Commercial releases aside, Patiño's SAMSARA is 2023 best film.Better late than never, am I right? As we all know, here at The Film Experience, a cinematic year only ends after the Oscars, so maybe I'm not so late after all. Whatever the case, it's time to say goodbye to 2023, with the Miyazaki ranking as my prelude to this farewell. At long last, let's consider newer releases and, most importantly, turn away from the now to ruminate on the before – film history, here we come. Indeed, I've missed writing about older pictures like you wouldn't believe. But let's hold our horses. Before such revelry into the distant past, one has to look back at the year that's gone and all its big screen wonders. Personally, I thought they were a vibrant twelve months of cinema…
As I did in 2022, this list shall be an opportunity to remember writings of the past season, so expect a bunch of self-quotes and links along the way. Since The Film Experience is an American site, I'll also limit myself to titles released in the US, theatricality or otherwise. That means many of my favorite films from festivals won't make it to the top, including Lois Patiño's Samsara, which I'd name the best of 2023 cinema without a second thought. My trip to TIFF – what a wonderful opportunity that was, a veritable dream come true – is full of such titles.
Some already have distribution, so you can count on them for my 2024 top ten next year. Think Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Rosine Mbakam's Mambar Pierrette, and Pham Thien An's Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. Sadly, just as many titles still await an opportunity to dazzle American audiences beyond the festival circuit. Examples include Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge 3 and Victor Eríce's glorious comeback, Close Your Eyes. Fingers crossed, those latter projects get their chance down the road. They deserve it.
And of course, one must list some honorable mentions, those brilliant flicks that got close to the top ten without breaking into it. Sandra Hüller's Cannes double feature deserves plenty of applause. So distant in approach, they're both genius achievements in their own right. Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall considers the nature of truth through a bombastic murder trial, full of fantastic performances and playful ambiguities. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, for its part, is a formal exercise in cognitive dissonance and primordial disquiet, the rare experimental work to come near the mainstream.
The 76th Cannes Film Festival also gave us Asteroid City, a Matryoshka-like construction that takes Wes Anderson's diorama cinema to its melancholic extreme. Though many find its presentational style too impenetrable, I was moved beyond belief. Jack's Ride was another emotive experience, more connected to geography than dramatic structures collapsing into each other. Susana Nobre cuts between a taxi driver's rhyming routes, one in New York and the other in Vila Franca de Xira, near where I live. Between America and Portugal, the immigrant's experience sings with sorrow and structural poignancy, a paean of hybridized neo-realism and non-fiction.
Lila Avilés put forward another immense directorial vision in Tótem, though such words go against the intimacy of her small triumph. Spanish-language film had a moment in 2023, even beyond Spain and Mexico, which we already touched upon. Argentina gave us two treatises on the flexibility of storytelling. From El Pampero Cine, we have Laura Citarella's epic-length Trenque Lauquen. From the wild imaginings of Rodrigo Moreno, there's The Delinquents. In my ideal world, they'd have swept the season's Original Screenplay and Editing awards, respectively. If you want to know my complete Oscar ballot, check this Twitter thread.
Finally, there's Christian Petzold's Berlinale prize-winner, Afire, a story full of arrogance and broken connections, self-sabotage, and forest fire as destructive forces working together around a group of meandering artists. The German auteur's writing has never seemed so sharp, and even the way he uses his actors across the bucolic frame is a game of razor edges, biting bloody and blistering. Paula Beer, in particular, reveals herself as a mystery that beckons obsession. She's a mirror and a revelation, skewering the picture's lead – a solipsistic Thomas Schubert – and the audience in one go.
With honorable mentions dealt with, it's time to dive into the top ten proper, starting with a piece of Pakistani Humanism.
10) JOYLAND, Saim Sadiq
From my review:
"Here, first kisses are like galaxies being born, and the waves are the embrace of oblivion. The only thing more breathtaking than Joe Saade's lensing might be the cast's collective efforts, imbuing every person who appears on-screen with bottomless depths. You'll lose yourself in these people. Oh, how you'll learn to love these characters, flaws and all. Oh, how you'll suffer for it. But there's ecstasy mixed in with the agony, a sweet ache that smells like catharsis and tastes of cinematic perfection."
09) PRISCILLA, Sofia Coppola
Coppola re-thinks Priscilla Presley's memoir into a pastel confection with a poisoned filling. The fragmented construction highlights an emptiness at the picture's core, some deliberate void that discomfits the spectator. Often, scenes start too late and end too quick, keeping you on your toes while providing a sense of wrongness that defies description. The precepts of biopic filmmaking are all out of whack, inviting you to question their validity to begin with. And then there's the style as prison, surfaces everywhere, curated according to a man's imposing will. However, style can also be liberation or a gradual revolt. With her arsenal of formal and structural provocations, the director dares to study a character through the emptiness around her.
I also wrote about Priscilla's clothing and cosmetics at separate times. There's our Oscar Volley series and my last-minute FYC pitch for Best Costume Design.
08) MONSTER, Hirokazu Kore-eda
From my TIFF review:
"Monster is more than its story and ideas, ideals, tonalities. As ever, with this director, the cast is superlative, adult and underage thespians alike. Indeed, some stray storylines that never quite coalesce feel impossible to excise, thanks to the dimensions their actors reveal. There's the music, simple and in harmonious song with the sound design. Finally, Hirokazu Kore-eda's penchant for finding the perfect detail to cut to, uncovering immense meaning, remains unrivaled. Glimpses of troubled domesticity -- a muddy window that won't divulge its secrets, a caress, a dissonant horn in the distance -- are all reminders of how expansive the cosmos of other people is, beckoning wonder in place of terror. They're empathy crystalized in the form of cinema."
07) OUR BODY, Claire Simon
From my IndieLisboa capsule review:
"Starting at the cemetery and ending in hope, the film's structure spans from teenagers to those on the precipice of death, some trying to be parents, others looking for the end of a pregnancy. It goes from the early days of transition to the seldom-seen reality of trans people reaching middle age and beyond. It's an epic, a testimony, a must-see..."
06) THE BOY AND THE HERON, Hayao Miyazaki
From my TIFF review:
"Perhaps contemplating that, one day, his final film will really be a final film, the director decided to push his cinematic introspection to new depths. The result teeters on the knife's edge of eternal uncertainty, proposing an odyssey that starts in familiar territory and ends in oblivion, ruled by dream logic along its course. There's a chaotic verve to it, a willfulness to be illegible if not for how its emotional timbre resolves itself in the end, ringing truer than truth."
I also recently explored The Boy and The Heron in my Miyazaki ranking.
05) PACIFICTION, Albert Serra
Polynesian sights are irradiated, color stretched over the limits of postcard loveliness until it feels fantastically wrong, almost alien. The skies glow nuclear sunsets, waves an azure threat - the disco fakery a paradoxical comfort because at least it doesn't look on the verge of terminal fusion. I've long admired Albert Serra, but this might well be his definitive masterpiece, formidable across the board of image-making, tonal manipulation, obsidian-sharp satire, and direction of actors. The things he pulls out of a bored Benoît Magimel, dressed as the embodiment of the European colonial project, are nothing short of miraculous.
04) ALCARRÀS, Carla Simón
Between Summer 1993 and Alcarràs, nobody's doing it like Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón. In the latter, Berlin Bear-winning feature, she considers the land and its people, building a multidimensional poem about the transient nature of all things. Loss is viewed through the prism of an aggrieved family, and even the sight of a pristine peach is enough to drive the immersed spectator to tears. And yet, no matter how powerful her narrative might seem, the director's touch is never heavy. On the contrary, it remains feather-light, a gentle whisper that almost feels like the comforting kiss of a loved one at the end of a long day.
03) THE TASTE OF THINGS, Trần Anh Hùng
From my piece on the French Oscar submission scandal:
"Trần Anh Hùng appeals to classic technique and period stylings but is always looking forward to an abstract cinema of the senses. Here, he accomplishes an Epicurean experience beyond compare. Who needs sex when you can see two bodies work in perfect unison over a feast of French cuisine? Somehow, jump cuts are part of the harmony, smoothly fitting besides long balletic takes. So intoxicatingly elegant you feel drunk. The rhyme of pears and a naked back is an erotic pièce de résistance. And then there are the lovers, the actors. The way Magimel looks at his real-life ex eating is a marvel - a sex scene with no sex, erotic beyond belief."
02) MAY DECEMBER, Todd Haynes
From my Almost There write-up on Charles Melton:
"Inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, May December isn't a direct dramatization of the real-life story. Instead, it's another of Todd Haynes' experiments on the complicated relationship between cinema and truth, depiction and exploitation, the medium's limits and its vampiric properties. Keeping faithful to the director's past projects, it's also a sudsy melodrama dripping with meta-textual analysis and a certain air of obscenity. Many have debated if it's right to call May December a comedy when it depicts such serious issues, but part of the film's game centers on that discomforting dynamic.
Working from Samy Burch's Oscar-nominated script, Haynes makes the viewers squirm in their seats…"
I also wrote about the film when analyzing Natalie Portman's performance, a spectacle of deliberate artifice and mirrored surfaces.
01) KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, Martin Scorsese
From my review:
"In rite and Robbie Robertson rhapsody, Killers of the Flower Moon anticipates an opening flurry of archival footage, the most contextualization Scorsese will allow into his epic. After that, talk of headrights, 1920s politicking, white guardianship over Native fortunes, and inheritance laws shall be presented with little to no explanation. It's an all too rare show of respect from a Hollywood filmmaker to their audience's wits. Then again, in most regards, this particular director doesn't want to make things easy for the viewer. After all, for over 200 minutes, he reconfigures the truth of a nation's Genesis and offers his spin on its original sin, showing the white hands that built an empire of spilled blood on stolen land.
With it comes an accusation of complicity, a finger pointing outward from the screen. Not even the comforts of genre precepts will save you from this reckoning…"
Unsurprisingly, since this is my favorite film of the year, I've written about Killers of the Flower Moon numerous times. I'd like to point to my extensive analysis of Lily Gladstone's Mollie Kyle, an exploration of Jack Fisk's career as a production designer, and a fun little defense of Brendan Fraser's girthy turn.
If you're interested, I keep track of all the new releases I watch on Letterboxd. I've got a 300+ film ranking on my profile centered on 2023 titles. Check it out, and please share your own top tens.