🍿 Anatomy of a Fall (2023) is neck and neck with The Holdovers in being my favorite film of 2023. What a great year for movies.

I have no plans to watch Poor Things due to a severe Yorgos Lanthimos allergy, but if I do it will be only to see what kind of a performance Emma Stone could possibly have had to top the absolutely brilliant Sandra Hüller.

🍿 American Fiction (2023) was as good as biting satire gets: funny, poignant, and, ultimately, tripping on its own feet. It is better than The Triangle of Sadness and miles above Don’t Look Up but at heart it is still an insecure adolescent whose every seemingly earnest confession is followed by a “just kidding…” handwave.

🍿 The Holdovers (2023) shows that not making ‘em like we used to was a matter of choice not fate. Some people still have it in them to make beautifully shot, perfectly paced, subtly acted movies with a complex message. Here’s hoping it becomes a Christmas classic.

🍿 Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) will, I hope, be the worst film I will have seen this year. Words fail to describe how utterly bad everything in it is, from the soulless story through the already-dated CGI to the then-edgy (if you squinted) now-cringe humor. The creator’s name is plastered all over the promos for his follow-up franchise. It serves as an excellent deterrent.

🍿 If you want me to see a movie, write a review like this. It’s for Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, and it made a 2-hour movie about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo look absolutely marvelous.

🍿 Orion and the Dark (2024) is Charlie Kaufman’s go at writing for children, and he did a marvelous job. Early on it declares itself as a literal bedtime story, and thus follows the logic of every improvised bedtime story ever told, from Alice in Wonderland to whatever tall tale you told your own kids most recently. So it runs on feeling more than on plot, but then which Kaufman movie didn’t? A David Foster Wallace mention and a Werner Herzog cameo are cherries on top.

🍿 Charade (1963) is what you get when the director of Singing' in the Rain want to make his version of North by Northwest: an absolute delight. Come for Audrey Hepburn’s fragile beauty, stay for all the shots of 1960s Paris set to Henry Mancini’s score.

🍿 Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the best live-action movie I have seen in years, and it wasn’t even close. In the topsy-turvy Monsterverse version Godzilla is a misunderstood hero. In Minus One things are as they should be: the reptile is a force of nature, the humans want to stop it, but the real battle is with the government inertia.

Caveats: it was the black and white version in a “4DX” theater which I thought meant a bigger screen but in fact involved motorized seats, strobe lights and gusts of wind blowing in my face. It was an unusual combination: the colorless, grainy images á la Kurosawa made into a theme park attraction. What would Scorcese have said?

I don’t care! The very first movie was also a thrill ride.

🍿 Toma (2023) is a biopic of a Serbian folk singer Toma Zdravković, and yes I’m biased but it was much more enjoyable than the more and less recent Hollywood attempts at the genre. Here is the problem: it is not available for streaming anywhere, there is little to no information about it online, and if you try to search for it you will get information about a 2023 TV show that is basically extra footage packaged into an 8-episode mini series.

So how many more international gems are out there, unavailable and unknown outside of their tiny target market? The internet is the first wonder of the modern world, but for all its greatness it also gives us a false sense of access to everything when there are in fact untold treasures disappearing at the margin.

🍿 The Father (2020) shows that the simplest of premises can make for the best of movies. Christopher Nolan, take note.