Damon Wise’s Best Movies Of 2023

This hasn’t been a vintage year for runaway favorites, but it’s been a great one for movies that puzzle, provoke and challenge. Every film on this list deserves a second view and, I hope, will very likely reward one…

May December

Todd Haynes’ latest drama takes a scandalous story from the ’90s and slowly exposes the tawdry reality behind a May-December relationship. Natalie Portman is at her best as an underhand actress documenting the life of Gracie, a middle-aged woman whose involvement with a minor made tabloid headlines twice: first at the time, and then again when she married him. The always excellent Julianne Moore makes Gracie a mesmerizing piece of work, but it’s newcomer Charles Melton who rises to the occasion playing the young man caught in the crosshairs of two shifty, self-obsessed women. Michel Legrand’s spine-tingling score for The Go-Between plays a crucial role, too.

Anatomy of a Fall

In a Cannes Competition packed with returning winners, Justine Triet’s serpentine thriller certainly punched above its weight to take the Palme d’Or this year. Key to its success is a stunning central performance from Sandra Hüller, who makes the daunting 152-minute runtime fly by. But credit is also due to the script, written by Triet and husband Arthur Harari, which takes a simple murder-mystery and turns it into a dazzlingly addictive dissection of a marriage, in which a German novelist finds herself charged with murder following the unexplained death of her French husband. The case goes to court, but questions linger long after the seemingly decisive verdict.

The Zone of Interest

Ten years after Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has done it again: he’s taken a book, stripped out the contents and somehow made an experiential masterpiece with the bare bones that remain. (Sadly, author Martin Amis died the week it premiered in Cannes, but it’s likely he would have approved.) Using dispassionate, Big Brother-style, remote-controlled cameras, The Zone of Interest shows the daily life of the Höss family, who live in the shadow of Auschwitz. The images tell us a story of a rural, middle-class idyll, but the soundtrack — harrowing screams and gunshots, plus the hellish sounds of Mica’s macabre score — reminds us what’s happening on the other side of the garden wall.

The Holdovers

Frost, Nixon and the funk of fusty schoolrooms loom over The Holdovers, in which Paul Giamatti and Alexander Payne reunite for another of their exquisite character pieces. The setting is 1970, and professor Paul Hunham is left with the task of watching over the pupils at his boarding school who don’t have a home for the Christmas holidays. It’s not hard to see where it’s all going, but the chemistry between the key players — notably Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the recently bereaved cook — create a genuine warmth that outweighs the hokeyness. Likewise, Payne re-creates the pre-internet era with an analog perfection and an eye for detail that’s even apparent in the trailer.

Past Lives

Like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Celine Song’s feature debut blossomed in a year that saw film discourse dominated by two much higher-profile movies (in Moonlight’s case, it was La La Land and Manchester By the Sea). It’s likely, in fact, that the sound and fury of the Barbenheimer debate actually drove audiences to check out this quiet, gently probing drama, a kind of reverse Sliding Doors in which a young, Americanized Korean woman named Nora (Greta Lee) gets the chance to reverse the effects of chance and time when her childhood sweetheart contacts her on Facebook. The final scene, in which Nora finally decides how all this is going to play out, is just perfect.

American Fiction

After a taster of his comic genius in Asteroid City (General Gibson’s side-splittingly deadpan “That was life” speech), Jeffrey Wright gets a whole movie to remind us just what he can do. Adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett, this stars Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a middle-class African American author who, disgusted by the edification of misery memoirs, writes a trashy gangster novel under a pseudonym and poses as an on-the-lam con. To his dismay, the book is a hit, and there’s a lot of comedy in the situation he then finds himself in. But Cord Jefferson’s feature debut is quietly radical in many other ways, chiefly by telling, in parallel, a perfectly relatable story of a family dealing with personal issues just like any other.

Dream Scenario

At night, when you’re asleep, into your bed he’ll creep… Not the Sheik of Araby, but Paul Matthews, a run-of-the-mill biologist who becomes “a thing” when he starts turning up in people’s dreams, initially as a passive presence. Paul is bewildered by his sudden notoriety and reluctantly embraces it, only to find that his cult status is short-lived when those dreams start turning into nightmares and his students want him gone. Starring Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario wittily captures the zeitgeist of the internet age, which reduces complex issues to a meme and reserves the right to cancel at a moment’s notice.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese’s “first Western” has been endlessly debated since its one and only screening in Cannes, mostly for its sensitivity to the Native American cause and for Lily Gladstone’s breakout performance. For me, though, the film belongs to Robert De Niro in his best performance since his last Scorsese hook-up, channeling the amoral spirit of Roger Stone for his portrayal of William King Hale, architect of the Osage murders. Similarly, Thelma Schoonmaker continues to be the power behind the throne, cutting with a vitality, energy and a touch so light the film almost dances to the finish line.

Poor Things

When it comes to world-building, Yorgos Lanthimos is in a league of his own, not only in terms of design but also with regard to the way he bends well-known actors to his will and blasts their familiar onscreen persona to smithereens. Emma Stone is the case in point here, blowing up her coquettish rom-com past by playing the sexually aggressive woman-child Bella, a morally unethical experiment created by an emotionally and physically scarred scientist (Willem Dafoe). Bella’s adventures aren’t for everyone, and neither is the over-ambitious running time, but Lanthimos has a vaudevillian mastery of the macabre that rivals David Lynch’s The Elephant Man for gaslit grue and intrigue.

Priscilla

The Ramones’ version of The Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You” is the surprise intro to Sofia Coppola’s loose account of Elvis Presley’s marriage, as seen from the lesser-noted viewpoint of his young wife Priscilla. The jury’s still out as to whether Jacob Elordi has even any of the King’s charisma, but Cailee Spaeny proved a revelation in the title role, elegantly transitioning in a role that poses more questions as the years go by. Coppola chooses not to dwell on the grooming, showing instead the journey of someone who heroically pulled themselves out of a bad relationship in the full glare of the media’s spotlight. Needless to say, the soundtrack is terrific, and possibly Coppola’s best yet.