Tag Archives: 2023

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Delinquents (2023) Movie Review

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Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of being found out, and the hiding of wads of cash all play an important role in the film. But The Delinquents is more like a slow cinema crime epic than the films it borrows these caper conventions from.

The three-hour-long film begins with a desire for cash and ends with a liberation of self. Morán (Daniel Elias) has spent a long career working at a bank, and he is still Continue reading The Delinquents (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Love It

The Taste of Things (2023) Movie Review

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If someone tried to argue that cooking is the most cinematic activity, it wouldn’t take much to convince me. The Taste of Things would make a good Exhibit A (or Exhibit B under Tampopo. Or Exhibit C under Big Night. Et cetera). When done right, there is something about the film depiction of cooking that just feels whole, like a full experience. Cooking is tactile, textural, occasionally sensual. It brings all of the senses into harmony. For someone like me who doesn’t know the first thing about the craft or art of cooking, The Taste of Things might be the closest I’ll come to understanding that harmony (I don’t even know half of the ingredients in the dishes prepared in this film).

The French title of The Taste of Things is La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. It is a fitting title, in that the film is driven forward by Continue reading The Taste of Things (2023) Movie Review →

Lists, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The 10 Best Movies of 2023

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Another year over, another long year of movies ahead of us in 2024. 2023 was an odd year in movies for me. It took roughly 10 months before I saw more than one film that really blew me away. Since that point, though, I’ve seen a number of great ones. I was happy to see a diversity in the types of films in my top 50: a nice mix of genres, a balance between major studios and independents, a good assortment of non-U.S. films that I was glad to be exposed to, a few thought-provoking docs, a number of beautiful animated films, I could go on. After resigning myself to a sub-par year in movies, I end the year pleasantly surprised by a number of titles I will happily return to in the future.

These are the best movies I saw in 2023, along with 15 honorable mentions. Happy New Year.

Honorable Mentions:

  • All of Us Strangers
  • Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
  • BlackBerry
  • Earth Mama
  • Fallen Leaves
  • Four Daughters
  • Godzilla Minus One
  • Kokomo City
  • May December
  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
  • Nimona
  • The Promised Land
  • Skinamarink
  • Talk to Me
  • A Thousand and One

10. Rye Lane

Sometimes, a film can be wholly satisfying without any of the bells and whistles, by just relying on Continue reading The 10 Best Movies of 2023 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Love It

The Iron Claw (2023) Movie Review

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Sean Durkin’s films are about haunted people. In The Nest, the English manor the characters move to becomes a haunting symbol of their marriage crumbling down around them in the present. The protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene is haunted by her traumatizing past in a cult. The characters of the Von Erich brothers in The Iron Claw are haunted by their futures.

The reason for this forward-looking anxiety is the brothers’ parents. Their father, Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany), owns the Dallas-based wrestling league the WCCW, and he only really expresses pride and love for his sons when they Continue reading The Iron Claw (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Leave the World Behind (2023) Movie Review

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Leave the World Behind, Netflix’s buzzy new film from writer-director Sam Esmail and based on the popular 2020 novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam, imagines how Americans would cope if the daily technologies of life were stripped away and information was cut off at the pass by some unknown enemy. It is more thought experiment than substantive film, in that the characters are intentionally self-absorbed, conceited, not particularly three-dimensional, and, in some cases, full-on nihilistic.

The film begins with Amanda Sanford (Julia Roberts), the matriarch of a nuclear family, declaring to her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) that they will be going on a spontaneous vacation because she has come to the realization that she hates people. Not much more is said on the matter; it’s pretty much smash cut from this conversation to the ornate home outside of New York City that the family will be staying in. They are essentially just far enough from the city to be considered “out of town.”

Following an indefinite loss of cell service and wireless internet, and a freak accident involving a beached oil tanker, the family’s first day in relative seclusion ends with Continue reading Leave the World Behind (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Poor Things (2023) Movie Review

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I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (Kinetta is a bit of black sheep for me, but it has its interesting moments). Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Favourite are all in my personal top 10 from their respective years. Alps and Killing of a Sacred Deer intrigue me enough that rewatches could easily lift them into top 10 lists of their own. Lanthimos makes exciting and unique films. He has a fantastic grasp of tone and morbid humor. And he pulls great performances out of his casts. Although Poor Things is imperfect, it checks all of these boxes, as well.

Poor Things is something of a libertine Frankenstein story. In Victorian England, a surgeon called God (short for Godwin Baxter) tasks a young medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) with Continue reading Poor Things (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) Movie Review

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Zack Snyder’s latest is a two-part space opera epic with the classic rebels-versus-empire dynamic popularized in the cinema mainstream by Star Wars (the film began its life as a Star Wars film pitched to Disney). This dynamic is purposefully simplistic, with basic white hat heroes and black hat villains. The issue with Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is that these characters are not only simplistically drawn, but they are never particularly compelling figures to begin with.

The first sign that this script has character issues is an emotional monologue given by Sofia Boutella’s Kora. She speaks of being unable to Continue reading Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

All of Us Strangers (2023) Movie Review

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Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a story about a haunted man, which becomes a film about a (potentially more literal) haunting. The film’s main preoccupation is with conversations which never happen. Adam (Andrew Scott), an aspiring screenwriter, is using the script format to try and crack into his inner visions of his deceased parents. Hypothetical conversations play out on screen, where Adam divulges to his parents things he never had the chance to while they were alive. His mum and dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) appear younger than Adam; they are the last version of them he can remember, as they died in a car crash when he was still a boy.

These dialogues are the heart of the film, despite a great performance by Paul Mescal that props up the film’s other half: a budding romance between two lonely men who are living in an almost entirely empty high rise. As the film progresses, the Continue reading All of Us Strangers (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Godzilla Minus One (2023) Movie Review

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I am not a historian. It doesn’t take a historian, though, to understand that the 1954 film Godzilla is about the devastating possibilities of human-made destruction that was realized in the wake of World War II. What we are capable of, as a species, was demonstrated in many different ways in those years, and Godzilla bottles the anxieties surrounding our own extinction into a distinct (and now very recognizable) figure. Ishirō Honda’s film is most remembered for introducing kaiju monsters to the mainstream, but it is as much a film about the human characters on the ground who must deal with what is towering over them as it is about Godzilla.

What has been lost in the Americanized iterations of the Godzilla IP is not so much this human focus (there are plenty of human characters, I just couldn’t tell you any of their names). What is lost is the Continue reading Godzilla Minus One (2023) Movie Review →

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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) Movie Review

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What makes a monster? It’s a question we can consider from two perspectives (two of many possible). The first is those primordial things that make up evil: those pieces of the human condition that must be foreclosed such that a person can do monstrous things. The second involves an act of creation. What is it within our civilized society that seeks to identify and call out the bad of humankind? Who crafts the narratives that cast some as villains and others as victims, and through what contexts are these narratives codified and/or agreed upon? At least…agreed upon enough that stories with monsters become tropes that are legible to us, or agreed upon enough that guilty verdicts can be reached in homicide cases.

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall presents us with a contained incident (the eponymous fall) and a proceeding attempt by many parties to Continue reading Anatomy of a Fall (2023) Movie Review →