Sometimes I try to take a few data points from the year’s movies and extrapolate a State of the Cinema Union address to introduce my annual best-of-the-year list. Not this year - let’s just get to it, shall we?
BONUS: Turn Every Page
This is actually a 2022 film that didn’t make its way into Houston (AFAIK) - a documentary about the lifelong collaboration of nonfiction author Robert Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb. It conveys the passion for craft and tension between two giants of literature who just might not speak to each other for a few weeks over a dispute about a semicolon.
13. Bottoms
A riotous comedy which navigates today’s conversations about sexuality and identity with a duo of hilariously flawed protagonists. Too many teen comedies play it safe - Bottoms is uncompromising, absurd, and we need more films like this.
12. The Boy and the Heron
What is possibly Hayao Miyazaki’s final feature film manages to encapsulate the qualities that comprise his canon - achingly beautiful images that can take everyday objects and imbue them with a magical sense of wonder; launching a mythical adventure through carefully chosen everyday details. Nobody does quiet moments better than Miyazaki: a light gust of breeze, a hand reaching into water, a pause before entering a door — somehow become poetic when rendered through his vision.
11. Leave the World Behind
I adore that this just dropped into my Netflix feed, not even aware of its existence beforehand. Did anyone know this was coming? It taps into the omnipresent techno-anxiety lurking behind every corner of contemporary life. Hitchcockian in the best way - a progressively cycling descent into societal collapse - focused in the limited perception of a tiny handful of characters.
10. American Fiction
An alternate title might be “The Other Side of Wokeness.” American Fiction examines the zeitgeist in diverse entertainment from the perspective of an African-American author who does not want to be reduced or commoditized based on his identity. Much of the discussion about the appeal of this film comes directly from the tensions and nuance about racial identity - but none of those concepts would work if not for the characters and relationships that are so expertly crafted. The sibling relationships in particular are extraordinary - conveying a shared family universe and history through conversational beats, glances, in-jokes, countenance - in a way that is fully realized. Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross portray a brother-sister relationship with a depth I haven’t seen since Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney in You Can Count on Me, and they manage to do it in far less screen time together.
9. Zone of Interest
A film comprised of variations on a theme—one visual concept, an arresting juxtaposition—modulated endlessly over the course of two hours. The banality of those complicit in the Holocaust depicted in bright and vivid colors, enjoying a Summer swim, enjoying a family meal, tending to their well-manicured gardens. A meditation that builds cumulatively—cultivating discomfort and ratcheting up the sensation minute by minute, scene by scene. The result is an inversion of the cinema of Terrence Malick; instead of pointing a camera at the majesty of nature and combining it with lyrical narration, Jonathan Glazer lingers upon mankind at its worst and combines it with unnerving music and sparse dialogue.
8. The Creator
The revolution will not be pre-vizualized. Director Gareth Edwards has blazed a trail for an entirely new way of making sci-fi films. Gone are the slavish restrictions of pre-visualized shot compositions and set-in-stone shot lists. Instead, with The Creator, he makes visual effects “backwards” - instead of pre-planning every aspect of an effect shot, he operates his own camera like a documentarian and puts off solving the effects problems until another day. The approach gives the film an immediacy and verisimilitude never seen in a genre film. Alas, the final act could’ve used a serious polish on the script - and the edit feels wrong in the end - at 2 hours and 13 minutes, the ending feels rushed - I wonder if there’s an eventual extended cut that will make this even better? But those quibbles aside, the images are stunning; I would not be surprised if the methodology behind this film inspires an entire generation of filmmakers in a fashion similar to the original Blade Runner.
7. The Taste of Things
There’s probably nothing I loathe more than spoilers but I’m going to spoil this movie because it’s un-spoilable. It’s set in France in the 1880s. Almost one third of this film is shots of people cooking food. The rest is people talking about food. That’s it. That’s the entire film. Sounds boring and abysmal, right? Wrong.
Based on the subject matter, I would’ve expected to hate this film. I am a terrible cook. I have fairly pedestrian tastes. When conversations turn culinary, I get bored. But as the great Roger Ebert said, “It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.”
I have no idea what’s going on in these 1880s French kitchens, but the authenticity and attention to detail is staggering. I do not understand cooking, but I do relate to obsession and passion for craft. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life geeking out with fellow movie and comics nerds - and this film is about that dynamic. The universal experience of devoted fandom and creative expertise. What it’s like to devote yourself utterly to an obsession and find joy in the details, to be thrilled by the process of deconstructive appreciation, to savor those moments with reverence and hope that somehow, if we can just systematize those creative acts with sufficient precision, we can try to experience that sensation again.
6. Killers of the Flower Moon
Scorsese finally unites the two actors who’ve carried the majority of his canon—Leo and Bob. For years I’ve wondered what kind of project could be special enough for both DiCaprio and De Niro to feel equally represented in the material. And when, if, that would ever occur, how they would compete with each other on-screen.
The funny thing is, as brilliant as Leo and Bob are in this, they both ended up playing second fiddle to Lily Gladstone.
5. Poor Things
An audacious and singular demented fairy tale—a creative vision the likes of which we haven’t seen since early Tim Burton or David Lynch—operating by its own rules. It’s also formulated to give Emma Stone the opportunity to bring to screen a stunning array of emotions, practically running the gamut of the human condition with just one character. The role, as written, is almost like a contrived set of exercises from every actor’s workshop in Los Angeles. But that’s what’s ingenious about it; the actor is given the freedom to have a deep journey through a human life, but on a vastly accelerated time scale.
4. Maestro
With Maestro, Bradly Cooper has invented the anti-Biopic. He has taken the idea of the Standard Hollywood Biographical Movie, with its straight chronological faithful retelling of all the important beats of a figure’s life, and said fuck that. Instead of showing all the scenes you’re expecting to be there - Cooper has decided to make his film exist entirely between those standard moments. The result is a stunning success both in terms of story and performance. His Leonard Bernstein emerges not as a highlight reel, but rather as a fully-dimensional human being. We do not witness most of his biggest moments, but instead get to linger and hang out with him. Observe him with his guard down. This voyeuristic approach creates a mosaic, a more fully realized character, and I would expect a number of future biographical films to take their cues from Maestro.
3. The Holdovers
The movie that most comes to mind when I think about The Holdovers is Dead Poets Society. Both films are about younger students at an elite school who are led toward adulthood via a teacher. The difference is that, while Dead Poets’ John Keating played by Robin Williams desperately wants to inspire his students, The Holdovers’ Paul Hunham played by Paul Giamatti wants to give his students homework and detention.
Giamatti gives what is perhaps a career-best performance in this wintery tale. One of my favorite “genres” of films are those that could be called the “Some characters spend an intense and compressed period of time together, go through some serious shit, and now are bonded for life” genre, and in that category The Holdovers immediately becomes one of the best of the format.
2. Oppenheimer
Not what I was expecting. I think they’ve been showing trailers for this for three years now. And yet, with all of that hype and build-up, I was expecting a fairly predictable story: Nazis bad, Nazis might get bomb, we need make bomb, we make bomb, bomb goes boom. Even that simple version of the story could be masterful in the hands of Christopher Nolan, but what we got in Oppenheimer is so much more than that. It’s one part who’s-who of modern physics, one part science and engineering project, and one part courtroom drama.
I highly recommend watching the “making of” documentary on the Oppenheimer blu-ray. One of the things it illuminates is just how challenging Cilian Murphy’s job was on the sets of this movie. Since Nolan wanted to shoot the entire film in IMAX, even the quieter moments, it placed extraordinary demands on Murphy, practically being put under by a microscope for every shot. A microscope that captures images that eventually are projected on a 72-foot-tall screen.
1. Across the Spider-Verse
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, for the second year in a row, I feel the best film of the year is a multiverse-themed work. And that in recent years, we’ve had a multiverse of multiverses, be it Everything Everywhere All at Once, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Not only does the world we live in currently feel like it’s one version of an infinity of possibilities, it feels like we all know we’re in a shitty slice of the multiverse. If the grass is always greener on the other side, it’s gonna be even greenier when the other side is an entirely different Earth altogether.
Somehow, this follow-up chapter not only managed to continue the zig-zag/cut-paste/jitter aesthetic of Into the Spider-Verse but expand it with the epically stylized Indian-like Mumbattan and the futuristic Earth-928 where seemingly every pixel is packed with an alternate version of Spider-Man.
The two hours and twenty minutes of this film flew by. Every minute was a thrill. I saw it five times in the theater. Even though I’d loved the first film in this series, I had very low expectations for this film. I chalked the creative and financial success of the first one to a fluke. I was so happy to be so wrong about that. And I’ll be going into the third with low expectations again. Lightning can’t strike this brightly thrice, can it? I sure hope it can.