Everything I watched in 2023

The last bit of year-end business. Here is the full list of every movie I watched or rewatched, at home or in the theater, in 2023.

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

All Hallows’ Eve (Damien Leone, 2013)

Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980)

…All the Marbles (Robert Aldrich, 1981)

Amsterdamned (Dick Maas, 1988)

Anatahan (Josef Von Sternberg, 1953)

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, 2008)

Aquaslash (Renaud Gauthier, 2019)

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

Bad Girls Go to Hell (Doris Wishman, 1965)

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude, 2021)

Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)

Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992)

The Beales of Grey Gardens (Albert & David Maysles, 2006)

Bebo’s Girl (Luigi Comencini, 1964)

The Bedroom Window (Curtis Hanson, 1987)

The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981)

Beyond the Door III (Jeff Kwitny, 1989)

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)

The Bitch (Christine Pascal, 1984)

Black Panthers (Agnes Varda, 1968)

The Black Phone (Scott Derrickson, 2021)

Black Widow (Bob Rafelson, 1987)

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

The Boss (Fernando Di Leo, 1973)

The Brain (Ed Hunt, 1988)

Brand upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2006)

Broken Trail (Walter Hill, 2006)

Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992)

Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)

The Cat and the Canary (Elliott Nugent, 1939)

Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021)

The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1966)

Chocolate Babies (Steven Winter, 1996)

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Class Relations (Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet, 1984)

Come True (Anthony Scott Burns, 2020)

Confidentially Yours (Francois Truffaut, 1983)

Coogan’s Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968)

Les cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959)

Craze (Freddie Francis, 1974)

Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell, 1984)

Crime Zone (Luis Llosa, 1989)

Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983)

The Curse (David Keith, 1987)

Curse II: The Bite (Federico Prosperi (as Fred Goodwin), 1989)

Curse of the Blue Lights (John Henry Johnson, 1988)

Curse of the Devil (Carlos Aured, 1973)

The Curse of the Screaming Dead aka Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (Tony Malanowski, 1982)

Curtains (Richard Ciupka, 1983)

Daddy’s Boys (Joseph Minion, 1988)

Damien: Omen II (Don Taylor, 1978)

Damned River (Michael Schroeder, 1989)

The Dark (John “Bud” Cardos, 1979)

Dark Night of the Scarecrow (Frank De Felitta, 1981)

Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)

Dawn of the Mummy (Frank Agrama, 1981)

Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985)

The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975)

Dead End Drive-In (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1986)

Deadly Weapons (Doris Wishman, 1974)

Death in the Garden (Luis Bunuel, 1956)

Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)

Demons 2 (Lamberto Bava, 1986)

The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941)

The Devil Is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)

The Devil Queen (Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, 1974)

The Devil’s Rain (Robert Fuest, 1975)

Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (Wayne Wang, 1985)

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (John Hough, 1974)

A Distant Trumpet (Raoul Walsh, 1964)

D.O.A. (Rudolph Mate, 1949)

Don’t Come Knocking (Wim Wenders, 2005)

Don’t Let It Kill You (Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, 1967)

Don’t Panic (Ruben Galindo Jr., 1988)

Double Agent 73 (Doris Wishman, 1974)

Down to the Bone (Debra Granik, 2004)

Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

The Drowning Pool (Stuart Rosenberg, 1975)

Edge of the City (Martin Ritt, 1957)

Edward and Caroline (Jacques Becker, 1951)

The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (C.B. Stockfleth, 2022)

The Enchanted Desna (Yuliya Solntseva, 1964)

The End of Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1961)

The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976)

Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009)

The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)

The Exorcist: Believer (David Gordon Green, 2023)

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022)

The Face at the Window (George King, 1939)

A Face in the Fog (Robert F. Hill, 1936)

Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki, 2023)

Faraway, So Close! (Wim Wenders, 1993)

The Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1954)

Fear and Desire (Stanley Kubrick, 1952)

Fear Street: 1666 (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

Fear Street: 1978 (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

Fear Street: 1994 (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

Ferryman Maria (Frank Wisbar, 1936)

Freedom Day Parade (Wakefield Poole, 1974)

The Front (Martin Ritt, 1976)

Le gai savoir (Jean-Luc Godard, 1969)

The Gingerdead Man (Charles Band, 2005)

Give a Girl a Break (Stanley Donen, 1953)

The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)

The Golem (Julien Duvivier, 1936)

A Gorgeous Girl like Me (Francois Truffaut, 1972)

The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, & Galen Johnson, 2017)

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986)

Grizzly (William Girdler, 1976)

The Gun Hawk (Edward Ludwig, 1963)

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945)

The Harvest (John McNaughton, 2013)

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

Honky Tonk Freeway (John Schlesinger, 1981)

Horsehead (Romain Basset, 2014)

The House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951)

The Human Monster aka The Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939)

The Human Pyramid (Jean Rouch, 1961)

I Don’t Know (Penelope Spheeris, 1971)

Indecent Desires (Doris Wishman, 1968)

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (Guy Debord, 1978)

In Search of Darkness: Part III (David A. Weiner, 2022)

In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 (Toby Amies, 2022)

Introduction (Hong Sang-soo, 2021)

Intruder (Scott Spiegel, 1989)

The Intruder (Claire Denis, 2004)

The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin, 2023)

The Italian Connection (Fernando Di Leo, 1972)

Joint Security Area (Park Chan-wook, 2000)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Jurassic Park III (Joe Johnston, 2001)

Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015)

Jurassic World Dominion (Colin Trevorrow, 2022)

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J.A. Bayona, 2018)

Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952)

Keyhole (Guy Maddin, 2011)

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)

Land of Plenty (Wim Wenders, 2004)

Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, 2021)

The Last Run (Richard Fleischer & (uncredited) John Huston, 1971)

The Last Thing Mary Saw (Edoardo Vitaletti, 2021)

The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan, 1976)

Leptirica (Dorde Kadijevic, 1973)

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau, 1974)

Lingering (Yoon Eun-gyeong, 2020)

Lions Love (… and Lies) (Agnes Varda, 1969)

Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994)

Lost, Lost, Lost (Jonas Mekas, 1976)

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1997)

Love Affair (Leo McCarey, 1939)

Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman, 1965)

Madam Satan (Cecil B. DeMille, 1930)

Mad Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora, 1976)

Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021)

Malignant (James Wan, 2021)

Man on the Roof (Bo Widerberg, 1976)

The Manor (Axelle Carolyn, 2021)

Massacre at Central High (Rene Daalder, 1976)

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2022)

May December (Todd Haynes, 2023)

Meatcleaver Massacre (Keith Burns & (possibly) Ed Wood (credited to Evan Lee), 1977)

Miami Blues (George Armitage, 1990)

Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965)

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)

Le Mirage (Jean-Claude Guiguet, 1992)

The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn, 1976)

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981)

Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1959)

Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Mortal Kombat (Simon McQuoid, 2021)

Mosquito (Gary Jones, 1994)

Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926)

Mummy’s Boys (Fred Guiol, 1936)

The Muthers (Cirio H. Santiago, 1976)

The Mutilator (Buddy Cooper, 1984)

My Dear Killer (Tonino Valerii, 1972)

Navajeros (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1980)

Nekromantik (Jorg Buttgereit, 1988)

Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)

Night of the Demons (Kevin Tenney, 1988)

Night of the Werewolf (Paul Naschy, 1981)

The Night James Brown Saved Boston (David Leaf, 2008)

Night’s End (Jennifer Reeder, 2022)

No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022)

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-soo, 2013)

Nobody’s Hero (Alain Guiraudie, 2022)

No One Heard the Scream (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1973)

No, or the Vain Glory of Command (Manoel de Oliveira, 1990)

Nosferatu in Venice (Augusto Caminito, 1988)

Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Wim Wenders, 1989)

Nude on the Moon (Doris Wishman & Raymond Phelan, 1961)

Obsession (Brian De Palma, 1976)

October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (Sergei Eisenstein & Grigori Aleksandrov, 1927)

The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)

The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

Outpost (Joe Lo Truglio, 2022)

Outrageous! (Richard Benner, 1977)

Pacifiction (Albert Serra, 2022)

Padre Pio (Abel Ferrara, 2022)

Paranoia aka Orgasmo (Umberto Lenzi, 1969)

Passing Fancy (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Pathosis (Austin Bonang, 2020)

Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997)

A Perfect Couple (Robert Altman, 1979)

Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)

Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (Richard Friedman, 1989)

Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune (Kenneth Bowser, 2010)

Play It as It Lays (Frank Perry, 1972)

Poem of the Sea (Yuliya Solntseva, 1958)

Poison (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Poison for the Fairies (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1986)

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

P.P. Rider (Shinji Somai, 1983)

Primal Rage (Vittorio Rambaldi, 1988)

Pumping Iron II: The Women (George Butler, 1985)

The Queen of Black Magic (Kimo Stamboel, 2019)

Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (Dick Richards, 1975)

Random Acts of Violence (Jay Baruchel, 2019)

The Ranger (Jenn Wexler, 2018)

The Rat Catcher (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Reunion (Jake Mahaffy, 2020)

Revolt of the Zombies (Victor Halperin, 1936)

Rhubarb (Arthur Lubin, 1951)

Roadie (Alan Rudolph, 1980)

Rocktober Blood (Beverly Sebastian, 1984)

Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)

Safe in Hell (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Sandra (Luchino Visconti, 1965)

O Sangue (Pedro Costa, 1989)

Satan’s Slaves 2: Communion (Joko Anwar, 2022)

Saturn Bowling (Patricia Mazuy, 2022)

The Savage Eye (Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick, 1959)

The Seafarers (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)

Séance (Simon Barrett, 2021)

Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012)

Sharknado (Anthony C. Ferrante, 2013)

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022)

Siege (Paul Donovan & Maura O’Connell, 1983)

Skull: The Mask (Kapel Furman & Armando Fonseca, 2020)

Slapface (Jeremiah Kipp, 2021)

Slightly Scarlet (Allan Dwan, 1956)

Slumber Party Massacre (Danishka Esterhazy, 2021)

The Sparks Brothers (Edgar Wright, 2021)

Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)

Speaking of Sex (John McNaughton, 2001)

Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)

State of Siege (Costa-Gavras, 1972)

The Strange One (Jack Garfein, 1957)

Summer with Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)

The Sunshine Boys (Herbert Ross, 1975)

Super-Sleuth (Benjamin Stoloff, 1937)

The Suspect (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

The Swan (Wes Anderson, 2023)

A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992)

The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957)

The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976)

That Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman, 1969)

There’s Someone Inside Your House (Patrick Brice, 2021)

They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich, 1981)

Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932)

Tigers Are Not Afraid (Issa Lopez, 2017)

Too Late Blues (John Cassavetes, 1961)

Tori and Lokita (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2022)

The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002)

A Trick of the Light (Wim Wenders, 1995)

Two Men in Manhattan (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1959)

Typhoon Club (Shinji Somai, 1985)

Uncle Yanco (Agnes Varda, 1967)

Unrest (Cyril Schaublin, 2022)

Vengeance Is Mine (Michael Roemer, 1984)

V/H/S (various, 2012)

V/H/S/2 (various, 2013)

V/H/S/94 (various, 2021)

V/H/S: Viral (various, 2014)

Viva (Anna Biller, 2007)

Welcome to L.A. (Alan Rudolph, 1976)

Wham! (Chris Smith, 2023)

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022)

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (Matt Wolf, 2008)

The Wind of Ayahuasca (Nora de Izcue, 1983)

Witchboard (Kevin Tenney, 1986)

Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh, 1981)

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Yes, Madam! (Corey Yuen, 1985)

You Won’t Be Alone (Goran Stolevski, 2022)

Yoyo (Pierre Etaix, 1965)

Zombie (Lucio Fulci, 1979)

2023 on the Big Screen Part 2: The Old Stuff

Thanks to the close proximity of the Austin Film Society's theater to my home, I get to see amazing (and less-than-amazing but historically fascinating) movies from the entirety of film history on a big screen on a regular basis. It's one of the only positive things happening in Texas. Here are my favorite revival and repertory screenings of 2023, always a more exciting and interesting group to me than the new releases of any single year. 

FAVORITES

3 WOMEN (Robert Altman, 1977)

One of my favorite Altmans, so getting a chance to see this on a theater screen was a real thrill. It's hard for me to recall another movie that's as simultaneously telescope-detail specific and ambiguously dream-floaty. The locations have that crazily visual non-"movie" quality Altman was so good at finding in his '70s and early '80s films, but there's something even more specific yet ungraspable here. Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall are two of my favorite actors, and 3 Women lets them do things other movies never quite gave them the freedom or space to do, with Duvall being especially amazing. (The third woman, Janice Rule, also deserves mention.) Duvall's inhabiting of Millie Lammoreaux (one of my all-time favorite movie characters) appears to come as naturally to her as breathing (love those fantastically long trails of ash on her cigarettes). I'm laughing at her while also feeling the sting of those fair and unfair laughs and recognizing the parts of her that exist in my own heart. What a beautifully strange blend of tones Altman achieved here.

AFTER HOURS (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

My introduction to Scorsese, rented on VHS from a convenience store during a fifth- or sixth-grade sleepover because Cheech and Chong were in it. I was a born cinephile, so my mind was BLOWN (my friends were just mildly amused), though we were all disappointed that Cheech and Chong weren't the leads. After years of revisiting After Hours on VHS and DVD, I finally got to see it projected large in '23. This time around, I couldn't stop ooh-ing and aah-ing over the stylistic decisions made by the power team of Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who also worked extensively with Fassbinder. The dolly zoom in the office, the camera gliding up to Marcy's face as she gives us all a wink, the dissolve as Paul goes up the stairs. This is cinema, baby. I love all the performances, but I wish Rosanna Arquette got to stick around for the whole movie. She's so charming here.

THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)

I love the way von Sternberg photographs rain, doors, windows, crowds, and faces, especially Marlene Dietrich's. Even if that doesn't impress you much, this is worth watching just for the insane hats Dietrich wears.

THE DEVIL QUEEN (Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, 1974)

This gritty, nasty, relentless, and hilarious queer Brazilian crime film has a dazzling color palette (major kudos to the production designer, costume designer, set decorator, and location scout, and to 1970s Brazil in general) and an insane final third. Each actor looks the most 1970s a human could possibly look until the next actor walks into frame. No one has a conscience and everyone is triple-crossing everyone. I love it. The score is so damn great, too. It sounds like a fusion of Italian giallo and crime soundtracks, tropicalia, Krautrock, salsa, hard rock, and psychedelia. Some boutique label needs to release it immediately. I live for movies like this, but are there other movies like this? It's kinda like the tones of Fox and His Friends, Pixote, El Pico, Freaks, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Truck Turner, and the second half of Female Trouble collided head-on, but not quite.

EVERYONE ELSE (Maren Ade, 2009)

Ade's queasy pre-Toni Erdmann film about a volatile couple on vacation and their painful interactions with a semi-friendly acquaintance/annoyance and his wife coincidentally vacationing in the same place inspired much quiet horror and laughter as I recognized unwanted bits of myself in each partner in each of the two couples (and also a third couple with a boat trip invite who are only in one scene). I'm a masochist, so I mostly enjoyed the feeling.

THE EXILES (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)

Kent Mackenzie, a British ex-pat living in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles and trying to make it as a filmmaker, befriended a group of Native American men living near him who had left the reservation for the big city. Mackenzie collaborated with these men on a semi-improvised, semi-autobiographical movie taking place over the course of twelve hours on a single Friday night in 1958, with a soundtrack of both traditional indigenous music and regional '50s rock and roll and doo wop and an expressive use of voice-over narration. Mackenzie, noticing the movie was missing a woman's perspective, added Yvonne Williams to the cast. Unlike the men, Williams was a stranger to Mackenzie, but he interviewed her about her life and incorporated her story into theirs. Though Williams has mixed feelings about the film and her participation in it (she worries that she was too painfully honest and also that the film's depiction of the men's heavy drinking could be interpreted stereotypically instead of as a representation of the lifestyle of these particular men at this particular time in their lives), she's a soft-spoken but strong presence who gives the movie a depth and balance it needs. Mackenzie never got the filmmaking career he'd hoped for, but The Exiles is one of the great American independents, filmed in '58, finished and released to film festivals in '61, and finally getting proper distribution in 2008. Mackenzie has an incredible eye, and the movie shares the pictorial qualities of some of the great photography of the period without sacrificing the motion part of the motion picture form. He also has a curiosity and nonjudgmental empathy for every person his camera looks at and for the landscapes, streetscapes, and interiors of his adopted city and neighborhood. So many movies are filmed in the industry hub of Los Angeles, and yet so few of them have any kind of visual curiosity for the actual city. This one has it.

FREEDOM DAY PARADE (Wakefield Poole, 1974)

Historically fascinating, hilarious, and life-filled short film documenting a 1974 gay pride parade in San Francisco, and the varied crowds gathered to watch it, shot by multi-hyphenate Wakefield Poole with an eclectic collage-style soundtrack (Beatles, Chi-Lites, opera). Hits a sweet spot between the documentary and the home movie. The squares seemed to be enjoying the parade, too.

I DON'T KNOW (Penelope Spheeris, 1971)

Long before her run of '80s cult classics (The Decline of Western Civilization documentaries, Suburbia, The Boys Next Door, Hollywood Vice Squad, Dudes) and '90s mainstream Hollywood career (Wayne's World, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Little Rascals, Black Sheep), Penelope Spheeris made several excellent but little-seen short films. I Don't Know follows Spheeris's sister and her sister's on-again/off-again partner, Jimmie/Jennifer, a person who considers him/herself in between male and female and able to inhabit each gender. Right-wing pundits like to claim that people like Jimmie/Jennifer didn't exist until recently, but right-wing pundits are bad-faith scam artists who've never been right about anything except how easy it is to make a fortune if you're a shameless grifter. The short is an early '70s hangout film about fluidity of identity, persona, and gender, people who are comfortable with that fluidity, and people who aren't (including Spheeris's homophobic brother). It makes a great companion piece to the Decline of Western Civilization docs in its combination of fly-on-the-wall intimacy and exaggerated more-real-than-real performance for the camera goaded on by Spheeris.

KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (Phil Karlson, 1952)

Phil Karlson is one of the unsung greats, and Kansas City Confidential joins 99 River Street, The Phenix City Story, and The Brothers Rico at the top of my Karlson canon. This is a tough, intense, desperate, darkly funny film noir with a stacked cast of character acting legends (Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef, Neville Brand, John Payne, Carleton Young) at their sweatiest.

LIONS LOVE (Agnés Varda, 1969)

I love the way Agnés Varda plays with film form, and I love how her movies are all so different from each other but still recognizably hers. This one, made during one of her two stints in Los Angeles, is a semi-improvised immersion in the lives of three actors (played by Factory scenester Viva and Hair co-writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni) renting a house in the Hollywood Hills in the summer of '68, sleeping with each other, and turning every waking moment into a ridiculous performance, late-'60s post-hippie theater-people style. The three leads are hilarious but also very exhausting (I repeat, late-'60s post-hippie theater people), so the addition of New York indie filmmaker Shirley Clarke, playing a version of herself and acting as a kind of Varda surrogate (though Varda also appears), about a third of the way in is a welcome development. Clarke is a perfect foil for the thespian hippie maniacs, their flowing locks, and their frilly outfits with her hippies-never-happened art scene fashion sense, short hair, no-bullshit manner of speaking, and dry sense of humor. Her arrival turns the movie into a sort of art film Odd Couple sitcom. I love the scene of the four of them watching an old sci-fi movie on TV and carrying on what sounds like four simultaneous conversations. Besides these pleasures, I also love the way Varda and her cinematographer Stevan Larner photograph the Southern California sunlight in the hilltop home with its huge windows and in the scenes where we leave the house for the city streets, and I love the movie's summer of '68 time capsule quality. Varda was still filming Lions Love during the particularly tumultuous week of June 2-8 when Valerie Solanas shot and seriously injured Andy Warhol on Monday, Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy on Wednesday, and Kennedy died on Thursday, so these events and the cast's/actors' reactions to them become part of the structure and tone of the film's final third. We also get cameos from Eddie Constantine, Peter Bogdanovich, and Rip Torn.

MADAM SATAN (Cecil B. DeMille, 1930)

Woman exiting the theater in front of me: "Wow. They really decided to make a movie that was every kind of movie."

Even more impressive than this film beginning as a very funny but hardly groundbreaking screwball comic farce and ending with hundreds of costumed revelers parachuting out of a slowly disintegrating lightning-struck zeppelin onto the heads of stunned New Yorkers is that it was filmed in the early days of sound, an awkward period where the incredible visual advances made in the silent era were abruptly rolled back with the arrival of the clunky new sound equipment. DeMille compensates by filling the static dialogue shots with zippy conversation, witty banter, sound effects, and actors who can really move within the frame even while the camera sits still, and by going absolutely motherfucking berserk in every scene where dialogue can be overdubbed or is not needed. DeMille was a right-wing conservative in his politics (his anti-union crusades are infuriating), a showman who embraced new technology and pushing of visual boundaries in his artistic life, and a kinky sex freak in his private life, and he rolls all three of those disparate selves into one package here. Surprisingly (or maybe not), this was one of his rare flops, bewildering the 1930 movie audience, but it's something to see. From the twisted mind of John Krasinski Cecil B. DeMille.

OUTRAGEOUS! (Richard Benner, 1977)

An underseen independent Canadian gem about two best friends/roommates, a hairdresser and drag queen (Craig Russell) and a schizophrenic woman fresh out of an institution (Hollis McLaren) living in late '70s Toronto. I love movies where the characters drive the narrative instead of the plot, and this movie is full of great characters, particularly the adorable leads, who have excellent chemistry and compellingly real screen presences. The happy ending (I'm not spoiling anything, relax) is deservedly earned, and not just because characters like Russell's and McLaren's are frequently punished as tragic figures. It's not happily-ever-after Hollywood bullshit, either. It's we're okay right now, and we're looking out for each other.

PUMPING IRON II: THE WOMEN (George Butler, 1985)

A classic '80s pop culture time capsule as well as an artificially constructed and partially staged precursor to reality television (though presented with way more style and self-deprecating humor), but also a surprisingly prescient foreshadowing of our current and seemingly endless culture wars, especially the bad-faith "define woman" gasbag argument from right-wing babies scared of a world where people control their own bodies and minds.

ROADIE (Alan Rudolph, 1980)

Speaking of '80s pop culture time capsules, Roadie is a rock'n'roll/outlaw country/new wave live-action cartoon time capsule of the '70s turning into the '80s, filmed and set in the music cities of Austin, Los Angeles, and New York. The broad humor gets a bit exhausting over the course of the runtime, and only about half the jokes land, but I love the nutso Rube Goldberg-meets-Sanford and Son setup of Art Carney's character's house (the same house used in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre!!!) and the all-pop-culture-at-once-where's-the-decade-going 1980ness of throwing Meat Loaf, Alice Cooper, Asleep at the Wheel, Blondie, Hank Williams Jr., Roy Orbison, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Soul Train's Don Cornelius, and Austin postpunk band Standing Waves in the same movie. Kaki Hunter is also pretty charming and has good chemistry with Meat Loaf, and Alan Rudolph makes the visuals pop like a comic book panel come to life. It's smart and stupid in some of the wrong ways, but also some of the right ones.

SAFE IN HELL (William A. Wellman, 1931)

A gloriously eccentric pre-Code crime film from one of the early masters, William A. Wellman. It's loaded with the good stuff — an atmosphere of seedy, sweaty desperation, a brilliant performance from Dorothy Mackaill, a cast full of character actors with great lived-in faces, and an ending that doesn't cop out even when you want it to.

O SANGUE (BLOOD) (Pedro Costa, 1989)

Pedro Costa's first film takes a surprisingly different approach from the later work I'm more familiar with, especially in the way it uses music, the movement of the camera, and the organization of people and space within the frame to overtly reference its cinematic influences. It's a movie haunted by the ghosts of other movies instead of lived experience, though the ghosts are personal, not performative. Costa's later films bend their influences toward his specific point of view instead of him bending toward them, but the images in this one are so powerful on a big screen.

TYPHOON CLUB (Shinji Somai, 1985)

My wife (end Borat voice now) says this movie perfectly captures how puberty feels, and I'm in agreement. I like Typhoon Club even more than Somai's P.P. Rider (see my honorable mentions). Both films share an eccentrically expressive use of the handheld camera, a disregard for narrative convention, and an uncommon understanding of the emotional landscape of the middle school/early teenage years, but Typhoon Club feels more assured in its rhythms, shifts in tone, and structure, and the characters are deeper, stranger, and more complex.

UNCLE YANCO (Agnés Varda, 1967)

This Varda short packs an incredible amount of detail and a number of memorable images into 18 minutes. I love the vibrant colors and the playful way it's structured and edited together. I don't want to be depressed, so I'm not going to do any research into how gentrified and/or psychotically libertarian this floating DIY houseboat commune in Sausalito has become since the late '60s. 

VENGEANCE IS MINE (Michael Roemer, 1984)

A neglected masterpiece (Michael Roemer only made neglected masterpieces, see also The Plot against Harry and Nothing but a Man) that didn't even get a proper theatrical release, Vengeance Is Mine went straight from the film festivals to a few screenings on PBS in the mid-'80s and then mostly disappeared until its recent restoration. I'm not sure why it didn't even warrant a brief arthouse run, but I can understand why it would have been a hard sell to distributors in the all-sizzle, no-steak '80s. Vengeance Is Mine (not to be confused with Shohei Imamura's 1979 Vengeance Is Mine, which is also a great movie, or the 2021 movie Vengeance Is Mine, which I have not seen but I'm guessing is bad since most 21st century movies are bad) has a novelistic complexity of character, a strong and unusual sense of place (how often has Rhode Island been a movie's setting?), a cinematic wealth of visual detail, incredible performances from Brooke Adams and Trish Van Devere, and a staggeringly tricky tone (I agree with the letterboxd reviewer who compared it to a blend of John Cassavetes, Ingmar Bergman, Mike Leigh, and Claude Chabrol). We also get a hilarious insult (true in spirit, not in fact) at the expense of my home state of Nebraska. As an ex-Catholic raised in the church, I really felt the scenes where Brooke Adams' ex-Catholic sits awkwardly in the pew and silently debates whether to kneel.

THE WIND OF AYAHUASCA (Nora de Izcue, 1983)

A film with a narrative rhythm unique to itself and not indebted to the way other films move. Its awkward moments are easily forgiven. I had the feeling The Wind of Ayahuasca could wander off in any direction or follow any bit player or supporting character, and the results would be just as compelling. The Peruvian Amazon is such a stunning filming location, and it's exciting to see it presented by a local filmmaker instead of the usual outsiders.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

BLACK PANTHERS (Agnés Varda, 1968)

I think Varda was one of the only French New Wave directors capable of making a film about the Black Panthers without embarrassing herself. Varda's outsiderdom is both a strength and a weakness here, and her curious and empathetic eye notices details most other filmmakers would miss, though a certain distance remains. Depressingly, everything the Black Panthers are saying about the police in this 1968 film is the same old story in 2023. We need a viable political party willing to take on the power, corruption, bloated budgets, militarization, violence, and racism of U.S. police departments, but both major parties keep throwing money at them. It sucks.

THE GLEANERS AND I (Agnés Varda, 2000)

The first few minutes made me worry this was going to be a little too cutesy and whimsical for my bitter, poisonous soul to handle, but, as a Varda-head, I should have known better. She begins with the search for potatoes in already-harvested fields by people going through hard financial times and ends up touching on almost everything. This would have made my favorites list except for the superficial reason that it was shot on early-2000s digital cameras, which produce images that remind me of the oppressive quality of the light during my least favorite time of day and year: the late afternoon shortly before dusk on cold late autumn and early winter days in the Midwest of my childhood and teenage years, after the leaves have all dropped and before the snow comes. That early digital camera look does something bad to me that I have to work hard to get past (notable exception: David Lynch's Inland Empire).

P.P. RIDER (Shinji Somai, 1983)

Great performances, great individual scenes (the heroin-haze apartment swordfight with hallucinatory fireworks!!), some of the most aesthetically pleasing handheld-camera long takes, and a thrilling disregard for plot conventions, but I felt most of the 118 minutes instead of getting sucked into the film's rhythm.

MIXED BAGS

THE BITCH (Christine Pascal, 1984)

The actors look great onscreen. So do the locations, clothing, and interiors. Legendary cinematographer Raoul Coutard makes it all look fantastic. Isabelle Huppert does so much with subtle facial expressions and movement. Oddly, though, for a movie directed by an actor, the characters aren't given much time, space, depth, or detail and are stuck inside a goofy neo-noir love triangle plot that's hard to care too much about. The somewhat unfortunate French sexual politics on display are not perverse enough to rise above the ick factor, either. A curiously unsatisfying movie in some respects, but Huppert brings the depth otherwise missing, and the surfaces are fabulous.

CARMEN JONES (Otto Preminger, 1954)

James Baldwin delivered one of the all-time great eviscerations of a film in his piece "Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough," which can be found in his essay collection Notes of a Native Son. I can't argue with much of anything Baldwin writes about his impressions of the movie, its audience, and Americans in general, with the minor exception of his description of the visual style as "appallingly technicolored" (this may have had more zing in the '50s, but after 25 years of Hollywood releasing some of the ugliest movies the planet has ever seen, Carmen Jones' color palette is like cool, fresh water to this dehydrated man) and the major exception of his imperviousness to Dorothy Dandridge's charms (though I agree in spirit with what he says about Pearl Bailey being the only performer to threaten the movie's "lifeless unreality"; Bailey's songs are the only ones I didn't suffer through). Dandridge is exciting, sexy, and charismatic, even when she's lip-syncing the embarrassing aural blackface of white opera singer Marilyn Horne, and my eye was drawn to her whenever she was onscreen, even when the frame was full of people. Dandridge is so good she made me mostly forget Harry Belafonte is in the movie, though his character is the epitome of inertia (they even overdub his singing voice with a white singer's!!! why?????). Baldwin gets in a great line about Belafonte's flat, desexualized character ("... Mr. Belafonte is really not allowed to do anything more than walk around looking like a spaniel"). You only have to watch Odds Against Tomorrow, from a few years later, to see the missed opportunity here with Belafonte. Sounds like I didn't like the movie, huh? That's the weird thing about movies and their power. I agree with almost everything Baldwin wrote, but I enjoyed the experience of sitting in a theater and watching Dorothy Dandridge in Technicolor for a few hours, and that's not nothing. I also really liked Pearl Bailey's and Roy Glenn's performances, the whole stretch of the movie from the jeep drive to the peach being thrown at the wall, and the way Preminger shot the boxing match and crowd in the final scene.

D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949)

I'm a major film noir fanatic, but this is not one of my favorites, despite its reputation as a classic. The great-on-paper plot is occasionally awkward in practice, and there's a distanced remove between me and the movie I can't quite get past. Also, in the early hotel scenes, some goofball sound FX guy goes apeshit on a slide whistle whenever the protagonist sees an attractive woman. This is hilarious on its own, but such a terrible thing to do to the atmosphere and tone of the movie. Despite my many criticisms, it never stops being a good time, a handful of scenes really catch fire, and it's a blast to see on the big screen.

FEAR AND DESIRE (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)

Kubrick's first feature (disowned by him) is a fascinating bit of juvenilia, though his visual style is mostly already formed. Fortunately, he would have better actors and screenplays later. I misheard the line "I collect reasons" as "I collect raisins" and really thought the movie was going to go someplace weird.

JOINT SECURITY AREA (Park Chan-wook, 2000)

Chan-wook's DMZ political thriller moves back and forth from flashback to present with his usual visual sophistication, but there's a surprising clunkiness to the narrative, particularly in the procedural part of the story focusing on an investigation. However, the flashback scenes, about a secret friendship between two North Korean and two South Korean soldiers, are pretty great.

THE SAVAGE EYE (Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick, 1959)

I love the images of late-'50s Los Angeles dive bars, roller derbies, pro wrestling matches, burlesque shows, drag balls, diners, apartments, streets, and Pentecostal church services, but I find the voice-over internal dialogue between Barbara Baxley's character and her male conscience pompous, unintentionally funny, soooo pleased with itself, and over-reliant on dated stereotypes about the fragile mental health of newly divorced women, though Baxley is very good at delivering this business naturally. A landmark of early American independent filmmaking. I wish I liked it more, because I mostly love what it's doing visually.

THE SEAFARERS (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)

An early short industrial film about the seafarers' union Kubrick was hired to make between his first and second features, this is more of a historical curiosity than an essential piece of his filmography, but he's able to sneak in plenty of personal touches. Worth watching just for the scene where a union rep delivers cartons of cigars and cigarettes to injured and sick seafarers in the hospital, who are all already puffing on cigs. 1953, baby.

FAVORITE FIRST WATCHES ON STREAMING AND HOME VIDEO

Here are the non-2023 movies I watched on streaming or home video for the first time this year that got four stars or higher from me on letterboxd, presented in the order I saw them. I'll post the full list of everything I watched this year sometime soon.

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)

Death in the Garden (Luis Bunuel, 1956)

Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (Dick Richards, 1975)

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

My Dear Killer (Tonino Valerii, 1972)

The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2017)

Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Night of the Werewolf (Paul Naschy, 1981)

Navajeros (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1980)

Confidentially Yours (Francois Truffaut, 1983)

Ferryman Maria (Frank Wisbar, 1936)

The Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1954)

Viva (Anna Biller, 2007)

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

No One Heard the Scream (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1973)

Bad Girls Go to Hell (Doris Wishman, 1965)

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, 2008)

The Drowning Pool (Stuart Rosenberg, 1975)

Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992)

Deadly Weapons (Doris Wishman, 1974)

Double Agent 73 (Doris Wishman, 1974)

Edward and Caroline (Jacques Becker, 1951)

Man on the Roof (Bo Widerberg, 1976)

Poem of the Sea (Yuliya Solntseva, 1958)

The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957)

The Devil's Rain (Robert Fuest, 1975)

Yes, Madam! (Corey Yuen, 1985)

The Muthers (Cirio H. Santiago, 1976)

The Mutilator (Buddy Cooper, 1984)

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

The Bedroom Window (Curtis Hanson, 1987)

Black Widow (Bob Rafelson, 1987)

Don't Let It Kill You (Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, 1967)

The Italian Connection (Fernando Di Leo, 1972)

Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)

Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell, 1984)

The Boss (Fernando Di Leo, 1973)

Mad Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora, 1976)

A Perfect Couple (Robert Altman, 1979)

Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021)

Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997)

The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975)

Class Relations (Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, 1984)

Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926)

Miami Blues (George Armitage, 1990)

The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1927)

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981)

Orgasmo aka Paranoia (Umberto Lenzi, 1969)

The Intruder (Claire Denis, 2004)

Passing Fancy (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Poison for the Fairies (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1986)

Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Love Affair (Leo McCarey, 1939)

Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman, 1965)

Primal Rage (Vittorio Rambaldi, 1988)

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

The Dark (John "Bud" Cardos, 1979)

Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)

Nobody's Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-soo, 2013)

Coogan's Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968)

Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (Wayne Wang, 1985)

Nobody's Hero (Alain Guiraudie, 2022)

Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)

All that Money Can Buy aka The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941)

Lost, Lost, Lost (Jonas Mekas, 1976)

Obsession (Brian De Palma, 1976)

Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953)

Slightly Scarlet (Allan Dwan, 1956)

Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959)

The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn, 1976)

Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1959)

They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich, 1981)

Massacre at Central High (Rene Daalder, 1976)

The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1966)

Siege (Paul Donovan and Maura O'Connell, 1983)

Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945)

That Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman, 1969)

The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976)

Two Men in Manhattan (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1959)

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (John Hough, 1974)

Give a Girl a Break (Stanley Donen, 1953)

...All the Marbles (Robert Aldrich, 1981)

Yoyo (Pierre Etaix, 1965)

Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)

The Gun Hawk (Edward Ludwig, 1963)

Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932)

The Face at the Window (George King, 1939)

The Enchanted Desna (Yuliya Solntseva, 1964)

Dead End Drive-In (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1986)

2023 on the Big Screen Part 1: The New Stuff

Before 2020, these year-end posts used to be about movies (though everything I write is also a cry for help/autobiography/rant). They're still about movies, but, in 2020, my wife's stage 4 metastatic breast cancer diagnosis and the simultaneous arrival of COVID-19 turned that year's post, and all the year-end posts after that, into a stranger and more expansive attempt to place the movies I watched the previous year into the overall context of my wildly transformed life. There was also some talk about how Cher's full name is Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman if you include her maiden name and the last names of her ex-husbands. It all ties together. Trust me. If you want to get up to speed, the link to the 2020 post is here. Collect them all.

What can I say about 2023? It was the second worst year of my life after 2020, and I feel like a living haunted house. The good news is that my wife is approaching the fourth anniversary of her diagnosis and is doing well, but there have been some complications. We ended 2022 and began 2023 in a period of uncertainty, as a small progression of the cancer in a lymph node in her armpit forced a change in treatment. In March, she was given targeted radiation and placed on a second line of treatment. This seemed to work for a few months, but we were soon back where we started with the lymph node, which was tremendously disappointing for both of us. She's on her third line of treatment now, and things seem to be heading in a positive direction once again. I hope they stay that way. She's the best. (She even got a big promotion at work. If you'd told me when she was diagnosed in 2020 that we'd be celebrating a work promotion for her in 2024, I would have fallen over in relief.)

Things are otherwise rough (see haunted house reference above). I've been dealing with the most prolonged stretch of depression I've ever experienced, and my state agency job has been a profoundly miserable place to work for most of the year because the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general of my disgusting state are three of the biggest pieces of shit who ever lived (the speaker of the house is just a run-of-the-mill piece of shit). My creative life is stagnant (I want to play music again, but I'm not having any luck making anything happen), and I'm directionless and lost. I miss the community I used to have from playing in bands for 15 years. Outside of my own self-pitying echo chamber (as Neil Young once sang in my second favorite Young song, "though my problems are meaningless/that don't make them go away"), I'm depressed about what's happening in Gaza, the end of abortion rights and bodily autonomy in states controlled by Republican legislatures, the anti-immigrant and anti-public education crusades the soulless ghoul governing my state is paid to pursue by the evangelical oil billionaire scum who own him, and the miserable choices we have in the upcoming presidential election. I am angry and sad about all these things, but it feels performative and banal to say much about them on social media. As Hammerin' Hank Rollins once yelled, "Life will not break your heart/it'll crush it," but, as Zelmo Swift once yelled, "I go on." 

Speaking of crushing it, how 'bout those movies, eh? I watch a movie and listen to a record almost every day. It's my heroin. (Also my heroin: heroin. Just kidding. I'm saving that for retirement.) Here are my favorite new releases I saw on the big screen in 2023, plus the honorable mentions and disappointments. My usual disclaimer: I'm not a plot or storytelling guy. I can appreciate a story in a carton-for-the-eggs kind of way, but what I really care about are the eggs: image, movement, sound, silence, character, performance, structure, form, light, shadow, setting, mood, tone, atmosphere, detail, digression, visual texture, local color, mirrors, windows, carpet, wallpaper, cigarette smoke, dirt, bodies, faces, trains, water, lamps, streets, trees, voices, interiors, exteriors, the juxtaposition of scenes, opening credit fonts, and the score. That's what a movie is to me, and if it isn't that, then I don't want it.

Some of this post (but less than last year's) has been cannibalized, revised, and/or stolen from my letterboxd page. Click here or here if you have any interest in my reviews and want to follow me there. It's pretty much all I got going right now.  

MY FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2023 AS SEEN ON THE BIG SCREEN

(in alphabetical order because I'm not the hierarchical type)

FALLEN LEAVES (Aki Kaurismaki)

I'm a longtime Kaurismaki fan, but there's something special about this one. I try to watch movies like they're a body of water I'm submerging myself into instead of an ego-mirror reflecting my own experience back to me (pretentious enough for you?), but life has been kicking me so hard for the last four years that I couldn't help but see myself in the two lonely characters at the center of this sad and very funny film. It's a movie that knows the world is a place that doesn't ever stop crushing you, but it also knows that inside this place are many small, wonderful things hidden in plain sight. Not a single image is wasted or perfunctory, and nothing is shown just to move the story along. There's a visual and an emotional reason for every shot. Kaurismaki's actors, too, are so good at tapping into a deep vein of emotion without any Big Acting Moves. Every tiny gesture has the weight of a dozen big speeches. Who needs heavy drama when a wink will do?

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: KING CRIMSON AT 50 (Toby Amies)

One of my favorite music documentaries of the last several years (I enjoyed it almost as much as Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground), In the Court of the Crimson King is surprisingly hilarious in its candid, multi-perspective portrait of interpersonal band dynamics. Filmmaker Toby Amies, instead of spending the bulk of his time on Robert Fripp, understands that the story of King Crimson is really the story of how every member of the band (including Fripp) handles or doesn't handle being in a band with Fripp. (Classic Fripp moment: He tells Amies that he took a cold shower that morning because a cold shower is unpleasant and it's a way of telling your body "you will do what I tell you.") I also can't thank Amies enough for the scenes with the late, great Bill Rieflin. I'm obviously someone whose life has been drastically changed by my wife's cancer diagnosis, and these moments with Rieflin mean a great deal to me. The world of film is littered with so many bullshit depictions of people with cancer, and this is such a welcome corrective. 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Martin Scorsese)

A historical drama with expressively abstract touches and both a fiery and mournful tone, Killers of the Flower Moon is an outsider's take on an Osage story made in collaboration with the Osage, and Scorsese acknowledges this outsiderdom humbly and respectfully. He's been criticized in both thoughtful and clickbait-y ways for emphasizing Hale and especially Burkhart (Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio), but I think Scorsese is making his predominantly white audience reckon with the white supremacist hell of our own making without an escape hatch or a breather, and he's not trying to speak for the Osage, many of whom made vital contributions to the film. This critique also tends to isolate the central importance of Lily Gladstone's performance as Mollie, which can't be isolated, and downplays the Osage presence (or pointed lack of presence) in every frame. Gladstone carries the film and connects every piece of it to every other piece. I'm glad the multiplex crowd is getting a chance to see how great she is. The rest of us have known since Certain Women (#humblebrag). The 81-year-old Scorsese continues to push himself, and the final three scenes, both separately and in relation to each other, are some of his finest work, with the risky penultimate scene one of his most radically self-aware.

MAY DECEMBER (Todd Haynes)

I have no idea if he would even agree with my assessment of what he's doing, but Todd Haynes in May December pulls off the incredible feat of making a movie in four different modes (deeply felt melodrama, ruthless observational comedy, intricately constructed art film about performance and predation, and distanced satire/simulation of a mildly trashy Lifetime-style made-for-cable TV movie). Instead of blending these modes into an inconsistent sludge, Haynes keeps all four running on parallel tracks, creating a strange and unsettling space where earnest emotion and ironic detachment have no trouble coexisting. The scenes with Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman looking directly into the camera or at their reflections in mirrors create this electric tension between the audience, the characters, and the actors playing the characters. Haynes' filmography is an embarrassment of riches (even Velvet Goldmine, where his reach exceeds his grasp and certain scenes fall flat, is admirable in its crazy ambition), but I think May December is one of his masterpieces. (IMO his other masterpieces are Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (his unsanctioned faux biopic using Barbie dolls as actors), Safe, Carol, and The Velvet Underground.) I've mostly talked about Haynes here, but everyone involved in this movie did some of their best work. I know this is streaming on Netflix, but see it in a theater if you can. The images really demand and exploit the space of a big screen in ways they won't on a TV.

PACIFICTION (Albert Serra)

Paradise and hell, leaking into each other. Pacifiction is lush, hypnotic, and creepy, and its uniquely odd portrayal of colonial rot in French Polynesia has a seductively unhurried novelistic sprawl. Benoit Magimel is in nearly every scene as De Roller, the French high commissioner of Tahiti, who moves through the island in his trademark white suit and expensive shades, glad-handing and schmoozing the locals, unaware of his own unimportance as a mid-level bureaucrat filling a colonizer's role on an island that doesn't need him. A submarine full of French Navy men shows up unexpectedly, stirring up dark rumors and mysterious events that rock De Roller's confidence and understanding. The structure of the film follows De Roller's mental state, and Pacifiction grows more fragmented, paranoid, and hallucinatory in its wild final third. It's hard to pick a favorite moment, but the jet ski scene is way up there.

SHOWING UP (Kelly Reichardt)

The Hollywood depiction of artists as magical beings or tortured souls furiously creating works of genius is every bit as stupid as the Hollywood depiction of people with cancer that I bitched about several paragraphs earlier. Kelly Reichardt, one of the great American independent filmmakers, gives us a finely detailed ensemble portrait of artists as regular, flawed people with a compulsion to make stuff and shows the making of art as the hard work it is. The movie is tough and brittle but also warm and funny, and so smart about interpersonal relationships between longtime friends, family members, coworkers/colleagues, creative peers, and landlords and renters (some of these characters are all these things to each other). My sympathies with and frustrations toward the characters fluctuated quite a bit during my second viewing, so I think this will be one of those movies that will provide a new experience every time I watch it. Michelle Williams and Hong Chau are great separately and together and deserve much praise in the lead roles, but the smaller parts are so damn good, too, especially Andre Benjamin, Amanda Plummer, Matt Malloy, James Le Gros, and Heather Lawless.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

(Not quite up there with my six favorites, but pretty strong)

ASTEROID CITY (Wes Anderson)

Asteroid City's baked desert landscapes (shot in rural Spain, set in a heightened southwestern U.S.) and its constructed sets (a roadside motor court, a mechanic's shop, an unfinished overpass, and the quintessential rectangular '50s diner are among the highlights) combine the natural with the postcard-artificial, and the story's layers within layers of artifice catch hold of real emotion in a complementary way. I wish Anderson would let a little spontaneity and a few jagged edges into his meticulously controlled and symmetrical compositions, but this is still immensely pleasurable to look at. A busy man in 2023, Anderson also made four short Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison) that brought out something weirder, bleaker, and creepier in him. I hope he explores that menacing tone in a full-length feature.

BARBIE (Greta Gerwig)

Finally, a 21st century Hollywood movie unafraid of a vibrant color palette. I love the look of this thing, and I laughed at most of the jokes. Not all of it works, and some of the big speeches are a little cringy, but Gerwig did not make this movie for depressed fortysomething men like myself, and a funny line or visually inventive set piece is never far away.

THE ELEPHANT 6 RECORDING CO. (C.B. Stockfleth)

I'm not a nostalgic person, but an uninvited nostalgia for my '90s college years has been squatting in my brainpan for months. College town, cheap rent, no social media, no apps, no streaming, no poptimism, not many possessions, no money, making weird stuff with friends for the sake of it. (Imagine a long, heavy sigh after you read that sentence fragment.) This movie was no damn help at all in getting rid of any of that, though it did make me fall in love with the Olivia Tremor Control all over again. 

THE HOLDOVERS (Alexander Payne)

The plot synopsis makes this sound like a screenplay written by the second-best student in a how-to-write-screenplays class (outsiders at cross-purposes thrown together through circumstances beyond their control? check! they become unlikely allies? check! they teach each other life lessons? you better fucking believe that's a check!), but the execution is so well done, the characters are so finely drawn and so lived-in (even the slightly exaggerated character played by Giamatti), and the homage-to-'70s-movies visual style is so textured and detailed that the whole thing feels like a warm blanket and a bowl of leftover chili on a winter day. Payne is playing it a little safe here after taking a crazy swing with Downsizing (which is not as bad as its reputation though still pretty messy), but it's not a sterile safety. The movie's got a lot of blood in its veins.

THE IRON CLAW (Sean Durkin)

Like The Holdovers, Durkin's mildly fictionalized biography of the Von Erich pro wrestling family and its many tragedies is an old-fashioned classic drama, made with real feeling and skill, with actors who have great chemistry together. 

Long digression ahead: I was a rabid pro wrestling fan in the last gasp of the territory system days from roughly 1982 to 1992. Of course, I loved the cartoony WWF product as a kid, but I considered Jim Crockett Promotions/Mid-Atlantic/NWA, Mid-South/UWF, World Class, and, to a lesser extent, AWA the real wrestling. I've dipped in and out occasionally since then, but I don't connect with modern pro wrestling much except for keeping up with the news about behind-the-scenes scandals and business dealings. I regularly watch archived episodes of '70s and '80s territory wrestling on YouTube (I've fallen in love with Memphis wrestling, which never made it to my Midwest hometown), but the modern stuff is too slick, too corporate, and too brightly lit. I need to watch overworked, pilled-up, coked-up, eccentric men (and a few women) living their gimmicks inside and outside the ring, performing in family-owned regional territories across the country in front of local audiences full of elderly people, kids, and nutty adults who believe deeply in the truth of what they're seeing. I miss when old ladies stabbed the heels with hatpins, when fans would riot when a babyface got ambushed, when the babyfaces and heels could not travel or be seen in public together, when the gimmick had to be lived even when a wrestler was buying groceries or getting his car washed, when promos were improvised instead of scripted. As a famous fan once said, "it's still real to me, damn it." Vince McMahon ruined everything. I'm pleased that my love for this era of wrestling is shared by filmmaker Sean Durkin.

Though the film is primarily about a family and its dynamics, and, in particular, how the surviving brother, Kevin, dealt with so much loss, the wrestling looks good. The details are mostly right. The respect is there. Pro wrestling scenes in movies mostly look terrible, but not here. I have plenty of minor nitpicks about the changes this movie makes to Von Erich history (chronology is shuffled, the actor playing Ric Flair botches it hard, a few "facts" are invented —World Class didn't have a Saturday night ESPN deal in the early '80s for example, certain events are simplified or absent, poor Chris Von Erich is written out of the film entirely and so are most of the grandchildren and all the wives except Kevin's, the mat is too clean in one of the matches (dirty that shit up)), but the spirit and flavor are correct. 

Besides the wrestling stuff, the movie does so many things right. Its late-'70s to early-'90s period setting is presented with lived-in care and subtlety. It doesn't punch the time period too hard the way most biopics do. Those movies tend to turn their settings into a theme park of the particular year's music, slang, cars, and furniture instead of understanding that things change gradually. This movie gets it. The tragedies are also approached subtly and empathetically, and the movie goes for quiet moments instead of overheated drama, often pulling away to focus on a small character detail when you expect it to run headlong into melodrama. There is some sentimentality, certain things feel rushed (I wish we got to see the brothers hanging out together a bit more; the scenes we do get are pretty great), and important facts are absent or changed for sometimes unclear reasons, but for the most part this is a thoughtful and sincere movie, and I didn't think it would be. 

MASTER GARDENER (Paul Schrader)

The concluding installment of Schrader's recent thematic trilogy (following First Reformed and The Card Counter) is the strangest of the three and the most out of step with the zeitgeist. I can't imagine this movie working well in a crowded theater, but the mostly empty late-night screening I attended because of my nutty 2023 work schedule was the ideal setting. I think some of the resistance to this movie comes from the contemporary tendency to distrust any kind of acting that's not based in either pseudo-documentary realism (lingering ghost of the Method) or the broad strokes of Hollywood blockbuster mythmaking, and the possibly related tendency to see every human as either all-virtuous or all-terrible, especially on social media. Schrader's trilogy uses parable (or near-parable) in settings that have most of the trappings of the real world but with elements of that world quietly removed, heightened, muted, or rearranged. In Master Gardener, that rearrangement is the unnamed city the characters live in, impossibly containing parts of New Orleans and New York. As always, Schrader is unafraid to embarrass himself a little, but there's something inhuman about a perfect movie. Also, Sigourney Weaver gets to be scary.

NO BEARS (Jafar Panahi)

Jafar Panahi's successful struggle to keep making movies even as the Iranian government has imprisoned him, placed him on house arrest, or simply banned him from working in film has turned him into an international symbol. This sometimes overshadows the work itself, which is pretty damn good, though it was even greater in the '90s and early 2000s when he had more choices and fewer constrictions and was experiencing less harassment. No Bears has some heavy-handedness and a sprinkling of sentimentality previously absent from Panahi's filmography (mostly in the film-within-a-film scenes), but these stray moments are easy to forgive, and the scene of Panahi, playing a version of himself, silently debating whether to step across the border into Turkey is one of his most affecting pieces of work.

TORI AND LOKITA (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)

The Dardennes, in their last few films, have lost a bit of vitality, and they seem surprisingly hesitant to explore their characters with the depth of their pre-Young Ahmed work. Are their social realist docufictions starting to become stylistically dated? Maybe it's the switch from film to digital? Whatever the cause, Tori and Lokita is still well worth seeing if you're a Dardennes fan, with a compellingly detailed narrative and strong performances from the young leads, especially Pablo Schils, who gives the film the urgency and energy it needs. Despite my criticisms, this is a step up from the curiously flat Young Ahmed, and it's a tense and gripping movie.

DISAPPOINTMENT

THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER (David Gordon Green)

I'm North America's premier David Gordon Green apologist, and I also think some of this film's naysayers are being a smidge hyperbolic, but this is ultimately too damn ordinary. The opening third is effective at setting the mood and tone and getting us to care about the characters, but once the lost girls are found and the demonic possession biz kicks in, it's Peggy Lee time (is that all there is?). I love the first three Exorcist movies (yes, even John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic), which were each directed by a different strong personality and are all intense, perverse, nutty, and darkly hilarious in their own special ways. This one is just a little too standard issue. I wish Green had given it some of his Vice Principals energy.

TV

I don't usually talk much about TV in these posts unless a filmmaker I like makes a TV show because I try to focus on the theatrical experience versus the home viewing experience, and I'm also not that wild about most contemporary television (my TV viewing largely consists of The Rockford Files, '80s territory-era pro wrestling, and Match Game reruns on the game show channel I can pick up in clear weather with my rabbit-ear antenna that's missing an ear; I've also been watching Monk), but I'm halfway through Boots Riley's I'm a Virgo, and I'm loving it. I don't want to reveal anything about it because it constantly surprises. I just want more people to see it.