Worst to Best: Neon's 2023 Slate

Every year, members of film critic guilds are sent "the Neon box," the jewel of awards-season sets. Let's dig in.

Over the last few years, the Neon box has become the most anticipated awards-season shipment for critics, not only because of the company’s eclecticism and unusually high hit-to-miss ratio, but also because it cuts against the trend of awards screeners in general. You’re not getting a slow drip-drip-drip of DVDs sent piecemeal through the mail or triple-authenticated digital links that require their own apps, along with limited views and an expiration date. You get one distributor’s complete vision for a single year and admire the effort that went into curating it. (Which, honestly, may be why bigger distributors would never do anything like it.) 

Last year, I wrote about the 2022 slate, which included All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Triangle of Sadness, Moonage Daydream, and Crimes of the Future. And now here’s my ranking of the 2023 set, which may be even stronger, with new films by Michael Mann, Wim Wenders, and Kitty Green, as well as the Palme D’Or winner (and multi-Oscar nominee) Anatomy of a Fall. One small note here: The box came with Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, which Neon re-released for its 20th anniversary and which would have been #1 had I included it.

IFFY

13. It Lives Inside (dir. Bishal Dutta) 

An anomaly in this year’s slate, It Lives Inside took a swing for the box-office fences, hoping to become the type of niche-y indie horror that catches fire on a weekend where nothing much else is happening. (Expend4bles was the only other wide release that week.) And the premise does have some potential, drawing on a culturally specific malevolent Hindu spirit called a Pishash while aligning itself with a second-generation Indian teenager (Megan Suri) who would rather assimilate to American culture than cart her mother’s homemade lunches to school. (The insolence of this child to turn down freshly baked naan!) But It Lives Inside is a shoddy piece of work, a typical PG-13 mishmash of tacky effects, bloodless violence and jump scares. 

Where to watch: Streaming on Hulu. Rentable elsewhere. 

12. Origin (dir. Ava DuVernay) 

One of the year’s most polarizing experiences, with several prominent critics on board, like Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri and The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, and others, like yours truly, who were left cold by Ava DuVernay’s approach to adapting Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a book about the common hierarchies of global oppression. Without material to dramatize, DuVernay instead follows Wilkerson herself, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she researches her thesis during a difficult period in her personal life and in a country roiling with white supremacy and racially motivated violence. There are moments when Wilkerson’s research into topics as varied as Nazi Germany and the Indian caste system lead to montage sequences that unify her thesis in persuasive cinematic form. Yet those are show-don’t-tell pebbles in a stilted pond of tell-don’t-show messaging. 

Where to watch: Theaters. 

NOT TOO SHABBY

11. Sanctuary (dir. Zachary Wigon) 

Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley are two of my favorite young actors, so a film that sticks them in a hotel suite for 90 minutes of mind games and sexual intrigue has my full attention. And the actors completely deliver in Wigon’s two-hander, which casts Qualley as a dominatrix who follows through on scripted encounters with Abbott’s wound-up young corporate executive, who stands to inherit the hotel chain that includes the one they occupy. But the dominatrix has a better idea than anyone of her client’s vulnerabilities and she attempts to manipulate him for a stake in the business, with the not-unreasonable rationale that she owes whatever confidence he has to her. There’s never a point when Sanctuary feels like much more than a tantalizing bit of gamesmanship itself, but the chemistry between Abbott and Qualley is enough to make it a fun little diversion. 

Where to watch: Streaming on Hulu. Rentable elsewhere. 

SOLID 

10. Robot Dreams (dir. Pablo Berger) 

Adorbs. In an ‘80s New York City populated entirely by animals, a lonely dog named Dog sends away for a robot companion advertised on a late-night infomercial and assembles himself a best friend. The early scenes of Robot Dreams are perhaps the most charming, as Dog and Robot happily wander around a city that’s been beautifully evoked through detailed images of storefronts, gadgets and fashions, mostly set to Earth, Wind & Fire on the soundtrack. Then they have a day at the beach at Coney Island, which is a great time until Dog realizes that robots are not waterproof. Their subsequent separation leads to a melancholy animated film that might have functioned better as a short, but remains blissfully watchable throughout. 

Where to watch: Release date TBD. “Early 2024.” 

9. La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher) 

There’s an abundance of stuff in Rohrwacher’s comedy/fantasy/nostalgia piece, which looks back fondly on a boisterous Tuscan village in the 1980s. It’s there that an Englishman with a knack for illegally digging up Etruscan antiquities returns after a prison stint to spend time with the family of his girlfriend, who’s thought to be dead. La Chimera has moments of raucous comedy around this motley band of thieves and Fellini-esque eccentrics, but it also reaches for melancholy and longing around this young woman (the “chimera” of the title) that’s only accessible in memory. There are so many worthy elements to the film—the vivid sense of place, the spirit of an older school of Italian filmmaking, a terrific supporting turn by Isabella Rossellini—that I feel guilty for not jibing with it more. Perhaps some of the blame falls on Josh O’Connor, who’s something of a blank in the lead. 

Where to watch: In theaters March 29, 2024. 

8. Eileen (dir. William Oldroyd) 

Casting Thomasin McKenzie as a lonely young woman who daydreams her way into a dangerous misadventure makes Eileen seem like a drabbed-down companion to Last Night in Soho, with Anne Hathaway completing the fantasy as a glamorous new counselor at the ’60s juvenile detention facility in Boston where she works. McKenzie and Hathaway’s New England accents sound a little tacked-on at first, too, but the film picks up dramatically as they get closer together and Hathaway uses the younger woman’s attraction to lure her into a shockingly compromised situation. That doesn’t end the surprising revelations that spring from their twisted relationship, and Eileen gains more momentum as a nasty little neo-noir as it goes along. Make it a double feature with Carol. 

Where to watch: Rentable. (Though still at “premium” rates.) 

7. Infinity Pool (dir. Brandon Cronenberg) 

This is my first Brandon Cronenberg film, and so I can’t comment, as Keith did in his review, on the connections between Infinity Pool and his previous feature, Possessor. But I can be the umpteenth person to note that the young Cronenberg apple did not fall far from the old Cronenberg tree while also being impressed by how effectively this film exploits the icky nature of beach resorts where tourists are walled off from whatever ugly realities exist for the locals outside. Here, the fictional country of Li Tolqa gives Cronenberg enough distance from a real place to indulge in a ghoulish fantasy in which a writer (Alexander Skarsgård) can escape the death penalty for vehicular homicide by allowing the authorities to execute his duplicate instead. The fallout from this situation is every bit as gross as the Cronenberg brand might lead you to imagine, but the satire is well-served by the horror, which makes literal the disconnect the privileged class can feel from moral responsibility. 

Where to watch: Streaming on Hulu. Rentable elsewhere. 

6. Ferrari (dir. Michael Mann) 

Above, I suggested pairing Eileen with Carol, two period pieces about lesbian romances gone astray. Now I’m suggesting Ferrari as the darker underbelly of Tucker: The Man and His Dream, two films about obsessive craftsmen whose artistic integrity defies the cold economic demands of the market—and, in so doing, become motorized allegories for their iconoclastic directors. Adam Driver’s Enzo Ferrari is difficult to access by design, leaving Penélope Cruz to do much of the dramatic heavy-lifting as his wife and business partner, whose frustrations rev up their relationship like nitro. Like Ali, Ferrari does well to examine its famous hero in a limited time frame, in this case the lead-up to the catastrophic 1957 running of the Mille Miglia. When it comes time to deliver on the tragic climax, Mann stages one of the greatest and most disturbing sequences of the year. 

Where to watch: Rentable. (Though still at “premium” rates.)

5. How to Blow Up a Pipeline (dir. Daniel Goldhaber) 

I’m going to give out my own Independent Spirit Award to this scrappy political thriller, which has a DIY quality to the filmmaking that perfectly mirrors the urgent, ragged, desperate efforts of eight young adults to blow up an oil pipeline in West Texas. However you feel about such a radical act of sabotage, How to Blow Up a Pipeline channels the frustration of a generation that inherited an environmental crisis and doesn’t have the luxury to wait around for change to happen. Goldhaber crafts the film like a pauper’s Ocean’s Eleven, and while the how-they-got-there flashbacks are a little clunky, the planning, execution and fallout from the plan is genuinely thrilling without losing sight of the huge moral stakes. It’s a conversation starter. Or maybe a lit match. 

Where to watch: Streaming on Hulu. Rentable elsewhere.

NOW WE’RE COOKING WITH GAS

4. Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders) 

Nearly 40 years after Tokyo-Ga, his documentary about Yasujiro Ozu that doubled as a slice-of-life about contemporary Tokyo, Wenders returns to the city for his own version of a late-period Ozu film, serene and beautifully proportioned. The great Koji Yakusho gets a lot of a little as an elderly bachelor who cleans public toilets for a living and has Wim Wenders’ taste in music, plugging the cassette deck of his work truck with The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and The Kinks. The premise of a lonely old man cleaning toilets certainly doesn’t suggest the happiest man on Earth, but Perfect Days taps into the pleasures of his routine and his ability to draw fulfillment from personal encounters. (It should also be noted that Tokyo has some amazing public toilets. No Trainspotting jobs in sight.) 

How to watch: Release date TBD. “Early 2024.” 

3. The Royal Hotel (dir. Kitty Green) 

Green’s follow-up to The Assistant, her excellent film about a young woman working for a Harvey Weinstein-like boss, seems like its mirror image. Green again casts Julia Garner as a low-level laborer in a toxic workplace, but the hostile ambience of a movie production office has been replaced here by the rowdy, openly aggressive regulars at an Outback pub where she and an American friend (Jessica Henwick) are trying to raise a few bucks to continue their Australian vacation. And yet, The Royal Hotel is remarkably similar to The Assistant in how Green sustains a threatening atmosphere where violence always seems possible, but never quite explodes as you might expect. You think you’re watching a gender-reversed Wake In Fright or Straw Dogs, but the film’s restraint gives it a different flavor. 

How to watch: Rentable. 

2. Enys Men (dir. Mark Jenkin) 

On an otherwise unoccupied island off the Cornish coast—the title translates to “stone island”—a woman credited simply as The Volunteer sets about her daily routine in this austere place, which includes logging the progress of an outcropping of flowers on a cliffside. Most days, her journal reads “no change,” but in Jenkin’s experimental folk horror, there’s eventually a change that shifts this unsettling film into the psychotropic. Comparisons to The Wicker Man are unmistakable, but The Volunteer’s solitude feeds into a stranger and more internalized film, entirely reliant on Jenkin’s ability to whip up atmosphere out of eerie vibes and 16mm images that seem unearthed from some unholy film archive. Few films are so reliant on direction alone to give them life, and Jenkin’s exercise in minimalism was quietly one of the year’s most accomplished works. 

How to watch: Streaming on Hulu. Rentable elsewhere. 

EXCELLENT

1. Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet) 

There’s nothing much more about Triet’s wrenching twist on the courtroom drama that I haven’t already said in my review or my Top 15 list, where it landed at #4, but the more I think about the film, the more I appreciate the space Triet allows for this situation to unfold. That starts from the very beginning, when Sandra Hüller’s novelist is trying to give a (notably flirty) interview with a graduate student, but has their chat disrupted by her husband blasting a steel-drum version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” (Hands down the ear worm of the year.) From there, the question of whether she later murdered her husband at their chalet gets a full airing in a French courtroom, which allows arguments to unspool with little of the formality of an American court. And then, Triet flashes back to reveal the fullness of this marital conflict in an extended scene that goes deeper than the did-she-or-didn’t-she question. Sidney Lumet would be proud. 

How to watch: Rentable.