My annual disclaimer: This list is late on purpose.
Not only do I like to outwait the year-end listicle tsunami, but the Midwest still flies economy when it comes to movie releases. The year’s best films are served to the first-class coasts before the theatrical flight attendant serves us here in the flatlands. Also, studios typically don’t release anything worth seeing the weekend of the Super Bowl, February’s only actual holiday. Sorry not sorry to all presidents and valentines.
It is always fascinating to see the themes that emerge when this annual ranking is said and done. This year’s theme: Life is a bummer! Remove the three comedies and you have nothing but heartbreak, death, and Nazis. It’s like World War II made a mixtape. Speaking of bombs, let’s begin with the bad stuff!
The Worst 5 Films I Saw Last Year
5.) Fast X
Fast X has broken me upon its wheel, split me upon its axel. I’ll give you whatever you want, just make Diesel stop flexing, Cena stop mugging, and the word “family” stop losing all meaning. Between this and Elon Musk, if we have to get rid of all cars, I will proudly climb aboard a Segway or horse or just rollerblade everywhere. Nothing is worth this noisy, vapid futility. I will walk, dammit. I will walk. Maybe only when we are all just pedestrians, this can finally end.
4.) The Flash
The buzz for The Flash was everywhere for a very long time. It had stalled in development and was plagued with issues, and the defense was always “But it is so good that it must be seen.” It musn’t! I have seen it, and it absolutely did not need to be seen. Even the post-credit scene is so useless and lame, so without cleverness, that the only thing that can be done for the “DCU” is to nuke it from space and start over. Also, bring Keaton back for a live-action Batman Beyond, you cowards. Rant over.
3.) Iron Claw
The Iron Claw is maddening. It has a crucial, salient message that is bungled. If this were a film only loosely based on the real Von Erich boys, its message about the curse of narcissistic Boomer daddies would resonate louder than a stiff-heeled boot stomped in a wrestling ring. That is, provided you overlook the painfully stilted dialogue and the fact that, performance-wise, the High School Musical guy dances The Bear back into the kitchen.
2.) Oppenheimer
Even though Oppenheimer is about smart people doing super science stuff, it is stupid. Laughably stupid. Repeatedly laughably very stupid. It has two of the worst sex scenes in history, the second somehow more hilarious than the first. It chops up an inherently compelling narrative into various threads that it then spaghettis into confusing, interweaving timelines with a billion characters and holds the mess up like a toddler making spaghetti art. Dumbest of all, Christopher Nolan becomes the first director to ever make Florence Pugh dull. Forget creating the atomic bomb, neutralizing Pugh may be the most dubious of all human achievements.
1.) Maestro
I didn’t write a review for this one, although I was extremely tempted. Biopics are bad and dumb, but this was the baddest and dumbest. It was so insanely cringe-worthy that I can only assume everyone has been nominating it for stuff to avoid telling Bradley Cooper how they really feel. It just seems easier than explaining to him why what he did here was just exceptionally upsetting. Also definitely worth noting that two of the year’s “most acclaimed” films have much awfulness in common. They both cast non-Jews to play historically famous Jewish Americans while warping perceptions of actual people to serve narcissistic purpose. This made me want to go and watch early seasons of Alias again, if only to see Cooper be tortured on screen. I didn’t care for it!
The 10 Best Films of 2023
One last thing before we run it up: My honorable mentions were super-duper honorable this year. Click away for my full reviews, but here’s a quick rundown. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was still can’t-miss without Katniss. The Boy and the Heron is pure Miyazaki magic that will soon be missed. The Royal Hotel is the best feminist thriller of 2023. Godzilla Minus One made me actually feel hopeful, which is likely why it narrowly missed this year’s mostly brooding top 10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse only got cut because it’s basically half a (perfect) movie. Well done, all of you! Now get under your desk while I drop some perfectly safe and non-genocidal bombs.
10.) Beau Is Afraid
Beau Is Afraid is the funny-sad, gross-gorgeous, obvious-dense oxymoron it billed itself to be. Give me this self-flagellating nightmare that descends into abstract madness a thousand times over before yet-another tepid adaptation that leverages “intellectual property” of whatever household product a mega-corp wants to promote. I’d rather see Ari Aster beat himself up and work through his mommy issues than watch Kleenex: The Movie or whatever is next.
9.) Barbie
A hilarious lament on the objectively unfair burden of being a human woman, writer/director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is as gloriously overt and subtlety-free as its titular character. Any fears of Gerwig and cowriter Noah Baumbach being too precious or clever are quickly obliterated, like tears in the rain or Oppenheimer’s boom-boom. It is proudly on-the-nose, equally capable of winning over both the doll’s devotees and disparagers, and a reminder that Kate McKinnon is the funniest GD person alive.
Most movies that focus on despicable, irredeemable vermin take time to consider their side of things. It’s why those films are repellant to me. Nobody offers so much as a fleeting defense here. No backstories are presented. No context needed. This is a shallow couple concerned about conspicuous consumption and comfort, picking ashes of dead Jews from their hair. It is wildly enraging in its dry, dull depiction.
7.) American Fiction
As sophisticated as this movie is, as smart as it is, what will linger the longest is how emotionally honest and sincere it is. Having gotten to this one late, after it had received so much praise, part of me feared that the reaction was an overcorrection by the overwhelmingly white world of reviewers (like myself). I worried that the celebration was the critic community saying “You got us!” in a way that would have betrayed the point of the film. Nope. This is just one goddamn good movie.
Anatomy of a Fall exists to be debated. A vibrant masterwork composed only of gray, it exploits ambiguity to expose our inherent, unspoken prejudices about relationships, gender roles, parental responsibility, and justice. Although much of it is in French, it isn’t aloof in its purposeful uncertainty. It is a mirror shaped like a magnifying glass, sifting through a potential crime for evidence of your humanity. It’s pretty good, can you tell?
5.) Talk to Me
With almost no jump scares, Talk to Me opts for “uncomfortable” over “gotcha.” It tells you when it is going to be terrifying, giving an explicit countdown, which is its own kind of spooky fun. It also doesn’t fall into a trap of trying to say too much thematically. It’s not a meditation on grief so much as a literal exploration of the collateral damage associated with suicide. Most commendably, it doesn’t get bogged down in explanations of how things work or some big overarching evil malice at work. “If there are ghosts, we probably shouldn’t TikTok them possessing us” is a simplistic but alarmingly sufficient argument. Good horror movies make you squirm in your seat. Great horror movies make you squirm trying to sleep later that night. The best horror movies make you squirm out of nowhere for days.
4.) Bottoms
Most so-called satires lack bite. Bottoms literally gnaws on chunks of flesh and then smiles with bloody teeth. Writer/director Emma Seligman and writer/star Rachel Sennott have somehow interwoven the savagery of Heathers with the hilarity of Mean Girls to answer the unasked question: “What do adults educated entirely post-Columbine, living in an era of open discourse about sexual assault, consider dark comedy these days?”
3.) No One Will Save You
SURPRISE! Most of this list is fairly duplicative of stuff I’ve seen on other top 10s from folks. I may be the only critic foaming at the mouth for this one. I didn’t post a review for this nearly wordless Hulu flick, but boy howdy am I a big champion of it. Cool kids still say “boy howdy,” right? Anyhoodle, Kaitlyn Dever runs from aliens creeping in her rural home. Writer/director Brian Duffield does my absolute favorite film thing where a gimmick winds up not being gimmicky at all but wildly authentic and compelling. It even has a thoroughly divisive ending, which I l-o-v-e. Sci-fi horror that highlights showing above telling is always gonna hit me in the sweet spot. That’s not a euphemism. It’s a metaphor. I’m pretty sure…
2.) Poor Things
If Barbie is a late-life epiphany movie that declares “Women have it impossibly hard,” director Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarro bildungsroman asks “What would it look like if someone simply refused to accept that?” The sheer exhilaration of watching a woman do as she pleases, learn as she pleases, and decide upon the most pleasing version of herself makes for singular cinema. Although it flirts with steampunk, the simplistic boldness of a female character who simply will have nothing to do with gaslighting is triumphant.
1.) Past Lives
Past Lives is a lament for what never was but also a celebration for what is. It is an embrace of every hitch and hiccup, every misstep and missed opportunity that led you to be who you are now. It is a dirge, an elegy for who others saw you to be but who you never were. It is an innocent idea, a dangerous daydream, a painful pleasure. There are many different reasons to cry by the film’s final act. Maybe the biggest is that you’ll never be able to see it for the first time again.