The skinny on 2023

When I first envisioned the subject for this post, it wasn't just a play on words about the title of my #1 movie. (Sorry, by tradition, I spoil that up front, though you can still be surprised by the ranking of my other 167 films.)

No, I was also convinced this year would be really skinny by the standards of my recent output, especially compared to my record-setting 175 movies ranked last year, which I referred to as "a whale of a year" -- also of course a play on words with last year's #1.

Twenty twenty-three ended up being skinnier, but not by a huge amount. The 168 I watched this year are only seven fewer than last year, though they're also two fewer than the number I saw in 2021, which at least makes this my skinniest year since 2020. (When I ranked only 149. Thanks COVID.)

When I thought I was going to see more like 160 movies at most, that was an intentional choice in reaction to thinking 2023 was a pretty bad year for movies. In reality, it was just a backloaded year. Every year is backloaded, a friend of mine pointed out, but 2023 seemed even more so, as a full half of my top ten are movies I've seen roughly within the past six weeks. That's sort of in alignment with the strategy to release awards contenders at the end of the year, but sort of not, as two of those five were movies released earlier in the year, that I only caught on video since the start of December. 

It's still a bit of an unusual year as it has produced possibly my least accessible #1 movie ever, though more on that in a moment. If there were ever any danger of me slouching toward the mainstream as I get older -- remember I turned 50 in 2023 -- then this choice seems to put that discussion to rest, at least for now. 

And I was glad to see that as the year got into its final weeks, I fed my movie need as intensely as I always do, turning an underwhelming movie year into one that had a lot of really good movies and some really tough omissions from my top ten.

But before we get to that top ten and then the rest, let me start by offering up ten movies you won't find on this list, in two different categories. One is movies I could have seen but didn't, and one is regrets that just weren't available to me. Let's take the first first:

Top five unlikely omissions, in order of how unlikely they are not to be on my list:

5. Thanksgiving - I was certainly interested in seeing Eli Roth's expansion of his Grindhouse trailer into feature length, but it only came down from the $19.99 premium rental price on the very day I'm posting this.

4. The Blue Beetle - I usually end up seeing all the superhero movies. This year I didn't, which brings us to ...

3. The Marvels - I would have seen this if Disney had made it available for free on Disney+ now rather than a few weeks from now, but I finally needed a theatrical break from Marvel movies, and this is the first I'm not ranking in the year of its release since Thor: The Dark World.

2. Wish - More Disney. What can I say, I don't have children young enough to want to see this anymore, and it just didn't make my adult list of priorities.

1. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One - I wanted to skip one of the big action movies, but ended up seeing John Wick 4 and Fast X for free on streaming. The M:I movies haven't really done it for me since Ghost Protocol, and that was 13 years ago. 

Now, five I would have seen if they had been available, increasing in level of regret from 5 to 1:

5. The Color Purple - A musical version of the classic Alice Walker novel? Intriguing. 
4. Fallen Leaves - Aki Kaurismaki is usually a middling pleasure at most for me, but I understand this could be his best.

3. American Fiction - Love Jeffrey Wright. Not available here yet.
2. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt - Oops. I only just noticed this actually is now available for $5.99 rental, when it's too late. I'll still include it. 

1. The Zone of Interest - It'll be a shame not to include this after Jonathan Glazer's last film made my top ten of the whole decade, but it doesn't come out here for another month.

Okay! You've been waiting long enough. Let's start with my top ten:

10. The Holdovers - When I was first really becoming a cinephile, Alexander Payne was one of two directors I considered "my guys," the other being David O. Russell. Payne hit my top ten with three consecutive films: Election, About Schmidt and Sideways. It's taken him nearly 20 years to get back, so welcome back, Mr. Payne. Payne's regular misfires since then are a thing of the past, as he's extracted incredible warmth from the surface cold of this film I was fortunate to squeeze in before Christmas (for my only $19.99 premium rental of 2023). The Holdovers takes place over a lonely, snowy Christmas in 1970, featuring three people who would like to be anywhere else than with each other, on the campus of a prestigious New England boarding school. Becoming something of an old softie now that he's in his 60s, Payne layers humanism and decency atop his usual acerbic wit, concocting an emotionally potent slice of nostalgia in which sad and angry people learn to provide each other the basic necessities needed for their mutual survival. Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa and Da'Vine Joy Randolph are by turns funny and contemplative and just plain real. If this is the most conventional film Payne has made, let's have more please, and maybe we'll see him here again in a couple years. 

9. May December - Todd Haynes' latest could have fallen victim to the differing distribution deals between countries. Instead of being available on my couch via the comfort of Netflix, as it was since December 1st for those living in America, the movie doesn't even hit Australian theaters for another ten days. Fortunately, I saw May December at an advanced screening, and it claimed one of the last spots in my top ten, awarding Haynes his first top ten in his tenth feature (six of which I've seen). My second favorite Haynes (Safe) is also a collaboration with Julianne Moore, and his first collaboration with Natalie Portman brings out the best in both of these increasingly selective, Oscar-winning actresses. A lisp is often a bad choice for an actor, but don't tell that to Moore, who uses this speech impediment as a crucial tool to bringing to life Gracie Atherton-Yoo, the woman made famous a quarter century earlier when she slept with a 14-year-old boy and ended up having three children with him. Barely keeping it together in a different way is the actress played by Portman, Elizabeth Berry, who descends on Gracie's life to study her for an upcoming portrayal, but has her own twisted psychology that regularly pokes through. In fact, the most centered (and most heartbreaking) is the boy himself, grown awkwardly into a man in his late 30s, played by Charles Melton in a role that really puts him on the map. Haynes is master of multiple tones as he both has devilish fun with these characters, a point emphasized by the melodramatic score, and takes their plight seriously, as we can see in the confused agony just below the surface of Melton's face. Few directors have it both ways like Todd Haynes.

8. Asteroid City - And the seesaw Wes Anderson has been riding his entire career goes back up again. After basically loathing The French Dispatch (#151 of 2021), I find myself in love with another Anderson project, as I seem to do every other film. This typically dense and probably needlessly ambitious structure is Anderson's fourth visit to my top ten and first since Fantastic Mr. Fox, which ties him with Joel Coen and the aforementioned Alexander Payne (just this year) for the most top ten finishes for any director. However, the fact that it is fundamentally no less fussy than The French Dispatch -- which was about a former career of mine, journalism, no less -- just means that it's the little details in an Anderson film that win you over or drive you away. And they all won me over here, from the performances (specifically those by Scarlett Johansson and Jason Schwartzman) to the set design (can I live in that tiny southwest town for the rest of my life?) to the comedy (the appearance of the alien was not the only time I cracked up) to the pathos at the core of the best Anderson films (the off-screen loss of Schwartzman's wife put me in mind of The Royal Tenenbaums). The fact that I love this film as much as I do, without its outer narrative layer (the black and white TV show about the making of the play) really registering with me, is saying something. 

7. Blood & Gold - While the Nazi revenge fantasy on everyone's lips in 2023 seemed to be Sisu, Blood & Gold was the one I stumbled over on Netflix and ended up loving. I won't get too into why Sisu's one note quickly tired me, and instead spend time on the higher entertainment value of a film structured as an old-fashioned western, where a Jewish town must be liberated from the oppression of a group of Nazis making their last stand rather than a group of bandits in black bandanas. The man with no name type is a German deserter who escaped the hangman's noose, and he teams up with a war widow whose brother is mentally challenged. The filmmaking by Peter Thorwarth gave me a sort of early Tarantino thrill, complete with a wit and kineticism in every fight scene and an overall high level of confidence on camera movements. In fact, if you told me Blood & Gold existed in the same universe as Inglourious Basterds, I'd believe you. The German language film gives us a delectable old school villain in the sadistic SS commander played by Florian Schmidtke, and watching these characters arcs play out, which include of course his comeuppance, had all the satisfactions of an old Saturday matinee. This fulfills my annual quotient for "a top ten movie you haven't heard of, but should have."

6. A Good Person - Florence Pugh is a regular on my top ten list. This marks her third appearance out of only 12 films I've ever seen. But this is a first for director Zach Braff, whom I think we all wrote off years ago. In 2004, Garden State was on the outside of my top ten looking in, but it accumulated backlash quickly, as though the book were written on Braff as an incurable romantic with pretentious indie sensibilities and a fetish for twee manic mixie dream girls. Imagine how impressed I was by the incredible maturity of A Good Person, which I'd been avoiding all year (despite the presence of Pugh) because I thought I'd heard somewhere that it was bad. I sat there at full attention during a period of exhausted December viewing in which I was falling asleep during every other movie I saw, taking in not only Pugh and long-time favorite Molly Shannon, but Morgan Freeman in a performance I had no idea he was still capable of giving as he has moved into the second half of his 80s. This sober look at tragedy, depression and addiction has the chance to play out like a movie we've seen on screen a thousand times before, but doesn't due to the sure hand of Braff. Pugh can play the frayed edges of her emotional spectrum better than anyone out there, and Freeman has his feet solidly planted in this role after some wobbly other performances from the past few years, both emotionally generous and wickedly resentful at various points of the plot. A Good Person is honest and true and extremely well written -- also by Braff. 

5. BlackBerry - When I finally see a Matt Johnson movie in the year in which it was released, this is what happens. I've been a big fan of the director's found footage-style filmmaking since I first saw The Dirties, and with BlackBerry, the guy who kind of seems like a geek who learned how to make movies has graduated to a widespread critical embrace. Johnson also co-stars in BlackBerry with Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton, the latter giving one of my absolute favorite performances of the year, and in a year in which we were practically smothered by movies that recounted how certain famous products came into existence, BlackBerry stood out for its unique style and for its ability to perfectly capture its era. There are few movies at which I laughed harder in 2023 than the first half of BlackBerry, though of course, given the eventual nosedive of the technology into obsolescence, those good times can't last. But then the sobering comedown is compelling in its own right. I've never been a fan of Howerton's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, so I was completely taken aback by the bald-headed businessman he plays here, able to spin marketing gold (with a little creative and illegal accounting) out of the product devised by Baruchel and Johnson's Research in Motion, all while unleashing streams of expletives and while smashing pay phones against their chassis, metaphorically or otherwise. If you think you've seen this character before, you haven't seen Howerton do it. It's one of only two 2023 films I watched twice. 

4. Monster - I know it -- I'm a sucker for Hirokazu Koreeda. This is actually only the second of his films to make my top ten, though Shoplifters narrowly missed in 2018 (#11). The fact that Monster got almost as high as the #2-ranked 2014 film Like Father, Like Son, which is comfortably in my top 100 on Flickchart, is more an indication of the lesser competition than anything else. And because not a lot of people saw this, and therefore it hasn't been in year-end podcast conversations, I haven't done a lot of thinking about it since I saw it at MIFF. But in the midst of that viewing, I was wondering if it might have enough to overtake my then #1. It didn't, but that doesn't mean this Rashomon-style story of miscommunications and incomplete truths involving bullying at a Japanese school -- between students, but also between a teacher and a student -- isn't another superbly crafted slice of humanism by Koreeda, one that keeps revealing itself further over its running time as perspectives shift from one character to the next. There's also a touching "it gets better" message embedded within all the social drama. I'm not sure how Koreeda makes a movie every year and remains at such a high level. Finally sitting down with his film that came out too late in 2022 for me to rank it, Broker, is one of the most anticipated high points of finishing up my 2023 viewings and returning to watching whatever I want. I always want to watch Hirokazu Koreeda. 

3. All of Us Strangers - You'd think a movie that so thoroughly ensconces you in a world of memory, loss and loneliness, to the extent that it becomes and stays untethered from the real world, would become exhausting and tedious early on in its runtime. Someone who'd make such a movie might also tend to go heavy-handed and beat us over the head until it becomes an exercise in woe and empty solipsism. Andrew Haigh dodges every possible pitfall in All of Us Strangers, the film where his stand-in -- Andrew Scott in one of the year's best acting performances -- slides deep into the premise of the script he's writing, and starts visiting his childhood home to see his parents, who have been frozen at their age when they died in a car accident 25 years ago. The film doesn't suggest Adam has been struggling with this trauma that entire time, but that the headspace that comes with writing this script has left him almost drowning in emotions he had set aside, and considering how this early loss and his struggles as a gay man have dictated his intimacy with others. It's a similar thematic space as another recent Paul Mescal film, Aftersun from 2022, though this one had a far more intense emotional impact on me. Rarely have you seen an actor deliver underplayed emotions so devastatingly as Scott does here, as Haigh's dialogue does the other half of the work in giving us a true portrait that enriches us with the depth of its humanity. If not for some slight misgivings I have about the third act, which have primarily to do with unbearable melancholy about how the story plays out, this might have been my #1 of 2023. 

2. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. - I wasn't the same age as the characters in Kelly Fremon Craig's follow-up to The Edge of Seventeen until about 14 years after this film was set. But there's something about well-done nostalgia that puts you in a place of immense cinematic comfort, even if it is not exactly your own nostalgia. I felt transported to the 1970 of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., and even to a different gender. Great cinema puts you in the shoes of its characters whether they are shoes that are a close size to your normal shoes or quite different, and in this film, I felt the struggles of young girls wondering when they were going to get their period and what bra size they needed as if they were my own. The film embraces you with its sense of warmth, and rides two wonderful performances: Abby Ryder Fortson in what I hope is a star-making turn as the title character, who wears her emotions on her sleeve despite trying to impress her friends with how grown up she is, and Rachel McAdams as her mother, who has the movie's most heart-breaking arc as a woman who was abandoned by her own parents because she married a Jewish man (Benny Safdie). That the film deals earnestly with spiritual yearnings and reckonings, in a year in which a war is being fought over religious differences, just adds meat to what felt like a dessert from start to finish -- and not just because I watched it on Christmas day. 

1. Skinamarink - If I told you that my #1 movie takes place all inside a single house, exclusively at night, featuring characters whose faces you never see clearly, and dialogue difficult enough to understand that they've provided subtitles, you would have not only thought me a liar, but you would have asked if such a thing could even be properly described as a movie. But here we are. Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink is the king of 2023 based on its absolutely chilling effectiveness plunging you into a nightmare seemingly without end. If you have ever woken up late at night with the TV no longer playing what you were watching, and thought that the quiet and the low light of the canted angles of your living room portended terrifying things from the everyday objects in your view, that is basically this whole movie. It's slow cinema to the extreme, and it played so poorly for some audiences that every screening featured walk-outs. But for those who got on this film's wavelength and could never leave, the experience was an all-encompassing, full-body sense of a nightmare from which there was no escape. In the horror genre, that is incredibly hard to accomplish. Skinamarink ends up here despite the fact that I have never had a horror movie top my year-end rankings, and that I spent the final six months of the year actively rooting for something more conventionally #1-worthy to supersede it. Nothing did, and I watched Skinamarink a second time just to confirm it still gave me that certain buzz that no other 2023 film provided: the feeling that it could be the best of the year. So is Skinamarink a "real" #1, or is it a default choice because I never found anything that seemed more like the right answer? Does it matter? The fact remains that no other 2023 film succeeded more perfectly in doing what it set out to do; no other saw through its unique vision to the very last frame. That's as good a description as any for a #1 movie of the year. 

And now, because you can't have the good without the bad, the five worst movies I saw in 2023:

164. Murder Mystery 2 - Have you forgotten the surprising dose of delight you got from the original Murder Mystery in 2019? If you watched this limp, lifeless, inert and unfunny sequel, that memory is certainly now gone if it wasn't already. Shame shame, Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. 

165. Genie - I had hoped the days of Melissa McCarthy delivering just absolute garbage were over. Nope.

166. Bad Behaviour - The extra U is for ugly, unfunny and uncomfortable. This is probably the lowest I have ever ranked a film I saw at MIFF, and even a star I adore as much as Jennifer Connelly could not correct the course of this misanthropic movie about a former child actor at a wellness retreat. 

167. The Out-Laws - Adam Devine came THIS CLOSE to becoming a two-time loser after Game Over Man! was my lowest ranked of 2018, but this insipid and idiotic movie about a guy whose new in-laws are world-class bank robbers got beaten out in the endgame by another Netflix movie, the fourth of this year's bottom five ...

168. Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire - ... and it only took Zack Snyder left to his worst and most unchecked indulgences to do it. Movies have gotten competent enough, in general, that you never see actual continuity errors or botched editing anymore. This awful Star Wars ripoff is riddled with them, and rounded out with terrible performances and laughable world building. And sci-fi finishes last three years in a row after The Matrix Resurrections and Moonfall. 

And here's the whole list!

1. Skinamarink
2. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
3. All of Us Strangers
4. Monster
5. BlackBerry
6. A Good Person
7. Blood & Gold
8. Asteroid City
9. May December
10. The Holdovers
11. Anatomy of a Fall
12. Poor Things
13. No One Will Save You
14. Dream Scenario
15. Society of the Snow
16. Kill Boksoon
17. Banel & Adama
18. Elemental
19. Air
20. Killers of the Flower Moon
21. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
22. Past Lives

23. Polite Society
24. M3GAN
25. Barbie
26. Oppenheimer
27. Next Goal Wins
28. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
29. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
30. The Artifice Girl
31. Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose
32. The Blue Caftan
33. Saltburn
34. Reality
35. The Flash
36. Bottoms
37. Peter Pan & Wendy
38. Nimona
39. Swallowed
40. The Magician's Elephant
41. R.M.N.
42. The Old Oak
43. Rye Lane
44. The Face of the Jellyfish
45. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
46. Plane
47. Master Gardener
48. Shotgun Wedding
49. Wham!
50. Still
51. Reptile
52. Nyad
53. Carmen
54. Art Talent Show
55. Longest Third Date
56. Leave the World Behind
57. Wonka
58. Extraction 2
59. American Symphony
60. The Royal Hotel
61. Ferrari
62. Infinity Pool
63. Enys Men
64. Biosphere
65. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
66. Renfield
67. 80 for Brady
68. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
69. Strays
70. The Conference
71. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
72. You Hurt My Feelings
73. Jung_E
74. Creed III

75. Fingernails

76. Good Grief
77. Gran Turismo

78. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

79. The Strays

80. Joy Ride

81. No Hard Feelings

82. Champions

83. A Million Miles Away

84. The Burial

85. Flora and Son

86. Napoleon

87. Sisu

88. Dumb Money

89. Shazam! Fury of the Gods

90. Priscilla

91. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

92. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

93. Anselm

94. Chevalier

95. Sorcery

96. Nowhere

97. The Beanie Bubble

98. Evil Dead Rise

99. Family Switch

100. The Pope's Exorcist

101. Magic Mike's Last Dance

102. Robots

103. Bird Box Barcelona

104. Haunted Mansion

105. Fast X

106. Rustin

107. The Killer

108. Cassandro

109. Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom

110. Fair Play

111. We Have a Ghost

112. You People

113. They Cloned Tyrone

114. A Haunting in Venice

115. Daliland

116. The Boy and the Heron

117. Tetris

118. The Wrath of Becky

119. Knock at the Cabin

120. Boston Strangler

121. 65

122. Mercy Road

123. John Wick: Chapter 4

124. Mister Organ

125. The Iron Claw

126. El Conde

127. Sanctuary

128. Leo

129. The Little Mermaid

130. The Boogeyman

131. Cocaine Bear

132. Maestro

133. The Creator

134. Linoleum

135. Run Rabbit Run

136. Pain Hustlers

137. Alice, Darling

138. It Lives Inside

139. The Mother

140. Somebody I Used to Know

141. Passages

142. Foe

143. Theater Camp

144. Beau is Afraid

145. Showing Up

146. Paint

147. Fool's Paradise

148. Talk to Me

149. Shut Eye

150. Mafia Mamma

151. The Portable Door

152. Ghosted

153. Scream VI

154. White Men Can't Jump

155. Die Hart

156. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

157. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

158. Hypnotic

159. Old Dads

160. The Super Mario Bros. Movie

161. Candy Cane Lane

162. Cat Person

163. Your Place or Mine

164. Murder Mystery 2

165. Genie

166. Bad Behaviour

167. The Out-Laws

168. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

If that's not enough for you, how about ten more movies where I feel like I need to include a quick word of clarification/defense about where I've placed them:

22. Past Lives - I wanted to like it more and was so close to liking it more. This is still a good ranking.

28. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah - For once, Adam Sandler made the right move by casting his family.

65. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Nothing but love for this franchise, but this was too long and convoluted.

67. 80 for Brady - And this is not just because the New England Patriots are my football team. I thought this was really charming.

90. Priscilla - Sofia, don't worry, I still love you.

107. The Killer - David Fincher has had better days.

116. The Boy and the Heron - Befuddled me, and not in a good way, and the whimper of the very ending is a strange choice on which to end Miyazaki's career. 

131. Cocaine Bear - The best idea of the year without the execution to match.

143. Theater Camp - Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe you're wrong. Unfunny. 

148. Talk to Me - I don't know why everyone thought this was great. 

As always, I welcome comments, but more than anything, thank you for reading.