Are movies still a thing? Or are we post-? Say hello to the billion-plus Gen Z-ers — those born since, say, Obama’s first election — for whom cinema is an afterthought, a quaint legacy of an attentional stone age, when their grandparents read magazines made out of paper. It seems that for many today, movies are at most an acquired taste, like modest little bento boxes of visual narrative, struggling to be noticed amid the endless Volga of streaming series, the fungal whack-a-mole occupation of blockbuster reboots and franchise ka-chings, and the toxic plume of viral-screen-meme-branded-Tok-influencer-pop-up-ad “new media” on every possible physical surface, even the inside of your car while you’re driving, even on premium cable channels you pay extra for. It’s supposed to be convenient as well as dumbfounding, this cataract of “content,” but convenience has become just another way of trying not to call it a forever war of distractionism, stretching to infinity. Who can blame someone who’s never not known streaming for being squashed by the the life-wasting breadth of the virtual world? Meanwhile, that’s one thing I like about movies: They begin, and then, soon enough, they end.
Ah well. If we are in fact living in a post-cinema world, like we’re living in a post-jazz, post-avant-garde, post-postmodern fiction, post-ballet, post-boxing, post-theory, post-truth, post-fact-checking, post–Jim Henson world, then we should probably also be living in a post-lamentation-about-the-demise-of-movie-culture world. If only we got to choose, most of the time. Because most of the time, the culture we live and invest in metamorphizes, from a grub to a butterfly to an action figure to a giant inflatable parade balloon of unidentifiable origin, and we’re told to get in line, keep our sphincters tight, and smile.
Maybe it’s not a good sign of the State of Things when the best movie of the year is a historical film that studiously avoids depicting its own subject matter.
Which is what critics must do if they want to retain their utility, which I would argue they can still have. Take the Top Ten list, for instance: inherently silly, OK, but also handy. If you know your film critic at all, not merely by reading them but by lining up your own takeaways with theirs, then the year-end list in question can serve an undeniable curational function. (Book reviewers, who read many more books than any one member of their audience possibly can, don’t have the same role; it’s a good thing Dwight Garner is such a terrific sentence-smith because I, maybe reading two or three of the same books in a given year, have no idea if I might routinely agree or disagree with his assessments or reasoning. A mess of movies, on the other hand, can signal if the two of you are sharing DNA or belong to entirely different phyla.)
The pioneering glazomaniac who invented this nonsense, by the way, was the New York Times’s Mordaunt Hall, the first critic of any kind anywhere to judge and listify an art form’s yearly output, which he began doing in 1924. We can’t be sure exactly why he did this, since back then giving your readers a list of the year’s “best,” months after most have left the theater circuit for good with no chance left to “catch up,” would seem to have been pretty unhelpful. Plus, Hall’s lists were unranked, which many critics prefer to do today as a sign of austere maturity. I believe in ranking, feeling in my blood, apples to apples-ishly, that anything can be sized up against everything else, and to do so complicates the conversation in a mediascape that relentlessly strives to simplify everything into carrot puree.
Complications, please. In fact, looking at my list, the really good films of 2023 are putting all their chips on ambivalence and doubt and uncertainty as the form’s freshest experiential edge. It’s not exactly a brand new toggle — hello, the Antonioni ‘60s — but we all could use more doubt, and particularly self-doubt, in our diets these days, for this election year more than any other. The quickest way for a new film to fail me is to serve up some steaming-hot easy answers. You don’t know everything, and neither do movies.
- The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, U.K./Poland).
Maybe it’s not a good sign of the State of Things when the best movie of the year is a historical film that studiously avoids depicting its own subject matter. Or maybe it’s not a sign of anything at all except Glazer’s diamond-cut conceptual intelligence (mutating the filming process into quasi-surveillance, for just one thing), and his faith in his audience. (Whomever that might be; I’ve met camp survivors who found Roberto Begnini’s Life Is Beautiful to be a profoundly moving experience.) With Glazer, you feel a historiographer’s discipline bolting your feet to the floor. Anyone who needs more from a Holocaust film than this one places on the evidence table doesn’t deserve this movie.
- About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey)
Ceylan has become an art-movie island unto himself, making big, burly, character-driven novel-movies that are so restless and bedeviling they feel less like films than actual people, or groups of people, flinty and secretive malcontents with whom your life is somehow entwined and with whom you struggle to deal. Thus, we as viewers are being regarded, uniquely in contemporary film culture, as four-dimensional adults ourselves, capable of wrestling with the ambiguity of other people and with the fuck-with-you passage of time. No one else alive is doing what Ceylan’s doing, not this thornily, not over this long a road. Big surprise few viewers, and fewer critics, saw fit to step up.
- Close (Lukas Dhont, Belgium)
More evasions: Because its characters are preteen, gayness might not even be the whole social-crisis yolk at the center of this heartbreaker, which is easily the best film — that is, the most understanding film — about children I’ve seen, at least since Ruben Östlund’s Play (2011). Our entertainment thunderdome is drowning in product for and of kids, but movies that really pay attention to them, and to the ways in which the confrontation with pubertal stress is a ubiquitous and inevitable tragedy, are unicorns.
- R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)
The Romanian harvest rolls on, from what might still be Europe’s most fecund, and bullshit-free, movie-movie hothouse, 18 years and running. The titular acronym refers to magnetic resonance spectroscopy — a brain scan of a modern culture wrestling, as is too common now, with ethnic identity as it rises up to defend itself with bared teeth against immigrant influx. Which sounds programmatic, but as usual Mungiu makes it seethe and breathe like a cornered bear.
You’re a Winston Smith navigating a cacotopia of hypermarketed everything-everywhere.
- Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, Iceland)
Stringent, formidably bitter, formally cool, unmanipulative, homily-free, doped on long traveling shots — you should see a pattern emerging. Know your critic! The Icelandic landscape itself should share auteur credit here; sometimes the terror of terrestrial forms does a lot of the work, as Werner Herzog always knew.
- Pacifiction (Albert Serra, Spain/France/Tahiti)
Again, more like inhabiting a fraught location than tracing a tale, with looming pockets of mystery and secrecy, and as with Ceylan you hunt for easy moral and narrative equations (here, regarding post-colonialism and tourist culture) at your own risk. Another multi-movie motif emerges (as it does in Brandon Cronenberg’s dynamite Infinity Pool, a second-Top-Ten choice for me), splitting open the chest of culture clash and the costs of exploiting native societies. Serra delivers the meds, but not in easily swallowable pill form.
- Rimini (Ulrich Seidl, Germany)
The performance of the year, if (or because it is) often difficult to watch. Seidl is Europe’s premier ethnographer of human dissolution — he never squints — and this is the Nausea of 21st-century show biz afterlife. Who promised you a pleasant time at the movies?
- Twilight (Szürkület) (György Fehér, Hungary)
Originally released in Hungary 33 years ago, this is the best movie Bela Tarr never made — which is to say, Fehér was Tarr’s producer, and he entirely lifted the master’s brooding, sepulchral style. So what? It’s certainly an upgrade from Sean Penn’s perfectly fine 2001 version of the same grim-murder-procedural Dürrenmatt novel (The Pledge), and anyway, isn’t grade-B+ Tarr better than no Tarr at all?
- Return to Seoul (Davy Chou, France/South Korea)
Here we are again, crossing borders — the not-so-new century’s default vexation. Chou, a Cambodian born in France, first made a dent in 2011 with Golden Slumbers, a fascinating exploration of the vacuum left after the thriving Cambodian film industry was eradicated, down to the last print, by the Khmer Rouge. This prickly character study correspondingly dances in the twilight between crushed and erased national identities, without worrying about being liked.
- Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, Canada)
An inspired masterpiece of making something out of absolutely nothing at all. A house, children, carpet … ghost-iness? Almost a movie that happened by accident, at the crisscross between neglected chemicals, like swamp gas.
And, because I’m no particular fan of the decimal system, my runners-up, in order, are: Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, Canada/Croatia/Hungary), May December (Todd Haynes, U.S.), Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, U.S.), Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, France), Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, U.K.), The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, Argentina), Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, U.K./U.S.), Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, U.S.), Subject (Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera, U.S.), Happer’s Comet (Tyler Taormina, U.S.), Chile ‘76 (Manuela Martelli, Chile), and Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, U.S.).
But wait, there’s more. The year’s new releases are merely new, of course; what about the not-new films I saw for the first time this year, having missed or evaded them up to now for usually completely random reasons? As I’ve done forever on social media, here are my stand-outs in the year’s new-to-me archival viewing, again in order of esteem:
• The Navigator (Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp, 1924)
• Black Gravel (Schwarzer Kies) (Helmut Käutner, 1961)
• El Vampiro Negro (Román Viñoly Barreto, 1953)
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
• Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus (Dalibor Barić, 2020)
• Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)
• Asako I & II (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2018)
• Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)
• Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1978)
• The Crooked Way (Robert Florey, 1949)
• The Beekeeper (Theo Angelopoulos, 1986)
• Il Demonio (Brunello Rondi, 1963)
• Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)
• Liberté (Albert Serra, 2019)
• Invasion (Shahram Mokri, 2017)
• Swing High, Swing Low (Mitchell Leisen, 1937)
• Sandra (Luchino Visconti, 1965)
• The Man in Grey (Leslie Arliss, 1943)
• Berlin-Alexanderplatz (Phil Jutzi, 1931)
• Moderato Cantabile (Peter Brook, 1960)
• The Intimate Stranger (Finger of Guilt) (Joseph Losey, 1956)
• Les Parents Terribles (Jean Cocteau, 1948)
• Identification Marks: None (Rysopis) (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1964)
• The First Year (Patricio Guzmán, 1972)
• A Dirty Story (Une Sale Histoire) (Jean Eustache, 1977)
News you can use? I can only hope. Because you’re a normie, a civilian, a Winston Smith navigating a cacotopia of hypermarketed everything-everywhere, you perhaps need less and better culture for dinner, not more and more mindless, and we’re here to help. And if movies are niche now, fine. Let’s geek out together with our tapas serving of savory, artisanal beginning-middle-end dreamtime, and when it’s over, and it will be over in plenty of time for a nightcap, we can have a chat about it. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
