Most of the sites to which I contribute primarily use me for genre-specific work, which is fine — I know that world very, very well. But it can also feel like typecasting sometimes. I entered the field of a film criticism as a reviewer who saw everything, and only went niche once the Internet fragmented everything into niches. I’m happy to spotlight great fantasy and superhero films with focused lists, but as anyone who clicks on my name at this site knows, I see and enjoy a LOT more than that.
With that said, does anyone feel that best-of lists these year feel particularly “same-y”? It honestly feels like you can predict 90% of what any given writer’s list will be. I can’t entirely fault that — as you’ll see, my own list has some of those same titles on it as well. But where’s the personality? The sloppiness? The “Boy, that guy was smoking something!” picks? And I don’t count outrage-baiters like Armond White or Tom Snyder courting the MAGA clicks. It’s more a case of yeah, I know The Holdovers, All of Us Strangers, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest, Barbenheimer, Poor Things, The Boy and the Heron et al are beloved and acclaimed. Can you tell me something I don’t know? I’m glad to see May December not being as wholly overrated as I feared, though I still remain bafflingly unable to connect to Todd Haynes in general. And while All of Us Strangers seems to be this year’s Call Me By Your Name/Little Women, I’m happy to say that unlike those two, it’s actually good and not a crashing bore. (Although, having had a mother very much like the one depicted, I would advise that film’s protagonist that she’d have been just as likely to get less tolerant with age rather than more.)
Anyway, here are mine. Feel free to go off on them. At least one will probably make you wonder what I was drinking. (I never smoke anything. It hurts.)
1. Beau Is Afraid.
I’ve appreciated Ari Aster as a stylist rather than hailing him as a new, exciting voice in elevated horror, given that his two films thus far were stealth remakes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man, and I’m sorry, it doesn’t get much more elevated than “horror directed by Polanski, starring Cassavetes and Farrow.” His third film, however, feels directly sucked from his id, a waking nightmare in the vein of what David Lynch does but never feeling like a ripoff. What if every minor insecurity you had did come true? What sort of world would that create? And what if every victory over your fears came at too high a price? Joaquin Phoenix is best as an actor when he’s reacting to things, and here he’s stuck in a bad dream he can’t wake up from. The ending is divisive, but I’ve come to feel that it’s [SPOILER] a reverse-Owl Creek: rather than his escape being a dream and him dying in reality, he dies in his dreams while escaping in reality. Which might be just as crushing, but we’ll never know.
2. Backwards Faces
I don’t really have anything more to say than I did in my initial review, right here on Cinegods. But you can rent it on Prime Video for less than $2.
3. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
It’s about six different movies jammed into one, and all of them are good. One complaint I had about its predecessor was that at times it felt too polished, relative to earlier teasers, and that’s fixed here, with some deliberate “rough draft” styles and pencil tests and the like visible. It’s also a pointed argument against fan rigidity and corporate creative limits that seemed to bypass the usual gatekeepers’ kneejerk defenses. The inevitable trilogy capper has a lot to live up to.
4. The Zone of Interest
It’s too easy to compare this unblinking-eye portrait of the Auschwitz Commandant’s family life to a Stanley Kubrick film — Kubrick had more of a sense of humor and story than Jonathan Glazer is going for. But it is fair, I think, to compare it to some of Raymond Briggs’ graphic novels for adults: as in The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman, or When the Wind Blows, gentle humor about wartime situations gets periodically interrupted by stark, black-and-white insert pages that scream THIS IS TERRIBLE AND PEOPLE ARE GONNA DIE. The ending’s also a kick in the nuts, [SPOILER] as an entire movie about how humans can immunize themselves to the horrors in their backyard suddenly switches to the perspective of people for whom it has to become mundane in order to do their jobs — the janitors at what is now a museum of death.
5. Poor Things
I haven’t always loved Yorgos Lanthimos, but I do love that he finally got the budget to create an entire fantasy world from the ground up just so he could make Horny Bride of Frankenstein.
6. Killers of the Flower Moon
I’ve seen this twice, and would gladly watch again — an old-fashioned movie epic like they used to make them (minus the white supremacy), depicting a historical event enacted on a grand scale with movie stars. I didn’t know the history of the Osage, and I’m glad to be informed, and while it’s true that Martin Scorsese as a non-Native may be limited in his perspective, he acknowledges that point, especially with the ending, and never overreaches, portraying events through the perspective of the dumb white guy slowly figuring stuff out. Lily Gladstone is both wonderfully subtle and painfully unsparing, showing that Mollie kinda does love her husband even as he blunders toward possibly killing her.
7. Oppenheimer
I’m honestly amazed this one turned out to be a crowd-pleaser, and also that it pleased me so much. Creative editing and cinematography enlivens the life of the atomic bomb’s father, and his moral qualms about letting things go any further. There may be more than a little allegory in there for director Christopher Nolan tiring of cinematic destruction movies and pivoting to weightier matters. Like Flower Moon, an old-style epic with movie stars, but shot and cut in a much more modern way. Maybe if we’re lucky, studios will notice a trend here.
8. Godzilla Minus One
Everything a remake of Godzilla should be. That is all.
9. Barbie
I’m a toy guy, from a toy generation, and while Barbie wasn’t ever my specific jam, its messages about mixed messaging, evolving sensibilities, and the way we express ourselves through plastic avatars are all on the nose. I wish The LEGO Movie had gotten this much credit for its very similar points, but no matter — it’s a Barbie World.
10. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Take the tone of The Princess Bride and add an insane budget for world-building, and this is what you get. I can only assume it didn’t do better because nobody under 40 cares much about Dungeons & Dragons as a brand any more. Maybe the only way forward is to remake the ’80s cartoon, as this movie does for a split-second, much-loved Easter egg.
11. Saw X
I couldn’t think which movie to bump in order to add this, but I really didn’t want to leave it out either, so my list now goes to eleven. On the Blu-ray of Saw X, you get to see a 25 minute scene, shot originally as one master shot, in which Tobin Bell delivers a lengthy, part-improvised monologue that lays out the entire plot of the movie, and it’s mesmerizing. Just one of many moments that demonstrate the Shakespearean — I’m not kidding — gravitas he applies to his signature role as horror antagonist John “Jigsaw” Kramer. Or in this case, protagonist. For once, John is up against a villain more evil than himself, and it’s gonna take all that acting craft to convincingly make the delusional, charismatic narcissist into our new hero. He does it, in the second-best performance of the year after Emma Stone in Poor Things.