There is a difference between “favourite” and “best” movie. For me, the former indicates some form of emotional or psychological attachment to something, while “best” attempts to separate those emotions from objectivity. When discussing movies, objectivity is virtually impossible, but it’s at least an attempt to get away from what is familiar to enjoy something that is not.
If I could put it in sports terms, as a hockey fan, it’s like this: the Montreal Canadiens are my favourite team because I followed them as a kid, have continued to follow them into adulthood, and root for them regardless of if they’re good or bad. However, they’re not the best team, nor even the team I enjoy watching most right now, given how bad they are. Does that make sense? I hope so.
Anyway, let’s get to my favourite/best movies of 2023. These will be separated into four categories of five movies each:
- Favourite releases from 2023 alone
- Best releases from 2023 alone
- Favourite releases from prior to 2023 that I had never seen
- Best releases from prior to 2023 that I had never seen
If there is any overlap, the movie will be mentioned but another will take its place.
Let’s not waste any more time, and these movies are in no particular order within their group.
*Note: two movies I haven’t seen that I plan to before the year is out are Poor Things and Past Lives. Both have been heralded, so this list may change, but this will be updated if necessary.
Favourite Releases of 2023
Killers of the Flower Moon
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone
There are times in a Scorsese movie where he’s not very subtle; that’ll be explored later in a different movie on a different list. There are times where he is subtle, though, and that subtlety will knock you on your ass when it happens.
Flower Moon is the story of the indigenous Osage Nation in Oklahoma after World War I. They were a people that had a lot of oil wealth on their land, and the murders committed by the White Americans around them for that oil wealth are the focus of the story.
Part of that story is how White Americans were put in charge of the money that could be accessed by members of the Osage that had oil on their lands. In other words, they were stewards of the wealth that the Osage possessed, but they weren’t Osage, and could dictate when or how much money could be withdrawn by the people who actually owned the land. One of those stewards was a character named Pitts Beaty. Beaty shows up early on in the movie when a member of the Osage goes to his office to ask to withdraw their own money.
Beaty shows up again later, though. He is marching in a parade through town and gets a wave from DiCaprio’s character. That parade is for the Ku Klux Klan, by the way.
Later in the movie, Beaty is shown on the jury for the trial of a person that is charged with the murder of a member of the Osage Nation. Though he doesn’t get many lines, and only appears a handful of times, Scorsese uses the same character as a steward of Osage wealth, as a proud member of the KKK, and then as part of a trial jury. There isn’t a big deal made of it in the movie; it plays like it’s the normal course of business. And it is, but there’s absolutely nothing normal about that arrangement.
There is so much to dissect about Flower Moon that this could run 10 000 words and we’d just start scratching the surface. While the criticisms of the movie are fair – it is still a non-Osage person telling the story of the Osage – it is clear that Scorsese took his time to get the story as correct as possible, significantly veering off from the novel it was based on. Something as simple as Beaty’s character shows the structure that was designed to dispossess the Osage, and eventually just murder them. It is truly a masterpiece and my favourite movie of the year.
May December
Director: Todd Haynes
Starring: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
Full confession: I am not a big fan of true crime documentaries/podcasts/stories. It is not any sort of moral objection (though maybe it should be) but it’s just not something that overly interests me.
May December rips directly from the Mary Kay Letourneau case where an older teacher has sexual relations with a grade school student and is sent to prison for statutory rape. In this movie, Moore’s character of Gracie has sexual relations with then-13-year-old Joe and goes to prison. The two are, in a very fucked up way, in love, and they marry when he comes of age (and she’s out of prison). Moore’s character is even impregnated by Joe in that encounter, and she has the child while in prison; Joe is a father in grade nine. The catch is that Portman’s character (Elizabeth) is cast to play Gracie in a movie about this entire affair (in every sense of that word), and the movie follows her following Gracie, how Gracie and Joe fit into their community, how Gracie’s families interact (she was married with children before she married Joe), and Elizabeth’s journey getting to know this entire situation.
All the complexities aside, this is an unbelievable portrayal of the rot of true crime when they hurt the families they’re based on, what can actually be learned about a character like Gracie when you’re not asking the right questions, and the conversations people should be having but never do. A lot of this movie plays as a comedy but there is a dual darkness that goes with that levity. The performances are Oscar-worthy, the subject matter is broached with the right touch, and there are a number of unforgettable scenes. It came around late in the year but hit me like a Lennox Lewis right cross.
John Wick 4
Director: Chad Stahelski
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgard
Ask three different people what their favourite scene is from any John Wick movie and there’ll probably be three different answers. That is what makes these movies so special – there are intimate action moments that draw the viewer in and then spectacular action sequences that are among the best for the genre this century. John Wick 4 is no exception.
The movie picks up where we left off in John Wick 3, which is John must run for his life (again) and try to take down the nebulous High Table so he can, eventually, stop running. The scene on the stairs at Sacré Coeur or the cars around the Arc de Triomphe are standout scenes, but it’s the overhead view with the incendiary shotgun shells that stand out. It looks like a top-down video game but much of it is one long tracking shot which requires a lot of great stunt coordination. It is unlike anything we see in action movies and is absolutely breathtaking even when watching it a second or third time.
Even non-action fans can appreciate this movie of a man looking for absolution in a world where he won’t get it until he dies. They delivered on the action again and gave us some of the most memorable scenes of the year.
Skinamarink
Director: Kyle Edward Ball
Starring: Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault
Two brief sidebars.
First, I am old enough to remember the release of the original Blair Witch Project. I was 12-13 years old at the time and the internet was a thing, but even in the late 90s, it was nothing like it is today. All this is to say that until I saw the actors on the Jay Leno show, I really didn’t know if it was real or not. ‘Found Footage’ horror movies have been popular since, but none have been able to recreate that moment since (though one was excellent and will be featured on a different list).
Second, this year I became aware of a book called House of Leaves. It has a complicated story, but it boils down to this: it’s a story about a family that move into a house and the house is changing on them. Literally. There are days when the house itself is a bit smaller, or random hallways appear, or windows disappear, and so on. It’s a book I’m going to get to soon, but it was a cult hit earlier this century.
Skinamarink was made on a budget of $15 000 and shot entirely in the childhood home of director Kyle Edward Ball. It is all shot as ‘found footage’ but it’s also shot from the angle of the four- and six-year-old children that are the stars of the movie. In other words, all the camera angles are about three feet off the ground, making everything in the house larger and, because this is a horror movie, scarier.
The hook of the movie is this: four-year-old Kevin and six-year-old Kaylee return home with their father and Kevin has a bandage on his head. We see a family photo with their mother that is no longer in the home so, presumably, there has been some sort of accident where the mother died, and the son was injured. The kids go to bed and wake up when their father leaves the house. He has abandoned them in that house, never to return.
From that point, it’s a 75-minute white-knuckle experience. The kids hear the father leave the house and when they go downstairs, they can’t open the door. They go to open the living room curtains and the windows have disappeared. They can’t get out of the house, and then the voices/sounds that a child of that age would fear when walking around a house in the dark start flooding the speakers with regularity.
There isn’t a lot that scares me in horror movies these days, but this movie certainly did the trick. Shooting everything from the perspective of a four- or six-year-old changes the entire experience, and it’s hard, as a viewer, not to think of times we were scared at that age. It may not tickle the fancy of everyone that watches it, but for me, this was easily my favourite horror movie of the year.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg
Without spoiling anything, there was a scene near the end of the movie involving a train coming apart that was among the best scenes of the year. Was it ripped directly from a video game? Sure, but it was also unbelievable to see on screen and it’s part of the magic that Cruise can conjure with this franchise.
Plot doesn’t really matter here, but it’s about Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character retrieving two keys that are necessary to stop an Artificial Intelligence program named Entity. It gets a bit convoluted, but it doesn’t really matter. The connection between Hunt and the rest of his team, the callbacks to earlier franchise instalments, and his chemistry with an outstanding Hayley Atwell made this about the most fun to be had over a 2 ½ hour span this year.
This may not be the best of the franchise, or even one of the best, but the bar is so high that we can’t fault the movie for that. Whether the on-foot chase scenes in the airport or through the streets of Venice, the car chase where Cruise and Atwell are handcuffed together, the motorcycle jump off the cliff, or the train sequence itself, there is a lot here that ranks up there with the best from John Wick 4. One of the best movies of the year, it is not. One of my favourite movie-going experiences of 2023? Absolutely.
Cliffy's hell-hole 