Sarah's Favorite Movies of 2023
A wealth of rich images, and the emotions that go with them.
I’ve spent my tenure as a cohost of the Seeing & Believing podcast resistant to the idea of ranked lists. You won’t find any numbers on this one; I’ve ordered these movies so that they each speak to each other, as a sort of 2023 film festival. Each of these films revolves around compelling characters, set in unmistakable times and locations. Each of them revolves around rich, complicated emotions: longing, regret, rage, and joy. I hope they speak to you as much as they spoke to me.
Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
A portrait of the artist as a nervous wreck. Showing Up spends a week with Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor preparing for an upcoming show, as she tries to balance her artwork against the demands of the rest of her life. Reichardt’s approach to her characters is both gentle and unsparing in its honesty. Lizzy can be a real pill; she’s cranky toward friends, colleagues, and family, unable to see past her own work and her own pains, big and small. The beauty of the film is in its perceptiveness about the small slice of the Portland art scene where Lizzy lives and works: the self-absorption that comes with complete focus on creating a piece of art, and the flush of joy that comes with that art finally being shared with the outside world.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers)
An exuberant assertion that the way things always have been isn’t the way that things always need to be. Spider-Man as an individual has always been an imperfect nerd, but he’s trying to make the world a better place the only way he knows how: with a mask, the ability to shoot spiderwebs, and a quip at the ready. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse blew apart the conventions of what a superhero movie should look like in 2018; Across the Spider-Verse questions the very structure of the genre, and it does so with a sense of humor that matches the spider-people it revolves around. Throw in bold, ever-shifting art direction, inventive action sequences, and a lineup of terrific vocal performances, and you have a superhero movie that celebrates its origin stories while suggesting that it’s time to move beyond them.
Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)
The title evokes a sense of longing and looking back at what might have been, but the beauty of Celine Song’s debut is that it’s focused tightly on the now of its characters: a warm nod between a couple as they cross paths in a New York City crosswalk, the distinct pang of a dropped Skype call, the awkward search for words between two people when the third person who connects them both has left the room. The film would topple over if it weren’t anchored by its three central performances from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro. The script, and the players who embody it, is generous. The film is like a rare fruit in season: it could have gone bitter if allowed to overripen. Instead, it’s sweet and perfect, the kind of delicacy that doesn’t come along very often. Savor it.
Priscilla (dir. Sofia Coppola)
Priscilla Presley is the perfect subject for Sofia Coppola, whose entire oeuvre revolves around young women who have the appearance of all the power in the world but none of the agency. Coppola never lets us forget that Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) was far too young when she first met Elvis (Jacob Elordi), and she does it all through costuming, makeup, and her finely tuned sense for pairing anachronistic music with montage. Priscilla catches the delicacy of a young woman whose entire identity is stolen away from her before she can fully develop it or possibly fathom what she’s been asked to give up. The strength of the movie is that it floats above the sordid details, giving the character the privacy she’d never been afforded in real life and allowing her to excavate herself from Elvis’s smothering influence slowly, until all of a sudden she’s the person she always was supposed to be.
Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson)
Asteroid City is a layer cake of framing devices, with so many stories within stories that it’s impossible to keep track of which tales are “real” and which ones are stories being told within the artifice of the movie. This is the beauty of Wes Anderson’s aesthetic: the precise framing, 90-degree camera pans, and meticulous production design make the audience keenly aware, always, that we are watching a movie. If you’re tuned in to Anderson’s wavelength, that awareness allows for suspension of disbelief that makes the many layers of his aesthetic credible. By holding us at arm’s length, we can see the details clearly. Across each story, the same actor can play different shades of the same color of longing; flip back and forth between them, as the movie does, and the action blends into a more complete whole. Somewhere in the center of his precise cinematic machinery, Anderson has suspended the pulsing organic yearning of the human heart.
Occupied City (dir. Steve McQueen)
Human history is long, and human memory is short. Steve McQueen balances these two opposing forces by superimposing the history of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the form of steady voiceover atop static shots of ordinary contemporary life around the city. At first the effect is jarring, then numbing; the narration is devoid of emotion, presenting only facts. This is the address, here are the people who lived here, this is what they did, and how they died. Atrocity, then atrocity, then act of resistance, then atrocity again, the years of Nazi occupation reduced to a few short sentences for each location. All the while, life goes on: young people smoke joints in the park, men and women work, children play. The narration invites contemplation, forcing the mind to wander and return by necessity. How aware are these people of the history on which they tread? How much do they care? Occupied City is an exercise in patience, but then again, so is history, and so is the act of living.
Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)
Grim and gorgeous and meticulously plotted, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is less about a Great Man of History than it is about a brilliant man who got swept up in the current of history because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. The film depicts the push and pull of fusion and fission on two tracks, one in the subjective screaming color of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), and the other in the coldly lush black-and-white of a petty rival, Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). Nolan tells the story of the development of the atomic bomb as a classic tragedy: the very thing that makes Oppenheimer so suited to his work will prove also to be his undoing and possibly the undoing of the world as we know it.
Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese’s retelling of the book by David Grann is a work of true adaptation, taking the source material and reinterpreting it for film in a way that leaves us with no doubts about where Scorsese is coming from and why he finds this story so compelling. Where Grann treats the story of the Osage murders as a by-the-numbers criminal investigation, focusing primarily on the methods used by the nascent FBI, Scorsese instead chooses to focus on the factors that allowed the murders to take place. His long years as a master of the gangster picture have made him uniquely suited to tell stories about ravenous human depravity. With Scorsese’s experience comes the wisdom to know when to admit he’s just one storyteller. Killers of the Flower Moon opens the door on a dark chapter of United States history and leaves space for future stories from other perspectives to be told.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (dir. Raven Jackson)
A portrait of land and memory and human touch, all layered together in a film that eschews plot because it simply doesn’t need it. Jackson’s feature debut marries her sense for striking, warm imagery with a poetic approach toward editing. She opens with a shot of two pairs of hands: Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) holding a fishing pole at the center of the frame, with the hands of her father (Chris Chalk) in the foreground, empty but going through the motions as he teaches her how to fish. His hands overlap hers but never fully cover her gestures. He’s left his mark on how she approaches the world, but now she can choose what to do with herself. The rest of the film shuttles back and forth between past and future, marking the ways that Mack’s parents, and the place she grew up, shaped her. The resulting portrait is delicate and resilient, the lapping of water that shapes a riverbank.
The Boy and the Heron (dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
We don’t tend to think of swan songs as being playful, but Miyazaki has had practice with coming out of retirement to make films that are imaginative statements about life. The Boy and the Heron is dead-serious when it comes to questions about legacy, family, and responsibility. It’s also colorful and surprising, with a lightness of touch that serves to underline the film’s rage in a way that strengthens its argument. It’s time to let go of the old ways of thinking, says Miyazaki, and to embrace an existence built on grace and raucous life. I’ll never look at parakeets the same way again.
Honorable Mentions: Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders), Godland (dir. Hylnur Pálmason), Ferrari (dir. Michael Mann), Evil Dead Rise (dir. Lee Cronin), Bottoms (dir. Emma Seligman), A Still Small Voice (dir. Luke Lorentzen), You Hurt My Feelings (dir. Nicole Holofcener), Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki).