This list was hard. Possibly the hardest I've yet made.
There have been some great years for movies since I started this blog, years where multiple movies came out that became instant all-time favorites of mine. We've seen some great triumphs, none more satisfying than my beloved EEAAO sweeping last year's Academy Awards. And I certainly did not see MORE movies this year than I used to; my „new film intake“ continues to remain relatively low compared to when I tried to make it a point to see one new film every week (ah! youth).
Dakota Johnson was right; the film industry is an utter hellscape in so many ways right now. The major studios and their soulless billionaire owners with more wealth than God seem determined to be as cruel, as narrow-minded, as creatively bankrupt as possible, because that's what post-war Western capitalism rewards. This year saw possibly the biggest and most important strike in my lifetime, and it will certainly not be the last. Problems aplenty in the special effects and animation industries abound, #MeToo ended with less than a whimper, the superhero genre finally started to show cracks, and the cultural Black Death that is live-action adaptations of animated classics remains unsated.
And yet. The movies I was able to see this year were SO good, and there were SO many of them, that nearly every single film I am about to name, even the honorable mentions, could top other people's lists (and many of them did!!). That this happened in spite of all our troubles was something of a light in the darkness for me; there are still so many unbelievably talented people in every branch of this business, still doing their best to churn art better, more representative, and more worthwhile than ever before, and some are still pulling it off, in spite of it all.
There was almost no wrong way for me to order these, so of course, that made it all the more stress-inducing to try and do so. So I won't be able to offer much in the way of justifications as to why certain films are higher than others. In the end, all I had was my gut. And here's what my bundle of organs had to say about this year at the movies.
Honorable Mentions: The Holdovers, John Wick 4, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Suzume, Poupelle of Chimney Town
10. A Haunting in Venice (Kenneth Branagh)
I absolutely, unabashedly love this series. They are old-school campy in the best way possible. This one, however, is the first that I would call a straight-up great movie. Not having read the book, I understanding that his adaption changes a lot to allow for a setting and style that is far more explicitly horror-oriented than the first two films, which were mostly fairly direct whodunnits. The result is the best of both worlds, just enough horror to keep the thrills coming, while still having a compelling and believable mystery with multiple twists and turns right up to the end, with just enough left open to provide discussion fodder afterwards. I hope Branagh keeps making these til he dies.
9. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
Out of the year's major big-name releases, I would rank this as the most ambitious. A massively long and exhaustive adaptation of a little-known book detailing one of the most horrific crimes ever committed against a Native American tribe (and yes, that IS saying something), with a focus on authentic cultural representation and language, plus one of the most open fourth wall breaks Scorsese has ever attempted, there are so many ways this could have not worked, or come off as insensitive. And there are fair criticisms to be made that even if this is the „best version“ of a White man making a movie about Native Americans, it still falls short. I myself did find the length a bit too trying at times, and in the crucial final section- where the evil of it all is finally coming to light- I very much wished for less time with the White criminals and more time with Mollie, seeing her trying to process the depths of her husband's betrayal.
Nonetheless, I do feel that there is value in having a trio of the most influential figures in American cinema take this story, put in the effort to empower the community it impacted, and to bring awareness of it to an audience that would otherwise have never bothered to learn of the Osage Terror. It does mean something when Lily Gladstone becomes the first Native American to win another major award and gives another speech viewed by millions. Controversial and debatable the film will remain, but the fact that it will have an impact at all is still enough for me to rank it as one of the year's most important works.
8. Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)
I can enjoy a good monster flick, but it's never been „my thing“, and the current effort by American studios to revive the genre have left me relatively cold, so that made it an extra special treat to get this quasi-remake of the original that hit in all the right places. The action set pieces maximize every cent of the small budget and leave a greater impact that most recent Marvel movies, but its the humanistic core- a Miyazaki-esque call to live, no matter what- that makes it something truly special. Alongside the OG, this is the Gojira flick everyone should see at least once.
7. Past Lives (Celine Song)
A majestic, slow-burn story of how each decision we make- or that others make for us- shape our futures just a little bit more, how our identities can be torn between worlds, and how we can suddenly realize that whole potential paths we once considered are now closed off forever. It is a bittersweet sort of beauty, the way we fall in and out of each other's lives, and it's captured so effectively in the way the three leads interact with each other. Beautiful and poignant, this is the sort of experience that leaves a pregnant silence in its wake.
6. Barbie (Greta Gerwig)
With the passage of time, and some distance from all my Barbenheimer bloviating from last summer, Barbie has ultimately fallen a bit further down the ladder in my mind's eye, while the artistry of Oppenheimer continues to rise. However, this is not meant as a knock on the film itself. This is absolutely the best and most boundary-pushing version of a corporate-approved movie-as-commercial we could have gotten. It will undoubtedly create a whole new bandwagon for toy companies to try and jump on, but I feel safe predicting that this was the lightning strike we will never see happen again.
Plus, there is a sad irony at play right now in just how desperate the awards circuit is to show us why super on-the-nose lessons like Ferrera's „Feminism 101“ monologue are still necessary. Yeah, maybe the film's feminism is a touch White, and bringing in Will Ferrell way too easily distracts from Mattel's real-world (and genuine piece of shit) CEO. But if „serious“ industry figures are willing to reward the literal joke song over a wonderful Billie Eilish number, or somehow decide that the female director of the most dominant box-office film of the year doesn't merit a Best Director nomination, then it really does start to feel like Ryan Gosling in the only man on Earth who got the actual point of it all.
5. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)
Why does this film work so well? A good 90% of it is literally just following a toilet cleaner in Tokyo making his rounds, eating his lunch, tending his plants. That SHOULDN'T work as a beautiful celebration of the small joys that make up daily life, or as a paean to simplicity over shallow materialism, or offer subtle commentary on the trauma of unmet familial expectations, or as a powerful meditation on how to exist in the Now.
But it does. It works, presenting an old man's singular and somewhat strange version of nirvana, while still allowing us to glimpse some of the cracks in his soul and leaving it to us to guess whether he is truly happy or not. This is a prime example of the unmatched power of cinema to take literally anything, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, and make it a metaphor for life itself.
4. The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)
Damnit, he's still got it. No one can mesh together resigned pessimism with determined optimism like Hayao Miyazaki, and I don't know if anyone after him ever will. His latest (I won't say „final“ because WHO KNOWS) combines a fairly direct treatment of childhood trauma in its first half with a fantasy coming-of-age arc in its second part, transitioning seemlessly from one to the other. The fact that Miyazaki permitted himself to hand over the rudder more than usual shows. There is a lot more variety in the animation styles on display than in his earlier works, which very much works in the film's favor. There may be no Studio Ghibli after Miyazaki. But for now, he's still here, and he remains one of humanity's most essential artists.
3. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
There's not much left at this point for me to gush over when it comes to Oppenheimer. I get why some don't like the movie as an experience, or feel too uncomfortable with the subject matter. But like with Dunkirk, there are a lot of ways Nolan is quietly undermining the shallow „Great Men doing Great Things and Making History“ spin that this sort of movie would usually entail. This is not blind hagiography; the film is VERY critical, openly so, about pretty much everyone on screen (except for David Krumholtz, who is a treasure and I love him). A lot of the power the film holds for me, particularly its masterful final sequence, is how 1-1 the fears of uncontrollable nuclear holocaust can be switched over to climate change. I have been plagued for years with the persistant fear I am trappen in a world on fire, and nothing has been able to capture that emotion via pictures and music like this did.
And now.....
Yes! It's a TIE for the #1 spot. I told you this year was hard, so I decided to go easy on myself for once.
1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson)
I have gone on record multiple times saying that Enter The Spider-Verse is about as perfect a rendition of the classic hero origin story that can be made by human hands. Well, the bastards came back and topped it. Better character development, better dramatic beats, better music, better jokes, phenomenal expansion of this particular multiverse, greater stakes, and a true gut punch of a final twist. If the first movie was the best possible case study of the origin story, this is the best possible case study of the follow-up. Not a single beat is missed. Like its predecessor, this film is a genuine miracle.
Now, given the MASSIVE cliffhangers this film ends on, unlike the standalone first movie, whether or not this one holds up long-term will depend on how well the final installment ties it all together. Plus, the stories coming out of production have been less than nice, and I am very much hoping that they do NOT push to bring the film out in less than a year as currently planned. I adore this series and want the finale to do it justice. If I have to wait a decade for that to happen, I am young and strong and patient and I will do it.
1. My Small Land (Emma Kawawada)
I had to. I just had to. The film that hit me, personally, right in the soloplex of my soul and left me a blubbering mess for a solid three-quarters of an hour. There is a reason refugees are regularly mentioned in ancient secular or spiritual texts as the sort of group where how they are treated says worlds about the values of a given society. And most of the time, what it says about us is horrifying.
My Small Land, based on real-life stories of Kurdish refugees in Tokyo and partially inspired by a documentary, encapsulates so much of the unique travails and pressures that fall on the young when society refuses to lift themselves up. There is a unique psychological burden when children are forced to bear the weight of cold shoulders and closed doors, and the young amateur Kawawada-san found for the lead role manifests this perfectly in one of the year's standout performances. Life will go on- it MUST go on- but films like these force us to once again look in a mirror and ask ourselves how much longer we will continue to do such terrible harm to each other.
-Noah
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