The movies of 2023.

I saw 68 movies in 2023. I really don't want to reprise my 'the theatrical experience lives!' spiel from last year, but what can you do?

My favorite movies of 2022:

10. Elemental - Pixar’s first attempt at romantic comedy is as charming and eye-catching as you’d expect.

9. Asteroid City - Fascinating Wes Anderson take on an alien invasion, brought to life by a marvelous cast.

8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem - Oddball animation and a spirited voice cast make this an engaging reboot.

7. The Holdovers - Splendid drama about broken people healing each other nicely evokes the era in which it is set.

6. Sisu - WWII thriller is one of the most exciting - and most gorgeous-looking - movies of the year.

5. Guardians of the Galaxy - Vol. 3 - James Gunn concludes his trilogy in grand style with surprising emotion.

4. M3GAN - The story of a girl’s new best friend is an entertaining yarn from Blumhouse.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon - Terrific adaptation of a little known chapter of American history is properly sprawling and powerfully acted.

2. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves - Fun fantasy adventure carries itself much like the actual game.

1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Follow-up to Into the Spider-Verse may well be even better; runs the gamut from action to drama to comedy.

Runners-up:

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.

Barbie

Blue Beetle

The Boy and the Heron

Dumb Money

Joy Ride

Missing

Oppenheimer

Still: a Michael J. Fox Movie

Thanksgiving

Underrated:

Haunted Mansion, The Marvels, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken

Overrated:

John Wick: Chapter 4, Nimona

Streaming exclusives that should've been released in theaters:

Quiz Lady, Still: a Michael J. Fox Movie, They Cloned Tyrone

Theatrical movies that should've been relegated to streaming:

The Flash, Retribution, Silent Night, 65

My favorite things in movies - 2023:

Andrew Barth Feldman serenades Jennifer Lawrence - forcing her to rethink what she wants - in No Hard Feelings

Anthony Ramos quits his job in Dumb Money

The build up to the bomb’s detonation, and the detonation itself, in Oppenheimer

The cheeky nod to spiritual predecessor Searching in Missing

The curtain getting pulled back in Asteroid City

Dave Bautista in Knock at the Cabin. His finest performance yet in an exceptionally tense thriller officially confirms him not as a wrestler-turned-actor, but as an actor who happened to wrestle in his younger days.

The flame-rounds oner in John Wick: Chapter 4. The nearly three-hour running time is a classic example of filmmakers getting high on their own supply, but it was almost worth it to get such an exhilarating sequence.

Glenn Howerton in Blackberry

Hespera reads the letter in Shazam! Fury of the Gods

The in-person cameo in The Flash. Sad that this is something that had to be qualified, but…you know. In two and a half hours of pathetic, Emmerich’s Godzilla/Bay’s Transformers/‘cadence of a joke’ humor, it is the one thing in this movie that genuinely made me laugh.

Jack Black in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, especially his performance of the song, "Peaches".

Jason Momoa in Fast X. Even now, I am gobsmacked that he was allowed to get away with such a character - and such a performance! - in 20-freaking-23 and we get two more movies with this cat? Bring ‘em on!

Kjell Lagerroos's cinematography for Sisu

The narrator dog in Strays, especially one line in particular; if you seen the film, you know exactly the one

The opening sequence in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. So, young Harrison Ford was executed with CGI. That shit was exciting and anyone who disagrees is lying to themselves.

The power-switching montage in The Marvels

Pretty much anything said by George Lopez’s Uncle Rudy in Blue Beetle

The re-creations of 1931’s Dracula in Renfield

The resignation montage in Napoleon

The scenes between Denzel Washington's McCall and Dakota Fanning's Collins in The Equalizer 3, especially the reveal as to why he contacted her

The sense of humor in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a strong element to an enjoyable movie, especially the line following the heroes' escape.

The surprise ending of Killers of the Flower Moon. It takes a real prankish sensibility to conclude your heavy historical drama on this note, and I quite liked it.

Tony Hale as Ben Franklin in Quiz Lady. Granted, the schtick is little more than a rip off of Janeane Garofalo's cameo in The Cable Guy ("There were no utensils in medieval times, hence, there are no utensils at Medieval Times. Would you like a refill on your Pepsi?"), but hey, I laugh at what I laugh at. 

The violin duel in Chevalier

“We’re in a franchise!” - Scream VI

“Who’s Black Sabbath?” - Thanksgiving 

Random thoughts:

- As I have noted several times on message boards, I’m well aware that we live in the Internet age where nothing could be kept a secret anymore, but this blew up in my face in the worst way. I had planned on seeing Thanksgiving the day before the actual holiday. I was pretty excited, but days before I was to see it - and, bear in mind, this is not even a couple days after it's been released in theaters - some jagoff on YouTube posted a video revealing who the killer was. I still enjoyed the film, but it was a bit less magical because of it. People like that ought to have their hands chopped off if they can’t even wait so much as seven goddamn days.

- Air was a decent look at how Nike and Michael Jordan turned each other into legends, if burdened with far too many 80s signifiers (it was almost like a rerun of “The Goldbergs”). However, they saved the worst for last: during Matt Damon’s climactic speech about what Jordan is capable of and there are flashes to the real-life tribulations that he’d go through. Jesus Christ! Way to undercut the guy that the whole freaking movie spent telling us was less a man than a god!

- So, yeah, that was totes Josh Gad‘s voice as Samara Weaving’s date at the beginning of Scream VI, yes?

- The last year or so has seen a number of YouTube trailers advertising fake Wes Anderson takes on a number of different plots. These trailers are executed with AI, apparently mocking Anderson’s style and his stable of actors. Now I’m more than a little unashamed to admit that I have gotten some laughs from these trailers, but it is the damnedest thing. This past summer, I saw a trailer for (ostensibly) a real movie, Jules (which played right before Asteroid City, if you can believe it!), that told the story of an alien who visits a small town and befriends an old man. For real, it totally felt like a Wes Anderson AI trailer for Asteroid City, but in real life. The only thing missing was the credit of “Owen Wilson as Jules”. (“Wow.”)

- Once upon a time, a movie based on a graphic novel was adapted into an animated feature by Blue Sky Studios, but then 20th Century Fox was bought by Disney, and the project was shelved. With roughly 25% of the project still yet to be completed, Netflix took over the production of the film and released it this past summer to great critical acclaim. That movie is called Nimona, which is now an Academy Award-nominated feature. I watched the film last December and, seriously, am I missing something here? I mean, the animation is good, and there are some strong thematic virtues, but then you have the protracted narrative (a moment occurs roughly an hour in that would seem to signal the natural endpoint of the story, but then, it just keeps going), the confused worldbuilding (so, the film is set in the near future, but there are also knights?), leftover Blue Sky humor (a secondary character dabs, because that is oh-so-timely and also, this is a movie produced in 2023 that used “Awkward.” as a punchline. I’m gonna say that again for the cheap seats: a movie produced in twenty-twenty-mother-fucking-three! used “Awkward.” as a punchline. Also, the title character is rather irritating for a good portion of it. I genuinely don’t see how this could be any sort of serious award competition for The Boy and the Heron or Spider-Verse and it’s high time that the film's die-hard fans realize that. 

- Blumhouse scored a home run at the beginning of last year with M3GAN, but as the year went on, things kinda went pear-shaped for them. In collaboration with Universal Pictures, the company spent $400 million on the rights to The Exorcist in the hopes of making a new trilogy. The first movie, The Exorcist: Believer made a little money, but was a critical failure. Three weeks later, they put out Five Nights at Freddy's, which ended up being the company's highest grosser, but creatively, it was very bankrupt. The trailers for their next couple projects, Night Swim and Imaginary, look wholly unpromising. I don’t want to say that the days of Get Out and The Invisible Man are far in the rear-view mirror, but I guess I just did. 

- The year in PG-13 F-bombs: Missing, The Flash and (surprisingly) Guardians of the Galaxy - Vol. 3

- “Say, do you wanna know why the aliens are here and what they want with Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever)? Well, you can fuck all the way off, ‘cause I’m not gonna tell you!” - Brian Duffield, writer/director of No One Will Save You…probably. Oh, and an extra ‘fuck you’ for stealing a plot point for a script that I was writing.

- If I had a nickel for every 2023 movie about an asshole teenager who uses time travel to go back and save their murdered mother, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Also, if I had one for every 2023 genre piece that tried to be pointlessly artsy by stripping away all the dialogue…

- Another moment of Fast X that stood out to me - besides Jason Momoa - was the scene where Jack Reacher tells Captain Marvel that he hates barbecues. I feel like this should have its own page at TV Tropes where the villain says that they hate something the hero loves. My go-to example is A Good Day to Die Hard: "If there's one thing I really hate, it's Americans. Especially cowboys."....and I know that we didn't know he was a villain when he said that, but in a movie like this, revealing that he wasn't a villain would've been a major disappointment.

- What do Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Renfield have in common? Both movies were written by veterans of “Rick and Morty”…and judging by both movies, neither gentleman has completely flushed the show from their respective systems. I haven't seen Quantumania (and unless an extended cut of the film featuring at least 30 seconds of Michael Pena delightfulness drops on Disney Plus, I never goddamn will), but from what I've heard, the residents of the Quantum Realm may as well have been rejects from an episode of the show, and Ben Schwartz's character in Renfield struck me as the kind of one-note one-shot character who gets introduced and ends up either getting killed or horribly mutated. If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m amazed his character lasted as long as he did.

- Is it possible to love a movie despite not having the faintest of clues what the hell is going on for most of it? That was Dumb Money, for me. The cast was terrific, and the Social Network blueprint is bulletproof, but honestly, I was practically Lorraine Bracco‘s character in Hackers. If someone asked me to explain short selling at gunpoint, that is the last you would ever hear from my Black ass.