Written by Tom Augustine.
Last year, I made a note about what goes into deciding what films are ‘in’ or ‘out’ when considering a year end list. This year I’ve come around to the idea that the best method going forward is to situate my list within the confines of what has had a commercial release to paying audiences in some form or another within these last twelve months. That means that excellent films that I’ve seen, but won’t be being released this year – most notably Sofia Coppola’s astounding Priscilla – aren’t going to be included here. As always, there are films that don’t make the cut – some honourable mentions this year include Passages, Perfect Days, How to Blow Up a Pipeline and Late Night With the Devil, as well as vivid short-form work like Strange Way of Life, AntsLive’s “Captain Ants”, TV series Succession and I Think You Should Leave, and New Zealand shorts like NZ International Film Festival winner Hey Brainy Man! and Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye’s wonderful essay film Seuteu. With that said, here are the twenty films that meant the most to me this year:
- Blue Jean (dir. Georgia Oakley)
My favourite of the burgeoning new wave of young, female British directors that also includes How to Have Sex’ Mollie Manning Walker and Scrapper’s Charlotte Regan is this deeply felt exploration of the double life of a closeted gym teacher in Thatcher’s England, anchored by a riveting performance from Rosy McEwen and shot on gorgeous 16mm. It may not reinvent the wheel as far as narrative drama goes, but Blue Jean provides atmosphere and catharsis in spades to make up for it.
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- Armageddon Time (dir. James Gray)
Perhaps the greatest American auteur not to be a household name, James Gray has been turning out classical, adult dramas for years in a cinemascape where such a thing no longer seems welcome. Armageddon Time is clearly one of Gray’s most personal, a reckoning with guilt, racism and responsibility through the eyes of a young Jewish boy in Seventies New York.
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- Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)
Box office be damned, the latest Mission: Impossible offering is yet another work from the Tom Cruise stable that proves he and his team have distilled blockbuster franchise filmmaking down to a fine art. Thrilling, pacy and well-performed with a clever, surprisingly timely villain in an all-seeing AI monstrosity, the series may seem like it’s at a low ebb, but all that’s easily forgotten while watching Ethan Hunt hang from a train slowly falling into an abyss.
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- The Boy and the Heron (dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
The octogenarian master’s latest work of fantasy by way of autobiography feels like a gentle, quiet reminder of not just what animation can be, but should be – magical, transcendent, personal and poetic.
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- No Bears (dir. Jafar Panahi)
The story of Jafar Panahi’s imprisonment and silencing by the Iranian government serves as a horrifying parallel to the great filmmaker’s many masterpieces. In his latest, No Bears, Panahi blends his own political struggle as a stifled creative with the many tribulations facing the people of Iran, a hybrid of documentary and narrative fiction that produces remarkable, harrowing results.
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- All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (dir. Laura Poitras)
Photographer Nan Goldin has been at the forefront of fearless, stridently political art-making since the 1970s, her work and activism remaining a vital element of the culture today. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, from Citizenfour documentarian Laura Poitras, weaves a compelling document of this visionary artist, encapsulating the injustices of the AIDS crisis and the modern day opioid crisis through the eyes of one who has seen it all and come out the other side battered, bruised, but never broken.
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- Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)
If I’d created this list on the other side of my first IMAX screening of Christopher Nolan’s latest immense work of maximalism, I’d have quite confidently given it the top spot for 2023. In the time (and multiple viewings) since, it’s fallen somewhat in my estimation, but remains a muscular, dizzying technical achievement, one that wrestles meaningfully with what may be the defining event of the 20th Century, producing Nolan’s most mature work in the process.
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- Knock at the Cabin (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
Still carving out a place for himself in the cinema landscape all these years later, Shyamalan’s most recent effort is one of his most accomplished and formally dazzling in years, featuring a career-defining performance from Dave Bautista.
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- Pacifiction (dir. Albert Serra)
Slow cinema wizard Albert Serra delivers his most accessible and possibly most accomplished work with this unsettling and dreamlike exploration of climate change and colonialism on the brink of catastrophe. Serra overloads his stunning digital photography with the gauzy, hazy colours of the film’s French Polynesian paradise, serving to amplify both the film’s choking sense of paranoia and its nightmarishly rendered hedonism.
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- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (dir. Kelly Fremon Craig)
Overseen by James L. Brooks and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (of the seriously undervalued Edge of Seventeen), Are You There God? is the platonic ideal of an adaptation of beloved material – sweet, sensitive, funny, and faithful in the ways that count. The cast brings to life this childhood staple with wit and care – most significantly the great Rachel McAdams, deserving of an Oscar nomination for this one – making for a classic that will surely be very easy to return to time and again.
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- Asteroid City + The Roald Dahl Shorts (dir. Wes Anderson)
A bit of a cheat, but I’ve included both 2023 offerings from auteur Wes Anderson because, even though they differ in tone and distributor, they nevertheless feel of a piece, a symbol of how confident Anderson is in his abilities and in his singular vision at this point in time. Asteroid City is a busy, exquisite portrait of grief and of a country in a stage of transformation, while the Netflix Roald Dahl shorts – Poison, The Rat-Catcher, The Swan and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar wrangle these dark, largely off-the-radar works from the beloved children’s author with care, grace and just a tinge of venom. Taken together, they’re testament to the continued vitality of this great filmmaker.
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- Afire (dir. Christian Petzold)
German filmmaker Christian Petzold has a number of modern classics under his belt – Phoenix, Barbara, Undine, Transit, to name a few – but continues to discover thrilling new shades to his ability with Afire, a film that takes the desire-soaked summer fables of Eric Rohmer and strains it through modern day climate anxiety. What initially seems to be Petzold’s first true comedy – cringe-inducing as it may be – soon morphs into something a lot more alarming and intriguing.
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- Tótem (dir. Lila Avilés)
The sweaty, humid dread of Lucrecia Martel’s beloved La Cienaga is retooled to entirely different purposes here, authentically conjuring the point of view of seven-year-old Sol (a luminous Naíma Sentíes) as she bounces around the confines of her grandparents’ house as they organise a surprise party for her father, who is slowly withering away from cancer. The sophomore effort of Avilés, Tótem has the distinct feeling of a filmed memory, much like last year’s Aftersun, but here the memory is recalled through textures and atmosphere. It’s a work of quiet devastation – don’t let it pass you by.
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- Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
Re-teaming with muse Michelle Williams, Showing Up is the closest American master Kelly Reichardt has come to a comedy, a gorgeous portrait of trying to keep your head above water as an artist in a society that seems to have lost its patience for art, and a system that seems designed to choke the creativity out of you at all costs. Cuts close to home for anyone who has tried to pursue a career in an industry not known for its ability to accrue capital.
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- The Killer (dir. David Fincher)
It’s something of a surprise that David Fincher, the cool, clinical visionary behind Fight Club, Zodiac, Gone Girl, and so on, has never made a film about a hitman before now, so suited to his style the world of contract killing seems to be. It was worth the wait, though – The Killer is another of Fincher’s airport novels given transcendent slickness by being passed through the Fincher filter, a gnarly, cold-as-ice thriller with a daring, slow-burn opening sequence set to voice-over and one of the best fight scenes of the year. The king is back, big time.
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- Last Summer (dir. Catherine Breillat)
Catherine Breillat, the French provocateur behind the controversial, audacious Fat Girl, drew middling reviews out of Cannes for this story of taboo, forbidden love between a lawyer and her teenage stepson, seemingly for its lack of noisy, jarring transgression. What Breillat is doing here, though, is far more patient, horrifying and haunting than it initially seems, portraying an ever-escalating chronicle of betrayal, desire and disloyalty that’s equal parts unnerving and thrillingly complex.
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- La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher)
Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher draws on the films of Federico Fellini for this strange, warmhearted story of a gang of misfits that rob ancient tombs littered across Italy in search of buried treasure. Headlined by a fantastic, wounded Josh O’Connor, the film is far more interested in concerns of the spiritual with regards to its characters, far more so than in the consequences they may face in the real world. The story that slowly emerges about why O’Connor’s bedraggled master thief keeps doing what he’s doing at all costs packs a powerful punch. It’s Rohrwacher’s most accomplished work yet.
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- Tár (dir. Todd Field)
It feels odd, recalling Tár, the film that set the awards circuit alight early in 2023, now with so much time having passed. Reappraising Todd Field’s film, what sticks is not its most buzzed about elements – the way it takes on cancel culture, the MeToo movement, and Generation Z, for example – but instead the film’s mature yet laceratingly funny portrait of a woman doomed by her own ego and hubris. Blanchett’s fiery performance remains one of the best of the year.
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- Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Much of what I had to say about elder statesman Scorsese’s latest I said in my review of the film at the time it was released. I’ve seen it several times now – and every time the world of Flower Moon gets richer, deeper, more satisfying, more crushing. It’s the newest chapter of a late-career run practically unparalleled in the halls of Hollywood fame, a picture that sees the great filmmaker take a hard, withering look at the American story, and through that prism, a look at his own complicity. It’s a messy, complicated film, one unequipped to fully encompass the tragedy of the murders of the Osage people, yes; but in the attempt, Scorsese brushes up against boundless poeticism – it’s there in the flames that ripple in the burning fields; it’s there in every perfectly timed cut from editor Thelma Schoonmaker; it’s there in Lily Gladstone’s eyes, as she asks that fateful question: ‘what was in the shots?’
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- May December (dir. Todd Haynes)
Todd Haynes directed Safe, one of the greatest of all American films – the story of a mysterious illness, an ‘allergy to the twentieth century’, that upends the life of a domestic housewife played by Julianne Moore. Nearly thirty years later, Haynes and Moore are still making masterpieces, works that unspool the elaborate fictions of modern life, leaving the viewer intoxicated, disturbed, awestruck and wholly satisfied. May December, follows an actress (Natalie Portman) as she prepares for the role of a lifetime – playing a woman (Julianne Moore) who seduced a high schooler (Charles Melton) some twenty years her junior. Haynes’ handsome, unpretentious filmmaking is razor-sharp, coaxing astonishing performances from his three actors – Portman has never been better, Moore is a monster as pathetic as she is intriguing, and Melton may just steal it out from everyone else as a grown man trapped forever in the abuse he couldn’t escape from. There’s a touch of Pedro Almódovar’s melodrama to May December, but Haynes’ is more grounded, subtler, eager to subdue you before it devours you whole. There have been many great films this year, but only a couple I’d consider among the best of this young century. May December is one of them.
The Best of 2023
Movie title: The Best of 2023
Movie description: The year that was confidently displayed the many contradictions of cinema in the modern era. It was a time of original stories breaking box office - and creative - boundaries; but also a time of sameness and homogenisation sweeping through our multiplexes and streaming services. Above all, 2023 made it clear that the cinema is still a commercial, ideological, technological battleground, a status that is unlikely to change any time soon. Here are the boldest, the most memorable, and finest pictures of 2023.
Date published: December 14, 2023