2023: Midyear in Review
My favorite movies of the year so far! Plus: my take on the current summer blockbuster season.
I have to confess: I don’t feel great about the 2023 summer movie season. So far, we’ve had four spectacle sequels (Fast X, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) and yet another nostalgia-bait Disney remake (The Little Mermaid), none of which fill me with much excitement. And unfortunately, that’s just a taster for what’s to come: Over the course of the next three months, our multiplex screens will be filled with resurgent DC superheroes, an Indiana Jones legacyquel, videogame adaptations and The Meg 2: The Trench—a movie title that is, in fact, real.
I know I’m screaming into the void here, but here it goes anyway: Can we chill just a little bit with the IP obsession? The more that the 21st century progresses, the more I feel the insidious forces of corporatism descending upon our multiplexes—something that seems entirely inevitable, yet still comes across like the plague.
Even Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, this summer’s first truly exciting blockbuster experience, is only half of a film. Following in the Avengers: Infinity War template, this new Spider-Verse was originally titled Across the Spider-Verse Part One, and it shows—the film ends in a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until another seque film that will be released in 2024. The same applies to Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, a movie that will surely be great, but will still be fail to tell a complete, single-movie story. (To quote David Chen: It’s the Summer of Half Movies, and I’m already tired.)
Despite my complaints, I’ll have to admit that we do still have Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City to look forward to, as well as the double-header experience of Barbie and Oppenheimer: both films are releasing on July 21. Film Twitter has been alight with the transformative possibilities of that day. Previously uncoverted heathens will have the chance to walk from Greta Gerwig’s cornucopia of pink Americana and into Christopher Nolan’s somber exploration of the man who split the atom—or vicec versa. Minds will explode. Boys will become men. The world may well change as we know it. And if the movies aren’t good, at least we’ll have the t-shirts. (Man, what a time to be alive.)
It’s a weird time to be a movie fan. With the aforementioned exceptions of Asteroid City and Oppenheimer, the only summer blockbusters to be excited about are sequels, requels, or toy adapations, and I’m none too happy about it. There’s still great talent behind the IP-machine camera: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are scripting the Barbie movie (still a strange thing to say), and action movie aficionado James Mangold is helming the new Indiana Jones. These are competent filmmakers putting their talents into big-budget affairs, yet I can’t help but wish that their talents were going somewhere besides blatant corporatism.
Summer blockbuster season isn’t everything, of course. A lot of great movies have been come out in 2023, though you may have had a hard finding them. On the list below, you’ll find Sundance hits, streaming originals, and movies about cellular phones that played mostly in arthosue theaters. These aren’t all services that are available or even known by the general public, and this is a problem: it’s becoming harder and harder to find interesting stories in your neighborhood multiplexes. But, as this list will hopefully reveal, quality cinema is still around—you just have to go looking for it.
Rather than organize my ten favorite movies of the year in order of preference, I’ve instead listed them in alphabetical order. I’m trying to be less focused on questions of quality; I’d rather provide a list of movies that can be enjoyed across the board. It also allows me the chance to recommend movies that I might not have recommended otherwise. You’ll find, for example, my favorite action film of the year, a couple of streaming service gems, and two instances of 2023’s strange new genre: the product-launch movie.
A Thousand and One
This story of motherhood and the city won the Grand Jury Award at Sundance this year, and deservedly so. Teyana Taylor delivers a magnificent performance as Inez, a struggling Harlem native who, upon being released from jail time on Riker’s Island, kidnaps her son Terry from social services. The story that follows—beginning in 1994 and concluding in 2005—is also the story of a rapidly gentrifying city, one that writer-director A.V. Rockwell recounts it with a hard-bitten specificity. Terry is played at different ages by three young performers (Aaron Kingsley Adetola at 6, Aven Courtney at 13, and a tremendous Josiah Cross at 17). Will Catlett is excellent in the role of Terry’s adoptive father Lucky, as is Gary Gunn’s sun-drenched musical score.
A Thousand and One is streaming now on Peacock.
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is the kind of clever, character-driven romp that feels about fifteen years out of date, and not just because it owes a debt to 2010’s The Social Network. The film is refreshingly quaint: more comedy than drama, BlackBerry prefers to enjoy the comic chaos of a business deal gone wrong than the philosophical implications of the impending smartphone market. The humor comes largely from the odd-couple pairing of tech nerd Mike Laziridis (Jay Baruchel) and business shark Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton)—a brains-and-braun combo that feels perfectly suited to the tech world of the late 90s. The film has flaws—the third act feels particularly rushed and overwrought—but Matt Johnson’s zippy direction more than makes up for it; the characters and setpieces remain entertaining the whole way through.
BlackBerry is available to rent on various VOD platforms.
John Wick: Chapter 4
Keanu Reeves solidifies his title as King of Action Cinema in this fourth installment of the John Wick franchise, a series that has reinvigorated Reeves’ action stardom with exquisite ultraviolence and emmaculately choreographed action setpieces. The film also brings to the fore an attitude that was always present in the series, but never fully unearthed: the epic sweep of a samurai tale. Chapter 4’s gun-fu seems to possess greater weight than that of its predecessors; there is a palpable conclusiveness to this film that elevates it above the rest. The film is also funny: it’s an exceptional venue for Reeves’ comic talents, and director Chad Stahelski allows space for an all-star supporting cast that includes Donnie Yen, Scott Adkins, Shamier Anderson, and Bill Skarsgård. To read more, check out my breakdown of the John Wick franchise here.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is available to rent on various VOD platforms.
Past Lives
Past Lives, Celine Song’s deeply felt romance, is the rare film where the chemistry comes from the simplicity of a brief touch, a lingering smile, a quiet stare. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are phenomenal as Nora and Hae Sung, two childhood friends with an instinctual connection—one that might have blossomed into something greater, had Nora not immigrated with her family to Canada from her home in South Korea. The film largely takes place after this childhood idyll, with Nora and Hae Sung considering the possibilities of their relationship over the course of 24 years. The film is a beautiful tale of uncertain love, and Song, a playwright by trade, constructs Past Lives with a theatrical precision. This is her first film, yet she somehow already possesses a director’s instinctual sensibility for camera placement and fluid editing. John Magaro delivers a wonderful turn as Nora’s huband Arthur, a neurotic writer with a plaintive acceptance that which he cannot control.
Past Lives is out now in select theaters.
Reality
Reality is a theatrical experiment of a film: every line of dialogue in this 83-minute gem is taken verbatim from an FBI interrogation recording of Reality Winner, played in this film by Syndey Sweeney. Winner, an Air Force veteran who leaked classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 US election, was sentenced in 2018 to five years in prison for violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. As directed by Tina Satter, Reality plays out as both documentary and docudrama, a strange blend of two forms that results in something tense and politically resonant. Perhaps most impressive is how Satter manages to coax theatricality from her actors: Sweeney delivers a performance that is somehow both naturalistic and operatic, as are the performances of the FBI interrogators by Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis.
Reality is streaming now on Max.
Return to Seoul
I’m not ranking the movies on this list, but if I had to pick a number one, it would undoubtedly be Return to Seoul. Park Ji-Min’s performance as Freddie Benoît is the best of the year: an incendiary portrait of an ever-changing woman who stumbles through her twenties with violence, confidence, and verve. Director Davy Chou reveals Freddie’s character in four chapters spanning eight years of her life, each time possessing an entirely new personality. We first meet her at 25, brazen and brash, rejecting any pretenses of her Korean heritage: Freddie is a French adoptee, and is revisiting her ancestral homeland for the first time. We meet her again at 27, then again at 32. Park’s performance—itself the product of an intense collaboration process with Chou—is furious and untethered. There is an anger in Freddie that can never be quelled, a desire that can never be fulfilled. If you want to read more, be sure to check out my full review here.
Return to Seoul is available to rent on various VOD platforms.
Rye Lane
The rom-com ain’t dead—it just hopped across the pond. Rye Lane is the feature debut of British filmmaker Raine Allen-Miller, and is a wonderful reminder that romance can be fun when done right. David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah play Dom and Yas, two South London twentysomethings recovering from difficult breakups. Their meet-cute, which takes place in a gender-neutral bathroom at a friend’s grotesque photography exhibition, is but one instance of the film’s joyful skewerings of 21st century cultural trends. Jonsson and Oparah have effortless chemistry, and Allen-Miller knows just how to play off of their easy rapport. Her direction has some wonderful flourishes, too: a scene involving a breakup reenactment and an audience filled entirely with Doms is a particular highlight.
Rye Lane is streaming now on Hulu.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Zany, over-the-top, and genuinely heroic, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is what superhero movies are meant to be. The story of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) isn’t a unique one (hero’s journeys never are), but the film executes it with such staggering artistry and joyous appreciation for its own medium that you can’t help but be swept up. On display are a staggering confluence of different animation styles, including Da Vinci-styled paper sketchings, Brit-punk aesthetics ripped straight from a Sex Pistols album cover, and a stop-motion Lego section quite literally animated by a 14-year-old. To describe the narrative here would be pointless, but suffice it to say the film engages in many of the past half-decade’s multiversal tropes while also managing to slyly subvert them. The film also features an insanely stacked voice acting cast, one that is too long to list out here, so just peep the IMDb page if you haven’t already.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is out now in wide release.
Tetris
In a year featuring in which we’ve received origin stories for Air Jordans, the Blackberry, and even the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, Tetris knows something that the others don’t: just how ridiculous a product-launch movie truly is. Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a 1980s designer and entrepeneur who embarks upon a primal quest to bring a block-falling videogame to the world. Standing in his way are corrupt Russians oligarchs and a snarling Robert Maxwell, neither of whom are a match for Egerton’s mustachioed charm. It’s all ridiculous, and it’s all the better for it. Screenwriter Noah Pink and director Jon S. Baird have converted the story of a videogame licensing deal into a neoliberal hero’s journey—Joseph Campbell, but with a sprinkling of Reaganomics. If you want to read more, be sure to check out my full review here.
Tetris is streaming now on Apple TV+.
You Hurt My Feelings
No movie from this year has been more pleasantly low-stakes than You Hurt My Feelings, Nicole Holofcener’s quotidian comedy about middle-class New Yorkers with fragile egos. The film’s inciting incident is so miniscule that you might balk at its pettiness: New Yorker novelist Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) collapses into a ball of wounded petiness when she overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) complaining that he doesn’t actually like her new book. The rest of the film plays out with a salient awareness of the narcissism of middle-class urbanites, knowing just how to skewer their pretention without ever leaning into contempt. You Hurt My Feelings also features a cast of unbelievable comic talent: Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, David Cross, Amber Tamblyn, Zach Cherry, and Jeannie Berlin all get moments in the spotlight.
You Hurt My Feelings is out now in select theaters.