Hi friends!

It’s Oscar Day at last, and gosh it feels like this awards season has been going for a very long time, doesn’t it?

Yes I know, awards are meaningless and commercial and a shallow way of engaging with art… but I can’t help it, I love the Oscars. I just can’t resist an occasion to evangelise and argue about movies, particularly when there’s a solid chance of drama. Will it be Lily or Emma? Paul or Cillian? Will Nolan finally get his shiny paperweight? And whose speech is going to go spectacularly off the rails?

So to add to all that chatter, here’s my thoughts on the past year in movies, and my favourite films of 2023.

Stuart’s Top 20 Films of 2023

“Cinema is back, baby!” was the rallying cry for 2023, from Barbenheimer to the festival circuit, and honestly… what a stunning year. I think it was the best in recent memory, a reminder that film is still a vital art form and an irreplaceable communal experience.

2023 was the year that the superhero-industrial-complex began to collapse, even as Barbie and Oppenheimer proved that studios are still capable of making vivid, bold mass-market movies that audiences will flock to. Old Masters returned with some of their finest work in years (welcome home Wim Wenders, Martin Scorsese & Hayao Miyazaki); we had multiple French courtroom dramas (Saint Omer, Anatomy of a Fall), slow cinema mediations on everyday life (Showing Up, Perfect Days), musings on the impossibility of recreating the past for catharsis or entertainment (Four Daughters, May December), reminders that artists are trash people (Afire, Maestro, You Hurt My Feelings, Cobweb and so many more), a boatload of chaotic queers (Bottoms, Theatre Camp), and no less than five films from Wes Anderson (levels of delight may vary).

True, there’s no guarantee that the good times will last. The Hollywood studios look more and more like wounded beasts, staggering from blows both self-inflicted (the WGA & SAG-AFTRA strikes, the unprofitable pivot to streaming, and short-sighted over-reliance on franchises) and existential (the rise of AI, competition with social media & every other screen in our lives). But even if we’re entering a period of retrenchment, it’s heartening to see streamers and indie distributors continuing to fund big swings from talented filmmakers — the likes of Beau is Afraid, Zone of Interest and El Conde would have been a hard sell in any era. And there’s no shortage of thrilling work coming from filmmakers across the globe working with limited budgets but great ambition, as far apart as Mayalsia (Tiger Stripes), the Phillipines (The Missing), Pakistan (Joyland), Morrocco (The Mother of All Lies) and, of course, little old Australia.

In particular, I want to shout out two superb local films: TALK TO ME (dir. Michael & Danny Philippou) and BIRDEATER (dir. Jack Clark & Jim Weir). I feel weird putting them on a ranked list because I know extremely talented people on their respective crews, but I think they’re terrific examples of the exciting, genre-infused cinema coming out of this country lately. Talk to Me was of course a global horror hit, whilst Birdeater is a scrappy and contained micro-budget thriller, but they share a willingness to push audiences into dark corners the psyche, and an uncompromising clarity of vision. Here’s hoping for more like that in 2024 — I have high hopes for the next feature by a certain Samuel Van Grinsven ;-)

And now, onto the list…

I’ve tried to follow Oscar rules around what year a film belongs to — so if a film was first released internationally in 2023, it qualifies. That doesn’t always line up with local release dates, so a few of these are only hitting cinemas in Australia now — all the better to see them on the big screen!

A few honourable mentions: THE BOY AND THE HERON (dir. Hayao Miyazaki), A THOUSAND AND ONE (dir. A.V. Rockwell), RICEBOY SLEEPS (dir. Anthony Shim), PAST LIVES (dir. Greta Lee), LA CHIMERA (dir. Alice Rohrwacher), THE HOLDOVERS (dir. Alexander Payne).

20. SMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD

A beautiful observational documentary that asks us to sit with a group of women in a traditional Estonian smoke sauna in the middle of the woods, and listen to them share their stories. Simple, heartfelt, often distressing, and ultimately restorative.

19. BARBIE

Look, I don’t think Barbie completely, totally works. It’s hard to be a broad studio comedy, a feminist tale of self-actualisation, a gender-roles satire, a personal mediation on the desire to be an artist rather than an object, and a toy commercial all at once. And honestly I think the Will Ferrel scenes are… bad. But did anything else this year make me laugh as hard as “Depression Barbie”? Or the Kens serenading the Barbies with Matchbox 20? Or the “I’m Just Ken” dream ballet?! No. No they did not. So thank you Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie. Please enjoy all your money.

18. PRISCILLA

The perfect subject for Sofia; a child bride trapped in an isolated palace where her power is precarious and her autonomy is stifled at every turn. Yet her portrait of Priscilla and Elvis’ marriage is delicately illustrated, pushing past the “ick” factor to find tenderness and aching need. Cailee Spaney is terrific, and Sofia did more to convince me that Elvis (and Jacob Elordi) is a star with just a piano and a glass of whiskey than Baz managed with almost 3 hours of pyrotechnics.

17. POOR THINGS

A movie this fucked up has no business being so delightful. Like its heroic Frankenstein’s Monster, Bella Baxter, Poor Things is constantly prodding at the boundaries of social convention and good taste, navigating a hypocritical world with an unlikely sense of wonder. It’s not Yogos’ sharpest satire, but it might be his funniest (for a founding member of the Greek Weird Wave, this practically constitutes going mainstream). And it wouldn’t be possible without Emma Stone’s ferocious, reckless and relentless performance. Bella Baxter has all the trappings of the born-sexy-yesterday trope, and her amorous adventures could have easily have devolved into a male gaze fantasia — but I think Stone ensures Bella always feels truthful, and centred in her own story.

16. SAINT OMER

Yes it’s the other superb French Courtroom drama of the year. Saint Omer is an act of observation: the story of Laurence Coly, an immigrant accused of murdering her infant daughter, unfurls entirely through the eyes of Rama, a professor who attends her trial. There’s no connection between the two women, beyond a shared Senegalese background and Rama’s own impending motherhood. Nonetheless Rama finds herself increasingly identifying with the long-suffering, isolated Coly, and reckoning with anxieties about parenting, race and otherness that she’d long suppressed. Inspired by a real case (and director Alice Diop’s own obsession with it), what initially feels like a cold and impersonal slice of true crime voyeurism begins to knock down the barriers between the two women — object and audience — until what’s left is something unusually raw and self-reflective.

15. GODZILLA MINUS ONE

While the American Godzilla films descend into joyful schlock (next up: Godzilla and King Kong team up to fight monsters from the Centre of the Earth!), Japan has produced two killer Godzilla entries back-to-back that can both legitimately claim to be the best since the 1954 original. Where 2016’s Shin Godzilla was a savage satire of ineffectual bureaucracy, shot with a sense of scale and awe, Godzilla Minus One is a beautifully wrought and utterly earnest period melodrama about cowardice, found family and patriotism… which also features the best action scenes of the year. And on about 1/10th of a Marvel budget! An absolute delight. Godzilla remains the King of the Monsters.

14. THE ZONE OF INTEREST

The Zone of Interest isn’t an easy film to watch. It’s not meant to be. For almost two hours, we follow the Höss family as they deal with the minutiae of domestic life: birthdays, unruly children, visiting parents, home renovations, work trips and office feuds. And all the while, something truly horrifying is going on just over the wall. Glazer never lets us see Auschwitz; only hear it. How long would it take us to tune out the distant screams and gunshots? What monstrosities do we turn a blind eye to in our own backyards; what evils do we tacitly accept because they furnish us with creature comforts? Perhaps we’d like to believe we’re the Apple Girl, making a difference through small acts of resistance; but we’re just as likely to be the service workers in the compound, keeping our heads down as the world beyond the wall burns.

12 & 13. ASTEROID CITY / THE SWAN

Wes Anderson had an absolutely stellar year. Five films, including one (Henry Sugar) that will surely win him a short film Oscar today. I didn’t love Asteroid City at first, but at a friend’s recommendation I gave it a second go, and now I’m convinced it’s one of Wes’ finest: the nested and circular plotlines felt richer once I knew where it was going and recognised that the plot itself is far less important than the emotions swirling underneath (why does Augie burn his hand on the griddle?).

But the Wes film that really blew me away was The Swan, a 17-minute, stage-bound Roald Dahl adaptation about childhood bullying and wanton cruelty. It’s effectively an illustrated short story; Rupert Friend narrates the tale direct-to-camera, as stage-hands supply the props and scenery. Yet in his whole catalogue of films about grief, I don’t think Anderson has ever been as nakedly emotional as he is in the final minutes of The Swan. “My darling boy, what’s happened to you?”

11. FOUR DAUGHTERS

A slippery, electrifying piece of work. This is a documentary about a Tunisian family whose radicalised teenage daughters fled the country to join ISIS in 2016, told via re-enactments involving both the family members and actors brought in to play their parts. Director Kauouther Ben Hania invites us to watch not only the re-enactments and interviews, but the process of transformation itself, as the actors and their subjects meet and inform one another. The boundaries begin to feel porous; both actors and family members excuse themselves from disturbing scenes, swapping places, and the most distressing allegations spill out in casual conversation. It’s a messy and almost unhinged act of portraiture, plunging into artifice in search of a deeper truth.

10. MAY DECEMBER

Speaking of slippery films about performance, family and motherhood… Todd Haynes is back! And what a show. May December is fearless. It tackles horrifying subject matter — the twenty-year aftermath of a woman’s “affair” with a 13 year old boy — with flair and camp (“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs!”). It’s funny (Julianne Moore as the rapist-turned-suburban mum), devastating (Charles Melton as the victim-turned-family-man, held in a state of arrested adolescence), and absolutely savage (Natalie Portman playing a narcissistic actor-as-parasite).

9. SHOWING UP

A portrait of an artist as a working schmoe. A characteristically tender and understated film by Kelly Reichardt that feels more than a little autobiographical. Lizzy (Michelle Williams) has an administrative day job at an arts college; she sculpts in her garage in her off-hours and tries desperately to fend off other demands on her time; she struggles to maintain relationships with her eccentric friends and family; and she bristles at the easy-going, devil-may-care attitude of more successful colleagues (including a very funny Hong Chau). There’s no “big break” on the horizon — even her upcoming arts show is a small affair — just the ebb and flow of life. I’m so grateful that Kelly is making movies like this: honest, hilarious and hand-wrought.

8. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Yes, it’s long. But the unrelenting sense of dread that Marty & editor extraordinaire Thelma Schoonmaker build minute by minute is remarkable. Almost suffocating. I don’t think Flower Moon is a historical drama or a western; I think it’s a horror movie, where the monsters lurk in plain slight, cloaked purely by money, privilege and false pieties. And it is to Lily Gladstone’s eternal credit that she makes Mollie, the Osage woman at the centre of the maelstrom of bloodshed, more than just a victim or a suffering saint. Gladstone’s remarkable performance shifts the gravity of the entire film. I loved her, screamed for her, hoped against hope for her. But she doesn’t control the film’s narrative; her treacherous, snivelling husband does. Or is it his manipulative uncle? Or the crusading FBI? Marty knows exactly what he’s doing — what he’s spent a career doing. In the bravado final sequence, he acknowledges his role in reducing women like Mollie to footnotes in the stories of violent men, and cedes the stage.

7. PERFECT DAYS

For Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), every day is remarkably like the last. He wakes at dawn, waters his plants, works as a toilet cleaner, listens to music, photographs trees, reads a novel, eats at the same ramen joint, and goes to bed. The central tension in Wim Wender’s wonderful, evenly paced film is not Hirayama’s, but ours. Do we believe that this man’s life — small and repetitive as it is — is worthwhile, or do we believe that it is in need of disruption and change? Is what we’re observing detachment from “real life” or the portrait of a fulfilling life? Of course as the film goes on things happen, but that question lingers until the very final frame. It’s worth asking of ourselves too.

6. OPPENHEIMER

Oppenheimer is big and brash and LOUD — it is a Christopher Nolan joint after all. But despite its relentless pace and bite-sized scenes, I don’t think the resulting epic is shallow; I found it remarkably rich, grappling with bitter questions about morality, science, and politics that echo from Los Alamos to the present. Nolan, whose work often veers towards the reactionary, has made a film full of warmth for “fellow travellers”, infused with a pacifist spirit and aching horror at the atomic age. The final sequence (“I believe we did") reduced me to a quivering mess.

5. ANATOMY OF A FALL

A portrait of an artist as a maybe-possibly-murderer. Did novelist Sandra Voyter (the remarkable Sandra Hüller) push her husband out the window? Was it an accident? Or could it have been suicide? Justine Triet takes us through every stage of the investigation, from the early interviews to the court proceedings, laying out the evidence but refusing to give us an easy answer. Do the facts condemn Sandra, or is she deemed unsympathetic because of her nationality, her sexuality, her role as a working mother, her refusal to play the media-assigned grieving widow, or the content of her books? The rope pulls tighter and tighter; it twists like a thriller and burns like a polemic. And let’s not forget Messi the dog, whose performance is so damn good he’s been banned from all Oscar events for overshadowing all those pesky awards campaigners.

4. ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

A portrait of an artist as an activist. I’ve struggled with the recent class of documentaries that prioritise beautiful imagery yet pretend the crew aren’t in the room shaping the visuals — I think they reek of dishonesty. Laura Poitras’ All The Beauty & the Bloodshed was the antidote: a wide-ranging, clear-eyed masterpiece that trusts in its story and its subject. It follows photographer Nan Goldin’s battle against the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid epidemic, interweaving her crusade with fragments from her extraordinary life and work (particularly The Ballad of Sexual Dependency). Poitras (who directed the similarly remarkable Edward Snowden doc CitizenFour) doesn’t hide her camera or her presence in the story, but folds Nan’s reluctance to cede control of her narrative into the very fabric of the film.

3. PASSAGES

And, of course, a portrait of an artist as the worst person in the world. The messy bisexual representation we wanted — nay, demanded — is here. Career-best work by Franz Rogowski as a film director (red flags already) who cheats on his husband (Ben Wishaw, in a succession of gorgeous dressing gowns and sweaters) with a young teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos, divine as ever). It’s thorny, mean-spirited, jaw-droppingly sexy, and extremely funny. You may not enjoy spending two hours watching this man take a sledgehammer to his perfect life whilst wearing the most ridiculous sheer tops imaginable, but I sure did. P.S. I promise I didn’t rank this so highly because it reflects real life — all the directors I know are lovely, upstanding members of society who would never.

2. JOYLAND

Joyland is a marvel; a deeply empathetic debut about self-discovery, deception and repression. Haider (Ali Junejo), under pressure from his conservative family to end years of house-husbanding, finds work at an erotic theatre supporting Biba (Alina Khan), a trans dancer. The set-up promises a queer love story, but there’s a knottier tangle of expectations and desires at play, and Haider’s flirtation with a more truthful life has unexpected implications for his wife (Rasti Farooq), sister-in-law (Sarwat Gilani) and father (Salmaan Peerzada). Each nurse their own hopes and dreams that push beyond social and religious norms; but unable to see one another clearly, the household re-enforces the same old prejudices, and together they lurch towards tragedy. Saim Sadiq has made a nuanced, deeply empathetic film that balances love for all its characters with a swell of terrible rage at their all-too-avoidable fates. They deserve so much better; but I’m grateful to have met them.

1. MONSTER

How do I talk about Monster? The new film from Japanese master Kirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Still Walking) is slow to untangle its mysteries. It begins with a suspicious fire, an ominous tunnel, and a single mother (the superb Sakura Ando) with a growing conviction that her increasingly withdrawn son is being abused by his teacher. But her ferocious hunt for the truth reveals something more is going on. Monster unfolds through a series of interweaving perspectives, continually challenging our assumptions and suggesting that genre itself might just be a matter of who’s telling the story… But I don’t want to spoil its twists and revelations. If you haven’t seen it, I hope you get to discover it for yourself, and recommend reading as little as possible. It’s a work of real beauty, and great generosity of spirit.

And that’s my year in cinema! Forgive me if I’ve missed any of your favourites — I’d love to hear what everyone else adored.

Odds & Ends

• Vale to Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and an extraordinarily influential artist for manga, anime, and pretty much all superhero and fantasy storytelling across the past 40 years. Thank you for dozens of mornings spent watching Goku battle Freeza on CheeseTV.

• And speaking of battles, Vulture has put together an exhaustive list of the 100 Most Influential Fight Scenes of All Time. Drunken Master II AND Anchorman are on there, so no complaints.

• An absolutely stunning new ContraPoints video essay on, of all things, Twilight, has just dropped! Natalie Wynn expands her re-examination of the Twilight novels & films into a 3-hour philosophical treatise on romance fiction, erotica, sadomasochism, taboos, sprituality, gender & sexual binaries, death, and love. Nowhere else will you find Stephenie Meyer, St Augustine, George Eliot, and Camille Lapaglia in the same video essay. Very generous of Natalie to produce these epics instead of putting all that academic energy into, say, a PhD.

And that’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and may all your Oscar predictions come true. If you’re after any more of my movie lists and hot takes, follow me on Letterboxd.