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

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 didn't realize Close Your Eyes is the new Victor Erice. I may try to catch it during the AFI EU Film Fest going on here this week.

NYT critics share their top 10s:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/movies/best-movies-of-2023.html

Manohla Dargis

1. ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ (Martin Scorsese)
2. ‘Oppenheimer’ (Christopher Nolan)
3. ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ (Frederick Wiseman)
4. ‘Occupied City’ (Steve McQueen)
5. ‘A Thousand and One’ (A.V. Rockwell)
6. ‘Asteroid City’ (Wes Anderson)
7. ‘May December’ (Todd Haynes)
8. ‘Showing Up’ (Kelly Reichardt)
9. ‘Orlando: My Political Biography’ (Paul B. Preciado)
10. ‘Stonewalling’ (Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka)

Ten more: “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” “Earth Mama,” “Fallen Leaves,” “Ferrari,” “John Wick: Chapter 4,” “Past Lives” “R.M.N.,” “Scarlet,” “Will-O’-the-Wisp,” “Youth (Spring).”

Alissa Wilkinson

1. ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ (Martin Scorsese)
2. ‘Past Lives’ (Celine Song)
3. ‘The Zone of Interest’ (Jonathan Glazer)
4. ‘Reality’ (Tina Satter)
5. ‘A Still Small Voice’ (Luke Lorentzen)
6. ‘Oppenheimer’ (Christopher Nolan)
7. ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ (Anna Hints)
8. ‘Godland’ (Hlynur Palmason)
9. ‘The Eternal Memory’ (Maite Alberdi)
10. ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ (Frederick Wiseman)

And don’t miss: “Afire” (Christian Petzold), “American Fiction” (Cord Jefferson), “American Symphony” (Matthew Heineman), “Anatomy of a Fall” (Justine Triet), “Anselm” (Wim Wenders), “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” (Kelly Fremon Craig), “Barbie” (Greta Gerwig), “BlackBerry” (Matt Johnson), “Eileen” (William Oldroyd), “Fallen Leaves” (Aki Kaurismaki), “Four Daughters” (Kaouther Ben Hania), “The Holdovers” (Alexander Payne), “May December” (Todd Haynes), “Poor Things” (Yorgos Lanthimos), “Priscilla” (Sofia Coppola), “The Royal Hotel” (Kitty Green), “Showing Up” (Kelly Reichardt), “The Starling Girl” (Laurel Parmet), “The Taste of Things” (Tran Anh Hung), “You Hurt My Feelings” (Nicole Holofcener)

Past Lives was a nice film whose traction has surprised me.

Not me. It's this year's perfectly fine, very safe, minor-key, nothing-wrong-with-it indie ... this year's Aftersun

I like both movies but I found Aftersun much more affecting.

👉 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/fCb0LE8ig2

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

That's

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GAQRfHXWgAAnpDC.png

Richard Brody's top 20:

01. Killers of the Flower Moon
02. Asteroid City
03. Barbie
04. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
05. Showing Up
06. Passages
07. Civic
08. A Thousand and One
09. Earth Mama
10. Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
11. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar/The Swan/The Rat Catcher/Poison
12. Menus-plaisirs - Les Troisgros
13. Petite Solange
14. Ferrari
15. Orlando, My Political Biography
16. Walk Up
17. Origin
18. Priscilla
19. The Color Purple
20. Our Body

The French fucking LOVED The Fabelmans (rightly):

Les Inrockuptibles' top 20

01. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
02. The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
03. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
04. The Animal Kingdom (Thomas Cailley)
05. Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice)
06. Red Island (Robin Campillo)
07. Return to Seoul (Davy Chou)
08. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Phạm Thiên Ân)
09. Tár (Todd Field)
10. Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)
11. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
12. In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo)
13. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)
14. The Rapture (Iris Kaltenbäck)
15. The Killer (David Fincher)
16. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
17. De humani corporis fabrica (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel)
18. Soul Mates (André Téchiné)
19. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie)
20. A Brighter Tomorrow (Nanni Moretti)

I guess everyone does 20 now.

Rolling Stone

01. Past Lives
02. The Zone of Interest
03. Killers of the Flower Moon
04. Poor Things
05. Showing Up
06. The Quiet Girl
07. Anatomy of a Fall
08. The Delinquents
09. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
10. Barbie
11. American Fiction
12. All of Us Strangers
13. Return to Seoul
14. Beau Is Afraid
15. Skinamarink
16. Passages
17. You Hurt My Feelings
18. Bottoms
19. The Boy and the Heron
20. Oppenheimer

Not me. It's this year's perfectly fine, very safe, minor-key, nothing-wrong-with-it indie ... this year's Aftersun

― active spectator of ecocide and dispossession (Eric H.), F

I didn't find Aftersun safe!

"Safe" wasn't meant to be bad, per se. You Hurt My Feelings, which is uber-safe, is one of my favorites of the year

Adam Nayman (of the Showgirls: It Doesn't Such monograph fame):

https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/12/5/23988275/best-movies-2023-top-ten

01. Showing Up
02. The Zone of Interest
03. Killers of the Flower Moon
04. May December
05. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
06. All of Us Strangers
07. The Killer
08. Fallen Leaves
09. The Boy and the Heron
10. Afire and Knock at the Cabin (tie)

But this is really the best part:

Honorable Mention: Oppenheimer
Maybe I’m the problem: While I thought that measured ambivalence was the best response to Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar biopic, I keep getting told I’m wrong by friends and strangers alike, that Oppenheimer is simply too accomplished—too structurally complex and thematically intricate; too ideologically sober and technically dazzling; too beautifully shot and vividly acted—to leave off any half-decent year-end list. (Some of these suggestions have not been very nice.) As somebody who’s always had mixed feelings about Nolan’s grandiose showmanship, I’ll concede that Oppenheimer represents a considerable achievement, and yet I’m not fully convinced that the film stands for much more than its own ingenious engineering—a monument to a filmmaker whose need to be at the top of the heap provides its own kind of psychodrama.

That's about where I am -- except his narrative gets rickety in the last hour. I wonder if losing his brother as a co-writer is a factor.

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).