Where Y'at Movie Editor's Best of 2023
The 96th Academy Awards are
coming up soon (March 10), so it is time for me to pick my personal favorite
films of last year. First, a few honorable mentions: Mission Impossible -
Dead Reckoning Part One was the most entertaining action picture of 2023,
and Evil Dead Rise retains the horrific gory spirit of 1981's original The
Evil Dead.
Now, here are the movies I consider the
best of 2023.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is
a profoundly affecting documentary chronicling actor Michael J. Fox's battle
with Parkinson's disease. It's sobering, yet often very funny thanks to Fox's
wry sense of humor.
Fatigue has set in for the comic book movie craze, but Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 delivers and doesn't feel like a tired retread, especially for a third chapter in a film series. All the characters are as fun as ever, the movie has a formidable villain (Chukwudi Iwuji), and a compelling backstory for the genetically engineered Rocket Raccoon (voice of Bradley Cooper).
It's great that director Christopher
Nolan's Oppenheimer, along with Barbie, got people to go and see
a movie in the theater. Oppenheimer, about physicist J. Robert
Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) developing the atomic bomb and its aftermath, is a
character study in the guise of a sprawling epic and it completely works.
Scenes of majestic awe, like the testing of the bomb, are complimented by
intimate moments in Oppenheimer's life.
At the center of Martin Scorsese's Killers
of the Flower Moon is a tragic love story between a Native American woman
(Lily Gladstone) and an easily manipulated man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is
helping to murder her people for their money. It's this relationship that gives
this fascinating crime thriller weight.
My favorite movie of 2023 is Godzilla
Minus One. Director, writer, and visual effects artist Takashi Yamazaki has
created an intelligent horror movie meditating on the nightmare that Japan
endured during the ending of World War II and has also written a main character
(Ryunosuke Kamiki) struggling with inner turmoil. The scenes with the giant
atomic monster Godzilla are well spread out and incredibly exciting, and
Godzilla is actually scary in this movie. This is the best Godzilla film ever
made, and, I don't say this lightly, it's even better than the original 1954 Gojira.
