THE GIST:

A belated welcome, yet again, to my year-end filmography rundown.

To all the new readers out there, this list is an ongoing tribute to my friend who instituted this format, crappy DaFont stylization and all, and I’m committed to keep it going even as it feels ever more daunting and draining. After all, I always feel great when it’s finished.

Now, I don’t wish to normalize this tardy January posting for something that is celebrating all of the previous year, but the realities of now working in the high-pressure film industry mean that I encounter more frequent hiccups in writing about what I see and enjoy.

That’s not to say that the job hasn’t had its perks. I got to watch not one but two (!) films I worked on be seen the rest of the world, including, most awesomely, my niece during her first and second movie theater experiences (her popcorn consumption rate and technique is scarily similar to my own). Any lacking attribution in the end credits for work done behind the scenes is easily washed away by the ability to tell a three year-old that you’re good friends with the characters onscreen.

Of course, to keep things entirely unbiased and above board, I’ve removed both of those films from all consideration in the below categories. As for the rest, my deeply held, never-audited qualifications for what constitutes a 2023 release are as follows: if I, as a member of the public, could reasonably buy a theater ticket in Los Angeles to see it, or if it was widely published to an online platform in the United States, it counts. As always, the occasional international arthouse slow release rollout obfuscates this, but I try my best to stay honest to no one but myself.

Further complicating this definition though were the dual writers-actors work stoppages which kicked off #HotStrikeSummer and would inevitably punt some releases I saw early all the way into 2024, while also giving me my own minor occupational headaches.

But with a post-Covid glut of releases to sift through, I never felt a dearth of something new to see–something in years past which I would have to supplement by tracking down more foreign fare. This year, I recognize I have a lot more blind spots amongst the subtitled set.

Minor concerns though. I find so little to actually complain about. I saw a lot I loved. I had a lot of trouble whittling down this list. And there’s still so much out there for me to see. As it stands though, the following blurbs consider 109 releases from 2023.

Enjoy!

THE UNHERALDED:

The films that never found their audience, could just use some more exposure, or deserve another look.

A period piece which recognizes how boring the doldrums of society conversation must have been, this is a Malick-like mediation on laying, waiting, and anticipating the moment Emma Mackey abandons polite-ish eye rolls and decides to fire off her verbal sniper rifle from across the room, delivering a single, killing blow of Brontë wit.

This tightly wound procedural manages to refreshingly give some breathing space to subplots involving chilling with the boys and adventures in kitchen renovations.

A belated coming-of-age which walks right up to the edge of thriller, arm hairs all on end—not from any looming sense of danger—but from another moment of self-discovery for our protagonist.

Big, bold tonal swings and a non-stop inertia makes this Technicolor, fish-eyed rom-com feel like we’re watching a meet-cute inside Mad Max: Fury Road.

Filling the unoccupied space of late autumn holiday slashers, this strategic win pitched in the key of Masshole earns hoots, hollers, and eventual annual second helpings.

FAVORITE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE OF 2023:

In a year when we were fully back from Covid lockdown, every public gathering became a hot ticket. None more so than for the pair of highly anticipated films premiering the July 21st weekend, Barbie and Oppenheimer. A dual commitment from both to not shift release dates meant that people could experience not one, but two zeitgeist moments in a single weekend should they refuse to choose.

The prevailing attitude, espoused by a generation which doesn’t blink an eye to unusual juxtapositions and cohabitations of styles and genres within playlists and personal bios, was that we could totally do both at once. Any old-world thinking of box office showdown became an afterthought as people planned their weekends accordingly.

For those of us in LA, it was a great exercise of our skills to make reservations and schedule a day around a movie theater visit. I didn’t overthink my double feature. I just found some times that worked and opted to blast hyper pop in the AM while munching on Red Vines before I cozied up into my black-coffee-fueled dad-rock den in the afternoon. But for those who needed to document and be seen embracing their multi-hyphenate identities to the extreme, the effect of these two films, taken together, flipped each of their creators’ original authorial intent.

I saw individual tickets for the extremely limited 70mm IMAX showings of Oppenheimer become—for the first time—highly marked-up, scalpable commodities, the ultimate trophy (golden or otherwise) which any single film could aspire for. Meanwhile, the longest queue not filing into either film’s showing wrapped around to the iconic Barbie box photo opportunity—before which groups of friends eagerly counted down to the moment they would pose shocked and awed before a flash. Within this shared theater space, it was Oppenheimer which best showcased a gross display of American consumerism, while Barbie became a drawn-out team-building exercise.

I WAS THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED:

How this film became the most touted conversation topic before, during, and after its release shouldn’t come as a surprise. It promised and delivered upon everything we thought we wanted: Euphoria set in a posh, fairytale estate with fancam Elordi; critical darling Keoghan awkwardly partying through the motions of sex and drugs; Pike serving all sorts of NSFW-mentionable looks on every red carpet unfurled from its rollout; and a series of “sticky” meme images you *must* see to understand their OMG contexts.

That all of this never convalesces into a meaningful whole is all quickly explained by Fennel’s position at the helm, now delivering 0-for-2 on films with any substance (she’s backed herself into the ugly corner wherein the only way she can keep her tilted, firebrand crown through her third feature is to shoot a dog).

But pound for pound, you can’t deny this film has more style than most this year. The accents, the clothes, the abundance of shots which will show up in other commercial directors’ mood boards for a long time to come, and yes, the music. This is 2007 electroclash and bloghouse pandering at its finest.

To take this question mark of a category prompt at its most literal, looking at 2007, yes, I was there when it happened. At least I can feel high and mighty digging up my hot take that “Murder on the Dancefloor” isn’t even a top-five Sophie-Ellis Bextor track.

HOT MESS OF THE YEAR:

They push the definitional limits of “watchable” and will probably never again be seen by anyone with autotomy over the remote or a modicum of self-respect.

A film devoid of any dialogue need not be the province of the arthouse, but when this premise is stubbornly applied to a film that is so clearly internally screaming to say something, it must be recognized as a failed experiment.

There are many examples of successful action films with mute protagonists, but when every other character here is illogically rendered voiceless as well (within the same room, our hero’s wife can only convey her grief to him via an onscreen text message), it stretches the incredulity of this world to its limit and becomes more distracting and chaotic than the post-modern gangland anarchy in which it’s set.

While my ears thirsted for anything worth listening to on the screen in front of me, the barely attended theater I sat in also gave me little to focus on. My options: a full-volume but unintelligible argument in Russian from a couple who left halfway through the film or the dulcet sounds of snoring from a man in the row immediately behind me. Somehow both parties saw even less in this film than I did.

A very special Dishonorable Mention for this one because it took me multiple home-viewing attempts to trudge all the way through, a task I’ve now properly flagged as an automatic qualifier for this category ever since Space Jam: A New Legacy made me first realize that my lacking time management skills and poor judgement of priorities could at least produce a single line-item anecdote in my annual film writeup.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Because making a ranked list is hard, these shortlist candidates are ordered alphabetically.

Delivering on the musical theater potential of a French courtroom’s composition, this rollicking song-and-dance number features blind boys, sarcastic lawyers, bad girl-bosses, and the most arch needle drop of the year. It was an instrumental!

The genre of boom and bust tech tellings is becoming sadly long, but this one barrels through entertainingly enough by explaining its success rested on the shaky architecture of nothing more than boardroom boars and dumbly exploited technical loopholes. With a commitment to building local and covert NHL franchise machinations, this is the most proudly Canadian movie of 2023.

A hilarious, queer, modern Heathers, the perfect case study for elevating the subtext to the main text. It’s Not Another Teen Movie through the lens of Assassination Nation.

Points off for closing the book on a “4” instead of a “3”, as the steadily reliable acrobatic exposition finally hit its laugh limit. But for every down-note yin, there’s something like the dragon-gun shootout to provide the necessary, jolting yang to pick us back up and tackle the Sisyphean task of that Montmartre staircase three steps at a time.

Buoyed by a narrator more problematic and unreliable than a podcast host who over-performs for his video audience, this globetrotting one-man show folds up across six neat chapters. Fincher will say it’s a nod of respect to its graphic novel origins. Realists will say it’s him sneaking his slick, pitch-black visuals past the Netflix algorithm to deliver a more receptive audience, even if the stay-at-home crowd still haven’t gotten around to adjusting their TVs to properly display that one episode from the final season of Game of Thrones.

A marathon work, one that entertains and surprises by constantly changing up style and mise en scène on the fly. What’s more ugly American than wall-to-wall rock stars behaving badly and a captive audience listening to a live taping of a true-crime podcast hour?

There’s an exhilarating feeling that washes over you the moment you realize the film you’re sitting in is camp, especially if that camp is initially camouflaged by the desaturated pastels of a tiny-town, coastal Savannah. An intentionally muted palette serves this emotional scab-picking tabloid melodrama well, as it appears to receive the same lackadaisical level of color grading care the Lifetime TV movie made about this unstable nuclear family will eventually receive.

While a well-drawn, interior tug-of-war emotionally anchors this twee LiveJournal entry, things really get rolling when third-wheeling is studied as a voyeur cringe curiosity. Sometimes love means being the bigger man and not staying home with your Playstation.

An unintentional funhouse mirror pointed at Barbie, a black-and-white reflection of that doll’s life lived backwards: our mortal protagonist conquers death, grows up within the patriarchy, discovers the support of women, rejects capitalism to become her “own means of production” (with all the genitals), and eventually retires in a very un-plastic utopia. Go girl!

Fresh faces I care about, whip-smart directing, and a supernatural logic and context which make enough sense to me that the scares burrow in and earn themselves.

GREAT PERFORMANCES:

The actors who defined their films, made bad material great, and occasionally made you crawl the end credits just to see who that was, listed alphabetically.

TOP 10:

The bones of this film are pulled straight from the best heist thrillers around—the team-building romp of Ocean’s Eleven, the hold-your-breath execution of Rififi, and the insurgent and incendiary provocation of The Battle of Algiers. If you get your kicks from people in a huddle talking through a plan to break the law, sign right up.

Just know though, these guys promise no cache of gold behind a vault door or the raising of your favorite flag. No fortune, no glory, just a tantrum to stay alive. But, if a quickened pulse is all it takes, then the way this story is assembled together will deliver, as the ratcheting up of tension triggered my most effective heart attack since Good Time.

While other films this year could erstwhile be described as “punk rock”, this is the one that’s actually driven a broken van across the blank Midwest and spent a night in jail with a busted lip. Hell yeah.

While 2016’s Shin Godzilla succeeded as a jesterly, acid-dipped criticism of a specific moment in Japan’s political history, this re-reboot seeks to be more atemporal and leave a longer-lasting influence. It’s not about making a snide barb at the world now, but building a blockbuster therapy project to conquer the demons who still haunt decades on.

It’s the perfect Godzilla story, a retelling of the original with a fuller, more contemporary emotional vocabulary. When this historical context is bolstered by a great supporting cast of actual characters, the monster sequences take on more meaningful import. As if the international acclaim of Drive My Car inspired a new wave of hard-fought optimism in Japanese cinema, what we have here isn’t a battle waged against a creature but for a battered humanity.

Win or lose, it’s never not fascinating that one of a country’s longest-standing, soft-power pop-cultural exports can so consistently and effectively criticize its own government.

Capping off his “Difficult Men With Troubled Pasts” trilogy, Schrader takes us into the exciting world of horticulture to teach us a thing or two about rose bushes and a lot about metaphors barely buried in shallow graves.

Come for the weeding. Come for the journaling. If you can get on this film’s wavelength, its disregard for style (a purposeful anti-style?) is particularly fascinating. I’d argue outmoded crop-zooms and sloppy ADR matching aren’t just old-school flourishes but give the appropriate level of attention to messy, messy themes!

This is an ugly affair, but I love the gruff navel-gazing driving it all: can bad men become good guys if they pick up meditative hobbies? This is the stuff that boys like to think about!

If this film adaptation was inevitable, we are so lucky this is the form it took. While its feminist themes and corporate satire might be too light for the Third Wave, or too heavy-handed for thin-skinned others, they’re enough of a leap away from just the pure plastic fan-fiction this could’ve been.

While its Barbenheimer complement sought to awaken a public numbed from CGI by practically detonating a pocket nuke, the actual most audacious special effect of the year was as simple as the uncanny image of bodies running across an endless white cyclotron set. It’s this craft, a commitment to all the seen and unseen work in the margins (where the suits from multiple corporate conglomerates wouldn’t be able to give teardown notes) that this film succeeds.

I can appreciate this film just for it wanting to expose a wider, younger audience to radical filmmaking images both oft-imitated and the more obscure. Kubrick’s origin of man. Jodorowsky’s display of the sacred and profane. Tati’s office purgatory. Fosse’s danse macabre (it occurs mid-warfare after all). This is huge.

Even while Barbie the doll can be anything, this film could never be everything for everyone. But Gerwig’s worldview and her widely publicized list of influences she wants to share with fans will have a more meaningful effect on the public consciousness than any rundown listing all the dream cars featured and wrecked in Fast X.

Cronenberg again delivers not just his inherited namesake’s gross-out body horror goop or bleak outlook on a society constantly (consistently?) in free fall, but steps out from his father’s shadow to deliver a roaring, pitch-black comedy.

I shuddered. I howled. I wanted to read an incomplete history of its fictional broken European state, filled with anachronistic rituals and corrupt officials patterned in 1970s chic.

Leapfrogging the simple, first-thought sci-fi logic of a never-ending, sun-drenched Mediterranean nightmare, this holiday presents itself as something far more fun and inviting, one perhaps you could be convinced of never wanting to leave.

Like a series of electrons furiously spinning around an atom, there’s an Ouroboros nature to the ideas explored here, witty turns of phrases returned to time and time again, a man’s personal foibles gaining meaning if only as rehearsals for later-delivered elegant monologues and historical quotes.

Even if Nolan again returns to the well of using a time-jump to deliver a final-scene knife twist (now eliciting more memes than admiration), the rest of the technical team he’s assembled and their achievements more than make up for any minor flaws.

Ludwig Göransson’s score treats physicists like rock stars on tour, turning chalkboards into new frontiers, and giving emotional weight to interior universes as much as the grand-scale creation of new ones in the New Mexico desert.

Tying it all together, Jennifer Lame’s editing wins the film, keeping a three-hour runtime surging forward with incredible urgency, overlaying dialogue and cutting before action to keep us off-kilter as we attempt to simultaneously occupy multiple times and spaces all at once.

Even those who bemoan the third act’s rigid shift (arriving intentionally at exactly 2:00:00) into “boring” courtroom facsimile ignore its significance. The achievement of the big boom we all came to see must be soured before we leave the theater again. We must be forced to sit through an iota of aftermath so that any ingenuity or charm we assign to this whole affair is given enough time to decay into true, lasting horror, something no longer just purely impressive but now to be rightfully feared and avoided when reconsidering a rewatch. How’s that for fallout?

The mines are shuttered. The foresting is slowing. And though there’s an underlying dread about something lurking within the still-dense woods, that’s just a distraction from the slow-burning fire that’s creeping across the Transylvanian countryside and right up to everyone’s doorstep.

There’s no clear-cut, black-and-white visual given to this fomenting rage, but Mungiu trusts we’ll be able to recognize a universal story even if we’re hazy on plot or ignorant of its real-world context. On the other side of it all, there’s still an entire history here I can attempt and fail to fully unpack.

All we need to understand is that this is about nativism, self-reliance, breaking bread and eating glass, and the ironies and limitations which reveal themselves in espousing interdependence, intra-dependence, AND independence.

Squint and you’ll recognize a complement in your own backyard, whether it’s the regular townsfolk keeping their heads down and just trying their best, the brutish main character the film abandons partway through the same way the rest of society does, or an ever-curious, open-minded cosmopolitan figure unfairly anchored by circumstance to her birthplace. Poetically, the latter spends nights performing Shigeru Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s Theme” on her cello all alone. As one of just the many who are overlooked in Eastern Europe, she’s found a forgotten language of the Eastern World to properly deliver a futile cry for empathy falling on deaf ears.

If that’s too obscure for some, the film climaxes with a more easily recognizable scene, a single-take town hall showdown. As a debate on what to do about an “influx” of migrant workers devolves into a polyglot blame game, deep-seeded animosities amongst layered Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Gypsy identities push and pull, portraying a Tower of Babel crumbling in real time. Between the lines of color-shifting subtitles, any American viewer will hear echos of the familiar “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”

That the most poignant and clear-minded modern period piece of any origin came from a place I’ve never given much thought to stirs in me a chilling realization: if we look up, this fire is burning everywhere.

Early in this film, Beyoncé’s face is projected onto a multi-story screen before an arena audience. Like she was a cosmic body with undeniable gravity, a star orbits her, casting a roving shadow and illuminating every corner of her face, unearthing every discernible flaw and enlarging it tenfold. In laying bare the very human, physical base that Beyoncé the director starts with, she is asking us to recognize all the work she and her team do to build Beyoncé the icon.

Alongside this stadium-sized sculpting is an ever-present confessional narration. Whether you believe these thoughts to be genuine or side-eye them as just more artificial image-making, it’s undeniably clear, Beyoncé has taken her grandmother’s words to heart: “If you can make someone look good, they will love you.” Yes, Beyoncé loves herself.

How else to explain the first jaw-dropping visual medley that opens this film? On display is an editing technique I’ve never seen attempted anywhere else (not for lack of imagination, but simple wardrobe limitations), which I can only describe as Sartorial Syncopation, cutting on the beat of the music across dozens of live performances to create a kaleidoscopic flash of Beyoncé wearing multiple outfits separately and simultaneously.

The logistics that make any of this even possible are explored in an in-depth explanation on the scaffolding—both mechanical and emotional—which literally sets her stage for Busby Berkeley crane choreography, Fritz Lang-inspired Afro-Futurism, and a repackaging of the ballroom world first explored in Paris is Burning for a much wider audience.

Only after passing through the stargate of Beyoncé’s entire universe, you realize this is not a concert film. This is not a rundown of her greatest hits (in fact, it’s those omissions that allow under-looked songs to shine brighter). This is a physical performance you’ve never seen before and a declaration that Beyoncé could read the phonebook and make it sound meaningful.

The simple log line is the green light for the novel this is based on. That’s the what. The how is what positions this adaptation as a divisive, love-it-or-hate-it “best or worst of the year”, but also, undoubtedly one of the few “films of the decade”—one considering not just this first impact but the rolling tally of every director who will dare crib from this frightening, reorienting vision in the years to come.

Because in the face of unspeakable evil, an entire genre of storytelling was created, its lesser renditions and visual shorthand making its immensely serious subject matter unfortunately rote. How could Glazer lure a modern, numbed audience back into this moment in history and convince them to not avert their eyes? In the grossest way possible, by giving the people of now what they really want: a trashy reality show.

Deprived of any actual onscreen horror, we’re left with an almost Kardashian-like slice of life, rotten comfort food detailing the unequivocally worst people in the world. As the audience becomes fat on family sitcom scenes, Glazer inserts subtle hints lingering innocuously at the edge of frame or just out of view.

Likewise, within everyday empty conversation, single words have been surgically inserted to serve as ever-nagging reminders. The ultimate quivering-hand litmus test, the genesis of the film’s only purposeful laugh-line—a most high-wire feat—is the result of a most dutiful bureaucrat’s delivery of a rote sign-off to be even more rote. When even pledges of allegiance become dangerously mechanical (he was just following orders “et cetera”), we’re reminded that language papers over horrors just as effectively as concrete walls.

And yet, still the most oppressive obstacle, one which I feel is the basis for assignations that this film is “monumental” or reminiscent of a Richard Serra work, is this score. Mica Levi’s minimal, totemic drone is immediately conscripted to join the ranks of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” as a missive from the depths of hell. Paired with springtime bird chirps and a frightening editorial color block, the full impact on the audience is an aural monolith we can only cower before. Your will want to climb over this frame. We must see something else. We must hear something else. Even if it’s binge-watching abject horror, ignorance is a deadlier threat.

Like any great second episode (The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Toy Story 2), we’re immediately presented here with an unexpected U-turn in perspective, pitching us directly into the world of Gwen Stacy.

As a cold open, it’s a welcome fresh start, but it’s not a new Spider backstory or the promise of a father-filled emotional arc which hold any meaningful sway over the audience. Those details are almost comically yadda-yadda’d to nothing more than rough sketches, as the real draw here is a blank canvas for a radical palette of pastel watercolors and pop-punk synth possibilities to take form.

It’s these bold sensory strokes which whisk us through an action scene that continues to introduce multiple new complications, new characters, and further tangles a web we were only just thrown into. Before the title cards even roll, the first 20 minutes of this film feature more interior life and paradigm-shifting stylistic ideas than potentially the last 20 years of film.

Thankfully, none of this these AV leaps forward come off as heavy-handed, as a rapid fire of jokes and blink-and-you’ll-miss footnotes reassure me I’m having a good time, even when I get lost in the ever-stacking A-B-C-D plots. It’s all going to be ok.

With every rewatch, I continuously struggle to delineate how many clear acts this film even has. Is it a clean, serialized three? Or is it a single-sitting binge of six episodes? It’s this disarming of my ability to detect when one issue of Spider-Man ends and the next one begins which makes this the perfect comic-book film.

Because in this amorphous structure, I can remind myself: this is all bigger than just that Spider-Man. This is a fulfillment on the broader promise of multiverse storytelling, that no single story—not even a single character—has to be “the one” any of us care about. If by the third film that concludes this Spider-Verse saga, we see an entire war for the fabric of time and space from the POV of an entirely new character still yet to be imagined, I would be thrilled.

We’d probably get to see more new visual artists surface from the depths of online to guide us into these new worlds, rock out to another stellar B2B set between Daniel Pemberton’s kitchen-sink score and Metro Boomin’s superstar lineup, and witness Hailee Steinfeld build even more upon her already committed vocal performance on display here, prying open the possibility that the Academy Awards might finally recognize acting and art in all its forms.

EVERYTHING I SAW IN 2023:

M3GAN / Plane / Infinity Pool / Knock at the Cabin / 80 for Brady / Magic Mike’s Last Dance / Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania / Shotgun Wedding / Saint Omer / Return to Seoul / Inside / 65 / Scream VI / Tetris / John Wick: Chapter 4 / The Super Mario Bros. Movie / Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves / Creed III / How to Blow Up a Pipeline / Air / Evil Dead Rise / Beau Is Afraid / Polite Society / Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 / Fast X / Master Gardener / Sanctuary / Emily / Migration / Blackberry / Past Lives / You Hurt My Feelings / Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse / Transformers: Rise of the Beasts / Asteroid City / The Blackening / Sharper / Elemental / Extraction 2 / Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny / No Hard Feelings / Rye Lane / Sick / Reality / Nimona / Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One / Barbie / Oppenheimer / Talk to Me / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem / Passages / Bottoms / Gran Turismo / Chevalier / They Cloned Tyrone / Showing Up / The Equalizer 3 / Theater Camp / A Haunting in Venice / The Creator / The Royal Hotel / Strange Way of Life / Dicks: The Musical / The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar ; Poison ; The Swan ; The Rat Catcher / Reptile / Anatomy of a Fall / Killers of the Flower Moon / The Pigeon Tunnel / The Killer / The Pope’s Exorcist / Priscilla / The Covenant / The Holdovers / The Marvels / Dream Scenario / Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. / May December / No One Will Save You / Next Goal Wins / Saltburn / Napoleon / Thanksgiving / A Thousand and One / Luther: The Fallen Sun / Cassandro / Quiz Lady / Godzilla Minus One / The Beanie Bubble / The Iron Claw / Silent Night / The Boy and the Heron / R.M.N. / Leave the World Behind / Poor Things / Eileen / Wish / Fingernails / Maestro / The Zone of Interest / Monster / Wonka / Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé / Afire / American Fiction / Fallen Leaves / Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire / All of Us Strangers / The Last Voyage of the Demeter / Ferrari

THE GIST:

Welcome, again, to another year-end filmography rundown from me. To all the new readers out there, this list is an ongoing tribute to my friend who instituted this format, crappy DaFont stylization and all, and I’m committed to keep it going even as it feels ever more daunting and draining. (But I always feel great when it’s finished.)

In terms of qualifying films considered below, all titles are films that me, as a member of the public, could reasonably buy a theater ticket to see in Los Angeles within 2022.

I must note, the distributor Neon continues to baffle, as year after year, they hold even their limited release windows until the new year. This is why The Worst Person in the World, which I must now consider to be lost in time, is reflected neither in my 2021 or 2022 lists (and yet if the world was just and I could keep my head on straight, it would’ve received a Top 10 placement in either year).

But, that’s all balanced out now by my future-leaning ability to see 2023 releases already, as most significantly, this year I started working in film! To account for unbiased takes, I’ve instituted a new critical separation, removing the films on which I work from consideration (even if that means I would’ve had the opportunity to further applauded Michelle Yeoh).

There are still so many 2022 titles I wanted to watch that I didn’t get to in time (Broker / Corsage / The Inspection / Smile / Women Talking / The Wonder), but this year I successfully became a more intentional film viewer, lessening my tally from previous years’ unsustainable highs. All in though, the following blurbs consider 116 releases from 2022.

Enjoy!

THE UNHERALDED:

The films that never found their audience, could just use some more exposure, or deserve another look.

An intimate, female gaze of a lazy, sun-drenched Turkish holiday, honing in on adolescent ennui and turning the trip into an autobiographical purgatory preceding Charlotte Wells’s grappling with the abyss of adulthood.

Unboxing childhood toys with adult cynicism, this is a clever shot across the bow at shallow nostalgia and constant IP resuscitation.

A twisted, haunting, and wordless rendering of a Hieronymus Bosch-themed Rube Goldberg device that spits out an utterly insane but worthy experience, even if just to test your palatable limit of coherent narrative film.

Cat and mouse confined to closed-door conversations and true-story coerced confessions, this exhaustive police procedural and long-legged sting operation pays proper respect to Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.

Rendering a “final girl” horror spin on a voyeuristic thriller, this film’s foreign (to its protagonist) Romanian setting casts everything in dense, vampiric blacks and plucks a baroque note on taut piano wire.

FAVORITE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE OF 2022:

Thanks to a quote by Mark Twain, comedy and tragedy exist on the same spectrum, two poles joined by nothing more than the stretching and compressing putty of timing. A playful exploitation of pace, Barbarian put my audience entirely off-balance, never knowing which to expect lurking around the next corner: a jump-scare or a jump-laugh.

With its laxidasical first act’s table setting, the film’s little-to-no concern for world-building meant we had to shift focus a cute-awkward first date and a welcome argument for a female protagonist our audience couldn’t shout “don’t go in there!” at. After methodically exploiting every defensive option and breadcrumb mechanic, we had a hero everyone could root for, and were primed to shift our animosity to a big bad.

The villain’s belated introduction sucked the oxygen of the theater I was in, resulting in the most jarring, hardest left turn in any narrative I saw this year (while a hard right would’ve sent us all straight into the ocean).

I WAS THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED:

Heavy is the head that wears the crown of Palme d’Or, but set against a mega yacht primed to accept air-to-sea deliveries of Nutella, this is one ride that can stand to take a few punches.

While Ruben Östlund’s previous Palme-waving satire, The Square also alienated, its dressing down of a world I wasn’t really attentive to at least taught me something about the language and tropes of high-end art criticism. Its text was the chuckle-eliciting salve a museum docent would give you after downloading you on post-modernism.

But in a world of disposable, empty-calorie, but widely enjoyed entertainment like Instagram scammer Netflix docuseries and Below Deck, Triangle of Sadness doesn’t necessarily have anything new to say to anyone, upper crust or otherwise.

Lacking sharpness, it ruminates in the only thing it has: excess. In ensemble cast, runtime, budget, comedic tone, and international flag-planting representation, this boat bloats. Heavily publicized promotional items for this film were branded vomit bags, which sought to flaunt a highlight of its second act: a luxury meal in the center of a storm and the ensuing acrobatic gastronomical ado. At least when Luis Buñuel merged the dining room and bathroom in The Phantom of Liberty, he created an image worthy of a high-end art gallery. The Square would’ve probably nodded and called it “ground-breaking.”

HOT MESS OF THE YEAR:

A neck-and-neck race to the bottom, this year’s award is being shared by two titles who held contempt for people: one for its main character, the other for its mass audience.

If meant to be a reflection of not a true biography but of a literary fiction, I find it utterly baffling that in his adaptation, Andrew Dominik had very little interest in making its main (is she even eponymous?) character an active participant or protagonist in her own story.

My usual benedictine monkish theater-attending composure was shattered as I audibly shouted “Oh, fuck off!” at the screen when a Barbasol can was dropped as a pervy nod to whatever Loot-Crate-wielding nerds were still scanning the screen for acknowledgements two-plus hours into the film.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Because making a ranked list is hard, these shortlist candidates are ordered alphabetically.

Bayhem that can’t—but also shouldn’t—imitated. A technically proficient and brilliant experience that’s also extremely obtuse and possibly uninviting, all made on the fly. Free jazz more than a deliberate work, its highest highs necessitate a backwards approach to how we got there. Spit-take line readings and ad-libs steer scenes, practical stunt hiccups dictate hastily stitched sequences. Its seams are showing, and it makes this 100mph ride even more thrilling when you discover there’s nothing underneath. The emperor may have no clothes, but that won’t stop Jake Gyllenhaal from loudly reminding you he’s glowing in cashmere.

A story about friendship, ambition, and Catholic guilt, all told in a cuss-filled Irish lilt. Superbad for adults.

Wildly imaginative, extremely fucked-up, occasionally hilarious. The body horror master obsessed with our inner selves shifts his dial to soft sci-fi, allowing himself to give a gentler, if still nihilistic, prophetic reading for our self-destructed future.

A lean, mean, white-knuckle pot-boiler featuring the best use of Aubrey Plaza’s bulging eyes. Bonus points for showcasing corporate catering gig delivery drivers and student loan debt as newly available, contemporary cinematic shorthands for an object being squeezed and its complimentary vice.

Bigger, louder, and pointedly not a retread of Rian Johnson’s first whodunit tribute, this Greek getaway embraces manic, screwball energy and spews enough witty one-liners to keep audiences from ever caring about the mystery. The only clue I was doggedly looking out for was the moment when Daniel Craig would again have to work the film’s title into one of his rambling monologues.

A testament to how even the most arrestedly developed individuals can grow and evolve, this legacy outing fine-tunes its editorial flow and embraces an endearingly inclusive, body-positive tone. Never not shocking, but always fun, this thing glides like a 300lb man on a lubed-up slip-n-slide.

The preeminent figurehead of slow cinema, Apichatpong Weerasethakul almost exists more as an art house libertine punchline than an actual director. The discursive camps surrounding him, one of quiet reverence, the other of hushed snickers, only intensified when critic Justin Chang raved about Memoria last year, saying he gave himself over to the cinema as an experience and knelt prostrate before the screen on which it played. And yet, Weerasethakul still had a trick up his sleeve to make us wait before deciding in which camp we’d position ourselves.

This time, he convinced the film’s distributer, Neon, to release Memoria only as an event—promising no on-demand streaming or tangible, physical media object ever—turning this title into an ole-timey “catch it when it comes to your town” never-ending touring circus act.

So, ready to decide for myself if I too would be a true believer, my pursuit of even tracking down a date and tickets to see this at a screening in Los Angeles became as memorable as Tilda Swinton’s pursuit of knowing the unknowable at the heart of her journey.

The line between artist, art, performance, and audience blurred for me, while the difference between creative vision and realization was made clearer. What if you loved something which moved you deeply, and then in recollecting it, were only met with a fuzzy, distant hum? I almost forgot I saw this this year, and I think that’s a feature, not a bug.

A clever retool of the Predator story, Prey strips out the franchise’s high-tech toys and bombastic egos, making this a hunt all about will and wit. Passed down through generations of oral tradition across the Great Plains, it has been said that there was never a more villainous portrayal of French fur trappers.

Great animation, voice acting, score, comedy, and pathos satisfy in this copy of a copy, a sequel to a spin-off. Even its thrift-store finds of the remaining, untapped storybook characters is itself a joke, a wry case for this film having something to say even if there’s no clear audience for it.

Such an amazing work of action filmmaking. Shot with such a clear eye for staging character and motivation, you’re always totally aware of what is going on and why, even when the how bends the laws of physics.

Every bit is heartfelt and hilarious, all the way down to its exuberant embrace of the letter “R”, akin to a high schooler carving their favorite band name into the surface of their desk. With cartoon villainy topping an 11, this post-colonial urtext created the actual loudest, most raucous theater-going experience I enjoyed this year.

GREAT PERFORMANCES:

The actors who defined their films, made bad material great, and occasionally made you crawl the end credits just to see who that was, listed alphabetically.

…And one non-human performance which deserves recognition:

TOP 10:

Park Chan-wook makes his long overdue return to scribing an original story with a showcase of his greatest strengths (inventive camerawork and whip-smart comedic timing) while also demonstrating he can still surprise (mastering the labyrinths of smart phone drama and linguistic babels), making for a twisted romantic noire without a clear beginning, middle, or end.

Although as epic as the D.W. Griffith classic, Intolerance, which famously first brought Babel to life on screen, Babylon has less to do with the rise and fall of the Silent Era than it does with people coming to realize they’re living through history as it’s happening.

It made me think of an old college professor of mine who’d constantly refer back to the brief decade-and-change (which coincidentally almost aligns with this film’s setting) of the Weimar Republic as the height of creative, cosmopolitan, and sexual freedom in a rapidly modernizing Europe. “They were partying like there was no tomorrow… Because they sensed this couldn’t last.” (Spoiler: it didn’t.)

How this sentiment translates to Babylon is the film very early on lets you know what it is and will be: a Sisyphean task of pushing a party animal up a hill, followed by an incessant drumbeat of debauchery that will eventually turn into a cacophony.

By token of its content and scale, this is very clearly something that couldn’t be confined to a TV series. In a different time, even one just ten years ago or so, a summary of this film’s opening party would have been enough of a provocation for Babylon to become the prime target for an organized boycott from a vocal Facebook group of concerned mothers or cable TV news fear-mongering. But now, nobody’s looking, the audience is empty, and that’s the point.

The check is due, and on that line looking for his signature, Damien Chazelle has drawn a big middle finger. After the technicolor tribute of La La Land, only a proper madman would spit in the party’s punch and turn “Singing in the Rain” into a tragic denouement as the life of cinema flashes before our eyes in the form of a flickering, kaleidoscopic Stargate.

I’m notably out on most modern documentaries for their over-reliance on talking heads and crime stories. This is markedly different.

Told entirely in archival images and an extremely economical yet poetic narration (by Miranda July!), this is a document of both a burgeoning field of study and a romantic relationship. Who knew it would take two hip French kids raised on Goddard to show us something the world had never seen or really respected before?

This is a piece built around the power of images, but it’s also an interrogation of how they’re made and framed. If scientific understanding begins with just observing, how can that study be translated into action? There’s a turn in here when the study and interplay with humanity produces a clear objective: “Volcanoes are beautiful, but they kill. My dream is volcanoes no longer kill.”

A documentary which should be heralded not just for the story it tells, but how it does so: with careful writing, editing, and directing.

Some of my initial, dumbstruck reactions upon walking out from this film could be explained by my body’s attempts to recalibrate to the duller, everyday world devoid of IMAX 3D HFR in DOLBY ATMOS. In a way, I had the bends, sickening myself by obsessing only on the depths of its technology-pushing, thrill-ride plaudits.

But if the must-see amusement park attraction comparison holds sway for people considering to also step in line, then I’d have to say, it’s the standing in line bits that I keep thinking back on. While we waited 13 years for the ride to be fixed, I found myself most enjoying just winding my way through its queue, taking in the fully committed world-building.

I’d happily read a fictional encyclopedia entry about Pandora whaling because Big Jim’s on-screen vision is guided by a concept almost entirely unheard of by a contemporary blockbuster crowd: earnestness.

There’s no wink or intentional humor on display here, just a promise that every creature, machine, and bit of jargon has a cultural tenant and history behind it. That’s all the invitation I need to silence my inhibitions and dive into those blue waters to high-five a whale who writes poetry.

Valorizing what is basically a woman listening to a true crime podcast and becoming obsessed with its mystery, Steven Soderbergh successfully mashes up The Conversation and Rear Window with the absolute maximum of 2022 hallmarks. Ready your checklist: we’ve got big tech paranoia, social distancing anxiety (Soderbergh putting his favorite iPhone cinematography to good use), lockdown agoraphobia, a mental health crisis, Zoom etiquette, organized protests against homelessness sweeps, masking vigilance AND laxness, and in a unique creation, hand sanitizer application choreography.

Zoë Kravitz dons blue hair, some scene-stealing cameos pop up, and Soderbergh whisks us to the end credits in just 89 minutes. My most-watched plane movie of the year.

A much-needed shakeup of the Pixar visual style, Turning Red jumpstarts to life with whip pans and snap edits, mimicking a tween’s overconfidence without ever falling into precociousness.

The most personal is the most universal, and Domee Shi’s detailed look back at her coming-of-age in Toronto has imparted this story with a clear sense of time and place, and created an easily accessible pubescent metaphor that radiates a bold, colorful, halcyon sheen.

This cowboy is never gonna ride off into the sunset, at least not on anything ever resembling a horse you or I could ever hope to even attempt to saddle up on.

I say, let Tom Cruise strap himself into an experimental supersonic jet and see the curvature of the earth. If he goes fast enough, he might just de-age right before our eyes, a superhuman feat that would finally explain away his inability to master everyday human tasks like drinking a beer, throwing a football, or knowing how to handle oneself around Jennifer Connelly in an intimate setting.

For the popcorn crowd, there’s much fun to be had in this big-screen spectacle, one that invites active participation in background cloud-gazing and UFO theorizing.

While its ultimate twist into a creature feature is surprising, it’s easy to follow. Jordan Peele’s streak of bending expectations balanced with clear rationale and underlying logic for every element onscreen continues to impress me. As a season ticket holder for Peele, I trust his commitment to the various subtexts that permeate his “social thrillers” will add up.

I could overthink the significance of the Afro-Caribbean origins of the rainbow skydancers that litter this field of the Haywood Ranch, or I could just trust that I’m in good hands, avert my eyes, and live my life.

In another universe, this review has been written for a few weeks now, sitting nicely within a spellchecked draft for timely publication before December 31st, 2022. It features citations. And clever jokes. It will eventually enjoy a minor viral moment when it is circulated around Twitter by a well-respected film critic.

It doesn’t suffer from clarity of focus, one exacerbated by the myriad of distractions and conflicting viewpoints readily available just a few clicks away from the word processor it was typed in. The review doesn’t try to connect its authorship to the film’s fascination with the dizzying rift the internet has created across generations.

In that universe–it should also be noted–this film was directed by other filmmakers who also genuflect in the direction of Wong Kar-wai, ones who are regularly rewarded with inclusion in my Top 10 (in many universes across the infinite amount that exist, a spot is always reserved for such loving homages). Yet regardless of its author, that film features yet another surefire Best Actress win by the current record holder for most Oscars ever, Michelle Yeoh.

There, in that universe, dildo-wielding martial arts and hot-dog finger thigh-slapping mating dances are amongst the most highly celebrated forms of performance, while tu-tu-clad ballerinas are deemed entirely obscene. Purple is red, kitchen toasters work backwards, the Buffalo Bills are four-time Super Bowl champions, and I have perfect teeth.

In that universe, everything sounds pretty great and its version of this review is something roundly enjoyed everywhere. And yet, coming to terms with the fact that in this universe, this review is late, meandering, and discordant all at once is what makes this existence perfectly average and one I’d like to cheer on.

A mystery with no mystery, a horror with no horror, TÁR creates a world where every detail begs to be analyzed or feared, even if their revelations are pedestrian or their violence is bloodless.

Plainly speaking, this is a drama in which every conversation is a lure for a later trap to be sprung, a series of chamber piece rehearsals that will eventually flawlessly reverberate throughout a symphony hall or even the ears of every New Yorker podcast subscriber.

On my own journey to attempt to understand this layered mythmaking, I wanted to be able to cosplay Lydia Tár in her apartment, tapping her bare feet over a collection of record covers to decide her favorite iteration of Mahher’s “Symphony No. 5”. Her pick, Claudio Abbado’s with the Berlin Philharmonic, was the record I too needed to have.

After an exhaustive trek across Wikipedia, Discogs, Deutche Grammaphone’s entire catalog, and a few tumbles down some classical music forum rabbit holes, I realized the record didn’t actually exist (even if the CD does).

I felt betrayed, unable to believe I’d been lied to. I, like a sizable portion of this film’s audience, had believed that this genius wasn’t just constructed, that Lydia Tár was actually a real person. It turns out, when I wasn’t looking, I had fallen for Todd Field’s ultimate trap, turning myself into a weaponized toxic fanboy acolyte of TÁR.

EVERYTHING I SAW IN 2022:

The 355 / A Hero / Belle / Jackass Forever / Kimi / Blacklight / Death On The Nile / The Sky Is Everywhere / Fistful of Vengeance / Texas Chainsaw Massacre / No Exit / Cyrano / The Batman / Fresh / After Yang / Turning Red / Deep Water / Windfall / The Outfit / X / The Lost City / Everything Everywhere All At Once / RRR / Morbius / The Contractor / Memoria / Ambulance / All the Old Knives / Dual / The Bad Guys / The Northman / The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent / Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness / Petite Maman / On the Count of Three / Pleasure / Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers / Men / Top Gun: Maverick / The Bob’s Burgers Movie / Crimes of the Future / Fire Island / Watcher / Hustle / Jurassic World Dominion / Mad God / Lightyear / Cha Cha Real Smooth / Spiderhead / Good Luck to You, Leo Grande / Official Competition / The Black Phone / Elvis / Marcel the Shell with Shoes On / Minions: The Rise of Gru / Fire of Love / Thor: Love and Thunder / The Gray Man / Nope / Not Okay / Resurrection / Thirteen Lives / Vengeance / Bullet Train / Luck / Prey / Bodies Bodies Bodies / Emily the Criminal / Beast / Three Thousand Years of Longing / Breaking / Funny Pages / Barbarian / The Woman King / Blonde / Confess, Fletch / Moonage Daydream / Pearl / See How They Run / Don’t Worry Darling / Athena / Bros / The Greatest Beer Run Ever / Hellraiser / Tár / Triangle of Sadness / Werewolf By Night / Rosaline / Stars At Noon / Decision to Leave / The Stranger / Ticket to Paradise / Aftersun / The Banshees of Inisherin / Wendell & Wild / Armageddon Time / Causeway / Weird: The Al Yankovic Story / BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths / Black Panther: Wakanda Forever / The Fablemans / Is That Black Enough for You?!? / Bones and All / She Said / The Menu / EO / Strange World / Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery / Guiermo Dem Toro’s Pinocchio / White Noise / The Whale / Avatar: The Way of Water / Puss in Boots: The Last Wish / Babylon