Favorite Movies of 2023

I don't have a lot to say here, so I'll make it very brief. These are my favorite movies! I've (obviously) not been doing reviews on the blog this past year, but I am still updating my Letterboxd, so when it says "Read original review," it's linking to that.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! Feel free to share your own favorites!

Favorite Movies

1. May December
Stunning, unclassifiable cinema. I've liked a lot of what Todd Haynes has done in the 21st century, but the slipperiness of this film feels like a return to the complex semiotics he was playing with in his '90s work.

[Read original review]

2. The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki came out of retirement not just to make the best animated movie of the year and a dense, self-reflexive meditation on loss and creation but also to make sure that people remember that his movies can pivot from cute magical hijinks to grim nightmare fantasies full of bird poop and blood. The gooey-ness of Miyakazi films is underappreciated, but it's front and center here. I guess that might sound off-putting, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't enjoy this movie on some level, so don't knock it until you've tried it.

[Read original review]

3. Knock at the Cabin
Speaking of not knocking (hahaaa) until you try it, I feel like I still encounter a lot of people who still have not forgiven M. Night Shyamalan for his wilderness period. Those people are missing out majorly. Without expending a lot of energy, you could probably convince me to say that this is the best film of his career. Obviously the best performance of Dave Bautista's career.

[Read original review]

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Replicates the slow, horrific march to the grave that Scorsese achieved in The Irishman, only this time, it's a genocide. I'm very much into this late-style Scorsese.

[Read original review]

5. Afire
People don't seem to like this one as much as the previous few Christian Petzold movies, and it certainly doesn't have the mythic, political overtures as, say, Transit, but in place of that, it is as vicious a character piece as he's ever done.

[Read original review]

6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The fact that this flopped at the box office is so incredibly depressing to me. This should be a family film instant classic; Rachel McAdams should be getting an Oscar; Kelly Fremon Craig should be getting Greta Gerwig money, acclaim, and household name status. I suppose prospects of it finding an audience streaming on [checks notes] Starz is unlikely, but I'm hoping.

[Read original review]

7. You Hurt My Feelings
Most of the time with Nicole Holofcener, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's what's nice about it. Good to see that her partnership with Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to bear fruit. Bonus points for tunneling into some very specific anxieties of mine this time around.

[Read original review]

8. The Holdovers
I thought for sure after the nostalgia-baiting trailer and opening stylistic pastiche that I would find this too cute, but no, it's very good! Sure to be a new sad-sack Christmas classic. It will probably be up for all sorts of awards, and I can get behind that.

[Read original review]

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most technically and aesthetically adventurous mainstream American animated movie in years, more so than the first one by a considerable margin, and that alone was probably enough to land this in my top 10. On top of that, though, I was actually into the story, and while I am entirely prepared to eat crow if the sequel resolves all of the threads in this movie with a wet fart, for now, I am actually excited to see what happens next.

[Read original review]

10. Godzilla Minus One
In addition to just being a very entertaining monster movie, I want to highlight how great the design and effects are on Godzilla himself (itself? themself?): maintaining the lovably bulgy proportions of the old "dude in a rubber suit" Godzillas while also containing the scale and menace that CG can provide. The best effects of any effects-driven movie I saw this year, which should put American studios to shame.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: BlackBerry—In the year of the "brand biopic," this caustic take on a brand doomed to fail stood out. Great performances all around, too: Glenn Howerton just screams the whole movie, and it is very watchable.

Would Have Been in the Top 10 If It Were Actually a Feature Film: That collection of shorts adapting Roald Dahl that Wes Anderson did for Netflix—I've enjoyed Wes Anderson's output of the past decade even as he has divided some of his fans while tunneling deeper and deeper into the hermeticism of his aesthetic. However, this is easily his best work since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel. An utter delight, and the "it's a stage play, but also an audiobook" format proves surprisingly flexible for telling four very different stories.

Best Documentary: In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50—A compelling rumination on mortality and Robert Fripp's dictatorial regime within the band. Terrific music, of course.

Best Action: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One—I mean, it's a new Mission: Impossible movie, so of course. There also wasn't a ton of competition. A very limp year for American action films.

Best Action Sequence: John Wick: Chapter 4—That said, I gotta give props to John Wick fighting his way up that staircase (twice!) near the end of this entirely too-long series finale. For as much as Cruise gets all the Keaton comparisons (mostly valid), that one sequence feels like the strongest evocation of silent comedy I saw in a mainstream American film this year. The train crash scene in Dead Reckoning comes at a close second, though.

Movie I Laughed Most Watching: Bottoms—This bizarro-world high school comedy is something of a return to the '90s/2000s heyday of the spoof movie, e.g. Not Another Teen Movie, though rather than parody anything specific, Bottoms instead just goes for the weird and the heightened. It doesn't all work, but most of it does.

Best Joke: Barbie—Ken mansplaining Pavement to Barbie is probably only funny for the very narrow swatch of boring, approaching-middle-age men that I consider myself a part of, but this was a big moment for us.

More People Should Talk About This One: The Starling Girl—Evokes its Christian fundamentalist milieu with more accuracy than anything I've ever seen in a movie even approaching mainstream, and while for me that alone would be enough to rush out to see this film, it also does a terrific job telling a very human story that I found riveting. Maybe the contours of this movie just appeal to me more than most people, but I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: Infinity Pool—In what may become an annual fixture of this list (MaXXXine may come out this year!), I have to shout out Mia Goth's performance here, which is far and away the best thing about Infinity Pool (a movie I enjoyed otherwise, I should stress). For Your Consideration: Mia Goth draped across the hood of a car, shouting the protagonist's name while reading negative reviews of his ill-begotten novel.

Best Audience Con: Skinamarink—Basically an avant-garde film marketed as a horror film, and it somehow made $2.1 million! I liked it, for what it's worth, but mostly, I respect the audacity.

Best Vibes: Rye Lane—A very fun, frothy rom-com with a tremendous sense of place, style, and music. Just a good time overall, I felt good watching it, and I have nothing but good memories about it.

Most Vibes: Enys Men—I almost gave this the "best" vibes award, but I don't think "best" is the best way to describe something that feels this mysterious and at-times threatening. Still, it's unparalleled in the thick atmosphere it creates. Good thing, too, because that's basically all it does.

"Not Her Best, But I Appreciate That She's Still Doing Her Thing" Award: Showing Up—Every Kelly Reichardt movie feels like a miracle for existing, especially in a film economy that doesn't make a lot of space (or funding) for these kind of without-a-marketing-hook pieces of gentle rumination.

"Good For Her" Award: Poor Things—I didn't love this as much as some people did, but Emma Stone did great work with out-of-left-field performances this year (see also: The Curse). Very interested to see what else she does now that she seems to be in her weirdo phase. Also, good for her character; seems like she had a great time.

"Good For Him" Award: Beau Is Afraid—Ari Aster, man, I think it's cool that you are comfortable enough to spend $35 million setting fire to all your good will you've earned so far. I genuinely respect that.

"Don't Know How to Work This In, But I Feel Like I Should Include This One" Award: No One Will Save You—Probably doomed to be forgotten as it lies buried on Hulu, but this is a very fun, exciting, clever alien invasion thriller.

Most Played in the Room Adjacent to Me: The Super Mario Bros. Movie—My son got majorly obsessed with Mario and Donkey Kong this year, so as soon as this got put on Netflix, it was curtains for my hopes of getting him into European arthouse cinema during his midday movie/rest time.

Worst Animated Movie of the Year: Nimona—Despite there being two animated movies in my top 10, this was a particularly bad year for feature-film animation, and this was the worst of the worst that I saw (consider yourself lucky, Disney's Wish). Thoroughly irritating, and it looks bad.

Worst Movie of the Year: Your Place or Mine—Probably not actually the worst movie of the year, but I watch so few streaming-dump "content" movies that it feels pretty egregious when I do happen to sit through one.

Best Non-2023 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2023: Theorem—This film simply refused to leave my brain since I saw it in March. A bourgeois family has a sexual encounter with the divine and the spirals into oblivion: the story all of us Christians living a middle class American existence should be wrestling with.

Favorite Music of 2023

I'm back, baby!

Well, for this post and a year-end movie post, at least. In terms of this blog, the big thing about 2023 is that I stopped posting regularly—and it felt nice! Not that I didn't enjoy blogging every week for eight years, but as I alluded to in my year-end movie list last year, life has just become very full and busy for me over the past couple of years (in mostly good ways), and it's been something of a relief not to have the constant pressure to keep a weekly blog deadline; I honestly don't think I realized how strong that pressure was, and going on hiatus felt like when you suddenly realize you've been holding your breath and let it out in a rush. So speaking of holding breath, I wouldn't hold yours for the grand return of the weekly mini-reviews posts.

Anyway, y'all came here for music, not for a rehash of the "I'm so busy" jig that all adults spiral into if you ask them how things are going. So: music! 2023 was a weird year for me. More than any other year I can remember, I had a hard time finding music that I loved. My usual genre blind spots have become blinder than ever (I have literally zero idea what is going on in metal, and I have mostly bounced off most of the biggest hip-hop acts of the year, though based on commercial performance [dubious, but still], I'm not the only one struggling to connect with contemporary hip-hop), and the Top 40's very chaotic, TikTok-influenced hodge-podge yielded nothing that grabbed me. I believe this is what academics call Getting Old. That said, even within my home-base genres of rock and jazz, it was harder for me to find music that I was passionate about. Part of this certainly has to do with the increasingly fractured and marginal place listening to new music has in my life because of all the other demands that pull at my attention—again, I invoke Getting Old. I dunno; my "to-listen" list is longer than ever this year, so it's not as if I didn't have options. I'm confident that there are albums out there that I haven't given much time to that would have had a good chance to make my top 10 (for example: Saved! by the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, née Lingua Ignota), so maybe I just need to change my habits.

Whatever the case, enough reflection. There was still plenty of good music this year, so let's get on with it. I come not to bury 2023 but to praise it!

As always, I'd love to hear what music y'all readers (if you're still out there!) enjoyed this year! I view this as the beginning of a conversation—a semicolon rather than a period, if I can get English-teacher-y. Let me know what I'm missing!

Favorite Albums:

1. Sufjan Stevens: Javelin
Sufjan's most straightforward and accessible songwriting in quite some time, which might seem like it would be an issue for someone like me who definitely prefers Weird Sufjan. And initially, I was a little underwhelmed: "Carrie & Lowell by way of Illinois" was my initial, slightly disappointed reaction, but this grew in my estimation with each listen until here it is as my favorite of the year. The thing about straightforward, accessible songwriting is that it is straightforward and accessible, even for a pretentious curmudgeon like me, and I became bowled over at the beauty and clarity of this music. Plus, magic of all magic, he was able to turn "There's a World," probably the worst track off Neil Young's Harvest, into something delicate and gorgeous.

2. Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer & Shahzad Ismaily: Love in Exile
This isn't the kind of music people mean when they talk about ambient jazz, but it's the descriptor that comes most readily to mind when I try to describe this album: a 72-minute exploration of space and mood, Arooj Aftab's meditative vocals weaving in and out of the soundscapes laid down by Vijay Iyer's spare but precise piano and Shahzad Ismaily's Moog. I'm fairly familiar with Iyer's output and a little with Aftab's, but Ismaily' is entirely new to me, and he's a quiet revelation on here. Hypnotic music. Perfect in its own cosmic way.

3. Emergency Group: Inspection of Cruelty
Not a lot to explaining why I like this: it sounds like the early goings of electric jazz, especially Miles Davis c. In a Silent Way or A Tribute to Jack Johnson or maybe Tony Williams's Emergency!—aka some of my favorite music of all time. Probably my most-listened-to album of the year if I were able to keep those metrics. It just goes down so groovily and easily.

4. Kate NV: WOW
I don't know if this makes sense to anyone else, but this album sounds like Adventure Time music to me. I don't know what else to say.

5. more eaze: Eternity
Bandcamp (and, I suppose by extension, more eaze herself) classifies this as a "track," but it's 43 minutes long, so I declare an album. It's a beautiful piece of longform electronica that reminds me of early The Orb in its playfulness.

6. JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: SCARING THE HOES
About as much fun as you'd imagine a collaboration between these two being, i.e. very. Riding a line between uproarious and vaguely disquieting while spinning some ridiculous samples, these two are a match made in alt-rap heaven. And you really beat the delirious rhymes: "Let me tell you what I'm gonna do / Tell no lies, just tell your truth / I'm a big dog like Marmaduke / Park itself when I come through." Bespoke slant rhymes from above. Great album art.

7. Mandy, Indiana: i've seen a way
The debut album from this experimental electronica band is surprisingly diverse, pinging around from synth-core to ambient to industrial to more openly club-y material, but for as divergent as some of these sounds can be, there's a cohesive sense of space and tone that makes this feel like a unified vision of eclecticism rather than just scattershot pastiche.

8. Lonnie Holley: Oh Me Oh My
I wish it hadn't taken Michael Stipe and Bon Iver being on one of his albums for Lonnie Holley to get on my radar, but better late than never, right? He's a bona-fide Southern weirdo in a way that appeals to me quite a bit, somehow very earthy and material while also coming across as a kind of cosmic mystic. Very much my speed.

9. Fever Ray: Radical Romantics
Not a particularly surprising album from Fever Ray, but still good. Also, it has some of the best worst cover art of the year.

10. Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I'm a very fair-weather Lana fan, but the weather turned out to be very fair this year. The title track and (especially) "A&W" are two of her best songs, and the rest of the album is very strong, too—except for the "Judah Smith Interlude," which may be my most-skipped track of the year.

Great 2023 Songs Not On These Albums:

Chief Adjuah: "Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning"—The pivot Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) made in his LP this year kind of threw me: there's a continuity in leaving spiritual jazz for West-African-inflected folk music that makes sense in retrospect (the connection between West Africa and New Orleans is one that Adjuah himself made very clear in his promotion of the record), but it's a left turn I certainly didn't see coming. Anyway, cool and interesting album, but one that only really coalesced into something I loved in its loping 15-minute title track, a more stripped back and somber song than many of the other compositions, with Adjuah intoning like a prophet over some picked string instrument (the liner notes aren't very specific) and Weedie Braimah's insistent, driving percussion.

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: "First Peoples"—I sometimes find what Idris Ackamoor does a little corny, but when he and the Pyramids hit, they hit. Exhibit A: this track, winding higher and higher around its reedy riff.

jamie branch: "burning grey"—RIP to weird jazz great jamie branch. Glad the third Fly or Die came together anyway. This track in particular rips.

Janelle Monáe: "Champagne Shit"—I could have picked any number of tracks from The Age of Pleasure, but I picked this one.

PJ Harvey: "The Nether-edge"—I wasn't a huge fan of the new PJ Harvey album, but this slinky, pulsing track lodged itself deep inside my brain and wouldn't leave.

Kieran Hebden & William Tyler: "Darkness, Darkness"—The "cosmic folk" great William Tyler working with Four Tet. I mean.

Octo Octa: "Late Night Love"—Kind of the consensus "this is the electronic dance track from this year that all the critics are into," and I dunno, critics can be right.

on4word: "Jigsaw Falling Into Place"—This is perilously close to a meme instead of real music, and the popularity of an album that recreated Radiohead's In Rainbows exclusively using samples from N64 games turned what was already a niche trend into a full-blown avalanche of imitators. But it's really good! Especially this song, which feels like boss music or maybe a really intense level where you have to outrun a robot while doing tricky platforming or something.

The Smile: "Bending Hectic"—And speaking of Radiohead, if we're not ever going to get a real new Radiohead album, I'll have to keep banging the drum for the almost Radiohead releases. When "Bending Hectic" changes gears, it thunders.

Spoon: "Sugar Babies"—Spoon just don't miss, and somehow it always sounds like something they just threw together in an hour. Surely false. Love the infectious shuffle of this one.

Xiu Xiu: "For M."—The moment when Xiu Xiu's album of already pitch-black sludge and terror pushes itself so far that it turns nearly ambient, and it's kind of beautiful.

Young Fathers: "I Saw"—I don't really understand what Young Fathers' whole deal is, and maybe that's their deal? The beginning of this song sounds furious, spitting out lyrics and that Viking-drum rock beat like venom, but then it morphs into something much sunnier and more anthemic? I can't parse it, but it's good.