A Godzilla film?  Really, Joe?  Yes, really.  This one came in right under the wire for me, and trust me, I’m just as surprised as you are to find this one skyrocketing to a prestige position on this list.  Takashi Yamazaki’s spectacular film is simply that good, though.  The 37^th film in the Godzilla franchise is a revelation, boasting top-tier special effects that often work to supplement its thrilling narrative, not supplant it.  In fact, large stretches of the movie are big lizard-free, and they are as engaging as when the radioactive beast is crashing through Tokyo and adjacent islands.  This magnificent creature feature is an audience-pleasing marvel that has you on the edge of your seat one moment and quelling the lump in your throat the next. 

Every year, there is always one movie that I drag my feet on seeing for no good reason.  I had multiple opportunities to see The Holdovers since it debuted while I was in Canada at the Toronto Film Festival.  I skipped those screenings, thinking I’d see them at our Twin Cities Film Festival, which I was later ill for.  Then…the film just became the one title that kept getting pushed down the list.  Of course, when I finally sat down to watch director Alexander Payne’s period-set film, I fell as in love with it as I knew I would.  Set in a fictional New England prep school over the Christmas holiday in 1970, this is a beautifully warm and wisely funny tale of how we can miss vibrant complexities in others when we are too focused on the mundanity of daily life.  As a teacher used to an unsurprising life, Paul Giamatti delivers one of his most well-crafted performances that’s caustically familiar yet richly singular.  While I’m not quite as high as others on Da’Vine Joy Randolph (a solid turn but nothing Oscar-winning), the real star is Dominic Sessa, a young man who finds education and personal growth outside of the classroom.

Nicole Holofcener has written and directed many strong films over her career, but You Hurt My Feelings is the first one I’d call perfect. The script is tight, and each scene is a little masterclass in comedy or high-stakes drama.  Starring a phenomenal Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a college professor who overhears her therapist husband (Tobias Menzies) disparaging her new book to her brother-in-law, the movie bites down hard on the nitpicks and nagging in relationships that can send us over the edge.  To understand the film at its core and to truly, wholly feel its perfection, a working understanding of what it’s like to know someone so well and intimately that it will only take one glance from them, or lack thereof, to give you satisfaction or send you on a shrill spiral to your perception of super doom is beneficial.  That’s the beauty in what Holofcener does for film and those who love it – she brings some of the real world, warts and all, into the open.

Set aside some time after A Thousand and One to meditate on how many outstanding creative forces could come together in one film. This only adds volume to the battle cry that casting directors need more recognition in the film industry; there’s no single performance here that doesn’t leave a lasting impression.  As a Brooklyn mother who kidnaps her son out of the foster care system and spends the next years creating a new life with him in the city, musician Teyona Taylor is superb in peeling back layers of hurt and pain tempered with optimism for a future that may not always be within reach.  Winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, A Thousand and One should have been seen by more people when it was first released, but over time I know cinephiles will discover it and Taylor’s performance because works of art like this don’t stay hidden forever.

As the film industry has evolved over the past three years, so has the theatrical movie-going experience. Now, it’s not uncommon for movies by respected directors to appear on a streaming service, skipping your local cinema altogether. That keeps overall costs down from a consumer cash perspective to the annoyance of movie chains that rely on the dough raked in from concessions. However, what is the ultimate price the viewer pays when they miss an opportunity to share time in a dark room with strangers watching the latest large-scale blockbuster projected on a screen four stories high? That’s when we truly lose the art in cinema, and no amount of savings can ever replace that.  One half of the now-infamous Barbenheimer event during the summer of 2023, Oppenheimer is a movie with a capital “M,” a technical wonder created by director Christopher Nolan to not only demand audiences come back to the theater but knock their socks off at the same time.  Dense and hard to digest fully in one viewing, it’s a rare experience that comes more into focus with each watch.  The performances are outstanding, especially Cillian Murphy in the titular role and a never-been-better Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss.

If you missed it in theaters…what a pity.

Director Jonathan Glazer hasn’t directed that many films, and the ones he has are conversation starters, to put it mildly. He finds common ground with The Zone of Interest, one of the most haunting films about the atrocities in Auschwitz I’ve ever seen, and not because it depicts in any graphic detail what went on inside the camp.  Instead, Glazer’s focus is entirely outside the walls of the camp, in the home of its commandant and his family, who live in quasi-luxury (regularly pilfering the goods/clothes stripped from the prisoners) while heinous evil is happening mere feet away. The contrast between the stunning cinematography that suggests a home in the German countryside and the sound design, which always has the faint sound of pain and death ringing in our ears, will gnaw at your bones for days/weeks after.  Watching it for a second time recently hammers home Glazer’s thesis on the blind indifference demonstrated by the family and reinforces our role as viewers watching the film from a modern lens. 

Even with little knowledge of the finer points of wrestling or the WWF, The Iron Claw is one of the most accessible sports films I’ve seen in eons.  That’s because writer/director Sean Durkin has made his film about the tragedies that befell the Von Erich family of wrestlers more of a family drama than a sports biopic.  Significant time is spent within the ring, where the Von Erich brothers (Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Stanley Simons) walked in the legendary footsteps of their father (Holt McCallany), but it’s getting to know these men and the women that loved them (Maura Tierney as their mom and Lily James as Efron’s wife) that drive home the utter sadness of it all.  Efron’s performances is transformative both physically and on an acting level.  Looking like a He-Man action figure, Efron dives to previously unseen depths and the result is not to be missed.  At times unbearably sad (the final fifteen minutes are brutal), this will surely resonate even more for people who come from large families.

Wanting to have the opportunity to talk to a loved one who is gone and catch them up on where life has taken you and what they’ve missed is natural, but how would your life be different if that occasion presented itself?  That scenario is just part of the equation writer/director Andrew Haigh designed in his new film All of Us Strangers. It is a beautifully introspective look inside processing grief and accepting fate for all its cruel twists and wonderous turns. Part modern romance and part family drama, it’s a full-on five-hanky weepie. It may center on a gay man reconnecting with his vulnerable heart, but it’s an ambitiously universal story that deftly moves across community borders to embrace all walks of life.  Andrew Scott’s performance as a lonely writer in the beginning stages of a relationship with a neighbor (Paul Mescal) is sketched with sensitivity and protection for the truth these new developments often bring.  At the same time, his character begins to see and converse with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) at his childhood home, even though they’d been killed in a car crash decades earlier.   Through these meetings, he can have frank discussions about his life, his loves, his disappointments, and the fear that ultimately is keeping him from being able to move on fully and into a partnership.  All four actors deliver top-tier work, coupled with Haigh’s direction of his intricate screenplay; the result is a satisfyingly heartbreaking motion picture. 

The simple truth is this: Hollywood has a history of mucking up biopics, often reducing an individual’s life into too small a box or extending it far past the boundaries it should ever have reached. Some lives deserve the grand scale treatment due to the scope of those they touched, while there are figures throughout time that warrant a more intimate exploration of how they made their mark. Inevitably, something goes awry, and you either have a movie that comes across as cinematic Cliffs Notes or a mini-series that is too long and fussily focused on every minute detail. Film should inspire us to dive deeper and ask follow-up questions, and that’s what those movies do.  That’s also why a movie like Maestro, inspired by the relationship between Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia, reaches new levels of superiority in showcasing a life while letting the audience naturally find their way forward. If you are coming to Maestro expecting to see co-writer/director/star Bradley Cooper painstakingly recreate pivotal moments of the life of composer Leonard Bernstein, be prepared to leave unfulfilled. How his art was made has been chronicled in numerous documentaries and literature, and a dramatization of these events would be a pure rehash of what is easily accessed by the curious. Instead, Cooper keeps his film tight and doesn’t focus on stuffing it all in and covering what we know, but reveals the moments we weren’t, couldn’t, have been privy to and shows how that molded a complex partnership with love at its core. There are so many tiny treasures present in Maestro, little flicks of memories that Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer lifted from the lives of the Bernstein’s, giving the film a sincere and unique touch. This is a marvelous film that doesn’t take the easy route to its destination, with Cooper and co-star Carey Mulligan wonderfully emulating a couple most audiences never got to know fully; the kind of big-screen biopic that works like all should.

Weekend box office reports often say that a movie “debuts at #1,” and the same could be said for American Fiction and my Best of the Year list.  I vividly remember attending the early morning screening of first-time director Cord Jefferson’s film at the Toronto Film Festival and not knowing what to expect.  Most films at the festival had released a still photograph, giving you at least a vague idea of what the movie would look like, but American Fiction had nothing.  This was a true blind faith watch, and my faith in modern comedies made for intelligent adults was restored by the time it was over.  Riotously funny while maintaining its wisely askew view of culture and societal influence, this is an outstanding film that represents our world today, the people giving voice to it in error, and the voices we need to hear that are falling on deaf ears.  Leading a cast who should already be engraving their names on the SAG Best Ensemble award, Jeffrey Wright is blazingly good as a frustrated award-winning writer who pens a terrifically inflammatory novel meant to play into racial stereotypes that then sees his book become a sensation, creating more trouble than he could have expected.  At the same time, Wright’s character deals with personal issues within his family that demand his attention, stranger than fiction developments he overlooks longer than he should.  Starting as my favorite film in Toronto, though films like Maestro, All of Us Strangers, and The Iron Claw have come to challenge it, American Fiction easily held its spot as the best film I saw in 2023. 

I never expected to see a movie starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie on my Worst of the Year list.  Yet here we have Eileen, the type of lolly-gagging thriller you struggle to keep your eyes open for even though you know sleep would make the most sense for everyone involved. From start to finish, it achieved the impressive feat of consistently underwhelming.  Usually able to deliver these strange psychological character studies, it was a bit bizarre to see Hathaway (and, to a lesser extent, McKenzie) wandering through a script desperately searching for purpose.   Only a late-in-the-game turn from Marin Ireland gives the film some verve, but by then, it’s far too late to care about her character, least of all the main players that have been skulking around director William Oldroyd’s feature.  Based on Otessa Moshfegh’s novel, Eileen is a prime example of cinematic disappointment.  The plot is a tired collage of pulpy clichés, characters that should be revealing in their motivation lack any semblance of depth, and the dialogue is often cringe-inducing considering its source material.

The inspiring story of American Samoa’s bid to pull itself up from last place in the World Cup rankings deserves its say on film, there’s no doubt about it. Unfortunately, Next Goal Wins is not the movie to do it.  I’m pretty sure co-writer/director Taika Waititi’s latest is actively bad for much of its 105 minutes, this despite a last-ditch rally cry that only amounts to a modicum of audience rousing, likely to prepare them with enough energy to gather their belongings and go home.  For a movie about community, it’s an isolating experience to sit through.  That’s mainly because Waititi doesn’t know how to handle interpersonal drama as well as he does absurd humor.  Star Michael Fassbender looks bored and is badly miscast (and knows it) and you wish the far more appealing American Samoan cast were truly the stars.  This should be a story about the team first and foremost.  Instead, it’s a laboriously formulaic slog through an obnoxious knob’s redemptive arc that has nothing new to add to the sports/underdog genre. 

I usually find these “Dad” movies easy to root for because they are so noble in intent, if predictable in structure. With The Boys in the Boat, I had to keep looking for those moments of respectability because they were few and far between. I wouldn’t go so far or sink so low as to call the film boring, but it suffers from a severe “lack of sustained engagement” because of its dull performances of a disappointing script. The racing sequences do create what few thrills that are offered, but there’s a lot of movie in between that is interminably hackneyed and clumsy.  Everyone on board appears to have brought their C game and it shows throughout.  Clooney’s direction is slack, and cinematographer Martin Ruhe has shot the period set film in an extremely digitized format, so the entire movie looks like when your TV has been accidentally flipped to the high-definition settings. Faces look too smooth and waxy, there’s no fine grain to wide shots, which would have helped give the film a time and place instantly, and in general, there’s a faux tidiness to everything that feels like a computer unfamiliar with history generated it.  Worst of all is Alexandre Desplat’s score, two steps above random plunks on a piano; like the movie, there’s bizarrely little effort put in with the expectation that we should like it anyway.  Not on my watch. 

It’s challenging to approach a critique of a documentary such as American Symphony because it’s so deeply personal that one feels like they are ostensibly reviewing an individual’s life and what they have chosen to be vulnerable and share with the world. However, award-winning musician Jon Batiste and partner Suleika Jaouad have gone there with director Matthew Heineman, opening a door that can’t easily be closed.  The film is at its best when it takes in the silence of Jaouad and her continued journey through the ravages of leukemia. A bestselling author who detailed her first battle with the disease in her novel Between Two Kingdoms, Jaouad is a serene presence throughout who is unfortunately shuttled off to the side in favor of Batiste and his other pursuits. Undeniably gifted musically, I found Batiste lacking in self-awareness of how he might be coming across. Toiling away at the titular symphony held at the climax of the film, we see him weighed down by the burden of pulling it all together and agonizing over the many decisions he must make…while his wife is in the next room recovering from a bone marrow transplant.  It’s a chilly watch, an aloof and often antagonizing view of a public figure who is always aware a camera is following him.

The same magic that worked with David Gordon Green’s reboot of Halloween in 2018 was never going to work with an update to 1973’s The Exorcist.  Not only is that classic William Friedkin demonic possession film different in style and scope than the 1978 John Carpenter slasher granddaddy, but it never really called out for a continuation.  Unfortunately, Green and Universal Studios picked up the phone anyway and the result was the dismal The Exorcist: Believer, the first in a (as of now) trilogy of films coming out.  Clearly tinkered with after poor test screenings, the film is a mess of fractured storylines (the editing is atrocious) and characters that enter and leave the picture without any ceremony whatsoever.  Bringing Ellen Burstyn back was a good get for Green…but she’s wasted (and done dirty!) in a glorified cameo that falls far short of the type of participation Jamie Lee Curtis offered in the Halloween follow-ups.  Even with a few decent scares, The Exorcist: Believer didn’t compel much thought after it was over.

You won’t want to talk a walk down Candy Cane Lane with anyone, least of all someone you love, because this Eddie Murphy-led stinker is abysmally rotten. It’s a crushed holiday ornament sold as an upscale bauble the whole family will (not) enjoy. If your family falls for brainless dreck that looks like it was made for $5.99 in the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood and one massive green screen, this could be your new go-to for Christmas cheerlessness. Despite the presence of the indispensable Tracee Ellis Ross (who works so very hard to mine any comedy out of her role) and wild-eyed Jillian Bell (the most insufferably over the top yet still more committed than anyone else), this Lane is a dead-end.

While gay romances have been on the rise, they are few and far between, and as last fall’s heavily hyped but big-time-belly flop Bros proved, even with the best intentions and a predominantly queer crew, it doesn’t spell success. I would have loved to write that Red, White & Royal Blue hasn’t suffered the same fate as Bros and isn’t as treacly twee as the Hallmark movies it has borrowed most of its sets from (a 57 million budget obviously doesn’t go far) but it sadly has. It’s not even about the cheap look or that first-time director Matthew López injects zero style into the filmmaking, robbing the tone of anything resembling creative energy. Like Bros, Red, White & Royal Blue is a movie that wants to be so “with” it that it can’t see how much it’s functioning without. If ever there was supporting evidence for gay men playing gay characters, look no further than the two leads of Red, White & Royal Blue.  From the charmless straight-presenting ultra-bro-ish pool until the script dictates they not be, one lacks acting credibility, and both lack the chemistry the movie demands.   By the end, I was Over It, Tired, and Royally Disappointed.

Watching Wes Anderson’s film Asteroid City was like paging through a novel made up only of lowercase “i’s” and a hieroglyph of a man drinking a Pepsi.  It’s a superb exercise in production design and a feast for the eyes (the nicest thing you can do for them, aside from sleep), but it makes absolutely no sense when it comes time to need to understand it.  Sure, you can squint and try to force it to make sense, but you’re connecting the dots the filmmaker hasn’t bothered to put into any workable order in the first place. That makes for a mighty frustrating experience, especially for those equipped with an Anderson decoder ring already tuned to his frequency.  It’s not hard to decipher that Anderson has made a COVID-adjacent movie and is offering a semi-statement about the bubble we’ve all been gradually emerging from. That’s all well and good, but even that message starts to get lost amid the falderol of its twee-ness run amuck.  No one in Asteroid City (the place, the movie, or its “real” life interstitials) can have a straight conversation, preferring to talk in a broken code that even Alan Turing would have trouble deciphering.  The only way I’d revisit Asteroid City again would be on mute, only on mute.

On many best-of-the-year lists, Poor Things nearly reached the number one position on my Worst List.  What can I say?  I know I’m in the minority on this, and while it may at times be the best-looking film of the year (the production design and general visual aesthetic are astounding), I found this to be one of the most vile movies I had the displeasure to sit through.  I can see the work that star Emma Stone has put into her performance and the journey meant to be taken in this pseudo-Frankenstein tale, but Stone’s lobbing a mostly manic creation of physicality and unhinged sexuality over on the audience without fully considering the ugliness of it all.  Director Yorgos Lanthimos reteams with writer Tony McNamara, whom he wrote The Favourite in 2018, to far less positive results.  That earlier film was brimming with a razor-sharpness that sliced you if you even brushed up against it.  Poor Things actively lunges at you with knives whirling, and I fully hated the experience.  What the viewer is being asked to accept about Stone’s character (and what the men in the film do to her) is ghastly, an awfulness that may be part of the point of the piece, but I’d argue it’s a pathway that doesn’t need to be explored to strengthen the argument for continued empowerment.  If this is the way the filmmakers seek to forge new inroads, count me out.

Mamma Mia Mafia Mamma is bad.  A stunningly miscalculated comedy starring Toni Collette and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, there’s so much bad taste and poor writing to go around you’d think crappy entertainment was being served family style.  It’s almost as if every instinct toward finding a laugh has been deliberately resisted, giving each actor nothing to do but find themselves in one awkward exchange after another. The tone is all over the map, with the Europeans trying for arch physical comedy made of broad gestures and the Americans coming at it from a more mannered approach. Neither work in the least, so you know very early (within the first 10 minutes) that Mafia Mamma is a fat turkey of a flick.  Painfully horrible.