My Top 25 Favorite Watches of 2023

The love grows

[posted to IG from January 6, 2023, to January 9, 2023]

​Ayyyy, I fucking love movies. And I love even more that whether I’m watching arthouse flicks, commercial blockbusters, or anything in-between, I continue to be blown away, floored, obliterated, re-formed, deeply touched, profoundly moved, educated, challenged, taken on journeys of staggering proportions, and irrevocably changed by the art form I adore so much, even after 33 years of life and thousands of films seen under my belt. So without further ado, not including re-watches, here are the movies that affected and impressed me the most in 2023.

​I’m an easy mark for POV shots in dark abandoned rooms, especially when those rooms have broken physics and ghosts with lacerated torsos and twisted limbs and chatter away with freaky inky eyes. An elite found footage/faux documentary horror film effective enough to leave me physically and mentally drained by the end.

Blending gothic psychodrama with shadow-laden noir into a dense, spiraling atmosphere of paranoia and manipulation, George Cukor’s unnerving and lavish technical masterpiece Gaslight was the basis (along with the film’s source material) for the now common term “gaslighting.” A thrilling melodrama and a fascinating, superlatively acted character study.

A sharply crafted, darkly humorous absurdist satire with captivating characters and oddball dry comedy that doesn’t really have punchlines. It’s a constant flow of ridiculousness played with a completely straight face and subdued delivery - until it goes full fucko mode, that is - highlighting how out of touch with reality the uber-wealthy really are. And you know I dig any movie that literally shits on capitalists.

​One of the best Just Turn Your Brain Off And Enjoy the Ride movies I watched in 2023. Stahelski cleverly works around any semblance of character development by continuously introducing barrages of outlandish characters who basically just pop in for a scene or two - just enough to keep the momentum rocking. With its nonstop over-the-top bonkers nonsense stuffed with memorable idiosyncratic characters, notable quotables, stunning camerawork, and supremely innovative fight choreography, this is the pinnacle of the Wickverse for me.

British director Derek Jarman was passion unfiltered, living proof that you don't need to be a mastermind technician to create stunning works of film art. He was the epitome of art as self-expression, and in The Garden, backed by an evocative score from Simon Fisher-Turner, Jarman created a non-linear, kaleidoscopic odyssey of loosely related poetic montages in which he reflects on his own mortality, grieves the loved ones he lost to the disease that would eventually take his own life, and viscerally lays bare the heinous results of homophobia and bigotry. In this film, Jarman's deeply poetic impressionism, gleeful experimentation, irreverent humor, poignant vulnerability, scathing ire, surreal nonsequiturs, confrontational politics, and limitless imagination coalesced into a profoundly affecting symbiotic crescendo. Disturbing, campy, haunting, eccentric, beautiful, mournful, unforgettable.

​A frenzied wolf-girl and her wrathful wolf family face off against gun-loving industrialists with no respect for nature in this unexpectedly bloody animated fantasy thriller from the perpetual environmentalist and notorious greed-hater Hayo Miyazaki. Princess Mononoke features stunning animation that captures the magic of the natural world and plenty of Miyazaki’s imaginative creature design.

​Dream big, do bigger. Every facet of this documentary left me in awe, whether the footage or the perspective it all elicits. It’s humbling and inspiring to be reminded what humans can accomplish when great minds are working together (e.g. walking on the goddam moon). I’ve never seen anyone more excited to collect soil than these astronauts - giddier than kids at an amusement park.

I never knew how desperately I needed a team up between the great British actor Charles Laughton and the lionized French director Jean Renoir until I saw this film. Never the formalist and largely known as an actor’s director, Renoir always served the characters and story first and foremost with his masterfully polished, passionately effective craft, and Laughton thrives here. Like the best WWII dramas, the monologues in This Land Is Mine will take your breath away, with Laughton delivering two powerhouse courtroom speeches late in the film - the latter of which nearly had me choking up. This Land Is Mine is an unsung gem of 40s cinema and a humblingly powerful wartime howl about courage, resistance, and sacrifice in the face of corruption.

​Punched up by absolute earworm synths that lend some ethereal dream pop vibes to the pure unadulterated nightmare hell of it all, this sequel to the controversial, head-turning slasher Terrifier (2016) is everything that fringe cinema should be (short of formal experimentation): provocative, boundary-pushing, excessive, unrestrained, and makes you wonder how and why anyone would come up with this shit. Terrifier 2 amps the demented, eye-popping violence up to 11 (with no lack of style), dropping some of the most grotesquely impressive practical effects of the century. It’s fucked up but unique, like a pulpy, tasteless, way over-the-top horror comic come to life, with Art the Clown taking center stage like an unimaginably sadistic, hate-fueled vaudeville demon - hitting the perfect balance between darkly comedic and utterly horrifying - cementing himself as an S-tier horror villain (main actress Lauren LaVera is also an immediate scream queen icon). Director Damien Leone does 70s horror proud with his relentless provocation and 80s horror proud with his relentless excess. Is Terrifier 2 perfect? Fuck no. Is it one of the most memorable slashers out there and an elite piece of contemporary exploitation? Yeah, I’ll co-sign the hell out of

Another remarkable, perspective-shifting documentary. Bad Axe is beautiful and profound and one of only like a dozen movies that have ever made the tears come out of my eyeholes.

​The second chapter of the Evangelion rebuild tetralogy condenses the latter 75% of the revered anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1997) - with revamped digital animation and new and reimagined characters, creatures, and scenarios - before going buck wild at the end, morphing Shinji from broken to savior to infinitely powerful world-ender in a very short span. The show’s gut-punches will still knock the wind out of you, and now it has a cataclysmic cherry on top of its trauma sundae.

​With ace performances from Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, this mischievous, endlessly quotable satire delivers a clever, subversive, darkly funny script that signaled the growing disillusionment among American youth in the late 80s in the face of exponential commercialization and the fetid, hypocritical core of individual exceptionalism.

​It’s Not a Movie, It’s an Experience™️ Last and First Men is the posthumous directorial debut from acclaimed film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (The Theory of Everything [2014], Sicario [2015], Arrival [2016]) and it showcases a novel artistry that encompasses far more than just music. Surging with inspired experimental filmmaking, Jóhannsson’s lone feature is a spellbinding piece of speculative fiction that fuses unadorned simplicity with astronomical grandeur in its future-ambient faux-documentary approach. The lore hounds out there will salivate at its fathomless wonder, and all will be at the mercy of Jóhannsson’s sublime score, a four-dimensional blade that tears through the fabric of time and space.​

​Giving back to the genres and creators that inspired them, The Wachowskis handed the keys of their groundbreaking trilogy over to some of Japan's most talented animators and storytellers to breathe new life into the abundantly fertile world they created, resulting in a breeding ground of ideas - whether visual, conceptual, or philosophical. It’s a savory artistic stew that wonderfully demonstrates the magic of collaboration and fully lives up to the best parts of the original trilogy.

​I still haven’t seen the first one, but this was much better than I was expecting, and it made me realize that I don't give Cameron enough credit as a director. He’s the definition of highly conventional commercial filmmaking, but the dude only puts out hits - typically the type of blockbuster epics that make you feel like a little kid: movie magic. This astonishing sequel is eye-candy the whole way through, flooded with superb creatures and environments, monumental technical effects, and breathtaking set pieces - a first-rate epic where the emotional broad strokes pay off just as much as the spectacle.

​​Limite is pure visual poetry told with a mesmerizing rhythm and non-linear structuring, full of extremely unconventional framing choices and an endless procession of striking imagery as director Mario Peixoto treated the camera like a living breathing organism that was just as much a part of the story as the characters. To put it simply, Peixoto’s artistry was astonishingly ahead of its time. Don’t ask me what the movie is actually about though because I have no fucking clue - all I know is that I was glued to the screen for every minute of it.

​​I was fully expecting to dislike this, but it’s straight-up my favorite slasher of the 21st century. These characters are some of the most watchable self-absorbed assholes I’ve ever seen, and I could watch them unravel and tear into each other for days, which is largely thanks to the highly committed, nuanced performances and razor-sharp, zeitgeist-fueled writing. The characters are utterly unpredictable and the ensemble cast follow through with incredible line delivery. It also thankfully avoids the pitfalls of the shallow, performative social commentary of many contemporary horror films; by killing off the men right away, the story simply allows for us to follow a group of extremely flawed and extremely complex female characters, and that feels like legit representation to me - especially for a “slasher” where everyone is typically reduced to one-note archetypes, and people are just assholes for the hell out it. Here, we actually get some characterization. Tense, bizarre, violent, stylish, and wickedly funny, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a near-perfect pitch-dark horror comedy that, along with some other recent releases, gives me a lot of hope for Gen Zennial horror (I heard the term Gen Zennial used today to describe the overlap of millennials and Gen-Z and I really liked it and wanted to use it).

The slapstick silliness at the beginning and my own lack of knowledge about the source material left me very unprepared for how cold-hearted and evil this shit is. I always thought the phantom was just a sad weirdo who lurked in the shadows playing his organ and singing and leaving flowers for random women he fell in love with - more of a ghostlike haunting than a physical force - but he's a hardcore murderous psychopathic horror villain. I was legit shook when he dropped a full chandalier on the rival of his secret paramour in front of a packed theater - and that wasn't even close to the end of his violent reign. He racks up a solid bodycount by the end including stranglings, poisonings, and drownings, and and he nearly roasts two men alive in the booby-trapped torture chambers of his subterranean dwellings on some real H.H. Holmes shit. It’s basically an early slasher with one hell of a demented villain. Expertly paced and effective across the board, The Phantom of the Opera is an S-Tier early horror film for me, and I’m not just talking about silent films, I mean all the way up until the modern horror boom of the 60s.

​​Though everyone knows the Wes Anderson aesthetic, the wit and whimsy of his stories often overshadow his stunning technical proficiency. On The French Dispatch, he lets his filmmaking take the front seat and delivers an endlessly bold formal masterpiece that exemplifies why he deserves to be named with the likes of Kubrick, Coppola, or the many New Wave filmmakers The French Dispatch is indebted to. It’s pure eye candy and an elite exercise in form, yet retains Anderson’s infectious playfulness and comedy through all of its light experimentation, and it’s so cool to see Wes translate and reinterpret New Wave cinema through the lens of his own incredibly unique artistry - a film lover’s film through and through.

​Teinosuke Kinugasa’s masterful avant-garde psychological horror film A Page of Madness needs to be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror classics. The creative ideas swirling out of it floored me. It’s a pre-Un Chien Andalou (1929) piece of experimental, avant-garde surrealism that, like Limite, was wildly ahead of its time, and it rages with a chaotic maelstrom of overlapping and juxtaposed images that feels like Soviet Montage Theory on coke. Also similar to Limite, I can't say that I entirely comprehended what was going on a lot of the time other than surface observations as there are no title cards, but when the craft is this creative and visionary and the images are this powerful and unique, it doesn't really matter.

​I’d been waiting for a major project from Jessica Beshir since falling in love with her darkly mystical short doc Hairat (2017) a few years ago, and her feature debut not only lived up to but surpassed my expectations. Faya Dayi - a dreamlike documentary focusing on the khat trade in Ethiopia, the people affected by the drug’s addictive properties, and the region’s political turmoil - is overwhelmingly poetic and, at times, unbearably heartbreaking. Beshir’s mesmerizing slow-cinema impressionism and the profoundly lyrical atmosphere it evokes concocts a thick, sticky spiritual molasses that traps viewers in the same inescapable limbo as the oppressed laborers and khat addicts that serve as the documentary’s subjects. Both the intermittent ambient score and the diegetically performed songs have a way of latching onto one’s soul, and the worn-down emotion with which some of the performers sing about love and heartbreak is aching. The faces and voices that populate Faya Dayi have an unmistakable love for their homeland and a fierce pride in their culture, but the lack of control over their lives due to political persecution and oppression, and the damaging nature of a drug that has religious significance for them, is like a sieve from which their passion leaks. It’s a haunting portrait of those unable to undo the past and without the resources to move forward (without putting their lives at risk) - the tragic margins of the human condition where choice and safety are void, the crushing realm where one’s future isn’t theirs to decide, where their life doesn’t feel like theirs to live. As deeply sobering as it is ethereal, Faya Dayi is one of this century’s most artistically sublime and meaningful documentaries, and Jessica Beshir is a name that should be on every cinephile’s radar.

On my all-time favorite films list, I actually have this ranked higher than any of the other movies on this year-end list (IN THE TOP 50!), but I bumped it down a few spots because I never wrote anything for it and thus don’t remember what I loved about it in too much detail other than the reasons I love all Evangelion content: incredible imagery, unpredictable batshit insanity, deeply affecting emotional lyricism, and oceans of profound existential themes. I don’t feel like rewatching it right now either as I’m a fragile boy at this time of the year and Evangelion cuts TOO deep. Just know, I fucking love it and even if I don’t remember it all, it had an unshakeable impact on me (it must have really fucked me up [in a good way in this case because I do remember it having a rather beautiful ending] to crack the top 50).

The sheer audacity of Skinamarink - an aggressively experimental, disorienting sleep paralysis nightmare of a horror film - left me deeply darkly satisfied with the lengths it goes to subvert expectations, exploring the terror of being not just unable to help, but unable to even see the characters in the film as they’re toyed with by a malicious extra-dimensional entity. Though patience-testing, there’s a liminal lyricality to writer-director Kyle Edward Ball’s fractured, peripheral framing that seeps its way under the folds of your brain and locks you in an interplanar stasis where you become a victim to time and space rather than an active participant. The way Ball’s novel filmmaking techniques lock us into tight corners and empty spaces as nearly every substantive storytelling beat happens offscreen is a unique subversion of the medium that's supposed to allow us to see everything and a clever choice for the genre that plays on fears of the unseen. That blindness makes every sound more unsettling and every shadow more menacing as we desperately search every nook and cranny of the darkened frames for something to grasp on to, for an anchor point or some sense of safety - to the extent where even just seeing the kids' feet through the cracks under the couch elicits a sigh of relief and a brief respite from the impotent drifting. It’s such a bold and quietly brilliant decision to manipulate the techniques and pacing of slow-cinema, which requires active viewership to engage with the images, and force the viewer into utterly submissive passivity, as shadows grow and materialize, the film grain reddening and swirling like hellish snow or a primordial plague heralding the arrival of an ancient, timeless, universal force of evil, wreaking havoc on the imagination and the human tendency to seek patterns in the static and shapeless. It’s an exceptional and deeply unique showcase of implied horror; the power of human imagination to fill in the blanks, where even shrunken down on a shoestring budget with the most simple devices, the cosmic is ever-present - ambient horror at its finest.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a patient, evocative, achingly human, profound emotional odyssey with first-rate writing, directing, and acting. It’s an unforgettable encounter with the human condition that reaches mastery on every level. Every detail in this stirring meta-textual story doubles back, folds over, and connects, constructing a fortress of complex emotions around a core of transcendent humanism. It sneaks its way under your skin and forces you to feel - rather than feeling the emotions for you. It’s everything I could want from an atmospheric slow-burn drama and boasts one of my favorite scripts in recent memory. Drive My Car, to me, reaches the pinnacle of dramatic writing.

Like all of cinema’s greatest films, The Great Silence only ramps up with each act, and it ramps so damn high before dropping the floor out from under the viewer at the end that the plummet ripped the air from my lungs and left me frozen, crumpled in a heap where I remained paralyzed and cold until long after the credits stopped rolling. Sergio Corbucci’s shocking and confrontational snow-capped revisionist spaghetti western, which subverts a flurry of classic genre tropes as legendary composer Ennio Morricone's electrifying score charges every shootout and every sweeping vista with riveting intensity, serves as a despairingly bleak political allegory for the late 60s revolutionary movements. Made following the murders of Che Guevara and Malcolm X (neither of whom were perfect but were fighting for just causes), The Great Silence is a chilling gut-punch about the death of ideology and honor, and the ascent of cruel, bloodthirsty men who manipulate their way to the top, camouflaging themselves as arms of the law so they can freely enact - and profit off - wanton violence against marginalized communities. The ending of the film also gives a new meaning to its title as myth transfers from hero to villain - because sometimes the psychopaths win, and history is written by the victors. The Great Silence is a brutal watch that’s lost no impact or importance over the years, and it’s an essential reminder to keep fighting, lest the oppressors and would-be autocrats rewrite history and liberation in their own image.