80 | Happer’s Comet
Echoing Chantal Akerman’s Toute Une Nuit in its near-wordless ensemble of night-crawling suburbaners, Tyler Taormina’s hypnotic city symphony is one of the more unique and memorable no-budget films of recent years. Just about every shot here is a carefully-composed winner, culminating in a surrealist set-piece that serves as an awfully charming post-COVID paean to the need for human connection. – R.J.
79 | Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
It’s hard to think of a filmmaker like Guy Ritchie who oscillates between comedy and tragedy so easily within their work. One recalls Clint Eastwood alternating between Honkytonk Man and Bronco Billy. Operation Fortune, of course, exists in his lighter mode, but it is significantly more substantive than his misfire at past grandeur The Gentlemen. Taking James Bond by way of Ethan Hunt as his north star, Ritchie and his cinematic Madonna, Jason Statham, sally forth in a delightfully breezy adventure, with welcome appearances from Cary Elwes, Josh Hartnett, and especially Hugh Grant, who nearly steals the entire Operation. -J.S.
78 | Infinity Pool
Brandon Cronenberg’s psychedelic odyssey of cloning and cuckolding proves him a worthy successor to his father’s body horror empire, but it’s Mia Goth’s unhinged turn as a gleefully sadistic seductress that’s managed to stick with me ever since the film’s debut last January. She’s great fun in those Ti West films, but for my money, this is the one that proves she’s really got the goods – just an unforgettable performance. – R.J.
77 | R.M.N.
This ominous tale from Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu places a gripping marital drama amidst a backdrop of shrinking job markets and small-town xenophobia. It’s a carefully paced and surprisingly surreal portrait of a rural community in crisis, culminating in a lengthy one-take town hall sequence that’s among the finest scenes of the year. – R.J.
76 | All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
The most visually striking picture of the year, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a lurid, dreamlike film with a feverishly original feel and exceptional cast. I am pretty shocked to see just how few people managed to seek this film out last year. Here’s hoping that in the years to come audiences will find their way back to this film and give it the true recognition it deserves. Great, great stuff. – C.W.
75 | Air
Ben Affleck’s warm, fluffy slice of 80s corporate historia is hardly the most inventive title on this list, but its good-timin’ soundtrack and quite frankly overpowered cast ensure that its well-worn Moneyball-esque cliches go down easy. The smarmy business bro back-and-forths zing with appropriate aplomb, but my favorite wrinkle here just might be the aggressively mannered and idiosyncratic performance from Funny Pages standout Matthew Maher as shoe designer Peter Moore, an incredibly memorable portrayal of the oft-peculiar minds quietly dreaming up mass culture. – R.J.
74 | Emily
Few biopics have matched their subject so perfectly this year as did Emily, a mysteriously moody look into the author of Wuthering Heights. Of course, to boil down the story of Emily Brontë to her only novel would be a disservice to the person, who pushed against the social confines of her time. The inner turmoil of trying to find one’s truth amongst others expectations is portrayed excellently by Emma Mackey, who anchors the whole affair with an emotionally volatile performance. Combine that with the dreary locations and a powerful score for a moving period biopic to match the work. -N.A.
73 | Dreamin’ Wild
Dreamin’ Wild has the terseness and specificity of character of a great New Yorker feature piece. It relies less on classical script convention than on an accumulation of feeling to capture that most slippery of traits: American virtue. Casey Affleck, Walton Goggins, Zooey Deschanel, and Lloyd Bridges can not respectably be called Bressonian in their characterizations of people who can best be described as flyover country in human form, but it would not be overreaching to say they gesture towards this tradition. Bill Pohlad, who crafted one of the most remarkable biopics, musical or otherwise, with his marvelous Love & Mercy plumbs a far more esoteric region with the Emerson brothers who unlike Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys occupy a far more idiosyncratic footnote in musical history. But the typical American life is not beholden to a rave review in Pitchfork, and Dreamin’ Wild insists not on the vulgarity of celebrity but on the ties that bind: father and son, brother to brother, husband and wife. -J.S.
72 | Shortcomings
A snarky, postmodern romcom custommade to fill the Master of None-shaped hole in your heart, Randall Park’s Shortcomings is a delightfully self-effacing portrait of the (spiritually) involuntarily celibate cinephile, as well as a surprisingly bracing meditation on the pathologies of interracial dating. A delightful and sneakily Rohmer-indebted piece of work. – R.J.
71 | The Pope’s Exorcist
Of any modern actor, Russell Crowe is perhaps the closest to exemplifying the spirit of Marlon Brando. This is not a thinly veiled insult in their latter-day efforts towards rotundity, but speaks more to their outrageous talents employed towards eccentric ends. The Pope’s Exorcist should frankly have been closer in quality to what popes are purportedly said to do in the woods, but it is Crowe’s immense gameness and the fineness of the creative team that surrounds him that elevate the film above the Ford Model T assembly line of supernatural horror (God Damn The Exorcist: Believer). – J.S.
70 | Thanksgiving
Of all the unexpected curiosities of 2023, none were more shocking to the horror fans among us than a return to form for director Eli Roth with Thanksgiving. Out of all the joke trailers from 2007’s Grindhouse, it only makes sense that Roth’s seasonal slasher would eventually expand to feature length, taking the sight gags and building a story that’s just as mean around them. Following your basic slasher premise combining brutal kills with a whodunnit, it’s an enjoyable time of trying to figure out both the fiend behind the mask as well as how the next novelty kill will play out. It’s a back-to-basics approach for Roth, whose last few outings have been quite tame compared to the disgusting hallmarks of his earlier career, revived here with grocery cart scalpings, corn cob holder ear stabbings, and a gnarly turkey day spread. It may be a one-off horror film, but at the very least it gives us hope that Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S. may one day see feature length. -N.A.
69 | El Conde
The world leader as bloodsucking vampire. It’s a metaphor so hack as to fill countless political cartoons, but in Pablo Larrain’s delicate hands, it constitutes a trenchant work of historical trauma turned monstrously comic. The myth of the vampire, tired as it is, continually finds new relevance (or blood, if we’re feeling coy) in films from Nosferatu to Thirst to El Conde. Gorgeously rendered by legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman in pungent black-and-white, Larrain renders the spectre of Pinochet impotent in the same way that Mel Brooks did Hitler in The Producers. Stay tuned for an especially irreverent broadside in the third act which is likely the funniest indictment of a major political figure that puts the weekend crew at 30 Rockefeller to shame. – J.S.
68 | The Eight Mountains
A sweeping, epic tale of friendship across a lifetime, The Eight Mountains follows two friends whose relationship remains despite the twists and turns they each take on their own paths. Facing strained parental relationships and their own aimlessness, Pietro and Bruno return to find solace in the mountains of their childhood. The Italian Alps appear in full force throughout the film, using location shooting to capture them in all their glory, as well as some inspired use of drone photography to follow an ascent. Following the pair over the years of highs and lows reveals something undefinable about true friendships and their nature to stand the test of time, even as the people in them change. -N.A.
67 | Other People’s Children
Lovely film that should be higher on the list! I saw this on a day at the cinema alongside R.M.N, The Eight Mountains, and Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3. Without a doubt the best film I saw that day, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children, is a wonderful motion picture that I hope our readers seek out soon. – C.W.
66 | Fremont
Now that Jim Jarmusch no longer seems content (or capable) at making Jim Jarmusch films, Babak Jalali has anointed himself heir presumptive with Fremont. The film may bear more than a trace of Stranger Than Paradise: the ascetic black & white, blank affect, anxieties of immigrant life in capitalist America, etc. but then again, a facsimile of a masterpiece, can itself bear great fruit. Humor and emotion bubble up again and again in Fremont, California both because of and despite its aesthetic trappings. Fremont is ably carried by lead Anaita Wali Zada, in whose incandescent presence the film chugs along, and her supporting cast of misfits which vary from an uproarious Gregg Turkington (one will never associate White Fang in quite the same way) and a star-confirming turn from Jeremy Allen White. – J.S.
65 | Polite Society
Eschewing known conventions and tropes of a coming-of-age film with stunts and martial arts, Polite Society forges its own path on its own terms. A delightful action-comedy romp (among many other genres), the film and its young stunt performer-in-training, Ria, fight against what’s expected of them at every turn. For Ria, that means the impending marriage of her sister, who’s given up on her artistic dreams and is ready to settle for domesticity. Featuring a bevy of stunts, gags, well-choreographed fights, and a major dance number in the film’s climax, Polite Society goes all in when it comes to creating a unique action-packed style, carrying it through to an off-the-rails third act. When a film is playing around with this many ideas and styles, and is just as unapologetically joyful while doing it, it’s hard to disapprove. -N.A.
64 | Talk to Me
Another fresh take on possession, Talk to Me treats ghostly or demonic invasion as a group of teens’ seemingly safe-enough party trick. The YouTube-based Phlippou Brothers’ directorial debut is certainly working in the vein of the A24 distributed horror films that came before it, but still manages to make an old concept fresh again with its shocking moments and scares. As a descendant of the Ouija craze, there’s a pretty clear message here regarding peer pressure and the dangerous cycle of playing with forces beyond one’s control, hammering that point home with a much more invasive experience than simply moving a planchette across a board. -N.A.
63 | Walk Up
Another entrancing and elliptical tale from Hong Sang-soo – perhaps my favorite of his many films from the past few years, Walk Up’s hypnotic sense of repetition amid the passage of time proves utterly absorbing. – R.J.
62 | Little Richard: I Am Everything
The artist not properly appreciated in their lifetime is one of the greatest and most common of tragedies. By definition, it doesn’t occur to the mediocre and the medium talents. They receive their flowers in proper proportion. It is the pioneers who remain unsung, when the vocabulary simply doesn’t exist to verbalize their achievement. Such is the case with Little Richard whose “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom” remains the greatest lyric in rock history. It was a cry of ecstasy and defiance to a world unreceptive to the intersectionality (and contradictions) of his many identities: black, gay, Christian, rock’n’motherfucking’roller. If anyone rested in heaven and raised hell simultaneously, it would be Richard Wayne Penniman. -J.S.
61 | Magic Mike’s Last Dance
The great delight of the Magic Mike trilogy is in each installment’s refusal to follow the schematic order typically prescribed to a franchise. “The audience wants the same package, different dressing” cries conventional wisdom. But Steven Soderbergh is too canny and chameleonic a filmmaker to offer up Channing Tatum’s package on the same silver platter time and time again. In this third (final?) Magic trick, Mike is not a cipher of economic recession or embarked on a picaresque road trip as in installments I and II, respectively. Here, he’s fully and self-reflexively doing what he was born to do – puttin’ on a show. It’s a refreshingly localized and straight-ahead approach that, reminiscent to the cadences of a sports film, builds up to a spectacular climax equal parts stripshow revue and Gene Kelly showmanship. But that belies the beating, throbbing, complicated heart of the whole affair: Salma Hayek. She puts forth one of the most fully realized, stunningly complex portrayals in this new century; shades of Tennesee Williams, Pedro Almodovar, and Cassavetes live within her character. This radical, conscious recentering on female desire is the genius stroke of what is likely Mr. Mike’s last dance, last chance for love. -J.S.
Scrawls on Cinema Blog 