Category: movies

(With the understanding that someone might be interested in reading my annual roundup on movies and not the equivalent music piece — or vice versa — and lacking the desire to reiterate what I said last time: If you want to know my thoughts on the state of the world and the state of myself and the state of this website, you can read the essay that opened my musical retrospective here. It still covers just about everything I’m capable of saying right now. Otherwise, please enjoy this year’s Top 20 Movies!)

I’m not wild about 2024 as a year in movies. Yeah, I ultimately filled this list with a handful of contenders to spare, but…I don’t know. I got there in part by cheating, at least by my standards; there are two entries with runtimes so short I’m not sure I’d have qualified them as feature length in a year when I was less desperate for films I’d actually be excited to write about. And even with that rule broken, you have to get a couple entries deep before you start finding movies I’m confident would have made the cut last year.

Part of the problem is that 2024 played as something of a reverse 2023 — it got off to an extremely strong start, then just flatlined for the rest of the year. The top four entries on this list had all been released by April, and that’s quite a high to come down from.

Still, the top tier of this year’s list is pretty, well, top tier. And considering how recently I was sincerely concerned 2024 would not have enough great movies to comfortably fill twenty slots, the fact that I ended up with as much overflow as I did — even if I don’t feel compelled to include any of it as an honorable mention — comes as some relief. There will never be a year with no great movies — and if 2024 could pull it off, there will probably never be a year where this list is a challenge. This isn’t my favorite column since I started doing this — though, for what it’s worth, it also isn’t my least favorite — but in the end I’m content with it.

Let us begin!

20. Evil Does Not Exist

Evil Does Not Exist is the kind of Top 20 entry that’s really only one fatal flaw away from being a Top 10 entry. There’s part of me that even thinks it might be better than the much more culturally impactful Drive My Car — or that most of it is, anyway. It’s typically beautiful work from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: I make my living as a small-town journalist, I love me a good public meeting, inject your movie about municipal water systems directly into my veins. But what really stands out to me is how skillfully paced it is — slow and deliberate, to be sure, but in this way that allows it to complete every thought before moving on. Hamaguchi establishes a sort of chilly remove that accentuates its depiction of mundane worldly cruelties and provide and stages its surprising sense of humor with appropriate awkwardness. Like I said, it’s the sort of movie that normally would comfortably slot itself in the Top 10 or Top 5 — but for my feeling that it nowhere near sticks the landing, and in fact fails to earn it by such a significant distance that it can cast the faintest pallor over the film preceding it. Not much of one, though — Evil Does Not Exist is extraordinary until it isn’t, and it isn’t only for a short time. I continue to watch Hamaguchi’s career with interest.

19. Look Back

The year’s best cry-like-an-idiot movie. This is one of two entries I feel like I might have disqualified in a year where I found my also-rans more compelling — at only fifty minutes, it’s shorter than a lot of TV shows these days. But the Academy counts that as feature length, so whatever — this year, it’s good enough for me. Look Back is absolute emotional dynamite for weird artsy types who have a difficult, anxious relationship with their work — which is to say me, it’s emotional dynamite for me specifically. It’s also emotional dynamite for people with a tendency to fixate on what-ifs and might-have-beens and who struggle with the transience and impermanence of things, which is to say that, really, this kind of became overkill for me past a certain point. Charming, low-key, and delightful until it’s crushing, then swings from hope to despair and back again until it’s put you the whole way through the wringer. Beautiful, sad, affirming, great.

18. Conclave

Conclave is the kind of movie that reminds me why I frame these lists as “favorites,” not “bests.” Obviously, who am I to decide my own subjective emotional responses ought to be representative of some larger object standard? But it’s more than that, it’s the fact that even my own personal sense of what’s good or bad or better or worse get tangled up in the complexity of telling a story. I can easily think of ways Conclave could have been technically better cinema. And all of those things would have made me like it less. I worry in my discussions over the last several months I’ve overemphasized Conclave as an ironic pleasure; let me be clear now that it truly isn’t. This is a well-made film, it looks great, the cast is phenomenal, it somehow makes behind-the-scenes Vatican politicking the most fascinating thing in the world. It’s super melodramatic and intense, but I have a weakness for that kind of thing. It’s just that when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong — but also swings for the fences so hard that you have to admire it. This would be a “better” movie if it ended twenty minutes earlier, on that final moment of ambiguity — instead of suddenly ratcheting everything up to eleven and piling on twist after twist after twist. But I had a big, stupid smile on my face through the whole ending the first time I watched it, relishing each earth-shattering revelation, doing a spit-take the moment I realized what the final turn was going to be. For me, it’s The Dark Knight Rises of pope movies: great when it’s good and a masterpiece when it isn’t. Loved it.

17. Rap World

The other entry I thought about disqualifying, and it’s even more tempting in this case, not only because it runs a mere fifty minutes but because it’s literally a really long YouTube video and even I have trouble muscling past the stigma associated with that. But Rap World is just too…undeniable. It occupied my thoughts far too long after I watched it to be discarded solely on account of its medium. There really is a level of stupidity that a movie cannot achieve without the people making it secretly being actual geniuses, and I’m struggling to think of anything that better demonstrates what I mean by that than Rap World. It doesn’t just deliver on the jokes — though let me be clear that it is hilarious, and somehow only gets funnier as it goes — it perfectly replicates the experience of hanging out with the stupidest guys you knew in the year 2009. Every inch of every frame reflects an unwavering commitment to the bit — the camera as much the medium as it is an actor portraying a character in the story, every dialogue exchange feeling loose and improvisational despite the fact that it would have to be extremely purposeful in order to convey the necessary information and set up the jokes for the editing room, the cultural references and overall mood having to line up with a historical period that happened too recently to be easily signaled visually. It can only exist as a function of an extraordinary amount of thought going into it. It truly is Moron Citizen Kane. Funny when it’s funny and hilarious when it’s kind of sad.

16. Nickel Boys

You know, I always complain about how late I am with these because of how long it can take certain films to screen near me (if they do at all). And yet, I sometimes feel like the extra three or four months I get to do these still isn’t enough. I don’t know how I’d handle throwing a list together at the tail end of December having only seen everything one time and some films only a handful of days prior. Nickel Boys feels like it’s occupying a placeholder slot here. I had no idea where to put it. Because it’s clearly extraordinary, but I’ve also never seen anything like it and I know I didn’t completely get my head around it on the first viewing. I could see repeat viewings moving it to pretty much any position here. The craftsmanship is incomprehensible, how its cinematography can be so beautiful while also being one hundred percent subjective, anchored in the direct point of view of its characters. And it maintains that delicate state without ever breaking kayfabe — it actually feels like you’re looking through a human being’s eyes, it has that fidgety distraction that comes with reacting to changes in your environment, and yet it’s all so deliberately stitched together and graceful. And that’s just the surface, not the rich core of theme and feeling I still don’t completely have in hand. Just an impossible thing, a miracle of a movie.

15. Anora

Another year, another Sean Baker movie that I feel like you guys like way more than I do, and honestly, I’m not even sure Anora is my favorite of his; it lacks that Sean Baker-y texture of everyday oddity that drives the rest of his work. But for the purposes of a list like this, that says a lot more about where you guys are than I am, because Anora is still one of the best — for lack of a better descriptor — “four-quadrant” movies of the year. You know, the sort of movie that’s accessible on a hundred different levels, whether you’re in it for the jokes or the feelings. I like the smallness of its scope, and the inherent hilariousness of its concept. And the performances are across-the-board stellar; I’m actually completely fine with that upset Mikey Madison Best Actress win (and probably would’ve voted for Yura Borisov too, were I a member of the Academy). Weird, layered, doesn’t always take things where you think it’s going to. Good fun.

14. Rebel Ridge

I would like for Netflix to die in the hottest fire it can find for completely burying this. There is absolutely no reason why Rebel Ridge shouldn’t be a monster hit, much less nearly forgotten only a handful of months after its release. Well, if there’s only one person left beating the drum, let it be me — Rebel Ridge is one hell of a bone-crunching thriller (that’s also weirdly humane at the end of the day?). It’s the modern world’s answer to First Blood. It slides gracefully from slow-burn indie intensity to detective procedural and finally to pulse-pounding actioner, never misses a beat. The civil asset forfeiture revenge thriller: just what the doctor ordered.

13. Hit Man

While we’re on the subject of “burn in hell, Netflix,” here’s the other great movie they casually dropped halfway through the year and then pretended never existed. Hit Man is the first Richard Linklater movie I’ve loved since 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!! and possibly his best “fun one” since as far back as School of Rock (depending on how you define “fun one,” anyway). It has a lot of his staples, chiefly its low-key tone and its talky but not overly self-serious philosophical dimensions. But it’s also kind of a departure for him in that it replaces his aching sincerity with biting, red-hot irony. What if you therapy speak’d yourself into becoming a sociopath? What if the best version of yourself is actually kind of terrible? Cheeky, kind of slimy, deliberately leans into its guilty pleasure elements. Super watchable, and also kind of quietly unprecedented.

12. Nosferatu

I’m picking up a vibe like people are starting to get a little sick of Robert Eggers. Not me, though. It’s weird, because I have a long history of being a “story over aesthetics” guy when a movie forces me to make that choice, but Eggers is just such a generational talent behind the camera. He’s one of the best technical craftsmen working, and at this point probably a candidate for the all-time list. He’s going to have to turn in a script that’s actively bad even to get me to drop below my customary four stars, much less to turn me against him. And Nosferatu does not have a bad script! It isn’t flawless, but it’s doing some interesting things, particularly with the strange psychosexual aspects of the story; I strongly disagree with the strain of criticism accusing it of having nothing on its mind. Nosferatu has more than enough beneath the surface to support its staggering visuals. It looks and sounds phenomenal, and it’s interesting to see Eggers attack something a little more visceral — less the slow burn of The Witch and more a proper horror thriller. It’s unsettling as all hell, a horror movie that feels deeply, pervasively evil and buries itself in your gut. A filmmaker at the absolute height of his powers.

11. Hard Truths

Mike Leigh is one of those otherworldly talents to me — I simply cannot comprehend how he manages to do what he does with such consistency. I don’t understand the functions of his work, and never in a million years could I replicate them — constantly creating things that feel like new, unprecedented experiences despite being naturalistic, improvisational dramas about the lives of everyday, average people. How he can wrangle such beauty out of sets that consist largely of living rooms, how he can mine so many layers of complexity out of premises so simple they’re barely even loglines, how he can get those performances out of so many different people over so many years — seriously, I think there’s an argument to be made that no director in the history of the medium has been better with actors. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, just, my god. It’s all so familiar, the characters so much like people you know in real life, their situations so relatable, and yet it’s so complicated, so evocative, a house of cards that would collapse instantly with one wrong move and yet somehow no one ever makes one. And it’s all done with such humility; there isn’t a single moment where the film starts to feel impressed with itself. Just another day at the office. It confounds me in the best possible way.

10. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

There’s no doubt it can be hard to separate a movie like The Seed of the Sacred Fig from its circumstances — the fact that its mere existence is an act of extraordinary courage, that multiple members of the cast and crew have been arrested and/or exiled for making it. But the older I get, the more I believe that’s part and parcel of the whole thing — that movies, or any works of art, for that matter, are functions of their real-world foundations as much as what’s actually contained within them. Sometimes the medium really is the message. It’s that bravery that makes The Seed of the Sacred Fig so cutting and urgent, that gives it its vitality. Specificity, once again, is key — what ultimately exposes the universality of the human condition and what ails it. You don’t have to have lived a second of its story for its characters and their increasingly fraught relationship with one another to ring achingly familiar. Edward Albee once said, “Fiction is fact distilled into truth.” The Seed of the Sacred Fig is truth.

9. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Easily the year’s most pleasant surprise. I gave up on Aardman at some point; the studio hasn’t delivered anything better than OK in a while, and its recent turn toward sequels felt like a desperate last grasp at keeping its doors open. The mediocrity of the new Chicken Run more or less sealed the deal for me. Then lo and behold! They delivered Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, their best feature in twenty years, since its own predecessor — and there’s a small part of me that wonders if I like it even more than that one! It’s exactly what I want out of a Wallace & Gromit movie — simple but inventive, dryly funny, sometimes a riot but not so often it becomes exhausting, replete with the requisite Aardman charm, and it’s also got stronger storytelling than I’m used to even in the studio’s best features. Nothing fancy, of course, but there’s a sense of purpose and drive to it that I don’t think Aardman has tapped into since Chicken Run. It’s just a good time, the perfect family film.

8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

It grew on me! It’s no Fury Road, but I don’t think it matters. This is the Aliens to Fury Road’s Alien — inferior, but different enough as a movie that you stop comparing them. Alien is the best version of itself, Aliens is the best version of itself, and so it goes with Furiosa. It’s less of a slam-bang action flick, more of a sweeping epic — albeit one that’s more honed in on character, more interested in telling a story. Fury Road is fun; Furiosa is bleak. It feels the loss of the old world more profoundly than any other entry in the Mad Max franchise; there’s a weight to it, a sense of grief. Chris Hemsworth has absolutely never been better, and Anya Taylor Joy’s Charlize Theron impression is downright creepy. And through it all, you still get the great set pieces and utterly deranged characters you see these movies for. And it’s an excellent companion piece to its predecessor, the latter of which is something of a tonic for the former’s bleakness. If nothing you do matters, might as well do something right. What else are you going to do?

7. Flow

One thing I’ve found over the years is that I really, really like the idea of movies about animals — actual animals, I mean, not Disney animals with essentially human intelligence — but I struggle to get into them in practice. Even all-timers like Au Hasard Balthazar I respect more than enjoy. They’re animals! There isn’t a whole lot of texture to dig into there. It’s hard to feel anything deep and interesting. That’s why it’s significant that I loved Flow right out of the gate and it never lost me. I don’t know how fair it is to say it’s about actual animals — the concept requires it to take at least a few liberties, like that they figure out how to steer the boat. But in the ways that matter, it feels authentic. I think Flow low-key has some of the best storytelling of any movie this year, or at least the most novel — that it somehow manages to wring character arcs out of its furry cast while still having them feel like animals. It pulls off this cause-and-effect, punishment/reward angle — if I do this, I get food; if I do this, I get hurt, that sort of thing — that feels true to the way animals learn, makes its characters dynamic, and sends them on a journey that’s as much emotional as physical. I think what most stands out to me is how broadly appealing it feels, despite being a little indie movie with a lot of vision — simply because of how skillfully it executes on a ton of different levels. You’ve got cute animals, you’ve got enough concrete storytelling to engage the average audience, and there’s mystery and ambiguity to it — especially its haunted world-building — that leave it feeling like it’s hit upon something important. Truly something special.

6. Sing Sing

Another one that’s grown on me with distance and a second viewing. Sing Sing is good in all the ways you want a movie to be good, the ones that maybe aren’t as fun to write about, but where it goes the extra mile, I think, is how unified it feels in its purpose. How seemingly everyone involved knew what was unique to the story they were telling, what made it special, what made it interesting, and worked to bring that out — not only in writing and filmmaking and performance but in the reality of the production itself. It’s only kind of the real-life John Whitfield’s story, and it’s only kind of a true story in the first place. Really, by drawing the film from his account, then threading in the details of other men he knew over the course of his incarceration, then casting actual former inmates in those roles and letting them incorporate some of their own autobiographies into the story, they created something that’s a perfect approximation of its own subject. It’s theater — the ultimate collaborative art form. And Sing Sing is a very collaborative-feeling movie, a lot of different people bringing their own truth to the experience. So you get this balanced, nuanced movie, as much a hangout flick as a propulsive narrative, and it walks the line gracefully. Never feels thin, never feels overstuffed, there’s always some new layer being peeled back, and sometimes it’s surprising what you find underneath. Despite its heavy subject matter, it’s warm, uplifting, and full of love, and it earns every second.

5. The Brutalist

I’ve said before that if The Brutalist is not quite the best movie of 2024, it’s easily the most American. An immigrant population crawling out of the ashes of generational trauma, while the world continues spinning apathetically around them, funneled into the blood and sweat of the capitalist grind, expected to pick up and carry on somehow. A big world run by even bigger whims, a people with little recourse against them but to live and die by their whims. Even after obtaining prestige and a certain indispensability, it only affords the opportunity to stand silently and watch as self-made wealthy megalomaniacs pass the torch to their failsons who are no less evil than them but lack even the mad vision to build something that lasts; they know and care nothing of the world beyond spreadsheets and the numbers that go up and down on them. And in the end, what you leave behind is bigger than you; what it inspires is out of your hands. Art, commerce, ego. A staggering, ambitious epic that’s all the more impressive for how it stands perpetually on the razor’s edge of collapse without ever tipping in.

4. Hundreds of Beavers

I swear I am just hemorrhaging brain cells, man. Every year I’m alive on this Earth I become measurably stupider. I go through different artistic phases from time to time, where a specific type of thing fascinates me and I get way too into it. Right now, that thing is what I can only describe as “the artfully stupid.” Get me artists at the absolute height of their powers who are devoting all of that talent and perfectionism to the most moronic ideas that ever slithered across their diseased brains. Go to film school, then pool all of your resources into bringing that big Drunk Idea to life. Anyway, if there was a Wikipedia page for “the artfully stupid,” I’d have to insist on the poster for Hundreds of Beavers being at the very top. It has codified the entire concept. Sincerely well designed, possibly the best edited movie of the entire year, lovingly hand-crafted, and you will feel entire sections of your brain sloughing off while you watch it. This isn’t a movie you experience; it’s a movie you lose a fight with. I can identify the exact moment where my dumbfounded silence lapsed into complete hysteria and then never stopped. We’ve done it, ladies and gentlemen. The pinnacle of human achievement. The stupidest movie ever made. I laughed until I was sick. I loved every second of it. I made it my entire personality last year and I do not regret it.

3. I Saw the TV Glow

I have never seen anything like I Saw the TV Glow. That’s pretty much the long and short of it. It’s a rare thing, a movie that feels like it’s discovered some whole new way of communicating, like it’s expanded the known boundaries of what cinema can do. And somehow, it does that despite wearing its influences very explicitly on its sleeve — part of me thinks Jane Schoenbrun has been a little too forthcoming about their influences on the interview circuit, and yet it hasn’t made a dent in the overall novelty of the experience. I Saw the TV Glow keeps its literal and metaphorical elements in perfect balance, sliding from the more traditionally narrative to the downright Lynchian without ever losing you, cheating your emotional investment, or shedding the core of what it is. It always feels of a piece with itself. It achieves thematic clarity on the level of the preachiest morality play you’ve seen, without ever putting its actual subject into the literal text of the story. It’s evocative, it defies genre, it borrows chintzy ‘90s YA visuals and somehow transforms them striking and gorgeous. Blank check for Schoenbrun; I’m there for whatever comes next.

2. Dune: Part 2

I am as God made me, folks. It’s like I said when I put Part 1 in that year’s Top 20: I love science fiction nonsense, I love big worms and laser guns and spaceships, and when you hand those things to a director who knows how to shoot them so that they are not gray, warmed-over filth, I’m a cat chasing a laser pointer. You’ve got me; I’m putty in your hands. Anyway, I still have a handful of minor reservations about Part 1, but those do not recur in Part 2 — it’s the better movie in every conceivable way; it even brought me around on some of the things I didn’t care for the first time around (chiefly that loud loud LOUD score, which now feels like the purest reflection of the duology’s “sinners in the hand of an angry god” ethos). Being alive in a time of prophecy would be as invigorating as it would be terrifying, and that’s the key to how Dune: Part 2 manages to be a rousing epic and a feel-bad indictment of religion and power at the same time. It’s some truly extraordinary big-screen spectacle. Bring on Dune: Messiah, bring on the other sequels, let’s get to the weird stuff, let’s upset some people, let’s set Warner Bros’ money on fire, we’re doing this.

And drumroll…

1. Challengers

Alternative title: The Most Damning Indictment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences This Side of Crash! I’m definitely not sore about this, not even a little bit. The kind of movie that makes me want to put on a bad Humphrey Bogart voice and declare “What a picture!” Challengers has reliably gotten better every single time I’ve watched it. With full respect to Call Me By Your Name’s following — it’s a great film, and I have no quarrel with it — this is the best work of Luca Guadagnino’s career, and to be completely honest, I don’t consider it close. Challengers is just plain a movie, man, a good, old-fashioned movie, with electric direction and razor-sharp writing and real, actual movie-star performances from real, actual movie stars. It’s smart and trusts its audience; it’s entertainment made by and for adults. There’s already a part of me that thinks it might be the best sports movie of all time, one that actually manages to synchronize what’s happening on the court with what’s happening off of it. There’s no moment here where a character just Digs Deep; it’s all fully motivated. And somehow it pulls off that feat while navigating as many as three or four simultaneous timelines without confusing its audience or losing its freight-train momentum; every new piece of information is deployed at the exact perfect time. There was a moment in the climax that almost made me leap out of my seat when I realized what was going on. This, right here, is how it’s done, kids. A master class.

2023 was a pretty good year for movies.

Yeah, for all of my complaint — and I was full of it this year — that’s the inescapable conclusion looking over this list. This wasn’t a great year, but it more than justified its existence by the time the lights went down.

It just didn’t feel that way. Mostly I think that’s because 2023 was a very back-loaded year. We had to hold out until November and December for a lot of these; a handful of them have only been in wide release — for a certain value of “wide release” — for a month or two even now. And for me, living in a rural area means even a lot of the earlier releases were impossible to see until streaming services picked them up in the fall. Basically, Barbenheimer was all I had sustaining me for the first three-fourths of the year. Hard not to feel kind of glum about the state of things when that’s your situation! I went to a dark place when they postponed Dune.

But hey, it did result in December and January being one of the best two months of movies I’ve ever lived through. And even though I didn’t see a sizable number of these in time to save 2023 from itself, there’s still a lot of really special stuff on here. Once again, they represent a fairly diverse selection, and I’m pretty happy with them on the whole.

(And I’m glad for that because 2024’s slate is looking like a real bummer right now!)

Anyway, I don’t normally do honorable mentions for these, but this year, there is a very definitive Number 21. So I’ll just take a moment to recognize it: May December. I think it’s a lot of tension with very little release, which is ultimately why it was my last cut from the list. However, it’s genuinely insightful, one of the rare movies that I think helped me understand its subject in a new way — and of course, Charles Melton was robbed.

Now for the Top 20!

20. John Wick: Chapter 4
I’m not sure whether the John Wick movies are getting better or if I’m just getting more amenable to them. I kind of think it’s the latter, because it seems impossible to me that each of them has been better than the last, which has been my experience with them. I’ve been meaning to revisit the first one to see if I like it now, but have thus far refused to do so for the very good reason that I cannot watch that puppy die again. That said, I do think Chapter 4, at least, is better than the others — at least, better than my memory of them — which is why the series is now making its first-ever appearance on my year-end list. These movies all have a certain magic about them; even when they’re bad, they’re good. There’s a moment on the cusp of what feels like the final showdown where Chapter 4 goes, “But first, another thirty-minute action sequence!” And I sighed, but then the movie was like, “OK, OK, I hear you, but what if this scene involves Keanu Reeves killing dudes with cars and then falling down a cartoonish amount of stairs for like fifteen minutes?” And I was like, “Fine, I’ll allow it.” It kicks as much hindquarter as you need these movies to; moreover, it gives John Wick probably his best enemy yet, the first one who is not obviously more evil than him, and I think it advances the series’ central theme — can a leopard change its spots? — to an appropriately complicated place. The cool thing about this list is that no one can stop me from cutting a Todd Haynes movie to make room for Keanu Reeves shooting guys in the face.

19. Fallen Leaves
I think the best thing I can say about Fallen Leaves is that it would probably be even higher if I spoke the language. Comedy can be tough to translate across language barriers, and that can keep this one at arm’s length once in a while. It’s hard to hear the nuance in context and delivery that’ll really make the joke go the extra mile. So the fact that I loved this movie as much as I did is a real testament to how good it actually is. For me, it comes down to one thing: this romantic comedy centers on one of the most unusual fictional couples I can think of, and the fact that it makes them work is genuine magic. These two are awkward, have terrible social skills, can barely look each other in the eye, have an anti-chemistry so intense that someone it winds all the way back around into being chemistry again. Only these two people would have this kind of patience for each other. They’re destined to spend the rest of their lives sitting two feet apart on a couch, and both of them will be completely happy with that arrangement. And there’s just something kinda sweet about that. Maybe eventually they’ll exchange enough words to learn each other’s names.

18. Barbie
Shrug. This is the world we live in now. Interesting, unique, well-made art can still exist on a mainstream level, you just have to smuggle it through the system in Barbie packaging. I think enough proverbial ink has been spilled over Barbie at this point; on most levels, you can assume I’m more or less in agreement with the general consensus. For my part, I think I was always going to sign off on it so long as it delivered quality jokes and a distinctive, well-realized aesthetic. That it ended up delivering much more than that — including another peak performance by Comedy Ryan Gosling, the best Ryan Gosling — is really just icing on the cake. Like I said. It’s a Barbie world.

17. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
I will actually lose my mind if you people put Kelly Fremon Craig in director jail again. When I first saw it, I thought word-of-mouth would rescue its box office; when that didn’t happen, I thought Oscar season would breathe some life into its cultural presence; when that didn’t happen, I began to feel as though I was going mad. I have no idea why Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was allowed to pass in the night like this. Craig has now proven twice over that she may be THE voice for coming-of-age stories about girls. Just like The Edge of Seventeen, Are You There God is funny, sweet, observant, tells its story well, and gets tremendous performances out of its whole cast (we as a culture are failing Rachel McAdams). Somebody please rescue this from obscurity; I don’t want to have to wait another seven years for Craig’s next one.

16. Robot Dreams
The Oscars do serve at least one purpose — without them, I don’t think I’d ever have bothered to watch this. It’s such an unassuming thing, and yet it’s also unprecedented in its way — how it is simultaneously perfect for both adults and children, to the extent that I couldn’t even tell you which of those audiences it’s primarily for. It shows you a sort of cynical, adult world, and then views it through an innocent, childlike lens. And in doing so, it achieves a certain clarity about things. Oh, and what’s that? It’s about endings and beginnings and the transience of things, the subject most likely to reduce me to a simpering puddle of tears? Yeah, I liked this one.

15. Monster
Hirokazu Koreeda stands apart with Asghar Farhadi as a social observer of passionate moral conviction and the ability to tell stories that somehow feel as though they’ve never been told before despite never invoking anything stronger than the everyday problems of everyday people. Monster is one of the best Rashomon-style narratives I can recall seeing. It has an expert, instinctive sense of when the moment comes to most powerfully expand your understanding of its story. It might not be as airtight as some of its director’s best work, but it more than makes up for that with its resolve. I love a movie that strikes a perfect balance between concrete, clearly conveyed information and more ambiguous developments that allow you to speculate about the characters and themes. And I love movies about the interconnectedness of humanity, how everything we do ripples outward to the people around us and then to the people around them. Simultaneously crushing and beautiful — which is to say, exactly what you expect from a Koreeda film, and exactly what you want most.

14. The Boy and the Heron
A Hayao Miyazaki film that attends more to its metaphorical dimensions than its literal ones, thus positioning it somewhat farther from my comfort zone than a lot of his work. And yet, it’s a Miyazaki film — gorgeous, on all levels, without fail, and to the extent that it’s something a little off the beaten path, at least getting your head around it is an arresting challenge. It’s the sort of movie you could watch a dozen times without failing to find something new. I’ve heard it called a Miyazaki highlights reel, but if it is, well, of course! It’s transparently a reflection on everything he’s made, whether it did any good and whether he’s left it in secure hands. It’s a phenomenal coda on an iconic career — assuming it is, in fact, his last film, which knowing him and how many times he’s tried to quit this business already, I recognize it almost certainly isn’t.

13. Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos exists at a confluence of “obviously extraordinarily gifted” and “not really my thing” that makes his movies difficult to position on lists like this. That’s probably never been truer than it is with Poor Things, a movie I have no problem calling an all-time masterpiece even though it weirded me all the way out. Honestly, I’m prepared to argue it’s Lanthimos’s best work — the most fully inhabited, the prettiest, the most purposeful, the best constructed. Certainly Emma Stone’s is the best performance to have happened under his supervision, which is saying a lot. Also his funniest movie, by a pretty significant margin: I’d have been fine with Poor Things if it had been nothing but Bella slowly driving Mark Ruffalo insane. And it is certainly more than that. Fifty-fifty chance I never watch this again, zero chance I’m not still thinking about it on my deathbed.

12. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Even as a tiny microbudget indie, the existence of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is outright shocking to me. I kept waiting for it to pull a punch, hedge its bets, dial it back toward something a little more comfortable for the political mainstream. It never did. It’s certainly the boldest thing to happen on the big screen this year. I think what makes it feel so radical is that it avoids the politics altogether. It isn’t trying to have a dialogue about the problem and how best to respond to it. It simply throws you into the mix with these characters, brings you into their world, and then trusts you to follow them through the paces of what is otherwise a normal heist movie/slow burn thriller — a very good one, but still, normal. Treating the subject like it’s no big deal somehow makes it the biggest deal of all. How to Blow Up a Pipeline was one of the year’s earliest releases, and it has loomed large in my mind ever since.

11. The Iron Claw
One of the best screenplays of the year, with one of the strongest senses of character. There’s nothing outwardly unusual about it, but I can’t recall seeing its subject — the world of professional wrestling — brought to life in quite this way before. The balance between what’s real and what’s fake in this thing that’s half sport, half theater is very tricky to navigate, and probably uniquely toxic for someone with a competitive spirit. Sean Durkin’s prior experience capturing cult dynamics in film fits the material uniquely well. Strong performances, strong filmmaking, genuinely insightful in its approach to its real-life characters, one of those all-around good movies for adults that we don’t get enough of anymore.

10. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
The most I can remember liking a Mission: Impossible movie right out of the gate — and I don’t think that’s just a matter of circumstance. Dead Reckoning, of course, delivers everything we’re starting to take for granted from this franchise — the tactile, hard-hitting action, and the mind-blowing stunt work. But I also think it’s a major step forward on a story level. For starters, it’s the first time these movies have ever felt like they’re putting their central ethos — never leave a man behind — to a serious test; Dead Reckoning is intense in a way I don’t remember the majority of its predecessors being. Additionally, the new villain, despite being a literal algorithm, is genuinely threatening and even kind of scary in the brief moment where it brings its full power to bear. It’s super fun to watch, but also strangely compelling. With Dead Reckoning, I can say something I’ve never said about a Mission: Impossible movie before: I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Honestly, what do I even say? This movie doesn’t need anyone else to lavish praise upon it. It’s all true, everything you’ve heard. The animation is now operating on levels that feel physically impossible. The writing is razor-sharp. There are no other superhero movies on the market working with characters this deeply felt. Somehow, all of this is happening despite the plot being a twenty-car pileup of characters and storylines. Yeah, it is, for the moment, only half a movie, but if Beyond the Spider-Verse even comes close to matching it, it’s half one of the greatest movies ever made.

8. The Zone of Interest
Impossible to talk about. Harrowing. A knife in your gut, twisted slowly. Sandra Hüller is terrifying. It could only have happened like this. It always happens like this. It’s happening like this right now. When it happens again, it will happen like this — not because we’re good at ignoring the cruelty, but because some part of us wants it. Can’t envision paradise without it. To a lot of us, Heaven is not Heaven if Hell is not below it.

7. The Starling Girl
Every year, I adopt and make a cause out of at least one movie barely anyone saw and that missed most critics’ year-end retrospectives. The Starling Girl is 2023’s. As usual, it’s my own experiences informing that — there’s so much about this movie, its circumstances, its characters, the little things they say and do and why and how, that rang instantly true for me. There’s a scene where its main character breaks down because she’s so happy she’s certain that means the thing she’s happy about is something God wants her to give up, and it made me wonder: would anyone who hasn’t experienced that even recognize what was going on in that scene? I don’t know, but believe me, it’s worth trying. Even as much as it’s personal for me, The Starling Girl is a just-plain-great movie on every relevant level. Check it out; it’s a real good cry.

6. The Holdovers
Alexander Payne’s best in a while — and ever is on the table. His talents as a filmmaker are plenty, but I think what I love most about him is that he’s one of the last directors making really good movies about normal, average people who have normal, average problems. People who don’t look like Sears fall collection models, who have weird hangups, who have lazy eyes and smell like fish and sometimes are awful for no reason. I’ve never understood the criticisms of Payne’s work as misanthropic — he’s clear-eyed about his characters and their flaws, but his movies always having them realizing that solace is in one another. I don’t think he’s ever told that story as beautifully as he does here. The Holdovers is sweet and sad and funny and anchored on a trio of the year’s best performances.

5. Anatomy of a Fall
I think it’s likely the best courtroom dramas aren’t really about the proceedings themselves, and so it goes with Anatomy of a Fall, a movie where the plot itself feels like an act of misdirection — the possible murder, the trial, that’s just a framing device used to probe the shadows of a failing marriage and a mother and son struggling to put themselves back together. It’s in the execution thereof that I think Anatomy of a Fall sets itself apart from its contemporaries in the genre — how it reverse engineers a sort of flashback structure despite, ultimately, containing only one actual flashback (which is so loaded with meaning it almost serves as an entire film unto itself). It’s tough to make a movie where the protagonist keeps secrets from the audience, and that’s how Anatomy of a Fall gets away with it. Guilt or innocence matter less than what brought us to this point. The fall is simply the final consequence. I think I’ve detected the faintest hint of a backlash to this one, so let this stand as a firm declaration that I am not a part of it. Fully deserving of all its accolades.

4. Godzilla Minus One
ha ha ha you can’t stop me — but also, why would you want to? Yeah, I think these last few years have fully ruined me on American blockbusters. My message to the public, at this point, is that if you won’t even read the sparse, simple subtitles of a foreign genre flick, you have no idea what you’re missing. Godzilla Minus One is, at the very least, the best Godzilla movie of my lifetime, and the only reason I won’t go farther back than that is that I haven’t actually seen any of those. I would also contend it’s one of the best movies of its kind more generally. A disaster movie where you actually care about the characters? What a concept! Minus One is also possibly the best Godzilla has ever been as social commentary — it’s deeply weird to say that a movie whose primary appeal is a digital monster knocking over digital buildings is ultimately sort of life-affirming, but Godzilla Minus One contains multitudes. It delivered everything I want from a kaiju movie, and also unexpectedly made me feel better about this beautiful, catastrophic thing we call humanity. I’ve wanted to love a Godzilla movie my whole life, and I can’t tell you how it feels to finally get to. If I do not get a U.S. Blu Ray of this, I will become dangerous.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon
I don’t really have favorite filmmakers. I’m not sure whether that’s unusual for a movie nerd. It’s more like a long list of directors who consistently do really good work that I’ll always check out on the big screen if at all possible. But if you asked me to step outside myself and decide who I think is the best filmmaker of all time, I’m pretty sure my answer would be Martin Scorsese. And I can’t think of stronger evidence in my favor than the run he’s been on since The Wolf of Wall Street — to Silence to The Irishman to, well, this. Those four films would be the envy of any artist, so I can’t think of any better testament to Scorsese than that I think a lot of his fans, maybe even most of them, would not consider this his golden era. This is all just par for the course at this point. I think that makes it easy to take him for granted, so consider Killers of the Flower Moon’s positioning on this list my way of ensuring that I don’t. It’s lesser Scorsese, which makes it just about any other director’s crowning achievement. Absolutely stunning.

2. Oppenheimer
At this point, I think what I like most about Christopher Nolan is that I get the impression with him, more than any other filmmaker, that he’s doggedly determined to grow with each new project he takes on. The sense I get from him is that if he’s not taking a step forward, if he’s not innovating something, he thinks the whole thing is a waste of time. Each new movie has to be his pinnacle as a director. Anyway, I hope failing that test isn’t too frustrating for him, because it is very difficult to imagine him spending the rest of his career outdoing Oppenheimer. It’s so masterful on a craft level that it’s sometimes astonishing to remember it’s from the same guy we chewed out for putting the camera too close to the action during a couple of Batman movies over a decade ago. It really feels like his whole career has been building to this grim opera of a biopic — breathless and insistent, convinced sound and fury can signify something, and damn you for thinking otherwise. After a particularly successful second viewing, I’m actually starting to wonder if maybe it’s my actual favorite movie this year and I’m just holding out because I don’t want to admit the Oscars got it right twice consecutively. Stay tuned on that, I guess.

1. Past Lives
   I saw this in September, and it has held onto the top slot ever since. I’ve already alluded to it in an earlier entry on this list, but there’s little that impresses me more than the ability to tell a real story about real people and still have it feel as though it has never been told before. That’s especially true of a movie like Past Lives, which on paper fits pretty snugly into a whole subgenre of semi-love stories about regret and what might have been. Another thing I’ve already alluded to: movies about that have my number in a big way, and Past Lives basically broke me in half — you know, in a good way. Its cultural specifics are so beautifully woven into the structure of it. The central theme feels potentially iconic, the way it instantly and permanently resonates throughout the whole story. I’m consistently struck by how flawlessly directed it is — the gentle sort of flow of it, the way Celine Song meters things out and lets them bleed together. I was stunned to learn that her work in the industry before this was as sparse as it is — for any artist to arrive this fully formed feels like a miracle. The subtleties of it, its hypnotic rhythm, the absolutely gutting performances, its composure and grace, the way every viewing peels back a new layer — Past Lives is exquisite, and I think more than worthy to wear 2023’s crown.

2022 was a flippin’ fantastic year for movies.

I don’t have much sense of what the consensus is on these things anymore. I feel like I used to. Maybe I’m no longer plugged into the right circles. Either way, I haven’t heard many people talking about what a phenomenal year 2022 was, so I feel the need to set the record straight on this, as loudly as I can manage it: 2022 was a staggeringly great year for movies! Maybe even the best since I started doing this over a decade ago!

And what a breath of fresh air it was. 2021 was so bad I actually started to wonder if I just didn’t like movies anymore. 2022 was a godsend, reminding me: Yes, I do! Quite a bit! Movies have just been pretty bad for a couple years!

I have never been this excited about my year-end list. Even in years I otherwise think are really good, I usually have a few noteworthy reservations about the last quarter of the entries. This year, I have no problem recommending all of these to just about anybody. For the right price, I’d add just about any of them to my collection. This year, there are no “I admire it more than I enjoy it” entries. There are no trollish “I love this way more than I should” entries. I’d go to bat for all twenty of these. The stuff the old veterans made was par for the course; the stuff the new faces on the scene made burst with potential.

Another thing that strikes me: This was a uniquely strong year for genre movies. I pretend to be fancier than I am, and the state of Hollywood blockbusters has covered for me for a while now. It’s easy to have your year-end lists favor arthouse fare and awards contenders when everything else is focus-grouped to death before you even see the first trailer. It’s not that I don’t love those movies, too — but it was action, fantasy, science-fiction that brought me into this, and when I head out to my local theater, that’s usually what I’m hoping for. I pretend to be a hifalutin arthouse guy — I can be, in the right mood — but more than anything, I want to have fun at the movies. I did that way more often than usual this year. I’m excited to finally have a year-end list loaded with movies that are just plain fun — that made me laugh, that put me on the edge of my seat, that stirred my imagination.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this year a sea change — that’s a tough thing to predict in advance — but there’s definitely something in the air that feels a bit different to me. I’m not sure everyone is moving away from the franchises that have dominated the last decade, but it feels like a sizable new audience has emerged looking for something new. This is an unusually creative slate of movies, with more than one entry I can’t easily compare to anything else. And if 2022 really does mark a new era, I can hardly imagine a stronger start.

(Note: This year, I started watching some documentaries as well. I’ve decided to exclude them from this list because rating/ranking real life has always felt crass to me. You can expect this rule to remain in place for future lists unless I say otherwise.)

20. Emergency
When I first saw this, I said to myself, “Oh yeah, that’s top ten for sure.” And here I am, a year later, narrowly choosing it over Till to round out the list. At no point in the interim did my opinion of it change. It walks a tonal tightrope near flawlessly, very funny most of the time but absolutely gutting when it wants to be. The political angle is incorporated very gracefully. Not one member of the young cast misses a beat. Everyone involved in the production of Emergency is worth keeping an eye on. It isn’t self-conscious, it isn’t — quote, unquote — weird, and yet I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it before.

19. All Quiet on the Western Front
I still have mixed feelings about it as an adaptation — it cuts the things that make All Quiet on the Western Front what it is, leaving just another war movie in its place. It makes the list nevertheless because it is a staggering technical achievement — in that regard, a worthy successor to the 1930 version. It contains several of the strongest movie battle scenes this side of Saving Private Ryan. There might not be as much going on under the surface, but few movies have managed a visual depiction of the degradation, corruption, and devaluation of the human soul on this level. Edward Berger is one hell of a director.

18. Three Thousand Years of Longing
This is going to get the mother of all critical reappraisals in a few years’ time, so I think it only prudent to stake out my ground on Three Thousand Years of Longing right now. I am incapable of understanding how it received mixed reviews. I have utterly failed to put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t like it at least a little. I am very cognizant of its flaws, chiefly that it falls apart in its last half hour after it abandons its — surprisingly engaging? — M.O. of “woman accidentally unleashes a genie and they just spend two hours telling each other stories about their lives.” But there’s a lot of movie before that happens, and that movie is friggin’ magical. A fairytale for adults that actually feels exactly like that.

17. The Northman
I spent a good chunk of the year thinking The Northman was a lock for my top five. If I had to say exactly what it is about Robert Eggers that appeals to me — other than that he is a damn good filmmaker — it’s that he always goes for it, one hundred percent, nothing left on the table. His movies just…insist upon themselves. They’re the cinematic manifestation of “beatings will continue until morale improves.” Eggers grabs you by the throat and drags you into his world; he has no interest in reaching into yours. I think The Northman is probably his weakest effort, mainly because it has the least going on under the surface. But even if all it wants to be is a blood-soaked tale of vengeance, at least it does you the courtesy of nailing every single beat.

16. The Fallout
HBO released this right at the beginning of the year, and it seems to have been just about forgotten. That’s a shame, because The Fallout is a great movie that I hope heralds big things for all involved. It’s a high school drama that beats with sincerity and, especially, authenticity — these characters, for once, feel like actual teenagers, not an out-of-touch adult’s attempt at replicating what they think the kids are into these days. The two leads are phenomenal. But more than anything, it’s a sensitive, thoughtful portrayal of one of the deepest darknesses confronting American society — not pat, not manipulative, not heavy-handed, and lacking simplistic answers to the trauma of an entire generation. I truly hope The Fallout finds its way back into the conversation someday.

15. Barbarian
You’re probably already sick of me saying this, but I can’t believe Barbarian isn’t top ten. One of the most purely enjoyable movie experiences of the year for me. It’s best seen knowing as little about it as possible, so I won’t say much — just that, as a horror movie, it strikes a perfect balance between “actually scary” and “delightfully deranged.” I watched most of it through my fingers, and yet it also contains my pick for the funniest joke of any movie this year. The gulf between where it begins and where it ends is…impressive. Two thumbs up, more of this, please.

14. Top Gun: Maverick
I flat hate the original Top Gun. I can’t tell you how shocking this is to me. It still feels like a personal, moral defeat that I’m putting Top Gun: Maverick on here. I’d have laughed in your face if you told me that a year ago. But here we are. This is by far THE most dramatic margin by which a sequel has ever been better than the original. Everything I think Top Gun does wrong, Top Gun: Maverick not only does right but does like it’s totally second-nature. It makes all this look easy. Deft, propulsive, fun as hell — Top Gun: Maverick is the first genuinely great franchise blockbuster since…yeesh, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, maybe? A billion-dollar miracle.

13. Decision to Leave
Lesser Park Chan-wook, but lesser Park Chan-wook is most filmmakers’ career-long aspiration. Decision to Leave both is and isn’t a departure for him. There’s no shortage of storytellers who are interested in human beings at their worst; what makes Park Chan-wook stand out is his fascination with human beings at their most twisted — when they are most governed by their primal urges. You could watch most of it with your parents, but it’s still quietly demented somewhere deep within — in the psychology of the characters, the moral lines they cross, the animal wants that drives them. Somehow, there’s also an argument to be made that it’s the prettiest film of Park Chan-wook’s career. Not an easy film to unpack in one paragraph, but rest assured — it’s par for the course, and then some.

12. Turning Red
I remain, as ever, a committed Pixar fan — but even I have to admit that their body of work the last few years has not, for the most part, withstood scrutiny the way it once did. I’m not talking about the “one for Disney” they have to make every once in a while, i.e. Lightyear, although that’s certainly not helping. Their original work, too, has lacked a certain spark recently. Repeat viewings don’t do their movies the favors they used to. Not so with Turning Red. This is the first Pixar movie since Inside Out that I liked more on the second viewing. It’s exactly what the studio needed — new talent at the helm, making something that isn’t a complete departure from the house style but still stands out in tone and style and thematic preoccupation. Turning Red is a lot of fun, beautifully animated as always, and it confronts parent/child relationships in a way that I think is actually very bold for a kids movie. I’m so glad it seems to have found an audience.

11. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
Not even in the top ten. Madness. Yeah, I don’t part much from the consensus on this one. Guillermo Del Toro and stop-motion animation are a match made in heaven; frankly, I’m surprised it took this long to finally happen. And his take on Pinocchio is so beautiful, so well thought out, and so expertly realized that I desperately hope it is also definitive and will forestall any further film adaptations of this story. Del Toro threads a lot of his usual trademarks through the old, familiar tale (I’ll always love the way even his “good” supernatural characters are otherworldly, incomprehensible eldritch creatures), but his main contribution is the way he psychologizes all the story beats — takes the scenes you know and ties them together, gives them new meaning. Mostly I’m OK with Del Toro doing whatever he wants at this point, but I sure hope he tries animation again someday.

10. Nope
It’s looking like Jordan Peele is here to stay, and I couldn’t be happier about that. Nope, even more than his last two films, really solidifies him as a superb technical craftsman — someone who knows where to point the camera, how to light the shot, how to move everything within the frame. It also solidifies him as a guy with a gonzo imagination we still haven’t seen the limits of. Nope is sort of unclassifiable. It is horror, but there’s more to it than that. A lot of critics have identified a Spielberg vibe in there; it’s fun, a sweeping adventure, and it wonders at the mysteries of the universe. But there’s also a tongue-in-cheek meanness to it, a condescending sneer as it picks apart the dark side of the industry. The concept here is bizarre, and yet Peele uses it to achieve what actually might be one of the single most disturbing scenes I have ever seen in a motion picture. I don’t think a single day has passed since I first saw it in July that I have not thought about Jupe’s Claim at least once. At this rate, Movie No. 4 is going to be completely bonkers, and I already can’t wait to find out how.

9. Avatar: The Way of Water
OK, I do get to engage in a little trolling here, so if you’ll indulge me for a moment — ahem — neener neener neener it’s my list you can’t stop meeeeeee. For real, though: James Cameron is The Man, bet against him at your own peril. I don’t know how, in the current cinematic culture, we managed to get not one but two actually-good billion-dollar blockbusters in a single year, but like I said: 2022 was pretty special. It’s funny: No one would ever call Avatar a throwback, the entire selling point is that it’s the future of visual effects, but of all the Stranger Things wannabes out there, it’s Avatar: The Way of Water that most feels like an actual 80s movie to me. Its go-for-broke attitude, its cheesy sincerity, its natural meat-and-potatoes functionality — it’s basically Terminator but pretty. It is an improvement over its predecessor in every possible way, including, by what I can only describe as literal magic, the visuals. Call it precipitously reduced standards, but I’m not going to turn down an expensive movie that actually looks like it was expensive. I’m all aboard the Avatar train; give me a hundred more of these. Payakan forever.

8. Close
With respect to All Quiet on the Western Front, if only one foreign language film can compete for big Oscars in a given year, Close ought to have been 2023’s. It’s masterful on a level I can barely get my head around. I think it’s a movie this moment needs — we don’t have much art that explores the way homophobia causes people to pathologize friendship, especially male friendship, and Close does that with a keen eye. I have no complaints with the way it approaches that central issue. And even when it does change tracks, it has such a strong sense of character that you don’t miss a beat. The performances are tremendous; Lukas Dhont puts a lot of faith in his cast, without whom the movie just plain doesn’t work. Close can tell an entire story in an actor’s sideways glance, a pause in a line of dialogue, a subtle movement. Every inch of it is deliberate, and perfectly calibrated. Broke me, then put me back together.

7. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
I’m happy to watch as many of these as Rian Johnson feels like making. He’s so good at this he somehow gives me impostor syndrome even though I’ve never even published anything. Mysteries are hard, but he makes it look like he writes them in his sleep. I don’t think Glass Onion is as cohesive politically as its predecessor, but it makes up for that by being funnier and more energetic. It leans a lot harder into its genre, and I think that’s the right move to set itself apart. Where Knives Out was challenging, Glass Onion is cathartic. Simpler, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. What it means to be is a blast, and it more than accomplishes that much.

6. The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg is a wizard. He just plain should not be able to get away with what he does. He’s the only person who has ever been good at making movies like this. I feel about The Fabelmans much the same way I do about Pinocchio — so great it also ought to be definitive, a wrap on an entire genre that has in large part been insufferable. It’s the specificity of Spielberg’s approach that makes The Fabelmans sing — where other movies like it simply slap treacly music over shots of film running through a projector and declare that movies are magic, Spielberg says, “Movies are magic to me, and here’s why.” In telling his own story, The Fabelmans increases my impression of Spielberg as a very instinctual filmmaker — a guy who doesn’t always know why he does what he does, just that he likes it and thinks other people will too — and that quality may be his greatest strength here. On paper, this is one of the cheesiest movies of the year. Maybe not just on paper. But Spielberg always knows exactly how far he can take it, at exactly what point you’ll start resisting. He has navigated that balance his entire career, but may never have done it this effectively. The Fabelmans rates among the very best of his more dramatic fare.

5. Tár
I watch movies for a lot of reasons. I want to have fun, I want to think about something, I want to experience life through another person’s eyes, I want to be affirmed, I want to have hope, and sometimes…sometimes I just want to commiserate. Sometimes I want to see a movie that’s so full of hate it winds back around into being kind of delightful. Enter Tár, the rare film that could accurately be described as searing. Cate Blanchett anchors an incisive character study, and Todd Field’s script incorporates cultural debates I’m sick to death of hearing about in a refreshingly nuanced way. It all culminates in what is easily the best ending of any film this year, one that repurposes the opening credits, of all things, as a retroactively hilarious Chekov’s gun. Unique, intelligent, much funnier than you’d think — Tár is really something special.

4. Aftersun
So Aftersun is probably the best movie of the year. I don’t really believe in that sort of thing — the idea of a film being objectively good or bad, objectively better or worse than another film. I think it’s only kind of possible to separate “what I like” from “what is good/bad/better/worse” — every now and then, I’m cognizant of a movie being very well done while recognizing that I’m not quite the target audience. But I feel I have to make a note of it with Aftersun, because the same thing that makes it a miraculous achievement also makes it impossible to analyze relative to other films: I don’t think I have ever seen another movie remotely like it. Every other movie on this is list is playing by somebody else’s rules. Most art — the vast majority — is. Creating something truly new is close to impossible. I think debut filmmaker Charlotte Wells may have pulled it off with Aftersun. There’s no weird trick here — no twist, no revelation, no nakedly unusual thing. It’s all in the way it comes together. There’s a moment — and I think it will arrive at a different time for everyone watching it — when it suddenly clicks. You have that euphoric “eureka” moment where you suddenly understand why it communicates in the way that it does, why it shows you what it chooses to show you, what the larger context is. And that moment hits like a freight train. My personal journey with Aftersun was unlike any I’ve taken with another film. I went from not getting it, wondering what the fuss was about, to kind of appreciating its rhythm, beginning to file it under the aforementioned category of “I admire it more than I enjoy it,” to suddenly being shattered by it, sitting open-mouthed and shellshocked as the credits rolled, then scrambling to the internet to found out what the hell other people were saying about it and reading all of it, in exhaustive detail, well into the night. Aftersun is, simply, an astonishing achievement. I’m not sure I know what to do with it, and that might well be its most outstanding quality.

3. The Banshees of Inisherin
I feel an obligation, the deeper I go into this list, to say more about the film in question — if it’s one of my favorites of the year, I should have a lot of thoughts about it, right? But every now and then my love for a movie prevents me from putting anything interesting into words — the cast is great, the writing is great, the direction is great, what do you want from me? There’s just some sort of alchemy at play that I almost don’t want to understand — I’d rather appreciate the weird spell it casts. The Banshees of Inisherin is that movie this year. It’s just a good movie, in all the ways you want a movie to be good, and somewhere in there is a little spark of a nebulous “special something” that gives it the air of the iconic. If I had to isolate something specific that pushes it to the front of the pack, it’s that it’s essentially Perfect Line Read: The Motion Picture. The year’s best match of actors to material — witty, and bleakly hilarious.

2. RRR
I’m thinking about quitting my job to become a full-time missionary for RRR — traveling from city to city, knocking on doors, asking: “Have you heard the good news?” I have been downright annoying about this movie. I’ve personally recommended it to everyone I know, and I still periodically check in with the ones who haven’t watched it yet to make sure they’re aware that they’re on notice. I said at the outset that this was a great year for having fun at the movies, and here’s the pinnacle. RRR is the most over-the-top, the most ludicrous, the most hilarious, the coolest, the biggest, [insert multiple synonyms for “amazing” here] action movie I have seen in years. Maybe ever! It’s three hours long, and I would conservatively estimate that I spent the last two of those hours in a constant state of screeching like a howler monkey. This movie turned me into a friggin’ soccer hooligan. It is every genre of movie at once, and they are all great. It could’ve settled for just being a meme movie; it certainly has the goods to get away with only being that. And yet it’s also very well made — well shot, well directed, nice looking, as fun to watch as it is to experience. I keep glancing at movies like Tár and Aftersun that probe the human condition with impossible-to-replicate thoughtfulness and thinking: “Really? This movie over those ones?” And then I think to myself: not one single character in The Banshees of Inisherin uses a leopard as a projectile weapon. And I wonder if maybe I’m lying to myself by not putting RRR in the top slot.

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
   Speaking of movies that are every genre at the same time and somehow good at all of them… Look, I get it. I hate being cliched, and even when the Oscars get it right, it’s hard not to feel obligated to pick something different than they did so you can remain one of the cool kids. But this year, being what it was…is this my favorite movie of 2023? The top four or five movies on this list are essentially a tie; they are each spectacularly different pieces of work that I enjoy for very different reasons. I’ve spent months wringing my hands over their positioning. Everything Everywhere All at Once is my favorite…I think? But that margin is so thin in so many directions that it’s hard not to feel like some kind of default, an escape from having to make a real choice. Plus, Everything Everywhere All at Once is so ambitious that it’s almost inevitable that it also feels a bit messy — not quite as assured as the other movies in the top five. But that ambition is sky high, and that the movie reaches its goal so much more often than not is an achievement in its own right. And if it’s a chaotic, messy movie, that’s because it’s about our chaotic, messy lives, in all their beautiful, gross, judgmental, loving, stupid, masterful glory. Everything Everywhere All at Once makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it entertains you, it makes you think; its imagination is boundless and fascinating. It’s all things to all people — that’s the point. That’s the promise. It’s literally in the title. And that brings me back around: yes, this is a worthy choice. I’m content with it. 2023 was a great year for a wide variety of movies. What better to represent it than a movie that has a little bit of all of them in its DNA?

2021 was a weird year for movies.

Allow me, if you will, to take you on a journey into How My Brain Works, an undertaking you surely will come to regret. In a given year, my Top 20 can essentially be broken down into three categories:

• The really good to maybe-great movies. The four-stars-out-of-five. These make up the back half of the list, maybe a portion of the Top 10. These are movies I loved, but that I do have a handful of noteworthy reservations about. They’re not quite all-time favorites, but I may add two or three to my collection.

• The genuinely great movies. These make up most of the Top 5, maybe most of the Top 10 if we’re lucky. It’s a happy compromise if one of these wins big at the Oscars. I have very little negative to say about them — possibly nothing at all. Sometimes they only lack that special, impossible-to-determine something that would proclaim them as all-timers. They’re probably headed for my collection.

• The unqualified masterpieces. Easy five-star movies. Not every year has these. That’s usually, for me, the sign of a mediocre-to-bad year, but not always — I can still, on balance, consider it a solid year if enough movies qualify for the second and third category. Any year that does have entries in this category, it’s probably only one or two. New all-time favorites don’t come along every day, after all.

To me, an average year — movies were as good as they could reasonably be expected to be — looks like, say…2014, when my list had no movies in the first category, but several in the second, and a more or less normal number in the third. A bad year looks like 2016, where I exhausted every movie I would even consider eligible for the third category getting the list together. A good year looks like 2019, where I had a healthy percentage of everything — two in the elusive first category, a handful on the second, and a bunch of movies in the third that I was genuinely enthusiastic about.

Of course, none of that is a hard rule. 2016 actually had at least one movie secure all-timer status for me, and Category No. 2 was pretty well-rounded. It was the gulf between those and the bottom tier that made it so underwhelming on the whole. You had a couple of filmmakers at the height of their powers, and everyone else was whiffing.

I also think of 2013, the other Weirdest Year since I started writing about movies online. I have no idea whether that year was mostly bad or one of the greatest years for movies, period. Her, 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, Short Term 12, Gravity, Before Midnight, Captain Phillips, Frances Ha. 2013’s top tier was stacked. And once you move past it, you mostly get a pile of mediocrity. I have no idea how that balances out.

I’m having the opposite debate about 2021. I’m not sure whether it’s the worst year for movies since I started keeping track, or if it’s unusually well-rounded. What I mean by this is that not only were there no movies this year that qualified for personal all-timer status, but for the first time since I started doing this, I’m not sure there were any that even qualified for that second category. That’s barring a few rewatches, of course. There are a couple top-fivers I could see advancing once I give them another whirl. But still, I have to admit I can’t remember a year whose movies left me so…uninspired. There was a lot that I enjoyed, but nothing I fell head-over-heels in love with.

But! 2021 also has the deepest bench of any year I can remember. Which is to say that third category was absolutely overflowing.

I am uninspired by this year. But I’m also really excited about almost every movie on this list. I have reservations big and small about all of them, but I was truly enraptured by what they did right. I want to call 2021 a terrible year in movies, but then I remember how many cuts I made finalizing this. Red Rocket, The Card Counter, The Harder They Fall — all really friggin’ good movies that you will see no mention of in the paragraphs to follow. The Matrix Resurrections — I was so sure that was going to be on this list, and it had a December release date. In the last few months of the year, I saw enough great movies that somehow it was dislodged. I also look at what barely made the list: movies I thought were Top 10 candidates when I first saw them. I’m almost embarrassed to put them that low, but I look at what’s ahead of them and have no clue what I’d part with.

So 2021: Good year? Bad year? I can’t even begin to decide. Wherever I land going forward, all I can say for now is that there was still a lot to love.

20. Luca
The most low-key Pixar has ever been, but that’s what’s so great about it. It’s a quiet, funny hangout movie where the highest stakes are a bicycle race. A good-natured fun-for-the-whole family film. It isn’t clear to me how culturally impactful Luca was, whether anyone other than me likes it in any meaningful sense. But I’m holding it close to my heart. It’s also the only movie on this list that I don’t feel would be in another year’s top ten.

19. The Lost Daughter
Your guess is as good as mine how I only managed to put this at No. 19, honestly. Weird year. Olivia Colman has rapidly emerged as one of our foremost talents, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut may well put her in the same company as fellow actress-turned-director Greta Gerwig. Her first time behind the camera is confident, compelling and distinctive. I’m not someone who gets invested in editing awards, but that the Oscars didn’t even nominate it is nuts.

18. Flee
I don’t usually watch documentaries; I prefer to read news, mostly. But I was intrigued by Flee’s unique approach and decided to check it out. Obviously, my inexperience leaves me ill-equipped to subject it to analysis. And even then, I’m not sure I want to — to me, analyzing a documentary is either attacking the substance of its claims, and if it falls flat on that front, it isn’t a good documentary, or talking about the filmmaking, cinematography, editing, etc., which just makes me feel crass. It’s someone’s actual story, this really happened, this pain exists, how stupid am I for wishing it was better presented? So all I’m able to say is that I found Flee very moving.

17. The Worst Person in the World
I’ve found it difficult to distill my feelings about this movie into a few sentences without restricting it to uninteresting basics. What’s truly special about it is how skillfully it handles individual moments, how every scene contains little surprises, little tics of writing and performance, that constantly shift the context and develop its characters/themes. It’s impossible to explain its transcendence in a few short words because what’s great about it is different in every scene. It’s always revealing itself to you.

16. Drive My Car
You may recall that I said the back half of this list contains a lot of movies that feel like they should be Top 10 contenders. I think on some level I may not love Drive My Car as much as everyone else, which says nothing about how great this movie is because I could convincingly declare it my favorite of the year and still like it less than the rest of you. This is very much a case of “YOU might say this is the best movie of the year; however, I think that it is just…very, very great.” I’m doing this routine because I don’t actually have a lot to say about emotional powerhouses like this. Acting good, writing good, directing good, movie good. Etc.

15. A Hero
We don’t deserve Asghar Farhadi, one of the best, if not the best, storytellers in this genre. With A Hero, he’s crafted another thoughtful social labyrinth where no one is evil, no one is innocent, and ethical dilemmas compound until the only way for the characters to do the right thing is to do the thing they can live with.

14. Passing
As Maggie Gyllenhaal collects much-deserved accolades for The Lost Daughter, we should be sure not to forget 2021’s other actress-turned-director breakthrough — who as far as I’m concerned, acquitted herself even better with this beautifully shot, impeccably crafted, and challenging drama about identity and people’s responsibility to one another. Passing feels like one of the year’s most unsung movies. I feel like we should be talking about it more. Much like Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Hall genuinely feels like a student of this stuff, and she looks at things in a very unique way here. I hope this isn’t the last we hear of her in the director’s chair.

13. C’mon C’mon
And now we’re entering the part of the list where I’m almost shocked the movies aren’t Top 5. Despite nearly all of its production happening in late 2019, C’mon C’mon somehow managed to be the most perfectly 2021 movie of its year. It’s the proverbial “movie we need right now,” one confronting the darkness of our times with battered optimism and a giant, loving heart for all of humanity. Both the leads are stellar. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Mike Mills’ best work, and I might not even think it’s close.

12. Mass
Mass is a thoughtful, even-handed, non-exploitative take on a generation-defining problem most of Hollywood is afraid to touch. The script and performances are the entire show here, and both are more than up to the task. I love 12 Angry Men-style closed-room, real-time dramas, and Mass is a worthy heir. Deeply felt and much more gripping than you’d expect.

11. Malignant
What, you thought I was kidding? I’ve spent half a year saying this was going to be in my Top 20. I do not kid about Malignant. I’m surprised I’m not putting it higher. I still might. This movie is completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and I loved every second of it. I didn’t know how badly I’d missed horror movies you cackle your way through until James Wan brought this madness into my life. Cinema.

10. Judas and the Black Messiah
Remember this movie? It was one of 2021’s earliest releases, and ended up getting lumped in with 2020’s films because it fell within the release window — expanded because of the pandemic — of last year’s Oscars, where it won (much-deserved) Best Supporting Actor honors for Daniel Kaluuya. For my part, between festivals and critic screenings, it’s already a pain keeping track of when movies technically released, so as far as I’m concerned, if it never once played before 2021, it’s a 2021 movie. And Judas and the Black Messiah opened the year on a strong note. It’s confrontational, unusually radical, and left me shellshocked.

9. The Tragedy of Macbeth
A Shakespeare adaptation so good it made me reconsider my aversion to Shakespeare. I can’t think of any director, off the top of my head, who reinvented themselves so thoroughly this late in their career. Joel Coen, already a legend, simply solidifies his status as one of the all-time greats with this — possibly the most beautiful and well-shot movie of a year where there’s a lot of competition for that title. This is Macbeth as pure fantasy, haunting and grim. Denzel Washington hasn’t had this much fun in years. Never underestimate the Coen brothers, even when it’s only half of them.

8. Dune
Look, I’m a simple person. All I really want to see is spaceships and explosions and giant worms, and on the rare occasion that such things are given to a filmmaker who will actually shoot them so they are nice looking, I’m pretty much just a cat chasing a laser pointer. Dune is gorgeous and fun, in its grim, austere way.

7. The Last Duel
Easily the year’s biggest surprise. What appeared, on paper, to be the most meatheaded of meatheaded cinema, in practice is almost the exact opposite. The must unsung film of 2021, as far as I’m concerned. It isn’t the first movie to tell a story multiple times, each from the perspective of a different character, but it’s rarely done this well, or this impactfully. Its most egregious awards snubs were in the categories of Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actress for Jodie Comer. It’s been a long time since I last felt the stakes of a movie’s climax this acutely. As an aside, I’m a huge fan of the rare post-movie title card that actually has emotional weight, and oh boy does it ever.

6. The Green Knight
I don’t understand why David Lowery isn’t one of the biggest names in cinema right now. He’s a chameleonic director — not voiceless, but somehow effortlessly speaking the language of every genre he tries his hand at, from the family-friendly warmth of Pete’s Dragon to the artful mystique of A Ghost Story to the easygoing true-story energy of The Old Man and the Gun, and now to high fantasy. The Green Knight is a gorgeous movie, a technical marvel, the sort of fantasy where every frame drips with history. A feast for the eyes, the heart, and the mind.

5. The Mitchells vs. the Machines
At one point, this movie made me laugh so hard and so suddenly that I physically hurt myself. It has unique, detailed animation, and a well-told story, but really it’s just that this is scene for scene one of the funniest movies to have been released in actual years. Genuine fun for the whole family, something for everyone, don’t miss it.

4. Parallel Mothers
It took me a bit to adjust to Parallel Mothers being much more genre than I expected, but once I did, I was all the way in. It’s genuinely fascinating to see a movie that could be classified as drama, that never does anything that couldn’t theoretically happen in real life, somehow come up with a story that feels like it’s never been told before. Not that it is, in the end, an overly serious indie philosophizing about The Meaning of Life — it’s very heightened, piling up several one-in-a-million possibilities in order to create a fundamentally preposterous social situation. But Pedro Almodovar knows exactly what this movie is, and it never does anything it doesn’t earn. I’m not sure what you’d call this, in the end — I’m gravitating toward “social thriller,” but even that doesn’t capture its well-drawn characters and performances, or the handful of things it’s truly sincere about. It’s rare that a movie can make me feel something while also having a certain…dementedness that makes it guilty fun. Parallel Mothers is a masterclass in having your cake and eating it, too.

3. West Side Story
This mainly exists as an excuse for Steven Spielberg to direct a musical, and that is more than enough to justify the price of admission — many times over. From a technical standpoint, West Side Story is a two-and-a-half-hour mic drop of a motion picture. I might barely prefer the original for story, but this version’s direction may have permanently ruined Hollywood musical numbers for me. Now I watch musicals and I just think, “Why isn’t this West Side Story?” This is what big screens and surround sound were built for.

2. Licorice Pizza
The best Paul Thomas Anderson has been since There Will Be Blood. It’s been a while since I last felt like I “got” one of his movies the way everyone else did, so Licorice Pizza comes as great relief. This is without question one of the year’s best screenplays — authentic and funny, with characters so fully psychologized they feel like friends of yours. I’ve missed Anderson in comedy mode, too, and this has some big laughs. Alana Haim isn’t just my personal 2021 Best Actress, hers might be my favorite performance of the year altogether, period, end of sentence.

1. The Power of the Dog
   I just hope we don’t have to wait another 13 years for Jane Campion to follow this one up. This is the sort of movie that only gets better in retrospect. The more you think about it, the better the pieces fit together. An hour after the movie, revelations will strike you out of nowhere: “Oh, that’s what was going on there!” Great characters, great casting, great writing, great direction, everyone involved in this production showed up with their A-game from day one. It’s a compelling, edgy, psychological drama topped off by one of the year’s best endings.