This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2023

NYFCC hands their awards out tomorrow btw

It begins (with a layup):

BEST ANIMATED FILM: The Boy and the Heron.

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

Sandra Hüller mostly earns the praise in Anatomy of a Murder, though Samuel Theis as her clueless husband is as fine.

To say nothing of the kid playing the son, who was equally fine

The kid was fine although I didn’t quite buy the business with the dog towards the end, but that’s more the fault of the screenplay. Huller’s performance was on another level than the rest.

Fabulous dog, though.

I don't think we're supposed to presume that the dog experiment is taken as actual evidence where it matters (i.e. the kid's decision, not the court's estimation). The son seems pretty clearly setting up a plausible structure by which to hang his choices on, to believe his mother

Another layup:

BEST FIRST FILM: Past Lives

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

Good.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Charles Melton, May December

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

These are getting decided at a super brisk clip this year:

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Oppenheimer

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

Downey Jr. looking a little less invincible in supporting actor

The supporting categories are in diametric contrast this year, with the male lineup all but seemingly locked up rn (Downey + Gosling + De Niro + Ruffalo + now Melton), and the female lineup pretty much wide open but for Randolph in The Holdovers.

Yes, very very yes:

BEST NON-FICTION FILM: Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

(This is only the second time Wiseman's taken this award btw, after In Jackson Heights.)

I didn't know Wiseman had a film out.

It doesn’t seem to have played around here at all, sadly.

I hadn't noticed until recently that Wiseman splits his time between super-democratic institutional ethnographies and behind-the-rope tours of uber-rarified, exclusive enclaves. This is very much the latter.

the female lineup pretty much wide open but for Randolph in The Holdovers

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

I've heard some buzz around Danielle Brooks in The Color Purple being a potential challenger to Randolph, though that'll probably depend on what the overall narrative around the movie turns out to be.

My hunch is The Color Purple is going to be a non-factor until the Golden Globe nominations ... and potentially after as well

BEST SCREENPLAY: May December

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

Gonna be a bit embarrassing when the Oppenheimer bloc overpowers the rest for the top prize

BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM: Anatomy of a Fall

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

BEST ACTOR: Franz Rogowski, Passages

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

The happiest surprise acting win since Regina Hall for Support the Girls imo

oh WOW.

I'm happy.

No chance of an Oscar nomination, of course.

The award is for the floral crop top.

Rogowski will win an Oscar a decade from now when he plays Joaquin Phoenix in a biopic.

BEST ACTRESS: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

feeling good about putting Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, and Anatomy of a Fall on my Vulture Movie Fantasy League roster

Oof, classic NYFCC wipeout

BEST DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

BEST FILM: Killers of the Flower Moon

— New York Film Critics Circle (@nyfcc) November 30, 2023

Kill me

I can live with the best film choice as another example of NYFCC just being straight up addicted to Scorsese at this point, but absolutely GTFO with that director pick

Interesting that they voted on Best Picture first but announced it last. Presumably so their vote wouldn't be influenced by the announcement of the other winners?

Final @nyfcc award (though we voted on it first) is best picture to Martin Scorsese’s KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON pic.twitter.com/VyuTsMwlMs

— David Rooney (@DavidCRooney1) November 30, 2023

Easier to spread the wealth that way I guess

I took it to mean that the voters themselves didn't know the result, but I'm not entirely sure how it works.

Calling Oscar races early is very much the ne plus ultra of detrius, but after today, I am pretty comfortable calling Gladstone and Randolph pretty close to locks

De Niro too, with Gosling almost enough if the Academy remembers Kevin Kline won in 1988.

De Niro feels like he's running 4th at this point to me

(Tho certainly less distinguished work has won others their third Oscar)

The question for me in supporting actor is whether Ruffalo and Dafoe both make it in for Poor Things. I can imagine a scenario where Melton wins the most critics' prizes but gets snubbed altogether in favor of Downey, Gosling, DeNiro, Ruffalo, and Dafoe. But I haven't Poor Things, so I don't have a good sense about their relative chances.

*haven't seen Poor Things

Actually, it's De Niro I'm starting to consider being the one Melton knocks out, not Dafoe (who twice in the last five years has gotten an acting nomination that was also the only nomination the film received)

feeling good about putting Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, and Anatomy of a Fall on my Vulture Movie Fantasy League roster
― jaymc, Thursday, November 30, 2023 12:29 PM (four hours ago)

What's your full list? I have a few major regrets on mine

Cahiers du cinema's top 10:

1. TRENQUE LAUQUEN
2. CLOSE YOUR EYES
3. ANATOMY OF A FALL
4, THE FABELMANS
5. FALLEN LEAVES
6. UNREST
7. DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD
8, THE TEMPLE WOODS GANG
9, LAST SUMMER
10. A PRINCE + SHOWING UP

✨ Nº 804 | TOP 2023 DE LA RÉDACTION ✨

Découvrez en avant-première le #Top10 de la rédaction des #cahiersducinema !

👉 Les tops individuels sont à retrouver dans le nº 804, en kiosque le 6 décembre, et déjà disponible en version numérique pour nos abonné·e·s ! pic.twitter.com/dt1JQwZJO5

— Cahiers du Cinéma (@cahierscinema) December 1, 2023

Also, unless I'm missing something, John Waters has joined Amy Taubin and apparently all other film contributors in NOT submitting a top 10 list to Artform, in the wake of the firing of editor-in-chief David Velasco

hmm

@Eric:

Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things, American Fiction, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, American Symphony, and 20 Days in Mariupol

Until the last minute, I was considering Oppenheimer / Perfect Days / You Hurt My Feelings instead of KOTFM / Anatomy of a Fall / Eras Tour. Pretty sure I made the right choice.

I made my picks too early, before it was clear the new Waititi was going to be a non-entity across the board (I already knew critics hated it, but y'know, Jojo Rabbit):

• Poor Things
• Rustin
• Barbie
• Past Lives
• Next Goal Wins
• All of Us Strangers
• Ferrari
• The Taste of Things

I finally dragged myself to a theater to see the nominated live-action and animated shorts. Next to the annual crop of misery porn, Wes Anderson's latest exercise in tweeness and artificiality looks darn good.

lol, yeah Henry Sugar really sticks out in that lineup.

Not really a film poster, so not sure if there's a better thread to do this, but I did want to get some thoughts down about Trenque Lauqne, which I saw last year, and was probably my favourite film (other candidates: The Boy and the Heron, The Eternal Daughter, Past Lives, Passages). Partly because I thought it wasn't amazingly well served by critics, who seemed to review it more or less favourably.

I'm just transcribing my notes, so it may be a little attenuated.

I saw it in one go but it comprises two parts, each just over two hours iirc. It is a very literary film, which is perhaps why I felt at home with it. I'm generally quite wary of films. A few critics used this term, and I agreed instinctively, but what constitutes 'literary'? It's slightly difficult to say - the typical shape or arc of a film is changed into chapters and nested narratives, two 'books' - i feel i recognise the structure and internal dynamics from books rather than film. Roughly speaking.

This did mean that the reviews I read felt 'illiterate' to a degree. 'Literary' + 'Argentina' seemed to mean name-checking Bolaño and Borges. Not entirely incorrectyly, but irrelevantly enough. Anyway, it's not important.

The trail of the 2 films comes in at a tangent, and a central absence (two men speaking in car park of a woman) and leaves, once again, with the same absence. The trail between the two points is picaresque or quixotic even, lightly handled, with a fantastic soundtrack.

Key elements:

• Narrative framing or nesting. The elusive mystery discovered by the main character (the woman, Laura, absent at beginning and end), exists as a trail of letters, a relationship, filleted between the pages of books, bringing with it emotional development - that plot, that emotional development is hidden, a meaning caché, with nevertheless a material trail to be discovered and to move things along. Stories within the story, itself only glancingly established from that initial conversation in a car park, establish themselves. My general thing from ghost stories is that nested narratives allow the materialisation of the immaterial or in some insubstantial to manifest itself into the main narrative, the 'real' if you must.

• The centre and the hinterland of Trenque Lauquen itself. Defined by not being Buenos Airies, it is itself a hinterland, but the passing in and out of its 'gate' is a constant rhythm to the film. It's also the drifting away from the centre - Buenos Airies, the males in the story, the original apparent centre of the story, all becoming gradually left behind as the peripheries of presence and relationships and even events become increasingly insubstantial and the main presence in the film.

• Especially the way men are pushed to the side despite being in the centre at first. They are in search of someone who already in that first scene cannot be reached, though they do not know it yet. Their masculinity is absurd from the beginning, but also uncomprehending (in different ways - the professor totally so, thwarted almost - the council worker uncomprehending, quietly heartbroken, not understanding until later if even then, understanding as much as he can maybe). I've seen people say the second film is much weaker than the first, but i don't think this is right. I enjoyed it more, it's true, but the second is characterised by a sort of diffusion of coherence, of purpose, which makes complete sense in terms of the overall film. Male certainty is undermined and in the end completely absent as a sort of irrelevance, slightly stupefied, uncomprehending. This does not come across as a particularly political point - it merely happens.

• Not quite doubles. A temporal love quadrant that isn't quite isomorphic, merely temptingly allusive, constituted out of psychological projection and narrative construction perhaps. You think initially the present is doubling the past but actually one of the legs isn't quite right.

• Mistaken identity (related to the above ofc). It is not at all clear that Emma Zunas is who they identify her to be

• I've written here 'the emotional mists of the narrative, a mirage of a narrative.' Not sure what I mean, I think it's just that the detection of Laura leads her to create the narrative that leads her in the end to oblivion. What word would we use to describe this? Fate? Destiny? Folly? Madness? None seem quite right - it's the success of the film that it creates a new mood to cover what happens here. A sign of a work of art imv.

• This is also a set of loosely related short stories about Trenque Lauquen, hooked together somewhat quixotically, as i say.

That's Trenque Lauquen instead of whatever garbarge i managed to typo in the first line there. Well done fizzles.

i like your post Fizzles.

I really kind of hated Passages. I have admired Franz Rogowski in previous roles - Transit, A Hidden Life, Great Freedom - but this film was so off-putting. He was portrayed as a person of interest but was completely unlikeable and uninteresting as a character and I couldn’t muster any empathy for him or for that matter the two other characters who cared about him. I have seen a lot of Ira Sachs’ films and have liked them all up until now

otm, he was unpleasant and destroyed people’s quite selfishly. that’s identified v clearly in the opening directorial sequence. he’s selfish and controlling - incidentally that scene also identified the importance of the language of body posture in the film, which is incredibly well handled.

it feels like it’s also about the hard work of healing that people do around him as it is the character portrayal of the cause of the destruction. idk i felt it was intelligent about that sort of obsessional love and lust and the sort of person that causes it and the sort of wounds it leaves.

If you liked Trenque Lauquen, you may also like The Delinquents out in the uk later this month Fizzles. Rodrigo Moreno isn’t a member of el pampero cine as such, though he shares actors (notably Laura Paredes) and a similar literary framework, though this is in some ways more of a traditional noir.

Intrigued as to what the Milei regime is going to mean for this wave of Argentine filmmakers - by all accounts he is taking his fiscal chainsaw to most cultural budgets - tho one of the defining aspects of ECP is their independence from traditional funding streams.

Thanks PG, I’ll keep an eye out for it. And I’d wondered that about the collective as well - it’s a very appealing creative structure (i must catch up with some of their previous works). My feeling is these things tend to have a natural life but i hope as you say the Milei administration doesn’t damage their approach and funding capabilities.

otm, he was unpleasant and destroyed people’s quite selfishly. that’s identified v clearly in the opening directorial sequence. he’s selfish and controlling - incidentally that scene also identified the importance of the language of body posture in the film, which is incredibly well handled.

it feels like it’s also about the hard work of healing that people do around him as it is the character portrayal of the cause of the destruction. idk i felt it was intelligent about that sort of obsessional love and lust and the sort of person that causes it and the sort of wounds it leaves.

OTM. The film's not blind about Rogowski's toxicity and Whishaw's attempts to distance himself from it.

Between Passages and Keep the Lights On, seems pretty clear that toxic lover really left his mark on Ira Sachs

i'm really still having trouble liking Emma Stone but i absolutely cannot put my finger on why

She's a woman?

lol

I liked her as an actress in Birdman and The Favourite. I thought she was great in those. And as ambivalent as I was about La La Land, her humorous audition scene near the beginning where she was reading a sad script and managed to squeeze out a tear only to be interrupted and startled by some casting underling endeared her to me.

I'm not looking forward to Poor Things though, I think it is the kind of movie I will most certainly not like. And I'm not sure she deserves a second best actress award right yet.

like somebody said they knew when they saw her in The Favourite that she was the real deal, i remember it being a fine performance. i should see Birdman. but actually i think she's good at accents and quite skillful, and she has that very "real" quality which is nice. still there's something on a personal level that doesn't draw me in. not that it matters.

I enjoyed A.S. Hamrah's recap in N+1, for the insights and takes I hadn't heard before.

imho Poor Things is worth seeing even just for the gorgeous set design.

Why hire the great Patrice Rushen to play gentle jazz piano over everything, in a score she didn’t write herself?

You know ... very this!

And, this bit is chef's kiss (I liked Barbie):

Richard Brody of the New Yorker became Barbie’s Number One fan among film critics, tweeting about Barbie or its principals some three dozen times, including one tweet in French and another that stated that Barbie was a better movie than 2001: A Space Odyssey, “except for the unrivalled Stargate sequence.” Brody had mentioned Barbie as early as February 2020, more than three years before the film came out, in a review of the Robbie-superhero-starrer Birds of Prey, in which he told readers he was “greatly looking forward to her performance in the title role of Barbie, the next film by Greta Gerwig, who, I suspect, will have an altogether more original view of Robbie’s art.” That is what you call advance praise.

really enjoyed those, although the one for anatomy of a fall was just a weirdly unimaginative take on the husband's blaring of the steel drum p.i.m.p. song (it definitely doesn't more than make him seem faintly ridiculous) and claimed the rest of the film was po-faced, which i vm disagree with

does*

Yeah, that's one capsule I just had to give the "different strokes" shrug to

Two more 2023 films that I saw recently and enjoyed: Monster (Kore-Eda) and Iron Claw (Durkin).