The Top 23 Movies of 2023

#1: An observant satire so incandescent you can hear the clutched pearls clack from here, AMERICAN FICTION dares to challenge accepted dogma in our culture while, simultaneously, crafting an engaging family drama (and even a romance). Brilliantly adapted from Percival Everett’s superb novel, "Erasure," adapter/director Cord Jefferson retains Everett's mordant wit and unerring eye and goes straight for the jugular of a certain strain of society, flipping over the rocks of academia and the media in the process. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright, in an award-worthy, world-weary performance, is the epitome of a professor who has watched life, and the culture, zoom past him. He can’t even teach a class without students storming out in protest. But in his publish-or-perish world, Monk still has some hope of prestige and success (and maybe money), crafting an adaptation of Aeschylus’s "The Persians," though it's not exactly airport bookstore fodder, much to the despair of his long-suffering agent, Arthur (the long-suffering, excellent character actor, Jon Ortiz). After Monk’s put on sabbatical for offending select students he decamps to his family home in Boston. Upon arrival he attends a book convention where he sees a successful, well-heeled author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) drop her Oberlin college lilt to effect a street accent to read from her debut novel, the best-seller, "We’s Lives in Da Ghetto." Monk's only stability is his put-upon sister, Lisa (a luminous Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor dealing directly with a divorce and the declining stages of their mother (Leslie Uggams), who has Alzheimer’s. He also struggles with Cliff, his wayward, self-destructive brother (Sterling K. Brown), the haunted history of their family home, and the new hope springing forth across the street of their beach house, in the form of a comely, understanding neighbor, played by Erika Alexander. With time on his hands Monk decides he is going to drop his ambitions of respectability and pander to the kind of fiction the public seems to want. The book he concocts, "My Pafology," hits all the notes, and Monk takes on a ridiculous nom de plume, Stagg R. Leigh ("Stagger Lee" was a hit record for Lloyd Price in 1958). The book is an immediate success, much to Monk’s chagrin, as now everyone wants to speak to the author, and Monk has to assume the made-up persona of the criminal Leigh. This all escalates in some ridiculous and poignant ways as the book takes off. Monk desperately tries to hijack the upward trajectory of "Pafology" as it seems to him just a perpetuation of stereotypes and tropes that make people feel comfortable and superior. And it just makes it worse. As this is going on Monk also seems to be sabotaging himself, in ways that are painful and regrettable. I’m still working on what the hell happens at the fractured end. But it’s irrelevant as AMERICAN FICTION had already made its indelible, incisive mark as the best film of the year. As Monk would say, "Egads."

#2: Ridley Scott’s NAPOLEON, manages scale & intimacy, sweep & detail in a historic epic anchored by another unique, studied performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the great “emperor” & an equally thoughtful, nuanced approach by Vanessa Kirby as his wife, Josephine. In fact, the film could easily have been titled NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE as it is as much about the ground gained between the warring sides in their marriage as Europe & the underlying rumble in the background through most of the scenes are the cannonades of his ambition & her survival instincts. David Scarpa’s script starts in the chaos of the French Revolution & Marie-Antoinette’s beheading, leading to Robespierre’s Terror, underscoring the absolute chaos engulfing France. It lays the necessary groundwork as to why they would embrace a law-&-order general, even if he appeared power hungry & not above employing a “whiff of grapeshot,” shooting into a crowd to decimate & scatter protestors, to make his point. Scott & cinematographer Dariusz Wolski have also eschewed the sodden, dark world of recent major pictures (including their own PROMETHEUS collaboration) for a film blanched in light. It’s a world of wide screen spectacle & complex humanity, successfully marrying the two in a way Scott has not done since KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, aided & abetted by all art departments. NAPOLEON also doesn’t get bogged down in the temptation to show & tell everything. It can’t & it doesn’t. Instead it elevates moments, large & small, that give particular insight into what made the man “great,” in the old, less moralizing sense of the word. Phoenix & Scott show him as the “Corsican brute,” many called him, an amazingly lucky, persevering, pompous creature. Kirby continues to explore the contours of complicated people. Her Josephine is a resourceful mother who embraces the salon & a man she is only mildly interested in, to gain her advantage. Yet she also may love him. It is also quite funny & contains my favorite line of recent years, one I may employ at my own dinner table: “Destiny has brought me this lambchop.”

#3: POOR THINGS was the best film at Venice (by my estimation and the juries) & unlike anything seen in a great while. This is Lanthimos’ greatest work so far. Emma Stone cements her place as a gutsy, vibrant, empathetic actress in league with contemporaries Collette, KStew & Robbie. Mark Ruffalo plays a cad deliciously, relishing every scene. The production is astounding with visual puckishness in every scene, like a film that James Whale & Terry Gilliam wished they had made. Don’t find out too much about it. Yes, it will also shock people; it’s grotesque, quite sexual (& funny), and outrageous in nature. Unique.

#4: BOTTOMS is the best, funniest pure-play comedy of the year by a wide, wide margin. Directed & co-written by Emma Seligman, who now is in my “well, if she did it, I’m watching it” category of filmmakers, it stars the other co-writer, Rachel Sennott, and the pitch-perfect, amazing Ayo Edebiri. The film is a lark, a mashup of HEATHERS & NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE, stretching, but never breaking the teen comedy sendup, as two best friends start a female fight club, mainly to get together with the girls of their dreams. This is my nominee for Casting of the Year as it also includes Ruby Cruz, magnificent in the shame-it-got-cancelled WILLOW, who brings a certain lightness, guts, and lilt to everything she does, & Marshawn Lynch, a famous former running back for the Seahawks, who is unforgettable and just launched a new career for himself. Warning: Very raunchy in spots, mostly for language. Very “R.” Very funny.

#5: Alexander Payne’s best film since 2011’s THE DESCENDANTS, THE HOLDOVERS does quite a bit by not doing a lot. At Barton, a prestigious, yet stifling prep school in the '70s, the unlikable, pedantic history teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) gets stuck babysitting five students who can't go home for Christmas break. This includes the rebellious, troubled Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) who is failing at life. Also trapped at Barton's is Mary Lamb (played with equally shattered spirit by Da'Vine Joy Randolph) who is broken by the loss of her son in Vietnam. What is so elegant is Payne & screenwriter David Hemingson don’t rely on dramatic plot contrivances to tell their story. No one is going to commit suicide. No car is going to slam into theirs. No one is going to lose their tether to themselves to drink from a swill bucket (as Giammati did in Payne's SIDEWAYS). It's an organic undoing and all the more real, painful, beautiful, and satisfying for it. Giammati is in the Best Actor hunt as Hunham as is Randolph for Lamb, as should the screenplay and the film itself (sorry, Alexander, it's pretty stacked in Best Director this year). A treasure.

#6: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is a deserved, rather than presumptive (cough, cough, THE IRISHMAN), Oscar contender with DiCaprio as Best Actor, De Niro as Supporting, Lily Gladstone Best Supporting, Scorsese Director (of course), Best Adapted & Best Film. It is a theatrical experience as it courses along, even at 3hours, 40 minutes, and that’s how it should be seen. It moves at its its own original rhythm to create a world where a man can exhibit a perverse example of cognitive dissonance, the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time but, in this case, with little moral qualms about it.

#7: AIR pops & crackles w/ sportsbook dialogue (bordering on soliloquies) by Alex Convery in a screenplay often on par w/ Shelton’s BULL DURHAM, making even small roles larger than leads in other films, hence Viola Davis’s presence. Keeping tempo is director Ben Affleck w/ Matt Damon as Nike’s guy who knows his basketball & knows genius when he sees it, which he does in a young Michael Jordan. The last act congeals a bit around contract negotiations when you want it to drive the lane but it’s all to a greater point, setting back for a three-pointer.

#8 This is the film that should have won the Palme d’Or. What did win was ANATOMY OF A FALL (and before you get indignant FALL comes in at #14). Bravo Jonathan Glazer for an absolutely chilling tale of the quotidian existence of a growing German family. Except the father is running Auschwitz, and it's right next door. Hannah Arendt's banality of evil always gets associated with bad breath, trials, and puniness. Here it's laundry, job promotions, etiquette, and teenage rebellion. The sound of the ever-burning furnaces in the near distances will haunt you. RIP Martin Amis, author of the book this was based upon.

#9: MAESTRO is a brave, passionate, & unruly thing. Bradley Cooper has about five tonal shifts in the movie about the brilliant composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein (LB); three of them work brilliantly, one is indulged & one to be gotten through. The first tone is 25-year-old LB in the NYC segment. He’s getting his break & wooing his later wife, Felicia Montealegre, played w/in-the-wings resolve by Carey Mulligan, even though LB is shown early in bed with a musician, David Oppenheimer (Matt Bomer). This segment has the rat-a-tat patter of a 1940s musical, a black & white rhapsody that culminates in an ON THE TOWN/Jerome Robbins dance number w/Cooper doing the actual hoofing. It’s the best segment, daft, daring & alive. The other four tones settle down & are different & in color; all shot gloriously in their respective way by Matthew Libatique. LB’s music is played throughout with particular attention paid to a soaring “Make Our Garden Grow” from “Candide,” & a long, unbroken, astonishing take of Cooper/LB directing a forceful, stirring rendering of Mahler’s “Resurrection.” The counterpoint of this overflowing creativity & vibrancy is the silent, slow, smothering of the couple’s marriage. LB begins to be careless with his affairs with men & with Felicia entirely. And this is one of the film’s most brilliant conceits. Cooper, co-writer Josh Singer & Mulligan have constructed a marriage that is not just of convenience, a beard, but an earnest love story. The Bernsteins build a family the public would approve of together, a dynasty that has them interviewed by Ed Murrow at home, but not if the whole truth was known. Yet there is real love for that family at its core, anchored by Felicia, and is its ultimate salvation. It’s not often that posters mean something but ensure you take your time thinking about that poster. The unravelling ends with a brilliant scene that takes place along the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Day Parade. Look out for Snoopy, harbinger of doom. Cooper is acting, playing the piano, singing, dancing, conducting & directing. He probably also did the catering. It’s not a one-man show but it’s a one-man marvel.

#10: If there were ever questions about the titanic, immutable force as a director that is Christopher Nolan, this film dispels them. Who else could convince a major studio to fund such a project? Who else could bring a cast this shockingly good together (minor, almost wordless roles are filled by Oscar winners)? Who else could take then take all of that and gamble with such a provocative film, one filmed with jarring sex scenes, physics discussions, and extended courtroom intrigue? Nolan can and does, though not always successfully. Cillian Murphy plays J. Oppenheimer as a man’s-man with a genius brain. Not only can he woo a married woman (Emily Blunt) and manage a longstanding, torrid relationship with a Russian dish and true believer (Florence Pugh), he can figure out the process to split the atom and manage the team that does it. The special effects, the production, the acting, all comes from consummate professionals and two-thirds of this movie puts it in my Best of the Year. But the third, a trial that did consume the post-war life of the man who helped America close out WWII, is a lugubrious bit of Oliver Stone’s end trial in JFK, without the panache or ferocity. In fact, it doesn’t feel like just setting the record straight but of standing on the street corner with signs proclaiming it. It’s as if Nolan became as obsessed with clearing Oppenheimer’s name as anyone working on the Manhattan project might have been in a race for the atomic bomb against the Nazis. Still, it’s a grand work. Maybe too much to settle out on until later.

#11: The plot is every stupid rom-com. Boy meets girl and they are soulmates and they get separated. It’s so hackneyed it hacks. Heck, in SWEET HOME ALABAMA, lightning even strikes the beach where they meet to leave the couple a glass memento! But in the hands of writer/director Celine Song and with a remarkable, effervescent, pained performance by Greta Lee, PAST LIVES turns into something quite universal and yet unique. One’s first unrequited love is not the stuff of fairy tales or the now-cancelled term “chick flicks.” It’s real and agonizing and confusing and has happened to pretty much all of us. And Song and Lee bring that poignancy to the screen. That feeling that something was misplaced and that you’re not quite whole anymore, imagined or not. Lee plays Nora who emigrates from Korea to America when she is thirteen. Her play-date romance at the time was Jung Hae Sung, and he is left behind. Ten years later, once the internet and global cell phones arrive, they reconnect and find themselves in a chaste, long-distance relationship that time and tide also disrupts. By the time that an older Jung Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) has broken up with his longtime girlfriend and traveled to New York to see her, Nora is married to fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro). The chemistry between Nora and her reunited classmate is tangible, thanks in large part to Lee, even though she has little to say, who communicates with every glance and smile. Lee and Song have crafted a Phantom Limb longing that poses danger in conversations or innocent lunch dates and infidelity at every moment. This story could later be a disastrous, three-Kleenex “Modern Love” in the New York Times. But it’s more alive than that and we’re left with a piquant sense of loss that makes this one of the year’s best.

#12: The biggest surprise at Venice, due to low expectations, was HIT MAN. Why low? Because it was programmed in the Out of Competition category. That was an early warning sign, an established director like Richard Linklater in Out of Competition and not In Competition. Linklater is himself to own up to the trepidation. While he has made very good movies like BOYHOOD, DAZED & CONFUSED, & the BEFORE series he has basted, cooked and delivered some true turkeys as well. So things were dicey going in. But this twisted, clever, entertaining rom-com (of sorts) was selected for all the right reasons. It’s almost astonishing that Venice programmed it as it’s so accessible. A terrific & versatile Glen Powell plays the meek Gary Johnson, a part-time philosophy prof who moonlights doing audio tech for the police, mostly catching people trying to hire a hit man. When Gary gets a chance to be the under-cover person trying to coax the confession, he throws himself into the role. He becomes a master of disguise, creating personas & costumes, transforming himself into whatever kind of hit man he suspects the suspect is expecting. And he’s pretty good at it. One of these personas is the ultra-suave Ron, who has to meet Madison (Adria Arjona, spectacular). Madison wants Ron to do a hit on her abusive husband but she is vulnerable & funny & the hapless Gary falls for her. We are in the middle of an improbable, but original, “meet-cute.” Ron talks Madison out of it, which is all caught on the mic. “What are you now, a life coach?” asks one of the cops (Retta, with pinpoint comedic timing), upset that they’ve let a potential killer get away.

But Madison hasn’t gotten away. Ron/Gary finds her & they begin a feisty, hearty love affair that blossoms into real love. But Madison still thinks that Ron is a hit man whose name is Ron, not Gary. And the creepy cop that Gary replaced runs into the couple on a date & starts to badger them. This all escalates until the Ron/Gary mix-up turns into a comedy that, at points, touches on TOOTSIE in its hilarity.

Powell & Arjona are a formidable romantic couple. They have that elusive “chemistry.” The script, written by Powell, Linklater, & Skip Hollandsworth is smart & light & supposedly “somewhat true.” What is true, no “somewhat” needed, is HIT MAN is wonderful.

#13: COUP DE CHANCE is Woody Allen’s best film since MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. It’s all in French and it stars the luminous Lou de Laâge. She looks like a young, less pouty, less gassy Emmanuelle Béart. De Laâge plays Fanny, once an artist & rebel, but now a married woman. Her husband is Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a doting, possessive businessman with a murky past on his ladder to success. They live in Paris and live the life of the rich but they don’t quite mesh, Fanny and Jean. He likes to hunt near their house in the country. Fanny would rather read & stay in the city. Fanny, by pure chance, runs into Alain (Niels Schneider), a former classmate of hers back in New York. He’s a writer & tells her quite bluntly that he had a massive crush on her in their school days & they begin meeting for romantic lunches, and the whole thing escalates into an affair. Jean, who already is a suspicious person, puts a private investigator on Fanny’s trail, which then goes wildly out of control. Like MATCH POINT there is a game afoot here & things won’t end well for someone. As with most Allen’s film, there is a simple point around which this film pivots amidst all the cheating & lying. Is our life controlled by luck, fate, and forces out of our control? Or are ideas like karma and chance just crutches for those who can’t forge their own results and destiny? The uproarious end of this movie, that had our early critics’ screening bursting into applause, answers that question, but it would be bad form to reveal it here. If it’s true that this is Woody Allen’s last picture he’s going out with a winner.

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