As my counterpoint to the Oscars, and in keeping with my longstanding practice, I offer my own list of the best films of 2023, interspersed with related opinions about what and who deserve more celebration than they get inside the Hollywood machinery. I've seen nearly every Oscar-nominated film, and in the neighborhood of 150 films this year (as every year) and, to my mind, these are the works that most deserve an audience. So here is the list itself:
1. Past Lives
2. Poor Things
3. L'immensità
4. Descendant
5. The Eternal
Memory
6. Rye Lane
7. Little Richard:
I Am Everything
8. Reality
9. Every Body
10. Perfect Days
I'm missing having a platform beyond my own blog to publish movie commentary and hope I will find one again soon. (I welcome any leads or connections on that.) My own experience reflects how celebrity culture submerges many of the most original and even vital contributions. Artists who keep creating in the face of those odds are my models to keep writing, and to keep offering what is yours to offer, whether or not it is seen or heard—especially if one of your gifts is to help others be seen and heard.
Here are some of thoughts about these ten beautiful films:
1.
Past Lives is one of the most gorgeous
films I have seen in this or any year.
Frankly, all the hullabaloo about Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie not
receiving Oscar nominations for "Barbie" has elicited major eyerolls
for me; although "Past Lives" (like the far inferior
"Barbie") is nominated for Best Picture and also Best Original
Screenplay (and deserves to win both but probably only has a shot at the
latter), its writer-director Celine Song deserves an Oscar for Best Director in
my book, and Greta Lee and Teo Yoo also deserved nominations for Best Actress
and Best Actor respectively. What they and their collaborators have achieved with
this beautiful film really has no parallel, certainly not among those who were
nominated.
2. Poor Things is the true feminist triumph on my list this year, counter to all the "Barbie" hype once again. I went into it with low expectations; director Yorgos Lanthimos is definitely an original but I don't always resonate with his artistic choices, which frequently go to extremes that don't ultimately pay off. This film was unsettling and weird and excessive in all the ways I have come to expect from Lanthimos—but this time the weird journey of the film redounds with profound insights about female identity and power. What might it look like for a woman to form an identity refreshingly unhampered by the contradictory and stifling expectations and power moves that drive so many of us to desperation?
Emma Stone deserves much of the credit here. Her fearless, gutsy performance makes the journey compelling—and indeed, I don't think very many performers could create a character as full-bodied as her Bella Baxter. Without giving away too much, it may help to know that Bella is a woman implanted with the brain of an infant (revealed a short way into the film but knowing that makes the early scenes a bit smoother going). Her consciousness awakens while in a woman's body and under the care of a mad but benevolent scientist whom she lovingly calls "God" (a perfect role for Willem Dafoe) and whom she experiences as a father figure. "God" (known to others as Godwin Baxter) offers Bella (in the name of scientific inquiry) more freedom than is typically allowed a human child, much less one in a woman's body. She emerges with a sense of freedom to experiment, to explore her body and play with language, and even to insist on things "God" and others would deny her. One of the delights of the film is to watch what is revealed about each of the characters in their response to Bella—revealed more clearly than usual because Bella is more clearly herself than most of us manage to be.
For example, Bella runs away with a rake, Duncan Wedderburn (an amusingly off-kilter Mark Ruffalo, whom she tellingly addresses mostly by his full name). He promises her adventure and warns her not to cling to him too hard. His life experience clearly has not prepared him for a woman who is both intrigued enough to be seduced by him but who is pursuing her own agenda, too convinced of her own agency to miss his lies and petulance or to think she actually needs him. Watching her navigate Duncan Wedderburn and his many predictable but fruitless attempts at manipulation is one of the film's true delights.
Sexual pleasure ("furious jumping" is a favorite term for Bella) plays a big role in the film, which has proved a distraction for some. To my mind, the film makes more of a case for its indulgences than most lusty films do; Bella is in her body and she is curious and also unhindered by whatever spin the culture around her puts on how she lives in that body. Her explorations of the world in the body of a woman identified as beautiful is a revelation; what would it be like to operate with such abandon? Godwin Baxter and his assistant, Max (first tasked with studying Bella and quickly smitten with her) both prove capable of evolving in response to the freedom she insists upon. Her expressions of delight and sorrow and curiosity feel inspired. How audiences responds to her exploration of life and female consciousness may prove similarly revealing.
Lanthimos's experimental aesthetic deepens the experience. The art direction of this film is a revelation; it's set in Victorian England and other parts of Europe, but also not in any real time. The colors and costumes and scientific revelations belong in a more imaginative parallel universe. All of that assists in shaking us out of our usual ways of seeing, perhaps moving us past a few of our failures of imagination.
I would give the Best Actress Oscar to Lily Gladstone (who managed to redeem and immeasurably deepen a story that should have built around her heroic indigenous character but which instead suffered from the usual failure of construction by centering the white men instead in "Killers of the Flower Moon"). Nevertheless, Emma Stone does miraculous work in "Poor Things." She is the real feminist hero of this year's crop of films.
[In English; rated R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore, and language; nominated for Academy Awards for Makeup and Hairstyling (my pick), Original Score, Best Picture, Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos, my pick among those nominated but should have gone to Celine Song), Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo, my pick among those nominated), Best Adapted Screenplay (Tony McNamara, my pick), Best Cinematography (Robbie Ryan, my pick), Film Editing (my pick), Production Design (my pick), and Costume Design (my pick). Available in theaters and on streaming platforms.]
3. "L'immensità" deserves much more attention than it has gotten. It's the story of Clara (the ever luminous Penélope Cruz), a mother of three children who is trapped in an unhappy marriage and a culture that confines her in Rome in the 1970s. Clara's oldest was born Adriana but wishes to be known as Andrea (Andrew)—but it is the 1970s in Rome and there isn't much of a conception of how Andrea could be insisting on something true.
Andrea and Clara share something in common in that respect. Clara, too, doesn't fit into her time; she is beautiful and powerful and inventive and full of life—but the culture she lives in doesn't offer her a way to live as herself. There is no way for her to leave her marriage to an abusive philanderer, and there are few opportunities for her to express herself and be playful and free. Her children see her unhappiness and we can see that her situation harms them—one of the younger children eats too much and the other will only play with her food, and they and Andrea watch their mother with a mixture of adoration and worry.
Though neither Andrea nor Clara can exactly name the parallel challenges they face, and though Clara doesn't have a way to process all of what her trans son needs, her instincts are marvelous in many ways. She takes him seriously, and owns her worry for him. She listens with compassion when he expresses that "you and dad made me wrong." She dances with her children with full abandon and delights in them. And there is an unforgettable scene in the film when she and Andrea are walking down a busy street. They look at each other, and Clara says, shall we do it?, clearly suggesting they take an action they have taken before. Andrea nods, and then the two of them run headlong down the sidewalk against all the traffic, waving their arms and shouting "Aaaaaah!" It's a beautiful evocation of the freedom they both need and want.
I have admired the films of writer-director Emanuele Crialese in the past—his early film "The Golden Door" (2006) had a lasting impact on me, envisioning the experience of Sicilians immigrating to the U.S. in the early 20th century in a way that illuminates some of the lies in our mythology. I had not realized until this film that Crialese is himself transgender; he first came out only after making this film. That revelation underlined the experience I had watching it; Crialese is about my age and, though I did not grow up in Italy, I felt that I understood the time Andrea is living in very well from his perspective, and felt how little room there is for his truth. Crialese has acknowledged that the story is in many ways autobiographical, depicting his own experiences of dysphoria and also what he observed in his own mother. As someone who also has had many experiences of not fitting into time and place, I felt deeply their love, the ways they fight for expression, and the ways that Clara applies her native and bruised inventiveness toward love for her children. As always, Penélope Cruz has burrowed deep into this character, and she has spoken with great insight about Clara's fight to be free. Absorbing her compassionate performance of that fight was one of the most memorable experiences I had this year.
[In Italian; not rated; deserved Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best International Feature (would be my pick), Best Director (Emanuele Crialese), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress (Penélope Cruz). Available on streaming platforms.]
4. "Descendant" is the best documentary I saw this year and left me quite undone. It takes viewers on a very intentional journey of solidarity with a community in Alabama that is largely made up of descendants of the survivors of the Clotilde, the last ship that carried enslaved Africans to the United States. Part of its focus involves efforts to find the Clotilde itself; it arrived long after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, and the white men who were responsible intentionally burned the ship after its arrival. For many years the survivors and their descendants understood that even talking about the ship was dangerous for them, even while the "success" of its voyage was an open and applauded secret among many in the white community at the time. Searching for the Clotilde, approached with wisely directed curiosity, affords an occasion for a search for a way for the community of descendants to seize agency over their own submerged and marginalized stories.
The very construction of the film reflects sound solidarity practice. Its director, Margaret Brown, is a white woman who grew up in the area, but she was approached to make the film by Kern Jackson, a Black folklorist with his own connections to the community who is credited as a writer and producer on the film and who appears in the film as well. Brown and her team embedded with the community itself and it shows; the interviews include ruminations of real depth that don't tend to arise without investing the time it takes to build trust. Descendants and collaborators offer a variety of perspectives on their history, on the meaning of the Clotilde and the efforts to find it, about their roles in the community and about what it means to be Black and to experience generations of harm that has continued without reckoning. And Kern Jackson dispenses wisdom that reverberated for me: "Yeah, it's a travesty. You live with it. You let it loose. You name it. And once you name it, then all the medicinal things start to happen. Once you name something, you can tell it what to do."
Director Brown has said that she should not have been surprised at how difficult it was to engage descendants of the white participants in the story of the Clotilde to participate in the film. The families responsible still dominate the community, controlling large amounts of land and influence. The few white community members who speak on camera complicate the story; they include politicians eager to capitalize on finding the slave ship and a man who proudly claims responsibility for that successful search and who then feels free to bring a descendant of the ship's captain to engage with descendants of the enslaved, heedless of the predictable and very problematic resulting dynamics.
As hard as some scenes are to watch, the filmmakers' practice is sound. Everyone is invited, and their participation speaks to the quality of their intentions and the depth of their own engagement with the truth, including the most difficult parts. The wisdom from many of the film's subjects resonates all the more deeply, even when you realize and observe that they have abundant experiences being ignored and outshone. I was especially struck by a Black diver with experience locating slave ship remains and who now teaches Black children to swim; he speaks with remarkable clarity and wisdom about the work he is clearly called to do. This film illuminates the connections between past and present by fostering a practice of deep listening and observation. It's a marvel of careful work that deserves gratitude and emulation.
[In English; not rated; deserved Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature and Best Director [Margaret Brown]. Streaming on Netflix.]
5. "The Eternal Memory" is beautiful in its complexity and courage, with a moving love story at its center. Its subjects are Augusto Góngora, a celebrated Chilean political journalist, and his wife Paulina Urrutia ("Pauli" to her husband), an actor who served as Chile's first culture minister. The film offers close observation of Góngora's final years, as Alzheimer's disease slowly erased his vitality and memory.
Much of the film captures moments of the two of them at home, via footage captured with the lightest of touches by its director, Maite Alberdi, and a small crew. They filmed over five years, the later of which occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Pauli herself did much of the camera work. It's the most intimate of films, centering on Pauli's daily efforts to help Góngora recapture whatever he can of what he has lost—increasingly recognition of who she is to him and of the life they built together.
Góngora is an important figure in Chile; he was part of a group of journalists who courageously produced clandestine news reports during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, fighting against the regime's erasure of truth via the military-controlled media. We are offered glimpses of his handsome younger self, interviewing people and tending to the fires of collective awareness. After the dictatorship collapsed in 1990, Góngora focused his energies on restoring pride in Chilean arts and culture and also shoring up collective memory of the abuses of the regime. Director Alberdi, who grew up in Santiago, Chile, in the 1990s, has described him as "the face of democracy." He co-wrote the three-volume "Chile: The Forbidden Memory," which details the human-rights abuses of the Pinochet era.
Pauli is just as impressive as her husband; 17 years younger than Góngora, she was his partner for 25 years and married him in 2016, two years after his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. This project must have been a costly one for her; to experience her beloved husband's decline, his increasing loss and helplessness in a public way could only be excruciating. Yet it was Góngora who persuaded her to participate in the project, filmed between 2017 and 2022, the year before Góngora's passing. Director Alberdi recounted to Screen Daily the case he made to his wife: "He said to her, 'I've seen so much pain in my life, so many people have opened their doors to show their fragility. How can I not open the door of my house to show my own fragility?"
Pauli's efforts to help Góngora hold on to as much as he can for as long as he can is moving and also instructive. As he declines, he has periods of despondency and longer periods where he does not know who she is. And yet there are moments when he returns and even comforts her in her experience of those losses. His emotional memories, including of the losses that he and others experienced during the Pinochet era, seem to remain even as he loses names and facts. And the love between these two is resilient and inspiring, as is their radical commitment to hold all of what is true.
[In Spanish; not rated; nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. (I haven't yet seen three of the rest but it is hard to imagine this would not be my pick of those nominated.) Available on streaming platforms.]
6. "Rye Lane" faced long odds with me as its audience; I'm not a fan of movie romances and this one wears its heart on its sleeve. However, from its first moment this film feels bracingly fresh and original. I fell in love.
It helps that its two leads could not be more delightful and engaging. Dom (an adorably vulnerable David Jonsson) and Yas (a vibrant Vivian Oparah) meet at a very obnoxious South London art show and, over a very eventful day, discover that each has recently undergone a very bad break-up. They bond over shared heartache and funky music and the eye-popping color and expressiveness of their neighborhood, the South London enclave of Peckham. First-time director Raine Allen-Miller carries off a wholly original visual and auditory aesthetic that makes Wes Anderson look stilted; her imagination and energy rejuvenate a familiar genre and make you care about every moment of the journey without being distracted by its familiar beats.
There is comedy here, and magic, and delight in a community that isn't depicted nearly as often as it could be. The deftness of Allen-Miller's direction is remarkable; she makes a thousand fresh choices full of intention somehow look easy and effortless. Perhaps my beef with most romances is less that they are untrue and more that they are uninteresting. This one invests two romantics with vitality that made me want to believe.
[In English; rated R for language, some sexual content, and nudity; deserved Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Raine Allen-Miller), Best Actor (David Jonsson), Best Actress (Vivian Aparah), Cinematography, and Production Design. Streaming on Hulu.]
7. "Little Richard: I am Everything" does a fine and very overdue job of offering the rock icon the recognition and appreciation he deserves. I can't say that I fully realized the lack before watching this film, and am so grateful for the corrective.
In this skillful and compassionate tribute, we come to understand much better Little Richard's origins and his significance, both musically and as a mover of culture. He apparently well understood that he was the true king of rock-and-roll, influencing a host of megastars that included Elvis, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Elton John, and Tom Jones. And influence is too light a word; these mostly white performers straight-up lifted his utterly original on-stage acrobatics, his flamboyance, and his playfulness with gender.
Many of these artists affirm Little Richard's influence in interviews in the film. But we also have the benefit of scholars who unpack the many manifestations of that influence, as well as his importance to fights for queer identity and acceptance. They and some of Little Richard's close friends and collaborators contribute insights into his shifts in identity, from loud and proud to debauchery and excess to renouncing it all and returning to his religious roots, causing harm to some of those he helped. These various shifts, which we see for ourselves in the dizzying array of personas inhabited by Little Richard himself, show us a person who struggled to hang on to who he was even while he sometimes had clarity about that which was far ahead of his time.
Excerpts of his music and performances are allowed to carry much of this story—and considered from the perspective of time, they are often jaw-dropping in their originality and power. It's heart-breaking to witness Little Richard's own frequently-expressed pain over how much less credit he received than he deserved, especially since the merits of that perspective become so undeniably clear in this telling.
Honoring this legacy is no simple task, and director Lisa Cortes has assembled a skillfully complex portrait of this famous but misunderstood and under-celebrated person. Like Little Richard himself, this film deserves a much wider and more appreciative audience.
[In English; not rated; deserved an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Available on streaming services.]
8. "Reality" is not a documentary but may well send you looking for one, as it did me. ("Reality Winner," currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is a good companion.) Writer-director Tina Satter, in her first feature film, has approached this story in an extremely canny way, basing it entirely on transcripts of the FBI interrogation that led to the arrest of an NSA whistle-blower. It's almost better not to know any of that before watching the film, though, and to let the events roll over you in a way that resonates more with how they did for the ironically (and literally) named Reality Winner herself. Definitely don't research the story further before experiencing the film.
Satter originally crafted the interrogation transcript into a riveting 65-minute play ("Is this a Room"), whose theatrical runs (including a brief stint on Broadway) enjoyed critical success. The film adaptation recreates in painstaking detail the sparsely furnished house that Winner was renting in Augusta, Georgia in 2017 and the circumstances of the interrogation, which began with a confrontation with FBI agents as she returned from a shopping trip wearing denim shorts, a white button-down shirt, and high-top tennis shoes. The awkward small-talk and cringy familiarity of many of the exchanges between this slight young woman and an array of male law enforcement officers feel both mundane and maddening. Satter has rightly discerned that this angle into the story unsettles in all the right ways. She has found a portal that shines important light on a story we aren't meant to see, both specifically as to Winner and generally as to how the exercise of government power is lived.
The film is aided by a riveting central performance by a nearly unrecognizable Sydney Sweeney, about as far from her hyper-sexualized "Euphoria" character as can be imagined. She makes you hang on Winner's every word and every twitch, essential to bringing you as close to being inside her body as possible. Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis play the two main interrogators by the book, which feels resonant with what the interrogators themselves were doing. There is a kind of unreality to the entire exercise, even in its mundanity, that generates appropriate unease with an interaction with significant consequences: you ultimately learn that Winner received a five-year sentence for leaking evidence that the Trump administration did not want released about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Satter's instincts here are apt. Stripped to these essentials, this story receives an important reframe, frightening and discomfiting in all the right ways.
[In English; not rated; deserved Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Tina Satter), and Best Actress (Sydney Sweeney). Streaming on MAX.]
9. "Every Body" is perhaps the most accessible film on my list and the one I can most confidently urge everyone to see (though I would make that case for most of these films). It's a fairly conventional approach to a subject that most of us know nothing about, and it cleanly makes the case that that is inexcusable.
Director Julie Cohen opens the film with a montage of gender reveal parties, a sometimes alarming tradition in which parents invest significant, showy attention to revelations of which of two genders their coming child will be. A problem with this is that a significant number of people don't fit into this gender binary—including intersex people. The tradition is one of the endless tells of how culturally attached we are to this fiction.
Taking as its subjects three intersex people who are willing to share intimately and matter-of-factly about their lives, the film helps us understand that intersex experience itself is quite varied and that the ways we harm intersex people with our utterly inaccurate ideas and indefensible needs around gender are legion. Political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel (she/they) was born with XY chromosomes, a vagina, and testes instead of ovaries. During her childhood, physicians advised her parents to have her testes removed so that they could declare her biologically female. Graduate student Sean Saifa Wall (he/him) was born without a uterus, but the hospital declared him female without even consulting his parents. (He also happens to be Black.) Actor River Gallo (they/them) was born without testes, and doctors put them on testosterone when they were 12, forcing them to go through puberty as a boy.
Each of the three subjects describe their experience of these medical interventions, the attendant secrecy, shame, and confusion, and their various struggles to forge an identity that feels authentic. The film places their experiences in the context of a larger movement of intersex people—and although intersex people have existed for much longer than three decades, that is the age of the movement. The idea of intersex people coming together in solidarity and advocating for themselves is still treated as radical. There are so many reasons to question why that is so.
In light of our collective ignorance on these matters, the film offers expert commentary and some historical context, including highly unethical medical experimentation that has caused serious harm and created misinformation that has been alarmingly difficult to undo. Having three guides who share their experiences and simply show us how to be okay with something that doesn't actually involve the rest of us but that seems to provoke such unfounded moral panic deftly removes all excuses. We come to see one more problem that really is not at all difficult to solve if we simply allow people to tell us what they need and give it to them—especially when what they need includes simply the respect and agency that we all want.
[In English; not rated; deserved an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Streaming on Amazon Prime.]
10. "Perfect Days" is strangely affecting, not so much for its story, which is slight, but as a depiction of someone living in a way that we treat as impossible, even inconceivable. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho in one of the best performances of the year) lives in a simple, sparsely furnished apartment and cleans toilets in Tokyo. It happens that the toilets are inside the most architecturally interesting bathrooms anyone has ever seen—but they are still toilets. He approaches his work with great care, and has stripped his life down to the sparest of routines that allow him to savor all that can be savored—the music he plays on cassettes during his drives to his various work locations, the plants he lovingly nurtures, his trips to the local bath house (his apartment lacks those facilities), his simple lunch breaks in the same daily spot where he photographs light through the same tree, and the simple mall restaurant where he takes most of his dinners, a book store where he buys a book for the next week from a seller who offers unsolicited commentary about his varied choices.
Hirayama is a handsome, middle-aged man and, though he doesn't say much, there are lots of indications that he may not have spent his entire life this way. We learn almost nothing about his back story, although an unexpected visit from his teenage niece reveals a few things indirectly. Her visit is prompted by a fight with her mother, Hirayama's sister, and their exchange when she comes to retrieve the girl hints at his history. There is likely pain there, and some sorrow and loss.
But the film doesn't attempt to answer those questions. It invites us to take a page from Hirayama's book and simply be present and observe. In one telling exchange with his niece, he cuts off her attempt to make plans for a future visit. "Next time is next time. Now is now." They chant it together, like a mantra. Whatever his reasons, whatever his story, Hirayama is living his life in a way that allows him to appreciate all that it contains. A final scene lingers on his face, holding it all, in the most beautiful way; when you reach that scene, you might find, as I did, that his face reflects your own back to you. Next time is next time. Now is now.
[In Japanese and English; not rated; nominated for (and
deserves to win) the Academy Award for Best International Feature; should also have
received a nomination for Best Actor (Koji Yakusho, who won the award for Best
Actor at Cannes). In theaters.]
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