Kevin's favorite movies of 2023
Looking back on a year of looking back.
After a slightly disappointing film year for me in 2022 (relatively speaking), the movies came roaring back this year. Established masters released masterpieces; lesser-known talents knocked me flat with bolt-from-the-blue works of art. My only misgiving with the list below is that it does not account for so many films that I simply did not have the chance to watch before press time. That’s the way it goes sometimes; I hope Hirokazu Kore-eda can forgive me.
Last week, Sarah arranged her list as a sort of film festival with the various films in conversation with one another, revealing interesting thematic juxtapositions. I don’t share Sarah’s allergy to ranked lists and am usually content to stick with a simple ranking in order of personal preference, but it’s hard to ignore the common thread running through my picks. So many of the year’s films were interested in the past: retelling history, probing at memories, or ruminating on the preoccupations that have generated a rich assortment of cinematic work from filmmakers over the decades. To invoke Robert Frost, 2023 was a year of reflection on the divergences of various woodland roads. These films consider the ways that our choices have made all the difference … or maybe the ways that we can only wish our choices had done so.
10. Priscilla (dir. Sofia Coppola)
Few people would label Sofia Coppola as a master of suspense. The moniker conjures associations of Hitchcockian clockwork, mortal danger, viewers on the edges of their seats. By contrast, Coppola’s films are typically quiet, even languid, in their portrayals of characters (often women) who find themselves at a crossroads where the stakes of their choices are high but hazily defined. Priscilla fits that mold with its take on the life of Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny, in an astounding breakout role), who gets roped into the mythology surrounding Elvis before she has the life experience that would enable her to count the cost of marriage to such a myth. Coppola captures the exhilaration of Priscilla being swept off her feet by Prince Charming; she also captures the stifling aimlessness of Priscilla pacing the empty rooms of her Graceland palace while the King attends to his pop empire elsewhere. Priscilla is not merely “Elvis’s wife,” but defining who she is instead is an arduous, slippery task. In the meantime, she is caught in abeyance, and so is the audience—if not a state of suspense, then at least a state of suspension.
9. The Starling Girl (dir. Laurel Parmet)
When contemplating common patterns of wrongdoing within entire subcultures, it’s all too easy to indulge simplified, flattened narratives about the individuals who are involved. Abusers are cast as inhuman monsters; victims and survivors can be portrayed in ways that rob them of personhood and agency. The Starling Girl is clear-eyed about how such situations are often much more complex. In telling its story of a teenage girl named Jem (Little Women’s Eliza Scanlen) who is groomed into a sexual relationship with her youth pastor, it is equally (and disturbingly) clear-eyed about how religious communities can provide fertile ground for specific varieties of abuse to flourish. Director Laurel Parmet, who also wrote the screenplay, has obviously paid attention to the nuances of the spiritualized language that some conservative churches employ to enforce preferred behavioral norms, sweep wrongdoing under the rug, and condition girls like Jem to distrust themselves. Scanlen plays her challenging role flawlessly: no sentimental or obvious ploys for sympathy, just a portrait of a girl who makes her own choices, keeps her own counsel, and refuses in the end to assent to passivity.
8. The Iron Claw (dir. Sean Durkin)
During the first date between pro wrestler Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) and his future wife, Pam (Lily James), Pam asks Kevin why he works so hard to excel at an athletic pursuit whose outcomes are prearranged. Kevin responds with an explanation of how entertainment like pro wrestling works, but his true answer comes later in the conversation, when he reveals that nothing in his life is more important than his family. Wrestling is the family business of the Von Erichs, a situation overseen by Holt McCallany’s Fritz, who is an overseer first and a father second. The Iron Claw takes more than a few liberties with the tragic real-life story of the Von Erichs, but the portrait that Sean Durkin paints is everything it needs to be in its depiction of a very American form of masculinity. The film is held together by McCallany and Efron: the former as a Saturn whose obsession devours his sons one by one, and the latter as a young man who seems almost to hide behind his own muscles. Efron’s eyes tell the full tale of a person who has been taught that there is only one way to be a man, and who lacks the language to ask for what he truly needs.
7. Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
Kelly Reichardt would never be confused with Frank Capra, but Showing Up shares one of the insights that has made It’s a Wonderful Life such an enduring classic. Michelle Williams’s Lizzy, a prickly sculptor laboring to pull together an art show at the eleventh hour, finds herself continually frustrated by the quotidian annoyances of everyday life that keep her from her work. She has a day job to attend to, of course. Her landlady keeps procrastinating on repairs to Lizzy’s broken water heater (and, to add insult to injury, is also an artist who seems to be enjoying greater success than Lizzy). And after Lizzy’s cat mauls a bird, she feels obliged to nurse it back to health, a time-consuming and anxiety-inducing effort. Lizzy displays palpable George Bailey energy in the way that she so often does the right thing only through gritted teeth, a characterization that sets up a similar hard-won lesson as the one that closes Capra’s film. The distractions and detours that seem to keep us from the good life are, in reality, a good life in themselves. George’s lesson is heralded by angels and full-throated choruses of Christmas carols; Lizzy’s makes itself known in a snatch of a birdcall, barely discernible just before Reichardt cuts to black.
6. Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders)
Speaking of the good life, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is the sort of film that makes you thankful just to be alive: a cup of cool water in a year that often felt to me like an arid wilderness. Its story (if you can call it that) follows Hirayama (Cannes honoree Kōji Yakusho), a quiet man living humbly in Tokyo as a cleaner of public toilets. Hirayama wakes before sunup, waters his plants, goes to work, eats dinner at the same restaurants, then goes home to read until he falls asleep. On his days off he visits bookstores and record shops to see if anything piques his curiosity. He barely speaks, but Yakusho needs no dialogue to reveal this character to us. The judicious editing turns Hirayama’s daily routines into rhythm; the camerawork and cinematography shape the rhythm into music. They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, so it would be pointless for me to continue like this. It would be fitting to say that Perfect Days made me feel like one of the trees that Hirayama loves so much: watered and nourished, stretching toward the sky.
5. The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer)
The resilience of the human race is often cited as one of our chief virtues. People are endlessly creative, endlessly adaptable. It sounds great in the abstract, but the devil is literally in the details. What happens when all that creativity and adaptability is applied to, say, committing genocide? Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest has a chilling answer to that question, giving us a portrait of a Nazi as an ordinary man. Rudolf Höss, the master of Auschwitz, is not a movie monster but just a guy. He celebrates his birthday, plays with his kids, and frets over his career just like any other guy might. His wife devotes herself to her garden (which shares a wall with the death camp next door) and bustles about her dream home. If this hair-raising exploration of the banality of evil constituted the entirety of Glazer’s project, it would be worth seeing, but he’s up to more than that. A flash-forward sequence of janitors putting in a shift at a modern-day Holocaust museum brings everything sharply into focus. As the cleaning crew blandly vacuums the carpet under a display of thousands of victims’ discarded shoes, we understand that Höss is not simply a cautionary tale or a historical boogeyman. Don’t get complacent, Glazer tells us. People really can get used to anything.
4. Ferrari (dir. Michael Mann)
As with so many Michael Mann characters, Enzo Ferrari is a man who knows what he wants to do and lets nothing—not ethics, not sentimentality, not loneliness—obstruct him from doing it. Ferrari wants his cars to be fast and wants the rest of the world to know it; he wants to honor his commitments to his mistress and their son, even though that would dishonor his wife and the son they had together. He tells himself that he does only what he must, that he acts not maliciously or selfishly but only in service to his principles. The tension in Mann’s film comes from the certainty that his principles will collide violently with other realities; as Ferrari himself points out, “two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same time.” Less disciplined films than Ferrari have taken similar setups and crafted stories about renegade geniuses who refuse to be shackled by the small, but Mann does not succumb to this seductive framing. This is no Randian fantasy. He lets us partake of Ferrari’s “terrible joy,” ensuring that we feel the full weight of both words in that phrase. We can judge for ourselves whether the exhilaration of speed is worth the cost, in the end.
3. Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Here is the sort of movie that almost feels too big to talk about. With this film and 2019’s The Irishman, Martin Scorsese has solidified his status as an unparalleled crafter of epics whose sprawling narratives are dwarfed by the magnitude of the moral issues with which they grapple. Scorsese has been doing this from the beginning, of course, but you get the sense that now, at the end of his life, he no longer has the time or appetite for playing with the audience’s sympathies toward his morally compromised characters. From its first scenes, Killers of the Flower Moon is unambiguous about the morally withered state of William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his various associates; it also plainly observes that their brazen misdeeds are not extraordinary but rather are symptoms of a sick society. Scorsese’s two-fisted filmmaking and his grief-stricken cameo in the epilogue don’t allow the audience to maintain any illusion that making a movie or watching it can redress these wrongs, but at least one can bear witness and mourn. That quality alone makes his film feel urgently important.
2. Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson)
Asteroid City is the most beautiful film on this list from a purely visual standpoint. Every frame of every scene in the titular desert town has the look of a faded truck-stop postcard, the kind with a podunk town’s name emblazoned across the sky while a brief message assures the recipient, “Wish you were here.” Wes Anderson’s characters wish something were here, and excavating their social niceties and deadpan speech to discover the precise nature of that something brings a rich vein of emotion to light. Longing hovers like a bruise beneath the skin of this film. Anderson does not press it directly for fear that the pain would be too much, which makes it easy to misinterpret the film as stoic or shallow. It’s easy to misunderstand the film entirely—what is Anderson even saying, here? The key might be in a late scene between an actor and his director, where the actor complains that he doesn’t understand the play he’s in. The director reassures him: “It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.”
1. Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)
It is not hard to see why Celine Song’s remarkable feature debut drew comparisons to Richard Linklater’s Before… trilogy. It follows two people whose brief connection in youth persists through the years, even as they reside on opposite sides of the globe and build lives and romances without each other. If the romance were all that Song had to offer, Past Lives would be fine, but nothing special. What brings it into best-of-the-year territory is its portrait of the sort of abstracted regret that all people carry. Greta Lee's Nora is fundamentally happy with the life and the husband she has, but that doesn't mean she is immune to contemplating the road not taken. Song poignantly captures and preserves instants where her characters' heart-pangs are so clear that they are practically audible on the soundtrack. Life is a succession of instants. Sometimes we are mercifully ignorant of when an instant’s decision closes off potential futures to us; sometimes, we know all too well what the consequences will be.
The next 10: The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki); You Hurt My Feelings (Holofcener); Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Dos Santos/Thompson/Powers); May December (Haynes); Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (Craig); Oppenheimer (Nolan); Tori and Lokita (Dardenne/Dardenne); The Killer (Fincher); Godland (Pálmason); Skinamarink (Ball)