PAST LIVES by Celine Song | Trailer
Who we are at any given moment is but the culmination of a series of choices, circumstances, luck, and mistakes, from both the parameters of our own lives and all the lives that precede us. Thus, there are infinite lives you could have lived, with infinite people you could have loved—or maybe just the one. This marvel of a film cracks open 8,000 layers of inyeon in its crushingly intimate exploration of the sliding-doors nature of human connection, and how our past selves will always be a part of us yet something we must relinquish.
SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE | Trailer
Art is our portal into the multiverse. Our singular universe in which we call home—when filtered through the prism of countless artists and their multitude of mediums and materials—becomes a kaleidoscope of possibilities. The tenth Spider-Man film in the last 21 years embraces the diversity of visual craft, from ink blots to hand-cut punk rock posters to Legos, to convey emotion and character in a way no other film has ever done before—Spider-Man or otherwise. By the end, we feel like we’ve hurtled through the extent of space and time, but always anchored to the web-slinging souls we have come to love.
ANATOMY OF A FALL by Justine Triet | Trailer
Objective truth is seemingly always just beyond our grasp. Instead, what remains is merely the truth that we hope to believe, wobbling just on the edges of the stories we tell ourselves. The Palm d’Or winner uses every tool in the cinematic toolbox to place the audience both in the jury box and in the faded memories of the story’s central psyches. We are left breathless with nothing but a vacillating sense of what to believe. In the end, truth is the only thing that matters but something we can never have.
POOR THINGS by Yorgos Lanthimos | Trailer
In the Year of Barbie comes Bizarro Barbie, an acid-trip coming-of-age-of-sorts of a man-made woman, which—like the highest grossing and biggest cultural touchstone of the year—comes replete with shaky feminist messaging, dizzying production design, and a surreal tone all its own. Lanthimos often feels like he’s reveling in his own weirdness for weirdness’s sake, but if you can find a way to climb aboard his wavelength, rocket-powered by Emma Stone’s wondrously audacious performance, Poor Things is perhaps this year’s most transportive experience.
THE HOLDOVERS by Alexander Payne | Trailer
Sometimes there’s no need to reinvent the wheel: Just make the most human and sharp-witted wheel of the season. A throwback in every sense, Payne’s best film in nearly two decades is populated with familiar but beloved archetypes: a rebellious teen burying deep parental pain, a mother struggling to move past her son’s death, and a curmudgeonly teacher—a role Paul Giamatti was born to play, with his uncanny ability to make every high-brow barb feel both cutting and tender. Even the 70’s-style title cards prepare you for the kind of story you’ve seen before. But in this case, the film’s enveloping aroma of familiarity serves as a sage gateway into the melancholic yet warm-like-a-Christmas-sweater heart of how we connect with others.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE by Takashi Yamazaki | Trailer
As its title suggests, the 38th Godzilla film, like The Holdovers, goes back to the basics. Making a $15 million production budget feel like $150 million, this miracle of a blockbuster recognizes that its kaiju can only really achieve Earth-shaking heft when fueled by the resonant emotional journeys of its puny human characters. The awe-inspiring monster/deity serves as a seismic post-WWII backdrop for the guilt, trauma, and hope of the characters on the ground in this resplendent melodrama (not nearly a bad word in this case) that is never, for even a moment, short of thrillingly compelling.
ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET. by Kelly Fremon Craig | Trailer
In polite American society, frank discourse of female puberty (and all its trappings: menstruation, training bras, boys) and religious choice are each taboo on its own. When thrown together, it becomes culturally explosive. It’s no wonder Judy Blume’s seminal middle-grade novel has struggled to make it to screen over nearly half a century; Instead, it became one of this nation’s most banned books. Fremon Craig, who has cornered the market on thoughtful, accessible female coming-of-age films seven years after her indelible debut, The Edge of Seventeen, breathes fresh life into 11-year-old Margaret while remaining achingly true to the source material. When Blume herself has stated that the movie is better than the book, what more can any review possibly say?
RETURN TO SEOUL by Davy Chou | Trailer
For some, the search for identity emanates from the need for an existential foundation. It’s a lonely odyssey, each of us floating through the universe, trying on different masks, hoping one will finally fit. Freddie, born in South Korea but adopted by French parents, preternaturally wears multiple masks at once, a survival instinct that simultaneously attracts others and destroys. But even when she finds the strength to lower her masks, she discovers not satisfaction but deep wounds that may never heal.
BARBIE by Greta Gerwig | Trailer
I tried desperately to find another movie worthy of the final spot on my list. Not that I didn’t love Barbie (it’s arguably the most fun I had watching a movie in 2023), but I was hoping to find a more under-the-radar film that I would be excited to bring needed attention to. When you’re arguably the most talked-about movie since the start of the Pandemic, what is there left to add to the conversation? So I’ll just conclude my list by leaving you with three words:
All Hail Allan.
Possibly Interesting 