The Cathode Ray Mission: Best of 2023
“Movies are back” has been the often glib rallying cry for filmgoers since the doldrums of 2020’s lockdown period, in which the future viability of commercial filmmaking, both at the level of individual quality and traditional exhibition, appeared to be in serious crisis. By and large, the trends that were exacerbated in that moment have continued, so I’m not sure if we can say that the health of the film industry is in any way improved except in the most literal way of there being new movies to go and see (and even then, a large chunk of the year was dominated by strikes by writers and actors, putting another halt on large-scale film production whose effects have already been felt in several delays to anticipated projects). So, are movies back? I don’t think any more so than they were a year or two ago, but the biggest moment from this year in movies has become a sort of flashpoint representing a contrast in the Hollywood method, on one hand a culmination of some of the worst inclinations of industrial American filmmaking versus a possibly encouraging kernel of an exciting new direction bubbling up, the tension from which will hopefully be borne out over the next several years, at which point we might really be able to say that movies are back. I am of course talking about Barbenheimer.
I enjoyed Barbie (Greta Gerwig) when I saw it in theaters, I think it’s generally pretty funny and it looks nice. But there is an undeniable stomach-turning quality to it by virtue of its function as naked advertisement for a brand and product, and this feeling has only magnified for me in the months since it came out. The cynical fusion of pop-feminist lip service that feels about nine years late with the corporate legwork of selling toys to kids is troubling on an ethical level, not to mention how the contradictory aims clearly hamstring what director Greta Gerwig is trying to do—Barbie’s dilemma is as much about Gerwig trying and failing to reconcile her compromise between being a real artist and cashing corporate checks as it is about her difficulty being a toy with an existential crisis (you could even say Gerwig is Hasbro’s toy… woah). Given the gangbusters success Barbie achieved at the box office this year (#1 in America and the world), I’d say Hasbro made a pretty good bet, but not a particularly original one. A giant corporate machine lifting a successful small-scale director to pilot a piece of IP on the way to a billion dollars has been the Marvel/Disney modus operandi for the better part of a decade, Barbie is merely the apotheosis of this strategy that has been running Hollywood moviemaking into the ground; at least the Marvel movies have had the pretense of building to some cinematic event, Barbie is literally just an ad when you boil it down. On the other end is Oppenheimer, which I won’t get too into the weeds on because, spoilers, it’s going to show up on the list. But the philosophy of Oppenheimer is vastly different on almost all levels: an epic-scale, serious adult drama helmed by a household name with virtually free license to work the material as he sees fit. Whatever you think of Christopher Nolan, and Lord knows I’ve been conflicted on the man’s work, to see an unabashedly auteurist project on this kind of scale is something that has been an exceedingly rare phenomenon since the 1970’s, and Oppenheimer’s financial returns (#5 domestically, #3 worldwide at the box office) suggest that the gamble by Universal to hand the keys over like this was well worth it (not to mention the likely awards returns the film will accrue). Whether this is because Nolan is an outlier a la Spielberg, one of the few working directors with serious, name-brand commercial cache and the resulting artistic freedom that comes with it, or an indication of a shifting tide towards more auteur-driven spectacles, is hard to say, but worth noting that since Oppenheimer’s release we’ve also gotten Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese, and we’re slated to get Megalopolis by Francis Ford Coppola and the continuation of James Cameron’s Avatar series in 2024, all of which fit this kind of mold to some extent. It feels silly to root for a movie to do well at the box office, but I will be hoping for just that for these projects to show if nothing else that there is a viable alternative to the IP bludgeoning that has become the standard Hollywood mode of filmmaking, and it might just give us some good movies anyway.
As was the case last year, this is going to be a list of ten movies that I’ve seen that have gotten a 2023 release. I have not seen everything that’s come out from the past year, and what constitutes a “2023 release” can get a bit dicey when it comes to festival and international releases. I’ll admit that my rules for these things verge on inconsistent, but ultimately, who cares. Some of what I missed that I think would probably have an argument for this list include How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber), Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella), Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt), Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse (dos Santos, Thompson, and Powers), The Curse (Nathan Fielder), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude), Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki), Menus Plaisirs — Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman), Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars (Jean-Luc Godard), and John Wick Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski). A number of other movies I’m interested in that are either confirmed for a 2024 domestic release or seem most likely to be considered as such include Hit Man (Richard Linklater), Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice), Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Last Things (Deborah Stratman), The Beast (Bertrand Bonello), Janet Planet (Annie Baker), Allensworth (James Benning), and In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo). Every year naturally has those higher profile movies that I avoid like the plague: Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) could not look to be less in my wheelhouse if it tried, The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) seems in my view to be morally untenable (but I’ll probably still see it), Priscilla (Sofia Coppola) just strikes me as boring, Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster) is asking a lot from me without having any familiarity with Aster. And of course a number of very good movies that narrowly missed the cut, for whatever reason: Master Gardener (Paul Schrader), Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki), Afire (Christian Petzold), The Killer (David Fincher), Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan), Ferrari (Michael Mann). With those caveats in place, here is the list.
#10. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese’s long gestating adaptation of David Grann’s book of the same name continues in many ways, stylistically and thematically, from what The Irishman achieved. Nobody is doing these large-scale, immersive American historical epics like Scorsese is, and as such you could aptly sketch out a 20th century history of America over these two films’ combined 400 minutes. American history has long been Scorsese’s secret main subject; more than gangsters, more than Christianity, more than 1970s rock music, Scorsese has used the tools of genre to illustrate who we are as a people, and how we got here. These examinations are often inextricable from certain portraits of corrupt masculinity: Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Ace Rothstein, Howard Hughes, Jordan Belfort, the list goes on of men that have been faced with a conception of America and taken seize of it for their own uses. More recently, Scoresese’s attention has shifted from the primary agents of history to their slow-witted footmen, first Frank Sheeran and now Ernest Burkhart. What this shift might indicate for Scorsese’s personal outlook, I’m not sure—maybe he’s tired of feeding into the “Great Man” notion of history, and finds the uglier and harsher ground-floor mechanics by which great men become such to be a more honest appraisal of historical events—but, as I alluded to above, it leads to a kind of mainstream American cinema that is far more bracing in its vision than what one might typically expect at this scale.
Being as it is a story about America, Killers of the Flower Moon is a story about the meeting of white supremacy and capitalism for one prolonged period of horrifying greed and destruction. The scheme at its center, for those unaware, involves the systematic murder of oil-rich Osage natives and the transference of their properties into the hands of white residents. Because the oil headrights are matters of inheritance, what this often involves is white men marrying Osage women and, after the chain of inheritance is drawn up, murdering them in ways that they are able to deny culpability (poisoning, car accidents, etc.). William Hale (Robert De Niro, in a performance that can only be described as Satanic) is the architect behind this plot, and the film zeroes in on his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) being folded into it, with the object of his attention being the noble Mollie (Lily Gladstone). The sensation of following a movie character that is outright stupid is one that I wasn’t even aware I was unfamiliar with until watching this; it can grow taxing, and strains plausibility at certain points that a dignified woman like Mollie would continue to abide him, but it crystallizes some of the aforementioned aims of Scorsese’s recent work similarly to what The Irishman was doing, though I think it’s important to note they’re of two different degrees: Frank was moreso an empty-headed stooge unable to articulate his own desires beyond what the boss asked of him, Ernest is similarly acquiescent to authority but he’s denser, seemingly unable to see the contradictions that Hale is encouraging him to play out, and lacking even the pretense of introspection that The Irishman’s framing gives Frank. Ernest’s stupidity ends up leading to one of the more complex dynamics of Killers, in the shape of his relationship with Mollie that becomes the central focus of the film. Ernest is either unable or actively unwilling to see the irreconcilability between his fealty to Hale and his genuine love for Mollie; what that ends up looking like is him dosing her with poisoned insulin as he devotedly attends her sickbed while she slowly dies.
Mollie remains the center of the film throughout, and her decay mirrors the viewing experience. It’s a long, ugly, infuriating affair that nobody feels good about. Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, his longtime editing partner, largely maintain that nauseous feeling, to an end that I would consider constructive. But the third act shifts gears a bit to a procedural mode that more directly mimics Grann’s book, introducing the FBI investigation that eventually led to the apprehension of Hale and his conspirators. There is a well-worn vein throughout of distrusting the systemic authorities that are supposed to be in place to protect you from the kinds of things that Hale and his people are doing; as the scope of the conspiracy becomes clearer, we see that the sheriff, the morticians, the doctors, the lawyers, etc. of Osage County are all in league with one another. It’s a terrifying realization that everyone that should have your welfare in mind is actually invested in your death. I’m troubled by how the FBI is perceived in this story, because I found myself rooting for them to save the day, and that kind of attitude feels severely misplaced in a story like this, even if in reality they did “save the day.” I’m not sure if that reaction is a result of my just wanting any sort of lifeline out of the preceding two hours of escalating misery, or if Scorsese is framing the federal agents in a particular way to encourage that kind of reaction, but if it’s the latter then it feels too easy for the kind of expectations that have been created beforehand— “The federal government will save you” is not exactly the kind of assurance or insight a story like this should end up leading to. The other troubling thing that nags me about this is the actual choice of narrative perspective, namely Ernest’s prominence. Josh Lewis’s review on Letterboxd details some of the same feelings I have, but in short Ernest’s primary narrative positioning feels excessive for how inscrutable he actually is.
This has ended up being the requisite “movie so good it lands on my top ten that I nonetheless have several legitimate qualms that bug me about it,” which I think is ultimately a testament to Scorsese’s willingness to resist doing anything simple or palatable with the kinds of privileged resources he can command. Here’s to a couple more from him.
#9. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
This year’s big winner at Cannes, Anatomy of a Fall marks a triumphant return of courtroom procedurals to the big stage, and as an American viewer, the novelty of the French court proceedings is highly entertaining. The eye-rolling marketing angle that precedes the movie (flashing “didshedoit.com” on the screen before the start had me prepared for the worst) served as almost a feint on what Triet is actually interested in doing here—the question of Sandra’s (Sandra Huller) guilt in the death of her husband is fairly low on the list of priorities. Instead, what Anatomy of a Fall takes as its main subject is the optics of marriage and the process of narrativizing one’s own life that the courtroom necessarily demands. The accumulation of detail is precise, and the back-and-forth of the cross-examination is gripping as much for its penetration of Sandra’s character and relationships as it is for the highly performative manner of its delivery, bouncing between French, English, and occasionally German all the way (Huller carries the movie with her performance, but healthy credit should also go to Antoine Reinartz as her prosecuting attorney). The invasiveness of the proceedings reveals many of the numerous ways in which both Sandra and her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) have had to transform their behaviors to accommodate each other and their visually impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), and the results often reflect the complicated sort of disavowal of identity that marriage dictates, down to the very language they speak being a compromise.
The trial climaxes with an audio recording played for the court depicting a fight between Sandra and Samuel the day before his death. The argument they have is wide-ranging, but mostly zeros in on the supposedly uneven burden distributed between them in making their lives work together—her lack of income as a novelist, prior infidelity, and deferred responsibility in caring for Daniel are all contentious subjects. The scene is a tremendous showcase of Huller’s talents but also of Triet’s, as the fight develops in a carefully observed, naturalistic process that starts on something benign before growing into an existential shouting match, but what really elevates it into one of the best sequences of the year is the representational play that Triet performs with it. When the recording begins in court, we get a few minutes playing in front of the audience before the scene is rendered diegetically, a visual reenactment to most accurately match what we hear. At the moment however that the fight escalates to the point of violence, it cuts back to the courtroom, and the only representation of the scene is the audio of shouts, hitting, and glass breaking. It’s a truly deft maneuver, shocking the viewer not only into an awareness of the domestic transgressions Sandra is capable of, but also of our imperfect perceptions of events and complicity in constructing events in a way that is fed by their context, not necessarily their reality. The conclusion of the trial is too corny for me to sign off on, but it realizes this idea as well: Daniel ultimately makes a successful appeal to the judges vouching for the innocence of his mother, but whether it’s a canny manipulation on his part or just a Hail Mary desperation move, his relitigation of the court’s narrative is sentimental enough that the judges defer to his interpretations. Overall though, Anatomy is a highly successful example of a drama that feels rare to find, and prods at compelling questions in addition to being an entertaining product in its own right.
#8. Walk Up (Hong Sang-Soo)
I wrote a little bit in this space last year about Hong Sang-Soo and The Novelist’s Film, what I designated with the shared title of my favorite of the year (with The Fabelmans); the calendar’s flipped, and some things have changed, but much like the seasons we can come to rely on Hong being there for us with a couple of bangers to rely on from the past year. Walk Up actually premiered at the end of 2022 but didn’t see domestic distribution until early 2023, so it occupies a sort of nebulous temporal space, not unlike its or many other Hong film protagonists! I only lightly detailed last year some of the idiosyncrasies that Hong has developed over his 30+ films that have come to be defining elements of his style, but something I didn’t acknowledge that is arguably the main differentiator for him is the unique narrative structural play that he employs in almost all of of his films (The Novelist’s Film is one of the exceptions in its fairly straightforward progression, hence the omission). These experiments are often temporal in nature (Hill of Freedom (2014) scrambles its timeline according to the order that a character reads another character’s letters which presumably describe the plot events), spatial in nature (Ha Ha Ha (2010) recounts the vacation stories of two friends who were in the same places with the same people at the same time without realizing it), textual in nature (Tale of Cinema (2005) reveals its first half to be a film-within-the-film that the second half ends up replicating), or more often some combination of all three. In effect, every new Hong movie feels somewhat like a puzzle that the seasoned viewer enters into trying to solve; consequently, there’s a uniquely rewarding quality to repeated viewings of many of Hong’s films, as you progress from attempting to grasp the (often unstated) mechanics to appreciating how those mechanics shift the familiar scenarios into new formations.
Walk Up finds Hong with one of his most compelling devices yet, the eponymous walk up building serving as the narrative hub both spatially and temporally. The film opens with film director Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) visiting the building, owned as it is by an old friend of his, Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young), with his maybe somewhat estranged daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so). They’re ostensibly here because Byung-soo wants to introduce the two women, and to encourage Ms. Kim to take Jeong-su on as an apprentice for her interior design business. Before that, Ms. Kim takes them on a tour of the building: the basement is home to her workshop, which she says she only really uses as a space to rest; the first and second floors are a restaurant, owned and operated by a single woman, who isn’t around; the third floor apartment is rented out by a couple that Kim finds endearing; and the fourth floor is rented out by a man who Kim describes as a reclusive artist type who’s nice but is behind on his bills and never seems to be around. With these details in place, the trio returns to the basement, where they drink a few bottles of wine and Kim and Jeong-su chat, a bit about their careers but mostly about Byung-soo, who has left to meet with a producer. Jeong-su decides to buy some more wine from the store, and we see her walking down the alley to the melancholy strums of a lo-fi guitar. The rest of the film episodically follows Byung-soo as he appears to assume the roles of the residents of this building, first returning to dine in the restaurant with Kim and the restaurateur, Sun-hee (Song Sun-mi), then living with Sun-hee on the third floor in the couples apartment, then living alone on the top floor and receiving a visit from another, new woman, Ji-young (Cho Yun-hee). There are no markers of time’s passage between these episodes, but the intuition is to place them together on a single linear timeline, albeit one where months or years may have passed from one scene to the next. The intuition is valid, even if it ends up being a little bleaker than what one was probably expecting—if we’re to take this as a linear progression of Byung-soo’s life, we see a once thriving, admired artist gradually close himself off more and more, drowning in his anxieties, his vague illnesses, and his frustrations with the industry barriers to making art. He ends telling Ji-young about a vision he had of God and his newfound religious faith, and he seems quite genuine in that, but it’s also hard not feel like he’s nonetheless at the end of his rope on the top floor.
Were that all that Walk Up had, it would still rank among one of the more intriguing films Hong has made recently, a decided throwback to some of his prime-2010s interests, not only in the chronological play but in the portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man suffering a quiet death of his own making. The final shot, though, introduces another possible reading: Byung-soo and Ji-young are leaving the building when she gets a call from her work about a real estate deal she should be a part of. He waits out front, smoking, followed by a cut to an exterior view of the building, then a cut back to him. The restaurant’s waiter (Shin Seok-ho), who we haven’t seen since the first episode, plays double duty as a pseudo-valet, pulling up in Byung-soo’s car and returning it to him, before Jeong-su returns from her wine purchasing and tells him that he shouldn’t smoke so much if he’s not feeling well. Byung-soo laughs and tells her he’ll meet her inside, as he pulls out another cigarette and lights it up. Essentially, the narrative loop closes itself here: in the span of a cutaway, we return from the ailing, possibly delusional Byung-soo that lives on the fourth floor back to the Byung-soo of the film’s beginning, still theoretically in command of his life, and the implication then can be drawn that the film’s episodes weren’t necessarily a single timeline with indefinite ellipses, but rather a multitude of simultaneous possible outcomes that he’s been imagining. Certain details among the episodes support this idea: at one point on the third floor, Byung-soo tells Ms. Kim about the ceiling leaking, then later on the fourth floor he tells her about a problem he’s been having with his bathroom drain, it standing to reason that one issue is causing the other. But in this possible reading, alternative meaning presents itself to the self-inflicted downward trajectory of Byung-soo. Hong has often been concerned with questions of self-determination and fate, whether our behavior determines our circumstances or vice versa, but here he gracefully allows the possibility for introspection in one of his numerous self-inserts, to consider the outcomes that life may deliver him and reflect. It’s a wonderful ending, and a wonderful cap to what may very well grow to be one of my favorite Hong movies.
#7. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
Firstly, I feel like I should preface this with my Nolan thoughts. I’m glad that Christopher Nolan has earned the immense canvas that he paints on, there are too few filmmakers, in Hollywood and elsewhere, that really push the idea of the scale that cinema allows to its limits anymore, and Nolan does so in a multitude of ways, being a pioneer of IMAX filmmaking and all that. But I’ve often found his movies to be exercises technical proficiency with little of interest to hold on to. Inception (2010) has been to my mind his most successful excursion, because the text itself is so obsessed with its own mechanics that Nolan’s complementary obsession with rendering those mechanics makes a natural fit; its weakest link is its fumbling attempt to inject an emotional core to the story, which is also what I find to be the failure, at a more pronounced level, of Interstellar (2014). Dunkirk (2017) is almost the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a work of pure mechanics with almost zero attempt at developing an emotional center, and it leaves me cold as a result in spite of how impressive it all is. I’ve long held the stance that Nolan is a great director in need of a decent writer, because his own facility in that department is greatly lacking. Imagine my shock when Oppenheimer came out and demonstrated not only the firmest grasp of an emotional dimension in Nolan’s career, but also the sharpest political intuitions, tonal control, and character development of his whole career. And he was the sole credited writer! Oppenheimer takes the prize for this year’s “I apologize, I was not familiar with your game” award.
Now, beyond my own hamstrung expectations of Nolan being far exceeded, Oppenheimer is a legitimately major work of large-scale original American studio filmmaking that we haven’t seen since I truly don’t know when, that also happens to see Nolan pushing his technique into a borderline experimental realm. Because, what makes Oppenheimer (and, truthfully, Nolan’s best moments) great is his application of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage into blockbuster terms, here sustained to epic feature length (this is also, to reference another filmmaker on this list, arguably the reason Goodfellas is such a major film, the expansion of montage into a comprehensive structure). The progression of narrative slips and slides as the story calls for, the flow further complicated by the narrative’s bifurcated form, one part taking place in Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) early physicist years on into the Manhattan Project, the other part jumping ahead a few years to the security hearing concerning Oppenheimer’s government clearances, chaired by Sec. Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), represented in color and black and white, respectively. Beholden as heavily as it is to its editing (truly unbelievable work by Nolan and Jennifer Lame), there develops a fascinating musical quality to the experience of watching the movie, even independent of the near-omnipresent score by Ludwig Goransson (again, phenomenal work).
For the first time in Nolan’s work, I can say that these component elements are in service of something genuinely earning their individual quality. Oppenheimer is a mature work of intense historical subjectivity. Much like many of the great filmmakers, there’s a certain thrall to power that has characterized Nolan’s work, often to somewhat nauseating, quasi-fascistic ends; while he can’t fully escape the implications of his attraction to the ubermensch, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) being more or less a supernaturally brilliant scientist whose mere existence acts as a rock in the river of time, there’s a much more complicated quality to his eminence that serves as the main subject of the film, particularly his own cataclysmic hubris and the naïvete that convinces him that he can safeguard this technology to be used to responsible ends. Obviously this doesn’t happen, as a significant chunk of the film details the systematic manner in which Oppenheimer is divorced from his work and the entire atomic energy program is transferred to the hands of the American military industrial complex, a development that has cast a radioactive shadow over the entire 80 years since. The film’s highest peak rests at the midpoint during the Trinity bomb test, ~30 minutes of sustained tension and dread flexing the absolute greatest skills of Nolan and co. that finds its nominal climax in the bomb’s explosion (as overwhelming as anything I’ve seen in a theater), but like the waves of sound following the blast the biggest impact comes delayed. At the celebratory reception following the official surrender of Japan, Oppenheimer’s speech becomes overcome by visions of his audience (including Nolan’s own daughter in what has to be the idiot savant move of the decade) disappearing in an atomic flash and disintegrating before his eyes as their raucous cheers transform into screams and wails. It’s not only an expertly conceived moment of purely cinematic dialectics, it’s the most emotionally cogent statement Nolan has ever attempted, and while Oppenheimer remains host to numerous of Nolan’s stortyelling flaws, the cumulative affect is something far greater than anything he’s ever done before.
#6. May December (Todd Haynes)
The winner of this year’s “I can’t believe what I’m watching” award, May December flirts with the kind of taboo material and slippery approach that feels maybe one notch away from being genuinely transgressive, not an insignificant feat for a Netflix distribution. Todd Haynes has long been primarily influenced by the particular kind of melodrama articulated in the work of Douglas Sirk (when he hasn’t been influenced by classic rock (I’ll never miss a chance for a plug, but in hindsight I think I’m Not There is Haynes’s weakest effort, and I was certainly a prisoner of the moment in thrall to Dylan when I wrote that)), characterized by a blend of extreme emotional registers retroactively considered camp ironically juxtaposed against rigorously designed mise-en-scene illustrating some sort of social critique. Sirk wasn’t always an ironist—The Tarnished Angels (1957) screams out a desperation that’s treated with the utmost sincerity—and neither is Haynes, but I find he’s often at his best when he remains in a third-person observational mode (see: Safe (1995)), even if criticisms of an overly-academic, clinical stylization to his work are not unfounded. May December threads the needle between Haynes’s pervading interests in soapy suburban drama, performativity, and identity slippage, and the ironically distanced packaging of the subject in a way that rises close to career best levels.
May December is modeled after the tabloid story of Mary Kay Letourneau, who in 1996 raped one of her sixth grade students, had his child while in custody, and later married him after she was released from prison. This is, obviously, ghastly in any number of ways, and while Samy Burch’s screenplay adjusts some of the details of the original incident, the overall situation remains the same. The film tracks the professional efforts of a medium-famous actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), in doing research into the life and psychology of Gracie (Julianne Moore), the film’s perpetrator, who is currently living with Joe (Charles Melton) and the family they’ve raised together twenty years after the incident took place. The film doesn’t make the backstory explicitly known until further in, but knowledge of the dynamic at play almost feels like a necessity before starting, as it colors the film’s early scenes of banal backyard parties and graduation preparations with a kind of bipolar pivot between abject horror and absurd bad-taste comedy, like if John Waters made a Michael Haneke movie. That tonal balance keeps up all throughout, and among individual feats of filmmaking accomplished in the past year, it very well might be the most difficult. May December initially explores itself as a morbid game of identity—as Elizabeth gets closer to Gracie and learns more about her, she begins modeling some of her appearance and behaviors after the older woman, and a persistent question surfaces as to whether Elizabeth is actually just very professionally committed or if she moreso finds the kind of proximity to the evil and the taboo that this role provides her to be a sort of vicarious thrill, which naturally implicates the TLC/true crime media industry that exploits these exact kinds of stories for entertainment value (and of course the consumers of that kind of media share some complicity as well). While this is all going on, however, the film slowly transitions its focus to Joe; Elizabeth’s interjection into the fragile peace of his family life initiates a dawning kind of consciousness in Joe, who begins to realize for what seems like the first time that he was the victim of some unspeakable trauma, and that his abuser has successfully ingratiated herself into the lives of him and his children. The kind of cringe horror of the Elizabeth/Gracie interactions is fully absent when the lens is on Joe, replaced instead by a seriousness of purpose and a gravity to his arc, realized immaculately by Melton’s performance. While the metaphors can get a little heavy-handed, what May December ends on is a note of rejuvenation: the graduation scenes and their aftermath are notably lacking in Gracie’s presence, but Joe is there, guiding his kids into the future, even amid the turmoil that he’s newly faced. There’s a sense that even though he had a large chunk of his adolescence erased from him, that he really recognizes how valuable these moments and his presence are to his loved ones, and that as much as its a new beginning for them it’s one for him as well.
#5. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)
May December, for all its virtues, cannot serve as the answer to this question: when was the last time you watched just a normal movie? Not something that was made for nine figures, not something straining to impress you, not something trying to preach to you or sell you something or do something weird. Just something normal. The Holdovers is the year’s best normal movie, and makes me wish there were more filmmakers with modest goals like that. Which is not to suggest that this is a beneficiary of a time of low expectations, where what once looked like mediocrity may now look exceptional; The Holdovers is great because it embraces its conventional qualities and executes them at a high level. Set in the early 70’s in and around a Massachusetts boy’s boarding school, the plot concerns a crusty professor of classics, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), who is charged with the oversight of the students that are left behind for whatever reason and don’t have anywhere to go for the winter break; his charges eventually winnow down to Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), an intelligent but impulsive student, and the two of them are frequently accompanied by the school’s cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who is grieving the death of her son in Vietnam. Yes, it’s funny; yes, it’s sad; yes, it’s a touch sentimental; yes, it’s the perfect modern Christmas movie to throw on with your parents if you don’t feel like running back one of the old standards and want something more complex than Hallmark-level fare. This marks my first encounter with Alexander Payne, but it makes me think he’s got the goods to be a premier mid-level auteur, and it makes me want to see what else he’s got going on.
#4. in water (Hong Sang-Soo)
I love a good normal movie as much as the next guy, and for as idiosyncratic as they may be, Hong tends to make normal movies. in water is not one of them, which is striking given it’s the most radical departure he’s made yet and we’re around 30 movies in. in water is shot almost entirely out of focus (there are two interior shots in the first ten minutes that look sufficiently in focus); supposedly, this experiment is intended to replicate the effect of Hong’s own failing eyesight, which adds a certain metatextual resonance to the whole thing, but even were that not the case I think it makes for a fascinating watch. The response to this has also been notable: the Hong fan club is not exactly overwhelming in numbers, and there tends to be a pretty universal appreciation for one of his new movies, but this one has produced a decidedly divisive reaction. Not everyone is loving the 60 minute blurry movie, which, fair enough, I get it. I, however, think it taps into a strange, unexplored beauty; I think it helps that Hong’s shots tend towards stasis, so we don’t get any camera movement in conjunction with the blurriness, which I think would probably be disastrous, but the effect is impressionistic in a way that calls to mind some of the great experimental formalists like Stan Brakhage or Paul Sharits, maybe not in any literal way but in their shared exploration of some of the furthest reaches of what we could imagine cinematic expression to be capable of. The story finds an unexpectedly resonant note as well, following a small trio of filmmakers, headed by the director Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho), as they wander around this coastal part of Korea trying to formulate an idea for a film, Seoung-mo grappling with a quiet difficulty in finding a proper vehicle for his artistic impulses. It’s the more melancholy sibling of The Novelist’s Film, but there is a lovely irony to Seoung-mo’s creative trouble depicted in a film richly infused with inspiration, which literally sees the world in a way that we’ve never known before.
#3. & #2. Asteroid City and the Roald Dahl short film cycle (Wes Anderson)
I’ve recently written in this space about these two projects, so I’m not going to be too redundant and rehash my thoughts about them here. In short, both are wonderful new offerings from one of our most distinctive auteurs that suggest possibly career best efforts when taken collectively and signal an exciting potential future for Anderson’s artistic method.
#1. Pacifiction (Albert Serra)
Contemporary art cinema seems to have settled on a primary mode of expression, that which could be designated “slow cinema,” which deserves a much more involved exploration than what this blog provides, but in short it’s a mode that emphasizes location, presence, duration, and cinema’s unique pictorial and temporal qualities instead of typical narrative interests. Pacifiction, despite its relaxed appearances, plus-size length, and scenes that seem to wend on endlessly, is not what I would file under slow cinema. Pacifiction, beneath its serene tropical surfaces, is a glimpse at suffocating paranoia and sinister parapolitical, neocolonial maneuvering, driven forward by a low-octave dread that does the work to suggest that paradise has been lost, or, more distressingly, will be imminently.
This is the first Albert Serra movie I’ve seen, and while he’s been a name in the international art film scene for a minute (I am especially intrigued by his The Death of Louis XIV (2016), namely due to its morbid repurposing of the image of Jean-Pierre Leaud, the face most synonymous with the French New Wave), Pacifiction would seem to mark the closest engagement Serra has taken thus far with what could be considered a mainstream product; that it also spurred numerous walkouts at its various festival premieres in the summer and fall of 2022 is, perhaps, good indication that Serra isn’t cut out for that world, and we’re better for it. But it’s easy to see why this is the one that has more or less broken through to a wider audience, its scenario is just too potent: in French Polynesia, the High Commissioner De Roller (Benoit Magimel) juggles his representative diplomatic mediating duties with his investigation of a troubling rumor that a French submarine has settled off the coast, possibly signaling a renewed nuclear weapons testing program on the island that he is unaware of. “Walking in circles” is how one possibly shady customer describes De Roller’s quest in the film’s last third—very little he ends up doing actually accomplishes anything, but like most people in these political figurehead positions, he certainly talks enough to give the impression that something is being done. The issue, though, is that he doesn’t realize how powerless he actually is; he may be walking in circles, or, as a different shady figure suggests in the same scene, from another angle those circles might be a downward spiral. De Roller’s growing realization of his impotence within the larger political picture spurs an increasingly (but never overtly) destabilized POV, where the line between paranoid delusion and reality grows less and less defined. He sees things that can’t be verified, and the images that people project shapeshift from one setting to another. Including, naturally, his own—he’s willing to play the sensitive colonial ambassador, affecting a modern disposition of liberal white guilt as though to assure the natives that he’s genuine in pursuing their betterment, and he’s also willing to threaten dramatic executive actions against a church that is standing in the way of burgeoning revenue streams, specifically a new casino; he is neoliberalism personified. By the end of the film, even discourse has failed him: the marine admiral (Marc Susini) tells him nothing of substance but that “[e]verything will be fine” after De Roller attempts to pry out some information on the submarine, and the wrathful car monologue he delivers in the following scene falls on the deaf ears of his companion asleep in the passenger seat. “Politics is like a nightclub,” he says in that monologue, and, as we see literally a few scenes later, he is vanishing amidst the noise and darkness.
Whether these suspicions are grounded or De Roller is simply imagining a complex conspiracy designed to sideline him is beside the point — to quote Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49:
Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.
There is a particularly Pynchonian quality to Pacifiction’s depiction of a paranoid fantasy overwhelming one’s perception of reality, and ultimately becoming the postmodern substitute for a mythical objective truth, not least especially due to the seeming legitimacy and political implications of that fantasy (in its own way, De Roller’s search for the submarine behaves like a slower-tempo mimic of Tyrone Slothrop’s search for the 00000 rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow; I’m sure you could even read some of that novel’s fixation on certain male sexual anxieties into the film). Serra is Spanish, not French, but the colonial history of western Europe shared between nations hangs heavy in the air. These historical implications surface not only in the specter of an annihilating submarine invading their shores, but in a number of other more suggestive vectors also: small boatloads of women are spotted disembarking at dusk, the assumption made that they’re prostituting themselves to the submarine crew; the aforementioned casino development receives De Roller’s intervention specifically because natives weren’t permitted entry, surely a discriminatory practice but one seemingly intended to prevent a more vulgar and predatory economic exploitation; the tourism industry is of course a prominent feature of the island and the film (most enigmatically represented by Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau), who cannily ingratiates herself closer and closer to De Roller and his symbolic power), an industry which, in our global postcolonial/neoliberal turn, has functioned more or less as a kind of soft colonial power.
All of these tensions are simmering beneath a serene surface, the film is less about any of them than it is about the mesmerizing hues of the twilight sky and the lush mountains overlooking crystalline seas and the throbbing pulse of the nightclub. The marriage of these sensual pleasures to the undercurrent of menacing political machinations is intoxicating, and by the masterful ending stretch, genuinely hypnotic; I’ve watched the last 45 minutes of this twice, and both times proved difficult to tear my eyes away from the screen. If this writeup has done an insufficient job articulating what is great about this movie, it’s because the qualities that truly distinguish it can only be conveyed by watching it—in short, pure cinema.
Superlatives
I always like handing out silly awards for things, so why not take a moment at the bottom here to single out some things that maybe I didn’t find the space for up above? Naturally these are all limited to what I’ve seen.
Best Performance: 1. Benoit Magimel (Pacifiction), 2. Charles Melton (May December), 3. Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall) — Huller is the prototypical carry job-performance, Anatomy would suffer greatly without her enigmatic manipulations from the stand; May December would still likely be good without Melton but would be stricken by an existential crisis (“What’s the point of this?”) were it not for the former Riverdale actor’s unbelievable sensitivity and physicality almost singlehandedly giving the film its soul. But Magimel does the most significant and probably most difficult work of the year: verbose yet aimless, pathetic yet magnetic, charismatic yet opaque; instead of listing more contrasting adjectives, I’ll sum up by saying Pacifiction is unthinkable without Magimel’s performance.
Best Ensemble: 1. May December 2. The Holdovers 3. Killers of the Flower Moon — Killers is host to the most compelling trio of Scorsese performers since probably Casino (I haven’t seen Wolf of Wall Street yet, I’ll reserve that possibility), and The Holdovers is just a class act through and through, featuring one of the best true debut performances I’ve ever seen in the likes of Dominic Sessa, but May December takes the crown. Portman, Moore, and Melton are all doing completely different things that somehow work in perfect harmony, and even beyond them the bit players are memorable, most especially Cory Michael Smith as the adult son from Gracie’s estranged first marriage. It’s a freakshow all the way down!
Best Not-Normal Movie: 1. May December 2. in water 3. Saw X — I’m taking two criteria into account for this category: the actual quality of the film, and how high it registers on the “this is not normal” scale. May December takes it in a walk, despite in water’s formal unconventionality, although the latest Saw entry deserves mention for essentially doing the usual Saw things while also unambiguously endorsing John Kramer’s (Tobin Bell) actions.
Best Title: 1. Pacifiction 2. Godzilla Minus One 3. Killers of the Flower Moon — I don’t really know what “Godzilla Minus One” is supposed to mean but it’s certainly a compelling arrangement, as is “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but “Pacifiction” manages to be a rare feat in a title that is itself an interpretive element of the film. Add an ‘a’ to create the suggestive “Pacification,” split the portmanteau to create “Pacific fiction,” finagle it a little more to make the oxymoronic slant-homophone “Passive action,” the world is yours with this one.
Worst Title: 1. Master Gardener 2. Knock at the Cabin 3. The Killer — “The Killer” is not offensive in any serious way, it’s just generic and fucks with the SEO for John Woo’s superior 1989 The Killer. “Knock at the Cabin” is just an awkward turn of phrase—you knock at doors, not buildings—but “Master Gardener” takes it for me because of how obviously it’s screaming for a definite article, a humble ‘The,’ and yet denies it.
Best Director: 1. Wes Anderson 2. Christopher Nolan 3. Albert Serra — I think Serra probably does the best individual job of the year, but Nolan does the most, which I think is worth something. Regardless, Wes has helmed 5(!) films in the past calendar year, and they range from good to excellent. “What about Hong?” I can hear you saying, “He’s been putting out two-to-three movies every year for a decade.” Yes, but he’s not trying very hard, and besides, Bill Belichick wasn’t winning Coach of the Year unless he was going 16–0.
Most Rewatchable: 1. The Holdovers 2. Afire 3. in water— The only movie of the year I’ve actually watched in full twice is Asteroid City, which certainly helped deepen my appreciation for it and I imagine would continue to do so in the future. But The Holdovers and Afire succeed by nailing a vibe that’s easy to hang out in, even though they’re both beholden to insufferable protagonists. The Holdovers takes the title here despite being longer because Hunham complicates some of that insufferability along the way; Afire’s Leon (Thomas Schubert) does not.
Most “Rewatchable”: 1. Anatomy of a Fall 2. The Killer 3. Ferrari — “The Rewatchables” is a podcast Bill Simmons does where he rewatches movies and talks about them; I have never listened to the show, but what I can tell from the plugs he does on his sports show is that “Rewatchables-core” movies are more or less things you’d watch after browsing through HBO’s library that are usually middlebrow genre fare driven by big name actors (or Michael Mann movies, hence Ferrari). Sandra Huller is maybe not a big name in America but Anatomy of a Fall otherwise succeeds in the lineage of the classic courtroom dramas Hollywood used to make: it’s eminently watchable and hits a sweet balance between approachability and intelligence that makes you feel good for keeping up with the action.
Biggest Flop: 1. Past Lives 2. Barbie 3. The Boy and the Heron — Sorry for doing misogyny by putting two women-directed movies here, but it is what it is. Boy and the Heron is certainly not a bad movie, but the expectations it carried as Hayao Miyazaki’s return to the fold (and possible swan song?) were too high, and it just fails to cohere into something really meaningful that I can make sense of. Barbie was enjoyable in the theater but has gotten worse since then, but also that was pretty predictable by virtue of it being a literal toy commercial; Past Lives had hope, though. I thought this was fine when I saw it but similar to Barbie has gotten worse with reflection. It truly feels like a creative writing class assignment put to the screen, and Celine Song is just not skilled at complicating the scenario or drawing nuance from the performances, or just composing interesting images (this is her first movie after directing theater for several years, which shows imo; I hold out hope she improves); despite the serious flaws that I find obvious, it’s nonetheless become a critical darling, and I assume that it’s going to win every Oscar it’s nominated for.
Best Old Movie: 1. Love Me Tonight (1932) 2. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) 3. Hi, Mom! (1970) — I’m marking the cutoff at features I watched from before 1980, for purely arbitrary reasons. Hi, Mom! is the first major Brian De Palma movie, and also features one of the most incendiary sequences I have ever seen in a movie, the “Be Black Baby” scene. Liberty Valance is sort of John Ford’s “Death of the West” western, loaded with all sorts of challenging questions on the nature of civilization and America’s history and the power of the law. Love Me Tonight is just a damn good time about a horny French guy lying his way to some royal pussy, with some great songs too.
“I Was Not Familiar With Your Game” Award: 1. Christopher Nolan 2. Charles Melton 3. Dave Bautista — I already mentioned how much Nolan surprised me with Oppenheimer, but if there were an argument against him winning this it would be that I always knew he could do stuff behind the camera. Charles “Riverdale was my Juilliard” Melton and Dave Bautista were complete footnotes in my mental cinematic index that each came out and turned in some of the best acting work of the year.
Best Scene/Sequence: 1. Final 40 minutes of Pacifiction 2. Trinity test + aftermath in Oppenheimer 3. The Swan — I’m counting The Swan as a sequence within the broader Roald Dahl cycle by Anderson, so there you go. It’s the best one of the four shorts, and is up there with the best things Wes has ever done. I wrote above about the Trinity sequence, which is less debatably the best thing Nolan has ever put on screen. Pacifiction is 165 minutes long, so I don’t feel bad singling out such a long chunk here; its ending stretch includes five scenes—De Roller interrogating the admiral, his car monologue, searching for the boat of women at night, one last trip to the nightclub, and the French marines leaving shore—that, despite their uneventfulness, are utterly gripping in a very mysterious way, and end with the most chilling scene of the year.
That does it for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this, and I hope to write more in the coming year.