movie list 2023

Saw 232 new movies in 2023, and 22 I'd seen before, for a total of 254. 

232 is a yearly best for new movies seen. To be fair, I was ill the first 6 or so months of the year, so had some down time. 

My average rating was 6.29

Top Ten movies were: Tower. A Bright Day., Fremont, Return to Seoul, Beginning, Saint Omer, Paterson, The Lighthouse, Aftersun, Miracle, and Transit.

List is below.

10
Tower. A Bright Day.
Fremont

9.93
Return To Seoul
Beginning

9.87
Saint Omer

9.8
Paterson

9.73
Lighthouse, The

9.67
Aftersun
Miracle (2021)

9.53
Transit

9.4
Beau Is Afraid
Unknown Country, The

9.27
A House Made Of Splinters
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
May December

9.2
Showing Up
Beasts, The

9.13
Barbara
Asteroid City
Bait
Carol

9.0
Starling Girl, The

8.93
Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

8.87
Holy Spider
Descendant
Earth Mama
R.M.N.

8.8
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Incendies
Monica

8.73
Reality
Yella
Royal Hotel, The

8.6
Decision To Leave
Dreamin' Wild

8.53
Are You Lonesome Tonight?
Megalomaniac
Dream Scenario

8.47
Sick Of Myself

8.4
Evil Dead Rise
Adults, The

8.33
Monos
Blackkklansman
Master Gardener
Order of Myths, The
Rhymes For Young Ghouls
Giving Birth To A Butterfly

8.27
White Noise
Whale, The

8.2
Full-Time
Bones And All
House That Jack Built, The
Bottoms

8.13
Close
Outwaters, The

8.07
Enys Men
Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Will Be My Last Film About You.
Great Photo, Lovely Life

8.0
My Life As A Zucchini
Marshland
Sing Street
Huesera: The Bone Woman
I Got A Monster
Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret.
Stars At Noon
Milli Vanilli

7.93
Love & Mercy
Sanctuary
Seire
Birth / Rebirth
Talk To Me
Black Christmas (1974)
Jennifer's Body
When Evil Lurks
Killer, The (2023)

7.87
Perpetrator
Smell of Money, The

7.8
Tin Can
Calvaire
Civil Dead, The
Fablemans, The
Reptile

7.73
Menu, The
Piggy
Infinity Pool
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
Memory: The Origins of Alien
Train to Busan
Mother, May I?
Joy Ride

7.67
When You Finish Saving The World

7.6
Painted Bird, The
Causeway
Passenger, The (2023)
Severing, The

7.53
Rolling Thunder
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
Cobweb
Thanksgiving

7.47
Dumb Money

7.4
Half of It, The
Baby Ruby
How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Theater Camp

7.33
As Of Yet
You Hurt My Feelings
Shortcomings

7.27
Victim / Suspect

7.2
Fever Dream
Woman King, The
Joe (1970)
Dating Amber
Megan
Missing
Women Talking
Deepest Breath, The
Last Stop Larrimah

7.13
Jethica
Harley and Katya

7.07
Tales of the Grim Sleeper
Sam Now
Flora and Son

6.93
A Thousand And One
Deadstream

6.87
Chalk Line, The
Welcome To Pine Hill
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Blackening, The

6.8
BS High
No One Will Save You
Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain
Ghosts of the Void

6.73
Integrity of Joseph Chambers, The
Knock At The Cabin
For Ellen
Somewhere In Queens
Into The Deep: The Submarine Murder Case

6.67
A Wounded Fawn
Artifice Girl, The

6.6
Sick
You People
Livid
Influencer
Bad Grandpa

6.53
Body, The (2012)

6.47
Brightwood

6.4
Murder!
Seven Faces of Jane, The

6.33
We Might Hurt Each Other

6.27
Alice, Darling
Pale Blue Eye, The
Mindhorn
Boston Strangler

6.2
Beyond Human Nature
Last Voyage of the Demeter, The

6.13
Cocaine Bear
Peninsula
Run Rabbit Run

6.07
Hidden

6.0
After The Bite

5.87
Moon Garden
Totally Killer

5.8
Grudge, The (2019)
Exorcist: Believer, The

5.73
Murder Mystery 2
Renfield
Good Nurse, The
No Hard Feelings
Dark Harvest
It Lives Inside

5.67
Susie Searches

5.6
Capturing The Killer Nurse

5.53
Calling, The
Unidentified Objects

5.4
Hypnotic (2023)
Boogeyman, The
Ice Cold

5.13
Gray Matter

5.07
Marsh King's Daughter, The

4.93
Undead

4.87
Hell Camp

4.8
Take Care of Maya

4.73
Unheard, The
There's Something Wrong With The Children

4.53
Sharksploitation

4.33
Scream 6
Maggie Moore(s)
Slumber Party Massacre

4.27
Burn
Jacir

4.2
Leave The World Behind

4.07
Manodrome

3.8
Slotherhouse

3.73
Blood (2023)
A Good Person
Happiness For Beginners
Cleansing Hour, The
Fair Play

3.67
Mayhem

3.4
Malum

3.27
Son, The (2022)

3.2
To Catch A Killer
Replicas
Meg 2: The Trench
Good Mother, The (2023)
Accidental Love

2.73
Luckiest Girl Alive
Insidious: The Red Door
Slumber Party Massacre 2

2.67
Bad Things

2.6
Willy's Wonderland

2.27
Unseen
Pet Sematary : Bloodlines

1.8
Outpost

1.53
Lesson, The

1.47
They Wait In The Dark

1.4
Wish Upon

1.33
Bama Rush
Esme My Love

1.27
It's A Wonderful Knife

.6
Family Switch

.47
Estate, The

.4
Lullaby

.33
Tutor, The
James Nash Is Married

.2
Other Zoey, The
Navigating Christmas
Death Link
Your Christmas Or Mine 2

.13
Coffee Wars

.07
Exmas

.00
Puppy Love


And, some words toward:

With harshly deadpan imagery, Seth A. Smith's Tin Can is a distantly fed close-up of tiny starvations. Anna Hopkins gives her character both strength and weakness and is able to differentiate what moments are realization and what are revelation. If all stories are doomed, revenge seems to meet a different maker than love. Class, age, access, protection...I don't know. Kick against that loneliness, tip it over, and still humans are what separate us from being human.

No heart of gold, here. Just difficult people feeling small. In this, The Whale, Fraser plays Charlie as goofy and scared and watches as they become the same thing. His performance finds not only common ground but also an earth to step quietly upon. Hong Chau, as Liz, gives an outing both open and inner, and for all the air sucked out of nonexistent rooms, her performance makes place hard to leave. Morton and Sink hit different keys and I was glad that both seemed beyond grace notes. I saw no lingering, nor excessive helplessness, nor loving of what helplessness there was. I did see these characters eyeing the exit immediately and then some deciding to stay, and others deciding to stay until their staying was exposed as a decoy for lost absence. I saw people pausing in doorways, brightly going, brightly gone. Not everything in the film is a perfect fit, and the ending both works and doesn't work, and is probably not what really happened. But it wears well the wearing down.

Theodore Schaefer's Giving Birth to a Butterfly is a disciplined dream that voids abstraction with a logic that is so awake it doesn't need sleep to get to the places it passes by to protect its map. I loved it. Annie Parisse and Gus Birney bell departure with a look and ring arrival in the church of the heartbreakingly deadpan. Owen Campbell and Paul Sparks each become elemental to a different outskirt, and give just enough blur to the ineffectively invisible, while Rachel Resheff grants a past permanence to the momentary. Things, here, are what they seem. Bring your leavings.

Morrisa Maltz's The Unknown Country is a work of deep location and knowing randomness that has a sweet tooth for the spare feast that is companionship and for the busy desolation that candies the eye. Aimlessness has many churches, and Lily Gladstone finds worship enough in her performance to cut the past with both clenched jaw and soft blink while drawing futures from a withholding present. What an elegant surplus of discovery is found, here, where nothing moves beneath the feet of those called to the body that carries their stillness.

David Fincher's The Killer is empty male whiteness as deep black comedy. Or it's just efficiently smug and hollow and kills everyone but the rich white dude. I am going with the former. But the joke might be on me.

I absolutely love Babak Jalali's Fremont. For how it memorializes memory, for how it details and decorates the abandoned time machine of place, for how its characters believe they are pressed for words when they are actually pressed for how to language them, for its inward humor and outward heroics, for the path it cuts for heartbreak, for the space it leaves the unfixed, and and and. And nothing I’ve said really says anything that speaks to what this film creates a voice for. As Donya, Anaita Wali Zada’s performance is both wall and fly, a movement based on a waiting impatience, a look looking for a look back. Visibility is no healer. Witness, no miracle. And yet, you’ll see, if you haven’t already, something new, here. Something wonderfully made. Familiar, far away, whole.

Megalomaniac is mean, mad, and sad as fuck. A brilliance in its desperation. A sobbing in its violent glories. Pay attention to what it shows. Almost anti-exploitive. Eline Schumacher is a revelation whose performance ditches the revelatory to be instead a human from trauma's first future. It's demonic through and through, and raises the living.

Via hyper engaged writing that re-imagines tired time travel and horror fantasies into a very awake grindhouse style teen movie that's progressive in both its reverse reverence and anti-homage, Jennifer Reeder's idea-driven and visually off-road Perpetrator invades and enhances spaces usually reserved for male histories and occupies the timeline thereof by overthrowing the mundanely comfortable with the bizarrely familiar. Kiah McKirnan makes her impossible performance relatable long enough to give it teeth, and short enough to quicken the blood might the heart reclaim its beating. There's so much here that even its revelations play catch-up to the known and the knowing.

The Adults is a ferociously sad film, not a showstopper in sight, just all show all the time. As siblings, Sophia Lillis deepens everything she does and doesn't touch, Hannah Gross is hermetically raw, and Michael Cera channels Julia era Tilda Swinton and Taxi Driver era Robert DeNiro in a performance that marries mirrors to every fantasy he's been divorced from. Don't blink, it's gone faster than loss can lose.

Jagoda Szelc's Tower. A Bright Day. knows and unknows and always undoes. Just because it's ancient doesn't mean it's a demon. The world comes for us, despite our rituals. The performances, here, are lived-in and okay with dying. None of this art matters if there isn't some recognizable earth. Anna Krotoska is revealing and familiar in her demands and commands and reprimands, and makes this whole thing human. What a perfect film. Humanistic, animalistic, so known, so unknown. It only takes a moment. The abyss, the void, the hour of confession, the always of nature, the possessed second. Good goddamn.

Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning has a runtime that avails duration of its gospel. What an indictment of absolution. Witness is a weak viewfinder. One mirror turns to salt, one to stone. Fire is just trying to see itself. Sorry, I got drunk. Watch this film anyway. Sober up.

Like watching a road movie in an empty house, Andrea Pallaoro's Monica is, by design, clumsily American, and, by detail, a hermetic ballet. Patricia Clarkson loses half her grip to illness beautifully, and we see the angel that saves her and the devil that rescues. Emily Browning and Joshua Close do well with small untouched touches, and Adriana Barraza looks at something we can only see. But the film belongs, and is given, to Trace Lysette, whose performance is a summoned stillness, a balance of childlike return and transformed vanishment. The last scene matters to all, but only because it feels like a first time for us and for them.

Watching Park Ji-Min in Davy Chou's Return to Seoul is like hearing music that someone else doesn't, and then they hear it and you don't, and then you both hear it and both try to find where it's coming from, you split up, and the music stops. But you can't be sure. And you might be two people. And you might be alone.

Alice Diop's radiantly grey Saint Omer is some unwatched, new, unknowable spectacle. A stationary doom that travels back in time to change place. A doom that takes time with it. The film is full of transcript, detail, explanation. But its magic is not uttered, and says all the quiet parts in a found language. Its rooms, its bodies, its faces, make of image a plagiarist. Its distance gets inside. You'll stand, and feel returned.