by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

This would be the point where I make a general observation on how good the year was for film, but it’s an eighteen item list and I’ve really got no clue. For film as an industry, this was an awful year, but anybody can tell you that (or maybe it was a good year, as far as awareness of the film industry’s awfulness goes). For film as an art? This just happens to be what I saw. On the one hand, I managed to avoid most of the movies I didn’t think I’d like. On the other, The Colour Purple and Ferrari don’t hit theatres until Christmas. Who am I to make observations on anything!

Thus, I’ve made the executive decision for this list to be as subjective as possible, with arbitrary rules about what constitutes “a 2023 movie.” I saw a lot of repertory screenings at the Dave Barber Cinematheque (shoutout the only movie screen in downtown Winnipeg!!!) and have decided that I’ll count any of them so long as they feel enough like “current events.”

Dressed in Blue (dir. Antonio Giménez Rico)

Newly restored by Altered Innocence sublabel Anus Films, this docu-surrealist portrait of trans sex workers in post-Francoist Spain is a marvel to witness. Framed around its six subjects convening for tea, each woman reconstructs her history and ideals in her own way. Yet we’re left with something missing—the need to galvanize a newly visible queer community. Having come and gone from the Criterion Channel without ceremony, it’s still unfortunately hard to come by.

Something You Said Last Night (dir. Luis De Filippis)

De Filippis takes something as mercenary as a “vacation movie” and makes something out of it that’s formally defiant, an examination of familial intimacy that uses its limited timeframe to linger, sleep in rather than “make the most of it”.

Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)

This is the closest American cinema has gotten to recapturing the magic of Nope: a morally uncomplicated blockbuster that makes the viewer come out feeling smarter, curious about the fuzzy edges of history. As symphonically all-encompassing as it may be, this is also Nolan’s folksiest effort to date: he practically remakes The Dark Knight’s boat scene here.

Porcupine (dir. Truong Minh Quy, Nicolas Graux)

Featured at WNDX Festival of Moving Image, this short starts with a man played by Truong giving a cam show in a dilapidated Brussels apartment, talking about how horny haunted houses make him as he strips. From there, the film begins to remap the digital landscape, along with those perpetually displaced in the analog world. Very take it or leave it, but to me this really manages to capture the surreal nature of existing online.

Häxan (dir. Benjamin Christensen)

Another “docu-surrealist” rep screening from this year: I ended up seeing the Swedish silent classic with an absolutely chilling soundtrack mix courtesy of Scott Fitzpatrick. I was seated with friends and about 40% of the joy was in whispering to each other whenever we recognized a song. Apparently Fitzpatrick has streamed the mix on Twitch yearly, so be sure to check it out if you’re a fan of industrial/ambient acts like Oneohtrix Point Never and Throbbing Gristle—the use of Oneohtrix over a diagram of the ancient cosmos or Swans over a witchcraft reenactment really heightens how groundbreaking Häxan remains.

Knock at the Cabin (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

Shyamalan cashes in on his status as the most successful arthouse director of the 21st century by making a movie about watching the news. Can a rack focus capture climate-change-induced dread? As we dream of the future, the present can’t help but become more and more surreal. This was the only instance that a theatre employee made small talk about the show itself by the way, so I’m declaring this the people’s choice for best of the year.

Skinamarink (dir. Kyle Edward Ball)

Makes me scared of the dark just thinking of it. Kyle Edward Ball translates memory into vast space beckoning to be filled with the detritus of repression and reconsideration. This is a film that beckons to its level, not simply depicting, but putting you into a dynamic of trust and trauma.

The Killer (dir. David Fincher)

Michael Fassbender brings an unbridled physicality to this that contemporary cinema has been missing, while a Tilda Swinton cameo takes you through every single one of The Killer’s character beats in ten minutes tops. Certainly this will go down as one of Fincher’s “minor” works, yet there’s an uncurrent of opulence to every scene. How much did all that dog medicine cost?

Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson)

In peeling back layers upon layers of art, there’s a search going on, an ineluctable nostalgia for the unreal. At this stage in his career, Anderson seems to see himself in the alien more than the elusive playwright.

Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

The funniest movie of the year also happens to be about a woman who takes shit a little too seriously. If this weren’t an incredible picture with two tour de force leads in Hong Chau and Michelle Williams, I’d still have to put it on the list out of a love its true star, the pigeon.

Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)

In an ideal world, this would be a watershed film for Indigenous issues making their way onto the big screen, a clue that mainstream audiences are able to make space for genuinely confrontational pictures. I’m sure that by 2025 Apple will quit writing blank cheques once subscriptions plateau and exclusively finance Ghosted sequels.

Love Life (dir. Koji Fukada)

Visually speaking, Fukada shows himself as an auteur in the most imminent sense. Before us lies a web of secrets and tragedies; a family begins to question its solidity. The woman who remains most devoted is also the one who experiences life as a series of constant impasses. The director has written these people into existence, but now he begins to compose his shots with a mind to intervene, to show them what life is really about. When shooting from afar, it’s like a spotlight has been cast from millions of miles away.

Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967 (dir. Agnès Varda)

Just as a great Varda short can pull a rabbit out of a hat as if it’s the first time, Ciné-Tamaris pulled a Varda doc out of the depths of history. Both she and her subject are foreigners to New York who make a quick sketch of urban poverty and the of a man walking down the street. As loose as Varda’s style is, this sort of thing is like capturing a lightning strike; there’s point in going longer than four minutes, because the thing’s already happened.

Stop Making Sense (dir. Jonathan Demme)

I know it’s a classic, you know it’s a classic; I got to explain explain to the guy behind me why Spike Lee was doing the astonishingly brief roundtable while we waited a good twenty minutes for it to begin. Demme’s direction puts every song on the cusp of what we’d call narrative filmmaking, preserving the band and their collaborators as an unceasing font of invention.

Priscilla (dir. Sofia Coppola)

The more I think about Priscilla, the less I know for sure. It is confounding, alienating, ethereal. It is also deeply human, and I mean deeply: as Presley and her ex-husband’s mutual love is taken for granted, we’re left digging for the inner psychology beneath the glamour. Within awkward two-shots between Spaeny and Elordi, this human mystery begins to its long, slow rise.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang)

A theatre closes, and it is unimportant. Sometimes you chance upon an old friend and all you do is make small talk. Nonetheless, a place’s history is written by fragments and ghosts. Like so many entries on my list, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is filled with present-day melancholia; so full that you could watch it any year and it’d feel contemporary. In other news, my neighbourhood bar is closing in February and It’s making me terminally discombobulated.

BOPPO (dir. Marie Trinh)

Another stellar short featured in the WNDX program. We watch a young man alone in a Maui skatepark at night; the frame glows blue like a UFO. While he hits the ramps, in voiceover he tries to explain how skating is the religion of youth: “You know, boppo.” The film is unapologetically idiomatic—how are we supposed to understand what this guy means in just four minutes? He floats through the concrete maze. Once, he wipes out, then gets back on his board like nothing, crying to himself, “boppo...” This is a hero of our time, a model of recovery.

No Bears (dir. Jahar Panahi)

I decided this was my “best-of” when I say it in February and still haven’t been convinced otherwise. It is funny, rich in mystery, and like Scorsese’s Killers, deeply skeptical of its political efficacy. It’s entirely possible that creating art is nothing but an addiction, a distraction from real political action; yet as Panahi’s latest illegal release slips from comedy-of-manners into a meditation on borders and the slow erasure of identity that comes with living in oppression, the director ends up showing us that the cinema still has untapped potential.