The year in cinema that was 2023 started slowly, built to a crescendo, exploded and imploded simultaneously–when the Barbenheimer phenomenon and twin work stoppages collided on the same whirlwind weekend in July–attempted to rebound and rally in the latter days of the post-strike holiday season (industry, heal thyself!), before closing out the calendar year and entering awards season with a slew of best-of lists that all seemed to reach the same general conclusion: “considering the apocalyptic prognostications that came to define entertainment industry editorials in 2023, it was a pretty damned solid year for movies!” I’m inclined to agree. My top 10 lists reflects my allegiance to this position:

10. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING, PART 1

It’s bizarre to think of a 250 million-dollar studio tentpole that’s also the seventh entry in a three-decade-old film franchise as an underdog property. But, in the summer of 2023, it was. Hamstrung by a bloated budget of Covid-related overruns, the insurmountable burden of expectation commensurate to being viewed as the spiritual successor to the phenomenon that was 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, the relative misfortune of being the actual successor to franchise apex Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and the unstoppable force that came in the form of the Barbenheimer buzzsaw (released just a week after this film), M: I - DR, P1 felt, weirdly–almost karmically–set up to fail. But a reassessment is coming. Maybe it will be as soon as 2025, when the culture, writ large, inevitably reevaluates Dead Reckoning, Part 1 before the eighth (and final?) film in the series hits theaters. Or maybe it will take much longer than that. But I’m confident that it will happen. Because this is not only one of the best films of 2023. It’s one of the finest installments in a franchise chocablock with genre classics and one of the greatest action films since, well… Fallout!

9. SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

It would have been very easy for the follow-up to a beloved, instant-classic, genre-defying, Oscar-winning game changer to rest on its laurels or even punt with a lazy “the same as last time, only more” approach. Luckily, the team that privileged us with the aesthetically and narratively groundbreaking Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse–one of the only 2018 films that seemed to achieve virtual unanimity amongst critics–still seems activated and motivated in the pursuit of not just breaking ground, but seeing how much deeper they can get into it. Deeper with their visual pallet, deeper with their characters, and deeper with their increasingly byzantine (yet never confusing) narrative gambits. Animation is not a genre. It’s a medium. It’s a technique. And there may not have been a film in 2023 with a more incorrigibly bravura technique than Across the Spider-Verse.

8. MENUS-PLAISIRS - LES TROISGROS

At a time in which our collective celebration and fetishization of all things culinary and gastronomic have created a cultural hegemony across virtually every avenue of the entertainment universe (even the most critically acclaimed, episodic, scripted series currently running is about the toll that kitchen culture takes on the psyche), it’s particularly remarkable and unexpected for a work of art that feels like “the last word on fine dining films” to come from, of all places, the 94-year-old master of the Verite form, Frederick Wiseman. Or perhaps it’s not that remarkable at all. Wiseman has been delivering films that feel like the “last word” on whatever institution he decides to point his camera at since he basically invented a documentary subgenre in the early 1960s. Once again he’s delivered not only the last word, but a full meal. It’s four hours long. But, like a great meal, I didn’t want it to end.

7. HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE

One of the best (and most unexpected) thrillers of 2023 came in the form of a fictional “adaptation” of a non-fiction, polemic manifesto about politically-motivated property destruction. But, in spite of the film’s thorny veil of righteous indignation with regard to the climate crisis, its secret weapon as a cinematic exercise is that it never allows anything close to a veneer of politics or preachiness to overwhelm its personality as an old-school, four-on-the-floor, barnburner (literally, in one case), thrill ride. In only his second feature, Harvard-educated director Daniel Goldhaber displays an uncommon facility with both deploying a large ensemble across a complex hyperlink narrative, as well as never losing sight of the opportune moments to ratchet up and release tensions proportionately. It’s a nerve-shredder of uncommon potency and an electrifying vehicle for an ensemble of exciting youg actors.

6. AMERICAN FICTION

It’s a deceptively precarious high-wire act that writer/director Cord Jefferson attempts and ultimately succeeds at in the execution of his culture-critic-comedy American Fiction. It’s simultaneously a wildly successful satire about racial expectations and stereotypes, a darkly comic treatise on creativity and commerce, and a deeply felt and bittersweet familial melodrama. Considering that this is Jefferson’s feature debut, it’s positively staggering that he successfully summoned the means to calibrate the proper frequencies of tone and timbre required by such an ambitious and thematically labyrinthine project. What’s most impressive of all, perhaps, is the casual, almost breezy personality he manages to infuse this comedy-forward exercise with. Never dour, always incisive, never pretentious, always inventive, never pandering, always entertaining. For an exciting new voice like Cord Jefferson, this is an artistic sucess story both remarkable and aspirational in equal measure.

5. THE ZONE OF INTEREST

In a recent interview about The Zone of Interest–Jonathan Glazer’s fourth feature film in 23 years–the director was quoted as saying “A brilliant philosopher, Gillian Rose, who wrote a lot about the Holocaust, imagined a film that could make us feel ‘unsafe,’ by showing how we’re emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we’d like to think we are. One that might leave us with as she called ‘the dry eyes of a deep grief.’ Dry eyes versus sentimental tears. Which I thought was a really strong idea. And that’s what I’m trying for. It’s not a cold film, but it has to be a forensic film.” To reductively suggest that The Zone of Interest is “about” the Holocaust is like saying that Lawrence of Arabia is about sand. In its own deeply upsetting yet lyrically artful way, it manages to be a bracingly effective film about the nature of evil by never allowing itself the luxury or simplicty of being about the nature of evil. And by never allowing itself to be that, it becomes so much more.

4. ASTEROID CITY

Somewhere along the line, Wes Anderson decided (or perhaps whatever artistic integrity acts as his creative compass decided for him) that instead of chasing the approval or acquiescence of his critics and detractors–who never stop deriding and devaluing what they see as his “quirks,” yet somehow can’t seem to stop watching his films–he would instead lean in to his artistic lane, faithfully delivering his peerless branded content to those of us who adore what he does and can’t get enough of it. But something interesting happened once he truly decided to double down on his aesthetic and embrace his inherent Wessyness- he turned into one of the most narratively ambitious storytellers of his generation. He always had a facility with framing devices and literal and figurative prosceniums. But the nesting doll structure that he’s been experimenting with and workshopping since, roughly, The Grand Budapest Hotel, finds its logical conclusion-cum-celebration in Asteroid City- a film so confident and sophisticated in its metanarrative gambit that when the emotional climax (perhaps Anderson’s most emotional gut punch since The Royal Tenenbaums) arrives, it feels both unexpected and inevitable. For years (decades even!) critics have pigeonholed Anderson as a shallow stylist more interested in symmetrical framing than with the emotional lives of his characters. What Asteroid City presupposes is… maybe he isn’t?

3. THE KILLER

But what is it about, really? Is it a reflection on the the gig economy and its social and psychological implications? Is it a treatise about unreliable narrators and their place in genre storytelling? Is it an autobiographical meta-commentary by an artist reckoning with his reputation, career, and creative process? Is it a reaction to and meditation on the filmmaker’s seminal provocation Fight Club, a quarter century and thousands of op-eds and misinterpretations later? Or is it just a crackerjack adaptation of a pulpy French comic book from the 90s, rendered with the kind of skill and attention to detail that could only come courtesy of our greatest living perfectionist? Why can’t it be all of the above? Personally I believe that Fincher is at his best when he is at his funniest (see: Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl, et. al), which is probably why I responded so effusively to The Killer, as it seemed to me to be, unequivocally, a self-aware comedy by a self-aware filmmaker. But… that’s just one man’s intepretation…

2. POOR THINGS

Emma Stone has gone on the record with her belief that Poor Things is, fundamentally, a romantic comedy. As one of the film’s producers, one of its creative conservators, and the actress embodying (in every sense of the word) its protagonist, “Bella Baxter,” I would be inclined to take Stone’s word at face value. But having seen the film multiple times now I couldn’t agree more with her assessment. Poor Things not only raises the bar and lends legitimacy to the oft-ghettoized “rom-com” (Stone sees the central “romantic” relationship as that between the film’s instantly iconic, Frankensteinian-feminist heroine and the world she seeks to “circumnavigate”) but does likewise for a similarly stigmatized subgenre, the “sex comedy.” As with the aforementioned David Fincher, I also believe that visionary Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is at his best when he’s at his funniest. As such, I’m of the opinion that this is not only Lanthimos’s best film since The Lobster (my third favorite film of 2016), but it might even be the funniest film I’ve seen since The Lobster. Perhaps this is also cause for some soul-searching on my part, concerning my particular sense of humor. But the heart wants what it wants, afterall…

1. OPPENHEIMER

In a year in which one of the defining auteurs to emerge from the 1980s (Michael Mann) and one of the defining auteurs to emerge from the 1990s (David Fincher) each released their twelfth feature film–both of which are distinct in how easily they can be read as autobiographical musings on their own careers and creative personalities–it seems almost poetic that Christopher Nolan (whose emergence is certainly most closely associated with the 2000s, despite his debut feature having been released in 1998) would privilege us with a film that has not only been widely declared as the filmmaker’s finest work but also brings his oeuvre to a dozen features, exactly. But with all due respect to Ferrari and The Killer–which function as productive metacommentaries for Mann’s obsession with masculinity and professionalism and Fincher’s borderline-sociopathic adherence to a methodology of perfectionism, respectively–it’s Nolan’s three-hour meditation on the social and ideological complexities and flaws of a visionary that emerges as the great “who am I and what have I done?” epic tragedy of the twenty-first century, as well as the defining film of 2023. In that regard, Oppenheimer takes its place as the capper on an unofficial trilogy (along with Inception and Interstellar) about misunderstood geniuses, whose aptitude in their field and professional success in the workplace, provide them with little pause or relief from the haunting realization that their actions have ripple effects and consequences that could lead to the destruction their families, co-workers, or–in the case or a certain theoretical physicist with a fondness for married women and his pork pie chapeau–all living organisms occupying the planet earth. While I can’t take credit for it, my favorite meta-reading of Oppenheimer is that the film is really about Nolan reckoning with the cultural chain reaction, triggered by the success of his Dark Knight trilogy, that led to an arms race within the entertainment industry, the fallout of which may lead to the ultimate destruction of the movie theater as an institution. Not for nothing that Nolan chose to cast as Oppenheimer’s villain, one, Robert Downey Jr.–Iron Man himself. That Marvel property was released in the same summer as The Dark Knight and was equally complicit in the shifting of the paradigm that landed us where we are today. Is Oppenheimer Nolan’s mea culpa? His public self-flagellation for the cultural apocalypse that he fears he may have wrought, smuggled in under the guise of an all-timer biopic? Is Nolan the Cinematic Prometheus!? Or is this kind of indulgent, cinephilic over-analysis just a symptom of the cultural conversation that seems to accompany the release of every new Nolan film? If the filmmaker is forthright in his dedication to being a generational champion for the theatrical cinematic experience, then Oppenheimer will forever be one of the apex examples of that mission. I don’t know if Oppenheimer is my favorite Nolan film or even, necessarily, his best (though it will undoubtedly win him a very deserved Oscar–his first). But it does kind of feel like his “masterpiece.” It is his most complete film, from a thematic, narrative, and intellectual standpoint. In 2023 Christopher Nolan and his hero Michael Mann both logged the twelfth film in their respective filmographies. But while Mann is winding down to what may well be his impending swan song, the 53-year-old Nolan (the exact age Mann was when he released his masterpiece, Heat) appears to be at the top of his game.

Now I am become movies, the savior of the cineplex.

Honorable mentions:

-ALL OF US STRANGERS
-ANATOMY OF A FALL
-BARBIE
-GODZILLA MINUS ONE
-JOHN WICK: CHAPTER FOUR
-KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
-ONE THOUSAND AND ONE
-PAST LIVES
-RYE LANE
-SHOWING UP