by
Julien Faddoul
10. A Thousand and One (AV Rockwell, USA)
Teyana Taylor’s utterly believable performance as a mother and Rikers ex-convict that struggles to cogently shape a good life for she and her son is what’s chiefly arresting about this 2023 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner. But to dismiss the film as another kitchen-sink family drama from Sundance would be a grave mistake. First time director AV Rockwell has made a confident, skilfully filmed old-fashioned sermon on the slow gentrification of the small enclaves of NYC throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The foreground drama and the background commentary dove together beautiful, hampered only in the final act, when Rockwell relies on the kind of writerly character revelations that work better on the stage.
9. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, France)
Justine Triet’s cerebral, engrossing drama works very well as an intellectual courtroom puzzle but even better as a dissection of a strained marriage after it has dissolved. Much of the discourse devoted to the film since it premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival (where it was honoured with the Palme d’Or) has focused on its central mystery, which is odd since this critic never found it all that mysterious. Its emotional strength is closer to that of an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama sharply scrutinising the curious but eerie situation Triet’s characters have found themselves in. It benefits greatly from a wonderful attention to dramatic details, and from Sandra Hüller’s intelligent lead performance.
8. May December (Todd Haynes, USA)
Based on the scandal of Washington State sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau, this is a campy, semi-comic attack on the sensationalist approach the modern culture has taken to provocative true-crime stories. Natalie Portman plays an actress doing research for a film about the fictional equivalent of Letourneau and husband Vili Fualaau (Julianne More and Charles Melton). The film indulges in hilarious depictions of prosaic cinematic symbolism – a speech on sex scenes that disconcerts a room of high school students; an early morning hunting walk on the day of an imperative graduation ceremony; a butterfly rearing hobby, the irony of which no character is wise enough to ascertain. The performances are also uniformly excellent here, particularly Portman's. As with all of Haynes’ work, this is about finding your way to the people who understand you, and in giving equal flavour not only to the victims and victimisers but to all those who endeavour to probe he forms a fascinating, unsettling and biting combination.
7. The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng, France)
Watching Trần Anh Hùng’s immaculate The Taste of Things is to watch a highwire act in sensory illustration. The film begins with about 40 minutes of footage of our characters simply (or perhaps not so simply) preparing a meal. Throughout that time Hung establishes a romance not just between the characters, and not just by the food being prepared, but also between the audience and his cinematic cadence. The sights, the sounds, even the smells all feel tangible, photographed with great care and visual style. The story depicted could not be simpler: Set in France in the 1880s, a wealthy gourmand and his cook share a love of food and for one another, until one of them becomes gravely ill. Some may find this romance of art, food and companionship to be a mere trifle, but cinematic trifles are rarely this evocative.
6. The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan)
The first film in 10 years by the living filmmaker I most revere. Set right in the middle of Japan’s participation during the Pacific War, a young boy whose mother has died moves from Tokyo to the country where his father has opted to marry his late wife’s sister. What follows is a calm yet elating onrush of stream-of-conscience phantasmagoria of the kind that Miyazaki’s peers come nowhere close to. It is a film about the grief that one undergoes when one realises they cannot control everything. Whether it is the death of one parent, the marriage of another, the disintegration of a world without malice or the irritating realisation that there are no more cigarettes for you to bargain for. For me, my great sorrow is in the fact that I don't have the power to keep this majestic filmmaker alive forever. The day he finally leaves the earth will be one of the saddest of my life.
5. Passages (Ira Sachs, France)
If the year 2023 had a cultural theme it was what I would call Post Sexual-Revolution Revolution. We live in comical times where sex, both in media and in life, is experienced through unusual avenues and perceived with awkward judgemental assessment, especially by young people. Modern-day filmmakers have already realised this (at least before a dummy like me did) and many have chosen to galvanise audiences with brave attempts at sexual exegesis, some fascinating and some not. May December, All of Us Strangers, Kokomo City, Fair Play, Infinity Pool, Saltburn, Bottoms, Eileen, Sanctuary and my #1 film on this list all confront sexual desire and relationships with unabashed candour. Ira Sach’s Passages might be the frankest and Mubi, the film’s US distributor, was forced to release the film with no MPAA rating, after that rationally moribund organisation slapped the film with an NC-17 rating. The film itself is a gripping, Rohmer-esque depiction of the psychological damage that careless people wreak on their partners, whether the relationships are “traditional” or not. Tomas, a German filmmaker based in Paris (Franz Rogowski, magnificent here) cheats on his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) with a female primary school teacher who interned on his latest film (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Tomas cruelly yet pathetically then goes on to use each of them in an attempt to fill an emotional destitution he has yet to acknowledge. Formally, Sachs has never been better, staging and editing the disintegration of both relationships beautifully through a series of unpleasant intellectual arguments, hateful jabs and, as I insinuated earlier, uninterrupted scenes of wanton gratification. In the end, he allows us to decide whether anyone here has sufficiently learned their lesson or if usury is a deep-rooted pitfall.
4. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, USA)
For many cinephiles, when it becomes clear that a filmmaker’s intentions will be indecipherable, a kind of exhilaration seems to kick in. This usually occurs around the 45-minute mark and often serves as a reminder that everything in art is about context. In this case, the context is placing Killers of the Flower Moon within the oeuvre of probably the most important living filmmaker. It’s a work that’s full of surprises, but they are of the implementation variety. The film plays essentially like Goodfellas (1990) if Henry Hill’s crimes were all psychological coercion instead of for his love of the gangster life. Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart is our window into that psychology and it’s a dizzying emotional ride. Based on David Grann’s non-fiction book, this 206-minute film depicts the small-scale genocide of the Osage Nation during the 1920s in Oklahoma, but unlike Grann’s book, which is told from the point of view of the FBI, Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth focus on Burkhart’s marriage to Osage Indian Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone, exceptional).
This is a film about regret. The regret for past criminal behaviour, the regret of being blind to the fact that one was in a toxic marriage, and the regret of a national atrocity without any probable reparative amends that would seem effective or even beneficial after such a period of time. Scorsese softens his usual robust, muscular approach – as he has done more and more in this late stage of his career eg. Silence (2016) and I Heard You Paint Houses (2019) – for something more elegant and purified, rhythmically emphasizing the casualness of the routine barbarity within a select community. It's long, deliberate and doesn't really provide any formal or narrative revelations. But surprising and insightful needn't be transposable, and the ending has been justifiably lauded for the thematic gut-punch it truly is.
3. Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, USA)
There are few filmmakers working today who treat their audiences as intelligently as Kelly Reichardt. The mixture of her generosity of characterisation and her slow tempo almost always bolsters a kind of humanity that proves irresistible. In Showing Up, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor and arts administrator assistant for the Oregon College of Art and Craft. As an individual she is eminently irritating even though she is often unequivocally correct. She deals with her stressful family as well as her flighty landlord and neighbour Jo, a rival artist who is both more accomplished and more successful. After providing you with that outline, you might conjure in your mind something parodic or even demeaning. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a more concentrated and unaffected depiction of a milieu this year; Reichardt fills her film with intermediate spaces (shots) of mundane proceedings, all of which are soothingly recognisable. Showing Up is the rarest of movies: one with no mockery whatsoever.
2. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, UK/Poland/USA)
Any film that would, on its surface, fall into the “conceptually bold” category will always be received with proportionate amounts of regard and dismissal. But Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, has also proved to me to be contradictory in the general public’s assessment of it. Much of what’s been written about the film seems to interpret it as a kind of art-show piece, a sensory experience into a bizarre time and location in humanity’s history. That’s all perfectly valid, but for me the film was much more of a fable, a fictionalized reconstruction of specific people in history that brilliantly traps the audience in a dual cognition of both what happened then and what could very easily happen in the future. It’s slightly odd for me to define the experience as fable-like, since Glazer’s film is actually much closer to historical events than Martin Amis’ book on which the film is based. The novel depicts a love triangle between the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, his wife and a Nazi officer, all of whom are tagged with fictional names. But literature is a different medium, and the brilliance of Glazer’s tactic here is cinema supreme, and I find it hard thinking of any literary equivalent to the kind of experience the film induces.
The film depicts the commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), as they and their children live in a house and garden next to the camp, until he is promoted and told they must move back to Germany. The film begins, and then it ends. We observe their family life, until we close on the same black screen that was seen at the beginning. All the while, beyond the garden wall, gunshots, shouting, and sounds of trains and furnaces are audible. It was shot with Sony Venice digital cameras equipped with Leica lenses which were embedded on the set and kept running simultaneously. Each take was accomplished sans any crew on set, allowing the performers to play out their scenes in isolation of the outside world. Make of this what you will, and some critics have dismissed it as a formal exercise that may achieve the opposite effect intended, but it’s certainly impossible to ignore.
1. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, USA/UK/Ireland)
At a time when so many films – including (evidently) some of the most venerated – lack the basic artistic competency of shape, cohesion and nuance, Poor Things is such an easy film simply to regard. Even if that weren’t the case, Yorgos Lanthimos’ delicious science fiction fantasy contains about as much “movie” as any handpicked selection of 50 bad movies I saw this year. I feel unintentionally sardonic putting it that way because Poor Things actually has a kind of shapelessness to it. But it’s a rockiness that somehow also feels utterly anchored, buoyed by the writing and the acting. Ever since his wonderful Dogtooth (2010), I’ve been fairly unimpassioned with Lanthimos’ succeeding output, mostly due to what I feel are the derivative and erratic compositional affectations that he indulges in. Those certainly remain, but the bizzarro premise (based on the Scottish novel by Alasdair Gray) allows a company of artists to cook with fuel and create both the most thrilling entertainment and stimulating dissertation of the year. Meticulous sets and costumes by James Price, Shona Heath and Holly Waddington, a finely tuned use of the zoom lens by Robbie Ryan and exemplary dialogue by Tony McNamara.
Brought back to life by a genius but certainly nutty scientist (Willem Dafoe), a young woman in Victorian London named Bella Baxter (or is she?) tracks a quixotic and circuitous route to the understanding of human equality and true liberation. Emma Stone is Bella in what amounts to a performance of not only astonishing technical precision but also of superb wit and dexterity. Psychologically, she ages throughout the film from infant to adult and we are at all times acutely aware of each stage of her development. She is a marvellous creation and her scenes chiefly with a debauched lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo are comedically exquisite.
It is a savage comedy with several hilarious sequences, fascinating global scenic design and brilliant leading performances. It delightfully skewers the inanity of adulthood, primarily sexual etiquette and gender politics, with an amplified sense of the general oddness of life, as seen through the eyes of its central human brainchild. And for me the film is best summarized by itself, a line of dialogue from a French Madam played by Kathryn Hunter: “We must experience everything, not just the good, but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole. Then we can know the world. And when we know the world, the world is ours.”
Honourable Mentions:
All of Us Strangers
Kokomo City
Menus Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Wonka
