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Hooray, thanks for making this, Shoog! I’m not sure what criteria I’ll be using for my list yet. I’m leaning towards just 2023 stuff as I didn’t have as many amazing older first-time watches this year as I did last year (just look at this! jesus!) but once I’ve made both we’ll see. Really looking forward to seeing everyone’s lists!
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Dec 17, 2023 19:08
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 21:46 |
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Jackass Forever owns, dude
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Dec 18, 2023 10:29
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I’ve decided I want to keep the list that actually counts towards this poll strictly to 2023 films, as otherwise a lot of great films from this year would get swallowed by old classics. However, I also made a separate list of my favourite older films I watched for the first time this year, so here’s that. with a reminder to Shoog that this is not my list for the poll: 10. Once Upon a Time in America (1984) A sweeping epic in the best possible way, with a fantastic focus on character over action. 09. To Sleep So as to Dream (1986) Part silent film homage, part treatise on loss, part off-kilter detective story, and one of the most assured debuts I’ve ever seen. 08. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) Arty and political without ever skimping on hilarity and pure entertainment. Brutal, disgusting, and funny as hell. Gambon is magnetic. 07. Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997) A live broadcast of a radio drama goes awry as everyone insists on various changes that leave the cast and crew scrambling to make something comprehensible. Unbelievably funny and truly makes you appreciate the magic that is creating art. 06. The Red Shoes (1948) It’s The Red Shoes, baby! Powell and Pressburger at their most expressionist, a truly sumptuous and powerful movie. The central dream ballet sequence is phenomenal. 05. Love & Pop (1998) The live-action debut of Hideaki Anno (Evangelion, Shin Godzilla), an unflinching look at societal sexual exploitation shot on consumer-grade camcorders with so many wild angles it’ll make your head spin. 04. In a Lonely Place (1950) Atypical for a Hollywood noir of this era, but also one of the best examples I’ve seen. Some really thoughtful themes, especially with regards to how people will bend over backwards to accommodate toxic masculinity - talk about ahead of its time, drat. 03. Blow Out (1981) The film where I finally “got” De Palma. Just a loving superb and taut conspiracy thriller, impeccably well-made and written, with an ending that made me sit straight up in my seat and gasp. 02. Le Bonheur (1965) Of course Varda has started finally getting her due a lot more recently but I remain shocked this isn’t as well-known and talked-about as other French New Wave touchstones. Great use of colour and music, and a wickedly subversive story that truly floored me with its gut-punch third act. 01. An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) It’s a four hour movie about sad people by a Bela Tarr protege, what the gently caress is up!!!!! An incredibly bleak portrait of Chinese society that still manages to be utterly compelling despite its slow pace due to fantastic character work, exceptional intimate cinematography, and evocative performances. It makes me so sad we will never get to see anything else by Hu Bo. Best movies of 2023 list coming soon!
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Dec 21, 2023 23:15
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And we’re back! 2023 was a very good year for movies, with a slightly higher quality of blockbuster than most years and a lot of returns to form by many of the greatest living filmmakers. There ended up being so many things I liked that some great movies like Barbie, The Boy and the Heron, and Evil Does Not Exist didn’t even make it into my top 20. First up, here’s ten honourable mentions, listed alphabetically: All of Us Strangers Anatomy of a Fall Fallen Leaves Godzilla Minus One Monster Rye Lane The Holdovers The Killer The Royal Hotel Theater Camp and now, the actual list of my ten favourite movies of 2023: 10. Oppenheimer Because I work at a one-screen cinema that is one of only three screens in the country able to play 70mm IMAX prints, we had sold-out screenings of this for weeks and weeks. It was exhausting and because we have people doing shifts in the auditorium we all ended up seeing it like 30 times each. Thankfully, the movie is so sick it wasn’t a problem! Stupendous visuals, a ton of fantastic performances (and classic line readings that became injokes at work, especially “I don’t like your phrase.”), excellent pacing, and Nolan’s best solo script to date. Even if he still doesn’t understand who women are or how sex works. 09. Killers of the Flower Moon Scorsese still hitting hard as ever in his old age. This is a brutal look at white greed and entitlement that stays riveting throughout a wildly long runtime, and has just so many stunning scenes and performances and ideas, culminating in one of the best and most affecting series of climactic scenes I’ve ever seen. It isn’t perfect - I think the depiction of Ernest presents him as too much of a victim of manipulation without getting into his head and seeing his own selfishness. And I think a lot of the Osage/indigenous criticisms are fair - fundamentally Scorsese made a movie for white audiences to ruminate on their own faults, rather than about and for indigenous audiences. Hopefully an Osage filmmaker will make their own movie some day, but considering what this film itself is actually aiming for, I think it’s a triumph. 08. John Wick: Chapter 4 I can’t get down with those who wish the John Wick franchise had stayed more grounded. Did y’all not see this poo poo?? Very possibly the best martial arts-adjacent movie to ever come out of Hollywood, Stahelski, Reeves, and the entire team outdid themselves in every way with a lunatic amount of utterly incredible action sequences, gorgeously shot and cut with ridiculously impressive choreography and variety. They put anything south of Fury Road to shame, really. Meanwhile, the world-building is as fun as it’s ever been and the story manages to contain actual pathos. A new peak for a killer franchise. RIP Lance Reddick!!!!!! 07. Hit Man Richard Linklater has long been one of my favourite directors, but his recent work hasn’t quite been on the level as his mid-2010s peak. While this may not be as meaty as those films - in fact, it’s probably his biggest crowd-pleaser since School of Rock - it makes up for it by being absolutely loving hilarious throughout and having two amazing gorgeous leads with insane chemistry. Of all the movies I saw at the London Film Festival this year, this one had by far the wildest crowd - there’s one scene that was so funny and satisfying and well-performed that people started clapping and cheering just at the end of the scene! And my friends who went to other screenings said it happened in theirs too! There’s still no news on an actual theatrical release for this one - Netflix own distribution rights, but nothing’s been announced, and I think it’s actually showing at Sundance next month for some reason - but I highly recommend everyone seek it out whenever they can. 06. Past Lives The early buzz had me awaiting this one for months and months, eventually catching a special screening in mid-July, several weeks before the actual UK release. I had the same experience as Chadzok initially - wondering if it was going to move out of the one gear it was in, before realising it was more just a detailed examination of its central ideas. Which is of course not a diss! It examines them so beautifully and tenderly, and you really feel the buried emotions and weight of the years that have passed. Even then, though, it sneaks up on you, and by the end I - and seemingly everyone else in the screen, judging from the noises I heard - was a complete mess. 05. May December Only Todd Haynes could have directed this movie. It’s such a devastating look at generational trauma, loss of innocence, arrested development, and repression, as well as a cutting analysis of the concepts of performance and facade, especially with regards to how so-called “method” work can affect people significantly for little gain. The fact it does all this without making anyone a villain or anything other than fully three-dimensional - and that it does so while being extremely darkly funny a lot of the time, with some excellent melodrama - is nothing short of a miracle. The screenplay - by first-time writer Samy Burch - is incredible, while there are a whole bunch of incomprehensibly good performances, with Natalie Portman doing her best acting ever, and relative newcomer Charles Melton deserving to be up there with industry legends like RDJ and Gosling in the Supporting Actor Oscar noms. 04. Poor Things This entry might be a little shorter than the others because it was the end of the festival when I saw this and I was fuckin exhausted and just wrote a jokey Letterboxd review I can’t steal from, but this is the first thing Yorgos Lanthimos has made that I felt lived up to the first movie I saw by him, Dogtooth. Idiosyncratic, bizarre, and audacious, with absolutely beautiful cinematography, a consistently hilarious script, and one of the wildest and bravest lead performances I’ve seen in some time. I cannot wait to see this again! Bella Baxter is a friggin icon!! 03. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse The first Spider-Verse was so gorgeous and funny and truly set the bar for 3D animation in the modern era, so I had no idea how a sequel would manage. Turns out, really really loving well. The visuals are so sublime and vibrant they make the first look like your typical Fox animated sitcom - in greyscale - while the humour lands just as well as before and the story is a layered and intelligent examination and critique on the concept of canon and shared belief on what has to define a character. The voice work is absolutely astonishing, especially from the new villains - Oscar Isaac’s desperate rage is fantastic, while Jason Schwartzman feels like he found the role his voice was made for with The Spot. Also Daniel Kaluuya is there being the coolest guy in the multiverse! Even I’m side-eyeing myself at putting this above the couple movies preceding it but whatever I just find the experience of watching it so joyous and thrilling and I cannot wait for the third installment. 02. The Zone of Interest Jonathan Glazer finally follows up Under the Skin a decade later with one of the most emotionally draining films of the century so far. Focusing on Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss and his family - and their picturesque, happy family home located right next to the camp - it explores the banality of evil about as well as any movie ever has, slowly expanding in horrifying ways without ever showing the atrocities happening just past the garden wall. The cinematography - frequently reminding me of Jeanne Dielman and even Ozu films when showing the family moving through the house - is so unnervingly normal in a way that makes the times it departs from that style even more effective. There is so much I could talk about here, but I want anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet to go in largely blind, so I’ll just say that even in a year with Flower Moon, this managed to have the most intense and stirring ending of the year, and one nobody who watches it will soon forget. A masterpiece. 01. Asteroid City A frequent criticism of recent Wes Anderson movies is that, while they still look great, they have abandoned the heart of his earlier movies like Rushmore and Tenenbaums in favour of something more clinical. I’ve never really agreed with this, but the heart certainly isn’t as on-sleeve, as they say, in the newer ones - it takes more burrowing to get to the real meaty thematic work. This can frequently be frustrating, however, and I’ll admit that The French Dispatch and especially Isle of Dogs didn’t always win me over. Which made Asteroid City such a stupendous achievement in my eyes - while you still have to work harder to get to the heart, once you get there it is so satisfying and so meaningful that it absolutely floored me. Some of the positives about this movie are ones that always apply to Wes - the framing and camera movements are always perfect, the production design is sumptuous, the ensemble cast is impeccable - but there are some ways in which I would put it above almost everything else he’s ever made. I think it’s easily one of his funniest scripts, for instance, making me laugh out loud almost constantly, with a great many brilliantly-realised characters. But let’s go back to the themes for a second. Asteroid City is a return to Wes exploring grief, in a delicate and meaningful way, but there’s a whole bunch more going on. First of all, it functions so well as a look into the unknown and our various reactions to a bizarre and unexplained event, from those who try and impose order to those who give himself over to chaos. There’s a key moment with Maya Hawke’s character that is essentially the Rosetta Stone of the whole movie, and it’s wonderful. More interestingly, there is a lot in here about artifice in storytelling: we find Wes confronting and in fact defending his style in a way I never thought he’d do. This movie calls so much attention to how unreal everything is - hell, most of the cast are real actors playing fake actors playing characters in a play, except it’s actually a live production of a documentary about the creation of the play, which even just typing it makes my head spin - yet this fundamentally does not detract from the power of the film to affect and move an audience. This is most notable in the scene with Margot Robbie, in which she is literally just reciting lines outside of the context of the play she was cut from, and yet it still manages to be incredibly emotional and heart-rending. Of course if this scene doesn’t work for you - and I know this isn’t uncommon among viewers - the point won’t be made, but I found it so beautiful and touching, a profound statement on the power of art, especially the way Anderson makes it. So there we go. Asteroid City is my favourite movie of 2023, and of the decade so far, and easily one of my top three movies from one of the best working filmmakers. And after writing all that, I think I’m gonna watch it again tonight. Thanks for reading! BONUS: I went to an Asteroid City exhibition when the film came out over here with a ton of original costumes, props, etc. It was so sick and I got a cool shirt I’m wearing right now! Pictures here! Easier list for Shoog: 10. Oppenheimer 09. Killers of the Flower Moon 08. John Wick: Chapter 4 07. Hit Man 06. Past Lives 05. May December 04. Poor Things 03. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 02. The Zone of Interest 01. Asteroid City Escobarbarian fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Dec 24, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 16:03
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All That Jazz is so absurdly good and oh man does Bob Fosse seem like a jerk I would not want to hang out with
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Dec 27, 2023 09:50
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drat BP that’s a cool list although I personally did not vibe with Throw Away Your Books
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Jan 1, 2024 00:06
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GOTY thread countdown probably won’t be til the 13th apparently
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Jan 1, 2024 09:48
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Really great stuff! Thanks for running this, Shoog, and I definitely hope it gains more traction next year. Very pleased with the results, Flower Moon was such an excellent movie.
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Jan 1, 2024 23:49
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checkplease posted:Good stuff. I need to watch Monster still as I’ve enjoyed the 3 other Kore-eda films I’ve seen. Monster is one of his best, imo. After Broker (while still a good movie) had me like “yeah Kore-eda I get it now” Monster really felt like something new and a big return to form
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Jan 3, 2024 16:31
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