Where Y'at Movie Editor's Best of 2023
The moviegoing years since the COVID-19
pandemic began have been relatively thin in terms of both volume and quality.
And while 2023 was not on par with 2019, which was an excellent year for film,
it did have more going for it cinematically than 2020-2022.
My favorite film of the year was
Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, which was a reunion with Paul
Giamatti, the star of Payne's career-best effort Sideways. Giamatti
plays an embittered classics professor at an elite boarding school in 1970 New
England. He is tasked with babysitting a difficult student (Dominic Sessa)
during a holiday break. Their only companion is the school cook (Da'vine Joy
Randolph). Funny, poignant, and bittersweet, it's a great piece of
character-driven cinema. Randolph has a real chance to win the Oscar for Best
Supporting Actress, and she deserves it. Giamatti is nominated for Best Actor
and would be my personal choice, but I think that Oscar might go to another
worthy candidate that's mentioned below.
Cillian Murphy turned in a career-best
performance in the title role of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.
The sprawling, three-hour biopic about the man who invented the atomic bomb is
a fascinating look at both an individual man and the moral quandaries faced by
those who wanted to end a devastating global conflict but feared the tool they
used to end that conflict (the atom bomb) would potentially end the world
itself. There are a number of memorable supporting performances in the film:
Emily Blunt (as Oppenheimer's wife) and Tom Conti (as Albert Einstein) stand
out. Thankfully audiences responded well to it, and this very long movie with
very little in the way of action or spectacle grossed almost $1 billion
worldwide.
My favorite female performance of the
year was Emma Stone in director Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things.
Stone plays Bella, the result of a science experiment involving the placement
of an infant's brain in a grown woman's body. Stone has to go from infantile
tantrums to childlike innocence to adolescent rebellion to hard-won maturity in
a single film. She does it brilliantly and Tony McNamara's script supplies her
with a wide variety of witty lines. The surreal set design recalls the best
films of director/animator Terry Gilliam.
The best under-the-radar film that I
wish more viewers would give a chance is The Teachers' Lounge,
the German entry in the Best Foreign Film category. This tight, tense,
and economical drama (a quick 90-something minutes) follows an idealistic
teacher (Leonie Benesch) at a school that's plagued by a series of cash and
property thefts. Troubled by an incident where an immigrant student was falsely
targeted and interrogated by administrators, she takes action to discover the
real perpetrator. Her actions do discover the guilty party (or at least very
likely identify the guilty party), but this also set forth a chain reaction
with heartbreaking consequences. Director Ilker Çatak is a talent to watch.
Hollywood proved it could still make
rousing, grand-scale entertainments with Mission Impossible: Dead
Reckoning Part One. Yes it's a bit long, but the action sequences are
in a league of their own. A car chase through the streets of Rome, a train
crash, and a motorcycle leap off a cliff are just some of the jaw-dropping
moments in the film. Star Tom Cruise is willing to put himself in harm's way in
a manner that most people would (understandably) be completely unwilling to do.
But his commitment to tactile, real-world stunts makes his films exhilarating
in a way modern CGI extravaganzas all too often are not.
