The year’s best films go unappreciated.
The media catchphrase “Barbenheimer” confirmed H. L. Mencken’s cynical proverb: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” It also revealed how pathetic 2023 movie culture became, compressing sales campaigns for two corporate products, neither of which were quality entertainment. This year’s Better-Than List reveals how such cultural gaslighting matched ongoing political gaslighting. More than ever, you needed independent thinking to appreciate good movies over junk.
Chad Stahelski climaxed the Keanu Reeves cult franchise with the year’s most visually, kinetically thrilling filmcraft. Movement is the perfect antidote to Christopher Nolan’s no-fun talkathon. Stahelski’s execution of dazzling choreographed combat extended silent-era and movie-musical slapstick — confronting mankind’s capacity for self-defense killing as a sublime moral act. He made antipathetic video-game artifice feel cathartic, unlike a nihilistic pseudo-history. Nolan, as ever, twists national defense into wearying social complexity. Hail the action genre gone nuclear, not pompous.
Rebel Moon > Killers of the Flower Moon
Zack Snyder, Stahelski’s only rival, knows what Godard knew: Myth is how we learn who we are. So Snyder remakes the childish Star Wars series into rousing adult moral lessons, whereas Martin Scorsese succumbs to America’s current self-loathing in his first political film (and first Western)— a bland epic superficially preoccupied with white supremacy. It shows Scorsese learned nothing from John Ford.
All of Us Strangers > Saltburn
Andrew Haigh’s pop-melodrama finds family-based emotion in the erotic awakening of lonely Brit Andrew Scott. Emerald Fennell’s phony analysis of England’s class system attacks the family unit through feminist/sexual transgression. A triumph commemorating Pet Shop Boys sophistication vs. a disaster that perverts a great Pet Shop Boys song.
The Taste of Things > Maestro
Tran Anh Hung’s exquisite re-creation of French culinary dedication practiced by Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel. It embarrasses the disingenuous dishonesty of Bradley Cooper’s autograph-hound pseudo-biography that toasts Leonard Bernstein’s political, sexual dissembling as modern virtue.
Winter Boy > May December
Christophe Honoré dares candid semi-autobiography in a coming-of-age story about Paul Kircher’s coming-of–personal responsibility. It bests another dishonest Todd Haynes academic thesis, this time indulging pedophilia as social defiance and artistic audacity.
Wes Anderson’s sunny, stylized nostalgic adolescent outing recalls America’s natural diversity in the ’50s, back when we believed in social, scientific, and artistic potential. Celine Song’s sad-sack narcissism prefers a tribal, Buddhist excuse for immaturity and social disconnection.
João Pedro Rodrigues interrogates Western art, sex, and politics when Portuguese heir Mauro Costa protests his heritage by becoming a dancing firefighter. This is genuine cultural radicalism, surreal and funny. Unlike Greta Gerwig’s toy-feminism, a marketing coup that sold misandry and ineptitude alongside vapid white privilege — all the more biased in its supporting cast of diversity tokens.
Everything Went Fine > Passages
François Ozon’s broken-family drama in which Sophie Marceau accepts the weirdness of her father André Dussollier as like her own. But Ira Sachs equates queerness with generational selfishness. Healing vs. rupture.
Nobody’s Hero > American Fiction
Alain Guiraudie teases French liberalism when middle-class Jean-Charles Clichet harbors a Muslim terrorist and then falls in love with middle-aged hooker Noémie Lvovksy. Hypocrisy becomes farce whereas Cord Jefferson practices the same racial hypocrisy as the black pathology trend of American lit that he pretends to satirize. Deep vs. shallow.
Full River Red > Origin and Rustin
Zhang Yimou’s visually stunning ode to China’s warrior history is a movie to marvel at and heed. Ava DuVernay extolling Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s intellectual research into the global “root causes” of American racism is off-the-charts ludicrous. So is George Wolfe’s inadvertent civil-rights-era comedy Rustin. Strong, artful patriotism vs. Hollywood weakness.
Eric Gravel’s empathy with Laure Calamy’s stressed young mother seeking pride and self-sufficiency teaches something real and non-cliché about working-class identity to indie-movie smarty-pants Alexander Payne.
The Crime Is Mine > Poor Things
François Ozon’s delirious feminist farce captures the inanity of the #MeToo movement. His cinematic and theatrical artifice goes back through the history of sexual duplicity, while art fraud Yorgos Lanthimos defends feminist hypocrisy in his odious sexual horror comedy.
Thanksgiving > Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie
Eli Roth has made the first movie to evoke J6, not shying away from how national chaos was distorted and misunderstood by mainstream corporate media. Brash, hilarious Roth satirizes American self-destruction, leaving Nolan, Scorsese, and Gerwig with moral and ideological blood on their hands.