The Ten Movies I Saw In Theaters In 2023

Conductors! Bombs! Boys and their Herons!

Hello! Here’s my last post of the year, covering the ten movies that I saw in theaters in 2023. It got a little long and has some big images in it (cause we’re talking about movies), so you should open this one either in your browser or the Substack app. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in 2024!

Tár

Where: Angelika Village East

With: Two strangers who got the classical music jokes, several more that didn’t.

After leaving dinner with Ivan Belcic and his wife at John’s of 12th Street in early January, I passed the Angelika Village East and saw that they were still playing Decision To Leave, the latest by Park Chan Wook, and Tár, a movie I knew nothing about other than that it was about classical music and had a lot of people on the internet extremely riled up. I posted a poll on my Instagram asking which I should see, and Tár won by a healthy margin. Apologies to all those who voted for Decision To Leave, I do plan on seeing that movie eventually, but I’m glad that Tár won. I’ve been increasingly disinterested in modern movies over the last few years but when I stumbled back out in the street, my head still reeling from what I had just seen, I knew only one thing for certain: Good movies were back, baby.

Tár is a masterpiece. It is solely responsible for this letter arriving as late in the month as it has. I find the idea of writing anything about it so daunting that I’ve found any excuse I can to be some other kind of productive. I fear that if I start trying to untangle all of the complicated thoughts and feelings that this movie provoked in me that I will never stop. Anything less than a full accounting will feel like I’m doing the film, myself, and you a disservice. I could spend a couple hundred words just on the significance of the opening credits. A full scale review of Tár would make my Barbenheimer essay from earlier this year look like a Christgau blurb.¹ However, because this is the last review I’m writing for this letter I know that this post is already too long to be read in an email, so disservice is the best I can offer.

What a joy to see a movie made by someone who knows what they’re talking about, about a character who knows what they’re doing. Todd Field must either be a classical music superfan or an expert researcher. Tár is frighteningly specific in how it captures not just the music, but the culture, corporate structure and setting² surrounding the music. Field’s script drops the right names of modern composers and picks the right targets for its in-world ire (Lydia Tár hating on Michael Tilson Thomas only seconds after waking up is a pitch-perfect parody of classical music cattiness). This is not a documentary, however. Field presents a vision of Classical Gothic, elegant concert halls and austere practice studios as tombs haunted by literal ghosts and metaphorical vampires. Conducting as necromancy, where the blood of young musicians serves to resurrect the work of dead men. Field goes so far as to imply that Tár’s crimes are part of a legacy of evil within the higher ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic dating back to at least Herbert von Karajan.

This is why handwringing about whether Tár was hustling backwards by telling a story about an abuser who happens to be a gay woman never sat right with me. First, because I can assure that there are absolutely women in the music industry capable of behaving with just as much viciousness as men and who may cloak themselves in the veneer of girl-boss progressivism while doing so. Second, because telling this story from a woman’s perspective defamiliarizes the beats of the now well worn cancellation arc such that we don’t view it as a matter of gender essentialism but as a story about power. What someone will do to get that power, who they will hurt, and what lies they will tell themselves about themselves in the process.

But all hope is not lost for the next generation. The kids, the gamers, the ones who study their favorite pieces on YouTube and know a thing or two about costume-making and video editing, will be the ones to shatter these structures and let the pure feeling of the music free once more. The next ground our feet touch will be that of a new world.

The Trial

Where: Film Forum

With: My parents

Around the same time that I saw Tár I was reading a copy of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial. Being an old copy, the book was rapidly in the process of unfinishing itself further. In fact, on the morning of the day that I saw Tár I awoke to find the pages that I’d read so far hanging off the spine of the book. This struck me as pretty funny, if inconvenient. This practical joke of fate aside, I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to laugh at Kafka’s story of a self-important banker trapped in the increasingly bizarre clutches of legal bureaucracy. Humor does not always translate across barriers of language and time. Luckily I had ol’ Orson Welles to assure me that yes, this shit is funny as hell.

Though drenched in shadows and framed by overbearing Soviet architecture, The Trial is at its heart a comedy. That heart beats to the tempo of Anthony Perkins flailing with gangly indignation³ as he’s swallowed up by a system that doesn’t pretend to be fair or even make legible sense to those outside of it. This system being, if we want to get all Deleuze-via-Fisher with it, recognizable as a metaphor for modern society as a whole makes The Trial feel like a thoroughly contemporary movie, a sensation only heightened by Welles’ style. The Trial is the missing link between the German Expressionism that preceded it and the surreal paranoia of say, Brazil or The Double, all the way to the socially conscious slapstick of Sorry To Bother You. A graduate level dorm poster classic.

Asteroid City

Where: Angelika Film Center

With: A packed house

I was out on Wes Anderson. I get the sense that a lot of people were, and maybe still are. The guy had been reduced in my mind to something like a twee AC/DC (AC/TweeC?), forever pumping out variations on the same small set of themes. This impression ignores how much Anderson’s style has changed over the years, and also how much “Thunderstruck” rules, but it has been tough to shake off. Time passed. I sat out two new Anderson movie cycles. Slowly, my heart softened. Eventually it softened enough that, upon learning that Asteroid City would be in select theaters near me soon, I said to myself “yeah, I’ll go see that”. All I knew was that the movie took place in the American Southwest during the atomic mid-century and had an easy-on-the-eyes color palette. I love looking at the desert on a movie screen and have an abiding interest in the early days of nuclear technology (more on that soon enough), so I figured that was enough to give Anderson another shot.

I’m glad that I did, because the depths to which Asteroid City is my shit were impossible for me to fathom from the surface. On one level it is Anderson by the numbers, a story about precious children and their anhedonic father figures shot in fussily maintained blocking. But this is simply one level among several. Asteroid City repeats the story-within-a-story framework of Grand Budapest Hotel but takes it a step further, leaving the doors open at the edges of each reality so that characters stumble or storm past the fourth wall as they please. All of this PoMo bluster, beyond giving Anderson’s much commented upon artificiality an “in universe” justification, ultimately lends Asteroid City a surprising vulnerability. Everything is connected, but nothing works. Anderson can’t quite figure out how to square his feelings about the era of his childhood and the present moment (it is 100% a pandemic movie, at least in affect if not in form) and he knows it, instead choosing to throw up his hands with the script still in them. A shrug of defeat on unwinable terrain. Also Tilda Swinton’s delivery of “why not Dr. Hickenlooper??” made me lol real hard.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Where: The Alpine

With: Jack & Alex (the boys)

Last year I put forth the theory that there is only one true blockbuster franchise in American cinema, and that franchise is Tom Cruise Doing Crazy Shit. The latest entry, the seventh in the sub-series Mission: Impossible and the first in the sub-sub-series Dead Reckoning, finds our diminutive cult leader once again face-to-face with the inhuman threat of technology. Picking up where his battle against automation in Top Gun: Maverick left off, Cruise spends M:I-DR1 chasing an evil A.I. across the globe. The metaphors are as thin as the thrills are loud. The dialogue is either gravely emphasized instructions⁴ or vague pontification on the potential of technology to change the world, which means that the story is both very easy to follow and makes little practical sense. Who cares? Tom Cruise is at the wheel of a tiny electric car and we are all along for the ride.

I saw this on a rainy summer weekend with Lamniformes producer Jack Greenleaf and one-time Lamniformes album artist Alex Van Dorp at The Alpine in Bay Ridge. We got dinner at a Szechwan place nearby first, and two out of the three of us got soaked on our way. Having put about as much water into my body at dinner as the weather had put onto it during my commute, I lost track of Jack & Alex on our way into the theater and missed what little was left of the trailers. Instead I settled for a seat in the back rows where I’m pretty sure some teens were getting busy. The Alpine is not the place to go if you care about being immersed in a movie. The thrills are loud, but they are also cheap.

BARBENHEIMER

Oppenheimer

Where: AMC Kips Bay

With: Ashna, Michael, & Peter

Barbie

Where: AMC Kips Bay

With: Ashna, Michael, & Peter

Oppenheimer

Where: The Music Box in Chicago

With: *~My Girlfriend~*

Bro, if you think I have a single thing more to say about either of these movies… you’d be correct! But instead of exhausting these subjects in one year I’ll let my Barbenheimer review from September stand in for now while the rest of my thoughts percolate.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Where: Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park

With: Frank “Friend of Music” Meadows

I saw Killers of the Flower Moon on opening weekend, something I did not expect that I’d do despite my interest in the film. I made this last minute call on the invitation of Frank “Friend of Music” Meadows, who did not know about the movie’s 3 and a half hour run time until we were leaving the theater. Oops. I figured that Frank’s brain had been poisoned as mine by inane discourse about men making movies that are too long, but as always he was refreshingly unaware and unconcerned with such nonsense. Of course I knew that Killers of the Flower Moon was long as hell. That’s part of why I wanted to see it!

Back in December of 2010 while waiting for our flights back to New York City at O’hare airport in Chicago, I had a conversation with my friend Kevin Gannon about Stanely Kubrick. I’d just seen A Clockwork Orange for the first time, and I told Kevin that I, in all of my 20 y/o wisdom, thought the movie was a little too long. “Man, there’s only so much Kubrick” Kevin told me “I’ll take as much as I can get”. This remark has stuck with me for 13 years and its likely to stick deeper into me as time goes on. What I’ve taken from this remark is that you simply must let the old greats cook, because you do not know how much longer they are going to be in the kitchen.

Scorsese, American cinema’s Italian grandpa, served up a meal too large and too filling for any one family to eat in a single sitting. All of his best movies have a way of pushing past the places where other stories would call it a day, often lingering on the depravity, suffering, or dull repetition of his characters’ lives as a way of of provoking his audience to ask “just how long can this possibly go on?”. A lot longer than you think. Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie about how evil, as often as it is a bullet placed hatefully in the back of a skull, is also a slow drip of morphine. Empires may be blueprinted in the velveted backrooms of mansions, but they are laid brick by brick by the dumbest guy you’ve ever met and caulked with blood. It is a movie about helplessness, endured and overcome only to be met with indifference or worse, commodification. Here is America’s original sin and its guilty repression, brought to you by Lucky Strike. The movie is two hundred and six minutes long, and all of them are worth watching.

Napoleon

Where: An AMC in Kalamazoo, Michigan

With: *~My Girlfriend~*

We saw Napoleon on the day after Thanksgiving in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Neither of us felt too strongly about the subject matter going in, and neither of us knew anything about the cast beyond Joaquin Phoenix. Mostly we needed a reason to get out of the house and kill some hours on a sleepy long weekend. Plus, anytime I’m outside of New York City seeing a movie in theaters counts as a bargain. Even though the theater left one of the overhead lights on during the whole movie and seemed to have the brightness on the projector turned down 20% percent I still feel like I came out ahead!

We didn’t feel too strongly about the movie going out either. But by the time we were grabbing a bite at Bell’s Brewery⁵ the two of us were already jokingly repeating the dialogue at each other. Come Monday, we had so consistently brought up the movie “as a bit” that I could no longer tell if I didn’t already love the movie. I’ll put it this way: I’m open to the idea of loving this movie even if I currently don’t. The battles are stunning (the lone rider fleeing cannonballs at Austerlitz, whew), the outfits are great, and I like the idea of depicting Napoleon as a dimwitted momma’s boy driven by sexual anxiety about half as much as I like looking at Vanessa Kirby, which is to say a whole lot. However, Napoleon cuts itself too short (ha ha) to say anything substantial, instead zipping through history at a Spark Notes pace. I’m happy to try again once destiny brings me Ridley Scott’s extended cut.

Maestro

Where: Angelika Film Center

With: Jack, Alex, Alexandra, Phoebe, and Henry (the gang)

One night this summer while I was roaming across YouTube, somewhere between doing last minute research for my Barbenheimer piece and sweating out its last lingering trains of thought like a fever, I stumbled across a video of Leonard Bernstein rehearsing with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for a recording of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. Only three minutes in my jaw went slack. There was Lydia Tár at the podium. Not literally of course, but each movement and gesture that Bernstein made while working over the start of Mahler’s fifth was one that I had seen in theaters only eight months prior from Cate Blanchett as Tár working over the same material. The two performances swiftly took on their own character, but the brief alignment made a strong impression. I felt like I’d unlocked something hidden in the background of Tár. Couldn’t you imagine Tár mimicking Bernstein’s every move the same way she fine-tuned her accent along with the radio? Wasn’t Tár’s comical bevy of accolades a cartoonish recreation of Bernstein’s own imposing collection? In sum, I had seen a movie about a narcissist painstakingly recreating Bernstein’s image for the most prestigious of clout only to be undone by their own hubris.

Let me slow down before I imply anything too severe about a movie that I had a pleasant time watching. I am grateful to have had two serious, adult dramas set in the world of classical music in theaters in the same calendar year. That’s cool. I just happened to like one of them much more than the other. Arriving as it did at the end of the year, Maestro couldn’t help but feel like a smoothie of the year’s biggest themes. A conductor character study, a mid-century period piece that leaps from black & white to color, about a self-involved man with a wife suffering for her proximity to his supposed greatness. Sadly all the fiber got lost in the blender. Despite a few showy gestures in the first half, Cooper’s camera is too devoted to the film’s stars, stopping outright to let Cooper and Mulligan deliver their many monologues with no visual interruption, to give us any other way into the story. Does it count as idol worship when you put yourself on the pedestal?

The Boy And The Heron

Where: AMC 19th St East 6

With: Jack, Ashna, and Michael

One last spur of the moment decision on a rainy December weekend. Here again, I must bow to the principle of letting the old guys cook. If Maestro was the anti-climactic culmination of the year’s themes, The Boy And The Heron is an epilogue that ends on a question mark. As dreamlike and stylistically loose as any Miyazaki film that I’ve seen. The work of a man who no longer feels the need to explain anything about himself and instead wastes no time in making you feel something. A creative origin story, a career summary, and a timely warning to the next generation delivered in the beaks of hundreds and hundreds of birds. I don’t want to commit to any strong critical positions on this one, especially since we saw it in English. All due respect to Robert “Team Aerith” Pattinson for really leaning into being a weird little dude, but I’ve been rewatching a few Miyazaki’s that I’d only seen before in English and I am certain that the Japanese version of this one will be better. Still, it is safe to say that if this is Miyazaki’s last film he ended on a high note.

And so did 2023! Thanks for reading everyone, see you in the new year.

1. I will absolutely get to work on a massive Tár review, if and ONLY IF five people comment on this post, in my inbox, or in real life saying that they would read it.

2. My friend Peter pointed out that the film lacks the same attention to detail when it comes to depicting the Philippines in its final act. To me this is consistent with the Eurocentric elitist point of view that the film is both operating from and skewering, but this criticism is a point well taken.

3. One can’t help but wonder whether Andrew Garfield has seen this film and, if he has, how much time he might serve for swagger-jacking this Perkins performance for his whole career.

4. I had fun after the theater giving myself reminders in the same cadence as Ving Rhames in this movie. “IAN… the trash goes OUT on Wednesday. That means you have to take the trash bag OUT of the container INSIDE of your house and put it into the bin OUTSIDE of your house. You don’t have much time, the garbage truck will be here in FOUR HOURS.”

5. “Are you here for All Stouts Day??” we were enthusiastically asked upon entry, a question that has no rational answer.