BW/DR Picks: The Best of 2023

*Killers of the Flower Moon* | photo: Apple TV+

Depending on your vantage point, 2023 was a rather fantastic year for films. Sure, there are naysayers, there always are, but for those of us who love nothing more than to lose ourselves in a movie for a couple of hours, well, there was a whole lot to get lost in last year. So without further ado, here are some thoughts on what got us through 2023…

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Elizabeth Cantwell:

10 of My Favorite 2023 Moments on Film

10. The ending of The Pope’s Exorcist

Okay, this is sort of on here as a goof. But also: when Russell Crowe and his sad sack sidekick who really should have died go to the Vatican and are praised for their work and then shown the secret Vatican room with a bunch of Spanish Inquisition maps marking the location of demon/Buffy-style Hellmouth wells, a moment occurs that made me among the most joyful I felt watching a movie this year. Russell Crowe asks how many more sites there are with demons that he’ll need to exorcise, which clearly seems like the set-up for a sequel. And the Vatican guy tells him there are 199 more sites. One hundred ninety-nine! I laughed out loud. Obviously there will not be 199 Pope’s Exorcist movies. But if there were, I would be in! I think mostly I just loved the bold insanity of a number that high. It’s rare to find a bad movie that knows what it is and telegraphs its identity so clearly.

9. “Once in a Lifetime,” Stop Making Sense

All riiiight, it’s kind of a cheat putting Stop Making Sense on here, but its 2023 re-release in theaters was a true gift for a fan like me. I dragged some friends who had never seen it to our local cinema and promised them they would love it and I think they did, but I loved it the most. I’ve seen this film multiple times and a different part strikes me each time, but on a big screen, in a theater, it was David Byrne’s performance of “Once in a Lifetime” that really got me. Maybe it’s being middle-aged or being a parent or having a tough year or watching the world burn around me or all of the above, but the energy and lighting and power of this song was exactly what I needed.

8. The sleeveless dress scene, May December

If you watched this film you know what I’m talking about. That moment when Julianne Moore says “You’re so brave to show your arms like that”—a true stunner of a line delivery. It brings her character into sudden, ugly focus: the way she effortlessly inhabits a seemingly genuine manipulation of others. In one line we understand that this is a woman who knows how to get her way no matter the consequences—how to railroad the other person in any interaction into feeling that they had to do what they did. Todd Haynes, of course, is also a master of the visual moment; give me any scene in mirrors like that and I’m head over heels.

7. Gwen’s confrontation with her father, Across the Spider-Verse

I fell hard for the visuals of this movie, and also found myself really loving the thinly-veiled coming-out metaphor of Gwen’s struggle to tell her father that she’s the Spider-Woman he’s been tracking. In lesser hands it might have felt overplayed, but the movie allows you to feel these resonances without also feeling like they’ve been didactically telegraphed. The scene where Gwen finally removes her mask—only to have her father see her and continue to point a gun at her—is beautifully composed, and imbued with emotion in a way most animated films struggle to achieve.

6. The scene at Anna’s grave, Killers of the Flower Moon

I didn’t love Killers of the Flower Moon the way I wanted to, but there was a lot to admire in this movie—especially the performances from both Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone. The scene where their characters meet at the cemetery where their daughter is being interred—Ernest handcuffed, out temporarily from jail where he is being held for his involvement in the Osage murders, and Molly finally recovered from Ernest’s slow poisoning of her—sees each actor elevating the other in a way I wanted more of from other parts of the film. There’s such nuance and complexity in this moment. As a viewer, you’re struggling to reconcile the love these two people had and still have for each other with the vile and ugly pain Ernest has quite literally injected into their relationship, and each actor works to convey layers of betrayal and confusion and vulnerability in their few lines. How can you grieve a child with someone who tried to kill you? How can you watch someone you love waste away into nothingness, holding their hand while you hasten their death? I would give both Leo and Lily Oscars for just this scene if I could!

5. The 27-minute long single-take scene on the boat in Season 4, Episode 3 of Succession

Sure, not a film, but if you’ve seen Succession you’ll probably agree that this scene deserves a place on this list. It wasn’t until about ten minutes in that I started realizing it was one take and was going to stay one take for quite a long time—and then my attention turned to intense admiration, all while I also felt myself plunged into the emotions of each of the Roy siblings as they hear about their father’s death. Honestly top-tier visual and emotional storytelling. It hit all the right buttons for me.

4. The Fiat 500 car chase in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

I get the critiques of this movie, I do! But tell me this scene doesn’t bring you joy! If I were Marie Kondo I would not throw it out!! The slapstick energy that Tom Cruise harbors but so rarely gets to indulge in—the propulsive camera work—the enjoyable claustrophobia of the tiny electric vehicle—the silly chemistry imposed by the handcuffs—I loved it! I think I was smiling the whole time. More action sequences like this, please.

3. Daniel’s testimony (both scenes), Anatomy of a Fall

There’s so much I could go on and on about in this movie. Some really subtly fascinating camera work, a boatload of insanely nuanced performances, a pitch-perfect dog, a marital fight that continues to trouble me in its relatability (raise your hand if you are married to a writer and have had tension over who is working/who is doing childcare) even through its relatively extreme expression. But the performance of Milo Machado Graner as Daniel anchors the movie, and the two scenes in which he delivers his testimony to the court completely absorbed me. The moment during that first scene when you realize the camera is rotating from side to side to indicate the direction of his hearing and imitate his inability to see the lawyers throwing their lawn dart questions at him: simply brilliant.

2. The “Who abandoned Snoopy in the vestibule?” scene, Maestro

I had mixed feelings about this movie but this scene is a winner. First of all, it’s immediately quotable—I can’t count how many times my husband has already muttered this in the house, and I’m online enough to have seen others quoting it, as well. Bradley Cooper’s line delivery—in that weird voice!—is an instant classic. Secondly, though, the sequence that follows, in which Leonard Bernstein and Felicia confront some of the thorny issues in their marriage that refuse to go away, is perfectly directed. Cooper’s choice to shoot the whole thing in wide (no close-ups!) as we watch the truncated top of the Thanksgiving Parade pass by the window was bold, and, for me, it works exactly the way he wanted it to. To see the whole couple, from both sides at once, in all their stubborn maze of repression and vivacity—I loved it.

1. The moment Joe sees his children graduate from high school, May December

Yeah, I gave May December two spots on my list, because in my mind it was the best movie of the year, no question. I struggled to decide whether I thought this moment or the scene on the roof between Joe and his son Charlie was stronger; both showcase the way Charles Melton’s standout performance grounds the film in a terrible sadness and regret that can’t be brushed away easily. This moment, though—Joe watching not from the stands but from a side gate—really got to me. In Melton’s face, you can see pride in his children; grief at watching them achieve a milestone he never got to reach; and a deep fear of what his immediate future looks like when he leaves this sunny field. I was stunned by it. Here’s to a 2024 rich with many awards for Charles Melton and Todd Haynes.

Looking over this list, it seems like what I valued in 2023 was joy and nuance—two qualities I’ve been hard-pressed to see in my daily interactions with the wider world. Maybe that’s what I’ll take with me into the coming year: a desire to keep seeing joy and nuance wherever I can.

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Carrie Courogen:

Top Ten New to Me (but not new releases) of 2023

Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939)

A comedy from 1939 about capitalism and socialism, living off the necessities for survival versus deriving joy from overconsumption, and fear of Russian agents? Relevant and downright delightful in 2023? Who would have guessed!

Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)

I’m not a huge fan of noir, but I am a fan of films about people so hypnotized by lust that they do the dumbest things imaginable and mess up spectacularly. What better example of that trope than this?

Summertime (Lean, 1955)

Katharine Hepburn traversing every nuance of being a single woman—both its liberating freedom and its devastating loneliness— in a world that often seems designed for couples, under David Lean’s empathetic direction, all on location in Italy? I wept so hard I hyperventilated.

Auntie Mame (DaCosta, 1958)

Stunningly deranged, campy, and unexpectedly soft. An utter joy! Incredible to think there was a time in cinema when you could just make a two and a half hour long epic about something like the life of one eccentric woman who lived in the early twentieth century!

Sweet Charity (Fosse, 1969)

A delirious, delicious romp, at once over the top and perfectly reigned in, calculated within the nth degree. Saw at Film Forum with the intermission in tact and respected, and I must say…bring back intermissions in 2024!!!

Network (Lumet, 1976)

Extremely cool that media has not changed one bit in nearly 50 years! Now if only we could make more movies about how much everything sucks with as much wit—and as gloriously shot—as this!

Saint Jack (Bogdanovich, 1979)

I started 2023 by giving myself a “project” to watch every single film—good, bad, depressingly made-for-tv, and everything in between—of Peter Bogdanovich’s canon. While I failed miserably at that endeavor, I did manage to finally watch this breezy and charming picture. Like my favorite Bogdanovich film, They All Laughed, Saint Jack soars on the strength of Ben Gazzara’s deeply lived-in performance, Bogdanovich’s mining of his personal life rather than the work of old greats, and its loose and slightly renegade production.

The Right Stuff (Kaufman, 1983)

An incredible magic act: A sweeping space cowboy epic docudrama and a critique of American myth making disguised as a classic kind of All-American Prestige Summer Blockbuster About Men and Space.

Noises Off… (Bogdanovich, 1992)

Another gem that I probably would have dismissed had it not been for the failed Bogdanovich Full Filmography 2023 Challenge. The film adaptation of the stage farce is wonderfully chaotic, completely insane, and manages to capture theatricality on film without becoming overly stagey. An underrated slapstick gem!

Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In (Beatty, 2023)

Hard to call this 25 minute long TCM special a “film” or a “new release,” although something about it counts as enough of one for Warren Beatty to hang onto the film rights to Dick Tracy until the character goes into public domain in 2027. Still, Tracy Zooms In was perhaps one of the most surreal viewing experiences I had all year, an unhinged fever dream of a program, simultaneously self-aware and self-indulgent, brilliant and stupid. I have to give it up to Beatty. The move is petty and narcissistic, sure, but it somehow circles around to benevolent: There’s no reason why he should be the only filmmaker allowed to make a Dick Tracy movie, but there’s also no telling what corporate entity would just as soon gobble up the existing IP to turn it into “content” instead! Thanks for sparing us, WB!

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Frank Falisi:

Maybe the fallacy of “a year in cinema” lies in thinking through any collection of cultural objects as a line ray instead of a constellation. I like the list form as much as any person who dawdled in the margins of middle school notebooks, but mostly I like a list that can be remade and remounted. Entries are made for moving around. They are moved by their environs and neighbors, a phenomenon I hope to share in. Move me around!

And isn’t the collation of a list just as impacted by its absences as its inclusions? This one was made without the wisdom of seeing All Of Us Strangers, Trenque Lauquen, Our Body. There are so many movies to watch. The best film I watched this year was Annie Baker’s Janet Planet but they tell me that it belongs to next year. Aren’t the best things about “best lists” the corona around them, the intersection point between you and movie? I watched May December in Staten Island, NY which is like Savannah, GA with a head cold. Martin Scorsese made a movie that got both of my parents into the same theater audience for the first time since the Clinton Administration. What is the word for driving past the Lower Trenton Bridge (“TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES”) twice in one night to see The Sweet East a state away?

This isn’t a top ten. Maybe it’s a second ten, or a sideways top. The poetry of list-making is how it descends a page, a kind of burrowing even as it aspires to the act of accumulation. Here then, is an orbit of films, art in the undergrowth, a mixing metaphor for a thing better simply said: there are so many movies to watch.

A Confucian Confusion + Mahjong (Edward Yang)

Buddies (Arthur J. Bressan Jr.)

Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma)

Geographies of Solitude (Jacquelyn Mills)

It’s What Each Person Needs (Sophy Romvari)

Maestro (Bradley Cooper)

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)

Monster (Kore-ada)

Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie)

Will-o’-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues)

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Kellie Herson:

My 10 Favorite Things I Watched for the First Time in 2023, in Alphabetical Order

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022): Solidified my belief that the most effective way an individual person can effect meaningful change is by gatekeeping odious people from the communities to which we belong.

Coco Gauff winning a Major (2023): It’s December and I still get teary every time I see this in an ESPN montage. I’m tearing up writing about it now! Because I’m an elder millennial and long-time tennis fan, many of my lifelong favorite players have aged out of the sport over the last few seasons, but it’s hard to stay sad about that when there are so many talented, endearing young players to cheer for.

@jetlagthegame YouTube channel (2022-present): I moved in with my boyfriend this fall, which means I’m learning a lot about YouTube culture—some of it bad (@GugaFoods, I will see you in hell where you will finally face punishment for your meat crimes), much of it good. But none of it is as great as @jetlagthegame, which follows three friends as they compete against each other in a series of complex, travel-based challenges. Every episode is smart/informative/creative/strategic and goofy as hell in equal measure, and it’s also an extremely pure representation of young adult friendship.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023): What more is there to say at this point? It’s basically perfect as both a standalone film and a lens that clarifies everything Scorsese created before it. The production design is impeccable. I cried at the end because of the ending itself, whereas I normally cry at the end of a new Scorsese because I get so depressed about his mortality. Lily Gladstone deserves the world. Also, Robert DeNiro’s driving goggles, lmao.

Lincoln (2012): I don’t know why I hadn’t seen this sooner, but I loved it. An excellent Tony Kushner script, a perfect Daniel Day-Lewis performance, and endless opportunities to point at the screen and name character actors — what more does a film need?

Primary (1960): My corollary to my boyfriend making me watch YouTube is that I make him watch movies he’s never seen before, which is basically all of them, which is why I haven’t seen that many new-to-me titles this year. This summer we watched The War Room, the Criterion edition of which includes an essay by Louis Menand that referenced Primary, which we immediately had to watch on Max due to the Wisconsin politics of it all. It’s a fascinating documentary in both content and form, but most importantly, it contains footage from a Kennedy campaign event in which someone gets on a loudspeaker and begs everyone to please stop smoking for just 20 minutes, which made us laugh so hard we had to press pause. Perfect moment, 10/10, no notes.

Real Housewives of Miami season 6 (2023-24): Even though Vanderpump Rules got the lion’s share of attention, I firmly believe that Miami is 2023’s Bravo crown jewel, and that’s why I’m giving it the one reality-television slot I’ve allowed myself on this list. (Honorable mentions go to Meredith Marks’s compelling accent work on this season of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and Sonja Morgan accidentally calling Ashley Madison “Dolley Madison” on the latest season of Ultimate Girls’ Trip.) I love Miami for the same reasons I love @jetlagthegame: it’s a beautiful depiction of friendship that gracefully threads the needle between depth and stupidity. Name one other TV show that could serve up an iconic episode that covers both the aftermath of a cancer diagnosis and an argument between friends about corn farts!

Somebody Somewhere season 2 (2023): As you may have gleaned from prior entries on this list, I am an easy mark for narratives above friendship, and Somebody Somewhere is one of the all-time greats. A kind-hearted depiction of the importance of community that resists naivete and simplicity, Somebody Somewhere reflects a deep understanding of the spiritual urgency of just hanging out, and also, it features a scene of Bridgett Everett singing Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”

Telemarketers (2023): I don’t want to shock you all but, to me, Telemarketers is above all else a story about friendship. Yes, it’s an effort to excavate layers upon layers of grotesque corruption, but at the bottom of all that is an ode to the way that a shitty job creates deep, lasting bonds with people you would otherwise never have met. The second we finished the miniseries, I texted all my cherished work friends of yore demanding that they watch it immediately.

You Hurt My Feelings (2023): I’m both mad at myself for not watching this sooner and thrilled with myself for waiting until this fall so the Beetlejuice Playbill joke could really hit. Is this mid-tier Nicole Holofcener? Yes—and that automatically makes it leagues better than most other things.

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Fran Hoepfner:

My Top 10 Theatrical Experiences of 2023 (ranked in the order I saw them)

Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan, 2023) @ Providence Place Cinemas 16. I saw this with fellow BWDR staffer Veronica Fitzpatrick. Six minutes before the end of the movie, the only other guy in the theater took a phone call saying, “What’s up? Movie’s almost over.”

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) @ Metrograph. Can you believe I’d never seen Jaws?!

Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015) @ Film at Lincoln Center. I lost track of what was the ambient noise of the movie and what was the ambient noise of a theater. A bit like going into a sensory deprivation tank (a thing I did for the first time later in the year).

Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004) @ Metrograph. You guys seen this???

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023) @ Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn. It’s crazy to see a movie and realize fifteen minutes in how much you are loving it. The feeling I hope for every time I sit down in a theater!

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-Wai, 2007) @ The Roxy Cinema. I was told for years this was “lesser” and “corny.” Good news: it’s neither.

Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023) @ IFC Center. It took me until my second, in-theaters viewing to really get a handle on what Sachs (and Rogowski, especially) are doing here. A laugh and a half.

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher (2023) @ Film at Lincoln Center & Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023) @ David Geffen Hall. CAN YOU BELIEVE I SAW THESE MOVIES THE SAME DAY?

A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019) @ MOMI. I cry and cry and cry.

Anyone But You (2023) @ Regal Essex. You’ll have to just text me about this one.

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Chad Perman:

1. Asteroid City

For the past 20 years, I’ve had to watch every single Wes Anderson movie for the first time by myself (except for Isle of Dogs, which we saw together as a family), and so I mostly associate them with being alone, but this year everything changed: my daughter—who, in Bright Wall/Dark Room‘s earliest days, did artwork for her favorite movie as a six year old (Frozen) for our first ever “Best Of” issue—is somehow now a teenager who made a “Wes Anderson inspired short film” for a film class last year, bought me a Wes Anderson t-shirt for Father’s Day, and agreed to go with me to Asteroid City a month before it came out. It was everything you could ask for in life: a great movie and a wonderful human being to watch it with. And then wouldn’t you know it, Wes ended up making the saddest, smartest, most inventive and wonderful thing I saw all year.

2. Oppenheimer

There is a 100% chance that I’ll casually be saying “I saw Oppenheimer in Norway” for decades. But that is largely because, I saw Oppenheimer in Norway. Or rather, we were in Norway during Barbenheimer, and my son (now a teenager too) really wanted to see a movie with me, and really wanted that movie to be Oppenheimer. So one night in Bergen near the tail end of the trip, we packed into a small, crowded theater together and proceeded to watch the best movie Christopher Nolan has ever made (yes, I said it). And on our walk back, my son told me it was the best movie he’d ever seen.¹

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

I’m the kind of nerd that reads the book first, so for the first time in over 20 years, I walked into a Martin Scorsese movie with at least some idea of what to expect, or what to expect to expect. In a way, though, that expectation somewhat got in the way of really taking in what Scorsese was doing the first time around, so much so that I had to see it again recently to better figure out how I felt about the movie itself. The first time around I admired it, but the second time, detached from expectations, it completely knocked me out. May Martin Scorsese live forever.

4. The Holdovers

As much as I’ve loved most of Alexander Payne’s movies over the years—and certainly felt more than a bit old when I realized I’ve been going to see them in the theater for almost 25 years now (my girlfriend in 1999, who became my wife in 2001, went to see Election on a date)—I’d always wondered what it would be like if he played his comedies a bit more straight and went for the heart, without over relying on humor or cynicism to counter balance the painful events and emotions he often puts onscreen. So it was an absolute delight to watch him pull it off here with The Holdovers, to hold onto what makes him great but transpose it to a different key, one where loneliness and tears show up more reliably than laughter, but never cross over into anything saccharine. The emotions here, both the characters and my own, continually surprised me—so many small and subtle moments of heartbreak and pain, but almost always held and contained by human responses and characters continually showing up for each other. A reminder of how hard life is, for everybody, but also how we make it through, and trudge on, buoyed by those around us, in even the unlikeliest of found families.

5. May December

I hate that I had to see this on Netflix, but so it goes. A movie I heard way too much about before I had a chance to see it, but also one that ‘hearing about’ can’t really prepare you for. Still, my expectations were beyond high going in, and Todd Haynes still easily cleared the bar. Plus we got to debate camp vs. melodrama for like a whole month.

6. Past Lives

Celine Song’s very first film makes so, so many sublime & surprising choices, and creates such a romantic, generous, existentially curious narrative that all you can do, really, is take it all in and be grateful for it.

7. You Hurt My Feelings

Fairly surprised to see so few mentions of Nicole Holofcener’s latest very Nicole Holofcener film, both during its release and on critics’ year end lists. Maybe everybody just takes Julia Louis-Dreyfus entirely for granted at this point—expecting her to always be so good, so not celebrating it way more every time she is. But she’s fantastic here (yes, again, always). Admittedly though, a movie featuring a therapist and writer as a married couple is something I’m very much predisposed to be in the tank for.

8. Anatomy of a Fall

Only watched this last night, still digesting, still processing. But Sandra Hüller’s performance alone absolutely gets it a place on the list for now.

9. Showing Up

Making art is an important, hard, frustrating, necessary, tedious, wonderful thing.

10. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One

A big step down from Fallout, but this year’s Mission Impossible still had plenty to recommend it by, and was a good (if occasionally frustrating) time at the movies. If it wasn’t the most best of the series, it was still a good thing to watch on a very big screen, and I’m more than willing to give McQuarrie and Cruise the benefit of the doubt here and predict that Part Two will eventually make this one even better in retrospect.

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Olivia Rutigliano:

I keep a ranked list of all the new releases I see in a given year. I try to see as many new movies as I possibly can, though inevitably I miss a few. This year, I saw 67 films from 2023, but here are my top 10:

1. The Holdovers

2. Oppenheimer

3. Showing Up

4. Past Lives

5. Asteroid City

6. May December

7. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

8. You Hurt My Feelings

9. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One

10. They Cloned Tyrone

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Ethan Warren:

1. Asteroid City
Funny, strange, gorgeous, and sad, plus shockingly beautiful. So, a Wes.

2. May December
Knotty, weird, captivating, and heartbreaking, with the year’s best acting.

3. Fremont
The year’s big surprise, a small and warm slice of life made with love and care.

4. Poor Things
A beautiful nightmare, stylized to fuck but full of wonderment.

5. The Boy and the Heron
Not in my top tier of Miyazaki’s work, but still a masterpiece.

6. Fallen Leaves
Aki is back with another wry slice of life. I’m grateful for him.

7. Priscilla
If it’s only occasionally transcendent, sometimes that’s enough.

8. Blackberry

The Social Network as sitcom—and Glenn is a revelation, man.

9. Afire
A comedy of manners with overtones of nostalgia and myth.

10. Enys Men
Folk horror is my shit, baby, and this one is gorgeous and bizarre.

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Sarah Welch-Larson:

Top Ten Theatrical Experiences of 2023

Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé (2023)—DCP with the sound blasting, AMC

Is this the ultimate expression of brand management and public relations? Yes. Was it worth getting swept up in anyway? Absolutely. Come for the costumes and the music, stay for the editing and the infectious joy.

Oppenheimer (2023)—70mm, The Music Box

All Christopher Nolan movies move with inevitable purpose, wrapped up as they are with his obsession with time and causality. This one leaves the question open-ended in a way that pays its respects to history, and that respects its audience without feeling the need to say everything plainly or all at once.

The Blackening (2023)—DCP, AMC

One of the most locked-in rowdy audiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching a comedy with. At one point a character in the film claims that the O’Reilly’s Auto Parts jingle has made more of an impact on pop culture than the National Anthem, then hums a few notes of the jingle to prove their point. I swear, the entire theater belted the rest of the song along with the movie.

Occupied City (2023)—DCP, Chicago International Film Festival

Immersive, meditative, upsetting. Works best in a silent dark room and an environment that’s open for contemplation.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)—35mm, Doc Films

Those action sequences pop. The inter-woven love stories sing. This is what movies are for!

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)—DCP, AMC, second screening

Nothing beats watching Keanu Reeves fight his way up the staircase to Sacre-Coeur, except maybe watching Keanu Reeves fight his way up the staircase to Sacre-Coeur surrounded by people who are seeing the movie for the first time and who have no idea what’s coming next.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)—35mm, Gene Siskel Film Center

The most velvety of inky blacks, shot through with light and Lillian Gish’s performance. Harry Powell is one of the scariest movie monsters we’ve got.

Last Things (2023)—DCP, True/False Film Festival

Almost something of a religious experience, a head-trip speculative tour of the future guided by rocks that have gone extinct. This movie was an oasis in the midst of a busy—and fulfilling—film festival, one that filled me up and sent me satisfied on my way.

Aliens (1986)—DCP, IFC Film Center

I’ll never tire of this film. I was very lucky to be able to see it in a theater surrounded by friends and critics whose work I admire, and then I was even luckier to be able to talk about it at length with them afterward.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)—DCP, Regal Cinema

The sicko who was cackling from the front row the entire time? That was me.

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Travis Woods:

BEST EROTIC THRILLER: FEMME

An astonishing—absolutely astonishing—queer erotic thriller suffused with a nervebursting audacity, unpredictability, and humanity, Femme is a film both gorgeous to look at and horrifying to watch as it follows a drag queen, Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, giving one of the two best performances of the year), as he launches a revenge plot to seduce and then out the in-the-closet thug (George MacKay, ditto) who once brutally assaulted him. What begins as a revenge thriller soon evolves into something else entirely as each man’s feelings for the other become increasingly complex, and Femme transforms, all jewelshimmered and jagged, into a work of eroticism and horror that’s as brutal as it is understanding, a synchronously prismatic and merciless neon-noir knotting of identity, vengeance, sex, and toxicity. (Note: Femme is currently in theaters in the U.K. and played multiple U.S. festivals in 2023; it will receive a theatrical U.S. release in 2024)

BEST FILM ABOUT EROTIC THRILLERS: WE KILL FOR LOVE

A documentary about the rise and fall of the erotic thriller (with an emphasis on the direct-to-video aisle of the genre), We Kill For Love is an act of monumental film scholarship that serves as an epic inquiry into Why We Like To Watch. At a monolithic three hours, the doc is a kind of sweat-slicked and cocaine-decored Los Angeles Plays Itself of the DTV fuck-noir, gathering together softcore creatives (stars, writers, and directors alike all appear, as if materializing out of the warpwaved tracking lines and pulverized pixels of the cable channels your parents blocked in 1997) as well as film scholars and general perverts (full disclosure: this writer appears as both) to trace an arc from 1940s films noir to 1990s thrillers erotic, while orgiastically celebrating and relentlessly investigating everything in-between. It’s a film just as thrillingly obsessive, passionate, and recklessly horny as the movies it catalogues, a veritable Cahier du Cinemax for our mostly chaste cinematic times.

BEST ERRATIC THRILLER: PASSAGES

A film that truly understands the aphrodisia of chaos and its consequences, Passages is a film as hilarious as it is horny, as horny as it is horrifying, as horrifying as it is honest, all as it pendulums the bisexual wrecking ball of filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) between his husband (Ben Wishaw) and his mistress (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Exceptionally raw, vivid, and tender in its portraiture of narcissism, fidelity, and fucking, Passages, in its triad of fluid sexual obsession, plays a little like Fight Club but with less cultural commentary and terrorism and more funky crop tops for its buzzcut antagonist.

BEST MISUNDERSTOOD FILM THAT WILL BE REEVALUATED AS A CLASSIC IN 25 YEARS: THE KILLER

Speaking of 1999’s Fight Club—that David Fincher film was a blackly-comic character study disguised as a scathing social satire told from the mouth and mind of a bleakly (and adolescently) philosophic narrator, a cinematic portrait of an emotionally-stunted man-child who hides behind facile nihilism, hyper-consumerism, and then militant anti-consumerism all as means to ignore the fact that he desperately desires intimacy with a woman who existentially terrifies him. And at the time, mainstream critics and crowds dismissed it, mistaking its satire for sincerity and its sincerity for cynicism. Fast-forward into the 21st century, though, and you’ll find the film revered as a classic.

So it’s somewhat fitting that Fincher’s thematic sequel to Fight Club has found itself facing a similar fate, one as repetitiously inane and frustrating as a wall of battered bald men endlessly muttering “his name is Robert Paulson.” For The Killer is a blackly-comic character study disguised as a pulp hitman movie told from the mouth and mind of a bleakly (and adolescently) philosophic narrator, a portrait of an emotionally-stunted man-child who hides behind Wikipedia factoids, ‘70s-‘80s pop TV references, and Smiths-styled arch miserabilism all as a means to ignore the fact that he desires the promise of safety and security with a woman whose mortality existentially terrifies him—and seems to have met the same level of dismissal as its spiritual prequel. If it feels like director and theme haven’t traveled very far in 25 years (incrementally evolving from a protagonist who can’t admit he loves a woman to a protagonist who can’t face losing that woman once he has her), well, neither have audiences or critics, who a half-century later saw this deeply funny, deeply felt, and deeply Fincher film, and still don’t get the joke.

BEST DOUBLE FEATURE ABOUT THE DEATH DRIVE: FERRARI / INFINITY POOL

Both Michael Mann’s and Brandon Cronenberg’s 2023 masterworks wrestle with the nature of identity in the face of death, and how our innate death drive (pun not intended) can careen mind and body toward obliterative dissolution, or hard metal clarity, or both. One film begins with a cataclysmic car collision, the other ends with one. Between those two bookends of bodybursting cinecarnage are dual explorations of What We Do With The Time We Have Left, and how the knowledge of our assured endings shapes all that we are, and all that we do, before we fade to black. Most interesting, though, might just be how diametrically-opposed the two men are in their conclusions on the matter, with the younger director left seemingly with nothing but dread and near-cosmic horror, and the older master finding himself revitalized and rebuilt with a motor-hummed ferocity.

BEST ALMODOVARIAN MASTERPIECE OF PASTEL SIRK-CAMP PULPDRAMA DELIRIUM, A PSYCHOTICALLY WELL-ACTED MYSTERY OF IDENTITY THAT LOCATES THE JAGGEDLY HILARIOUS AND DISTURBING HEARTS OF DARKNESS BENEATH THE INKY, THUMB-SMEARED FACES OF SUPERMARKET TABLOID ICONOGRAPHY: MAY DECEMBER

While Mann’s Ferrari notes that “two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same moment in time,” shockingly, May December discovers that elements of camp and melodrama can indeed collide and coexist, regardless of directorial intent or whatever a taxonomy nazi with a Twitter account may tell you. A film so good it almost justifies Netflix’s continued cultural decimation.

BEST ART AS RECKONING: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

It’s decimation that Scorsese fixedly has on his mind in his latest epic treatise on the middle-management middlemen of evil in our country, serving as the missing chapter in a timeline of American decline and moral rot that begins, chronologically, with Gangs of New York and continues through Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Irishman. Killers of the Flower Moon connects the 19th century horrors of Gangs to the gangs of his 20th century-set features, showing the soulless ease with which capitalism greases dark hearts on their journey to inhumanity. A bonebreakingly relentless crime drama/epic Western that centers on the white midcentury murders of the Osage Nation for the oil rights on tribal land, Killers is the capstone to Scorsese’s lifelong cinematic exploration of the evil that his men—and ours, and us—do. Along the way, Lily Gladstone acts her way to godhood, Robert De Niro reconfirms his, while Marty, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and late musician Robbie Robertson all transcend theirs into something else entirely, perhaps most especially in the film’s repeated reckonings with how various forms of media in The American Century tried to grapple with the horrors of its era, climaxing with an ending setpiece that has to be seen (and heard) to be believed. In every way, the film feels like the Final Act in Scorsese’s career-spanning rewording of Paradise Lost’s most famous aphorism: “Short is the way and easy, that out of heaven leads down to dark.”

BEST FAREWELL: THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL

It’s impossible not to think of endings when viewing this, the late William Friedkin’s final work. It’s a film that closes his life, as well as his recent career Renaissance of adapting skin-flayingly intense plays (see also: Bug, Killer Joe) into compact masterclasses of modern cinema. Each film of this unofficial trilogy serves to highlight what Friedkin did best—to marry a ruthless documentary style to pulp genre storytelling and then accent the results with European arthouse flair. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, then, serves as likely the best possible farewell to his angry, irascible, thrilling, confounding, frustrating, furious, and wonderful body of work, a naval courtroom drama that sails not on blistering flashbacks to the titular mutiny but instead rollicks upon the verbal violence done by those who live on the breaking point, a film that arc-welds his cold (bit not pitiless) docudrama stylings to a 1950s-style potboiler and then lets “Hurricane Billy” do what he always did with his art, good or bad: Tirelessly explore the mysteries of identity, faith, and fate. And in doing so here, he affords us a farewell gift for which I’ll be forever grateful: A journey into the heart of Hurricane, one last time.

It’s not an accident that my two top films this year were both ones I saw with my kids, and the experience of doing so is forever inextricable from the movies themselves, though I make no excuse for this; we respond to what we respond to, for all kinds of reasons, and context is no small thing. Still, I think even without the context, these would be my two favorite movies of the year.