Ryan's Top 15 Movies of 2023
by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring
I enjoy making lists. All kinds of lists. It’s just part of how my brain organizes things. But lists or rankings of art are merely snapshots of how I feel in a particular moment in time. This list might be different on any given day, as trying to pick 15 films I wanted to highlight as the best of the year is an impossible task. But the important thing to remember is that you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.
Here are five honorable mentions that almost made the cut (links to my reviews):
15. Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Can you find the wolves in this picture?
Through his crime movies–especially Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman–Scorsese has been exploring the ways that those operating outside the system act as a corrupting force. But in Killers of the Flower Moon, the perspective shifts to show the evil baked into the system itself and the complicitness required from “normal” people in order to make it operate. This one reason is why Killers of the Flower Moon focuses on Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and William Hale (De Niro), as they and the other white characters dehumanize the Osage over and over. But just as important is Lily Gladstone, who brings so much depth and complexity to her role that she outshines both movie stars in every scene she is in. One of the truly great performances.
14. Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
Person of the Year Taylor Swift wrote, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby/And I'm a monster on the hill,” but what Poor Things presupposes is that Emma Stone can be both. What results is a heartfelt fairy tale about a Frankenstein woman experiencing patriarchal society from the perspective of naivete, science, and love. Like Suzume, it feels like the third piece in a trilogy, standing alongside The Lobster and The Favourite as Lanthimos satirizes social constructs and how they twist men and women into monstrous forms. Of course the most monstrous thing here isn’t the woman with the brain of a baby; it is the men trying to control her.
13. Suzume (dir. Makoto Shinkai)
Suzume is the third Makoto Shinkai movie I’ve seen after Your Name. and Weathering With You, and I have loved each so far, while recognizing that Shinkai is working through similar ideas in each. Your Name. remains the most essential of the trilogy,
I found Suzume to be a thoughtful and heartfelt exploration for those who experience disaster as only a faint memory or impression–generational trauma. It is also a message to the young to remember what came before. Shinkai sends his title character, a 17 year old girl, on a voyage of self-discovery and independence in the form of chasing a boy turned into a chair, nightmares, and perhaps most importantly, other families. There is only one traditional–mom/dad/child–family that Suzume encounters on her travels. The other characters have or are single parents, and for Suzume’s aunt and Souta’s grandfather, they are thrust into parenthood unexpectedly. Suzume’s travels also represent a healing journey within herself that is only possible because she is able to move forward and reconnect with her childhood self, previously blocked off.
From a visual perspective, Shinkai’s films are only bested by Miyazaki when it comes to attention to detail, and Suzume is another beautiful example. The blend between traditional animation and CGI is nearly flawless, easily the best I have ever seen.
12. May December (dir. Todd Haynes)
This is one of those movies that I wasn’t sure how I felt about until it was over, and it keeps growing in my mind as one of the most interesting and well-constructed movies of the year. Samy Burch’s script is nothing short of astounding. By setting the story 23 years after the original affair between Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), it gives so much more room to explore the relationship between these two people and how it has evolved over time . Actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) coming to do research for her role to play Gracie in a new movie gives us the chance to get both an outsider view as well as a sort of “where are they now” perspective. We see the ripple effects of Gracie and Joe’s relationship on everyone around them, starting from their children together. But most poignantly, we see Joe’s struggles as he lives with decisions he made when he was far too young to make them. And finally, the film gives us an inside look into Elizabeth trying to understand Gracie and the journey she goes on in preparing for her role. Haynes and his cast bring a deep sense of empathy to the film but also do not shy away from some of the absurdities that arise from the situations within.
11. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (dir. Jeff Rowe)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been a part of my life almost as long as I can remember, but this movie completely renewed my interest in the franchise. I had seen all of the movies released in theaters–and watched a decent amount of three of the four animated series–but it took Mutant Mayhem to bring me back to the TMNT in an emotional way. The TMNT has always been a family story, with the turtles being brothers and Splinter their father and sensei. By forgoing Shredder for this new origin story, Mutant Mayhem gives the spotlight to many of other mutants in the TMNT menagerie, further emphasizing the family nature and maybe even suggesting that these mutants are the start of a new culture. Each of the characters in this very deep bench is given a distinct feel and at least a few moments to shine.
The craft on display here is wonderful, with the animation–clearly influenced by Spider-Verse, but also having its own distinct style–a joy to look at, the voice cast doing great work, and the combination of hip hop soundtrack and the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score working brilliantly. Plus, having Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello voiced by actual teens emphasized the teenage in the franchise’s name in a way that never fully came through for me before. This was my favorite franchise movie of the year until…well keep reading.
10. The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne)
What a fantastic comeback for both Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti. Payne seemed to have lost his touch after The Descendants and Downsizing, but The Holdovers is maybe the best film he’s made so far. Giamatti absolutely delivers on his first major film work since the start of Billions. The ‘70s set film about a teacher and students staying over at their boarding school during the Christmas break is ultimately a story about families, loss, and connection. But to get there, it sets Giamatti off on a personal quest of humiliation and doubt, as funny and satirical as A Confederacy of Dunces by way of Hal Ashby. Richly textured and the right mix of cynical and cozy, The Holdovers is going to be one I reach for whenever that Yuletide loneliness starts to creep inside.
9. Ferrari (dir. Michael Mann)
I love Michael Mann’s work. Each of his films is about a man so obsessed with his vocation that he can’t function doing much else. And so Enzo Ferrari, played here by Adam Driver, joins the Mann pantheon. Paring down a life to a defined period of time–in this case, 1957–is almost always the right choice for a biopic, but Ferrari also shines as an example of how to render your main subject knowable without voiceover or lengthy scenes of the main character explaining themselves. Here, we see Enzo Ferrari as a man obsessed with his own ego and self-image as much as he is with motor racing. Like the machines his factory creates, his life is a carefully constructed machine, and when one thing goes wrong…it will take a Herculean effort to repair.
Look for my full review of Ferrari here on MovieJawn later this week!
8. The Creator (dir. Gareth Edwards)
There’s a lot of elements to The Creator that have clear influences. Edwards references Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, and Akira in his vision of a Southeast Asian cyberpunk-meets-Apple aesthetic, as well as in some of the story beats and philosophical ideas he is exploring here. But the way these elements are synthesized together gives The Creator a distinct look as well as feel. Thinking about how Edwards is his own camera operator–making his collaboration with cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer a bit different from most–points to the director’s visual hallmarks. He has a roving, almost documentary eye with the camera, felt across all four of his features so far, but the scale and scope of The Creator feels the most attuned to his approach. Like Godzilla and Rogue One, Edwards tells a big story from the point of view of people on the ground, and the scenes of Joshua and Alphie moving through Southeast Asia–all shot on location–capture that feeling better than anything else he has done so far.
7. Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
While it would be easy to make a satire about Portland artists and students, or at the very least, sort them into readily recognizable archetypes, Reichardt pushes back on this expectation. While some of the works showcased may seem unremarkable, there is no derision of art here. Showing Up celebrates creation for its own end. While the looming gallery show creates urgency within Lizzy, she isn’t schmoozing or networking to try to climb the ladder of the art world, but prefers to let her work speak for itself. If there is any kind of satire at play, it is gentle and loving. These artists aren’t shown as outcasts for making things and being expressive, nor are they chastised for not being able to earn a living doing it. Capitalism tells us that anything worth doing can be assigned monetary value. But no one in this film is trying to sell their art. They are merely making it and wanting to share it with the world.
6. Priscilla (dir. Sofia Coppola)
Priscilla is a masterclass in control and perspective. There are no big speeches, few (if any) outsized moments, and so much of the film’s emotionality is communicated by holding on Cailee Spaeny’s face for just a few extra frames. Sofia Coppola trusts her audience to recognize Priscilla Presley (née Beaulieu) as a woman in a prison, albeit one made of her own naiveté and inexperience and held in place by a perpetual adolescent. Spaeny’s performance as Priscilla is note perfect as she is able to convincingly play her from the age of 14 through 27. Through body language and subtleties of performance, she is easy to read at all times, sometimes just processing the things that are going on around her.
Priscilla offers a damning yet complex portrait of Elvis. It is clear that he is under the thumb of Colonel Tom Parker (not seen but felt throughout the movie), and Priscilla is the one thing he can control in his life. He does so by picking her clothes, hair, and keeping her essentially captive at Graceland with his family, playing out a clearly rendered portrait of the Madonna-whore complex in his feelings towards Priscilla. But Coppola never lets Elvis’ presence dominate the film either, as this is fully Priscilla’s movie.
Priscilla is a claustrophobic and upsetting but powerful portrait of relationship dynamics that are far too common.
5. Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)
Oppenheimer is a very talky movie. Most of its scenes involve white men sitting in rooms talking about physics, engineering, warmaking, or political policy. Yet, many of those scenes are as thrilling or fraught as any involving nuclear material. There is an immediacy and urgency in almost every scene, as the stakes have never been higher up to that point in history. In addition, one of Nolan’s major strengths as a storyteller, the way the information is delivered to the viewer, is in full force. The density and nonlinear approach with which it is told allows for effective callbacks, repetition, and severely delayed resolution. One or two of them in particular do feel like your mind is splitting atoms, with how note-perfect the reveals are. The end result feels so effortless and organic that viewing Oppenheimer makes you feel like an instant expert on nuclear policy. By the time the political maneuvering is happening, everything seems twisted around and perverted by the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the Cold War must be reckoned with as well. How many world-ending devices does one country need? We’re all MAD (mutually assured destruction) here.
4. Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)
Not only does the construction of the script make Past Lives one of the best of the year so far, but Song demonstrates a reserve and trust in her performers that is striking for a debut. So much of her intention is captured through bodies. The way Nora smiles is different between Hae and Arthur and her posture completely changes when she is alone with either man. It’s readily evident how each person in a scene is feeling based on the way they move or sit, as well as the expressions on their face. This also applies to the way they are placed within the frame. Strong often places her actors off-center, creating an asymmetry that reflects their restless or unsettled nature. This is also emphasized by her slow pans, a recurring feature of the film. Often there will be two characters in the same space, the camera slowly moving from one to the other, or outpacing them to give us a sense of the environment around them.
3. Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson)
Between Asteroid City and his excellent collection of Roald Dahl shorts for Netflix, 2023 is the best year Wes Anderson has ever had (the previous holder of the title was 2004, when he released The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and this American Express commercial). I wrote earlier this year about my Grand Theory of Wes Anderson, and Asteroid City aligns with that thesis in every layer of the story.
The play-within-a-play structure here and the quarantine aspects of the plot fold in on each other, containing themselves inside of space and time. The movie opens with a television screen (a box), presenting a documentary about the making of the play Asteroid City, which evokes a black box theater setting. Within the play, the cabins of the motor lodge are essentially their own small stages, as is the inside of the crater. Plays within plays within plays. With the themes of quarantine and presentation running throughout the film, these boxes are a mix of container and performance space. Few of the characters in the film have preexisting relationships with each other beyond their familial bonds, and so they are introducing themselves to each other as if they are all characters in a play–which they are, of course. Anderson’s nesting doll constructions are always far easier to understand by watching than by description.
Augie (Jason Schwartzman, also having a career best year) and Midge (Scarlett Johansson) are the principal stars of this mini production. Both are parents who put their creative endeavors ahead of parenting, despite having children that are objectively exceptional. Both of them achieve catharsis–or at least a better understanding of parenthood–by being stuck with their kids. In Asteroid City, they can’t really focus on their photojournalism or acting careers, and those pursuits revert to hobbies, while parenting becomes more of a central concern.
Similarly, Conrad Earp (Ed Norton) and Schubert (Adrian Brody) find their creativity pushed in new directions when stuck in a space–be it a cabin, an acting classroom, or the theater building itself. Add to that the background atomic bombs, recurring car chase/shootout, and an alien encounter, Asteroid City is largely about what we can unlock in our creativity and ourselves while we remain in one place. This is Wes Anderson restrained, the film’s pacing is a bit slower and more overtly introspective than any of his other films, spending even more time in the same spaces.
Asteroid City will go down as one of the best movies about living through Tr*mp, COVID-19, war in Russia, and all of the various background and foreground apocalypses we have to choose to process or not, in order to keep living our lives. So much of that processing happens when we are being creative or taking in the creativity of others. “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
2. Godzilla Minus One (dir. Takashi Yamazaki)
Godzilla Minus One is everything I would want out of a "solo" Godzilla film. And everything I want from a franchise blockbuster. It echoes the 1954 original and the 2014 American take (with a dash of Shin Godzilla for good measure) while having a different focus and a different message from any previous entry in the franchise. Minus One also distinguishes itself by being set earlier than any other previous Godzilla movie, set in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
While “[Ishirō] Honda seems to have conceived this primordial force of nature as a living mushroom cloud,” in the words of J. Hoberman writing for Criterion, Minus One shows Godzilla to be a combination of Japanese warmongering and American imperialism, with a dash of early Cold War paranoia. Godzilla has proven to be a malleable monster metaphor, and here he rises to destroy the people who tried to control the Pacific.
Minus One’s protagonist, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) first meets a pre-irradiated Godzilla in 1945 on Odo Island, as he stops at a base for kamikaze pilots who need repairs. But his plane is fine, he’s just afraid of completing his mission, not ready to die. He is left as one of two survivors of Godzilla’s first appearance in the movie. After the war, he struggles with guilt and shame of surviving when his mission was to die. But he continues to survive, finding a family with a woman and infant who survived the Tokyo firebombing and with the crew of a minesweeping boat. As survivors, they are tasked with cleaning up the mines in the ocean around Japan, taking accountability for weaponry and pollution littering the ocean (Godzilla’s habitat). Godzilla itself also represents the theme of survival here, as it is shown to regenerate itself after being hurt or attacked (the scarring gives Godzilla an interesting patchwork effect over the course of the film).
Minus One draws on the Godzilla franchise of course, but also evokes Jaws, Dunkirk, and other western blockbusters while still remaining a fully Japanese story. This is also the first Godzilla movie where I can remember the names of multiple human characters, and their story had a deep emotional impact. After 70 years, Minus One shows that Godzilla is as relevant and vital as ever.
1. The Boy and the Heron (dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
I saw The Boy and the Heron two weeks ago as of this writing, and I am still processing it. In some ways, it is an overwhelming experience but also bypasses the conscious and speaks directly to the soul. One of the marks of a master artist like Miyazaki is that, while The Boy and the Heron clearly has things in common with much of his previous films (especially Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and The Wind Rises), it also feels completely distinct as well.
The young protagonist, Mahito (Soma Santoki), tries to navigate life in a relatively sheltered part of Japan during World War II after his mother is killed in a hospital fire in Tokyo. Moving to the country with his mom’s sister–now his stepmother–and his businessman father, he encounters a cadre of older housekeepers, a heron, and a mysterious tower. The heron says Mahito is being called to his mother, who is actually alive within the tower. Mahito experiences a dreamlike journey within the world inside the tower (or the world for which the tower acts as a gateway), that touches on life, death, and the act of creation. This liminal space is filled with colorful characters and challenging imagery, including caves, fire magic, and a dying pelican Mahito eventually finds his mysterious granduncle who asks him to take over as the master of this world.
The Boy and the Heron is a heartfelt bildungsroman, with many potential allegorical meanings, but it does not reduce them down to simple moral or lessons. Through his journey, Mahito learns about how complex systems are, whether natural or manmade. He also works through much of his feelings about his parents and his situation. Ultimately he rebukes his granduncle’s call to abandon the real world for one of fantasy and the (illusion) of control that goes with it.
Miyazaki acknowledges the pain of reality. Loss is part of being alive, whether that loss is personal or larger scale. Nature is real, as are the people in our lives. When we dream, we can build anything, but building is sort of an illusion. We can’t truly control anything, no matter how much we want to. We can’t even control our own dreams. But we need to dream in order to find our way forward and process our emotions. To echo Asteroid City again, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.