeries in much more graphic detail. (The latter is from the directors of the experiential/experimental doc Leviathan, which will give you an idea of what it’s like.) 

I’m still scrambling to catch up on everything for our big lists next week—I’m an hour into Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros and feeling confident of a Top 10 placement—but, as ever, I leave optimistic that the “every year is a great year for movies” maxim will hold up in 2024 once the patchwork of Hollywood and global cinema trickles all the way in. What about you, Keith? Final thoughts?

Keith: My final thoughts might be that there are no final thoughts on this or any other movie year. I look back at Best Of lists I’ve done for previous years and I’m baffled by some of the rankings I assign to movies. Did I really name Peter Jackson’s King Kong the third best film of 2003? Apparently! I still like it. But I look at that year’s honorable mentions—Broken Flowers, Munich, Nobody Knows, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit—and wonder what I was thinking. I’m not sure whether I’d put all of these films on a revised top 10 in 2023 but I suspect most would land above King Kong. And just as I tend to forget which films won the Oscars approximately five minutes after the show ends, this year will start to lose its shape as a discrete moment in film history almost at the moment the clock strikes midnight on January 1st. (If I were being egotistical I’d say “...the moment we publish our own top ten lists,” but I won’t.)

That said, I think these exercises are good and necessary if only to ask “Where are we?” movie-wise. And where do we go from here? I don’t have an answer and though I’m not naturally inclined to optimism, looking at this past year, I don’t think it will be dull. And I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about this time next year.