Best of...

Wanted to pull together the little movie reviews I do on Facebook into one post, a "best-of" from last year.  By the way, these little things are like crosswords for me.  I love trying to compress all I feel about each movie into a tiny paragraph/package.  It's like making a poem.  Every word has to count, every feeling justified.  

So here are movies from 2023 I truly loved haiku-ing about: 

MAY/DECEMBER:  One of the the best movies of 2023 from what I can tell.  MAY DECEMBER is slippery and arch and gentle and crazy and cinematic and trivial and just incredible.  Todd Haynes has worked for 30 years to get this elegant and this primal.  He planted the seed with SAFE back in 1995 with the divine and even diviner now Julianne Moore:  satire pulsing with tenderness, mean-spirited glazed irony with a sad exhausted loving soul at the center.  This one takes its cue from tabloid lives but then uses all of it to inspire a sort of crazy awe.  Natalie Portman has never been better:  pure cynical tigress jilted by her own ambition.  And Charles Melton as the object of all terrible affection is lost in what the world and the people in it do to him.  This movie is art.  Watching it again tonight. 

THE HOLDOVERS:  Saw this one (THE HOLDOVERS) last night and melted.  It's old-fashioned in a succinct and bighearted way that feels both antiquated and brand new, old-school and innovative.  Alexander Payne creates a world, and the actors populating it crush your soul with their intense sadsack ingenuity.  Paul Giamatti kills.  He is so deft at being hurt and left behind you feel your own memories folded into every moment he's in.  He deserves a crown.  And the newby Dominic Sessa as the troubled youth takes it on with vibrant fresh energy but finds an old soul within himself.  But it's Da'Vine Joy Randolph as a mom who has lost her son to Vietnam that fuels the movie's purpose and anchors its hurt and joy.  Her face reveals such sorrow and such survival I went into a weird melancholy trance just seeing her eyes.  This is one of those movies you can't really understand.  You just feel.  Snowy, earnest, slapsticky, soulful, it is a universe of kindness and struggle and reality and loss.  Probably Alexander's masterpiece.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST:  Glossy but focused on the banal, it has a moral code that is dazzlingly drab and somehow grimly openhearted. It concerns a family of Nazis who live directly nextdoor to Auchwitz, the death camp the father oversees. The movie moves with a precise dread. And everyone in it has that same dreadful precision.  Pettiness rules.  You feel complicit in all of it because of how deliberately and masterfully the movie shows you that everyday routine in the shadow of a Holocaust. Sandra Hüller as the frowzy matriarch so proud of her ashen-flowered garden and estate, IS the movie.  Her stupidity and meanness and frumpy control infiltrate your brain; all that makes her happy and proud make you second-guess your own petty little ways.  Jonathan Glazer, the writer-director, is working inside a feverdream composed of satire and outrage and pure metallic empathy.  The strangeness here isn't about how alien all of this is; it's about how intimate and sadly relatable this mundane, horrific spectacle is.

POOR THINGS:  Got to see POOR THINGS yesterday at the movies.  Stunned and delighted still. It's both immense and intricate, floral and sadistic, beautifully maximalist and yet somehow filled with simplicity and grace inside all the glorious steam punk flourishes and setpieces.  It is a masterpiece on all levels:  music, directing, screenplay, sets, costumes, makeup, acting...  Emma Stone's Bella comes out of the gate completely iconic, delivered with such precision and effortlessness you fall in love with her from the first infantile stumble, the first thrown plate.  Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo provide stellar support; in fact, the entire cast of retrobates and strangers and dandies are an expert operatic engine of shiny unhappy people dancing and fornicating through. But it's the director Yorgos Lanthimos' phosphorescent, delirious universe we swim and sink inside of, holding onto Bella for dear life.  This one really is everything.  Truly a piece of cinema, not just a movie.  Sounds too good to be true and it actually is.

NYAD:  NYAD on Netflix.  True story treatment that gets to it all economically and ferociously, and Annette Benning as the title character trying to swim Cuba to Key West is the reason to love this one, plus Jody Foster as her sidekick/coach.  Feels like DON QUIXOTE sometimes, with Annette all wide-eyed and full of herself, swimming toward windmills, and Jody her Sancho Panza suffering through.  But the movie pushes itself into going past Quixotic parallels into honoring a beautiful friendship that feels just as deep as the ocean they are contending with. Gorgeous hallucinatory footage as well.  You feel connected to a crazy dream without feeling too judgmental.  You are kind of there with them pushing and pulling through.

FAIR PLAY:  FAIR PLAY on Netflix.  Damn.  It's just plain sleek.  A style that cuts through substance.  Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich play a couple of Gen Y yuppies who work at an NYC hedge fund and when she gets a promotion he loses his shit.  The movie is impeccably shot, erotic-silvery-beige and headstrong, with a strangled synthpop soundtrack and a smoky cynical soul.  Like a sort of reinvented inverted DISCLOSURE, with a delicate but concrete spine.  This movie knows what it wants from the getgo.  Pure cinematic propulsion and also a meditation on what power is and does and ruins.

MAESTRO:  Watched MAESTRO on Netflix last night.  Bradley Cooper stars and writes and directs, and he's truly on it.  A bio pic of Leonard Bernstein, Cooper transforms into the composer with such grace and energy you can overlook the prosthetic nose pretty easily.  But it's Carey Mulligan as Felicia, his wife, that pushes the movie into tragic, lived-in realness.  Long-suffering but incredibly and stubbornly dedicated to her own peace of mind, she's the center of an ecstatic universe of love and betrayal and renewal.

OPPENHEIMER:  Saw OPPENHEIMER last night and it was just exactly what I wanted it to be:  classy, overwrought, overthought, pure cinema.  Also surprisingly easy to sit through.  There's a silvery, lovely velocity built into the gorgeous soundtrack and Cillian Murphy's spooky superintelligent eyes, so the story itself about bureaucratic egos and the apocalypse just works its way out of the circumstances and scenery and atmosphere.  A major bump in the road, in a very good way, is Emily Blunt's performance as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty.  It's a thankless role, but she somehow finds terrible grace and grit in being cast aside and yet still finding a way to stay in the game.

BARBIE:  Just saw this on Max and it was bliss.  Nothing else to say:  perfection.

ANATOMY OF A FALL:  Sandra Hüller in ANATOMY OF A FALL has a mean, terrible, beautiful authority that works its way into you as you sit through the intricacies of a procedural about a marriage falling apart and a death and how both seem to tip each other over.  The movie itself is like a chilly drunken episode of LAW AND ORDER with a sort of twisted elegance you feel trapped inside of.  It's Hüller's swagger and distinction that pulls you out of the courtroom-drama trance though.  She knows she's guilty and she knows she's innocent and that's the movie's dreamy/nightmarish soul.  Plus that dog.  Damn.  Never has a movie been graced with such a masterfully articulate/inarticulate spirit.  That dog's eyes tell you everything.  A good old-fashioned movie with an austere and epic strangeness within it that somehow comforts you without any comfort.

AMERICAN FICTION:  This one cuts through issues and emotions around family and ego and race and class effortlessly just by being what it wants to be: sweetly satirical, cantankerously loving, politically incorrect and correct simultaneously. It has the courage to not back away from its own fears and prejudices, confronting them with love and bitterness in equal measure. Cord Jefferson writes and directs in an Alexander-Payne mode, picking at sociopolitical scabs but then bandaging them with wit and recognition. Jeffrey Wright is perfectly uptight and befuddled as a college-professor/writer sick of highend literary stereotypes. Kind of like Dustin Hoffman in TOOTSIE, he fakes his way into popularity by writing a "lyrical authentic" novel about thug life, but then can't rid himself of the results. His journey doesn't yield any spectacular epiphanies, just a sense that no matter where you go and what you do there you are. Which is truly the epiphany maybe all of us need to confront.

PAST LIVES:  Watched PAST LIVES on Hulu last night.  The sad ache of it is still there.  Filmed like a lyrical precise home movie, it traces lost love through 20 or so years of connection and loss and connection. It doesn't go for the gusto; it relaxes into a slow sweet burn, and by the end when the 2 lovers break apart, it feels so familiar and forlorn and inevitable it crystallizes your own sense of romance and wayward longing.  Kind of a classic.  Celine Strong writes and directs with pure casual authority.  Scenes meander purposefully somehow; you really feel inside this dream.  Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as the star-crossed couple are genuinely inside that dream too, and the last half hour of the movie is pure acting genius.  A lovely way to spend an evening.

ALL OF US STRANGERS:  An immaculate, surreal explanation of sadness, a ghost story that doesn't try to redeem itself, and by the end I was wrecked in the most beautiful way.  It's on Hulu.  About parents dying in a car crash and loneliness and hurt, all of that set to the rococo throb of earnest techno music, with people so small and real they enter your soul effortlessly, like embarrassed angels needing to hide.  All the actors, Andrew Scott, Claire Foy, Jamie Bell, and Paul Mescal, locate a desperate quiet center in every scene, without forgetting what it means to love and be alive, a ferocity frozen by time and regret and not knowing any better.  Andrew Haigh, who writes and directs, has both an eye and an ear for lush interregnums, for forgetfulness leading into blue neon memories of 1987 London and beyond.  He's an astronaut with a record player and a word processor and his genius is not knowing when to quit.

(One side note:  we've now seen all of the Oscar-nominated Best Picture titles.  What a great year for movies...)