Nothing too fancy or flashy here. Just wanted to talk about a few films I enjoyed that came out in 2023 as well as a few I discovered for the first time last year.

2023 New Movies

I’ll start with some honorable mentions. These are movies I enjoyed, but I wouldn’t put them in my top of the year list: Asteroid City, Oppenheimer, Shin Ultraman, and Talk to Me (the latter two technically came out in 2022, but didn’t’ see a US theatrical release until 2023)

In no particular order, except saving the best for last:

Blackberry – This movie is great for Glenn Howerton’s performance alone. The rest of it is a somewhat fast and loose adaptation of real events, which would normally take it down a peg, but every second Howerton is on screen is magical.

Kuolleet lehdet “Fallen Leaves” – It’s been several weeks since I saw this, so I won’t do it justice even with a few sentences. It’s very much in line with Kaurismäki’s other films. He has his very specific art direction and character direction. It’s all present here. But the core of the film is a hopeful melancholy, something of a through line in all his works.

The Holdovers – Twenty years ago I might have enjoyed this movie, but set it aside in the “well, wasn’t that a nice movie?” category, but so few well-constructed films make it to cinemas now, that something like this manages to just spring to the top of the pile. Great characters. Great performances.

Past Lives – There’s a type of story that just bounces off me. The story of people who reconnect after decades apart, particularly if they last met as children, who rekindle a romance. I am not an unsentimental person, but it’s a facet of human behavior that I can’t get behind. Humans are so dynamic, we’re constantly meeting new people and forming new connections, pushing those old connections to the periphery… and yet this movie worked for me. It worked for me because it subverts the expectations of that type of story in a satisfying way (Sorry, still need to specify that last bit for The Last Jedi fans).

ゴジラ-1.0 “Godzilla Minus One” – How could any other movie not be the top of my list? I mean, come on. A new Godzilla movie from Toho? A Godzilla movie that has pretty well written human characters? A Godzilla that’s scary again? What a time to be alive! Don’t believe the hype. This is a really good movie. It’s not the best movie ever made. It’s just better than a lot of tent-pole entertainment that’s come out in the past few years.

2023 First Watch

On to some older films I watched for the first time in 2023. Once again, let’s start with some honorable mentions I won’t say too much about: Days of Heaven (1978), La Haine (1995), 聖誕快樂 “Merry Christmas” (1984), 殭屍先生 “Mr. Vampire” (1985), and 불가사리 “Pulgasari” (1985).

I also want to mention a few directors I discovered this year. Even if their films didn’t make my favorites of the year, I enjoyed and appreciated them: Kelly Reichardt, Chantel Akerman, Alan Resnais, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and John Cassavetes.

And again, in no particular order, except saving the best for last:

All That Heaven Allows (1955) – I watched this for a film course and was absolutely mesmerized by it. A subversive attack on “Eisenhower’s America” packaged as a studio melodrama. It suffers from very typical schmaltz of the era, but there are so many elements that just elevate it. In my head cannon for the film I have the lead actress, Jane Wyman, asking her co-star, Rock Hudson, if he had any advice on playing a character who was engaging in a forbidden romance that society wouldn’t allow, and him saying “uhm… yeah, I have a few thoughts on that”.

絞死刑 “Death by Hanging” (1968) – This is another that I watched for a film course. It was used as an example of Brechtian story telling, if you know what that is, you already have a sense of what kind of movie this is. I cannot recommend this to most people, but I was fascinated by it. One thing I can say, is if you’re a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion, you’ll find a lot of commonalities between stretches of this movie and the final two episodes of that show. I have no idea if Hideaki Anno was inspired by Nagisa Ôshima’s work, but he got the influence from somewhere.

Diamantino (2018) – I started a project to watch a movie from every country in the world, and saw that Portugal was missing from my Letterboxd list of films. So, I searched for Portuguese movies I had access to on streaming services to which I subscribe. This one came up highly rated. Listen, I can’t make you watch a movie, but if you find the following ideas intriguing, I have a film for you: Christiano Ronaldo parody, undercover lesbian spy posing as a little refugee boy, secret government cloning conspiracy to “Make Portugal Great Again”, man with female breasts, and… I don’t have all day. This movie is amazing. Watch it.

Victoria (2015) – I saw this in a list of “long take” films. It’s literally a single take, over two hours long, and is super engaging. It’s not two hours of people sitting in a room rehearsing lines. It moves from place to place and even includes some action scenes that can’t have been easy to pull off. The craft aside, the single take aspect gives it that sense of a long night out. Most of us have been there… but most of us don’t end up in the situation Victoria does. At least not every night, anyway.

すて猫トラちゃん “Little Tora, the Abandoned Cat” (1947) – A friend directed me to a site of public domain films and this one jumped out at me. Beyond its wonderful aesthetic qualities, I found myself fascinated by the very existence of this story, and the behavior of its characters. No story manifests in a vacuum. All art is the product of the environment in which it was created and is imbued, to some degree, with the pathos of its creator. How well did this story of fatherless family adopting an abandoned child resonate with Japanese audiences in 1947? I have no idea. But it’s a thought I can’t shake when watching this… and I have probably re-watched it a dozen times. I might rewatch it again right now.