The Ten Best Films of 2023
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Article by Mark Dujsik | December 29, 2023 Here are the ten best films of 2023:
As a filmmaker, Scorsese has made many films about crime and criminals. However,
this one is as much about the victims of those crimes as it is about the
criminals perpetrating them. Even as it becomes invested in the lives and
schemes and conspiracies of multiple white men whose prejudice against Native
Americans is only outweighed by their greed, a sense of grief remains.
At 206 minutes, this is a lot of story. It's at times overwhelming, but what
matters most is the overwhelming nature of its depiction of prejudice and greed
baked into so many people and systems of this country, as well as its outrage
for the human toll of, not only this string of crimes, but also that American
one.
The first thing to notice here is the extent to which the
filmmakers embrace the notions of these different characters and distinct worlds.
There are so many tiny and significant details here that any discussion of the
film's look seems destined to become derailed by simply explaining and admiring
them.
Bursting with ideas and visual flair, this is a gorgeously animated
film that carries on and deepens the characters and tale of its predecessor. It
is also—and fundamentally in almost every fiber of its being, right down to
its tantalizing, twist-filled cliffhanger of a finale—an affectionate tribute
to the creativity and ingenuity that have kept the comics a mainstay of pop
culture for almost a century. It's quite creative and ingenious in its own
right, too.
The screenplay is divided into three sections, with the first one
taking the point of view of a mother (Ando Sakura) who believes a teacher is
abusing her son (Kurokawa Soya), the second digging into the lonely life of the
accused teacher (Nagayama Eita), and the third offering a perspective that will
remain undisclosed here. This is a mystery, after all. So much of the
impact of it is in what is revealed and when, what is hidden and why, and how
both the characters' actions and secrets say who these people are.
These contradictory perspectives point at something else, too. Everyone is so caught up in their own
problems and trying to push the blame that no one even considers someone else's
point of view or, for that matter, the truth that's right there to be found if
any of them did.
If it's not one thing, it's another for Julie (Laure Calamy, instantly
sympathetic and completely attuned to the character's trajectory toward
desperation), a divorced mother of two kids. The plot, such as it is, just
follows Julie over the course of a week or so in this escalating nightmare of
job dissatisfaction, employment uncertainty, commuting troubles, financial
shortfalls, and domestic anxieties.
The intensity of this story is both in how all of these issues form at the same
time, while each one complicates the others in assorted ways, and in how we
realize that one misstep on Julie's part—or one accident beyond her
control—could send her entire life into an unstoppable tailspin. It's
constructed from comprehensible fears and sources of worry, and in that firm
focus on the ordinary, Gravel has made a kind of thriller that is anything but
ordinary.
The screenplay by Johnson and Matthew Miller is smart enough to know that this tale
is both significant, because it dramatizes the first chapters of our mobile
device-dependent society, and, because it also is about a soon-to-be forgotten
example of that device, frivolous. That feels like the perfect
combination for what the story really is about: a group of people's inability to
change or their misfortune to change in the worst possible way.
We can laugh at and with them, and that's the primary philosophy of the filmmakers
with this story. The film has a lot to say about the changing winds of
technological advancement and the basics of for-profit business gradually and
constantly making everything—from gadgets, to principles, to people—obsolete
over time. Johnson is clever in the ways he forces us to consider and laugh at
that harsh reality, as well as ourselves for making it so.
This story of a girl in the sixth grade, navigating the complex
dilemma of wanting to fit in and the complicated emotions of feeling different,
is for everyone—regardless of gender or age. There's simply so much to
recognize in the main character and everyone surrounding her.
The story is about pre-teen Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson)
making new friends and learning that they're obsessed with forthcoming puberty
and worrying that she'll be the last girl in her class to get her period.
Margaret's desire to be like everyone else is so strong that the girl, whose
Christian mother (a great Rachel McAdams) and Jewish father (Benny Safdie) want
her to choose her own religion when she's an adult, starts praying to a divine
power for that kind of normalcy.
There are depths to these characters, layers to these ideas, and healthy doses of both
hope and cynicism about life and being human. The film possesses vital
knowledge for children to learn and wisdom that would benefit adults to
remember. It really is that good, that intelligent, and that compassionate.
Director Justine Triet and Arthur Harai's screenplay begins as a fairly simple mystery. A man—a husband and a father—has fallen to his
death from an upper floor of the remote chalet in the French Alps where he lived with his wife and 11-year-old son. Was it an accident? Did the man intentionally fall or jump from the upper-most floor of his home? Was someone else involved?
If there was someone else, who else could it be but Sandra (Sandra
Hüller), the wife—the only person known to be in the house at the time
of the man's death? As a police investigation and Sandra's trial proceed, the
filmmakers go to great lengths to ensure that we understand each and every
element of the investigation, as well as Sandra's perspective on the matter at
hand. In her precisely enigmatic performance, it's quite incredible how much Hüller
gives us about this character without even hinting at what would seem to be the
most important quality of Sandra: her innocence or guilt.
Maybe the real question isn't what truth is or if it even matters.
It might just be, as the film's hauntingly ambiguous conclusion suggests, which
truths help us to sleep at night.
She's called Bella Baxter and played by Emma Stone in a
bold, daring, and constantly evolving performance. Stone embraces the chance to
play someone as singular as this character to the fullest, and that dedication
helps to make this gimmicky figure, a resurrected woman with the brain of a
baby, and this premise, which amounts to Bella coming of age during a journey
across Europe, feel as real as they possibly could.
That's not to downplay the efforts of director Yorgos Lanthimos, though. In the clever and colorful ways he depicts the out-of-time and
within-the-imagination look of this world, the filmmaker rises to another step of his creative prowess. It's a hauntingly beautiful vision that looks
like something out of a storybook—but is never so overwhelming that it overshadows the emotional and intellectual core of the tale.
This is a sprawling comedic epic about the human condition and human nature's effect
on society, grounded by its ideas and its unexpected compassion but elevated by
its imagination, performances, and the weirdly empathetic—and jut downright
weird—character at its center.
Writer/director Jonathan Glazer has made a series of bold and brave choices
here, and the result is an off-kilter and unexpectedly horrifying film about the
Holocaust. It forces us to bear witness to the sheer ordinariness of one of the
many people who imagined and implemented that seemingly unthinkable plan.
The film is a constant act of slowly inevitable revelation. The
first sign that something is amiss is a low rumbling, coming from somewhere
nearby. While we'll eventually see white smoke rising from multiple trains
transporting prisoners to the camp and black ash pouring out of a tall chimney
from another angle, sound becomes the primary way this film communicates what's
really happening here. In the distance, we can hear yells and screams of terror,
pain, and anguish, caused by or resulting in the crack of gunshots.
That's the horror of this story. People who are plain, ordinary, and even boring are
capable of and do great evil. Just as we must remember the consequences of this
event, we must never forget that awful truth of the basic humanity of those who
perpetrated it, if only so that we do not excuse, justify, or ignore that
potential again.
It’s a rich, deep piece about the complex and seemingly inscrutable J. Robert
Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy, in a staggering, internalized performance
of a man who comes to be haunted by his own existence), the history through
which he lived, and the horrific future he helped to usher in. Boiled down to
its core, the story, which follows Robert from theorist to his overseeing the
development of the first nuclear weapon at a secret military base in Los Alamos,
is about the consequences of the man's life and work.
This account is also about how so many of his contemporaries attempted and, in many ways, succeeded in
writing and re-writing history. One of the many, many questions posed by Nolan's
film is who among these really possesses the power they claim to have. Even a
question such as that, though, is eclipsed by, perhaps, the ultimate one
involving these figures: Do any of them—or, for that matter, any of
us—actually deserve to possess such power?
After witnessing the destructive potential of the bomb (in a spectacular scene of
re-creation) and imagining the effects of it on human bodies (in a horrifying
sequence that cheering crowd pierced silent by a single, anguished scream),
Robert finally takes a position that few want to hear. The film forces us to bear witness to it, though, in intimate and
all-too-frighteningly human terms. Honorable Mention:
American:
An Odyssey to 1947, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Eileen, Emily, Guy
Ritchie's The Covenant, The Holdovers, The Iron Claw, May December, Mission:
Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Napoleon, Of an Age, Past
Lives, The Promised Land, Rebel, Rye Lane, The Teachers' Lounge, Theater
Camp, A Thousand and One Copyright © 20 |
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