2023 in Review -- Movies

Here's one more post in my look back at 2023 -- this time about the movies I saw last year.

As luck would have it, I watched 52 movies over the course of the year, working out to an average of one a week. They were not at all so evenly spaced, though. In fact, I'd seen half of those movies just one quarter of the way into the year. (Then along came The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, consuming huge swaths of my time.)

I caught 16 of those movies out at a theater, one at the symphony (when I saw Danny Elfman's score from Tim Burton's original Batman played live to picture), one on an airplane (Weird), and the rest from the comfort of my own couch. 24 of the movies I saw were 2023 releases, which puts me slightly ahead of where I was the year before when I first made my Top Movies List for 2022.

But the thing is -- I'm far less confident in my list than I was last year. It's always the case that I wind up revising my annual list as I catch up on more movies, and "good but not great" movies near the bottom of my list get pushed out by worthier fare. But this year, "good but not great" would make up at least half my list. It may be that I haven't seen the right movies yet... or it may be that, for my tastes, 2023 wasn't actually a very good movie year.

So this time around, instead of posting a "Top 10" list, I'm going to launch this provisional version of my list as a "Top 5" only, and hope to extend it later. My picks (so far) for 2023 are:

1. Flora and Son
2. Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse
3. Renfield
4. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
5. Barbie

Even though I have seen several of the movies in the "award season" discussion, Barbie is the only one I wanted for my list. I liked-but-didn't-love The Holdovers, was lukewarm on Oppenheimer, and thought too little of Past Lives and Asteroid City to even bother with a review post. (Maybe if either becomes an actual Best Picture Oscar nominee, I'll circle back.) Meanwhile, the 2023 movies I most want to catch up with right now are on nobody's award radar, but rather just intrigue me with high concepts (No One Can Save You), compelling casts (A Haunting in Venice), or both (Leave the World Behind).

Here's hoping that 2024 brings some better movies -- perhaps movies that were held from 2023 during the Hollywood strikes?

Updated 1/31/2024:

1. Flora and Son
2. Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse
3. Elemental
   
4. Renfield
5. Anatomy of a Fall
   
6. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
7. Barbie