Slippery Souls: Best Films 2023 So Far

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The Best Films of 2023 … So Far

The Editors June 30, 2023

For too much of film history, the first half of the year has often been forgotten as people make their top ten lists when the calendar actually turns over. It’s a product of studios scheduling high-profile projects in a season that’s often kinder regarding awards, along with that little thing called recency bias. But this might be changing. The last Best Picture winner was a March 2022 premiere, and 2023 has been rich with artistic quality over its first six months. This list was once going to be around 15 titles but easily expanded to 20 and then 25. Honestly, we had to cut some excellent films from it. So consider this just a sample of what the writers of RogerEbert.com have loved so far this year, with new capsule reviews, links to the originals, and information on where to watch them. Catch up with these 25 movies. And don’t forget them in six months.

“Air”

We all know how this story of rich people getting richer ends: Michael Jordan’s deal with Nike is almost as legendary as his career with the Bulls. Somehow, director and uncredited co-screenwriter Ben Affleck keeps it surprising with superb structure, impeccable casting, and performances. (Though Jordan does get some credit as his one request was that Viola Davis play his mother, Deloris, and of course, Davis is dazzling as always.) It’s also important to point out that 2023 is the year of movies about the art of the deal, with consumer product origin stories featuring Blackberry smartphones, Beanie Babies, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Tetris, and more. On the surface, “Air” is about sneakers named for a basketball player. But it has a subtle, deeper origin story, especially meaningful during a writer’s strike with the possibility of an actors’ strike. “Air” is the first film from a new company formed by Affleck and Matt Damon that promises to give a percentage to the people who work on films as Nike did for Jordan, giving cinematographers, designers, and sound technicians a share in the profits of the work they help to create. The medium is the message. (Nell Minow)

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“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

Not only is Kelly Fremon Craig’s marvelous screen adaptation of iconic author Judy Blume’s 1970 masterpiece my favorite film of the year thus far, but it's also the first movie I’ve seen five times during its initial theatrical run. This resulted in me wanting to share the picture with as many friends and family members as possible, including my grandma—a lifelong movie buff—who told me as tears streamed down her face that this is the sort of film that can make the world a better place. For over half a century, Blume has busted stigmas regarding the female experience that the current governor of her home state appears hell-bent on reinforcing, and writer/director Craig has masterfully captured the timeless humanity of her work in every frame. The ensemble contains brilliant turns from Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, and a revelatory Elle Graham, though it is Abby Ryder Fortson’s extraordinary portrayal of the titular heroine’s adolescent bewilderment and spiritual yearning that makes this film a cinematic gift for the ages. Indeed, Abby told me during our interview that the conversations sparked by this movie are ones “we need to have in order to let people know, if nothing else, that they’re not alone.” (Matt Fagerholm)

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“Asteroid City”

In a time when people think they know Wes Anderson enough to develop AI systems that try to replicate his work, his “Asteroid City” proves not only that his voice and style can't be duplicated or recycled but that it keeps evolving. In this multilayered ensemble piece about an in-universe televised production of a play about an alien sighting at an astronomy convention in a deserted town during the ‘50s, Anderson reflects on life as an artist. “Asteroid City” is as inviting and quirky as most of Anderson's films, but the humor is consistently hilarious, swaying between upbeat and dark. The ensemble cast all pour incredible soulfulness into their immersive performances; Jason Schwartzman, Tom Hanks, Jefferey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and Jake Ryan (who I can only imagine Anderson went giddy over that he found a miniature Schwartzman) are standouts. But the film's boldest quality lies in Anderson's existential exploration of life, asking how artists can continue to make art with purpose when processing a significant tragedy. It’s as if the pandemic had Anderson wrestling with an existential crisis, and writing this script was his only outlet. “Asteroid City” is as humanely complex and sincere as his best work. (Rendy Jones)

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“The Eight Mountains”

The other day, while filling my car with gas, I was enjoying standing there in the cool misty morning, enjoying the quiet and peace. Suddenly the screen on the gas pump blazed into life with jingles and manic voices, all commercials. I was a captive audience. You can't "opt-out" of these. I resented this. I can't even have a minute alone to myself without being advertised to! This is all part of a larger cultural refusal to allow space for contemplation and stillness. Sometimes quiet and even emptiness leave room for depth of feeling and thought. Current movies sometimes act like that gas pump, afraid to allow the audience a moment to think.

What does this have to do with "The Eight Mountains"? The film's slow rhythm, its quietness, and gentleness, and its resistance to high-pitch emotions or even conflict took an attitude adjustment at first, even for me, who watches all kinds of movies of every pace imaginable. The film forces you to slow down. I was captured by the visuals, the cinematography, the music, and the way it told the story of a 40-year friendship between two very different men (Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi). Co-directed by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, based on a best-selling novel, "The Eight Mountains" has the patience to allow for things in the audience, giving us space and time to be with our own thoughts. This "allowing" space is all too rare. I see a lot of films, and some are forgettable, others are terrible. Some are flawed but likable, and some are very good. It's rare that a film expands in your consciousness after you've seen it, sticking with you, images floating by, a part of you already. "The Eight Mountains" is one of those films. (Sheila O’Malley)

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“Full Time”

Laure Calamy delivers a powerhouse performance in “Full Time,” a sharp observational drama set in and around Paris. Her force of presence in the role of Julie Roy, a stressed single mother of two who travels each day from the city to the suburbs, is essential to writer/director Éric Gravel’s breathless, furiously focused strain of social realism; both actor and filmmaker achieve an astonishing intimacy and credibility in their depiction of not only the quotidian rhythms of Julie’s domestic and working-class life but the social, psychological, and moral tensions that its economics impose. Entirely reliant upon public transportation to get to the five-star hotel where she works as the head chambermaid, and also to an interview for a job at a marketing firm that would better suit her skill set, Julie faces a hectic week even before a transit strike shuts down the city’s trains and buses, making her day-to-day existence even more fraught with obstacles. The film’s supply-chain drama informs Julie’s increasingly frantic movements—her all-consuming initiative and inner life governed by a sense of pressurized individualism—while remaining at its periphery; in Gravel’s cutting social analysis, her political and personal considerations of labor are suppressed by its constancy.

(Isaac Feldberg)

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“Godland”

In "Godland," writer/director Hlynur Pálmason uses the history of Iceland's colonial past to craft a transfixing meditation on life's many oppositions. At its center is the relationship between Danish priest Lucas, on a mission to build a Lutheran church in a rural southeast settlement, and his soulful Icelandic guide Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), who the colonizers continually belittle. As they make their journey together, cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff captures the beauty–and the harshness–of this unspoiled land, capturing its raging ocean waves, peaceful waterfalls, and glowing lava in richly textured 35mm shot in Academy ratio. This framing choice adds both intimacy and distance to the film as if it were composed of thousands of vacation slides. This same sensation is echoed in the way Pálmason films his actors, often centering their bodies, positioning their faces to look squarely at the camera, as if they too were about to be photographed by Lucas. Through these two characters, Pálmason contemplates the complex tension between Denmark and Iceland, the Church and the natural world, life and death. The title, “Godland,” is presented at the beginning and end of the film in Danish and Icelandic, probing the audience to contemplate these ever-present dualities of life in a colonized state. (Marya E. Gates)

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“How to Blow Up a Pipeline”

Daniel Goldhaber’s thriller is relentless because it has to be. It conveys the urgency of its creator that he felt on reading the non-fiction book of the same name by Andreas Malm. Working with writers Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol, Goldhaber took the study of extreme action to stem environmental trauma and fictionalized it into a riveting story of eight people drawn together by their extreme desire for change. Working back and forth to unpack a complex story of young people with different motives but similar goals, Goldhaber has made a film that simultaneously works as a character study, cultural commentary, and intense thriller. It’s not a movie that preaches; it pulses and hums with the understanding that we are long past the time when talking will save the future. It’s reductive to label this film as a call to violent action. Goldhaber isn’t interested in that kind of exact moral supposition. He merely understands that people need to do something more than talk about change that never comes. We don’t need to literally blow up anything to understand that lack of some kind of action will doom us. And we need to start asking ourselves what this kind of dread is doing to young people in this country, who are so increasingly frustrated by the world around them that something feels like it might explode inside them. (Brian Tallerico)

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“Infinity Pool”

“Infinity Pool” wouldn't really work as a black comedy or a horror movie if its creators weren't so committed to their depraved vision of bougie privilege run amok. This sort of eat-the-rich satire requires a full head of teeth and an appetite to match, and writer/director Brandon Cronenberg thankfully brought both. Set at a tacky vacation resort in the imaginary third-world country of Li Tolqa, “Infinity Pool” seems more like a natural extension of the to-the-molars style that Cronenberg previously established in both the hypno-hypochondriac psychodrama “Antiviral” and then the body-mod bloodbath “Possessor.” In “Infinity Pool,” “The Northman” star Alexander Skarsgard delivers another all-in turn as James Foster, a violently hungover and creatively blocked writer who stumbles into the wrong crowd, led by Mia Goth's femme fatale out-of-towner Gabi Bauer, and then gets stuck with them after he commits manslaughter, and then pays top dollar to clone himself to avoid the death penalty. The numbing bender that ensues wouldn't be as compelling if Cronenberg—and cinematographer Karim Hussain, and production designer Zosia Mackenzie, and special makeup artist Dan Martin—weren't so maniacally focused on representing James's physical and spiritual bottoming out. Many try, but few succeed at being this fanatically vicious. (Simon Abrams)

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“John Wick: Chapter 4”

In almost any other circumstance, beginning a film with a direct visual homage to one of the most famous moments of “Lawrence of Arabia” might come across as wildly cheeky at best or an act of insane hubris at worst. “John Wick: Chapter 4,” however, proves itself more than capable of covering that particular check. In this continuation of this saga about the enormously resourceful hitman on the run (Keanu Reeves, whose laid-back soulfulness continues to mesh beautifully with the insane violence he deals out), director Chad Stahelski takes us around the world, brings in an impressive supporting cast of series regulars (including Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, and the late Lance Reddick) and newcomers (such as the legendary Donnie Yen in a scene-stealing turn) and offers one knockout set piece after another over two solid hours. That is all prelude for its extended Paris-set finale, the most astonishing burst of sustained action to hit the screen since “Mad Max: Fury Road”—an orgy of pure cinema that pays homage to the likes of De Palma and Keaton and manages to continually top itself. And it does so in such a seemingly effortless manner that when it's all over, you may resent most other new action films—even the good ones—for a long time to come for their comparative lack of ambition and execution. (Peter Sobczynski)

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“Judy Blume Forever”

At first glance, “Judy Blume Forever” is your typical bio-doc about the life of a person whose name you might recognize from your old summer reading list. But this documentary blossoms into something poignant for today as well as a celebration of its subject, beloved author Judy Blume. The film is a nostalgic trip back to those awkward tween years normalizing the questions kids may have about God and periods, it’s a time capsule of when women had to struggle to pursue their own careers separate from their husbands, and it’s a call to fight book censorship, which Blume has done so for decades. With the recent release of the movie adaptation of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Davina Pardo & Leah Wolchok’s colorfully-illustrated documentary is an ideal companion piece, rich in heart, a revealing story time with the author on her sources of inspiration. Readers and fans of all ages will be delighted to learn Blume is a kid-at-heart, now eager to share personal memories and rally against the increased calls to prohibit kids from reading what they want. (Monica Castillo)

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“Knock at the Cabin”

Lots of people understandably take issue with M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, a moody, claustrophobic apocalypse thriller liberally adapted, let’s say, from Paul G. Tremblay’s novel. After all, it’s a film that posits, at least on its surface, that our salvation from a very Christian-looking apocalypse comes from the ritual killing of a queer person. But contrary to that (quite surface, in my estimation) reading, “Knock at the Cabin” feels like a thought experiment testing the purity and strength of queer love and resilience—fighting to stay ourselves in a world that hates us and what we’ll do to save the little corners of happiness we find. If that read doesn’t move you, consider it one of Shyamalan’s leanest and most stylish genre exercises to date. Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography turns a humble woodland cabin into a tesseract of skewed perspectives, and Dave Bautista and Ben Aldridge give impressive performances that constantly teeter between sensitivity and savagery. (Clint Worthington)

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“Master Gardener”

With his motif of men journaling, journaling, journaling, Paul Schrader has long chased a movie adapted from a book that didn’t exist, a book whose careworn spine they could feel in their hands, annotated, pages bent to make communing with its best passages all the easier. I would argue he’s succeeded twice; once in his script for “Taxi Driver,” his perverse revision of Catcher in the Rye, and now with “Master Gardener,” his tale of a white supremacist whose external humanity and fascist tattoos have to vie for conclusive proof of his soul’s true direction. Joel Edgerton plays Narvel Roth, a perfect literary name and fittingly a construct, a man that a neo-Nazi invented to escape his past. He has shaved himself to a fine point, a man who exists to say “yes” when people ask him for anything and ensure that acres of flowers don’t die on his watch. Schrader has found a vessel for his lifelong spiritual agony that’s genuinely on the precipice of something risky and dangerous. (Scout Tafoya)

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“Past Lives”

Woven from delicate whispers of truth, Celine Song’s debut feature summons an incandescent yearning for the paths untraveled, for the versions of ourselves lost to the passage of time in order to give birth to who we were meant to become. Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the central childhood sweethearts turned strangers over many decades and across thousands of miles, are not involved in a love triangle of dueling suitors. Instead, they reunite to mourn a precious shared past that didn’t bloom into a future together. But whether the hand of destiny or the randomness of circumstance is to blame for their multiple separations, the distant memory of who they once were to each other remains alive within them. For Nora, however, this bond exists not as romantic interest but as an anchor that holds together all the moving parts of her identity. The miracle of Song’s debut and the swoon-worthy performances within it is that they give a cinematic body to sentiments so layered and ambivalent they could seem nearly impossible to articulate on screen with such emotional precision. Thankfully for our hearts, the film’s tear-inducing conclusion brims with empathy for every character’s resolution. (Carlos Aguilar)

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“Polite Society”

“Polite Society” begins and ends with a spin kick. The feature debut from “We Are Lady Parts” creator Nida Manzoor explodes with energy, color, and movement, telling the story of a martial arts-obsessed British-Pakistani teenager named Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) who shifts into action-hero mode after her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) gets engaged to a wealthy doctor who’s too perfect to be real. The obvious touchstone here is Edgar Wright and “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World,” with whom Manzoor shares a knack for heightening familiar situations with bold, stylized filmmaking. But Manzoor’s sensibility leans more feminist and punk—dig that X-Ray Spex song over the end credits—giving her take on the coming-of-age action comedy an infectious sense of rebellion and fun. (Katie Rife)

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“Rye Lane”

Raine Allen-Miller's incredibly enjoyable feature debut proves the power of likable leads. It's such a simple formula, and Hollywood keeps failing to get it right. Two people that viewers not only want to spend time with but want to see end the film happy. It's that simple. And from nearly the first frames of this film, we find ourselves rooting for the happiness of Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah). As they walk through the vibrant neighborhood around Rye Lane Market, their backstories become clear, mostly how they still suffer from broken hearts. They make each other stronger. Yas helps Dom confront his toxic ex-girlfriend; Dom helps Yas do the same. It's an incredibly lean film in terms of plot, but we feel the growth in these characters that needed someone to help them get over the latest speedbump in their young lives. Jonsson and Oparah are cha

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Friday, June 30, 2023

Best Films 2023 So Far

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