Geek Out with the Top 2023 Movies: A Nerd's Guide to the Year's Best Films
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Welp, 2023 has been quite a ginormous year for moviegoers. It really has scaled into impressive heights. Both Barbie and Oppenhiemer (Barbenheimer) seem to have proven moviegoers crave original stories from empowered artists more so than the everyday tiresome superhero fatigue. Which asks the question, should multiple blockbusters be released on the same day more often? How on earth do you replicate the viral marketing that made these two films must-see events? The decisions will all come down to the studio executives. Although, they seem only focused on stretching their wallets out and replacing talent with AI in the future. Ever since the SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on strike, there still has not been any kind of resolution as of yet. All we can do is hope for the best and not just the future of cinema, but the stake of the artist’s careers and passions. While there still are many movies to look forward to this year, let’s take a look back at some of the best movies of the year.
M3GAN
Blumhouse marketed M3GAN as a horror movie, and yes, there are jump scares and bursts of violence to back that up. But there’s something so uncanny, and consistently hilarious, about the way this luxury AI doll—who’s played physically by Amie Donald—moves. As evil AI by way of the Chucky movies goes, M3GAN is refreshingly funny and engaging, on top of actually being reasonably scary. Allison Williams (Get Out) stars as the tech whiz who’s so unnerved by being granted guardianship over her dead sister’s kid that she builds a robot companion to handle all the difficult aspects of parenting. And then the robot gets protective. Scripted by Akela Cooper with the same shamelessly messy, giddy verve she brought to Malignant, M3GAN isn’t deathless, uplifting cinema. But it’s an unabashed good time for horror fans, who will catch the referential humor and wink-wink acknowledgements to the silliness of this whole endeavor, and then get some solid thrills out of the action to boot.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1
Dead Reckoning may not be the franchise's best installment, but boy oh boy does it still stand taller than half of the action movies shuffled out today. This time, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt isn’t fighting nihilistic terrorists or vaporous international-espionage networks but an all-powerful artificial intelligence known as “the Entity,” a variation on the man-versus-machine theme that Cruise pursued in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick. McQuarrie and Cruise, the Hitchcock and Stewart of adrenaline, have now got this stuff down to a fine art. And even though the film struggles slightly to differentiate itself from previous installments, there’s a calm mastery at work here that forces you to submit, from the Hunt For Red October-riffing opening sequence, to a high-tech airport cat-and-mouse game with multiple cats and multiple mice, to the train-set demolishing finale. Lord knows how they intend to top all this with Part 2.
Air
Air, Ben Affleck’s enormously entertaining corporate drama about Nike’s efforts to sign Michael Jordan, might seem at first like a ridiculous idea for a movie, but it is in fact an ingenious one. The creation of the Air Jordan sneaker changed pop culture forever, and Jordan’s unprecedented profit-sharing deal with Nike would give athletes equity in the products they were being used to sell. The film situates the Air Jordan as a product of the runaway consumerism of the 1980s, but it also hints at a boundless, complex new world coming into view. In what will surely go down in history as one of the great sports-movie speeches, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), the executive in charge of the shoe company’s basketball outreach, makes the point to Michael himself that the player practically exists outside of space and time.
Knock at the Cabin
M Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin smoothly moves from the textures of one type of thriller to another, even as the mood remains eerily consistent. A Frankenstein opening soon gives way to a home-invasion picture, then a village-cult horror movie, and finally a disaster flick. Knock at the Cabin is based on Paul Tremblay’s 2018 novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, and the script follows the book pretty closely for the first two-thirds. Both are works of the apocalyptic imagination, but Tremblay’s tale is more insular, working the ambiguity of the situation to explore the characters’ faith and emotional perseverance. Shyamalan, however, understands that there is usually little ambiguity around such horrors in cinema; in 2023, when someone in a movie says the planet is ending, it usually is. Instead, he returns to one of the animating ideas of his early work: a profound grief at the state of the world.
Asteroid City
If you’re watching a Wes Anderson film, you’re going to see a lot of fast-talking people responding with unemotive calm to extraordinary events, against a backdrop of meticulously designed pastel sets. But fans see a lot of nuance within that formula, as Anderson’s voice (especially his sense of humor) develops from film to film. In Astroid City, his ridiculously meta story-within-a-story sci-fi film about an alien encounter, that voice hones in on the question of art and creativity — who it’s for, what it brings the artist and the audience, why any form of recognition or acclaim is good enough for one creator while another strains to find connection and resonance in their work. It’s the kind of film that moves so quickly, and with so little attempt to hold the audience’s hands and tell them what to feel, that it takes some work to scratch the surface. But it’s worth diving into the movie’s connections and themes, as a who’s who of actors — many from Anderson’s usual stable, and some debuting here — bounce off each other, looking for meaning in an isolated desert setting.
Enys Men
There’s something haunting and ancient in the soil of Britain and it’s captured mesmerically in a trippy tale of isolation and disturbing plant life that plays like a druid’s cheese dream. It could only be the work of Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, whose debut drama, Bait was a handmade treasure back in 2019. Here, he uses the same vintage aesthetic and 16mm cameras to craft a worthy companion piece to any of the great ’70s folk horrors, as Mary Woodvine’s botanist goes full The Lighthouse on a remote island. Like Solaris, The Shining and Don’t Look Now – three loose touchpoints here – the ghostly goings-on are fuelled by an old trauma connected to that disaster at sea. Time folds on itself as the line between past and present disappears and Woodvine has ghostly encounters with old lovers, singing schoolgirls and mysterious robed maidens. By the end, your nerves will be shot and you won’t even know why.
Evil Dead Rise
The bar was set low for Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin to re-raise this beloved but faded horror series from the dead. The return of the demonic possession Deadites was originally intended to go straight to VHS (okay, streaming), and franchise OGs Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi were only distantly involved as exec-producers. But by hellfire’s light, Cronin and co cleared that bar by miles with a ferociously funny gore splatter tailor made for baying Friday night crowds. Australian stars Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland excel as estranged sisters holding back the dark in a condemned LA apartment tower, rather than a cabin in the woods. We never thought we’d say this, but bring on the sequel.
Talk to me
Talk to Me is like the horror-movie version of a perfect comedy sketch. It’s got a perfect premise, a brilliant turn you saw coming from the start but that hits even better than you expected, and it ends before it wears out its welcome. It helps that it’s also one of the most stylish and shocking horror movies of the last few years. The film brings a twist to the more traditional demonic possession narrative: A few kids have acquired the hand of a dead person, and if you say the right words and grasp the hand, you can summon a spirit back from the dead and even invite them into your body. So like all good teens, the kids immediately use possession as a party drug. As it turns out, if you don’t let the spirit overstay its welcome, you can ride the temporary high without losing control forever — all you have to do is drop the hand and you’re good. As you might imagine, someone eventually isn’t quite as precise with their timing as they should be. Once the movie’s turn hits and a demon overstays its welcome, the film shows off a flash of brilliant violence, and filmmaking, and queasy makeup work at its absolute, stomach-churning best.
Oppenheimer
Is there much left to say about the United States’ criminal, moral compromise in dropping the atomic bomb or the obviously tortured psychology of the bomb’s creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer? Maybe not, but as Christopher Nolan proves in his biopic on the life of the theoretical physicist, there’s plenty left to feel. Cross-cutting through time at lighting speed, and smashing together facts in ways its source material, the exhaustive biography American Prometheus, can’t in bound form, Nolan’s action-movie sensibilities split the very atoms of his subject to understand not the what, but the how and why. Even on IMAX, the seismic themes and ideas spill over the sides of Christopher Nolan's most spectacular, cerebral and haunting blockbuster yet. In a world of CGI, Nolan opts to recreate it using practical effects (a don’t-try-it-at-home mix of gasoline, aluminum powder, magnesium and propane). Like the movie itself, it leaves you shaken to the core.
Barbie
Could it live up to the hype? Would we end up just remembering the memes and how, for a short time in the summer of 2023, everything suddenly turned pink? The answers, it turned out, were ‘yes’ and ‘no’. When Greta Gerwig’s fuchsia-hued fantasia finally arrived in cinemas, it delivered all the promised silliness, mockery and straight-up Kenergy, sending Margot Robbie’s living doll on a journey of empowerment with Ryan Gosling’s insecure Ken in hot pursuit. What we hadn’t expected was how all-in Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay goes on Jordan Peterson-style meninism and even the movie’s own paymasters at Mattel (represented by a roomful of men in suits and Will Ferrell’s windbag CEO). She and Robbie promised we’d love it regardless of how we felt about Barbie – and she was right.
Creed 3
In the same way that no director other than Ryan Coogler could produce a movie like the original Creed, no director other than Michael B. Jordan could make a sequel quite like Creed 3. Jordan’s idiosyncrasies and passions for visual storytelling and editing are writ large and deep across every shot of Creed 3, from the film’s many many nod’s to Anime, to his distinctive, exhilarating approach to fight choreography and framing. Jordan is entirely in his element throughout the course of Creed III, as is Majors, whose performance as Anderson elevates the character from a mere paper-thin antagonist to a fully formed character as compelling as Adonis himself, equally turns insidious and sympathetic in his own right. In Creed 3, Adonis isn’t fighting to claim his birthright or right the injustices incurred by his father, but transcend both his birth father Apollo and his surrogate father Rocky Balboa to become his own man and fight for his own legacy. For both Michael B. Jordan and Adonis Creed, Creed 3 is nothing short of a triumph.
Blackberry
Before Apple took the smartphone world by storm with its iPhone, Blackberry reigned supreme. So as far long as I can remember, we’ve been inundated with stories of guys inventing things in garages that will “change the world.” The beginning of Matt Johnson’s Blackberry resembles one of those stories, albeit with a quirkier tone and more jagged texture. A group of nerds, led by Mike Lazaridis (a pitch-perfect Jay Baruchel) and his bombastic best friend Doug (Johnson), has created a device–a phone… that does computing!–that the world isn’t ready for. They’re not taken seriously, until a raging, recently fired businessman named Jim Balsillie (a movie-stealing Glenn Howerton) comes on board. He bluffs, he yells, he whips the ragtag group into shape, and pretty soon their device catches fire. (Remember?) It changes the world, yes. But what’s so beautiful about Johnson’s film–in addition to all the dynamic performances and moments of hilarity–is that in spending the final act on the company’s fall, the director shows how ephemeral these sorts of products are. Blackberry isn’t a film that valorizes business, nor is it one that sinks its teeth all that deep. Instead, it’s a movie that knocks wild ambition down a peg. No matter how big these men’s inventions get, they always seem quite small, destined to be munched up by bigger world-changers.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Cinematically, the fantasy genre has tended to take itself very seriously, but Dungeons & Dragons comes at its swords and sorcery with a refreshing and exuberant irreverence. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein respect their role-playing tabletop game source material, but also mirror the sense of levity and improvised invention you get while playing it. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein are seasoned purveyors of comedy who also love subverting genre conventions, as they proved with 2018’s raucous action-comedy Game Night. This one is a fantasy-adventure caper which owes more to Python than Tolkien, especially during one hilarious sequence in which its heroes attempt to glean a key piece of information by interrogating corpses via a ‘Speak with Dead’ spell, which only allows the interrogator five questions (‘That’s arbitrary,’ someone notes). With a game cast led by Chris Pine, a leading man who has turned making fun of his own leading maness into an art form. The film’s set pieces are built around comedy, with bits of (cleverly choreographed and directed) action to add some urgency, not the other way around. And the humor actually helps to up the suspense. Honor Among Thieves is the work of filmmakers who understand that the best way to take stuff like this seriously is not to take it seriously at all, and to have fun with it.
John Wick: Chapter 4
There’s not much left to say that hasn’t already been said about the nearly 3 hour epic of John Wick: Chapter 4, other than that it's not only one of the best movies of 2023, but only one of the greatest action movies ever made. This is the best-executed blockbuster sequel—on an R-rated, big-budget scale—in a long, long time. Keanu Reeves has this character down to a science, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and the late Lance Reddick are all back for more fun, and new supporting cast members Donnie Yen, Rina Sawayama, Bill Skarsgård, and Scott Adkins are all A+ additions. And can we talk about that last hour? We don't have to get into too much detail, but we need to at least mention that last hour. Some of the greatest stunts, choreography, and set pieces ever put on film. If you like any other John Wick movies, or action in general, do not skip John Wick: Chapter 4.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Picking up a year and change after the events of 2018's mind-blowing, Academy Award-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse follows Miles Morales on his next inter-dimensional adventure—and it absolutely rules (some, in fact, might argue that it's the best Spider-Man movie ever). This movie is a visual and audio experience that will not be matched by anything else in 2023, because that would be impossible. It's an experience. It's art. It's a whole lot of fun and it’s the best comic book film of this year. The cast of the original (Shameik Moore, Haliee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Jake Johnson) are joined by Oscar Isaac (following up on his role in the credits scene of the first movie) and Daniel Kaluuya, among others. It's the first of a planned two-part story—with the next movie due sometime in 2024. Just get ready to take it all in.
2023 may be coming to a close in a few months, but we still have many more staggering movies to look forward to. Here are some of the films coming out the rest of the year. Maestro, Napoleon, Poor Things, The Creator, The Bikeriders, Saltburn, Priscilla, Wonka, Ferrari, Next Goal Wins, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, The Killer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall, The Exorcist: Believer, Dumb Money, and The Holdovers are all quite a roster for the remainder of 2023. What does everyone plan on seeing before we hit the end of the year?
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