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By Roderick Heath

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As a wise man once said, your focus determines your reality. Depending on where one focused on the cinema scene in 2023, it could be described as both a singularly dire and tremendous year in film. Perhaps no recent year has gone by with so many weak and disposable big movie releases, and the survey of current day Hollywood and attached entertainment industries started to feel a little like the last act of a Martin Scorsese gangster film. Once-lucrative scams and ploys suddenly started coming undone, with streaming services that don’t make money vampirically draining out the commercial vitality of cinema, whilst movie studios who don’t like or comprehend their audience saw their franchises all ran out of steam at the worst possible moment. Or perhaps the better likeness was the atomic weapon set off in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, given how many bombs went off this year, each and every one a crater gouged in what’s left of cinema’s stature. Grand old heroes like Indiana Jones and Ethan Hunt and the Fast and Furious team and vaguely recognisable young heroes like The Flash and Shazam and Captain Marvel were all united in being greeted with a collective yawn and shrug from the public, mostly happy to wait for things to come online. That a shift in the zeitgeist was ushered in by the long years of pandemic was plain enough but the movies being released were often incidentally oblivious to it, still playing to the mores and social media arguments of 2019.

The mass audience made a show of not being wedged when it came to the choice between the serious, manly business of Oppenheimer and the frolicsome feminism of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and the success of the latter suddenly spotlighted a vast, long-abandoned and scarcely charted continent of potential, whereas attempts to retrofit boy’s-toys fare like the Marvel Cinematic Universe fell hard and heavy. Speaking of which, the superhero craze of the last 20 years, if not entirely exhausted, still plainly ran out of steam big time, and suddenly the question of what will be the next cash cow arose, a question possibly if conditionally and hardly reassuringly answered by the huge success of Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. The suddenly opened frontiers of the latest generation of pattern-and-data-amassing and remixing software – sorry, “Artificial Intelligence” – that preoccupied many saw synthetic bad guys stepping to the fore, like the murderous android posing as the ultimate poptimist pal in M3gan and the sinisterly orchestrating intelligence sported in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

Floundering artists and creatives with messy personal lives were all over the place in the year’s films, hinting at the way being creative in the current world has become an absurd limbo even as the pandemic experience made the usual isolation of artists seem like a general existential state. Writers found in Afire, American Fiction, Asteroid City, Infinity Pool, Past Lives, and Anatomy of a Fall were emotionally cordoned beings caught in the eddy of their perpetual observational remove, social uncertainty, and habits of insular meditation failing to contend with speed the real world moves at; characters in films like Ferrari, Showing Up, Maestro, Passages, M3gan, The Blue Caftan, May December, and even Oppenheimer and Barbie struggled to make sense of themselves through creation, the making of an artwork or article a brief deliverance from all churning confusion and unease. In partial contrast, the triumphs and tumbles of businesspeople in the recent past lined up to be glorified in the likes of Tetris, BlackBerry, Air, and Ferrari, the stories behind the making, and sometimes the undoing, of famous marques involving twists of out-on-a-limb inspiration and risk-reward balancing acts that sometimes paid off and sometimes came to a literally crashing halt, leaving behind little more than a good-looking chassis.

Simulacra of women went searching for self-actualisation in Barbie, M3gan, El Conde, and Poor Things, as did more substantial women in Boston Strangler, A Good Person, The Royal Hotel, Showing Up, Polite Society, No One Will Save You, and Eileen. Reality itself defied some protagonists – the isolated heroine of Enys Men toggled through a multitude of ages, trying to find some availing moment to get a purchase on; the children of Skinamarink roamed a shadowy house riddled with mysterious forces; the paltry antihero of Infinity Pool learned boldness and reclaimed pathos when seeing his own doppelganger put to death before plunging into a psychedelic morass. The Flash tried to rewrite personal history and instead broke the universe and condemned himself to franchise junction hell. Misbegotten creations of amoral father figures with their Faustian projects proliferated, from the tormented chimera in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to the tattooed avenging angel in God Is A Bullet, the lurching pumpkin-headed monsters of Dark Harvest and the possessed robots of Five Nights At Freddy’s and the protean heroine of Poor Things, a pattern inverted for The Creator with its harassed and hunted progeny of a post-human dawn and a martyred matriarch.

Biopics were preoccupied with the mythos of famous men all connected by mysterious genius and an incapacity to keep it in their pants, and the women with varying levels of luck who loved them. Some, like Napoleon and The Legend and Butterfly, mischievously contemplated the idea the legendary conquerors they depicted were in large part the constructed products of the ambition and talent of their wives, male equivalents of the tacked-together women of Barbie and Poor Things. Napoleon, Oppenheimer, Ferrari, and Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein portrait Maestro depicted tunnel-vision ability and obsession that gave birth to things of greatness but also laid waste to much. Such portraits nonetheless came draped in the glamour of a bygone period that was less socially free and easy but feels increasingly romantic in the allure of its cultural and intellectual vivacity compared the angrily self-hobbling present-tense, an allure also tapped by the fictional world of Asteroid City. Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon didn’t deal with anyone that famous but also took on real history and laid bare its entrails both the interest of the anatomist and the prognostication of the mystic, quaking for the past and fretting for the future.  The scared weird little guys made their plays for riches and escape or even mere self-respect in films like The Delinquents, Tetris, BlackBerry, Godzilla Minus One, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Dark Harvest, whilst schemers with varying levels of criminal intent made their play to cut off a slice in Saltburn, The Delinquents, and Napoleon. Amidst all of 2023’s chaotic lovers, greedy sensualists, and self-destructive seekers, Perfect Days portrayed a character who seemed, at least on the surface, to be their polar opposite.

The continuing and lucrative appeal of horror movies has been one of the few sturdy pillars of the current cinema scene, even if by and large their quality left something to be desired. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett resumed their exhumation of the Scream series with Scream VI, shifting the setting to New York and climes of contemporary collegians, as the two Carpenter sisters, once more played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, faced down yet another cabal of Ghostface-worshipping killers stalking them and their friends, this time with the cinephile element proving a major aspect of the story rather than meta sauce, as the series and the series-within-a-series Stab kept toggling back and forth in layers of franchise self-reference. This entry delivered a decent variation on the usual opening slaying of a chosen victim played by a familiar face, in this case Samara Weaving as a luckless film studies teacher, which unfolded intriguingly amidst busy, glitzy Manhattan. It also wisely brought back Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby, now evolved into a slightly cracked FBI agent, to take over as representative of the series legacy. These better aspects couldn’t paper over the way the new filmmaking team just don’t have the malicious wit in staging as Wes Craven, nor the scripts the fleet and witty zing of the early films. The movie ticked off all the usual meta flourishes and the evolving intergenerational theme and only just resisted the urge to ice the one remaining original cast member. But the new youth crew, for all their more self-consciously diverse makeup, are mostly pretty damn insipid and interchangeable – and early scenes introduced them in a manner that made them nearly as disturbing as the killers – and the climax devolved into a confused and tired roundelay of stabbings. Again I was left feeling like it would be my last go-round with the series, but I’ll probably say that after watching the next one too.

I didn’t think it possible, after 2022’s The Invitation, for contemporary spins on Dracula to get much worse, but 2023 proved me wrong by giving me not one but two clumsily revisionist variations that seized upon often neglected elements of the source material and tried to expand them into standalone stories. Chris McKay’s Renfield was a nominal comedy-horror entry for which the central selling point was the seemingly inspired casting of Nicholas Cage as a particularly sardonic take on the sanguinary Count. Nicholas Hoult was his oppressed minion, having in this take survived in uneasy partnership to the present day, with the haplessly servile Renfield granted a small share of vampiric power granted by his master. Renfield eventually learned to stand up to Dracula, who was presented as the archetypal abusive boss, after he fell in love with a strident female cop. Not a bad satiric idea in theory. In practice McKay let the blood run free in his attempts to be outrageous and cover up the lack of real wit and cleverness, turning the concept into a sort of gore-comedy-flecked superhero movie when it should have been a much more uneasy, subtle, cultish affair of the type Cage used to make a few times a year back in the late 1980s. Even the one, good, shocking twist, when Dracula murdered all of Renfield’s support group, was undone by movie’s end.

By contrast, André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter saw the Troll Hunter director adopting a more serious tack on the Dracula mythos, splitting off a portion of Dracula the novel usually neglected or skipped by filmmakers – the chapters depicting Dracula’s voyage to England, slowly decimating the crew of the title ship along the way and concluding with the famous image of the dead captain tied to his steering wheel. Around this kernel of mystique the screenwriters added plenty of “fresh” flourishes to fill out a necessarily unresolved narrative. The film looked good, at least in its early stages before retreating into digital murk, but the poor script (replete with lines like “Now we know where the Devil sleeps!”) and Øvredal’s direction conspired to create a movie at once impatient and overlong, caking Stoker’s work in current-day horror movie clichés. Whilst the film seemed to be trying to draw out Stoker’s influence on later narratives like Alien and The Thing, it utterly failed to generate any sense of the hallucinatory and existential dread the source sketched so deftly, reduced its feral, animalistic Dracula to a typical CGI fiend, and couldn’t even stick to its own supposed brief of presenting the title voyage in clean isolation and faithfulness, proffering a potentially interesting but entirely unconvincing Black Van Helsing-wannabe as protagonist. What it had, rather, was an array of overripe performances: Liam Cunningham, as the ill-fated captain, kept it afloat, but was still rather wasted.

For quite a different spin on the Stoker’s character and the vampire mystique one could turn to Pablo Larrain’s El Conde. After plodding about in strained, award-chic, quasi-feminist circles for his last couple of movies, Larrain steered back to the kind of material that provides the bedrock of his sensibility in again harking back to the grand old days of the Chilean junta with an added dose of symbolic-satirical conceit: El Conde implied a double meaning in its title, proposing it was a favoured nickname for Chile’s former military ruler Augusto Pinochet. Larrain posited that Pinochet was actually a nefarious vampire who emerged from the milieu of the French Revolution and set about resisting all forms of revolution, finding the ideal stage to do so when he washed up in Chile. After his nominal “death” Pinochet, who had let himself wane into a semblance of old age, set about trying to restore his youth, with a particularly tempting goad to his efforts in the form of a beautiful nun posing as an accountant, sent to destroy him and restore the wealth he purloined, whilst his family scurries to grab their slice. El Conde was somehow a return to form for Larrain but also a seriously mixed bag. Both the storyline and the lines of satiric enquiry felt clumsy and undeveloped, although its most inspired joke – bringing in the equally undead Margaret Thatcher and revealing her brand of first world Tory to be the literal and figurative parent of the Latin American dictator – came delivered with mordant wit and biting import. The gorgeous black-and-white photography infused Larrain’s occasionally powerful images, particularly when the newly vampirised nun revelled in weightless release and communion with the delight of evil, even if Larrain ultimately revealed little clear idea of what it all meant beyond a long reiteration of Bertholt Brecht’s epigram about Hitler and the bitch that bore him.

Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear also laboured to churn together blood-soaked genre business with waggish humour and mordant, nostalgic satire – even if the targets this time were far more nebulous – in spinning a zany chase-and-chomp thriller from an old tabloid headline with the most does-what-it-says-on-the-box title since Snakes On A Plane. The period in reference was, as so often at the moment, the 1980s, as a bear gets coked to the gills after munching on a load of yéyo from a crashed drug smugglers’ plane, and, driven to frenzy, terrorises a survey of luckless people drawn to a US national park for varying motives. Said walking lunches included Keri Russell as a mother trying to locate her daughter before the marauding beast, Alden Ehrenreich as a fed-up factotum in the drug ring, and Ray Liotta, in his last role, as the bullying kingpin. Banks didn’t take the material at all seriously, with a punchline that affirmed different versions of momma bear fierceness and protectiveness. But Banks’ touch as a filmmaker remains pretty slapdash, as the movie lurched uneasily between silliness and earnest violence with endemic clumsiness in staging, delivering neither queasy laughs or genuine tension beyond the most basic, and the whole thing came dressed in a kind of self-conscious naughtiness that made me wish I’d watched Grizzly again.

Despite its epic science fiction backdrop, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ 65 proved to be a variation on the same basic theme of being lost in the woods with a big toothy animal stalking you, albeit this one enfolding in the last days of the dinosaurs. Adam Driver was the emissary of a humanoid race exploring deep space who, after the ship he’s piloting crashes on a primeval Earth just before a species-decimating asteroid hits, finds himself stranded along with one fellow survivor, a young girl who reminds him a whole lot of his deceased daughter, and the two battle their way to a rescue craft with various carnivores in pursuit. Driver trying his hand at anchoring a meat-and-potatoes action-adventure flick was a welcome sight, and it started reasonably well, with a long, near-wordless passage of his hero stranded alone on a fearsome alien world and faced with a race to keep himself alive, all decorated with some eye-appeasing visual textures. But 65 ultimately proved a listless, cavernously empty retread of a dozen better movies: the boldness of the basic narrative conceit proved only to be a pretext for a predictable, schmaltzy tale of daddy-daughter angst, and culminated in a uniquely pointless and silly battle with a hungry tyrannosaurus.

Perhaps the most unexpected movie credit of the year was seeing Ben Wheatley’s name attached as director of Meg 2: The Trench, a belated sequel to Jon Turteltaub’s mildly amusing giant shark movie of 2018. Jason Statham and several other members of the original cast returned to be imperilled when another expedition into the depths of the Mariana Trench results in disaster and stranding on the sea floor, contending this time not just with megalodons but other prehistoric nasties as well as human villains. Wheatley did seem to be bent on having some fun with the material, wielding imagery that grazed Jules Verne territory as well as The Abyss and touching on Wheatley’s love of psychedelic plant life as his heroes trekked through a sunken fluorescent garden before entering a mysterious underwater base used by nefarious persons. Ultimately however Wheatley didn’t even seem particularly bent on transforming a commercial venture into an auteurist delight, with the film by and large offering the same blend of blandly sufficient action and comedy as the first. The second half again depicted an assault on a resort filled with rich Chinese tourists, and, like 65, the story boiled down to a daddy looking out for a rambunctious daughter, with some kind of thematic import arising from him and his adopted daughter’s Chinese uncle amicably divvying up protector duties. Maybe Peter Strickland or Joanna Hogg would like to tackle the third one.

Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You proved a stranger and, at least initially, arresting blend of familiar sci-fi and monster movie tropes with something more ambitious and rarefied. Kaitlyn Dever played a young woman living alone amidst a community that hates and ostracises her for reasons that slowly come into focus. One night she encounters an alien that enters her house and accidentally kills it during a struggle, and soon finds she could be the last person not assimilated into the ranks of those controlled by the aliens. Duffield’s boldest choice was to let the film play out as almost dialogue-free and telling the story as much through imagery as possible. Given the debt of the images to manifold influences from Robert Heinlein to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I was left feeling that wasn’t nearly as much an achievement as the film thought it was, and the absence of speaking mostly just made room for a lot of running about and game-playing, nominally that of human and aliens but really that of the director and audience, with the aliens proving conveniently very selective about when they can use their vast powers. The more cumulatively irritating aspect of the film was the way it obeyed the current playbook of the elevated genre film, with climactic scenes boiling everything down to a meditation on grief and guilt, with a punchline where the perplexed aliens seemed to rewrite reality so Duffield could claim a late swerve into David Lynch-esque territory, but in a manner that felt less truly surreal than like a sop to a very contemporary sensibility where if you don’t like the reality you live in you can curate your life feed so it matches your headspace.

Talk To Me, made by Australian director siblings Danny and Michael Phillipou, tackled a tale of supernatural haunting and possession in a more familiar fashion than No One Will Save You, but with the same essential thematic concern. Talk To Me revolved around a high school girl, still mourning her mother’s suicide, who finds herself caught in a spiral of possibly demonic influence when she and some friends have a party where the latest source of thrill-seeking entertainment is a plaster cast of a hand, supposedly that of a dead medium: this totem allows one’s body to be inhabited by a spirit for a short time, and the heroine’s emotional neediness proves to be the key to some dark and malign force seizing control of a friend, with the wronged dead gleefully acting out their rage towards the living. Talk To Me’s banal Aussie suburban setting and focus on teenage dares and rites of passage as a suitable place to root a study of anxiety and self-subverting efforts at moving on from tragedy was initially intriguing and grounded, with a particularly good performance from Miranda Otto as the canny mother of two of the teens. But the bug-eyed manifestations of possession and other, literal and generic flourishes to assure the general audience that yes, this was a horror movie, robbed it of the chance to be a subtle and disturbing study in a disintegrating psyche, and the kind of storyline that’s best articulated in a short story was dragged out somewhat as a feature film. More aggravatingly, the film’s exploitation of the kind of mental health drama it tried to piggyback its supposed seriousness upon felt a bit exploitative and, by the end, cruel.

Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist was by contrast emblematic of the modern Hollywood horror film, charged with gaudy, pumped-up spectacle in dealing with the notion of demonic possession, without any hint of subtlety or tension beyond a rollercoaster barrage of special effects and big acting. Russell Crowe continued his recent genre quickie slumming with seeming contentment, playing a character vaguely based on real life Vatican priest Gabriele Amorth, a Vespa-riding, bureaucrat-defying, practical psychology-wielding ass-kicker for the Lord. Amorth journeys to Spain to intervene in a supernatural assault on a recently transplanted American family, and finds himself contending with a bole of ancient evil eager to test his talents at compelling with the power of Christ. The film’s extremely flimsy based-on-a-true story pretext didn’t extend to being specific about which Pope exactly Amorth was exorcist-ing for, with Franco Nero playing what could only be called Generic Pope, and a fuzzy period setting that was nominally the late 1980s. As with Avery’s previous Overlord, The Pope’s Exorcist was essentially an exercise in harvesting and melding manifold clichés, mostly in this case lifted from William Friedkin’s 1973 ür-text for the subgenre, from suddenly terrible teens with croaky voices to demonic conspiracies designed to test the faith of the guilt-ridden priest. The result was executed with just enough gusto to be moderately enjoyable even if it left you feeling like you should say a few Hail Marys for watching it.

A long time ago, when he made 30 Days of Night, David Slade seemed like a potential new star of horror filmmaking, and the prospect of his resurgence with Dark Harvest, adapted from a well-regarded novel, seemed promising. Dark Harvest’s subject was an isolated town somewhere out in the vastness of the Midwestern wheat belt, in the early 1960s. There a peculiar yearly social custom has developed, demanding the teenage boys of the town risk their lives each Halloween to kill a marauding supernatural entity called Sawtooth Jack, whose rise is in turn propagated by the city elders in an obscure but deadly earnest ritual to stave off failed crops. The champion who brings down Jack is supposedly rewarded with freedom and their family enriched, but the younger brother of the previous year’s champion smells a rat and resolves to take part, forming an alliance with a plucky Black girl who’s new in town. The storyline worked to fuse the disparate influence of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King on modern American horror with its blend of Americana and stark metaphors for totemic deeds in communal life, with dashes of The Wicker Man and The Hunger Games for good measure. Dark Harvest had real potential, but Slade’s touch proved to have entirely deserted him, delivering a choppily-told, obviously-played tale, provoking tension but more in a frustrated, when-will-this-end way rather than exciting. Slade had no feel for the period setting, and gave only cursory portrayal of how the town’s peculiar atmosphere and social structure manifested. Most of the young protagonists were barely defined and hard to tell apart, and Slade built to an ending which clumsily rewrote the source, including offering the resolution proper in a scene needlessly inserted after the end credits started rolling. The performance by Luke Kirby, playing the town’s thuggish cop and chief enforcer of The Way Things Are, seemed to be aiming for the same kind of stylised bravura that made Jeffrey Combs a horror cult hero, but only achieved extreme irritation.

In a year of movies replete with malign robots and artificial intelligences, Emma Tammi’s Five Nights At Freddy’s also expanded a peculiar recent subgenre obsessed with exploring the sinister side of commercialised childhood iconography. Tammi, who suggested some talent with 2019’s The Wind even if the movie fell apart on her, returned to score a bona fide hit with a big screen take on a popular video game series, co-written by the game creator Scott Cawthon. Josh Hutcherson played a fraying young man, trying to care for his much younger sister but fatefully tormented by the memory of another sibling’s kidnapping and supposed murder. Our hero accepts from desperation a job as security guard at an abandoned former 1980s theme restaurant, and soon finds it inhabited by a gang of animatronic mascots with a murderous bent, but also a plaintive secret that must be understood before both he and his sister fall victim to them, with a local female cop proving suspiciously alert and sympathetic to their situation. The plotting of Five Nights At Freddy’s bore little scrutiny – I suspect if I spent too much energy trying to make sense of it, like how the hero managed to explain all the mayhem including his aunt’s murder – I might risk having a stroke. But it proved a modestly enjoyable and unpretentious pop horror outing, with Tammi swapping out the games’ signature jump scares for a stab at a more measured creepiness, with surprisingly minimal gore. Whilst it was inferior to M3gan as a movie, this one grasped something interesting and elusive in regards to the strange pathos of objects designed to please kids but then left to decay, made out of cynical motives and yet invested with a faintly haunting echo of lost childhood fancies, a motif amplified cleverly by making the robotic mascots vessels of lost children themselves, in a kind of updated take on M.R. James’ “Lost Hearts.” Also fun seeing Mary Stuart Masterson and Matthew Lillard in supporting parts of note.

Five Nights At Freddy’s notably and cruelly beat out David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer for the horror hit of the Halloween season. Green tried to transfer his success with his revivalist Halloween trilogy to another well-worn genre property, casting Leslie Odom Jr as a man who, after losing his wife in an earthquake during a visit to Haiti and raising their now-teenaged daughter alone in Savannah, Georgia, is driven frantic when she and a school friend vanish after conducting a séance, only for them to turn up days later, exhibiting signs of demonic possession. Faced with a schism between his own scepticism and the religious faith of the second girl’s parents and other people around him, he tracked down Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) for aid, and eventually tries a kind of ecumenical exorcism. Green showed some signs in the early stages of wanting to emulate William Friedkin’s original in terms of a reasonably slow, mood-setting, grounded approach. The revelation that Chris had become a 1980s daytime talk show fixture flogging a demonic possession memoir and reinventing herself as an exorcism guru felt stunningly apt. All for nought, given this degenerated into one of the most putrid disasters not just of the year but of recent years. One basic problem came from an unwillingness to accept the essential premise of the original, operating as it did, however much skill in character and milieu Friedkin and William Peter Blatty wrapped it in, from a particular, sectarian viewpoint. Incredibly incompetent efforts on both a script level, to explore intersections of faith and disparities in fateful choice, and on a stylistic one, didn’t help, nor did Green failing to offer anything even vaguely original in terms of exorcism action. Even the concluding fillip of letting us see Burstyn and Linda Blair together again after fifty years was no recompense.

Mohawk director Ted Geoghegan returned with Brooklyn 45, a chamber piece horror-drama with an immediately intriguing hook. Several veterans of the recently ended World War II, all of them friends and most with hard and troubling wartime experiences behind them, congregate in the Brooklyn home of a General (Larry Fessenden) in the last days of 1945. The General wants to conduct a séance to contact his wife, who died from suicide after a period of paranoid raving about her German neighbours being Nazi spies. After seeming to contact his wife’s spirit, the gathering find themselves in the company of both unquiet spirits that won’t let them leave the room, and of one those German neighbours, who had been drugged and imprisoned, and the question as to whether she really might be a spy proves immaterial to those who want to shoot her simply to satisfy lingering hate and xenophobia. Despite the period setting the real topic here was USA in the Trumpian, post-War on Terror era, trying to say something about the lingering effects of war and the notion of people being whipped up to increasing lunacy by an (this time literally) undead leader. The film suffered from similar problems to Mohawk, although it was a slight improvement on that: overripe acting and a potent whiff of hipster self-congratulation in the carefully arranged social commentary, with one overt choice of complication – refusing to answer the question as to whether the neighbour really was a Nazi – matched to a total lack of finesse in the characterisations and their varying angsts otherwise. The script eventually painted itself into a truly awkward corner, delivering a climax that failed to convince on any level.

Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside revolved around an Indian-American teenager. Alienated from both her mother, who insists on always speaking Hindi, and her childhood friend, who’s gone weird and unkempt, she’s trying to get on with being the average, assimilated girl, but soon finds, when she breaks the jar her old pal insists on carrying around fretfully and believes contained a trapped demon, that some alarming truths about her heritage are about to kick into relevance hard. It Lives Inside was certainly an attempt to yoke together recent templates for emergent genre film success: the story was built around the kind of remorseless, metaphorically charged demonic persecutor besetting a hapless heroine seen in the likes of The Babadook, It Follows, and Smile, with an added frame of Jordan Peele-era cultural angst as the heroine was obliged to embrace her cultural background to stand a chance of surviving her ordeal. The film’s concerns also intersected with 2023 stablemates Polite Society also in theme of a young Desi woman gripped by rebellious tendencies, and Talk To Me in depicting a haunting that invokes deep personal pain and teenage nightmares. Early scenes promised yet another wearying parade of obvious point-scoring about the immigrant experience, as our heroine tried to make nice with a clueless classmate, and the upshot of the finale was maybe just a little too cute in affirming friendship and personal pride as the keys to bottling evil. It Lives Inside proved better than a lot of the stuff it resembled, however, as the script threw a few nifty curveballs and allowed supporting characters to surprise with shows of emotional depth, and when finally revealed the monster was nicely old-school. Dutta had a strong directorial touch, making the most of a supernatural threat for which mischievous torment was part of the job description.

Canadian Kyle Edward Ball made his feature debut with Skinamarink, a genuinely odd, even unique distillation of the baseline emotions and atmosphere of horror cinema, delivered via an experimental film style. The obliquely hinted narrative portrayed two young children who at first appear to have been left alone in their house, sometime after one has had a sleepwalking accident. During a seemingly endless night, it becomes clear that they’re being tormented by a mysterious entity that can make objects move, mimic their parents, and distort not just the house but the nature of reality itself – or is it all merely the dreamscape of childhood? Ball’s aesthetic pursuit could be described as an attempt to boil those scenes from Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist when Carol Anne communes with the TV static in the dark house down to an abstracted membrane, whilst aiming to nail down that sensation, common it seems to most childhoods, of when we first become aware of our environs beyond the demarcations of quotidian rhythms, and every shadow seems to contain some presence leering back at us – a sort of Wendigo Syndrome of infant experience. On that level, Skinamarink was intriguing, sometimes even mesmerising, particularly as Ball’s photography shifted from a quasi-found-footage style (complete with faked film grain) to moments of more defined surrealist strangeness, and he used old public domain cartoons to both offset and intensify the mood of somnambulist alienation. Still, trying to stretch out this aesthetic – even calling it a premise feels exaggerated – to 100 minutes felt unnecessary, with much of the film proving repetitious. Occasional sops of horror imagery like glimpses of gnarled faces and weird things twitching in the gloom provided jolting pay-offs to the glaze of drawn-out anxiety but also, in a curious way, felt like violations of the rules of this particular game.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves saw writer-director duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein trying to forge a proper story out of the ever-popular role-playing game, that cultural pillar and rite of passage for so much of modern geekdom. Chris Pine’s gift for purveying old-school movie star stuff with a self-satirising glint was smartly exploited as he played Edgin, a hero-turned-criminal-turned-hero-again trying to win back his daughter and defeat an evil sorceress with his band of magical misfits. Daley and Goldstein twisted like yoga masters to at once please game aficionados whilst also amusing those indifferent to the source material. The result as a whole was mildly amusing and decent fun, even if in look it was undistinguished from the vast array of CGI-crusted quasi-medieval fantasies, apart from one bravura sequence involving Sophia Lillis’ shapeshifter, and both the humour and heart it tried to stoke stemmed from a kind of writing that can be found in any number of recent film and TV takes on dorky, motormouthed screw-ups. To their credit, however, Daley and Goldstein worked to not just make clever use of the game’s tropes and mechanics but to incorporate its cultural function and cultish appeal, its reputation as a haven for outsiders who all have to find ways to wield their own best capacities. Tropes of the game, like the magically transporting hither-thither staff, were utilised as goals or accidental discoveries to then be wielded creatively. Regé-Jean Page’s heartthrob aura was amusingly exploited in playing an insufferably noble do-gooder, Hugh Grant had some fun as the smarmy and devious subaltern villain, and Daisy Head was striking as his boss, the maniacal sorceress who jolted the film into a more serious mode for the finale.

Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One was the latest expansion of the ever-sprawling Godzilla mythos, returning the big fella not just to the land of his intellectual birth but also to the era and milieu he emerged from: Japan in the wake of World War II. In this semi-remake, Ryunosuke Kamiki played Shikishima, a fighter pilot who wimped out of both completing a glorious mission in the waning days of the war and also shooting up Godzilla when he attacked an air force base in his pre-mutation days. Wracked with guilt, he returns to a bombed-out Tokyo and builds something like a life with a young woman and a foundling he takes in whilst working with a motley crew of fellow veterans on a minesweeper. Shikishima gets his chance for redemption, and also raw revenge, when he seems to lose what little he has to the newly radiation-engorged and seemingly unstoppable monster when it crashes upon Japanese shores. Yamazaki, an experienced director who made the surprisingly decent Space Battleship Yamato (2010) and knows his way around retro patriotic guff, wielded honourable purpose with Godzilla Minus One with his desire to recapture some of the gravitas and immediacy of metaphor that made Ishiro Honda’s original film so lasting, and take seriously the human drama at the heart of this take on the tale, even as he shifted emphasis away from atomic bomb anxiety to explore the mindset of the beaten nation, as well as offering some inferences about its potential role today. It’s not too hard to see why many found Godzilla Minus One particularly appealing on the current movie scene, as a straightforward redemption saga where the personal angst and jingoistic drama were dovetailed, with swipes at government secrecy and cynicism to counterbalance the noble warrior stuff, and an odd emphasis on private enterprise as the best answer to the problem. But the film’s virtues have also been rather overblown, with disappointingly little by way of real ferocity and memorable spectacle to the monster action or cleverness to the story, and the interpersonal stuff was only substantial when dealing with Shikishima, with the supporting characters granted little detail or vivacity.

Over in straight-no-chaser action movie land, Jean-François Richet’s Plane saw Gerard Butler playing one of his stalwart hero parts, this time an airline pilot who finds his former military training extremely useful when he’s forced to make an emergency landing with his planeload of stock types on an island controlled by gangsters, making uneasy partnership with a passenger whose skills for hellraising are more freshly honed, and with only the small problem that he’s a prisoner under escort. Plane provoked an oddly fork-tongued response in me, at once making me wish it had tried just a little bit harder to set up both its characters and action in such a way as to give them the gravitas of a classic action movie in this zone rather than the kind of straightforward sufficiency that’s rife in our glorious new content age. But I also can’t deny that anyone looking for a solid, uncomplicated and satisfying action flick dialling through the choices on their streaming service would find Plane a pretty ideal choice, distinguished by Richet’s punchy staging and a decent cast. There was also a faint glimmer of something fresh in the way that, whilst the airline’s penny-pinching led to the grounding, not all of the bosses were portrayed as amoral creeps.

The series everyone except me seems to have felt held the rank of supreme action movie franchise in recent years came to an apparent end with Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 4, a would-be epic climax again starring Keanu Reeves as the raging superassassin. This time the so-called story stretched out the quasi-class war aspect of his conflict with the all-powerful cadre of bosses called the High Table to hyperbolic extremes. Whilst series stalwarts Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Lance Reddick bobbed around the fringes, Bill Skarsgard was wearisomely arch as the French nobleman who appoints himself Wick’s opponent in a duel to end the lasting quarrel, whilst trying to make sure Wick never makes the date by rousing entire armies of underworld killers to take him out. Chapter 4 started well, in large part thanks to Donnie Yen’s presence as a blind but preternaturally great foil for Wick, and Rina Sawayama as a conscientious daughter ready to go ninja-nuclear on a dime. The early, extended setpiece in Osaka would have been more than sufficient as a climax. But the film’s absurd running time was not earned by a plethora of supporting characters serving no real function save setting up hoped-for franchise segues, and endless, well-staged but finally downright boring scenes of an endless supply of anonymous thugs getting iced. The film was very, very pretty – and very, very empty, rather too fitting as a coda for a series that perversely built its popularity around stripping out the skeleton of melodrama that’s vital to investment in action fare, and Chapter 4, whilst plainly hoping to break through into a zone of self-sustaining absurdity, felt like a jackhammer with a jammed-on switch. Stahelski cheerfully confirmed his Walter Hill fandom by incorporating brazen riffs on The Warriors, and reconfirmed that his eye is truly excellent, even if finally wasted here.

Brett Donowho’s The Old Way was a more classical variation on hallowed Western film motifs, but with a particular, fashionable modern concern as its focus. Nicolas Cage played Colton Briggs, a version of a common genre type of antihero, the once-infamously ruthless gunman who’s retired and become a family man after finding the love of a good woman. This came with a specific twist of characterisation, signalling Colton is neurodivergent, his life defined first by efforts to mimic the behaviour of other people and then more often by his callous indifference to them before he found someone who finally plugged him in: his young daughter seems to have inherited some version of the same trait. When his wife is slain by the vengeful son of a man he killed years before, father and daughter set out together to track down this special enemy. Cage’s presence undoubtedly elevated the film, which hinged upon the mildly mortifying idea of his caring but coolly expedient father offering his daughter hard lessons in frontier justice. The most memorable moment came when Colton delivered a monologue bemoaning his lifetime of confusion and bitterness from dealing with his incomprehension of other humans, a vignette from Cage walking a fine line between subtle comedy and pathos. Otherwise The Old Way was merely a solid enough time-waster, with its digital glossiness and overall air of cheapness, and storyline that never found any particular, clever way of utilising its one distinguishing dramatic element to deviate the otherwise straightforward genre story.

Louis Leterrier was given the job of steering the Fast and Furious series towards a promised epic climax, with Fast X. This one harkened back to series highpoint Fast Five: Jason Mamoa played the son of that film’s Brazilian cartel kingpin, a vengeful, crazy, florid personality seeking to trap and destroy all the members of the now very extended and oft-resurrected Torretto clan. New components included Brie Larson as the tough-as-nails daughter of Kurt Russell’s Mr X and Daniela Melchior as the crop-top-fond sister of some character I don’t remember; around them swirled just about all the series regulars. Fast X saw Leterrier not only resisting taking the material too seriously but pushing it with an edge of cartoonishness the series never quite dipped to before, over-indulging Mamoa’s weird hambone performance as the supposedly terrifying Machiavellian psycho who insisted on acting, whilst drawing out his project of payback, like the personification of the internet, indulging wacky violence and playful gender-bending for no particular reason. The storyline also insisted on separating the heroes, with some kept far off on the margins, like Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, stuck with Charlize Theron’s galvanisingly icy Cipher, trying to escape an Arctic black-site prison together. Vin Diesel seemed a little more engaged than usual as his Dom was pushed to the wall by his foe’s efforts, but the film’s air of a franchise running on fumes (sorry) was only underlined by the tepid cliffhanger ending which didn’t exactly leave me gasping with anxiety about how Dom and Co were going to get out of this one.

Another team of beloved, close-knit heroes long familiar on movie screens, if more culturally hallowed, were dragged out for yet another spin around the track, in Martin Bourboulon’s The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan. Bourboulon’s entry kicked off a bifurcated adaptation of Alexandre Dumas pere’s legendary novel, more or less the same in structure as Richard Lester’s 1973 version. As well as applying the lush and gritty virtues of the particularly French approach to such historical epics, Bourboulon took the material more seriously than previous editions, highlighting the religious and social schisms of the epoch and exploiting them for a more political thriller-like variant, and fleshing out the backstory of certain characters, whilst still trying to maintain the familiar, jaunty charm of the heroes. The film fell prey to a certain awkward, modern blockbuster-style hype, like Milady de Winter taking a dramatic swan dive off the cliffs of Dover, and several extended one-take fight sequences. The adaptation also proved a little jammed between classical and revisionist motifs: Eva Green’s Milady, for instance, didn’t quite get to wield the psychopathic zest of previous incarnations as the script offered some sympathy for her formative experience, whilst Romain Duris’ Aramis engaged in torture. Bourboulon still managed for the most part to pull off the balancing act, with some of the modernising touches, like making Porthos a bisexual swinger, feeling like they were always there, and the cast was more or less perfect, particularly Vincent Cassel as Athos, and despite the hesitance of her writing Green owned every scene as Milady swanned through proceedings as 17th century fashion plate femme fatale.

Neil Jordan chose to tackle yet another character who still has a patina of pop culture legend even if he’s been neglected of late, with Marlowe. Jordan cast Liam Neeson as Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe knight, in a story that was, alas, adapted not from one of Chandler’s stories but from John Banville’s pseudonymous extension of the character mystique. Marlowe played in part as an origin story for its hero, who was depicted as still a relatively fresh-minted private eye just prior to The Big Sleep, as he became involved in a labyrinthine mystery involving murder, drug trafficking, and the ownership of a movie studio. Marlowe had real potential, given the strength of the cast – Jessica Lange, Diane Kruger, Colm Meaney, Alan Cumming, and Danny Huston were in there – and Jordan’s passion for noir style has pervaded his oeuvre. If all involved had made the film twenty years ago it might have been something truly memorable. As it was the result they came up with had flashes of appropriately hardboiled wit and looked good, but couldn’t stave off the feeling the whole thing was an accumulation of harvested clichés matched to revisionist tweaks that are themselves pretty hackneyed. The cast were conspicuously too old for the most part, with proceedings as a result badly lacking the necessary feeling of danger and sexiness inflecting the verbal jousting amidst the more literal jousts with villainy.

After his flatlining venture into historical biopic with Mank, David Fincher resumed his trademark fare of nihilist noir with The Killer, even reuniting with Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Waller. Michael Fassbender was the title character, one of that mythic cadre of coolly confident and utterly professional globetrotting assassins, who, after one of his hits goes awry, finds his life in danger and his hideaway and girlfriend both violated, setting him on an extended project of chastisement to ensure there will be no repetitions. Fincher’s touchstones were obvious enough – Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai was referenced within the first few seconds – and the antihero’s coldly fastidious approach was matched to Fincher’s filmmaking in a dance of style-as-substance that needed no decoding. Some took The Killer as a darkly witty deconstruction of the hitman mythos and the fantasy inflation of more common job-of-work experience it’s usually used to evoke. To be fair, there were flashes of that, particularly the Killer’s habit of roving around with The Smiths blasting in his ears all day, every day, in a bubble of droning detachment. And Fincher seemed to be channelling something of his frustration with the contemporary studio and streamer ethos, so hostile to his kind of operator. But whatever project Fincher had in mind, it didn’t compensate for a story that went nowhere, and a script that was never particularly funny, exciting, or rich in some other way to be worth the investment of time: instead it betrayed the spectacle of Fincher, and much of his fandom, embracing superficiality as an aesthetic value.

Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society was a tale of sisterly solidarity as interpreted through a lens of playful fantasy, Bollywood fetishism, and martial artistry: when a teenaged Anglo-Indian wannabe stunt woman learns her sister has dropped out of art school and resolved to marry a rich and charming doctor, she sets out to break up the union and refuses to let either of them abandon their ambitions. Soon she uncovers an insidious plot which outstrips her paranoia, thrusting her into battle less with her prospective brother-in-law than with his ferocious mother. The inspirations here were pretty blatant, particularly Edgar Wright’s films in toggling between humdrum life struggles and inflated, acrobatic action, with an overlay of pop feminist attitude. In that regard it was more spunky and agreeable than Barbie’s brand, although the narrative’s ultimate villainy lay more in a certain brand of imperious maternal will seeking to turn the next generation into clones of itself. Manzoor’s film looked good, embraced its own bratty attitude, and tapped the implicitly entertaining sight of high-kicking fung-fu action staged in full Hindu wedding regalia for all it was worth. Priya Kansara and Ritu Arya as the siblings both displayed star wattage. That said, when it all added up it wasn’t really that much better or more sophisticated than, say, the rebooted St. Trinians movies of the ‘00s, with a script that didn’t quite work hard enough to transform its metaphors or develop the turns of plot, and the finale didn’t quite cut loose with crazy spectacle as much as I hoped it would.

John Woo swung back into Hollywood action with Silent Night, a film built around the kind of storytelling gimmick that begs for cineastes to get rapturous and say things like “pure cinema” and “basically a silent film,” by which they mean there’s not much dialogue. Joel Kinnaman was Brian Godlock, a power worker whose son becomes collateral damage in a drive-by shooting as two scumbag gangs battle it out on the streets of his neighbourhood on Christmas Day, and Godlock loses his voice when he chases after the killers and gets a bullet in the throat for his pains. After a period of alcohol-soaked depression, he circles the next Christmas on the calendar with the scribbled directive to “Kill them all,” and sets about relentlessly training his body and accumulating what info and materiel he needs to go on a roaring rampage of revenge, at the cost of ending his marriage and descending into a whirlwind of slaughter he can’t possibly survive. Woo’s trademark blend of dynamic action staging and swooning emotionalism was well-matched to the demands of telling a story with as a little direct dialogue as necessary, able to invoke Brian’s anguish and then his purposeful self-transformation. The film was very enjoyable, even if it rather oddly lost some steam when the action finale arrived, with Woo, for all his bravura, feeling like a slightly bad match for the necessary brand of maniacal investment with this kind of story where unleavened hate is the driving dramatic value, and the climax proved a bit stale not in staging but in conception, as Brian fought his way up through a building through the regulation army of disposable baddies who all seemed to come out of nowhere.

Finnish director Jalmari Helander has forged a niche for himself as a maker of action-adventure films charged with Hollywood bravura but made and set in his native land, with a heavy dose of irony tapped in the contrasts involved. His latest effort in this vein, Sisu, depicted a heroic survivor of the Winter War with the Soviet Union who’s taken up looking for gold out in the Lapland tundra, ignoring the more recent occupation by Nazis besetting his land. When his triumphal path homeward with newfound riches collides with a Nazi convoy and its calculating commander, he is despite all drawn into a battle to the death with them, aided by some captive, abused local women. Sisu left me with mixed feelings to a degree. The initial, intriguing proposition was to focus on a game of cat-and-mouse reminiscent of John Frankenheimer’s The Train, pitting the canny, skilled, vastly outmatched hero against the evil invaders in a landscape that seems inimical to guerrilla tactics, and could have been something really thrilling if it had chosen even a slightly more grounded brand of action. But Helander settled for a tongue-in-cheek, deliberately ridiculous approach, making unsubtle nods to Inglourious Basterds and the Indiana Jones films, as his hero proved all but supernaturally invincible as the perfect incarnation of Finnish grit. The film was nonetheless highly enjoyable, and proved eventually to have a truly clever reason for mostly being played out in English by the multinational cast.

Sisu was also notably superior to the actual Indiana Jones film of the year: the long-delayed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny raised furtive hopes from many that director James Mangold, taking over from Steven Spielberg, could give an aging franchise, and star, a worthy and newly vigorous farewell, much as Mangold’s Logan supposedly managed. Alas, the result proved one of the most wearisome and disheartening misfires of recent annals, despite seeming to do just about everything so many fans and critics insisted it do over the years since the last entry. We got an extended sequence of a digitally rejuvenated Harrison Ford battling good old-fashioned Nazi heavies in the waning days of World War II, in a solid but uninspired attempt to mimic the classic series style. The main storyline, mostly unfolding in 1969, put Indy back on his own again – after crudely killing off his son and estranging him from wife Marion – and then pairing him off with a new pal, in the form of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s plucky but shady goddaughter, who the film was obviously but clumsily trying to set up as a replacement-inheritor. A whole bunch of breathless yet weightless and eventually tedious running-around ensued. The project was ultimately a lumpy pastiche when it wasn’t being genuinely insulting to its hero’s hard-won gravitas and long journey in pop culture lore. The finale wimped out of killing off Indy, but the experience as a whole didn’t exactly spark new desire to see him put the hat on again.

Guy Ritchie had a truly bewildering year, releasing two films within a couple of months — the much-delayed freewheeling comedy-thriller Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and the complete tonal volte face of The Covenant, a solemn drama about the Afghanistan War. The two movies couldn’t have more acutely described the good and bad sides to Ritchie’s creative touch if they’d been made for that purpose. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre wanted very badly to kickstart a franchise and marry The Italian Job to Mission: Impossible, as it offered some cool criminal operators who gang together to operate coolly in some shenanigans involving a doohickey and a thing with the guns and the satellites and lots of wry quips on private yachts and the like – and I see now how much impression it made on me. Jason Statham was the supposedly suave mastermind and Josh Hartnett had some fun as a Hollywood star drawn in to his world and finding himself delighted by its cast of characters. Hugh Grant was deployed for the second time in 2023 to deliver one of his sly, saggy, charming bad guy performances, but Aubrey Plaza gave proceedings what little real juice they had as the compulsory acerbic tech wiz who proved equally good toe-to-toe with the business end of the caper. Otherwise the film was an arrhythmic, tedious mess, with needless structural quirks and, apart from the odd moment when the cast plugged into the right vein of eccentric, semi-improvised humour, a lack of the spry wit it so desperately needed.

The Covenant yawed far closer in style and tone to the rigorous glaze of Wrath of Man, as the first half portrayed an American soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal), injured in an ambush, saved by his initially ambiguous-seeming Afghan translator (Dar Salim), who arduously hauls him across miles of open country. The second half was preoccupied with the American’s determined efforts after recovering Stateside to return the favour and bring the translator to the US, an effort that becomes urgent when he gets wind his friend is being hunted mercilessly by the Taliban. The Covenant had some pretences to playing as a worthy tribute to the many translators who allied with the US cause and a needling reminder of responsibility after the war’s jarring end, with a narrative structure that broadly resembled The Deer Hunter. But the movie mostly dispensed with deeper meditations on the whole sorry saga, to instead play out as a largely no-nonsense action-thriller mediated by a battle with bureaucracy played as a descent into Dante-esque hells for a traumatised and guilty warrior, and the film was both impressive and gripping for that reason, if also ultimately not all that terribly deep. Gyllenhaal and Salim did fine work as the two very different yet fatefully entangled men, and it seems these days that Ritchie is at his best when avoiding the ‘ullo guv larkishness that initially defined him.

2023 proved the year when the superhero movie industrial complex finally collapsed, only about a decade since I first started predicting it, leaving swathes of smoking rubble in industry expectation and commentariat talking points: the moment it became clear that some of the popular investment endowed in this kind of movie had waned, the paradigm that just a couple of years ago ruled the movie cosmos seemed to deflate like a punctured puffer fish. The one real success story for the style was James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, borne aloft by the hard-earned investment the audience had in its characters and the relative seriousness Gunn treated them with, and still even that one underperformed to a degree. Gunn’s third entry moved in two narrative streams, one recounting the origin story of Bradley Cooper’s rogue fuzzball Rocket Raccoon, product of a nefarious genetic tinkerer’s god delusions (a strong performance from Chukwudi Iwuji), and the other his friends’ efforts to save his life. Vol. 3 didn’t entirely hang together, with too many scenes that were just make-work to provide requisite action, and a segue into an endlessly promising satiric idea – an alternate Earth populated with mutated anthropomorphic animals forced to lead prosaic suburban lives – dropped as soon as it was introduced. But Gunn achieved a new pitch of emotional urgency, giving genuine shading and gravitas to the previously smarmy and feigned-feeling earnestness of his material, precisely by digging more boldly into his darker, less homiletic streak, skirting genuinely ugly images and dark fates before arriving at a point of festive revelry.

Peyton Reed’s third trip to his appointed wing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was met by contrast with general disdain and disinterest. Ant-Man’s special appeal once lay in the fact his zone of the MCU was the most modest in scale, with the everyman hero and his down-to-earth concerns, constantly toggling between literal and metaphorical insignificance. But Quantumania instead pushed its heroes into a microscopic fantasy world ruled over by the nefarious multiverse tyrant Kang the Conqueror, essentially remaking Thor: Ragnarok (2017) only with Jeff Goldblum swapped out for Bill Murray for the zany mid-movie cameo. Quantumania wasn’t quite as bad as it was painted by many, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathryn Newton providing fine additions as the long-lost and fresh-minted new guard of the heroic team, and whilst his off-screen behaviour drained the potential fun from Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang, he did well in providing a more Machiavellian and coldly manipulative type of major franchise villain. But the movie also never added up to anything, pacing through a very basic variation on the familiar type of story where some strangers arrive in a strange land and lead a rebellion against the evil ruler, but detached from any urgent emotional imperative. The evident intention to set up Kang as a terrifyingly omnipotent antagonist was undercut by the more immediate need to have him neatly defeated, at least in one iteration, by this entry’s end.

Nia DaCosta, who emerged from indieville with the strong debut Little Woods, was fated to be the lucky gal left holding the superhero movie bag when The Marvels saw release late in the year only to prove the first truly bruising MCU bomb. The reasons for that failure were many, not least of which that it was a tripartite sequel to not just 2019’s Captain Marvel, with Brie Larson returning as the intergalactic swashbuckler Carol Danvers, but also to two different TV shows with wildly varying viewing figures, as Carol was joined by two more superheroines, Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeaux and Iman Vellani’s Kamala ‘Ms. Marvel’ Khan. The trio was forced to battle a wrathful emissary of the alien Kree race after Carol inadvertently wrecked their society, and found themselves entangled through the incredible power of plot contrivance, randomly swapping locations and powers. The Marvels was at once a symptom and a victim of a franchise grown confused in its running story contexts and tepid in aesthetics, aiming for a straightforward and zesty girl power romp but insisting on blurring the matter with sidelong lurches into musical comedy and slapstick brand self-satire to the extent that the film threatened to feel like something cobbled together purely to fill a release date. The funny thing was, though, this was still quite enjoyable, at least until its last act fell in a heap: the three leads bounced off each-other well, and DaCosta invested it all with some colour and pizzazz, whilst Zawe Ashton’s villain was cool if rather wasted.

Despite the convulsions gripping the MCU brand it still seemed in roaring good health compared to the DC strand over at Warner Bros., where the attempt to dispel creative rictus by dumping most of the franchise as it stood resulted in both fans and casual viewers dropping any pretence of caring about the last few sorry entries to be released. David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods suffered from a similar collision between its own, modestly enjoyable achievement and the swiftly wilting cultural context for it to Quantumania. Sandberg’s sequel to his 2019 success saw his band of scrappy juvenile orphans turned perturbingly fit superheroes this time pitched against a trio of female gods, out to avenge themselves for having their powers stolen by Djimon Hounsou’s wizard. Fury of the Gods wielded a similarly unsettled mix of impulses to the first film, blending a bouncy, warm-hearted vibe channelling classic Saturday morning cartoons with the edgier, more violent and sardonic edge of ‘80s blockbusters for big kids, and a visual palette that toggled between flashes of loving texture and mystique in some of its fantasy realms, and a staggeringly bland depiction of contemporary Philadelphia, invaded by equally bland CGI manifestations of mythical beings. It didn’t help proceedings that Zachary Levi’s main protagonist was here by far the least interesting of the coterie of heroes. On the plus side, Helen Mirren seemed to be having some genuine fun as the more noble but waning elder of the offended gods; on the other, Lucy Liu walked through her part as the most villainous with a notable aura of contempt.

Andy Muschietti’s The Flash more completely revealed the total creative confusion of the brand whilst also sweeping it all towards the trash pile, offering a movie that was plainly the result of endless boardroom second guessing and opportunism. The Flash saw Barry Allen stranding himself in an alternate timeline after trying to use his reality-distorting gifts to rewrite history and save his mother from being murdered. Barry was eventually forced into alliance with a brutalised Supergirl and an aging Batman –Michael Keaton model – to try and fend off General Zod’s invasion of Earth. The idea of building an entire movie around Ezra Miller’s talkative dork hero because he was the one thing a lot of people liked about the first cut of Justice League was ill-advised enough, and Muschietti’s film went through the prescribed motions of providing a more playful and zany wing of the DC style after the gothic heaviosity of the earlier entries, before reportedly endless reshoots also force it to capitalise on trendy nostalgia and multiverse-enabled franchise panoplies. The Flash proved painfully devoted to giving Miller space to be extremely unfunny and tiresome in dual characterisations, and whilst it trucked in Keaton’s Batman, the movie then gave him practically nothing to do beyond listlessly recite some hallowed dialogue. Similarly,  Sasha Calle as Supergirl made immediate, intriguing impact even as she was given a total of about ten lines and repeatedly killed off, in order to summarise how paltry the DC imprimatur is without Superman and Wonder Woman.

Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle proved another nail in the superhero coffin. Xolo Maridueña was Jaime Reyes, the talented son of some hard-working Mexican immigrants living in Miami, who, struggling to find work after graduating from pre-law, finds himself through various contrivances trapped in a symbiotic relationship with a piece of alien hardware that transforms him into a flashy bionic warrior. This sets him on a collision cause with the notorious arms-manufacturing Kord clan, with both the fearsome, fascistic matriarch (Susan Sarandon) and her more conscientious niece (Bruna Marquezine) proving desirous of his anatomy, if different parts of it. Blue Beetle proved a self-conscious attempt to marry the most basic blueprint of the superhero mystique, with lashings of comic relief and a straightforward zero-to-hero arc, with a Latin American equivalent of Black Panther. In practice this meant a script packed full of dialogue so inane it might as well have been written with AI software (I lost count of the times someone said, “Let’s do this!” with gritty resolve), sitting cheek-by-jowl with references to serious history couched in the goofiest manner possible, like the Reyes clan’s ex-revolutionary grandma wielding a laser minigun. As a whole the film proved something truly fascinating, if only on one specific level, as an artefact made entirely in accordance to the precepts of progressive political consensus of recent years, and yet which finished up portraying its plucky heroes in the most broadly garish and stereotyped of terms, and tried to say something meaningful about the uneasy historical and unequal relationships of the various Americas in a manner both cringe-worthy and trivialising. The film did improve as it went on and embraced its own ridiculousness, but any pity I felt for the makers in their earnest attempts to turn a back-burner property into something distinctive was nullified by the stupefying banality of the result.

The Creator saw Gareth Edwards, with a couple of big franchise successes under his belt, skewing back to the template of his debut Monsters in applying genre metaphors and imagery to a story that yearned to address burning real-world issues, whilst also trying to fly the flag for adventurous, original sci-fi filmmaking. The setting was a near future in which a bellicose USA has declared war on robots and Artificial Intelligences after one was blamed for a nuclear explosion that decimated Los Angeles; the only refuge AIs have is the conglomerate nation of ‘New Asia’. John David Washington played the American agent who fell in love with a pro-AI New Asian woman (Gemma Chan) who then died in an ill-timed raid, and after a breakdown is called upon to track down a new AI superweapon. This proves to be a childlike android with the power to control all electrical devices. The Creator certainly looked good and hit the ground running, executed on a scale made to seem bigger than the relatively modest budget suggested, thanks to Edwards’ technical expertise, with dramatic and visual textures gleaned from a variety of post-cyberpunk sci-fi writing and illustrations. But the film was an aggravatingly simplistic poster child for the problems of trying to sell thinly veiled political metaphors through borrowed genre trappings, as Edwards went about it in a manner that made James Cameron’s Avatar movies, which he was clearly emulating, and their parables look like Jonathan Swift. Edwards’ efforts to explore Vietnam and War on Terror parallels came on with scarcely any attempt at genuine, clever defamiliarisation or complication, instead utilising the laziest and most familiar genre tropes, particularly the messianic child magician, in what almost threatened to become a sci-fi-daubed remake of the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Golden Child, whilst the militarist baddies were so caricatured they might as well have stumbled out of a Yippie street theatre skit. 

Speaking of sci-fi dystopias with excruciatingly shallow politics, Francis Lawrence revived The Hunger Games franchise with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, an adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel about the early days of that beloved series character, the future dictator Coriolanus Snow, and his particular role in transforming the eponymous death match from an exercise in fascist intimidation into a media event. Tom Blyth was cast as Snow, and he was indeed an apt youthful avatar for Donald Sutherland: as per Fellini, he had the eyes of a masturbator down pat. Snow, we learned, came from a once-mighty patrician family fallen on hard times, fending off disdainful peers and elders, who decides to go all in when he’s required to mentor a Hunger Games tribute, fiery protest singer Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler), when he realises she has little fighting talent but much star potential. This entry worked out better for Lawrence than going back to J.K. Rowling material did for David Yates, at least for the moment, but as a movie it was a jarringly uneven beast, alternating the compelling and the bottomlessly stupid. On the one hand, it had a surprisingly long, involved story we knew was not likely to have the cheeriest ending, and got down and dirty in portraying the Hunger Games themselves with a lot more pitchfork murders than apparently we could stand ten years ago. Peter Dinklage brought gravitas and cunning to playing Snow’s academic hater. The relatively gritty and substantial aspects sat cheek by jowl with flourishes of bewildering camp, like Viola Davis’ over-the-top performance as the wicked witch of the Hunger Games, and Zegler wrestling with a part impossible to make believable as a righteous folkie who can belt out a compelling blues a capella whilst an ocean of snakes slithers her way.

Michael B. Jordan chose to take on the mantle of star-turned-director in living up to the legacy of the seemingly imperishable Rocky-Creed franchise, helming Creed III. This entry saw Jordan’s hero Donnie Creed facing up to a troubling blast from his formerly edgy past. Dame Anderson (Jonathan Majors), an old pal from the orphanage and a former boxer of great promise himself but jailed for a long stint over an incident with a gun, came back into his life and manipulated him into giving him a shot in the ring, only for Donnie to find his former friend bent on vengeance and displacing him from his too-comfortable niche in life. Creed III had some problems, most particularly a storyline that didn’t bear much scrutiny in its mechanics, and it faced a similar problem to the later Rocky sequels in how to believably justify the sight of a successful fighter with a stable home life driven to engage in do-or-die grudge matches. Jordan nonetheless tried to more subtly take on that problem, with Dame embodying the darker side of Donnie’s schismatic personality, and displayed some genuine talent behind the camera as he worked to illustrate the psychology of his characters. Jordan also aimed to take seriously and wring dramatic traction from what was previously Donnie’s rather confused, box-ticking background as a character, locating a simmering angst and semi-buried rage still lurking in his makeup even as his old comrade tries to emasculate him. Jordan coaxed strong performances from himself and his cast.

Steven Soderbergh and Channing Tatum revived their own popular, physically prodigious hero, albeit one who’s also most assuredly the proverbial lover-not-a-fighter, for Magic Mike’s Last Dance. This time around Mike, pushing forty with his furniture store kaput thanks to the pandemic, stumbled into a second act in life when he encountered Salma Hayek’s Max, a woman recently separated from her unfaithful plutocrat husband and determined to use the fortune still at her command to meet her own needs: mesmerised by Mike’s preternatural dance talents and dedication to his female audience, she pushes him into staging and choreographing a revue in London. Third time around wasn’t quite a charm for the swashbuckling stripper, as the central romance between Mike and his florid but insecure benefactress never became convincing: Max was a rather grating, borderline thuggish character despite her nominally sympathetic motives, and the script instead took refuge in sitcom clichés, like a witty butler. Soderbergh’s tenor of antsy realism couldn’t tap into the same vein of gossamer showmanship so many people appreciated in the second film. And whilst the script took some potentially interesting pot-shots at the industry of backward-looking art about female suffering and proposed instead to celebrate gleeful modern sensualism, it did so in a pretty shallow fashion. Still, the dance numbers were tremendous, and well worth sitting through the rest for.

Kelly Fremon Craig took on Judy Blume’s beloved warhorse Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, retaining the novel’s early 1970s setting whilst delving into the timeless problems Blume explored through the adventures of the eponymous heroine, who faces changes to her reality exterior and interior, including moving to the suburbs, making new friends, feeling the urge to charge towards the supposed delights of adulthood, and negotiating the complexities of her family identity, particularly the matter of her faith. Abby Rider Fortson was ideal in the lead, never seeming precocious or blankly generic, and was surrounded by an excellent cast, including Rachel McAdams as her sympathetic mom contending with her own life pivot, and Kathy Bates as her brash but loving grandmother. Craig’s wisest touch was keeping the story in period, although this choice also highlighted something a little depressing about current cultural mores, or at least how movies usually tackle them: the ‘70s setting allowed Craig to avoid any urges to a more rhetorically modern take on Margaret’s experiences – no social media talking points and buzzwords flung in – instead giving it all the breathing room to simply, if wryly and with keen feeling, observe these rites of passage for the heroine, from frantic bust-building exercises to helping a friend weather the shock of her having her first period in a mortifying time and place. The insistence on Margaret’s agency when it came to those fateful choices of identity still retained some of the transgressive spark that long made Blume a target of conservative ire. The film had enormous charm and no small amount of humour, although the story was a bit sparse and episodic, perhaps in part from being forced to move away from the mediating perspective of the book, despite retaining Margaret’s narration. The insistence on good vibes all ‘round meant that it never quite grappled with the most chaotic and fervent impulses of that age either.

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City enlarged on hints in his recent movies that he’s trying to flesh out both his meta impulses and the undercurrent of melancholia that’s been registering more and more strongly. This time Anderson again delivered his trove of retro references and stylised gestures through a story-within-a-story conceit: the main narrative of the film, from which sprang the title, is a play, interspersed with a quasi-documentary presentation mimicking a 1950s TV style. Whilst the presentation recounts stories involving the artists and actors involved in writing and staging the now-legendary play, all filmed in black and white, the actual play, a mishmash of a pastiche of classic American theatre and a ‘50s sci-fi flick, unfolds in full colour. Asteroid City was a particularly agonising example of Anderson’s sensibility, affecting to self-critique his efforts to quell and contain overt emotion within the customary friezes of his visual and dramatic style, whilst also pushing that style right to breaking point, strangling both his humour and sigils of human feeling before anything could fully bloom. The usual amazing assembly of actors flitted by, even as most were required to give the same performance: Scarlett Johansson emerged as the most valuable, deftly inhabiting the space she was given to inhabit as a defensive movie star. One moment, when the cast suddenly burst out into a defiant, ritual chant, wielded an inchoate power that nonetheless had nothing to do with the rest of the film, save perhaps in offering a credo for Anderson’s resistance to reality.

Similarly unfolding largely in a deliberately artificial realm touched with aspects of nostalgia and stylised emotion was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the year’s financial champion. Margot Robbie headlined as the “stereotypical” Barbie, living out a joyous life in a realm filled with other variant Barbies and the ranks of Kens who persist as perpetually frustrated subalterns, as sustained in the collective imagination of the world. Barbie soon started falling prey to negative emotions projected on her from the real world and set out to put things right, only for her particular faithful Ken (Ryan Gosling) to get a load of patriarchy after travelling into reality with her, and, thrilled, imposing it on Barbieland. Gerwig and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach’s efforts to offer commentary on contemporary gender relations and the disparity between childhood idealisation and adult wisdom signalled an ambition beyond simply making a feature-length toy commercial, and it’s hard to argue with the way Barbie certainly hit a bullseye with a long-neglected and frustrated sector of the audience. The degree to whether the film actually found any substance in its quasi-satirical attitude, or merely shoved tropes and memes around like a game of curling, was nonetheless debatable. The film had a truly, peculiarly ambivalent attitude towards its supposed icon of female identity and stuck Robbie with a thankless role, whilst most of the actual entertainment value was supplied by Gosling as a Ken who invests everything from surfing to upholding gendered dictatorship with an attitude of boyish enthusiasm, and his fellows Kens in their ridiculous civil war.

Barbie’s biggest rival at the box office for the year was the animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a work just as sweetly tailored to a millennial viewer as Barbie was to its audience. Like that film too, it was an arch exercise in trying to transform a non-narrative intellectual property into something that could sustain audience interest, and did so in similar ways, if not in ultimate tone and pretences. But it was also one that remembered to work coherently for a younger audience indifferent to all that grown-up guff. Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, tasked with banishing the memory of the infamous 1993 take on the material, were puckish in trying to contour the adventures of Mario and Luigi Luigi into something resembling a coherent story. The title duo, hapless Brooklyn plumbers whose Italian accents we learn early on are faked for the sake of branding their faltering business, were accidentally transported to a magical universe where they find themselves in the middle of a battle for control between the forces of the nefarious saurian Bowser and the kingdom of foundling-turned-ruler Princess Peach. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was only intermittently clever, as in an early scene the saw Mario bouncing around impediments on a city street in charming recreation of the original game layout, and mixture of sardonic humour and hero’s journey was pretty standard for the day and age. The animation was slick and so colourful it could find a second life of popularity amongst the edibles-popping crowd, well-matched to a movie that stuck tongue so deep in cheek it came out the other side, as Donkey Kong was roped into the action and everyone went tearing about in go-karts for some reason, with Chris Pratt serviceably voicing Mario and Anya Taylor-Joy having fun as the spunky Peach.

Emma Seligman’s Bottoms managed to be both the indieville companion piece to Barbie and its would-be crazy-and-locked-in-the-attic sibling, in playing fast and loose with movie tropes and feminist preoccupations. For her sophomore outing after her marvellous Shiva Baby, Seligman took a hard swerve towards would-be popular fare, tackling the hallowed horny, anarchic high schooler movie. The official new twist was in focusing on two motor-mouthed, try-hard, dipshit queer girls attending a high school whose football matches are genuinely deadly events and where the official jock heroes are shrieking, fragile nitwits. Through a series of absurd events, the girls see a path to getting the nookie they crave by starting up a fight club…err, self-defence class that flings them into the company of variously hot and oddball schoolmates, and where the pleasures of girl-on-girl contact toggle between the sensual and the blood-soaked. Bottoms was fairly bold on a conceptual level, wanting to channel films like If… and Heathers, but really played as a ruder, cruder, more aggressively hip take on Booksmart, with gags aplenty taking aim at just about every conceivable target, but too often mistaking its pseudo-naughtiness for real transgression when, if all was boiled down, it was actually a pretty stock-standard girl power-themed movie, with the jokes tripping over each-other through the lack of a clearly sustained rhythm. The film’s core idea of seeing two self-centred and obnoxious heroines stumbling towards accidental heroism was a good one, but also one it couldn’t really stick to: the individual character stories floundered, and yet lessons were learned and eventually girl power celebrated, if in a deliberately ridiculous and ironic fashion, in a death-match confrontation with a rival school’s footballers. The ingenious observational and character humour that made Shiva Baby so eye-catching were nowhere to be found.

Emerald Fennell made her sophomore foray, following the talking point bullseye of Promising Young Woman, with Saltburn, a film that resembled, as many noted, a cross between Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley, with a little Teorema thrown in too. Barry Keoghan put his limpid blue glare and mistreated puppy dog face to expert use playing Oliver Quick, a seemingly pathetic freshman at Oxford who falls in with glamorous rich kid Felix (Jacob Elordi), and when invited to spend the summer at his family’s estate, begins to reveal a slippery talent for manipulation, seducing several members of the family – a clan that included Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike as the parents. Fennell’s authentic-feeling eye for the world of the British upper crust registered in the occasional jot of waspish humour and vignettes like a toff bawling out a rap song on a karaoke night, as well as packing in some nostalgic touchstones for the early 2000s, and giving Carey Mulligan an amusing cameo as a batty family friend. What began as a tale of class tension and yearning, mixed with intimations of deeply fetishised male sexuality, offered episodes trying oh so hard to be edgy, like Oliver lapping up menstrual blood and semen-infused bathwater and attempting to stick his dick in a grave. The problem with such provocations was that they were ultimately revealed to be gestures without any underlying substance. Oliver’s supposed passions were ultimately revealed to be a smokescreen and indeed such indulgences risked his overall project, as he was revealed to be just your average 19-year-old preternaturally talented fraudster-fetishist-seducer-murderer. Fennell failed to sustain any kind of psychological depth and extended her penchant for silly story twists, meaning the film ultimately proved to merely expound, despite the superficial satire, on an old, old topic: the upper class’s fear of having its stuff taken by people taking advantage of them. Saltburn at least looked good, and Fennell might make a filmmaker when she gets over herself.

Gene Stupnitsky’s No Hard Feelings wanted to revive the art of the edgy, smutty comedy and provide a vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence, renewing her attempts to present herself as a full-grown and gutsy lead. Lawrence played a 30-something woman who, faced with mounting money worries, takes on an offer made by two over-involved parents who want someone to seduce their terminally shy, barely-legal son before he goes off to college, in exchange for a new car. She finds her tense and gawky young target initially impossible to bed, but soon strikes up an evolving friendship that sees both of them alternately mortified and liberated by the results. The film had some fat satirical targets in mind, most particularly the distance between the not-that-much-older Gen Y, already resigned to perpetually treading water, and a parentally coddled and digitally infantilised teen cohort, but you knew sooner or later the film would insist it had heart too. Lawrence gave the part her all, displaying great chops for physical comedy, and Stupnitsky delivered one properly risqué and inspired comic setpiece when a stark-naked Lawrence got into a brawl with some obnoxious teens on a beach, set to Hall and Oates’ “Maneater.” But too often otherwise it was a movie that mistook various kinds of agony for humour, with a constant emphasis on humiliation, and the direction never felt properly attuned to the humour, particularly in comparison to the thematically similar Licorice Pizza.

Similar in focus on a life-battered young woman if very different in tone, A Good Person was written and directed by Zach Braff as a vehicle carefully tailored to his brief girlfriend Florence Pugh’s talents, and he succeeded to a surprising degree. Pugh played a pharmaceutical saleswoman with musical ability whose seemingly happy life is destroyed when she causes a car crash that kills members of her fiancé’s family. As, a year or so down the track, she begins an agonising crawl out of a gutter of festering guilt and painkiller addiction, she finds a sponsor in her now ex-partner’s grandfather (Morgan Freeman), who himself has a bitter history of substance abuse and sees helping her as the ultimate challenge in his search for redemption. Braff’s patented approach to filmmaking was in evidence, with plenty of soulful ditties on the soundtrack and calculated oscillations between high drama and wry comedy. Braff also proposed to make a deeply ironic point about the heroine’s pivot from hawking drugs to trying to blackmail old colleagues for some of them, although this edge of social commentary was dropped in favour of following a basic indie film template in which a disparate band of shambolic characters stumble together through their healing process. But A Good Person also played some interesting games with that template, with a heroine whose flashes of ugly behaviour and pathetic streak weren’t skirted, and a climactic confrontation, in which the accord of mutual aid and forgiveness broke down, that proved properly gruelling. The last act rambled on somewhat, fumbling for the right cathartic note to strike, as Braff set out to depict the main character’s evolution into an artist, but again I gave him points for not trying to wrap everything up in a neat bundle. In some way Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up played as the next step in the story.

Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days had the great Koji Yakusho playing Hirayama, a middle-aged man who has immersed himself in a simple, rhythmic existence, cleaning Tokyo’s toilets by day and enjoying simpler life pleasures the rest of the time, like reading a good book, listening to a beloved album, and eating and drinking in familiar haunts around town. He’s so blithely self-sufficient and wilfully behind the times he ironically finds himself coming round to cool again as the cassettes he still listens to attract hipster interest. On the way he interacts with people whose lives intersect with his, like his gawky young workmate and his cool but confused girlfriend, his teen niece who turns up seeking respite from her prosperous but demanding mother, and the dying ex-husband of a woman who runs a bar he frequents. Perfect Days saw Wenders claiming a new shore both in locale and creativity (reminiscent of the way Abbas Kiarostami also found an ideal stage for later career wanders in Japan), with the setting and with his usually dense narratives and aesthetic stripped down to the living stem. Whilst Hirayama resembled one of Wender’s familiar exiles-in-society protagonists, this one was happy in that role. Perhaps the film that resulted was a little too sentimentally perfect, with the forces that drove him to choose such a life described only as the faintest hints – Hirayama’s general avoidance of alcohol, mention of a father whose behaviour seems to have permanently alienated his son – left too minimal to make Hirayama seem much more than an emblem of Wenders’ idyll, for all of Yakusho’s fine-grained acting. The film had a remarkable effect all the same, making his analogue lifestyle and randomly invested sense of purpose uniquely appealing.

Whilst I admired Yorgos Lanthimos’ first two films, I was fatally turned off his work when he went English-language, but I forced myself to watch his latest, Poor Things, because of the unadulterated raves it received. Essentially the arthouse provocateur version of Barbie, Poor Things, loosely adapted from a novel by Scots writer Alisdair Gray, aimed to present a self-consciously feminist twist on Frankenstein, with Willem Dafoe playing Dr Godwin Baxter (who, in an indication of the film’s subtlety, is known to all and sundry as God, and has a scarred face, because he’s the real monster, y’all). Baxter forces one of his medical students into complicity in his latest, boldest experiment, having taken the body of a woman who committed suicide and implanted the brain of her own unborn child in her head prior to bringing her back to life, and is rearing the bizarre progeny that resulted – Bella (Emma Stone), a child in a full grown woman’s body, who acts as bratty as expected at first but starts to rapidly mature. Once she discovers the delights of sex, Bella runs off with God’s lawyer (Mark Ruffalo), a rakish hunk of puff pastry, as the start of a Candide-like odyssey through the highs and lows of human experience. Lanthimos framed all of this by setting it in a deliberately unreal, ahistorical, steampunk zone. This immediately undercut all pretences to commenting coherently on social history, and the main function of this choice was to let Lanthimos drop in anachronistic swearing when he felt like it, in a movie filmed in a manner that looked like a succession of recreated 1990s and 2000s alternative rock album covers. Lanthimos managed to rip off the fascination evinced in his early work and Greek generational fellow Athina Rachel Tsangari with herky-jerky physicality and distorted, alienated worldviews, whilst proffering a movie that recalled Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby but without its punky rawness or actual, strange love of humanity. Of all the films of year Poor Things probably irritated me the most, with its grindingly obvious and perfectly smug take on Bella’s journey, as well as its hollow provocations that revealed Lanthimos, for all his posturing about the weirdness of society, has no real sympathy for anyone, and the film as a whole was one of many this year that played at being provocative but delivered a message that was actually, highly reassuring for current hipster mores.

Speaking of arthouse provocateurs, Brandon Cronenberg resurged with his second feature, Infinity Pool. Alexander Skarsgard played a blocked writer who’s retreated with his wife to a swank resort in a small, imaginary country in search of inspiration, and after accidentally running over a local during a boozy night out with fellow guests and being arrested for the deed, learns about the unique local mode of justice the hard way: he’s told he can pay for an exact double of himself to be created and executed in his place. Perversely elated by the spectacle, he’s drawn into a clique of fellow tourists who have experienced the same ordeal and become addicted to dangerous and heady acts. Like its precursor Possessor, Infinity Pool had an interesting, Philip K. Dick-like story hook that Cronenberg fils buried under an unending pile of stylistic and gestural clichés for this mode of filmmaking, from the gnarled masks that represent the savagery of man to the extended trippy orgy sequence, and the usual, grimly droning music that kicked in so early in the affair I started to wonder if this was going to be a send-up of the style. Infinity Pool was slightly better than Possessor all told, as the absurd hyperbole of the castration fantasy hinted at some personal investment for Cronenberg if one read the protagonist’s anxiety over being identified as the son-in-law of a famous publisher for his own nepo baby status, and the extremely committed performances, including from Mia Goth as usual, gave it some real juice at points. But it still dissolved into an absurd stew where the excess of gore and sickness produced merely impatience rather than enthralled admiration for the daring, all wrapped up in what was at least a well-shot bundle.

It’s rather odd that it took over a decade for the examples of The Social Network and The Wolf of Wall Street to crystallise into a run of movies concentrating on the little legends of big business, but 2023 saw a small glut of such progeny. Jon S. Baird’s Tetris explored an ultimately triumphant story that was also timely in the way it traced current tech, gaming, and political paradigms back to the waning days of the Cold War. Tetris portrayed a young American go-getter trying to make contact with the Russian inventor of the eponymous, insanely addictive, ever-so-simply-elegant video game, but finding them both up against the glowering cyclopean buttresses of the collapsing Soviet Union’s endemic paranoia and corruption. The film wasn’t nearly as ambitious as its Yank protagonist, with rather stock illustrations of his brash life-loving energy crashing against Russian dourness and cynicism including a scene where he encourages his new friend to dance to ‘80s synth-pop, and a major subplot involving a two-faced interpreter turned rather suddenly into a feminist twist. But it was spritely, well-told, and had some cinematic wit as the eruption of action saw cinematic and digital textures starting to commingle.

Ben Affleck offered his own variation on this theme with Air: Affleck cast old buddy and collaborator Matt Damon as a Nike marketing executive, who pursues a risky and anomalous strategy to lure the young about-to-be-superstar of basketball Michael Jordan to sign a sponsorship deal with the rising but cash-strapped footwear company, with the concept of personalised and personally branded shoes. Affleck’s take on the story, which came with the promise of a built-in happy ending, had nonetheless a dimension of implicit meaning and sullen warning, as a parable for current Hollywood’s atrophied taste for risks, with Damon’s saggy, tired hero trying to recapture some feeling of the passion that defined the company’s early days as the only way to truly lay claim to the future. Affleck gave himself a scene-stealing role as the Zen-quoting head honcho torn between piecemeal defence of what he’s built and bolder grabs for glory. Air was a slick, entertaining movie, one that managed to hold the attention despite mostly being a bunch of conversations in a corporate office block. At the same time, Affleck’s approach also often threatened to turn it into an extended video for the array of super ‘80s hits on the soundtrack with narrative attached, and the whole thing reeked just a little of carefully lawyered-up ass-kissing. Jordan was portrayed in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of Jesus in Ben-Hur as the towering, faceless emblem of several intersecting lines of officially anointed heroism in American culture.

Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry presented the slouchy Canadian riposte to Tetris and Air’s brand of U!S!A! triumphalism, an antithetical portrait of men bound to go from losers to winners and back to losers. Johnson explored the twists of fortune that saw two socially inept but brilliant techies with a world-changing idea throw in their lot with high-powered businessman Jim Balsillie and become enormously successful, only to then be defeated both by wily rivals and their own hubris. Johnson, who also played the more idealistically nerdy of the two inventors, got good performances from Jay Baruchel as his former boy wonder colleague and particularly Glenn Howerton as Balsillie, whose ferocity is impressive until it suddenly isn’t. The story was certainly compelling even if Johnson’s direction was basic in its light veneer of handheld realism. His reflexes as a former comedian were apparent in his delight in the stark contrast of creative enthusiasm and geek unworldliness versus corporate thug culture, and what happens when the former are seduced as well as cowered by the latter, even if its take on that contrast was rather old-hat. I kept getting the feeling the film should either have chosen more properly to be a serious analysis of this world or become the satire Johnson’s reflexes felt more attuned to, so the characters never really progressed beyond types. Most enjoyably, Johnson scattered the cast with some heroes of Canadian film and TV, like Michael Ironside.

Oliver Parker’s The Great Escaper depicted a different kind of true story, harking back to the tale of Bernie Jordan, a near-nonagenerian World War II veteran who made his way alone to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day, fuelled by a personal sense of mission to honour the memory of a young man whose death during the invasion he still felt guilt over. Michael Caine played Bernie; Glenda Jackson was his ailing wife who has her own, more rarefied kind of odyssey whilst he’s out in the world. The most vital attraction here was also the most bittersweet, seeing Jackson in her first acting role in decades and also her last before her passing, and Caine in what he’s said will be his last. The actual film was a peculiarly uneven affair, at times the kind of superficially jaunty and nostalgic tale that’s been all over British cinema of late, delivered with anonymous polish by the reliably slick Parker, particularly in extremely rushed early scenes too eager to get Bernie out the door. But as the movie unfolded it proved doggedly interesting, meditating with some substance on the couple in both old age and the promise of youth, a youth defined by confronting awful immediacies and compensating passions of fearsome imminence. Bernie’s grazes with other veterans of various wars, nursing their own sad memories and tangled legacies, helped illustrate a conviction that some emotions, good and bad, hardly lessen with the passing years but become ever more urgent gongs ringing in the ears, and the act of witnessing combines both the creation of personal identity and the persistence of history, and the reality of both is lost when the witnesses die off.

Maggie Betts’ The Burial was another take on a would-be inspirational true story, albeit taking vast liberties in concocting an old-school crowd-pleasing legal drama unfolding in the mid-1990s. Tommy Lee Jones was Jerry O’Keefe, an aging patriarch and war hero who’s built a substantial funeral home and life insurance business who finds himself used and cheated by a Canadian conglomerate and its scumbag boss (Bill Camp); at the advice of a young, smart attorney (Mamadou Athie) he knows, he turns to flashy litigation specialist Willie Gary, played with maximum verve by Jamie Foxx, who specialises in chasing down multimillion dollar settlements. Gary has to move out of his comfort zone to win against a slippery opponent, who deploys his own, wily, tactically-selected riposte of a lawyer, Mame Downs (Jurnee Smollett), and the idea of turning the suit into an airing of racial laundry proves a double-edged sword before the expected triumphant ending. Betts’ colourful, emotionally fulsome approach, skilful use of formidably charismatic and talented stars, and wily exploitation of a well-worn formula to explore and sometimes complicate the sociological peculiarities in play, made The Burial the kind of movie that once upon a time would have been a popular smash, but had to settle for being one of 2023’s charming if minor byroads.

Matt Ruskin’s Boston Strangler raked over one of the most notorious of modern true crime mythologies, previously explored on film by Richard Fleischer in 1968. Where Fleischer’s film was dynamically docudrama-like, Ruskin took a different tack, exploring less the immediate investigation of the crimes and the nominal, unsatisfying result, than the work of a pair of female journalists, played well by Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon, who were initially paired as a kind of novelty act by their newspaper but proved valiant and incessant in digging into the case and the social miasma it stirred up, including highlighting peculiar gaps in the official story. The efforts to be more sociologically incisive, with a pointed feminist angle, were rich with potential, with Ruskin evidently wanting to make something similar to Zodiac as the seemingly clear path devolves into a labyrinthine exploration of official breakdown and lurking misogynist evil. But the movie eventually devolved into a heavy-handed, over-familiar slog, swathed in murky visuals that strained for grim grandeur. The script never quite differentiated authentic investigative zeal for truth and tabloid enthusiasm, with conspiracy angles explored with glowering conviction but not in a terribly convincing manner, and the characterisations left essentially as thematic placards.

Israeli director Guy Nattiv took up the story of another great and gutsy lady in the modern annals: his Golda recounted the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s struggle to keep a firm grip on the tiller of her country during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, facing down both a multipronged invasion and meltdowns amongst the coterie of seemingly cast-iron tough guys in her cabinet, all the while undergoing radiation therapy for cancer. Helen Mirren seemed a pretty odd candidate to play the earthy Meir, but came on swathed in latex wrinkles and flab, and deftly approximated the Prime Minister’s Ukraine-by-way-of-Noo Yawk accent. The subject matter was certainly interesting, and the ploy of exploring a famous leader’s character via the microcosm of a special crisis followed the likes of Lincoln and Darkest Hour, and given events this year the movie swung quickly from supernal Oscar bait to timely viewing. Trouble was, Nattiv and his screenwriters never quite decided if they were going for a no-nonsense docudrama, dependent on a sense of rolling events creating urgency, or something more expressive and allusive. Nattiv tried to turn Meir’s incessant smoking habit into a kind of poetic motif, and laid on mannered visuals to suggest the torturous psychological impact of such high-pressure leadership, but it all felt a bit clumsy, whilst the nitty-gritty of what was going on wasn’t always gracefully explored, like in one scene where Meir was privy to audio feed from a battle, a scene that played out like a bad radio play. Nattiv also seemed to assume a level of familiarity with the players in the history that many just won’t have outside Israel today, or at least treated them all pretty brusquely in terms of portraiture, as if a little bored by them. The script had surprisingly little to say about Meir other than that she was a pretty tough cookie, felt really bad when people died in war, and stood up to Henry Kissinger, who was played to scene-stealing effect by Liev Schreiber as a man who brought the relentless, ponderous approach of a steamroller to diplomacy.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was a far more ambitiously styled biopic and proved the rarest of rarities in the contemporary movie scene – a serious-minded, three-hour movie that earned blockbuster success, thanks to both the ever-loyal Nolan fandom and unexpected release synergy with Barbie. Cillian Murphy was the eponymous physicist-turned-leader of the Manhattan Project, in a movie that also charted his pre-war adventures in academia and various bedrooms, and his downfall during the Cold War through both professional rivalries and his own troubled conscience. Oppenheimer certainly proved that Nolan has an alchemist’s touch with the current moviegoing audience, and the material, engaging as it did the troubled visionary Nolan is so fond of and a heady zone of scientific theory, felt much more vital to his heart than the grunt’s-eye-view of warfare found in Dunkirk, his previous visit to the World War II milieu. Nolan refined and applied his familiar aesthetic strategies, particularly propulsive editing and high-handed music scoring to impart a sense of urgency even to the driest scenes of men in suits sitting about arguing physics and wartime ethics, whilst trying this time around to explore ambiguity of viewpoint more for character-defining ends rather than mere aesthetic flash. As a portrait of the particular man, however, Oppenheimer was curiously shallow and evasive, taking refuge in structural tricks and hallowed biopic tropes, to avoid getting down and dirty with his complex nature, the milieu he lived in, and the ramifications of his efforts. Nolan’s style remains the quintessence of middlebrow chic, and the film’s greatest imperative was suggesting the degree to which Nolan really, really, really wants to win an Oscar. The incredible cast did most of the work in keeping the film engaging and intelligible.

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro meanwhile tackled the life of Leonard Bernstein, taking as its focal point his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre despite his constant dalliances with male lovers over the years. Cooper’s key assumption was the same qualities that made Bernstein such a mercurial and infectious teacher, artist, and celebrity to the world at large also made him an often galling person to be close to, as he treated his romantic connections with the same free and easy, flitting nature, but as with his music there was a core of genuine ardour that refused diminishing. After his promising if overblown debut with A Star Is Born, Cooper more fully established both his particular talents and lacks as a filmmaker with Maestro. His way with generating real-feeling depictions of personal chemistry was invaluable in charting the Bernsteins’ relationship, and in the early portions looked for interesting ways to capture something of the way Leonard’s art wove in with his life, particularly a dreamlike sequence where a date with Felicia fuses with a performance of his ballet “Fancy Free” and offers hints of the dynamics that will define their lives. But long stretches of the film unfolded without any such inspiration, settling instead for more tried and tested stuff like recreating interviews and well-recorded, easily imitated performances, and the breadth of Bernstein’s contributions to music was more ticked off point by point than dynamically illustrated. Cooper’s performance was perhaps a little unfairly dismissed by some as he tried to turn his exacting impression to good use in playing a man who built his life around avoiding certain forms of introspection and projected all his anxious energy outwards (not to mention the silly debate about his makeup, although it was more convincing in portraying Bernstein’s middle age than youth), but it’s certainly true that Carey Mulligan’s performance as Felicia was the soul of the movie.

Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s entry in the epic historical movie stakes of 2023, was much less modest in scope but still had commonalities with many of the other biopics of the year, particularly its conviction that men of renown are usually inseparable from those who love them, for they also hate them most wisely. Joaquin Phoenix was the brilliant but bratty soldier turned insecure husband and conniving political leader, romping up and down Europe and falling in love with his own legend whilst contending with a marriage, to Vanessa Kirby’s socially connected and knowing Josephine, that keeps bringing him back down to earth with hard and inconvenient bumps. Napoleon proved less the kind of grandiose, straightforward portrait everyone expected than a sardonic, particularly British variety of quasi-satire that took on the mystique of the Emperor as a vehicle to explore the absurdities of power and the similarities between one puffed-up, democracy-toppling, self-promoting warmonger and more recent likenesses. Phoenix gleefully played Bonaparte as an overgrown teenager indulging his appetites and sweeping aside impediments as his own wiliness and the weakness of his contemporaries allowed, at least into he finally crashed headlong into forces that would not go away, particularly the Russian winter and Wellington’s regiments. It was a truly peculiar film that somehow managed to be disappointing and compelling, a fascinating by-product for its aging but still fearsome director, and one that will, as many expected even before its release, look like something entirely different when the mooted, much longer version for streaming emerges.

Japanese cinema has a long tradition of utilising the conventions of the jidai geki, which tends to hinge around figures of particular historical or folkloric heft, for introducing sly commentaries on modern social shifts. Keishi Ohtomo’s The Legend and Butterfly extended this tradition, by tackling a titanic figure of Japanese history, Nobunaga Oda, a regional feudal lord who set the country on the path to unification in the 1500s, but recounting his story with twists of artistic licence. Ohtomo initially portrayed the teenaged Oda (Takuya Kimura) as a vain and pampered brat, completely unaccomplished in all the familiar arts of the warrior culture he’s born into. His older, beautiful, strident wife Nohime (Haruka Ayase), whom he’s forced to marry for the sake of a political alliance, outdoes him at everything at first, and the film became a study in what happens when two wilful, power-hungry people marry and falling in love, in that order, as Nohime prods Oda onto the path of conquest, but finds that path will cost them both dearly. The Legend and Butterfly had ideas beyond mere period thud and blunder in play, with its central (if mostly invented) portrait of a peculiar marriage used to rifle familiar gender and social roles in the period, whilst also presenting the Odas as interested in the wider world but foiled by their determination to master the one they knew. The film proved an unexpected companion piece in both its take on history and such legendary personalities to Napoleon. Ohtomo is an experienced hand in film and TV directing, and his work was despite its length never boring, swerving in texture from of slapstick comedy to high tragedy. That said, Ohtomo didn’t quite succeed in weaving all this into coherent whole, with a tendency towards the episodic and resulting gaps in characterisation – Oda went from useless brat to hardened warrior to blood-soaked conqueror in the space of a couple of reels.

Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red staked out similar territory to his masterful Shadow, as another film with the trappings of a big-budget, lushly produced period epic wrapped around what was really more of a carbolic thriller about power and politics. But Full River Red was also a swerve for the director as he tried to invest proceedings with a lilt of black humour and satire. The percolating subtexts were intriguing, too. The title came from a beloved patriotic Chinese poem, and the plot was ultimately revealed to revolve around the rescuing of that poem from censored obscurity, in a narrative that tellingly split the difference between offering a hymn to official patriotic values (and territorial integration) whilst also musing on the necessity of dissent as a patriotic value, and the power of art in cementing and defining higher ideals and loyalties, with the tacit proposal that today’s forbidden expression might be tomorrow’s national glory. Trouble was, to get to this upshot one had to put up with a barrage of gamesmanship that was never exciting and rarely funny, as Zhang revealed that his touch, at least in this context, just isn’t light enough for the kind of blend he was aiming for. In accumulation it all became quite tedious, and Zhang seemed to be almost rolling his eyes at his own flourishes of high melodrama and emotion: marginalia like a pair of beautiful, deaf, deadly bodyguards plainly engaged him more.

Jesse V. Johnson’s Boudica: Queen Of War was an infinitely more modestly executed historical action film, playing as a sort of brand extension of Neil Marshall’s Centurion by casting Olga Kurylenko once more as a Roman-era Britannic she-wolf slathered in facepaint and cutting heads off. Kurylenko this time played the famous queen who, after the death of her husband and the abuse of herself and family by arrogant Romans, unleashed hellfire and rebellion. The script was a bit of a dog’s breakfast in terms of impulses, improvising freely on the historical record and working in hallowed mythical hero motifs in a manner that proved oddly spasmodic, but with glimmers here and there of a more interesting and finicky sense of historical context and detail. Kurylenko nonetheless displayed her usual class, embodying the film’s take on Boudica as she evolved from a pampered wife and mother to dead-eyed avenger. Johnson, an experienced maker of low-budget action movies, did a surprising amount with evidently few resources, laying on battle scenes with plenty of spuming gore and bursting entrails, and despite its obvious limitations the movie as a whole proved eminently satisfying.

Grant Singer’s Reptile was a crime drama co-written by star Benecio Del Toro, giving himself the meaty part of a middle-aged cop with a questionable past who contends with a murder case that seems initially open and shut, but eventually proves the fruit of an unholy alliance between a family of real estate moguls and some of his own colleagues. Reptile was a measured saga that tried to blend familiar noir film tropes with a deceptively casual character study of its hero, a man long used to the fine art of balancing the sober vicissitudes of a job that brings him in contact with terrible violence and conspiracy, with the stuff of simply living his life in a happy marriage (with Alicia Silverstone quietly splendid as his wife), whilst questioning the degree to which the two can be kept separated. In this regard Reptile was intriguing, thank in very large part to Del Toro’s ingeniously low-key performance as a man who only occasional allowed flashes of something hard and feral in his character to show through his veneer of worldly blear and middle-aged casualness. Still, Singer’s direction mistook murkiness for moodiness, the storyline was just too familiar when the time came to break things down, and the drama never really seemed to become properly urgent and shatter its own pseudo-arty veneer even in the compulsory violent shoot-out climax.

Daniel Goldhaber’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline took a more unusual and potentially provocative approach to the stuff of thrillers. Co-written by some members of its cast and adapted from a radical action handbook, Goldhaber’s film mimicked the familiar motif of a gang of operatives banding together to pull off an act of devious enterprise as often seen in a war or heist movie. But in this case the gang comprised of variously motivated activists aiming to knock out a sizeable oil pipeline in an American desert as a blow against global warming, with Goldhaber segmenting the narrative to explore the backgrounds and drives of the various saboteurs. On a superficial level Goldhaber handled the movie well, aping a documentary sense of realism and setting, and an aptly jagged approach to dipping in and out of the backstory depictions. In its better moments Goldhaber grazed a portrayal of where deep alienation and frustration leads people, but more often on a dramatic level the movie proved trite, with its collective of ecowarriors too blatantly diagrammed according to current leftist precepts, and not really invested with convincing depth or rooting interest beyond some placards of intent and forced emotion. Laboured story twists included the dippy hippy who proves to be a mastermind in manipulating law enforcement, and the on-message dialogue often lurched towards the bombastic.

The Royal Hotel was former Australian documentary maker Kitty Green’s sophomore feature, following the excellent The Assistant: this time Green turned the camera around to contemplate a far-flung part of her native land through simulated foreign eyes, but maintained a similar focus on female vulnerability and situational ambivalence in a workplace charged with threat. Julie Garner and Jessica Henwick played Canadian backpackers who arrive in Sydney on a cruise ship and accept jobs as bartenders at an outback pub to make money and have fun. But they soon find themselves stuck for the duration in a desolate locale, with an erratic and alcoholic boss (Hugo Weaving), and surrounded by locals with varying social skills and whose fondness for alcohol makes them all seem lewd and scary at some point, whilst the small differences in character that define the two women see them react to the situation in divergent ways. Inspired by some true events and courting comparisons with Ted Kotcheff’s canonical Aussie nightmare film Wake In Fright, The Royal Hotel proved The Assistant was no fluke. Where in The Assistant Green carefully wove a path around direct confrontations with ambiguous sources of threat, The Royal Hotel took on the harder job of describing a state of incipient violence and imminent danger without quite ever giving the game away, and explored tensions of viewpoint whilst maintaining a cleverly mediated focus on Garner’s anxious, standoffish character and her uncertainty if those traits are actual survival skills or mere timidity before life. The film only fell down right at the end, with an appended punchline that shattered the film’s previous, rigorous verisimilitude for the sake of making a corny, internet-approved statement.

Playwright turned director Tina Satter’s Reality was another fact-based portrait of a young woman confronted by intimidating men and undefined menace, but with a radically different pitch: Satter adapted the audio transcript of the arrest of Reality Winner, who was jailed for leaking classified information regarding Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, for a mostly fastidious restaging-cum-dramatisation. Satter’s choice of remaining as true to the transcript as possible, complete with moments where the actors would vanish during redacted passages, sought dramatic nuance in an interesting situation as Winner contended with the FBI agents searching her house and interviewing her with cool purpose and wily interrogative focus under surface bonhomie. The role was certainly a strong showcase for Sydney Sweeney, capturing Winner’s slowly crumbling dissembling and the tumult of moral imperative within whilst faced with chagrined and guilty acquiescence to the powers that be without. Satter signalled empathy for the whistleblower, and the overall pitch of the film’s oblique message evoked a special sting of disparity, particularly given Donald Trump’s own, notorious behaviour with classified documents. That said, Reality as an overall project seemed to exist at least half in a nebulous realm of implication that demanded knowing just what Winner had done and being aware of the furore around it, and Satter’s breaches of her own ultra-realist veneer for moments of stylised weirdness to ram home her intended point felt forced, when really it added up to textbook illustration of law enforcement method, regardless of one’s opinion of the law being enforced.

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall was another film about a woman who attracts the scorching scrutiny of the law and media. Triet captured the Palme d’Or at Cannes with a serpentine portrait of a successful author who is put through the legal wringer when her husband dies in a fall from the top floor of the Swiss chalet they’re renovating, and evidence suggests she might have pushed him, with their son left in limbo for the duration of the investigation and ensuing trial. Triet’s immediately interesting proposition was that a troubled marriage can, if the right circumstances ensue, look like a hellish roundelay where murder could easily be countenanced, and the idea of having to explain all of one’s life with all its lapses before an aggressively grilling prosecutor is rightly many people’s worst nightmare, particularly as Sandra Huller’s antiheroine finds her cool and articulate capability in self-defence might be a liability. Her son’s close attention to the case might be irreparably damaging him, but also ultimately proves consequential to the resolution. It’s the sort of story that’s immediately involving and intriguing, but the note struck in the opening scene, as the about-to-be-infamous authoress puts up with her husband’s noisy music whilst engaging in a vaguely flirtatious interview, promised a different, more closely observed and felt portrait of personal ambivalence and marital agony, before Triet changed course and went for a more familiar courtroom drama, one that tapped the structure of French court proceedings for maximum outrage value. The dramatic details often felt too carefully diagrammed for zeitgeist appeal and careful dramatic counterweighting (like the revelation that the writer was unfaithful – but bisexual, cancelling each-other out in discourse baiting) and symbolic impact (like the boy’s vision impairment). At times the story was downright contrived, like the husband’s habit of recording his conversations, which meant that one particularly bilious fight between the couple was played to the court and also illustrated in a flashback that proved a pretty bogus-feeling discursion, one that blunted the impact considerably. The best reason to watch was Huller, particularly as her role demanded acting in English and French in one of the more justified examples of 2023’s burgeoning bilingual cinema, but even she couldn’t quite negotiate some of the pretences of the script.

Todd Haynes’ May December also took on the allure of the tabloid crime drama involving people whose actuality hardly matches the headlines, but from a very different vantage: Haynes’ film depicted an actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who, trying to jolt her career back into gear after years spent on a popular but tacky TV show, signs up to play Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who was once jailed for seducing a 13-year-old coworker, in a supposedly serious indie movie. Gracie and her one-time forbidden amour Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) are now married and seemingly, briskly happy and prosperous, but as Elizabeth hangs out with them to grasp her character and feel out the truth of their experience, she contends with the rather more complex state of their lives as they each cope with the damage wrought to them, whilst they in turn are shaken up by Elizabeth’s scarcely-concealed hunger to assimilate them into her artistic process. Part of May December’s slippery texture was Haynes’ tribute not just of his familiar touchstones like Douglas Sirk, but of the trashy allure of 1990s media, ripe for anyone whose teenage years were spent being titillated by the likes of Murder In New Hampshire: The Pamela Smart Story (cough), complete with a thrumming synth soundtrack mimicking the scores of such by-products, ringing out with melodramatic import as Gracie meditates on the number of hotdogs for a barbecue. In the past I’ve not been the biggest fan of Haynes, who has tended to my eye to convert aspects of the camp aesthetic into something glazed and pretentious, but May December was a marvellous achievement, juggling aspects of black comedy and melancholy realism and tributes to retro trashiness, with deftly observed switchbacks between performed identities and underlying incoherence and the way artifice and authenticity often bleed into each-other. If I still couldn’t entirely embrace the film, it was because the overt gamesmanship in regard to whether or not Gracie is entirely putting on an act on a level Elizabeth can’t come close to matching, with supernal hints of violence, struck me as rather superfluous, whereas Melton did a brilliant job in revealing the deeper truth of a young man whose grown-up-fast experience has ironically left him infantalised.

Ira Sachs’ Passages was yet another study of a romantically challenged and self-involved artist, albeit this time with a surplus of priapic energy and the charm to use it: Franz Rogowski’s married gay filmmaker Tomas, as is his habit after finishing a shoot, turns from his long-suffering husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) and pursues what initially seems to be a quick fling with a young female schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The bulk of the movie portrayed the mercurial director trying to have his cake and eat it as he juggled his two mutually exclusive relationships, with bratty self-regard textured by hints of an unappeasable neediness, whilst his two lovers get increasingly fed up with his efforts to keep them both tied to him, particularly when Agathe gets pregnant and Tomas sees a way to have all he wants in an unusual kind of family. Sachs has been a well-respected and critically championed chronicler of gay life in movies for while now, and Passages’ alternately heartfelt and sardonic exploration of his antihero’s sexual and emotional greediness gave him an ideal stage to display his feeling for his actors and deft way with handling erotic intimacy. One particularly great scene saw Tomas and Agathe having dinner with her parents, spiralling quickly into a mortifying stand-off between the concerned parents and a particularly recalcitrant Tomas and with Agathe left cringing in pain by its end. Something about the characters, particularly Tomas, never really came into focus, however, and as a behavioural study of a galling man, Sachs’ habit of jumping over long portions of the unfolding relationships felt like he was avoiding the hard work of really making that behaviour felt: I wanted to learn more about the characters than their bedroom solipsisms. The climactic scenes had real punch, that said, with Sachs getting some revenge for Exarchopoulos in Blue Is The Warmest Color by letting her be the one to humiliate a desperately appealing lover, whilst Tomas weathered the ultimate rejection perhaps with his deepest, truest desire sated.

Juel Taylor’s They Cloned Tyrone expanded the growing ranks of what could be called the Black Paranoia style, proliferating since Jordan Peele’s Get Out, that mixes social satire and cynicism with hoary fantastical genre plots. Taylor cast John Boyega as a small-time drug dealer and thug who reappears seemingly unharmed after being gunned down by an enemy in his grimy hood. He teams up with a pimp who witnessed his “death” (Jamie Foxx) and a canny prostitute (Teyonah Parris) to work out what the hell is going on, and the trio eventually discover a mysterious, high-tech operation performing mind control and cloning experiments underground in pursuit of an insidious agenda. For about its first third, They Cloned Tyrone seemed set to be one of the year’s best. Taylor displayed an excellent visual sense and feel for locale, as well as equipping the strong cast with hilariously salty dialogue, and, as Taylor literally dramatised the concept of being Woke in the original sense, with some witty caricatures of consumerism as targeted to a Black audience and evocation of the unease underlying it all, as well as puckishly ribbing Blaxploitation motifs. The three leads were terrific, accumulating degrees of emotional vitality even as they plied the absurdism with a fine touch. Things fell away rather badly by the end, however, as the movie ran on way too long and offered an awkward resolution to a plot that, even given its purposefully sardonic and surreal take on both conspiracy theories and Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type movies, became a bit garbled, trying to dovetail its character drama and satirical survey in a manner that ultimately felt strained and contradictory.

Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary was a seemingly more realistic film than the likes of Infinity Pool or They Cloned Tyrone, but one no less preoccupied by role-playing and levels of personal reality. Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley were the fretting heir to a hotelier’s fortune and responsibilities and the dominatrix he’s employing to help him cope with the fallout of his father’s death and his oncoming anointing, only for their relationship to keep taking swift, jarring twists with power and desire in constant, slippery contention, before delivering a highly ironic kind of happy romantic ending. Abbott and Qualley were very good, and indeed as they usually do relished the chance to play characters who dance right on the edge. But the material lost me after a while, taking a scenario of charged intimacy and rendering it arch and ridiculous, another film that can’t simply depict an emotionally intense experience between two interesting personalities, but has to transmit it through agonised plot mechanics.

Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men shared some affinities with filmmakers like Ben Wheatley, Robert Eggers, and Peter Strickland in harking back to the glory days of 1970s cinema when the trippy and hallucinatory could easily cohabit with the gritty and humdrum, but pushed towards a more recessive zone of dreamy strangeness and splintered-across-time imagery, as if trying to remake The Shout but with the connective dramatic tissue excised. Mary Woodvine played a woman living alone on a small island off the coast of Cornwall, a place long since abandoned by people but riddled with signs of bygone life and labour like an old mine. She keeps tabs on a rare flower species and waits for a supply boat that never seems to come: the routine of her days plays out initially in recurring images and gestures, but soon starts to be rendered amorphous in time as her isolation continues, and she has visions of islanders of yore, a young woman who seems to live with her but winks in and out of existence, and a sailor who visits at random times. Whether she’s beholding ghosts or is losing her sanity is left entirely up to the viewer, although eventually some mysteries begin to resolve into something like sense. As a complete film Enys Men hovered a little uneasily between purely evocative abstraction and a suggestive portrait of one person’s fragmented musings on love and loss, with some things resolving with overworked literalness – the source of a scar on the woman’s belly, for instance – and other aspects left vague, with some visual flashes akin to Folk Horror shtick but refusing all generic gestures. Jenkin staked his claim regardless to being a talent to watch, and the film was mesmerising even at its most opaque, with Woodvine’s father John making salutary appearances as the conjured shade of a Victorian-era priest still watching sternly over his parishioners, even if there’s only one of them left.

The Blue Caftan saw Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani tackling topics still pretty sensitive in her homeland in a manner that tried to keep one eye on both the possibilities that come with change whilst maintaining tradition, and the delicate exchanges often laced into both life and cultural continuity. Her core characters were a gentle master tailor specialising in handmade caftans, continuing an ancient and irreducibly patient craft; his wife, a rather more forceful character who is however dying from cancer; and his new, talented young assistant. Gradually it emerges the tailor harbours secret queer desires he occasionally indulges in a local bathhouse, and is also attracted to the assistant, whilst still caring deeply for his wife, and the trio eventually fuse into a peculiar kind of happy ménage as the wife slowly but inevitably wanes. Touzani went for a measured, poetically resonant style matched to the exacting, patient craft of the artisan: the title came from a garment whose creation and fate proves a lodestone of meaning for all involved. Touzani approached her characters with great compassion. Too much compassion, perhaps, as The Blue Caftan proved one of those films that, when you scratched the surface of its admirably textured surfaces, was much less subtle than it wanted us to think it was, jammed somewhere between a meditative mood piece and a very familiar kind of romantic triangle with an upbeat, progressive message. Despite some complicating gestures – the wife’s tetchy edge, the assistant’s ambiguous history of self-sufficiency – the characters never really evolved beyond basic postures, the approach to suggesting sublimated sexuality and flirtation was corny, and their situation eventually didn’t combust but rather evolved in sentimental fashion. That said, the film still worked up a deal of emotional power, with a great ending.

Celine Song’s Past Lives wielded both a similar dramatic ambience and central figuration. Song told a semi-autobiographical tale, depicting a young and prodigious Korean girl whose family emigrates to Canada, where she’s rechristened Nora and starts on the path to becoming a successful playwright (played as an adult with consummate poise by Greta Lee), and later to New York when she marries a Jewish-American writer (John Magaro) – but still finds herself naggingly connected to her first childhood love, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), whom she left behind in Seoul. He has grown into a 30-something sadsack who plainly still pines for her, and eventually travels to New York for a sad and salutary reconnection. Song deftly communicated the echoing psychic crisis that can define an immigrant experience and the way it creates a sense of alternate dimensions of existence – it reminded me of elements of my own father’s experience, for instance – and wielded a clear-eyed, minimalist but emotionally evocative directing style, turning a warmly empathic touch on her three main characters and their evanescent emotions. Again, perhaps to a contrived deegree. Past Lives never quite shook off a subtle shroud of calculatedly bourgeois self-congratulation, the kind of film so determined to keep to its chosen key of elusive, mature fairness and sustain the tenor of frustrated romanticism on the same level as the smoothly buffed gleam of the cinematography that the characters never quite kicked to life with shows of unruliness – no shows even of petulance or irritation or cultural tension. Notably, for instance, Song dodged directly depicting what was rather merely noted in a single line as Nora commented on Hae Sung’s very Korean male attitudes, whilst Arthur noted with strained meta wryness on how in a normal take on such material he would be the evil white guy.

Christian Petzold’s Afire likewise focused on the uneasy relationship between a writer and the people trailing in the wake of their constant efforts to convert life into workable art, but in his case the case study came laced with a more sardonic diagnosis of the solipsistic state that afflicts such creative minds. Thomas Schubert played Leon, a young novelist working on his sophomore book, who travels with his artist pal Felix (Langston Uibel) to spend some time in Felix’s family’s holiday house on the Baltic coast. There supposedly to get down to work on their art, the two men find themselves flung together with the free-spirited Nadja (Paula Beer), who’s also staying in the house, and local rescue swimmer (Enno Trebs), who both Nadja and Felix have a fling with. Leon gazes on in personal frustration and faces up to the reality that his work-in-progress is a disaster, all while a wildfire rages in the district. Afire was less conceptually bold than Petzold’s other films until a very late turn towards the metafictional, whilst Petzold hinted an overarching thesis regarding artistic self-involvement in an age of oncoming perma-crisis. Still, the treatment trod close to a familiar kind of comedy of discomfort and the one-note as its sullen, moony protagonist kept making an ass of himself, before a late swerve towards elegiac tragedy that didn’t quite sit well with what preceded: Petzold even offered a double hit of imminent mortality to goad Leon’s ego and ram home the point. Schubert’s performance was indicative of the movie as a whole, capturing Leon’s insufferable streak and also the pathos in his simmering alienation, but never quite allowed to really display any real sign of the creativity he supposedly has or traits to make him interesting enough to be worth weathering his current crisis. That said, Petzold’s feel for quicksilver twists of feeling and flashes of ingenious expressivity – like Leon gazing on at a tennis match played with glowing bats that summarised a world of sensual wonder and spontaneity he can’t connect with – came laced with jots of wry humour. Beer’s terrific performance mostly made me wonder why her character had so much time for Schubert’s schmuck.

Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction was yet another portrait of a floundering writer, and could equally be described as a companion piece or riposte to something like They Cloned Tyrone, taking often lethally funny aim at carefully commoditised portraits of Black American experience pitched primarily to audiences of guilty/fetishising white liberals. Jeffrey Wright played Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, a teacher and middlingly successful writer of serious literature, scion of a prosperous medical family, who is forced to go back to his childhood home in Boston and, after his sister suddenly dies, inherits responsibility for caring for his ailing mother. To let off steam after seeing a book he takes for poverty porn earn raves and huge sales, he spits out his own, called My Pafology (later renamed Fuck for extra transgressive pep), combining all the ghetto clichés he can think of, and submits it as a gag to publishers, only to find himself with a smash hit on his hands. American Fiction was really two different films cohabiting a little awkwardly if quite enjoyably: one was a cultural satire that might have strayed out of a TV sketch comedy show or Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, taking purgative swipes at many targets, from the offended white student who objects to Monk using racist language in his class, to posturing Oscar-hungry filmmakers and the laboured reported street talk of would-be realistic fiction. The other film was a textured, tragicomic portrait of Monk’s engagement with his complex family, particularly his recently divorced and outed brother (Sterling K. Brown). That side of the movie was good but a little too indebted in feel and structure to Alexander Payne’s Sideways. The teasing relationship of the brothers was so well done it tended to crowd out the romantic dalliance Monk had with a lawyer neighbour (Erika Anderson), and after a while Monk’s ambivalence, particularly his refusal to tell anyone about his secret success, started to feel more like a plot contrivance than a genuinely observed character trait. Wright’s excellence was the glue that held things together, his character on a constant simmer of resentment and disdain balanced by an aura of soulful neediness so even in his jerkier moments Monk didn’t quite lose sympathy.

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Performances of Note

Paula Beer, Afire
Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer
Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction
Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
Benecio Del Toro, Reptile
Adam Driver, Ferrari
Abby Rider Fortson, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret
Jamie Foxx, They Cloned Tyrone / The Burial / God Is A Bullet
Morgan Freeman, A Good Person
Ryan Gosling, Barbie
Daniel Henshall, The Royal Hotel
Glenn Howerton, Blackberry
Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City
Priya Kansara, Polite Society
Vanessa Kirby, Napoleon
Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings
Maika Monroe, God Is A Bullet
Teyonah Parris, The Marvels / They Cloned Tyrone
Florence Pugh, A Good Person
Liev Schreiber, Golda
Jurnee Smollett, The Burial
Sigourney Weaver, Master Gardener
Allison Williams, M3gan
Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction
Kōji Yakusho, Perfect Days
Ensemble, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial
Ensemble, The Delinquents
Ensemble, Eileen
Ensemble, Killers of the Flower Moon
Ensemble, Showing Up
Action Lady Roll-Call: Hayley Atwell, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One / Golshifteh Farahani, Extraction II / Rebecca Ferguson, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One / Olga Kurylenko, Boudica: Queen of War

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Favourite Films of 2023

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The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (William Friedkin)

William Friedkin long balanced oppositional tendencies in his work – a documentary filmmaker who turned to narrative, a high cinema stylist with realist reflexes who very often based his work in theatrical adaptations, a spiky New Yorker who went Hollywood, a scathing social critic who found his protagonists in outsiders of many degrees but also in his society’s overtaxed centurions. His choice to adapt Herman Wouk’s play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial was yet another articulation of that constant dance of attitudes. Friedkin gave the play a light dusting of modernisation, much like his take on 12 Angry Men from the 1990s, highlighting the degree to which tensions in the material he was adapting had shifted or not since they were first penned. The modernisation was the least satisfying element, as Wouk’s story depended very specifically on the unique tenor of the mass mobilisation of World War II and the sudden conscription of entire social swathes into the military with inevitable, vast disparities in outlook, which Friedkin’s take skewed to encompass post 9/11 patriotism. Wouk’s story was also riven by a peculiar disconnection between the aspect everyone took away from it – the portrait of the neurotic commander Queeg as an archetype of the unstable martinet – and the aspect the conservative Wouk himself ultimately tried to emphasise, in depicting the insidious effect of intellectual cynicism posing as conscientiousness.

For Friedkin this tension became, naturally, the very focal point for his take on the material. This allowed him to revisit his needling ambivalence towards authority figures and also counterbalance it with his admiration for people trying to do difficult jobs, exposing the way individual character and the demands of role constantly blur and bleed together, deliberately provoking discomforting empathy with figures we might not be inclined to otherwise offer it to, in this case Queeg, just as he did once with Popeye Doyle and the antiheroes of Sorcerer and Cruising. Where many artists turn meditative and autumnal in their later works, Friedkin by contrast seemed to relish turning to a well-turned piece of theatre to impose intensity and integrity, not wasting a frame. Kiefer Sutherland’s inspired performance as Queeg, his imminent neurosis coloured with a slightly fey and forced attitude of agreeableness, made plain the man’s erratic and dangerous streak but also provoked agonised sympathy, offsetting the channelled resentment of Justin Clarke’s defence attorney Greenwald and Monica Raymund’s increasingly frustrated and bewildered prosecutor, with Lance Reddick delivering his last performance as the terse judge trying to keeping a tight leash on proceedings. Friedkin moved through the various testimonies in the court martial with staging and manipulation of the actors that constantly provoked a feeling of ratcheting intensity with gestural precision, matched to cutting and framing that worked like a closing vice, until the epic display of Queeg’s self-destruction on the stand. This was followed by a perfectly delivered coda as Greenwald finally unleashed his contempt, allowing Friedkin to turn his concluding gesture, memorable enough in earlier takes on the material, into his harshly witty blackout gag, and the perfect summative emblem for his career – a glass of water tossed in the face of the smug and fake.

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The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno)

Argentine filmmaker Rodrigo Moreno stated his intention with The Delinquents, a long and winding road of a movie, was to make something that would foil all applied algorithms to its storytelling. Along the way he made a movie that could speak not just to the peculiarly fraught current moment in the nation of its making, but indeed to an entire western world squelching through an anxious and exasperated epoch. Daniel Elías was Morán, the balding, bearded, tubby bank employee who, electing to chance a few years in jail over wasting the rest of his days in toil and decline, takes advantage of the lax security and pompous, oblivious leadership in his place of work and steals twice his expected lifetime pay. In US dollars, so its value won’t calamitously decline. Twice the pay, because he needs someone to hide and protect the loot for just reward whilst he serves out the expected prison term. He chooses, virtually at random, his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi), deftly using a mix of coercion and incentive to get him on board. Whilst Morán serves out the expected three-and-a-half years (with good behaviour), Román has to fend off the close attention of the bank bosses who suspect him of complicity in the robbery but in the wrong way. Eventually Román and Morán learn how, during different trips out to a particular, far-flung rural locale, both encountered and had passionate flings with the same woman, Morna (Margarita Molfino), but where for Román that connection is a brief, tantalising but perturbing time-out from his urban lifestyle and happy marriage, for Morán it’s the idyll he’s nursing through his confinement.

Moreno’s gently absurdist story, which less progressed like a river than spread out into a basin of brooks and lagoons and marshland, mused with ironic humour dotted with flashes of beauty and pain on the concept of freedom, particularly in a country where the whole idea of financial security sometimes goes belly-up, and authority in whatever guise always claims its piece of the action. German Da Silva was cast with sublime sarcasm as both the protagonists’ boss in the bank and as the racketeer who squeezes Morán for protection pay whilst he’s inside, with both Morán and Román putting up with standover tactics employed as much to satisfy the whole idea of the pecking order as to punish perceived transgressions, particularly necessary for those whose only source of identity is possessing authority. That overt doppelganger touch rhymed with the anagram names of the main characters, hinting at their affinity: Norma, the lusty lass from the fringes who works on a small documentary film crew, comes to embody for both the erstwhile thieves/escapees the happenstance pleasures and possibilities of life lived purely for itself, even if ultimately she has other ideas. Laura Paredes was particularly hilarious, and frightening, as the enforcer deployed by the bank to grill the employees and scare them back onto the straight and narrow, in part because the bank actually won’t publicise the theft lest it harm its image. Moreno found some uniquely hilarious ways of conveying the cyclical farcicality and intimate necessity of quotidian life, like when Román’s son keeps demanding multiple glasses of water in a row, as well as the kinds of accidental pleasures like forging unexpected fellowships, like Morán helping out the filmmakers in surveying wild but beautiful and appealing countryside, and reading out poetry to his fellow prisoners and converting them from threatening thugs to pals and art lovers. Perhaps only the very end of the very long movie, in refusing to offer a clear resolution, risked vexing the viewer. But, in fact, it only emphasised Moreno’s essential thesis, that life is what happens when you’re making the plans – and that’s a good thing.

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Eileen (William Oldroyd)

William Oldroyd’s second feature had many similarities to his first, Lady Macbeth – a patient piece of storytelling fixing on an initially ambiguous if sympathetic-seeming young woman who eventually finds a moment and a stage to suddenly flex her muscle and her character, in ways that contemplate the way people are unknowable until their actions reveal them, and by then it’s too late. Eileen shifted Oldroyd’s stage to Boston in the 1960s, a place of musty dolour, where the title character (Tomasin Mackenzie) spends her days gazing upon the human wreckage her job as a functionary at a prison brings her into contact with – both those behind the bars and those she’s forced to work with in the office – and her nights caring for her drunken, cashiered cop father (Shea Wigham), who dismisses her as a misbegotten nonentity and stews over long-unfinished business. In between she lolls in her car diddling herself whilst gazing on parking lovers at the frigid seashore. Into the prison waltzes a glamorous psychologist, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a student and sophisticated emissary of a vastly different, beckoning world Eileen longs to ascend to, with a quiff of icily glistening Hitchcock blonde hair and blood red dress and an eye that seems to see something in Eileen, be it a protégé in the school of life, a possible romantic liaison, a professional confederate in a delicate and dangerous mission to bring light to dark souls, or all of the above. A particularly ugly case, of a young man who killed his cop father, intrigues Rebecca even as it taunts Eileen and her father with discomforting doppelgangers.

Oldroyd evoked the frigid climes and equally frigid human landscape of the time and place as a suitably palpable and cheerless backdrop for a drama that suggests and teases until the inevitable moment when the narrative hammer drops, as the nature of what we’ve been seeing and who these people really are emerges with fateful bluntness. Oldroyd’s nods to the Hitchcockian proved to be miscues the old Master might nonetheless have appreciated, as the story segued into a study in psychological squalor and frustration, with Rebecca’s efforts proving akin to lifting a paving stone and noting what bugs scuttle for the crevices, not just in the case she’s trying to plumb but in regard to Eileen too. Eileen’s habits of fantasising the most gruesome and random acts provide jolts of the surreal and the darkly humorous, hinting at the strange mental habits she’s been cultivating whilst flying far under the radar. The epic scene that comprises much of the second half saw Eileen drawn into aiding Rebecca in a failed experiment in intervention and therapy that failed to reckon with the infinite limits of self-delusion and self-interest, as they’re confronted with a wretched but unapologetic abetter of abuse and crime. Eileen unleashed turns from mousy reject to red-lipped, hawk-eyed avenger with a trained pistol, but the creature Rebecca has awakened still isn’t exactly the heroine of her own story, but, as the very end suggests, we’ve seen the creation myth of yet another wanderer at roam on the endless sprawl of American roads and American fantasies.

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Extraction II (Sam Hargrave) / Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie)

2023 was a pretty sorry year for venerable action franchises, with Indiana Jones and the Fast and Furious team and the Hunger Games mythos going through the paces of pointless extensions, and superhero movies jumped the shark. The year’s two best action films, Extraction II and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One were studies in franchises at different stages of their life-cycle – Extraction II in the blazing ascendancy of maturity and Dead Reckoning Part One the grandiose red giant poised on the edge of going either supernova or black hole. Sam Hargrave’s Extraction II was a follow-up to his fairly enjoyable 2020 streaming hit. The sequel didn’t entirely escape the feeling of genre content sufficiency that defined the first film, dutifully presenting the necessary disparity between nobly suffering hero and nasty mob of villains awaiting a righteous comeuppance, a story that was sometimes lazy in erecting its pretexts for setpieces, and filming that globetrotted around oddly interchangeable locales. But Hargrave’s go-for-broke direction, manifest most particularly in a truly epic one-take prison break sequence, squeezed its conceit for every drop of entertainment and truly lived up to its knock-‘em-dead ethic, and Chris Hemsworth’s dogged capacity to be likeable even when grimly bashing in faces, helped boost this sequel to the head of the class in terms of current action franchises. This time around Hargrave downplayed the John Wick-ish gun-fu-style action favour of meatier thrills that oscillated between savage close-quarters combat and the more sweepingly chaotic. The film was also wise in promoting Golshifteh Farahani from intriguing adjunct to proper co-badass, and the best moments had a pitch of audacity that vaulted this franchise to the head of the current action stakes.

For its part, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, as the seventh entry in a series that kicked off in the Clinton years, saw star Tom Cruise finally starting to look a bit weathered but no less committed and dynamic. It’s likely that the reason why Dead Reckoning Part One finally clicked for me when the other entries in this series struck me as inconsequential was also the same reason why many long-time fans seems a bit sniffy about it. This entry dared finally to linger with some sense of gravitas on the humanity of the protagonists and the consequences of their actions and choices, and the plot did its best to force them to improvise in analogue ways to battle a digital villain. Whilst long and excessive, there was something deeply pleasurably to be had in precisely that rambling excess, with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, on his third go-round with the series, stretching his talents for staging action to the utmost. Cruise was once again Ethan Hunt, fighting the good fight despite this time suffering awful personal losses, with Rebecca Ferguson returning as his ongoing flame Ilse and Hayley Atwell supplied the new blood as a tricky thief who proves to be an ideal rookie IMF gallant. Dead Reckoning Part One was littered with great action sequences, including the lengthy chase through the streets of Rome and a climactic train ride that became a literal cliffhanger, although the film’s real height was its damn near operatic fight on a Venetian bridge. Props too to Pom Klementieff as the villain’s henchgirl, delighting in her marauding in a performance that felt more like something out of a classic James Bond movie than anything that series has done in years, and helping Mission: Impossible finally leave it and the other arthritic action franchises of the moment in the dust.

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Ferrari (Michael Mann)

After eight years of quiescence, which looked awfully liked retirement following the galling fate of Blackhat, Michael Mann suddenly came roaring out of the pits with his long-gestating Ferrari, a film that played as the period companion piece to its hypermodern precursor – the “elegant” code of the master hacker versus the “frenetic” imitator of Blackhat here gives way to encomiums to the sleek lines and distilled mechanistic efficiency of the Ferrari race car, with its mastermind commenting that the better things work, the better they tend to look too, in the ultimate example of Mann’s credo-stating dialogue. But if Mann is offering his sense of identification with Enzo Ferrari, the legendary founder of the car manufacturer, he’s also carefully measuring his critical distance. Ferrari is indeed the streamlined work of a master, moving forward with a balance of finely described emotional complexity and sleek style. But the greater perfection of the machine, the fruit of mind and muscle, is counterpart to the precisely observed chaos that is the fruit of being only human. The year is 1957: Enzo, embodied with zeal and poise by Adam Driver, contends with mess of his private life – mourning one son who died, whilst rearing another in seclusion with his long-term lover. Life with mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) and young son is the traditional, calm union; life with his actual wife, Laura, played with astonishing zeal by Penelope Cruz, is more like the perversely charged affair of passion, Enzo facing down her waved and sometimes fired guns and taking time out to boff passionately on the dinner table in frantic expressions of raw lust and ardour tangled up with hate and grief.

Unexpectedly, rather than such studies of men and  their tools in labour as Thief or Miami Vice, or the tapestry-like form of Ali, out of all of Mann’s previous work Ferrari most resembled the home life scenes of Heat, with their churning emotional ambivalence and unexpected proofs of persistent loyalties enacted in between duels with fate. The actual business of building and racing cars, the overriding preoccupation of Enzo’s life, is by comparison minimised in total narrative terms, the racing scenes delivered with Mann’s customary force but virtually incidental until the climax. That climax, whilst historical and easily discovered with a few minutes’ research, nonetheless comes at the viewer with shocking power, not least for the plain fact that Mann and his screenwriter, the late Troy Kennedy Martin, chose such a moment in a legendary career to be its emblem, its fateful crux. The wage of so much art, industry, and obsession, such glamour and swashbuckling zeal is only horrible death, a sudden swerve from a drama about a transfixed visionary in a heroic sports drama into a scene at home in Godard’s Week-End. A twist of fate that ends lives and threatens to ruin a project that preoccupies the individuals engaged on it and salves an entire, battered nation, but for an unexpected gesture that comes with a specific, painful price and counts with utmost cynicism on people doing what is expected, whether through venal habits or through making hard choices according to irreconcilable needs.

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A Haunting In Venice (Kenneth Branagh)

For Kenneth Branagh third time was definitely the charm when he and screenwriter Michael Green rewove Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party into A Haunting In Venice, an extension of their revisionist Hercule Poirot series and one that dove head first into a zone of grandiose Gothicism Branagh hasn’t dare plumb since the days of Dead Again and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Branagh’s Poirot, in the midst of trying to retire and detach himself from the world in the immediate post-World War II moment, is drawn once more unto the breach when his writer friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) lures him to a Halloween party being thrown in the supposedly haunted palazzo of tragedy-prone opera star Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly). Of course, soon Poirot finds himself investigating a killing, of psychic Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), as the house is buffeted by a raging storm and Poirot himself is buffeted by mysterious influences beyond his ken. Where Branagh had in Death On The Nile roved restlessly through stylistic touchstones with surface energy underscored by a psychological unease that bloomed in its haunting coda, A Haunting In Venice was more focused and intense as the usual selection of suspects were drawn together to weather out night as Poirot tried force ze little grey cells to operate under the influence of both hallucinogenic spiking and miasmic anxiety of death.

For Branagh the aging boy wonder this undoubtedly had some personal meaning, underlined as he recast his childhood avatar from Belfast, Jude Hill, as a preternaturally wise bookworm and functioning carer for his nerve-shredded father, again by played by Jamie Dornan. Just two players in a cast of characters who invoke the sprawl of murder enacted on a macrocosmic scale, finding within the palazzo’s walls echoes out of folklore of communal slaughter and more intimate crimes. Overlying this was a mesh of metatextual gamesmanship as varying levels of narrative and authoring, ownership of character and fame were invested, leaping off from elements in Christie’s text but taken further to justify and resolve the way Branagh and Green have been plying their take on Poirot with his formative traumas and ever-simmering passion for justice. All of this of course was just the thematic icing on the cake for the film’s gleefully over-the-top take on horror canards, which, after an awkward opening, cranked steadily from a mode of hushed and effervescent creepiness towards literal sturm-und-drang, as storm’s height brought waves crashing against the shuddering building whilst minds and cools frayed within, and Poirot became lost in a delirium of giallo and gothic horror tropes, making his psychic realm the map of Branagh’s obsessions.

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God Is A Bullet (Nick Cassavetes)

God Is A Bullet was definitely a film with problems, particularly the editing, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t include it on this list: I enjoyed it as much as any movie of the year. Compared to such artefacts of hipster posturing like The Killer or Poor Things it felt all the more admirable with its gamy, old-school grunge noir fare mixed with pseud philosophical and sociological meditations that were part and parcel with its epic pretences. Vaguely resembling The Searchers as remade in a fantasy collaboration of Tobe Hooper and Sam Peckinpah, and grazing the weird Americana universes of everyone from Bob Dylan to The Cramps, God Is A Bullet was a reminder of what movies used to look like before being permanently colonised by neutered impresarios and moralist prisses of various stripes, and when cocaine and poontang were the secret veins of film creativity. Nick Cassavetes’ shaggy, rambling saga sported Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, improbably but effectively cast as Bob Hightower, a Texas cop and ultra-square who descends into a transient netherworld to try and find his young daughter, kidnapped by a gang of sub-Manson Satanists/drug dealers/hired killers/paedophile pimping/park-in-a-handicap-space scumbags after killing his ex-wife and her new husband. Along the way he enters into a troubled pact with a young woman dubbed Case – short for Headcase (Maika Monroe), once one of the gang’s stolen and indoctrinated protégés, now an exiled and damaged survivor who wants several pounds of flesh dripping fresh blood and helps Bob to find the gang’s favourite haunts. Soon the hunt turns into an ongoing guerrilla war as Bob faces up to an utterly nihilistic corner of the world, a world Case despises but knows how to operate in, and indeed might only be suited to after being moulded in its image. 

For Cassavetes, scion of illustrious names in the annals of American film who once connected unexpectedly with the sunny and romantic side of the zeitgeist with The Notebook, God Is A Bullet felt like a return to where he should have been all along, studying fringe freakazoids and edgelord behavioural climes, whilst revolving around what eventually proved to be another rather more rarefied and bizarre but no less heartfelt kind of romance, one defined by a wry inversion of roles as Case nursed Bob through his cultural and moral shocks and took delight of literally printing her personal logo on his flesh. The film also had something interesting about the perpetuating relationship between America’s smooth main roads and wild byways, as Bob and Headcase’s battles were counterpointed with a gleefully semi-camp portrait of Bob’s supposedly normal, up-and-up friends and colleagues, who are actually business partners with the gang’s fruitcake boss and whose private lives are more Edward Albee than Norman Rockwell. The whole affair built with operatic force to a climactic battle with all the bone-crunching, blood-spurting, gun-toting viciousness one could ever hope for, only for the narrative to twist on towards an affecting coda that finally saw the lost souls of the world trailing homewards.

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Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese’s magnum opus had something to prove coming out of the gate, and set about proving it for 200 merciless, mesmerising, sweat-inducing minutes. Killers of the Flower Moon recounted the tragic and enraging events of the Osage murders of the 1920s in rural Oklahoma, which saw dozens of Native Americans killed by ruthless local whites for control of the oil fortune that came suddenly the Osages’ way. Scorsese and coscreenwriter Eric Roth found unexpected likenesses in the story to Scorsese’s classic gangster movies, focusing on Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, a dupe-cum-co-conspirator manipulated towards marrying Osage paper millionaire Molly (Lily Gladstone) by his uncle ‘King’ Hale (Robert De Niro), with a relentless whittling process taking out members of Molly’s family. When the killers’ footfalls finally grow too heavy, with shootings and even bombings supplanting more insidious and demanding methods, the fledgling FBI is called in. Around the facts of the historical case Scorsese, with every scintilla of art he’s accumulated in over fifty years of film directing, wove a bleakly epic moral legend about personal weakness and greed festering underneath declarations of love and duty, matched to a landscape of cultural warfare trending towards the literal.

The three lead roles deserved, and received, great performances that perfectly complimented each-other and evoked entire historical paradigms. Gladstone’s romantic yet slightly ironic register as Molly, giving way to haggard fatalism and finally to an entirely justified and considered delivery of punitive judgment. De Niro’s Hale, a study in superficial bonhomie and performed solidarity hiding the cold voracity and method of a thresher shark. DiCaprio, the glum, half-smart, self-deluding tool between them. Scorsese circled back to Boxcar Bertha in unexpected ways as he revisited his sense of modern America’s agonising birth pangs, capturing the mood of a time and place and musing with a deceptive blend of rambling narrative expanse executed with watchmaker precision, slowly peeling the skin off the situation. For Scorsese the material was almost too perfect as a place where he could unite both the classic motifs of film noir, those little myths of desire and death, and sociological breadth, patterns recurring on a vast scale, and describing zone of existential dread that questioned whether it’s worse to be slowly poisoned by someone you love or to be coerced into slowly poisoning someone you love, and the special hell awaiting those who don’t know the answer. The unexpected and ingenious coda managed to strike notes of relieving humour only to then make the chuckles die in the throat, not only casting into question the way history is represented through the media but making a sly argument for art as a way of constructing theses on history that put flesh on the bone of stories, blood in their hearts and eyes, when factoid presentations feign objectivity. But Scorsese also counterpointed it all with a deeply felt and ingeniously communicated sense of the ethereal, the spiritual, and the communal, things that persist and bind and make bearable the otherwise unendurable.

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M3gan (Gerard Johnstone)

Truly effective blends of horror and comedy are always pretty rare, especially with a level of pathos added into the mix. Gerard Johnstone’s M3gan managed the fusion with brisk energy as it set out to lampoon not only the emergent anxiety over Artificial Intelligence but a whole swathe of current pop culture and social mores, whilst delivering the genre film goods. The title character, a robotic helpmate, handily contained the internet as a metaphor within its petite frame, smoothly and assuredly taking control of every corner of life, assimilating all sorts of tropes until it could perfectly mimic the ideal parent figure, BFF, and ruthless watchdog, and brutally fend off any contradictions to its carefully cultivated bubble. Allison Williams refreshed her Get Out cred as a new genre mainstay, playing Gemma, the prototypical nerdlinger who’s a genius when it comes to building android toys and AI devices, but utterly clueless when she inherits the duty of looking for her grieving and withdrawn niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Her inspired answer: put M3gan, the super-sophisticated robotic doll she’s been developing for the high-tech toy company she works for, capable of learning from both experience and the internet and programmed to be an unfailing supporter, to look after Cady, only to find M3gan is so good at the job, and so determined to keep doing it, that she’s quickly evolving into a murderous fiend, and one that can’t be switched off.

M3gan was heavily memed even before it came out thanks to the (brief) sight of the pint-sized, retro-dressed dolly dancing disarmingly before going in for the kill, and indeed that scene was as fun as promised. M3gan avoided overt gore but managed the tricky task of tapping the same source for both its chuckles and its frissons, as M3gan’s moulded face was both reassuring for Cady in its lack of expressive subtlety registered as the absence of duplicity and insecurity, and disturbing for others, and when M3gan went on the hunt she proved both alarming and fascinating with her simian prowl and coolly cooing vocalisations. The film also managed, for all its lack of pretension, to be an effective counteragent to some of the more wearying traits of recent genre movies. It was more intelligible as a social commentary than many far more self-serious “elevated horror” entries. It also provided the ideal riposte to the sickly mix of market strategizing and confused satire found in Barbie, not just in taking aim at the idea of a toy companion being some sort of emotional surrogate for life beyond the playpen, but in tackling a similar lexicon of commercialism, like fake advertisements, with a more genuinely merciless eye for the commercial cynicism behind all the ventriloquised childhood fancy. Along the way Johnstone took shots at modern parenting, corporate culture, and the bromides of poptimism, as M3gan could belt out an inspiring tune assuring you of your invulnerability whilst quietly planning to turn you into an easily cared-for vegetable.

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La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)

Magic realism, neorealism, realism realism – all thrown into the mix in a truly rare piece of work that had more proper liveliness and art in it than 95% of the rest of 2023’s movies combined. The setting is Italy in the 1980s. Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is a former archaeologist of talent and reverence who’s fallen from his faith, now making a scanty living working with the “tombaroli,” a gang of scruffy locals who specialise in locating Etruscan tombs and selling the artefacts contained within on the black market for antiquities. Arthur’s great love Beniamana has died, and his perpetual, mournful pining has granted him a truly odd gift of divining where the tombs are hidden. Just out of jail after being caught on a raid, Arthur returns to Beniamina’s mother (Isabella Rossellini), who takes some care of him despite her own situation as a scion of an aristocratic family who is nonetheless penniless and has manipulated a student she’s teaching singing to, Italia (Carol Duarte), to act as family servant by way of recompense. Arthur’s hesitant flirtation with the earthy Italia and his adventures with the greedy, unscrupulous, but curiously lovable tombaroli unfolds against a backdrop of the ageless communality of the compagna and the perpetually punch-drunk state of Arthur’s grieving soul, dreaming constantly of following mysterious threads of red yarn to visions of the ghostly Beniamina.

The choice of an exiled Englishman as her hero – himself named aptly for a journey into arcana – proved an unusual but apt vessel for Rohrwacher present a spry and suggestive meditation on Italy past and present, and that Italia herself is her country’s namesake is both a joke and an earnest point of symbolism. La Chimera cast an indulgent but incisive eye on a land pocked with the proofs of ancient glories but entirely cynical in its present its plebs turned ragged grave-robbers to make a quick buck whilst excusing themselves with class politics and self-mythologising songs, the emissaries of a waned aristocracy aging and deluded and making use out of people with few other choices, and a shadowy network the new globalist elite snap up the purloined relics. Arthur and Italia stand outside the grubby roundelay, but with peculiarly diverging perspective – Arthur’s drive to purvey his strange talent is a means of communing with an ethereal zone, whilst Italia disdains the grave robbing with superstitious intensity, and sets up shop with other displaced and luckless woman to commandeer the disused infrastructure of a society riven with cast-offs and never-weres. The very end suggested that to live in the past is to embrace death, but also that some people are happier that way. Or was it the blessing of the goddess Arthur honoured?

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Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)

Near the end of Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, Sigourney Weaver’s representative of a waned and pathetic gentry opines to Joel Edgerton’s eponymous gardener, a former assassin for a neo-Nazi gang turned middle-aged, nurturing romantic, in regard to his intention shack up with her granddaughter, “That would be obscene,” only to be met with his appalled retort, “No it wouldn’t – I’ve seen obscene.” This was definitely a credo for the movie in specific, and for Schrader’s general attitude to the current pop cultural scene with its pockets of neo-puritanism and general contempt for human strangeness and the art that wells from it. Schrader’s latest didn’t quite land the same plaudits extended to its precursors in what feels like a loose trilogy, First Reformed and The Card Counter, perhaps because it was more deliberately provocative and less ambivalent than either, but also finally and distinctly more idealistic, as he confronted the contemporary social and political schism in an America groping through one of its periodic squalls of fractiousness and reactive territoriality, in a typically cockeyed way. One of Schrader’s familiar stories of a man with violence in his past pushed by circumstances to unleash it in the present, Master Gardener saw Schrader mixing up his own clichés as he cast Joel Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a calm, collected man who seems utterly at peace with what he does and who he is, tending carefully to the garden that is his realm and charge and doing much the same for Weaver’s aging, entitled, brittle belle of a long-ago ball. His former identity as a servant to the sick community that reared him and used him, is literally imprinted on his skin, hidden under his clothes much as the dark things he knows and is done persist behind his stoic façade.

One day he’s stuck with the task of schooling her granddaughter Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a mixed-race girl who’s trying to leave behind bad company and a drug habit and harbouring some understandable anger for the family scions who cut off her mother and left her to die. Cross-pollination soon occurs despite many good reasons not to, and soon marching orders come down from on high. Schrader’s stings were many, but the most radical aspect of Master Gardener was his willingness to extend sympathy, even admiration and hope, to its characters, aspects of the monstrous and the pathetic coexisting with loving and protective impulses, and the film as a whole was Schrader’s finest balance to date of emotional mess and aesthetic poise. The actual, inevitable moment when Narvel unleashed calculated violence on some scumbag drug dealers, nominally a recapitulation of other climactic Schrader massacres, was thrown away in a partial montage: the real climax was rather the scene where the two misbegotten children stripped naked literally and figuratively, and pledged loyalty and responsibility – only a person like Maya could order Narvel to burn away the signage of his past with authority. The very last shot was the most perfect image of Schrader’s career, encoding its message in a manner at once deeply ironic but also utterly earnest. Edgerton and Swindell were excellent, although Weaver to a great extent stole the film playing a character whose shows of bitchy brutality and absurd fragility were mere traits of just another delicate exotic Narvel had to tend.

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Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)

My favourite of Reichardt’s films to date, Showing Up returned to the wry humour and precise reportage from the fringes of arty bohemia glimpsed in her earlier films with the adroitness of her mature style. Long-time collaborator Michelle Williams played Lizzy, an artist and sculptor whose life is a checklist of the unremarkable, with the people around her forming her support network but also exhausting in that very necessity. She’s edging into middle age and living in a room rented off a fellow artist and friend (Hong Chau) whilst listlessly holding down a job in the art collective and school run by her mother (Maryann Plunkett). Her father (Judd Hirsch) is putting up a couple of random grey nomads; her brother Sean (John Magaro), a once-talented man and clearly the one her mother especially expected to be the great genius in the family, is now mentally ill and living alone, displaying paranoid thinking and kvetching about the loss of his favourite TV station. Her hot water heater is broken and she’s stuck with looking after a bird her cat mauled, like a simulacrum of the child she never could risk having as she plied her craft. And she’s trying to put together the last pieces for a planned art exhibition she hopes will rescue her from the state of, as Oscar Levant once put it, looking like the world’s oldest child prodigy. From the inside, her life is a constant trial – her nerves are understandably frayed, every action on her part like groping through a vat of molasses, every glimmer of success for others, which should be an unalloyed joy, instead a pinprick of evil tiding. From the outside, she’s shambling, preoccupied, rather prickly, and occasionally a bit of a jerk, grumbling, demanding, and ducking in alternation.

Actually creating her art is a finicky, absorbing process of transmuting thought into form, the fragile pieces she constructs, playful, wistful figurines encoded with the sense of motion and ephemeral grace. The sequence when her pal and colleague (André Benjamin) helps her transfer them from kiln to shelves, whilst played as perfectly simple, becomes perhaps the year’s greatest suspense sequence, as disarming bombs could hardly be more torturous and heart-stopping a task. It’s one of the most realistic and understanding portraits of being a struggling artist every put on film, counterpointed with vignettes describing the world she lives in that balance droll humour with aspects of pathos – the dreamy vigils on interpretive dancers frolicking on the lawns of the school, the boho parasites sprawled on couches, the gentle cooing of the healing bird, the mud splattered on her brother’s body as he digs a hole in the yard, which he claims to be an artwork and indeed might be some rite of communion with the soil, the only way to reattach body, mind, and soul. Showing Up’s relevance certainly reached beyond the art world too, in describing something our age when we’re all encouraged to maintain our bubbles of ego integrity and perma-adolescence free to supposedly pursue big things, but find the small pleasures of life so often flitting out of reach. The final scene brought everything together, elements of the story charged with symbolic meaning finally put to work without feeling obvious, as the eruption of something lovely but also wild, flighty, almost set everything to utter chaos – but also drew out the final, sublime effect.

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Added to favourites list after posting

TBA

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Runners-Up:

Afire (Christian Petzold)
Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig)
Enys Men (Mark Jenkin)
May December (Todd Haynes)
Napoleon (Ridley Scott)

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Interesting and/or Underrated

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)
Boudica: Queen Of War (Jesse V. Johnson)
Creed III (Michael B. Jordan)
Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)
A Good Person (Zach Braff)
The Great Escaper (Oliver Parker)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (James Gunn)
The Legend and Butterfly (Keishi Ohtomo)
The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green)
Silent Night (John Woo)
Sisu (Jalmari Helander)
Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball)
They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor)

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Disappointing and/or Overrated

Air (Ben Affleck)
Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
Blue Beetle (Angel Manuel Soto)
Boston Strangler (Matt Ruskin)
Barbie (Greta Gerwig)
The Creator (Gareth Edwards)
Dark Harvest (David Slade)
El Conde (Pablo Larrain)
The Flash (Andy Muschietti)
Full River Red (Zhang Yimou)
How To Blow Up A Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber)
The Killer (David Fincher)
John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski)
No Hard Feelings (Gene Stupnitsky)
No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield)
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
Past Lives (Celine Song)
Reality (Tina Satter)
Reptile (Grant Singer)
Saltburn (Emerald Fennell)
Talk To Me (Danny Phillipou, Michael Phillipou)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)

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Crap

65 (Scott Beck, Bryan Woods)
Fast X (Louis Leterrier)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold)
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (Guy Ritchie)
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Ninth Circle of Shit Horror Movie Hell: Brooklyn 45 (Ted Geoghegan) / Cocaine Bear (Elizabeth Banks) / The Exorcist: Believer (David Gordon Green) / The Last Voyage of the Demeter (André Øvredal)

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Unseen

About Dry Grasses ∙ All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt ∙ All of Us Strangers ∙ The Beast ∙ The Beasts ∙ Beau Is Afraid ∙ The Boy And The Heron ∙ Close Your Eyes ∙ Coup de Chance ∙ Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World ∙ The Eight Mountains ∙ Fallen Leaves ∙ Four Daughters ∙ Godland  ∙ The Holdovers ∙ Origin ∙ The Origin of Evil ∙ Pacification ∙ The Palace ∙ Priscilla ∙ R.M.N. ∙ Sound of Freedom ∙ Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ∙ A Thousand and One ∙ Trenque Lauquen ∙ You Hurt My Feelings ∙

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The Best Older Films I Saw First in 2023

Antoine et Colette / Stolen Kisses / Bed and Board / Love On The Run (François Truffaut)
The Ballad of Tam Lin (Roddy McDowall)
Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh)
The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Clan / There Was A Father / Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu)
Chicken Run (Peter Lord, Nick Park)
China (John Farrow)
Clue (Jonathan Lynn)
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)
Daughter of the Dragon (Lloyd Corrigan)
Downhill / The Ring / The Farmer’s Wife / Easy Virtue / The Manxman / Juno and the Paycock / The Skin Game / Waltzes From Vienna (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Fall of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein)
Flesh and the Devil / Anna Christie (Clarence Brown)
The Furies (Anthony Mann)
Häxan (Benjamin Christensen)
ivansxtc. (Bernard Rose)
Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton)
La Llorona (Ramon Peon)
The Lavender Hill Mob / A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton)
Le Beau Serge (Claude Chabrol)
The Lion King (Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff)
Little Old New York (Henry King)
Little Women (Greta Gerwig)
Love Exposure (Sono Sion)
The Magician (Rex Ingram)
The Man In The White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick)
The Man Who Haunted Himself (Basil Dearden)
The Message (Moustapha Akkad)
Mill of the Stone Women (Giorgio Ferroni)
The Moon and Sixpence (Albert Lewin)
Moon of Israel (Michael Curtiz)
More American Graffiti (Bill L. Norton)
The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu / The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (Rowland V. Lee)
One Mysterious Night / The Missing Juror / The Man From The Alamo / Seminole / Seven Men From Now (Budd Boetticher)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood)
Roman Holiday (William Wyler)
Sabrina (Billy Wilder)
Separate Tables (Delbert Mann)
The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak)
The Sons of Katie Elder (Henry Hathaway)
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes)
The Temptress / The Mysterious Lady (Fred Niblo)
The Unholy Three (Tod Browning)
Within Our Gates / The Spirit Of The Unconquered / Swing! / Lyin’ Lips (Oscar Micheaux)

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In Memoriam

∙ Joss Ackland ∙ Martin Amis ∙ Kenneth Anger ∙ Alan Arkin ∙ Burt Bacharach ∙ John Bailey ∙ Harry Belafonte ∙ Tony Bennett ∙ Helmut Berger ∙ Jane Birkin ∙ Earl Boen ∙ Andre Braugher ∙ Jim Brown ∙ Ricou Browning ∙ Don Cambern ∙ Sergio Calderdón ∙ Margit Carstensen ∙ Josephine Chaplin ∙ Marina Cicogna ∙ Marlene Clark ∙ Phyllis Coates ∙ David Crosby ∙ Terence Davies ∙ Carl Davis ∙ Melinda Dillon ∙ Ted Donaldson ∙ Shirley Anne Field ∙ Frederic Forrest ∙ Gerald Fried ∙ William Friedkin ∙ Michael Gambon ∙ Astrud Gilberto ∙ Mark Goddard ∙ Bo Goldman ∙ Lelia Goldoni ∙ Bert I. Gordon ∙ Piers Haggard ∙ Anthony Hickox ∙ Gregory Allen Howard ∙ Hugh Hudson ∙ Barry Humphries ∙ Gayle Hunnicutt ∙ Glenda Jackson ∙ Ken Kelsch ∙ Victor J. Kemper ∙ Marty Krofft ∙ Aldo Lado ∙ Piper Laurie ∙ Sara Lawson ∙ Lee Sun-kyun ∙ Michael Lerner ∙ Gordon Lightfoot ∙ Gina Lollabrigida ∙ Lisa Loring ∙ Eugenio Martin ∙ Leiji Matsumoto ∙ David McCallum ∙ Annette McCarthy ∙ Cormac McCarthy ∙ Mark Margolis ∙ Darius Mehrjui ∙ Murray Melvin ∙ George T. Miller ∙ Walter Mirisch ∙ Richard Moll ∙ Hildegard Neil ∙ Barry Newman ∙ Sinead O’Connor ∙ Ryan O’Neal ∙ Lara Parker ∙ Matthew Perry ∙ Gordon Pinsent ∙ Edward R. Pressman ∙ Lance Reddick ∙ Paul Reubens ∙ Owen Roizman ∙ Jaime ‘Robbie’ Robertson ∙ Richard Roundtree ∙ Jacques Rozier ∙ Ryuichi Sakamoto ∙ Julian Sands ∙ Carlos Saura ∙ Donald Shebib ∙ Tom Sizemore ∙ Tom Smothers ∙ Michael Snow ∙ Suzanne Somers ∙ Ginger Stanley ∙ Frances Sternhagen ∙ Stella Stevens ∙ Ray Stevenson ∙ Sylvia Syms ∙ Miiko Taka ∙ Chaim Topol ∙ Tina Turner ∙ Burt Young ∙ Raquel Welch ∙ Tom Wilkinson ∙ Cindy Williams ∙ Treat Williams ∙ 

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Review Index

65 (Scott Beck, Bryan Woods)

Afire (Christian Petzold)

Air (Ben Affleck)

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Peyton Reed)

Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig)

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)

Barbie (Greta Gerwig)

BlackBerry (Matt Johnson)

Blue Beetle (Angel Manuel Soto)

The Blue Caftan (Maryam Touzani)

Boston Strangler (Matt Ruskin)

Bottoms (Emma Seligman)

Boudica: Queen Of War (Jesse V. Johnson)

Brooklyn 45 (Ted Geoghegan)

The Burial (Maggie Betts)

The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (William Friedkin)

Cocaine Bear (Elizabeth Banks)

The Covenant (Guy Ritchie)

The Creator (Gareth Edwards)

Creed III (Michael B. Jordan)

Dark Harvest (David Slade)

The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno)

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein)

Eileen (William Oldroyd)

El Conde (Pablo Larrain)

Enys Men (Mark Jenkin)

The Exorcist: Believer (David Gordon Green)

Extraction II (Sam Hargrave)

Fast X (Louis Leterrier)

Ferrari (Michael Mann)

Five Nights At Freddy’s (Emma Tammi)

The Flash (Andy Muschietti)

Full River Red (Zhang Yimou)

God Is A Bullet (Nick Cassavetes)

Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)

Golda (Guy Nattiv)

A Good Person (Zach Braff)

The Great Escaper (Oliver Parker)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (James Gunn)

A Haunting In Venice (Kenneth Branagh)

How To Blow Up A Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber)

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (Francis Lawrence)

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold)

Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg)

It Lives Inside (Bishal Dutta)

John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski)

The Killer (David Fincher)

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (André Øvredal)

The Legend and Butterfly (Keishi Ohtomo)

M3gan (Gerard Johnstone)

Maestro (Bradley Cooper)

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Steven Soderbergh)

Marlowe (Neil Jordan)

The Marvels (Nia DaCosta)

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)

May December (Todd Haynes)

Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley)

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie)

Napoleon (Ridley Scott)

No Hard Feelings (Gene Stupnitsky)

No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield)

The Old Way (Brett Donowho)

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (Guy Ritchie)

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)

Passages (Ira Sachs)

Past Lives (Celine Song)

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

Plane (Jean-François Richet)

Polite Society (Nida Manzoor)

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)

The Pope’s Exorcist (Julius Avery)

Reality (Tina Satter)

Renfield (Chris McKay)

Reptile (Grant Singer)

The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green)

Saltburn (Emerald Fennell)

Sanctuary (Zachary Wigon)

Scream VI (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett)

Shazam! Fury of the Gods (David F. Sandberg)

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)

Silent Night (John Woo)

Sisu (Jalmari Helander)

Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball)

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic)

Talk To Me (Danny Phillipou, Michael Phillipou)

Tetris (Jon S. Baird)

They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor)

The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Martin Bourboulon)

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