I don’t usually publish my Top 10 lists until a month (or two, or three) into the new year. A lot of this is just logistics. It’s hard to catch all these great movies that come out in the last quarter of the year. It has to be spread out. Something has to give. And while I often find my favorites earlier in the year (this list will prove just that!) I can’t help but exercise patience in giving some late-year award contenders a chance.
When you combine that with the time-bending nature of being a full-time teacher and parent of two young children, you get a situation like this: a 2023 list over six months into 2024. But in many ways, this is how I like it. I love writing about movies that stick with me. My first attempt at a movie blog was called The Gumball Factory because that’s what the best art did for me: gave me something to chew over, on my own and with others. And if you really want to overextend the metaphor: something that I’d often catch my sole on whenever I thought my brain had discarded it.
So here it is: the stickiest films of 2023.
A FOND FAREWELL: Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3
Maybe it’s by accident. Maybe it’s just following a roster of GOTG comic book villains and this is the biggest remaining one. But I think it’s fitting for James Gunn to use the High Evolutionary, a villain so committed to his society-developing goals that he’ll wipe out entire, well-functioning towns just for another chance at something a smidge more successful. Is that not what reboot-laden Hollywood is today? Every good, popular thing must be remade. Not to add meaning or to explore new colors in the narrative – that’s bonus frosting for cinematic foodies. No, everything must be remade to squeeze a little more juice out of the aging lemon.
Gunn knows this as well as anyone. He’s now leading the DC film and television division at Warner Brothers, which currently has a prospective schedule full of rebooting characters. He’s currently making a rebooted Superman movie with the (and this could change!) title of…Superman. Hollywood is the High Evolutionary and it will always be. So what’s James Gunn gonna do with his final film with his beloved Guardians of the Galaxy, the franchise that helped boost Marvel’s financial and creative floor? He’s going to rage against the machine with all his unique touches.
I think it’s great he’s centered the entire movie’s narrative around Rocket Raccoon, a character that literally has a CGI mouth modeled after one of Gunn’s dogs, Von Spears. And that he begins the film with Raccoon half-singing to an acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep”, a reminder that this is a franchise of misfits. And that the ending involves not only saving a bunch of human orphans, but a whole Space Noah’s Ark of badly mistreated animals. I love that Gunn goes just as hard with the soundtrack, moving us into the 90’s with some unexpected choices. The fact that the action finale is scored to Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” is oddly perfect. This rag-tag team has embodied a bit of that snotty, yet earnest Beastie Boys attitude.
There are so many ways that Gunn could have sleepwalked his way through his last Marvel movie before jumping over to his extra-full-time gig at DC. But you can see him making the most of it. The giant physical set of Knowhere. The extra gross texture to the Orgoscope or the impressive gore when High Evolutionary’s face is removed. The way he takes Gamora’s death in the Avengers films – something that probably knee-capped the trilogy story he likely wanted to tell – and makes it a message of how people may not be who we want them to be, but they’re good enough as they are. Gunn has clearly hit upon a formula that works just as well for him as it does for audiences. The Suicide Squad could be considered the R-Rated DC version of Guardians of the Galaxy. And his next movie will be about one of the biggest, yet most well-meaning misfits in all of culture: Superman.
I will remember how deeply Gunn cares about all the trilogy actors he’s worked with. You can see it in the way he sends every character off on missions that fit not just who they are but who they can be. He wants these people to do well – fictional or not. Volume 3 is a big film that doesn’t quite fire on all cyclinders – the Marvel machine grinds the gears a little too often – but the goofball and heartfelt streaks Gunn and his team paint it with make it a worthwhile ride. Gunn will continue to make big blockbuster films with lovable actors, great music, and an earnest yet offbeat approach. In many ways, he’s just like the characters at the end of Volume 3 – pushing ahead out of his comfort zone and seeing what magic he can find in the process.
A KNOCKOUT JOKE: The Killer
The funniest thing about this movie is also the realest: it’s a feature-length setup for a zeitgeist punchline. Director David Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker are in total lockstep with this, an adaptation of the French graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon. It starts off funny enough, with Michael Fassbender’s narration almost comically meticulous, as if he’ll fall asleep while wanking off to the sound of his own carefully-calibrated voice. But when a mission goes awry, he must fix it. And anyone who’s ever had to be on the phone for hours – days, even – to dispute a bill will understand Fassbender’s pain as it plays out within the contract killer genre. He goes from one place to another, each finish line revealed to be the beginning of another race against time, money, and his own life. When it all ends high up in the Brooklyn apartment of a wealthy man, a big smile crept over my face. “What I’m trying to say here, and I can’t express this strongly enough,” the panicked billionaire says, “I have no issue with you. Zero. As far as I’m concerned, we’re good.” There are a comical amount of layers between him and the problem Fassbender was supposed to take care of so that the pain does not disturb the rich guy’s takeout meals. He is a man insulated from pain. And the insulation is the world the rest of us live in, the one where our bill disputes suck hours of our lives and when a mistake on the job can mean the difference between life and a callous death.
COME FOR THE LAUGHS, STAY FOR THE HEART: No Hard Feelings
If you’ve seen any interview Jennifer Lawrence has done over the years, you know she’s got a sense of humor rarely showcased on the big screen. Anytime someone wins an Oscar – as Lawrence did in 2013 – it’s hard to get off the Oscar-baiting Prestige Film Train. The trailer showed some good gags – the throat punch, the pickup line about weiners – but they successfully obscured a rather touching story about an adrift woman desperate to call something her own.
I still think about a scene midway through, when Maddie (Lawrence) and Percy (an incredible find in Andrew Barth Feldman) go to a fancy dinner at a fancy resturaunt to make up for the prom night neither of them went to. When a nearby upright piano opens up, Maddie dares Percy to show off the playing ability he previously disclosed. It all feels light and fun – an odd couple making the most of an unexpected summer connection – until Percy goes up to the piano and, to Maddie’s complete surprise, plays Hall And Oates’ “Maneater”. As he glides into the intro and the opening verses, the camera slowly eases towards Maddie, who is frozen by the fact the song applies to her way more than Percy even realizes. I still get goosebumps by the acting Lawrence does in this scene. The way she shows so many conflicting ideas and emotions on the verge of completely overwhelming her, all without moving. It’s an incredible scene to anchor the movie with, one that elevates it to something deeper than I ever expected.
THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD: A Thousand and One
I first checked this movie out after Film Crit Hulk’s effusive praise, and I’m so glad I did. Writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s thoroughly impressive debut avoids so many cliches by immersing itself in the specifics and grooving alongside Teyana Taylor’s incredible performance as Inez. But it’s in the film’s final third in which the story elevates. It takes all the cards it has carefully laid down and begins to reveal them, one by heartbreaking one. It’s here we meet the oldest version of Inez’s son, Terry (Josiah Cross). What makes Cross’s performance so unforgettable is the way he communicates so much with a character we know uses few words. Terry is often withdrawn. He needs more time to process things. But when the film’s twist kicks in, when the truth that’s been hid both from Terry and from us, the audience, is revealed, Cross devastates. Most onscreen teens we see are hyperverbal, sharing their many thoughts and conflicted feelings. Perhaps it’s because some writers don’t spend enough time around teenagers. But it also may be because teenagers can be notoriously frustrating people to converse with. They hold so much in – sometimes unconsciously, their brains still making sense of the world – and what they do share can sound completely unaware of the ecosystem around them. But Cross does it all with his eyes, with his body language, with his movement. It’s a masterful performance seeped in a honesty and vulnerability we don’t often get to see. Cross, like Rockwell’s film, avoids cliche with every choice. He meets Taylor inch for inch, giving their final scenes its bittersweet, yet hopeful sting.
A LAYER CAKE TO SAVOR: May December
What’s stuck with me most about May December is how much we gain from the layering of its narrative. We think we know this story because it closely remembers the true story of the teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and the 12-year-old male student she initiated a deeply inappropriate relationship with. But director Todd Haynes makes great use of the angles the script by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik offer. By having a try-hard actress in Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) come into the town where Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) reside, intending to shadow Gracie for a role in an upcoming biopic, we see the mythmaking that takes place. Elizabeth’s desperation to tell their story feels just as predatory as the media must have been when Gracie and Joe were first reported on. It’s rekindling a cycle of trauma and shame that begs us to ask: who does this story benefit and why are we so desperate to tell it again? And when will we value the cost of these stories more than eyeballs they bring?
At one point in the film, Haynes uses a gorgeous shot of Moore and Portman sitting before a multi-sided mirror, their reflections physically showing us just how many sides to the story there really can be. The additional mirrors added to the scene (per a suggestion from the cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt) makes it hard for us to figure out at first which angle is real and where characters in the scene are actually positioned. We never quite know which one is the truest angle. And it doesn’t matter. We will believe what we choose to believe. And we will find ways to distort the story over and over again.
What also sticks with me, all these months later, is Melton’s slow burn of a performance, and the way we realize he’s missed an entire childhood. He’s there for his first child’s high school graduation and it feels much like graduating college when you realize the goal you all shared no longer exists. Suddenly they – and you – are free, and what comes after is a terrifying unknown. He melts in silent tears. There is no going back. No parent to lean on and guide him through the next phases. The only way forward is stepping into deep uncertainty.
THE ASHES OF GUILT: Oppenheimer
This cast is stacked like a Russian Doll’s cupboard. Great actor upon great actor upon great actor, all neatly placed within roles that stretch down hallways and across boardrooms. It’s so great to see so many favorites – Josh Hartnett! David Krumholtz! David Dastmalchian! Florence Pugh! But having so many welcome sights doesn’t just put a face to a name – it makes the film skate by just fast enough to make you almost forget how harrowing it will all soon be.
The opening minutes of Nolan’s Oppenheimer show a level of editing the rest of the film doesn’t try to match. Full of suggestion and color, of visions and terrors, it’s as close to a big-budget art film as Nolan may ever attempt. And then it settles into rhythm. And, to be fair, there is a particular delight in that rhythm of watching great actor after great actor step up to the plate and knock their line or two clear out of the park. Everyone wants to work with Nolan. It feels as if the entire film is imbued with goodwill, even as it shows the outline of some of the darkest horrors of history. The scenes flow by and you can’t help but be swept up in it.
What sticks with me the most is the way Nolan ends his film, bringing Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy, deserving of all the awards and a sandwich or five) back to the pond with Einstein (an excellent Tom Conti) as he delivers this final line: “When they’ve punished you enough, they’ll serve you salmon and potato salad,” he says, as Nolan shows us flashes of the awards banquets soon to come, “give you a medal, and pat you on the back, telling you all is forgiven.” Then the look on Einstein’s face hardens. “Just remember, it won’t be for you…it will be for them.”
In just one line, beside a pond, we see how an everlasting history of complicity is built. People support the worst of urges in their own self-interest. They find someone else to blame. And then they circle back around, as their nightmares become too much, and try to reward their way out the guilt tunnel. They don’t want the burden. They don’t want to have to explain themselves to Saint Peter or whichever gatekeeper they believe in. They want to burnish regret and shame into a forged medal to be passed on to someone else. Let the demons find those ashes, they think. Let me admit my wrongs while maintaining my status above it all.
I think about the line everywhere I go. The many random, all-too-late recognitions for things that were once swept under the rug and out of sight. If you look hard enough, you can see the white-hot light at the center of it all, the passion hidden or stolen. It’s almost enough, just like the bombs borne from Oppenheimer’s work, to take your breath away.
YORGOS GOES YOLO: Poor Things
Very few filmmakers seem to be having as much fun as Yorgos Lanthimos while he chases dark ideas and quirky dreams. Not all of Poor Things quite comes together – but that’s only because it’s bursting at the seams with fantastical ideas and risks. Lanthimos allows his film to explode with color and contrastive visuals just as the loud, clashing world is being absorbed by a deeply confused yet ferociously curious Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). You can see every actor having the time of their life participating in this phantasmagoric fantasy, this technicolor acid trip of a film.
I do wish Lanthimos and his team gave us more of what they suggest in the final shots: an imagination from Bella Baxter that doesn’t seem so deeply drenched in the male gaze. But the surrounding film, and Stone’s performance at the center of it, shows just how cruel and colorful a world we bring our children into and how, at some point, we all have to let go.
A SHELL WORTHY OF HOME: TMNT: Mutant Mayhem
It does not take much to sell me on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. Even after the Platinum Dunes produced versions that came out in 2014 and 2016 with their nightmare fuel CGI designs. Even after all the cartoons made and all the toys botched (they’ll never make them as good as they used to, I keep telling myself). But a script from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg? With Jeff Rowe (Mitchells vs the Machines) co-writing and co-directing? With a new, invigorating art style? With a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score? What more could a Turtlehead even ask for?
It says a lot about this film that the hype never felt overblown. From the very get-go, when we’re in the middle of a mission and the Reznor + Ross score rocks out, you know you’re in good hands. The good vibes are sustained throughout.
What stuck the most with me is how easy it is to forget all these years later that these are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For whatever reason – perhaps the suits they wore in their original live-action films or the fact they just seemed so kick-ass – I always read them as aimless twenty-somethings. Here, they embody their names in many ways. They talk over each other. They joke. They seek ill-advised thrills. And, more than anything, they just want to fit in.
I found it an inspired choice this time around that for as gorgeous as the animation choices can be, the humans are by far the ugliest thing in the entire film. They look often look grotesque and judgmental. They look more alien than even a ninja turtle. You spend the whole film with this hilarious group of turtle teens, understanding their desire to fit in but also wanting to remind them that humans are absolutely no cooler. Perhaps that’s where the wisdom kicks in. We always think the older ones are wiser until we are them, and realize we’re still teenagers in our own hardened, shelled bodies, still desperate to fit in somewhere.
All this and it must be said how fun this movie is. When I strived to find a movie for my 4th graders to watch before a Break, the vast majority feverishly voted for this one. It makes them feel a little cooler. A little bit on the edge. A little more like the teenager they may one day dream themselves to be.
THE SOUND OF COMPLICITY: The Zone of Interest
It’s not often you see a movie scored with the sounds of human suffering, but Jonathan Glazer has always been one to set audiences off-balance. The genius of this film lies in how it plays like a rather standard family story. They’re all living their lives in a beautiful home, a happy life only temporarily upset by the father’s job transfer. They swim. They try on clothes. They argue about how they should not have to move. It’s all fairly standard familial stuff except for that part about the whole thing being scored to the sounds of humans being deprived of dignity and, eventually, their lives.
There’s a baby that cries almost all the way through the movie. You could think the baby is colic. But you will also be unable to ignore the gunshots, the screams, the many, many audible and visual reminders that next door to this family is a Holocaust crematorium. You’ll be unable to ignore the fancy coat the wife tries on, knowing it belongs to someone else. Or that the human remains that interrupt a family swim are not some unnatural phenomenon, but rather an everyday circumstance they’ve stumbled upon. Entire lives and family trees are being removed, one immoral decision at a time, and all you’re seeing in the foreground is a family who’s so used to it that they’ve tuned it out. It’s white noise. It’s everyday life.
Glazer and his team have created a masterful exploration of what it means to be complicit, to allow great suffering to slip into the casual noise of our lives. I still think about the final scenes when the father stumbles down the stairs, as if he’s going to vomit, to finally purge some awful thing that he’s been holding deep within him. Maybe he’s finally grown a moral center after seeing the plans other crematorium managers have. His whole body is keeled over. It’s a position we’ve never seen him in. And yet: nothing comes out. His body is used to it by now. The question becomes: is ours?
A PLAYFUL PLAYTHING: Barbie
There was no reason to believe that a film adaptation of one of the most popular toys of all time would be good. But I trusted in Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbauch, even if I had no idea the tone they’d aim for. But the first trailer showed just how delightful it could be. And so the excitement built and built and built and it finally came out last summer in a cultural explosion worth being a part of. You can practically hear Gerwig giggling behind the screen in every scene, so thoroughly entertained by all her wonderfully-game actors, delivering lines from a script full of ideas and heart. After the more subtle, intimate delights of her first two movies in Lady Bird and Little Women, it’s so exciting to see Gerwig play in such a massive pink sandbox and for so much of her voice and energy to carry over through the studio system.
Ryan Gosling’s Ken may have been the performance (rightfully) nominated for an Oscar, but it’s Margot Robbie’s Barbie that holds it all together at the center. She masterfully plays all the shades of Barbie’s feelings – her confidence, her self-doubt, her heartbreak when things fall apart – and gives the film the expansive emotional palate to play with. There are entire unforgettable sequences and lines I’ll always be excited to return to. Let Barbie be a reminder that you can be earnest in your pursuits (just look at how many classic film inspirations Gerwig name-drops in this video) while still embracing the absolute fun of it all.
A LIZARD KING WORTH FEARING: Godzilla Minus One
Hollywood has really tried their damndest to make Godzilla a thing. They rebranded him in 2014 with Gareth Edwards’ earnest take and its Michael Dougherty-led 2019 follow up, King of the Monsters. Then they tried again teaming him with King Kong – himself rebranded only 15 years after Peter Jackson’s remake – in 2021’s Godzilla vs Kong and 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. At this point, it feels like a classic Hollywood misunderstanding: mistaking iconography for character. Just because something looks cool doesn’t mean it will be. Don’t get me wrong: the current American Godzilla is pretty cool in its own way, especially when he blows an atomic breath blast to the middle of the Earth because he doesn’t want Kong talking shit about him. But what Japan understands is that Godzilla works best as a metaphor. He does not have the most mobile face. You can only work the eyes so much before they look goofy. You can make him too lean and look like a knockoff Jurassic Park T-Rex. He exists best as scaly, giant canvas to work upon.
What this Godzilla Minus One does so beautifully is show the percussive, crescendoing impact of trauma. Our lead character is already dealing with survivors’ guilt after the film’s incendiary opening scene. Then he feels another layer of guilt as he returns to a devastated hometown. And then – and only then – does Godzilla resurface. Instead of pumping your fists like we do in America, you’re thinking “Oh, fuck that guy.” You know these people don’t deserve any more pain. But a bill must be paid, and the chances of Godzilla paying are about as realistic as him having an online savings account. By the end, when the line, “Is your war now over?” is uttered, I got goosebumps and tears. It reminded me of the end of the original Jurassic Park, when the final moments aren’t about the badass dinosaurs but rather the end of a terrifying journey where these people feel fortunate to survive. There is no telling what will come next. Surely, chaos will reign. But somewhere in that moment, the formed bond becomes unmistakable and worth protecting. The war may be over, but worthy battles will soon begin.
10. You Hurt My Feelings
Nicole Holofcener is one of our greatest screenwriters alive. Few are so deft at observing and depicting the emotional microtranscations we make in our everyday lives. How we’re all tightly-wound, high-functioning people until someone unlocks us with the right key and we explode out into the wide, unpredictable open. Here, an entire movie centers around Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhearing some rather honest writing feedback from her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies). The person she believes no secrets are held between. The person who’s supposed to be her person. And once she hears the true opinion he’s been withholding, it feels like all bets are off. All truths are now some from of well-dressed lies. The center, for now, cannot hold.
Holofcener builds out her intimate thematic framework with characters who are all avoiding conversations they need to have. It’s the kind of thing that builds over years of routine, when we know the rhythms of our partners and children so well that we can sleepwalk through every hiccup. But it all adds up and, at some point, the bill must be paid.
I love the way Holofcener shows Don half-assing his way through his job as a therapist. After all, if all your conversations are happening behind closed doors, who’s there to really debate how good you are? He’s protected in a way that his wife, a writer, is not. Even when a disappointed couple threatens to sue him for therapy they claim doesn’t work, he’s unbothered. But after he lays out everything in the open with Beth, after they finally talk about the little white lies they’ve told each other, the little things they do to avoid the harder conversations they should probably consider having, he feels a shift. He comes back to the office a new person. He connects with his patients better. Holofcener walks us through the pain of truth, the ways we lie even as we’re hurt by being lied to, and how scrubbing off that scar tissue allows us to move a little better.
9. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
There’s a scene where our rag-tag group of heroes, desperate for answers, stumble upon a graveyard. There, they can ask each awoken deadman up to 5 questions before they return to their eternal slumber. They blunder it initially, asking questions to each other, only for it to be overhead by a deadman and counted against them. But then they start to figure it out, and with each given answer, we see glimpses of a battle that could easily have been slid within the high-budget fantasies of the past. That is, until they meet their on-field demise and their story reaches a literal dead end. If I were to sum up this film, this unexpected wonder of a $150 million dollar adaptation to a well-known fantasy board game, I’d point to this scene. The characters and actors play it straight, which only makes it funnier. And it ends on a perfect button of a deadman still awake, waiting for someone to ask a 5th and final question so he can finally get back underground. It’s ridiculous and hilarious a terrific use of Dungeons & Dragons lore that can delight fans and newbies alike.
Fantasy has rarely ever felt this fun. The creatures are inspired. The scenery gorgeous. And the film truly follows the spirit of a Dungeons and Dragons game in which every bit of problem-solving feels like an inspired bit of improv, of stumbling upon answers you didn’t realize existed. There are so many little nice touches set up that definitely pay off later, including a final choice at the end that – no joke – had me all emotional! You know that writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldenstein are probably a bit shocked they got people to put so much money into this. But you also know it’s gotta be a great script to get so many game, fun actors involved. Hugh Grant, especially, seems to delight in his villainous turn. Chris Pine deftly handles the silly and the serious while being a generous scene partner to actors who totally understand what movie they’re in. I could go on. In a fairer world, this would have been a massive box-office hit and a sequel would be currently filming.
8. American Fiction
The most persistent thing about this movie – the part I can’t shake, over 6 months later – is the way it shows the point it’s trying to make. It feels like we’re softly pinballing between two parallel lives, the story Monk (a pitch-perfect Jeffrey Wright) believes the world wants of him and the true life he’s not yet ready to write about. And he can’t seem to win in either one. He’s always playing catch-up while being reminded he’s not quite in control. In the literary and film world, he’s at the mercy of an algorithm developed within a system that constantly undermines him. In his own life, he’s stumbling his way through one family decision after another.
I still get goosebumps when I think about a small scene when Monk is driving back from the hospital and his family’s longtime nanny, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), asks him a simple question: will he walk her down the aisle? It’s a marriage you’re already rooting for because it’s two people late in life, grabbing on to whatever joy they can tie around their fingers. But it also reminds you how much of the family is missing and how, despite it all, Monk has made enough of an impression that he’s the one she chooses. You can see how much it touches Monk, how much he needs it. In a world desperate to place marginalized people on pedestals that only isolate, it hits especially hard when someone unexpectedly draws us in closer.
Jefferson has built quite the eclectic, impressive writing career over the years with his work on The Good Place and Watchmen. He always felt, to me, like the chameleon who could do it all. Here, he gets to show a little bite while showing just how much further he could push, if given the opportunity. I hope he gets it. I hope this is the beginning of a burgeoning new career direction and he goes all the way.
7. Past Lives
Too often these days I find myself failing to respond to people in a timely manner because I want to make space for them. A Marco Polo here, a text there. I leave them unanswered, waiting for the right moment that never quite comes. They are like books I’m holding, stacked high and just over my head, that I just need a place to set them down upon.
The real beauty of Past Lives, to me, is the way it makes space. It is an interrogation of the self disguised as a movie. You know these people. You may have been then at some point in your life. You’ve used the same technology – the laggy jitters of Skype, the Facebook messages sent leaping into the unknown. The story is simple in its structure to make way for a stunning amount of emotional complexity. And that complexity comes not just from the film itself, but from you, the viewer.
No film made me think about my own past quite like this one. It made me think long and hard about the parts of my life – both across time and space – that are inaccessible to others. How those from my childhood would not able to fully access my life here in Austin and vice versa. How there’s entire stories that I need to translate for others, over and over and over again, until I understand for myself why they matter so much to me.
6. Killers of the Flower Moon
The last time Martin Scorsese made a 3.5-hour movie (2019’s The Irishman), I found a morning when all would be quiet and marveled at how quickly the time passed. Years of story flowed before me, all culminating in a gut punch of an ending. Just recently, I found another quiet morning to watch a 3.5-hour Scorsese movie – this one only three minutes shorter – and marveled at the how quickly the time passed, again culminating with a gut punch of an ending. This is the power of being in the hands of a true master of cinema. It’s what happens when you have an editor like Thelma Schoonmaker. When you have a writer like Steve Zaillian or Eric Roth. When you have talented actors like Robert DeNiro and Leo DiCaprio. When you have a devastating, centering performance from Lily Gladstone as Molly Burkhart. There are few people doing it like Scorsese and you can feel the man working with utmost focus to ensure he tells this story with equal parts respect and verve.
Not once did I wonder if we needed to see the whole story as presented. Everything has its purpose. The deliberate pace setting the Osage Nation chessboard up, punctuated by the sparks of quick, wrongful violence. The many characters established as dominos leading toward a death spiral they can’t escape. You won’t truly appreciate how devastatingly the entire thing falls apart if you don’t see how formidably it was built, how painstakingly everyone was put into place, and how quickly everyone became a body to be pulled in front of another body, scrambling to keep ahead of the trail of guilt.
I still think about two paired shots that take place just before everything truly descends into tragedy. Scorsese, along with his masterful cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, sends the camera through a house full of Molly’s relatives and their partners. It’s a wide swoop of a shot. We see how it’s a little too many people – too many competing interests, both present and hidden – and how it does not nor cannot truly feel like home. The air has been poisoned with greed. You can feel it as much as you can see it. But as that camera slows, we see Molly’s grandmother, clearly at the end of her mortal coil, as the shot shifts to a house empty of everything but a single, solitary owl. It looks to Molly’s grandmother and nothing more needs to be said. Death is near. We are shown just how lonely it feels. To at once be surrounded by a true community and then to have it taken away within the next few breaths. The owl will return later on as more Osage die.
The surrealism of the owl, a powerful Osage symbol, shows just how genuine Scorsese and his collaborators are. In just two vibrant shots – one of worrisome plenty and one of terrifying scarcity – we see respect paid to a rich Osage culture and the way white man’s arrival and the destruction of their community has isolated them.
I still think about the final words delivered in the film, at the end of a dramatization of a radio show meant to market the FBI’s work in investigating the Osage crimes. For all we’ve seen – the tragedies, the blood shed, the history erased – we are reminded that those who did the most wrong were eventually released, and that the original owners of the land, the Osage, would be reduced to the sound of a mocking voice actor. And so Scorsese, playing a producer within the radio show, steps up to deliver a piece previously omitted: Mollie’s obituary. As he describes her life and family, the last line is the one that hits the hardest: “There was no mention of the murders.” If you can see how devastating the decimation of the Osage wealth and community in 1920s Oklahoma was, then you can only imagine how many other histories have been wiped out and swept under the rug. This is a film that will haunt you long after its final shot. As it should.
5. Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse
There are few films I’ve sung the gospel of more than 2017’s Into the Spiderverse. Every line hits. Every character lingers. Every action scene is full of emotion and confidence. And to top it all off, it assured many risk-averse studio heads that yes, you can invest in animation that looks a little different and it can be very, very successful. So how do you possibly follow up a film so many people consider a downright modern classic? It certainly helps to have producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller – a team that’s somehow made just about every bad-sounding idea into cinematic gold – back on scriptwriting duties. It also becomes apparent that so many of the people working on this astonishing film were inspired by the original before it. And that they all have the same collective goal: to take it one step further.
What makes this film so memorable is how it takes it further. There is certainly a god-level amount of technical work at play here, with the way so many characters are crammed into scenes and yet remain distinct. The artistry alone truly feels like a supergroup gone supernova. But what I keep coming back to is the way it pushes our characters. One of the opening scenes alone, in which Gwen must confront her father about her identity, is one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen or experienced in a movie theater. And to go there following a showstopper of an action scene with a DaVinci-drawing inspired Vulture time-tripping into a Guggenheim Museum with a pregnant and motorcycling Spider-Woman and for it all to feel as if it’s one piece? It’s incredible. How lucky are we such a thing exists?
But I keep coming back to the way the film does a very Lord and Miller thing of using the meta idea of a canon – one that, as our cultural superhero infatuation has shown, is predominately white and straight – and how it affects the way we live our lives. Miles can see the way things should go. The person he maybe should be. But when the math doesn’t seem to math, he takes matters in his own hands, in another mindblower of an action scene where just about every Spiderman ever created is chasing him up a sky-ascending train, culminating in the line that sets everything into place just as it all is blown up: “Nah, I’mma do me.”
I can’t wait to see what this means for Miles, Gwen, and the many Spiderfriends (especially Hobie aka Spider-Punk, one of the coolest characters ever committed to film) all wrapped up in this ever-expanding tale. I hope they take their time. The way the groundbreaking animation works with Daniel Pemberton’s invigorating score is just such a mood to bathe in. This is a series so committed to making something memorable that I know there’s nothing to worry about. They will do right by the characters and the audience. And we will be all the richer for it.
4. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
As someone completely mesmerized by writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s debut film The Edge of Seventeen in 2016, her follow-up sat high atop my must-see list since the first trailer. You can tell James L. Brooks (Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment) is her mentor, the way she shares his warmth and empathy for characters while punching out one great line after another. But adaptations can be tricky, even when they’re esteemed sources like Judy Blume’s 1970 classic. Needless to say: Craig and her team pull it off wonderfully.
I saw this movie 9 months ago and still cannot shake Rachel McAdam’s performance as Margaret’s mother, Barbara. At the start, we learn the family is going to move to New Jersey for Margaret’s father’s new job, and that Barbara will take a break from her busy career hours to stay at home. McAdam’s eyes are lit with tickled possibility as she informs Margaret that now she will be able to spend all the time together they didn’t have before. Every parent knows this fantasy. That opportunity to trade in years of guilt for the levity of sharing something special. But then the real kicker comes in: time frees up just as Margaret becomes as independent and social as ever. She needs her girlfriends to talk about all the Big Girl things coming her way, and with a candor she can’t quite imagine having with her own mother. Barbara does her best to swallow the disappointment, and McAdams presents it in beautiful, heartbreaking fashion, a mother doing her best to find some light in a situation full of shade and isolation. It’s a valiant effort, one so consuming that she keeps forgetting to order the new couch they need. Barbara just missed the window. And now she’s a child, without friends, relearning how to deal with the world again. That’s the tough thing about parenthood – you are reminded of all the time of what you’re missing with your kids and then when you finally get it, it’s too late.
In many delightful, all-too-human ways, Margaret spends the rest of the film trying just as much to figure out her beliefs on religion as her complex thoughts about these new phases of puberty. She sees the way religion tears her family apart – a thorny estrangement McAdam’s plays powerfully – and the way competing biological timelines threaten to spread giant cracks through every friendship she forms.
In the final scene, Margaret’s period finally arrives. She yells for her mother, who feels emboldened by the fact her daughter – so independent for so much of this wild New Jersey school year – finally needs her. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” Barbara says as they embrace. But we know. It’s so many emotions as a parent coursing through your veins, threatening to burst out at any moment. By this time, my tears are threatening to burst out, too. Barbara runs to get some pads she’s set aside for Margaret – because preparing for the possible future is definitely a parent coping strategy – only for Margaret to say she knows how to use them because she’s been practicing in her room for two months. You can see in McAdams performance – again, this should have won all the awards – how Barbara is doing the math, how she’s trying to sit her hurt at not being involved in this process along with her pride in her daughter’s growing persondom. “Well, then,” she says, pushing a smile as kindly as you she can, “You don’t need me.” She leaves the bathroom and shuts the door and that’s when my heart and chest caved in alongside Barbara’s. It reminds me of a tweet I read long ago where the difference between having kids and not having kids is not that you feel more emotions, but that you feel all of them deeper. McAdams as she shuts that bathroom door and takes it in all is Exhibit A.
Craig knows how to end this movie, this journey of a girl who’s spent so much time trying to figure out who she is alongside so many competing ideas, interests, and values. She’s had to wrestle with the opposing faiths of her grandparents and the competing interests of her fast-growing friends. She’s a duck calm above the pond but furiously pedaling beneath. And yet, here she is at the end, looking to the camera, a year older but untold years wiser, ready for the great unknown.
3. All Of Us Strangers
Family can make it feel like your past life is frozen in amber. There are comments you never escape. Ill-fitting jokes that are always repeated. A constant feeling like you can’t escape the person you were back then long enough for them to truly see who you are now. An example: my siblings insist I am terrible with directions. Just the worst. Not a person to ever count on. But every time they say it, it baffles me into a quiet submission. We haven’t lived close enough the last decade for me to give them many directions. But then I remember the trips we took together – the Canadian adventure without a working GPS, the hunting for an apartment around the wonky, turn-heavy South Hill of Spokane. Their memory of my ability to give directions is strongest in places where of course I would be bad at giving directions. I had no idea where we were going, where north, south, east, or west resided. It seems silly, but when it’s brought up – still to this day – it feels like I’m being yanked 15 years back. There’s no escaping it.
When Adam (Andrew Scott should have got all the awards for this) struggles to write a script about his one childhood, he finds himself mysteriously returning to his childhood home. And even though Adam’s parents died in a car accident when he was 12, they’re there to greet him. They were frozen in amber at the time of their death, and now they’ve been released. Their clothes or hairstyles haven’t changed. They are clearly stuck in the 80s. What at first seems like a great opportunity to make up for lost time is quickly undercut by the tension of Adam realizing he still hasn’t come out to his parents. He’s lived a whole life – full of loneliness, of success and failure – and they have no idea. They are now just as much strangers to him as he felt with them.
The way that Andrew Haigh frames this story (based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada) so elegantly shows how much we are constantly rewriting our lives. We’re looking back, imagining conversations we always meant to have and never did, wondering what choices could have changed our lives had they been different. While Adam’s reconnecting with his parents, he’s also starting a genuine, careful relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal). To say any more would be to give too much away. But I still think about the shock I felt at the ending, and the way Haigh suggests that maybe we’re just as much strangers to ourselves as we are to others. Maybe we’ll be spending the rest of our lives rewriting our way to a better ending, to who we want to be seen as.
2. Perfect Days
So much of technology these days flattens the joy. Cinematography looks duller and less-inspired than ever in the streaming era. Music is torn from albums and mixed in ever-expanding playlists that encourage us, whether we realize it or not, to stay in sonorous silos. Kindles, as much as I love the convenience of them, rob of us of that feeling of speeding through a book and realizing you’re about to run out of the minor miracle we’re now absorbing.
Hirayama (a luminous Koji Yakusho) drives to work each day doing a simple job he takes great pride in. He has all his tools. He does his job with the kind of precision you can find great satisfaction in. On his drives, he makes great use of his work van’s tape deck, listening to only cassettes. What feels rather fitting is that Apple – and likely any service streaming this film – does not include the name of the song or who the artist is. The lyrics are not even subtitled. It makes our main character more inaccessible to me. I can appreciate the visual beauty he finds, but I’m missing a key part of what connects with his soul. Finally, I use Shazam, an app Apple bought and embedded, to identify the song for me. But it won’t even try to sell me on the album it comes from. Only the single. It wants the thing to be broken into sellable parts. It wants to dangle a carrot forever. That’s the society Hirayama finds himself trapped in.
What I find so gorgeous about this film is the subtle ways it tells us in its second half that this man, who seems to have it all figured out, is using his routine to find the meaning he’s long been searching for. He didn’t get it at the previous career he escaped from. He didn’t find it in family. And he certainly didn’ find it when his coworker quits one day, sending him spiraling into an unexpected fit over the phone, demanding for a replacement as soon as possible.
We spend so much time thinking about what the perfect days would be – the resort we’d be drinking a margarita from, the family we’d be talking with, the delicious food we’d be ingesting – without considering how to make our everyday something we find great, accumulative meaning in. Perfect Days made me long for the analog, for the feel of bass and the warmth of tape, for the mistakes and questions, the mysteries and the wanderings. The way our routine can help us build these blocks of time in which we can, if we’re open to it, find a little bit of magic.
1. Asteroid City
I don’t even know where to start with this miracle of a movie. Pick one strand and out comes more colorful string from another side of it. You can turn this film over like a Rubik’s Cube, shuffling and turning and gazing at every side and you’d find something new. Ask 5 fans what they think this movie is really about and you’ll get 5 really unique answers (and more than likely at least 2 that will describe it as a baffling bore). No 2023 movie has stuck in my mind for so many different reasons quite like this one.
I think about the boy who’s constantly doing stupid shit, jumping off of buildings and daring others to do wild things. We, the audience, are just as sick of his antics as the characters around him. Finally, someone asks what his deal is. His response will stop you mid-breath: “I don’t know,” he says, “maybe it’s because I’m afraid no one else will notice my existence in the universe.” Behavior is communication. And Asteroid City is full of people expressing shades of grief, confusion, and longing.
People make fun of Anderson for his layers of artifice. But it’s not artificial; it’s the realest part of his films. We are always making meaning. We are constantly reframing our lives. We try on different voices – our therapists, our parents, our stronger selves – like narrative devices, shaking the stakes around to see if any truth we may have missed drops out like a cosmic 8 ball.
When a wide-eyed alien interrupts a star-gazing ceremony in the middle of the movie, coming down to take the asteroid rock it spots, it sends the entire group into an existential tailspin. What is this alien and what could it want from us? But the answer is far more sobering when it later returns to drop off it off and leave. It’s turned over to reveal some kind of number. They’re simply doing inventory. It’s so deflating to everyone that one small town’s phenomenon is another alien’s documentation on a spreadsheet.
Similar to May December, Asteroid City gains great power from its narrative layers. It takes a couple viewings to fully understand when an actor is playing a character – but it’s all intentional. Towards the end of the film, Augie Steenbeck (a fantastic Jason Schwartzman) exits the play to go behind the scenes and find the director. Augie expresses he still doesn’t understand the character and wants to know if he’s doing him right. “I still don’t understand the play,” he says. “Doesn’t matter,” the director (Adrian Brody) reminds, while assuring him he’s doing great. “Just keep telling the story.” We’re all Augie in our lives. We’re all finding ourself in moments where we aren’t sure if we’re playing the role right. And we just need to be reminded that we’re doing great, that it all doesn’t really matter in the end, and that we just keep telling the story we’re in. Augie is a photographer and there’s a line he repeats often throughout: “My pictures always come out.” It sounds like he’s bragging at first. Like he’s a man incapable of mistakes. But the repetition reveals something deeper: that every effort we make at understanding life matters. A picture may be a thousand of the most truthful words you can manage in that moment.
Later on, the actors are working with Saltzburg Kietel (Willem DaFoe), an acting teacher very much based on Lee Strasburg, and he leads them in an exercise all based on a simple mantra: you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. It’s a line that you unconsciously, intuitively understand before you truly get. You can apply it to the grieving process. You can apply it to just trying to figure out what you want out of this life. But the idea that you must be lulled into something, that you must sleepwalk, that you must wander and allow yourself to be lost before you can truly understand where to go? What a beautiful reminder. I haven’t shaken it since.
There is so much delight to find in this film. Scarlett Johansson’s incredible, heartbreaking work as a big-time actress all too aware the world doesn’t really understand her. The way Tom Hanks’ grandfather keeps pushing Augie to have the conversations even he’s not ready to have with his granddaughters. Jeffrey Wright’s rapid-fire ceremony monologue that somehow encapsulates the country’s anxious wartime history, culminating with the sticker of an all-too-relevant line (“If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born”). The young class that breaks into song with “Dear Alien (Who Art In Heaven)”. The consistently gorgeous pastel-pasted shots throughout. There will always be people who don’t like or don’t get Anderson’s films. But he’s always able to corral a beyond impressive group of actors and he always finds a way to comment on the deepest and hardest of human emotions in such a colorful, almost child-like form. We’re all children trying to figure things out. And it’s not that Anderson hasn’t grown up; it’s that he understands us better than we’ll ever give him credit for.
