Best of 2023: Movies
As always, I’m awful about watching movies released this year. There are two movies on my list that I’d consider 2023 movies (one properly 2023, the other is technically from 2022 but I think released early this year), and one of my honorable mentions came out in Europe in 2023, which is when we saw it. To be fair, I did see some new movies in theaters (John Wick 4, the last Indiana Jones movie, Suzume), and while they were good and fine, they weren’t Top 10 material. Instead, about a third of my list is from the ‘60s, another third are from the past four or five years, and the last third are from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. So let’s get to it!
Honorable mentions:
45 Years (2015) is another quiet, slow relationship drama from Andrew Haigh. Worth it for the build-up to the end.
Okja (2017) is a slightly more light-hearted Bong Joon-ho film — until the end, that is.
Plan 75 (2022) because it was the only movie we saw in a movie theater in Scotland.
The Trial (1962) because it’s one of the most visually interesting movies I’ve ever seen.
Hollywood Shuffle (1987) proves that some satire doesn’t get old (although some, unfortunately, doesn’t age as well).
Shiva Baby (2020) for translating social anxiety into film.
Saint Omer (2022) for using court testimony (perhaps the most impersonal and utilitarian form of communication) to tell an emotionally resonant story.
10. What a Way to Go! (1964)
I didn’t expect to like this movie as much as I did. It’s a rom-com-ish story of Louisa (Shirley MacLaine), a woman who may or may not be cursed. Every time she falls in love with a man (the cast here is stacked with talent, including Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, and Gene Kelly), she’s only able to enjoy that storybook romance for a short while until the man suddenly and unexpectedly dies, leaving her with his fortune.
The movie has an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I didn’t have very high expectations going in. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised by the script, a few song and dance numbers, and a movie that feels very ahead of its time. One of the best parts of What a Way to Go! is how MacLaine’s character visualizes each of her romances. From a silent-era Hollywood romance to a costume drama to a musical, each story has its own look and feel, which allows the movie to constantly reinvent itself.
9. Past Lives (2023)
An incredibly strong debut from Celine Song. You can tell that she’s a playwright because her dialogue is so natural. Past Lives follows Nora (Greta Lee), whose family moves from South Korea to Canada when she’s in elementary school. She leaves behind her childhood friend/crush, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), only to reconnect with him later as an adult when she’s living in New York City. Of course, things are complicated because Nora is married to an American named Arthur (John Magaro). That romantic triangle is at the heart of the movie. Past Lives tells a small story with a big impact.
There are so many factors that go into your perception of a movie: your mood when you start watching, how tired you are, what other movies you’ve seen before sitting down to watch this one. Like Nora’s relationship with these two men, it often feels like there are so many factors out of our control that it’s a wonder we end up connecting with any movie at all. In this case, I had seen Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul the day before. If there had been more time between Return to Seoul and Past Lives, I very well may have liked this one more. But in such close proximity to each other, I found Past Lives to be less interesting and less profound of a story. Don’t get me wrong — on its own it’s very interesting and very profound, but I couldn’t help comparing it to Return to Seoul.
8. Chameleon Street (1989)
It’s such a shame that Chameleon Street is writer/director/actor Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s only film. Although it won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, it had a minimal theatrical release and mixed reviews at the time. Thankfully Arbelos Films restored the film in 4k and released it on blu-ray earlier this year. Hopefully the film can get the recognition it deserves.
Chameleon Street is based on the life of William Douglas Street, Jr., a Black con artist who impersonated being a reporter, lawyer, and surgeon, among other credentialed professions. Similarly to What a Way to Go!, Chameleon Street’s script is very funny and plays a lot with genre. There’s a prison drama, a costume drama, a Bergman-esque drama, a domestic drama — even horror. For such a low budget movie, Harris is able to do so much in such a short amount of time.
Similarly to Hollywood Shuffle, some of the humor and attitudes don’t age well, but more often than not this movie feels depressingly contemporary.
7. The Guilty (2018)
It’s very easy for films with a gimmick to feel gimmicky simply because they don’t ever rise above that gimmick. Thankfully, Gustav Möller’s The Guilty isn’t guilty of that (sorry). The gimmick here is that the entire film takes place in a single location: an emergency dispatch call center. We follow police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) who, for reasons we learn over the course of the film, is temporarily assigned this desk duty in the call center. On this particular night he gets a call from a distressed woman, Iben (Jessica Dinnage), who is being held against her will in her husband’s van. Holm becomes more and more invested in this case even as it becomes harder and harder to help.
The genius of the gimmick is that we can’t see what’s happening on the other end of the line. Because we’re told everything from Iben, we the viewer can only imagine everything she’s telling us, and that makes it even scarier. The Guilty is a taut and gripping psychological thriller.
6. Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
In October 1987, the NAMES Project displayed a massive series of quilts on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Each patch was a memorial to an AIDS victim. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary weaves together the lives of five diverse people who died from AIDS-related causes. The stories and recollections are touching and funny and, ultimately, devastating. Especially the moment — and each speaker had one — when they remembered some tiny, specific detail about the death of their loved one.
At first I wasn’t sure how much I liked the stories jumping around from person to person, but there’s a patchwork-like mosaic that emerges. Also, if Epstein and Friedman had followed each person’s story linearly, the audience would experience something akin to emotional whiplash. By structuring the film the way they do, the sadness comes all at once and is somehow even more devastating. An incredible testament to the power of documentary filmmaking.
5. Something Like a War (1991)
Speaking of powerful documentaries: Deepa Dhanraj’s 63-minute Something Like a War isn’t very long, but she doesn’t waste a minute. This was also a complete surprise: Back in March I was looking for something short-ish to watch while Kaitlin was doing some work, and I happened to find this on the Criterion Channel. An hour later I was in awe of what Dhanrahj accomplished.
The real power of Something Like a War comes from its juxtapositions. One of the most haunting is the contrast between a group of Indian women discussing motherhood, sexuality, and their bodies, with the cold, sterile lecture of a doctor (male, of course) performing sterilizations on sedated women. This is all in the name of “family planning” — which, in this documentary, feels like an inverse of The Handmaid's Tale. Instead of being forced into pregnancy, these lower-caste women are forced into sterilizations.
But there’s more: Dhanraj also implicates the United States for being complicit in “family planning” by showing clips of old government propaganda films and quotes from various texts. Her layering together of these various threads is just incredible.
4. A Raisin in the Sun (1961)
A long time ago I taught a class on failure. One of the texts we discussed was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which is my favorite American play. To aid our discussion, I brought in clips from this 1961 adaptation and compared them with clips from a 2008 TV movie adaptation. The contrast was night and day: Sidney Poitier (1961) vs Sean Combs (2008) was perhaps the biggest disparity. But even though I had sought out clips of specific scenes I wanted to highlight, I hadn’t seen the whole 1961 film all the way through until earlier this year.
Holy shit. Hansberry adapts her own play into this screenplay, although she doesn’t have to change much. Seeing all these characters inhabit a tiny Chicago apartment adds to the stress each and every family member faces. I also love the ensemble, many of whom starred in the Broadway production. In some ways they were already a family, so seeing them interact together on film feels even more natural.
What else is there to say? The performances are wonderful. The script is so good. Although it looks and sounds a little dated, the message is still radical. Loved it.
3. In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Okay, technically we watched this one in 2022, but it was after I had published my 2022 best-of list, so I think this counts.
It’s easy to claim that the kind of prejudice and racism we see in In the Heat of the Night is unrealistic or otherwise cartoonish. But having grown up in the South (albeit in the ‘80s, not the ‘60s), it felt a little too close to home. It’s less the words and more the actions: Rod Steiger chewing gum in a way that I can only describe as intimidating. The looks and open condescension from the other police officers. There’s a simmering intensity that’s always present, but one of Norman Jewison’s impressive tricks is that the intensity never feels overwhelming.
And then, of course, you have Sidney Poitier who once again just absolutely nails it. Between the performances, the script, the title song by Ray Charles, and a pretty decent mystery at the heart of it, In the Heat of the Night has a lot going for it. I also appreciated that there was more to this than just “racists be racists” — there’s also police corruption, pride clouding one’s judgment, and the fact that a movie from 1967 recognized that the Confederate flag is the new face of the Klan.
2. Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Imagine if Jordan Peele took on the corporate world, then throw in a dash of Spike Lee (Bamboozled, in particular) and some of the more playful surrealist moments from Charlie Kaufman or Michel Gondry, and you’ve got yourself the recipe for Boots Riley’s directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You. LaKeith Stanfield is incredible as Cash Green, an aimless guy who starts working as a telemarketer. One day Cash discovers the power of using his “white voice” to close sales, which sends him on a truly wild journey.
The supporting cast is equally as great, many of whom I’d love to have seen more of, including: Steven Yeun as a union organizer, Terry Crews as Cash’s uncle, Danny Glover as Cash’s mentor at the telemarketing company, and Tessa Thompson as Cash’s girlfriend. Of course, these roles wouldn’t be nearly as memorable without a strong script, and Riley brings a lot of humor to this critique of our capitalist society.
However, one of the things I liked best about Sorry to Bother You is the world building. That might sound strange for a film that exists in our present, but the sets, the props, the costumes — the entire aesthetic — worked to make Cash’s world believable, even as his journey becomes more and more absurd. A thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyable movie.
1. Return to Seoul (2022)
While I enjoyed Sorry to Bother You more, the movie that most resonated with me this year was Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul. Ji-Min Park (who, amazingly, is an artist and not a trained actor) plays Freddie, a South Korean woman who was adopted by French parents when she was a baby. When we first meet Freddie she’s a drifting 20-something who has found her way back to Seoul. She doesn’t know anyone there, she doesn’t know the language, and she feels like a stranger in this, her homeland that is nothing like a home.
From there Freddie goes on a journey to find her biological parents. I won’t say anything more than that since Return to Seoul is an arthouse movie through and through: it has a slow place and quietly unravels its story. There isn’t a ton to spoil in the first place, but since it’s a relatively small story then I don’t want to give anything more away.
The thing is, for a movie that’s ostensibly about identity, what I found most fascinating about Return to Seoul is that it’s really about language. More specifically, the limits of language: what gets lost in translation (either purposefully or unintentionally), what can’t be articulated without a proper vocabulary, or, in the case of the dance sequences or a sad piano riff, what can’t be expressed in words at all. Extremely beautifully done, and Chou conveys so much in certain shots that words aren’t even necessary.
