Carol Lombardini and all whom the AMPTP represents can go fuck themselves.

Also movies were good in 2023.

Runner-up: How to Blow Up a Pipeline

I love that I get to say this: The movie list was the hardest one to put together this year.

Usually, for a variety of factors, it’s one of the easiest as at least for me, it has more off-years in recent memory than not. This isn’t to say that it’s the worst medium I cover or anything like that. It’s more that due to the sheer amount of logistics, release models, gross capitalistic bullshit, and so on that goes into movies, it often means that they get the fewest chances to shine. That, however, was not the case in 2023.

The blockbusters were generally fantastic, what with John Wick: Chapter 4 and Across the Spider-Verse and so many others. When the streaming movies were good, they generally knocked it out of the park, with They Cloned Tyrone and No One Will Save You and a few others standing out in particular. The action movies were good, the horror movies I saw were good, the indie darlings were good, and dubious feelings about auteur theory aside, it seemed like every gifted filmmaker came out of the woodwork to make something great. We even got a fuckin’ Miyazaki movie this year!

Looming over all of this, of course, is the CEOs refusing to offer a fair contract to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA until way too late into the year, delaying some of the movies I was looking forward to the most. (It should go without saying that this is the least important consequence of the strike, but I’m still a fan, and it matters to me damn it!) The absence of Dune Part II was pretty hard to swallow, as well as Challengers, aka Luca Guadagnino’s horny tennis movie, and a few others.

That said, as far as the product was concerned, there were a minimum of one or two movies that came out every month that I got genuinely enthusiastic about. Call it glut from quarantine, call it luck, call it whatever. As far as movies in 2023 were concerned, I was a pig in shit. Or to put it in a more quantifiable way, this is the longest the honorable mentions list has ever been.

All of this was a long way of saying that this list was a bloodbath, and the only reason How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t on the list proper is because I thought the informant storyline felt out of place. Like something the filmmakers included because it’s the kind of thing you do in a movie. That’s it. That’s the kind of microscopic hairs I had to split. List making is dumb and How to Blow Up a Pipeline rules.

10. Kokomo City

Maybe it’s just because I write about movies on the internet in longer paragraphs than most, particularly when it comes to these year-end lists, but I wonder sometimes whether or not I overthink things.

I have given myself the task of writing about Kokomo City, a documentary about trans women of color who do sex work in various cities in America. My first impulse was to try to think of something analytical to say. Something about the quieter aspects of the many injustices committed against trans women, or perhaps the paradox of trapping women of color in a life that’s designed to ensure their failure and then judging how they make money, or something about the performance of masculinity versus the truth of what I suspect a lot of men truly desire. Something that makes me sound smart.

Or they can just tell you themselves.

There is some intrusion on the part of the filmmakers. (“Intrusion” is way too harsh a word, but bear with me.) Some stylish editing decisions here, some creative visual flair there, the stunning black and white cinematography used to film this whole movie. But other than that, the brilliance of Kokomo City is that it pretty much just points a camera at its subjects and lets them talk.

Daniella Carter, Dominique Silver, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, and all the other people interviewed in Kokomo City. They’re the kind of people I think most would underestimate thanks to our good friends racism and misogyny. In the case of this movie, I’ll admit to being somewhat guilty of this myself, though not of any kind of prejudice. Rather, I don’t expect most human beings walking the planet to be as insightful and cogent as these women wound up being.

I genuinely felt like I got to know each of them. Some of them shined a little brighter than others, but it felt like the movie was simply taking a step back and letting them do the work. Thanks to this approach, there’s an extraordinary intimacy created between not only the women and the filmmakers, but the women and the audience as a whole. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this close to the subjects of a documentary.

I don’t have much to add here. They say it all for themselves. The only thing I’ve got left is a big RIP to Koko Da Doll. Thank you for letting us get to know you, if only just a little bit.

9. Anatomy of a Fall

I don’t know why it took me so long to notice this, but criminal trials are very stupid.

Set aside the racial and moral pitfalls of the judicial system. (Don’t actually set them aside ever, but just for the sake of this dumb thought exercise.) The state accuses someone of a crime. A burden is then placed on the state to prove that crime, and also for the accused to attempt to prove their innocence, provided they choose to do so. (Or at least that’s how it works here in America.) How did we decide to handle that onus? By gathering everyone in an elaborate room run by people in ridiculous robes and theatrically presenting evidence. We then let a bunch of random people decide who did or didn’t do what.

Is there a better way of doing this? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m also being somewhat exaggerative in that it doesn’t have to be a big stupid spectacle every time. But it is frequently a spectacle and it is frequently stupid.

All this came to mind because there’s a scene in Anatomy of a Fall in which the prosecutor tries to use the philosophical underpinnings of the lead character Sandra’s novels in order to prove that she’s a murderer. It’s a stupid move on the prosecutor’s part and it reeks of desperation and impetuosity. Yet, given that hip hop lyrics are for some reason allowed into evidence in certain trials, I can’t entirely dismiss it as fantasy.

The prosecution plays a secret recording of a devastating fight between Sandra and her late husband Samuel in order to prove that she killed him. They force Sandra to testify in front of her child that she had an affair with another woman and that, for all intents and purposes, their marriage was a disaster. It also gets unearthed, again, in front of her child, that Sandra’s husband was suicidal.

Most of this proves that Sandra’s a deeply flawed person, but none of it proves that she’s a murderer. The film makes it somewhat ambiguous whether or not she did it (for the record, I don’t think she did). However, I don’t think that’s really the point. The point is that you’re a shitty person in a shitty marriage, and because of a fling you had or a comment you made, or however you behaved in the tiny private world you didn’t think anyone was ever going to penetrate, you might be convicted of murder. Because you’re you, not because of anything you did. It’s an absurdly stupid thing that can just happen to you.

Also, the passive aggressive use of “P.I.M.P.” is quietly one of the best jokes of 2023.

8. The Killer

Talk about how great a hitman you are for a while. Fail at your job. Continuously lie about yourself to the audience. Kill some guys. Lie to yourself over and over again that you’re in charge of how you feel when you’re clearly not. Have a vision for the results you’re trying to achieve. Fail to deliver on them due to forces you’ve convinced yourself are in your control when they’re not. See someone at the airport who might be after you, and because of that, switch flights, rent a hotel room, create an elaborate detection trap at your front door, and fall asleep on a chair with one eye open. Be a Gen X cliché and listen to The Smiths while you do all of the above.

Swap out anything having to do with being a hitman or killing people and replace them with examples related to filmmaking and you’ve essentially described “auteur” directors. There’s much to learn about living life from watching The Killer. Thank you for the lessons, Fincher.

7. Past Lives

A whole lot of digital ink has been spilled over how much this movie devastated just about everybody who watched it. Indeed, there was many a loud sniffle and snort in my theater. Even though I’m broken and can’t cry during movies (I’m in therapy! I’m on it!) I did assemble a quick mental rolodex of every crush I’ve ever had that I fell out of contact with, and it suddenly occurred to me that nothing’s stopping me from reaching out again.

I didn’t. That would be weird. “Hey, long time no see. I’m reaching out because I saw this movie that reminded me of all the chemicals my brain pumps through my blood when I think about you and I don’t have any real control over how to make that process stop, even though I’d like to for the sake of this social interaction.” But just the thought that I could made clear a certain angle of this movie that I think has been somewhat ignored. Past Lives, on top of everything else, is a very affective internet movie.

Of course there’s that person you never really forgot about. The one that will always occupy a space in your emotional core, and though maybe you can go long stretches without thinking of this person, every once in a while, you’ll brain will put them front and center just to completely shatter you. Most of the time, this person pops up at some sort of emotional low. It’s not only a semi-basic fact of living, but we’ve seen who knows how many movies and read who knows how many books about this very topic. Stories where an old flame gets rekindled. The circumstances change, but the emotionality doesn’t.

What we haven’t had a lot of yet are explorations about how the internet can not only keep that flame burning hot without the prolonged periods of zero contact, but how it can open you and whoever that person is to you to all new modes of emotional ruin. Sure, you could delete your accounts, but they’re still just a quick reactivation or a new account away.

Past Lives doesn’t necessarily put that dynamic front and center. But it does spend the middle portion of the movie building up an intense (re)bond between Nora/Na Young and Hae Sung that’s forged by video calls and Facebook messages. Then we get that knockout of an ending. You don’t get one without the other.

Past Lives hit me the way my experiences with the Emily is Away games or Perfect Tides did. Which is to say that reports of its ability to demolish you have not been exaggerated.

6. Priscilla

One of my favorite qualities of Sofia Coppola is how mean she can be.

It’s a weird thing to think, seeing as this quality has led to some of her deepest creative lows. It’s the aspect of her creative output that led to the extremely misguided caricature of Cameron Diaz in Lost in Translation and her need to lampoon the emptiness of Los Angeles and the rich is what led to The Bling Ring, which for my money (and a lot of others I imagine) is one of her few misses to date.

Then again I don’t know whether or not the Cameron Diaz thing has finally been confirmed or not, and while I can pretend to be above it, I’m not. The Cameron Diaz thing was petty and witless, but I can’t say it wasn’t funny. And even though The Bling Ring didn’t do it for me, her impulse is correct that there’s something to the white Los Angeles elite that’s ripe for the mocking. Maybe she’s just the wrong person to do it. Clearly, she’s self-aware, but how self-aware can you be when you grew up more or less in that culture? What filters do you not know you have?

Priscilla takes this cutting impulse of hers and finally aims it in the right direction. (Or at least I think that’s “finally” the case. I haven’t seen Marie Antoinette since it came out.) It takes a cultural icon, Elvis Presley, a name so big that Pages knew the correct spelling when I just messed up typing his last name, and portrays him for what he was: A childish manipulative moron who seduced a teenager, gave her drugs, and kept her hanging on for a large chunk of her youth.

It’s glorious.

There’s a scene early on where Priscilla wants to have sex, but thanks to some basic Philosophy 101 Elvis has been reading in his spare time, he refuses her because he thinks they should control their desires. Very soon after, she listens in on a phone call between Elvis and The Colonel about how he’ll give up reading the books.

I haven’t seen this exact behavior play out before. But I’ve seen stuff that’s so close that it might as well be. Some sort of faux intellectual enlightenment used as a thin justification to deny someone because of the power trip. To watch Sofia Coppola use Elvis fucking Presley to channel a lot of guys I knew or heard about in college made me indescribably happy. That happiness doesn’t last the more I think about the implications, but still.

In the end, I hope more filmmakers follow Sofia’s lead in making anti-biopics about “great men.” We got a little bit of that with Napoleon as well, so maybe someone will realize this is a thing and pick up the torch.

5. Beau is Afraid

I have a tradition where I take my father to see the most fucked up movies of the year when they come out. The ones usually released by A24 and make a splash with movie nerds.

I took him to see Good Time. It certainly left an impression, but it’s a movie you’d have to remind him of were you to talk to him about it. (He didn’t think it was bad or anything like that. He loved it. He’s just old, as he’ll gleefully tell you.) That, however, is not the case with Midsommar. I’m too lazy to look up whether or not I wrote about this tradition when I put that on my top 10 when it came out, but that’s a movie he still brings up with enthusiasm every opportunity he gets to do so.

I will probably spend my life wondering what could’ve been if I was able to take him to see Beau is Afraid.

4. BS High

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched something that made me this angry.

BS High is a documentary about a man named Roy Johnson. Roy, essentially, created a fake high school, got a bunch of real kids to participate, promised all those kids college scholarships and potential careers in football, pocketed the loans he made out in their names that he also used to destroy their credit, worked them under exceedingly dangerous conditions including multiple games a week, delivered nothing to them in return, and shattered many of their dreams. Throughout the documentary, he’s given ample opportunity to show any amount of contrition or remorse. He fails to do so.

Whether it be the CTE cover-up or the us of college athletes as free labor or any number of football related scandals, it’s becoming clearer to wider swaths of the American public just how much professional football uses and abuses its athletes. None of this has stopped its fans from enjoying it of course, but there’s a stink in the air where the wasn’t before.

However, if there’s a difference between the CTE cover-up and Roy Johnson’s scam, it’s that the NFL knew that it should at least pretend to be ashamed of what it had done. Roy Johnson doesn’t have that in him.

Roy indeed had some co-conspirators in his scheme. A system that turns a blind eye toward anyone attempting to profit off the suffering of black kids. A system unconcerned with the consequences of said profit, or any profit for that matter. A lack of legislation that could’ve stopped this from happening. Performative masculinity. The bodies of athletes being the literal means of production as far as professional athleticism is concerned. All of these forces enabled Roy, and the documentary does a tremendous job of laying them out for the audience. But at the end of the day, there’s the man.

Roy could do it because these institutions are compromised, and he’s also the embodiment of these compromises. Some will chalk up his on-camera behavior to mental illness, but I think he can tell right from wrong and I’m not willing to let him off the hook. Roy is unchecked greed. Roy is the destruction of an athlete’s body. Roy is the force that will use up these kids for all their worth and then kick them to the curb. He is all of these things, unfiltered. Stopping him will not end anything that allowed him to destroy these kids’ lives. But nobody has ever embodied a problem the way Roy does.

There’s a part in the end where he says something to the effect of how he feels an energy he’s never felt before from talking about what he’s done, and how he only sees his life trajectory going up from here. It’s terrifying.

3. Barbie

I could get into the substance of the movie. The handling of what it means to be a woman, and generally, what it means to be human and how those two concepts intertwine. I could marvel at the technical aspects, mainly the production design. I could go into just how funny I still think it is and how I think this will remain true well into the future.

If I’m being honest, none of those reasons are why this movie is here. On merit, Barbie would still be this high on the list. But in reality, this movie is here because of the experience of seeing it in a theater.

Everyone (besides me) was wearing pink. (My one shirt with pink on it was too dirty to wear, having essentially sweated through it during the summer picket lines.) One person bothered to come dressed up as Ken in a box, and he had to take off his costume before sitting down. (I have a picture of him, but I don’t want to put a picture of a stranger on the internet, though I know full well that’s why he was doing it.) A large swath of the people there seemed to be my age. (I write this on January 16, 2024 at the age of 32.) The movie started and everyone, including myself, had an absolute blast.

There was an energy there that I don’t quite know how to describe. An energy I imagine Nolan wanted me to feel earlier in the day when I went to a 1:00 AM showing of Oppenheimer. (Because I thought it would be funny, that’s why.)

Oppenheimer is very much a movie wrapped in the artifice of seeing it in a theater. A film, like arguably all of Nolan’s movies, that’s trying to inspire an old school sense of awe that many of our living master filmmakers describe having as kids when they were sitting in theaters. That’s not why it isn’t on this list. (For the record, that’s because I didn’t click with the pacing and I didn’t think it did an effective job of interrogating the darkness.) But it was an aspect of Oppenheimer that I felt Nolan was cramming in my face ever second while watching it. It’s possible I was bringing in too much Nolan baggage with me. But I don’t care.

Barbie, on the other hand, gave me that feeling in its purest form, and it made it look easy. It’s a movie that’s dragging the weight of massive IP behind it, and admittedly the meta Mattel material was its weakest. But it felt like it was strong enough to carry that load, probably because it also didn’t feel like it was trying to carry a century’s worth of cinema along with it. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but compared to Oppenheimer, it feels boundless.

2. Poor Things

I have a tradition where I take my father to see the most fucked up movies of the year when they come out. The ones usually released by A24 and make a splash with movie nerds.

I took him to see Good Time. It certainly left an impression, but it’s a movie you’d have to remind him of were you to talk to him about it. (He didn’t think it was bad or anything like that. He loved it. He’s just old, as he’ll gleefully tell you.) That, however, is not the case with Midsommar. I’m too lazy to look up whether or not I wrote about this tradition when I put that on my top 10 when it came out, but that’s a movie he still brings up with enthusiasm every opportunity he gets to do so.

I will probably spend my life wondering what could’ve been if I was able to take him to see Beau is Afraid. And, even more so, Poor Things.

1. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

I’ve spent the last few years of this blog championing coming-of-age stories about girlhood.

There was my previously mentioned experiences with the Emily is Away games and Perfect Tides, video games about the intersection between self-discovery and the internet. I’ve talked about such movies as Turning Red, Eighth Grade, Aftersun, Waves, and a few more. On the TV front, I’ve got Sex Education, PEN15, and Never Have I Ever, and if we want to get into the stuff I didn’t or don’t cover on this blog, the list would continue. The graphic novel Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me had a profound effect on me when I read it in quarantine, the album Wallsocket by underscores almost made my year end album list this year, and so on and so on and so on.

I don’t love this stuff because I’m so profound or mature. (Nor am I a pervert! I swear!) It’s because, as I’ve probably explained elsewhere on this blog before, it’s just different. I’m a white dude who grew up in America. My story’s been told more times than I could ever count. These days, I simply crave what’s new to me.

In reality, however, it shouldn’t be new at all. Everything I just listed probably wouldn’t exist were it not for Judy Blume, and this is my first time ever fully experiencing one of her stories. I never read the books. I deeply regret that now, because they're probably the ur-text for most of what I’ve loved in recent years.

Shortly before writing this, I bought a copy of the book. If it has even a fraction of a morsel of the warmth and tenderness and humanity on display in the movie, I’m sure I’ll love it as dearly as I love all the media it’s influenced. And I’ll probably feel the same way about her other books to, because honestly, I’m ready to go all in on the the rest of those as well.

I’m trying to think of something more to say here, but I don’t really know what. This is certainly the most I felt a movie in 2023, and when Rachel McAdams is eventually snubbed, I won’t be surprised. But I’ll still be sad. Also, let’s make sure everyone involved in the making of this movie keeps working for a long time as well.

Honorable Mentions

Air
All of Us Strangers
BlackBerry
Bottoms
The Boy and the Heron
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
Close
Eileen
Extraction 2
Fast X
Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3
The Holdovers
The Iron Claw
John Wick: Chapter 4
Killers of the Flower Moon
May December
M3GAN
The Mission
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Napoleon
No One Will Save You
Passages
Polite Society
Saint Omer
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Taste of Things
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
They Cloned Tyrone
A Thousand and One
The Zone of Interest

Will Watch Someday

A bunch of docs I didn’t get to this year.
La Chimera
The Delinquents
Love Life
Pacification
Perfect Days
Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
Society of the Snow
I’m sure there’s more.