The Best Films of 2023, along with some Oscar commentary

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

 As usual, it's an eclectic mix, some of which have received recognition but most of which haven't gotten nearly the attention they deserve.  There are four documentaries, three films originating outside the U.S., seven films directed by women, and four films featuring queer characters and stories.  This mix of stories and storytellers taught me the most, touched me the most deeply, and had the most important things to say.

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.

 The story here is specific and complex, but is imparted with spareness that is only possible with rigorous honesty that most films can't touch.  It begins in South Korea, where two 12-year-olds, Na Young and Hae Sung, are smitten with each other.  Na Young's family emigrates to Canada and she becomes Nora (Greta Lee), and the two childhood friends lose contact.  They reestablish contact again at age 24, and the connection still feels compelling to both.  But oceans and cultures separate them as they are building their adult identities, so they ultimately decide not to pursue further contact.

 At age 36, Nora is a playwright living in New York City with her writer husband, Arthur (an excellent John Magaro), and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) travels there, ostensibly as a tourist but really to see Nora.  The heart of the film involves their meeting, and what the connection means for them and also for Nora and Arthur.  Yet this film avoids the love-triangle trap that most films (and many people) would fall into.  Instead, Nora and Hae Sung pick up the thread from childhood, which circumstances made impossible to hold as tightly as they might have done.  Who are you?  Who am I with you?  What if our lives had gone differently? 

 The film mostly depicts conversations—between Nora and Hae Sung, Nora and Arthur, even Hae Sung and Arthur—yet the conversations are riveting, as suspenseful as any action film.  Most movie romances trade on fantasy and dishonesty; they feed unrealistic expectations about what love looks like and how it is lived.  This film offers three people asking the deepest questions, and engaging those questions with rigorous honesty.  Though it's not exactly a romance, it is absolutely about love.  And though it depicts aspects of immigrant experience with great insight, the story may well spark reflection for any of us who have periods or spaces in our lives that exist apart from those closest to us now.  Nora is in some ways unknowable to Arthur, who clearly loves her and works to understand her and knows her very well.  She is also unknowable to Hae Sung, even while each man knows things about her that no one else does.  Only she can integrate those various selves—yet part of what makes their meeting compelling for Nora is that Hae Sung carries pieces of her that she has not been able to access. 

 The film's title nods toward the Korean concept of in yun, that past life connections reverberate into our present lives and influence the depth and quality of our relationships.  It's a rich idea, examined thoughtfully.  Among its many gifts, this luminous film invites us to wonder about and to honor our whole selves, our own past and current lives, and the tender truths accessible only through our most important connections.  [In Korean and English; rated PG-13 for some strong language; nominated for (and deserves to win) Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay (Celine Song); also would be my pick for Best Director (Celine Song), and would be on my own list for Best Actress (Greta Lee) and Best Actor (Teo Yoo).  Available on streaming platforms.] 

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 20^th 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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My list of the best films of 2022

As my counterpoint to the Oscars, and in keeping with my longstanding practice, I offer my own list of the best films of 2022, 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 the deserve to be prioritized.  So here is the list itself:

1.     1.      She Said

2.     2.    Nope

3.     3.    Living

4.     4.    Cairo Conspiracy

5.     5.    Prey

6.     6.    The Inspection

7.     7.    2^nd Chance

8.     8.    RRR

9.     9.    Free Choi Sol Lee

.     10.    Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical

 

1.     She Said tells a difficult story—indeed, an array of difficult stories--with consummate care.  Although it is regularly compared to other feature films about heroic journalism (think “All The President’s Men” and “Spotlight”), I would put it in a separate category; it’s a story about women’s experience that would not have been told without the painstaking work of careful and courageous women, and the story of how that story came to be told reflects the painstaking work of more careful and courageous women.  The execution here is, to my mind, superior to the afore-mentioned films, in part because of whose voices are centered, the deep understanding of systemic harm that is reflected in this film, and the ethic of care that is adhered to with such rigor in delivery of the story.  To my mind, it’s the best film of the year.

This could have been a dry procedural infused with self-congratulation—but the two New York Times reporters, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, whose pursuit of the story of Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse of scores of women in Hollywood is ostensibly the focus, don’t exude that sort of energy, either in interviews or in the book on which the film is based.  As reflected in the film and in interviews, they evince genuine interest in why this story was so difficult to tell—the forces arrayed against the telling, mostly implicating people who didn’t rape or abuse anyone. 

Decades of violence by Weinstein was an open secret in Hollywood, facilitated and protected by an entire community that contributed to the near-impossibility of exposing and reckoning with that secret.  In this case, the difficulty of breaking the story is part of the story, held with sensitivity and care in the screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and under the clear-eyed direction of Maria Schrader.  The efforts—the collaboration—of these women (including also excellent performances by the entire cast, notably Zoe Kazan as Kantor, Carey Mulligan as Twohey, and Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle as two of the many women whose courage contributed to exposing Weinstein) becomes a depiction of solidarity, a purposeful practice of many people assuming a share of the load of great suffering with the goal of alleviating that suffering.  The feat that all of these artists and fighters have pulled off here is much harder than it looks, and their work here contains wisdom beyond what most films attempt to offer.  Shame on the Academy Awards for not a single woman director and nearly all men for screenplay awards—this was one of the big misses, including for Best Picture.

(In English; rated R for language and descriptions of sexual assault; deserved Oscar nominations for Best Picture (it would be my pick); Best Director (Maria Schrader, who would be my pick), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Rebecca Lenkiewiczw, who also would be my pick); on at least 8 other critics’ top movie lists; available on streaming platforms)

2.    Nope is Jordan Peele’s third feature, and perhaps his most inscrutable.  Peele is a master at misdirecting and unsettling and unnerving the audience, and this film never lets up on that.  The themes here are harder to discern than in “Get Out” and “Us,” which topped my lists in 2017 and 2019.  Yet I think that may well be the point.  Peele manages to keep you both unsettled and engaged, a feat few filmmakers can touch, and in doing shakes up assumptions you didn’t know you had. 

The story here involves two siblings—a taciturn Daniel Kaluuya and a voluble Keke Palmer—with a legacy of wrangling horses for the film industry.  After their father dies in a disturbing and mysterious way, the two find themselves battling an inexplicable danger—a space invader?  An alien?  Which movie are we in?  Stephen Yeun, especially fascinating, appears as a former child star with a surprising response to childhood trauma and this newest danger, and the siblings find two other quirky collaborators in their quest to understand the source of the danger and perhaps capture it in an “Oprah-shot” on film.  How each challenge is depicted and fought is endlessly surprising and inventive, and each character’s instincts contrast with the others. 

It's best to experience the film without spoilers—and then to experience it again.  My own sense is that Peele is playing around with the ways in which we humans seek to control and exploit forces we assume are at our behest, and with just how wrong we can be.  Each of the characters has slightly different instincts around power and domination.  Do they seek to understand?  To dominate?  To exploit?  To collaborate?  Peele seems also to be interested in how such instincts play out in the film industry itself, even as he scares and confuses and entertains and messes with his film’s audience. 

I’m not finished thinking about this film, and will likely see it a few more times.  Peele has a way of inspiring that; there is always more to see and more to ponder.  In this particular case, I suspect this film may be best understood as being about power—who has it?  Who is really in charge?  What moves do we really have?

[In English; rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images; deserved Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Jordan Peele), Best Cinematography, and Best Original Screenplay (Jordan Peele); on at least 107 other critics’ top film lists; available on streaming platforms]

3.    Living is a quiet film that contains depths of meaning beyond what most critics appear to have caught.  Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”) adapted the screenplay from Akira Kurosawa’s film “Ikiru” and set the story in 1950s London, but the film is not specifically about its setting.  If anything, the setting might, if we let it, help us notice parallels in our own current lives.

The basic story is of a civil servant, Williams (an excellent Bill Nighy), who heads one of several offices in a government building that appear to function entirely to ensure that nothing ever actually happens.  Each day Williams and his underlings sit in a dull space with stacks of paper around them, exchanging no more than perfunctory conversation as they move the papers around.  Occasionally a citizen will enter and ask that some action be taken; inevitably that person will be directed to another office, where they will experience the same thing.

Williams appears untroubled by his circumstances—until, early in the film, he learns that he is dying.  For a few days, he is flummoxed; everything he has so meticulously maintained seems meaningless.  But eventually, he returns to the office with a determination to live, and becomes someone entirely unlike his former self. 

How he changes deserves the quiet attention offered by this observant film.  He is still quite subdued—but now much more curious.  When a group of ladies visits his office asking for permission to build a playground in an abandoned city space (as they have done over and over again for months to no avail), this time he listens to them.  He inquires as to the proposed location, and visits the site for himself.  Instead of sending the women from office to office, he visits various offices with them, and even begs the functionaries in more than one office to facilitate approving what the women want to accomplish. 

I am spoiling the plot a bit here, but in aid of helping you notice the contours of Williams’ transformation.  As is revealed in pieces, Williams goes from being in sync with a world where nothing ever gets done to devoting all of the life force it turns out he has to going against those instincts.  He risks being annoying, an irritant.  He gets his feet muddy.  He waits in line for hours.  He asks for things, and keeps asking, and thanks people individually when they say yes.  What seems simple and obvious is actually profound, and much more unusual than we want to notice. This is where Williams’ quest to begin living takes him—and also where it would take us.

[In English; rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and smoking; received and deserved Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (Ishiguro, my pick of the nominees) and Best Actor (Nighy—wonderful, though I would give the award to Austin Butler for “Elvis”); also deserved Oscar nominations for Best Director (Oliver Hermanus) and Best Picture; on at least 18 other critics’ top film lists; available on streaming platforms.]

4.    Cairo Conspiracy (also known as “Boy From Heaven”) had only the most limited run in Portland and has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves.  It took me deep into a world I understand almost nothing about, yet reflected back complicated insights, familiar to me but not commonly understood, about how treacherous it can be to navigate spaces where power games are being played.

The story centers on Adam (Tarfeek Barhom, excellent), the devout and studious son of a fisherman who lives in a small Egyptian village.  He is thrilled to be offered a coveted opportunity to study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which is the center of power for Sunni Islam.  Before long, however, Adam finds himself caught in the center of high-stakes conflicts between power elites in the religious and political establishment.  Integrity and intelligence are all he has to work with to save himself and his family.

Writer-Director Tarik Saleh, who grew up in Sweden, is Egyptian on his father’s side and cites his grandparents among his influences; his grandfather studied at Al-Azar.  Saleh does masterful work translating this world to those of us who do not understand it, exposing elements that are troubling but doing so without the fear and judgment and othering so prevalent in Western explorations of Islam.  I’m curious how someone with closer connections to this culture would feel; to me the film did not seem to center a Western gaze, which I appreciated.  

I felt the challenge of entering a world where women are so peripheral, but also noted power dynamics that are quite familiar to my Western experience.  The skills Adam must acquire are skills I relate to—he never imagined stakes this high, or the need for alertness this acute.  And the lessons he has received even from good teachers have not prepared him with the necessary skill to discern who to trust and how to navigate terrible options.  Watching him unlock what incentives will influence a rare person with integrity and thereby save himself is riveting and instructive.  This is a film I will return to again and again. 

[In Arabic; deserved Oscar nominations for Best Director (Tarik Saleh), Best Original Screenplay (Tarik Saleh, who would be my pick—he actually won at Cannes), Best Actor (Tawfeek Barhom), and Best International Feature Film (it would be my pick); not on any other critics’ top film lists; not yet available streaming but I think there is reason to hope given how well the film did at Cannes, where it also was nominated for the Palme d’Or.]

5.    Prey is not the sort of film I expected would end up on my top-ten list; it’s a prequel to the Predator franchise of alien action films.  But this one takes what I find to be a more interesting angle than the previous installments; it’s set 300 years ago and centers on members of the Comanche nation in the Great Plains of what is currently known as the United States.  Its protagonist is a young Comanche woman trained as a healer who wants to be taken seriously as a hunter. 

What transpires, then, is a battle of wits between the woman, Naru (a very compelling Amber Midthunder), and the Predator, in which she employs her wits, her skill as a tracker, and her knowledge of the terrain to meet challenge after challenge, backed only by a faithful dog and belief in herself.  It’s also the story of someone moving beyond the expectations of her culture’s expectations for her, cannily portraying ways in which that can be a strength and can also make one’s work harder. 

Though this is not a documentary, care was taken to honor indigenous wisdom in creating the film.  The indigenous characters are played by indigenous actors; Comanche tribal experts were consulted and cast members were also allowed to bring bits of their own tribal identifiers.  Although the plan to film in Comanche was scrapped for English, one can watch it dubbed in Comanche.  And though French settlers are also depicted, their language is not subtitled; Comanche people are centered in this story much like European settlers have been centered in an endless array of stories, a welcome and mindful shift of focus that serves this story well.

It's a too-rare pleasure watching indigenous characters display the sort of centuries-old mastery of their environment that came to be so devalued and obliterated.  It’s a special pleasure to watch Amber Midthunder employ the most elemental of tools (including her own body) to fight a bear or a space alien or a French trapper or the young men of her tribe.  And Dan Trachtenberg’s direction keeps the action moving; it doesn’t suffer from the overblown qualities so common to films of this genre.  Watch for the cave drawings at the end of the film, which cleverly depict the legend we just witnessed and the dangers that lie ahead.

[In English, French, and Comanche; rated R for strong, bloody violence; deserved Oscar nominations for Best Director (Daniel Trachtenberg), Best Actress (Amber Midthunder; Best Original Screenplay (Patrick Aison), Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, and Best Picture;  on at least 22 other critics’ top film lists; available for streaming on Hulu.]

6.    The Inspection is not a film I enjoyed watching, and yet it is a film I will watch again.  It’s the story of a Black gay man, Ellis French (brilliantly played by Jeremy Pope), who, after ten years on the streets, decides at age 25 that joining the Marines is his best option for escaping a life of homelessness, danger, and despair. If that is the choice a Black gay man makes, you know he is desperate; rejected by his mother, French trades a life on the streets for abuse and degradation in Marines basic training.  It’s hard to contemplate and harder to watch.

Even while I was watching it, though, I knew the experience was important.  Writer-director Elegance Bratton was himself rejected by his mother and joined the Marines in the era of “don’t-ask-don’t tell” after ten years living on the streets. The screenplay is heavily autobiographical, particularly as to the interactions with French’s mother Inez, brilliantly embodied in an unsparing performance by Gabrielle Union.  The mother-son scenes are excruciating, not least because Union conveys how, in Inez’s mind, she loves her son but can’t love who he is.  Bratton has said that directing Union’s work here healed him; she so faithfully captured the essence of his actual mother, with whom he was not able to find resolution before she passed away.

The military scenes are, in many ways, even harder to watch.  No part of me is okay with the deliberate dehumanization that is part of basic training, and when you add the ways that toxic masculinity plays out as to a Black gay man, the senselessness of the breakdown is all but unbearable to witness.  What I admired, though, was Bratton’s relentless commitment to the truth of his story.  Perhaps because he has said that he is grateful for the decade he spent in the Marines, the film has received some criticism for being pro-military.  In an interview with WBEZ Chicago, he noted, in response to such criticism, that his film is neither pro-military nor anti-military, but rather “pro-truth.”  Indeed it is—and that feels important.  His is a story that deserves attention, and we are blessed that he possesses the skill and willingness to tell it with such rigorous honesty.

[In English; rated R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and violence; deserved Oscar nominations for Best Director (Elegance Bratton), Best Original Screenplay (Bratton), Best Actor (Jeremy Pope), Best Supporting Actress (Gabrielle Union), and Best Picture; on at least 6 other critics’ top film lists; available on several streaming platforms.]

7.    2^nd Chance is the first feature length documentary by writer-director Ramin Bahrani, two of whose fictional films (“White Tiger” in 2021 and “Chop Shop” in 2006) made it onto my previous lists of the year’s best films.  Bahrani’s work reflects an interest in the choices people make to improve their fortunes, particularly those at the margins, and I sense that his lens on those concerns is impacted by his social location as the American-born son of immigrants from Iran.  As with his prior films, this film reflects a sort of open-handed curiosity that I really admire; complicated humans (that is, all humans) stay complicated under Bahrani’s gaze.

Richard Davis, whose life is the focus of this documentary, is definitely complicated.  He invented and made a sizeable fortune from the concealable bulletproof vest, shooting himself nearly 200 times as part of his case to market his product.  He did other things too, including keeping a record of lives saved by his vests and creating propagandistic films retelling the stories of the saves.  He quite eagerly speaks for himself for much of the film, and Bahrani wisely lets Davis himself point us toward the increasing reasons to question his versions of nearly every story told, about his own life, about the saves, and about the success of 2^nd Chance, his now-defunct company. 

Others chime in too, including two ex-wives, an array of friends and ex-friends, and a man whom Davis attempted to pay as a teenager to take the fall for something to avoid blame finding its way back to Davis.  The steady unraveling of pieces of Davis’s story opens up reasons to question how his promotion of his vests and the attendant propaganda contributed to a shift in the way we think about police in this country, and also to question what other similar dynamics may have contributed to those shifts.  Often those who find success in a country or institution reflect back things about the country or institution itself, and the story of Richard Davis, in Bahrani’s skillful hands, definitely offers insights in that vein It deserves a broader audience.

[In English; not rated; should have received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature (and would be my pick); not on any other critics’ top ten list; available to stream on Amazon Prime.]

8.    RRR has become a global phenomenon, and rightly so.  It’s impossible to imagine a more audacious, over-the-top display of action, dance and musical production, and melodrama.  It makes the Hollywood Marvel universe look tepid by comparison.

Set in the 1920s during British colonial rule of India, the film builds a rivalry and bromance between two impossibly virile and handsome men taking different routes to challenging the colonizers.  Raju (Konidela Ram) is a police officer who appears to have chosen the route of cooperation; he accepts the task of capturing Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), a tribal man who is on a quest to rescue a girl from his village who has been captured and enslaved by a British governor and his wife.  Through a mix of attraction and deception, the two dreamboats become friends, enemies, and collaborators by turns, along the way performing impossible physical feats, out-performing all the Brits, and charming a British woman or two along the way.

The colonizers here are the most ruthless of villains—not actually far from the truth—so the stakes are as high as they need to be for maximum drama.  Most Americans, including me, aren’t informed enough to sort through political signaling here that is likely problematic, though I do recommend listening to a good discussion of the film on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, which interrogates some aspects of Hindu nationalism and caste on display that deserve attention.  I don’t mean to minimize those concerns—but with some hesitation about what I am celebrating without being able to fully interrogate it, I am going to go ahead and celebrate it.  The scale and quality of the artistry here is so dazzling and joyous and beyond compare, I am compelled to acknowledge “RRR” as among the best films I saw this year.  You won’t find a more exhilarating way to spend three hours.

[In Telugu and English; not rated; received and deserved its Oscar nomination for Best Original Song (“Naatu Naatu,” my pick); also deserved nominations for Best Director (S.S. Rajamouli), Best International Feature Film, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design, and Best Film Editing; on at least 78 other critics’ best film lists; available to stream on Netflix but see it on a big screen if you can, which is actually still possible in some cities.]

9.    Free Chol Soo Lee brings long-overdue attention to a story whose invisibility reflects our collective failure to notice or care about injustice or about fights to overcome it.  Lee immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea as a child and, as a 20-year-old, was racially profiled and convicted of a Chinatown gang murder that members of the Chinese community could have told authorities he did not commit had they bothered to care.  After he spent years inside San Quentin prison, where he was targeted by gang violence and ended up on death row, Lee’s case caught the attention of a Korean-American journalist whose work to raise its profile sparked a widespread social movement of Asian Americans who collaborated to advocate for Lee’s release. 

This complicated and important story is told with great care by directors Julie Ha and Eugene Yi.  Lee fell through a series of cracks; he survived a difficult childhood marked by abuse, poverty, and racism, only to be sucked into the criminal legal system, where police failed to even follow up with any of his alibi witnesses.  He spent years inside the carceral system where the stakes of racism and violence are only raised from the already untenable levels experienced outside.  The social movement that finally achieved his release is remarkable for its clarity and concern about someone who had been so easily discarded—yet he then suffered again from the lack of any reckoning with the injustices that had robbed him of so many formative years and had left him traumatized. 

This film should be required viewing for anyone involved in administering the criminal legal system and, frankly, for all of us who live at a safe distance from the impacts of racial profiling and the othering experienced by immigrants and refugees and the currently and formerly incarcerated.  Attending to Lee’s story can point the way to much of our work that we neglect at the expense of those with the least power and resources.

[In English and Korean; rated PG-13, presumably for mature themes; deserved an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature; on at least one other critic’s best film list; available on streaming platforms.]

10.  Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical hasn’t gotten near the appreciation it deserves.  Benefitting from a spectacular lead performance by Alisha Weir, a beautifully and meaningfully diverse and talented cast, crisp and inventive direction by Matthew Warchus, and gloriously complex production numbers packed with children wrangled by choreographer Ellen Kane (whose name you really have to dig for), it’s a feat of imagination and inventiveness and heart. 

The story revolves around the title character, a tiny genius who drew the short straw in the parent department.  While other parents recognize their children as miracles (a focus of one of the delightful musical numbers), Matilda’s father can’t even bother to learn her gender and both parents (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, both terrifically despicable) view her as a curse and a bore.  Left to fend for and educate herself, Matilda finally ends up in a school whose headmistress is the sort of sadist that only Roald Dahl could dream up (perfectly embodied by Emma Thompson at her horrifying best).  Matilda’s instinct for revolutionary zeal ends up liberating not only her adorable classmates but the gentle teacher, Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch), whose fate ends up being curiously linked to her own. 

There’s a dark edge to the proceedings, since it’s Dahl, but my grandsons (then aged four and seven) adored the film; the mean parts are surrounded by such color and joy and inventiveness that many kids will be able to absorb it.  As for the adults who love them—particularly those who, like me, were failed by the adults who were meant to care for them as children—the ingenious struggles for liberation and hard-won moments of triumph here may be particularly satisfying.  They certainly were for me.

[In English; rated PG for thematic elements, exaggerated bullying and some language; deserved Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Matthow Warchus), Best Visual Effects, and Best Production Design; on at least 3 other critics’ top film lists; available to stream on Netflix.]