by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Hello! Thank you for reading my "B of '23" list. Now I know y'all be loving this shit right here. Every year is a good year for movies but this year, when I had a child aged 6- to 18-months old, was a terrible year for actually watching them. Aside from semi-regular trips to the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society and some screenings at PhilaMOCA, I saw one film in theaters (Inside). Everything else here was watched on a TV during the toddler's unpredictable naps or after he had fallen asleep around 7pm. I also had a sick dog for most of the year, which will eat into whatever time and money you have left in a year when both are extremely tight. There are always a hundred movies I want to have seen before making a list like this and that number is even higher this year. It's entirely possible films like Iron Claw, Showing Up, Zone of Interest and Poor Things would be here if I had the ability to see them-- all were made by directors who had movies on my best of the 2010s list. But I'm sending this thing in on the afternoon of December 11, 2023, and I am working with what I have. And that's still very impressive. I loved these (and so many more) films this year. Hot damn. Thank god for art.

I'd like to give a few special shout-outs to the TV shows Barry, How To with John Wilson, The Curse and Full Circle. Also giving honorable mentions to:

Don't Fall in Love With Yourself
Beyond the Sea -- This 80-minute-long Black Mirror episode worked best as a showcase for Aaron Paul's talents. The other actors do good work and the script is pretty strong but I mostly liked it because Paul played two characters and by the halfway point, you could tell which one he was portraying based on his posture. An incredible acting job.
Subject
Anonymous Sister
Earth Mama
Haha You Clowns
The Mask -- this is the Conner O'Malley short and not the 20 other things that show up in IMDb under this name
Luther: The Fallen Sun -- If parts of this are supposed to be funny-- and I'm not being arch, I think it's possible they are-- then this is one of the funniest movies I saw this year. If it's serious, then it's much funnier than that. Andy Serkis could have filmed his whole part with his little mocap suit and Golum voice and the movie wouldn't be that different, glaritatively. When Netflix released You People in January and Luther in February, I knew we were living in an age of miracles and wonder. "I don't care if we get a new Jonathan Glazer movie in 2023," I told my friends in February, "as long as Netflix gives movies to Gal Gadot and Jerry Seinfeld." For context, I had an aneurysm a few seconds before saying that and my head was in the process of swelling into something that looked like a big red water balloon.

Okay, the list proper. Going with a Top 15 this year, but, as always, the numbers are meaningless beyond the moment I ranked them.

15. Inside (dir. Vasilis Katsoupis)

If I was going to see one film in a theater this year, Inside was a good one. There's probably something pretty dramatic lost when you're watching Willem Dafoe stuck in an enclosed space for 90 minutes but you can pause everything and respond to a text whenever you want. Dafoe was in seven movies this year, which is "Eric Roberts delivering his lines over Zoom" territory, but it's Willem Dafoe, so he put his all them (or the ones I saw, at least). I have a small worry that the Inside's ideas about art will get swept away as people focus on how it feels as a response to COVID lockdowns, but that's what happens with movies: the real world is always there to force a more boring reading onto things. Everybody please thank my friend Josh for getting me a ticket to this.

14. Kokomo City (dir. D. Smith)

A beautiful look at the way four Black trans women navigate sex/survival work. There are a few weird choices here (namely, I think giving a fifth of the movie to a guy who was once attracted to a trans woman is a great use of time), but nothing that truly got in the way. I'd listen to these women, especially Daniella Carter, for another five hours. Her monologue at the end, about the disposability of Black men and what it meant for her mother to lose another Black man when Daniella transitioned, was a privilege to hear. And if the word "privilege" sounds dramatic, I'm using it because the last shot of the film is a flash of text telling us one of the four women was murdered. It sunk me. More and more, I watch documentaries like this and want to lock my doors forever. As much joy and awkwardness and humor as these women (and director D. Smith) bring to Kokomo City, it's still a story in 2020s America, where they all have to fight to stay alive, and I wish they didn't and I wish I wasn't in any way complicit in that danger and I wish I could knock the world to dust for breaking anybody this cruelly.

13. Telemarketers (dir. Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough)

The line between film and TV doesn't mean anything to me and is especially dustbunny thin when the TV show is a self-contained documentary series filmed by one person and directed by that guy and one other dude. Pat J. Pespas and co-director Sam Lipman-Stern start as workers in a call center and spend years trying to expose the way it exploited people. This is harder than you'd expect, given Lipman-Stern has actual footage of Pespas doing hard drugs at his cubicle. The other co-director, Adam Bhala Lough, produced TFW No GF, one of the worst movies I've ever seen, but he had the connections to get this three-part series in front of the right people, so good on him. If he could work on that bucket of vomit and diarrhea and then co-direct this a few years later, maybe there's hope for all of us.

Telemarketers answers every question I have when I finish a conversation with somebody who just called me out of the blue to see if I would consider donating to a cause I'd never heard of, and then it goes so much further, to the point that you're watching an unhinged asshole yell death threats at a person who isn't falling for his telemarketing grift. Of course that asshole was destined to be his company's top earner. By the time you meet him, Telemarketers has made its world at least that clear.

12. Chop and Steele (dir. Berndt Mader and Ben Steinbauer)

You ever root for two people to pee themselves? The story of Nick Preuher and Joe Pickett of the Found Footage Festival and the trouble they got in for pulling victimless pranks on morning news shows brought me there.I already admired Nick and Joe, and this movie, co-directed by the person who made the great Winnebago Man, gave me more to appreciate. The discussions around partnership were beautiful, even if or especially because they were juxtaposed with a man pushing a local news anchor to drink pureed garbage. I reviewed the film here.

11. Sisu (dir. Jalmari Helander)

Here’s a pretentious comparison for you— Sisu is like a Glenn Branca piece. It’s one note, over and over, until we all reach the sublime. It’s a man in a field, killing Nazis, and at first he’s stabbing them and by the end he’s riding a plane straight into the ground.

During my freshman year of high school, a classmate described almost all of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky to me multiple times. That sounds boring, but I wanted him to— I hadn’t seen the movie and the stuff he was talking about was absurd. How was there a movie like this? When I got the DVD for Christmas that year, Riki-Oh was everything I wanted. Sisu is probably the first movie since then that I would listen to another person describe, scene-by-scene, and the movie would still hold up. That doesn’t mean this is the best action movie since Riki-Oh, but there wouldn’t be much appeal in hearing somebody explain every beat of a Raid 2 scene. You can talk about Sisu, though, and say “the main dude lights himself on fire to scare away German Shepherds, jumps into a lake, slits a Nazi’s throat underwater and sucks the air out of his windpipe” and I’d get real joy from hearing that somebody put that in a movie. One of those experiences where the things you’re watching are so over-the-top horrific that you laugh at stuff that’d make you wince and look away in any other context. The people who run English need to get on figuring out a direct translation of the Finnish word "sisu" immediately.

10. May December (dir. Todd Haynes)

In this film, Natalie Portman plays May and Julianne Moore plays December, two assassins who happen to be best friends. When May has a change of heart and realizes committing crimes has a corrosive effect on her soul, December helps her escape C.A.L.E.N.D.A.R., the company that trained them (and ten other women) to be the world's best killers.

This is a Todd Haynes/Julianne Moore collaboration, which is enough for me, but it also brilliantly handles so many themes and plots I love in art-- the ways we rationalize and justify things to ourselves, unwanted celebrity (especially celebrity gained for the wrong reasons), passive aggression, ill-equipped people handling things that require care, people actively not dealing with trauma, checking in on players in a big event after significant time has passed, people realizing they've been on the wrong path for decades, people treating each other's pain as entertainment, arrested development, cruelty undertaken with the sincere belief that it's the right thing, ET CETERA. "Norah's Ark" is a perfect fake TV show name. I didn't love the music. Charles Melton was a real revelation for me. I'd never seen him in anything before this and was just so impressed with all of the nuances he was able to express here. It takes a lot of talent to be the stand-out in a movie that also stars Maude Lebowski.

9. Infinity Pool (dir. Brandon Cronenberg)

There could be a future where Brandon Cronenberg becomes Wes Anderson and is so committed to his early visual language that it becomes the only way he's capable of communicating. Until then, a list-within-a-list, on the occasion of Infinity Pool being my tenth favorite movie of the year:

Top 3 Uncomfortable-But-Expertly-Filmed Movie Hand-Jobs:

1. Anti-Christ

2. Infinity Pool

3. The Master

Yeah, Alexander Skarsgard and Mia Goth beat out/off the Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman duo. Cancel me!

Skarsgard is an incredible actor who continues to make perfect choices. He's very good at weaponizing the way he looks, and there's a range even to that. In the past few years, he's done it in Big Little Lies, Atlanta and now Infinity Pool, and each time in a different way. I'm 100% serious when I say not everybody can make themselves look like total shit, especially if they start from the point on the handsome scale that he does. I was also thrilled to see Cleopatra Coleman, who was so good in Last Man on Earth. Will continue to do my best to not hold Shia LaBeouf against Mia Goth, but that's a fucking weird choice on her part and it makes me feel gross!

8. Beau is Afraid (dir. Ari Aster)

I've spent 15 years waiting for somebody to have the talent, ambition, courage and desire to make another film like Synecdoche, New York and it finally happened when Ari Aster cashed his chips in and made Beau is Afraid. You have to root for the people who can make something as beautiful as this movie's play sequence and then show Joaquin Phoenix's giant prosthetic balls an hour later. People who say this isn't a horror movie are wrong. People who say this isn't a comedy are wrong. It is everything. This is a movie you make when you catch yourself thinking, "I wish I was not like this," and then you write down whatever the this is you felt and spend the next year turning it and a dozen other little notes into a movie.

7. Joe Pera: Slow and Steady (dir. Marty Schousboe)

I'd feel fine putting a more straightforward stand-up special here and I'm especially okay including one that goes the places this does. When I watch something like Slow and Steady, I feel connected to Pera but also to anybody who would enjoy it. That's true of all of his work and especially holds here.

6. You Hurt My Feelings (dir. Nicole Holofcener)

I don't think anybody's making movies about the emotions Nicole Holofcener and her actors are exploring here. There are things in You Hurt My Feelings I can relate to that I really haven't seen in art, that are so specific and complicated that the film was truly transcendent for me. The first time I watched it, I was on a five-hour-long plane ride and You Hurt My Feelings took up the first 90 minutes, after which I felt this magnetic pull to the ground, so that I could tell my wife about what I'd just seen. I would have sky-dived out and landed somewhere in Kansas to talk about it with her sooner.

The movie was incredible and then an even more profound (to me and my life) part t-boned it with a third of the running time left to go. And once everything had been t-boned, I realized I could have seen it coming, and I realized nobody's articulated this to me, through art or otherwise, and Nicole Holofcener stood that much taller in my mind.

5. Smoking Causes Coughing (dir. Quentin Dupieux)

Once I saw the drooling rat creature puppet, I knew I would love this movie. The premise-- a Super Sentai-like team that uses the power of cigarettes to kill monsters has cohesion problems and goes on a work retreat-- was strong, but it was the color of the discharge coming out of this puppet's mouth, after the puppet has already been introduced as being sexually attractive to one of the main characters, that made me sure this was what I wanted out of movies. Anybody can start with a good idea, but Dupieux really puts the effort into the details here to make sure the rest of the film lives up to that first scene where a Gamera-looking creature gets blown apart by nicotine and tar beams. I liked other movies more, but nothing inspired me like Smoking Causes Coughing.

4. FULL Actors Roundtable: Justin Theroux, Rajat Suresh, Jeremy Levick & More (dir. Johnny Frohman)

Jeremy and Rajat are incredible and this hour-long fake actors roundtable is the funniest thing they've done, the kind of undertaking that feels like a stunt and a flex. This is one of those Hollywood Reporter (in this case, "Hollywood Recorder") conversations between actors who are up for awards, only it stars a bunch of real actors reflecting on their groundbreaking work in fake or decidedly not prestige-level productions. Rajat was actually on Severance, but he got one line and talks about it like the performance elevated him to Clooney or Pitt status. Justin Theroux, taking the absolute piss out of himself, talks wistfully about the gravity of his time as the title character in MLK's Dresser. I love when somebody takes the joke so much further than you'd expect. All the little rhythms-- the backpatting and forced laughs at knowing jokes, the conversation-length humblebrags and unguarded behind-the-scenes moments-- are perfect. Theroux's delivery of the line "We've all got a charity, don't we?" will stick in my head for a decade. The development of his character, as he realizes he isn't the most necessary person in the room, hit me hard. The camera would glide past his face and he'd be scowling like a kid whose mom wouldn't get him ice cream, and I laughed out loud every time. Best final shot in a movie this decade.

3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (dir. Jeff Rowe)

My wife and I were in deep mourning for our dog and had turned this on in the hopes that it would make us happy. I've read a hundred Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics and even then I'm thrilled somebody finally adapted the toy line more than they did the original source material. Woodrow White's art is incredible and seeing it move like this is pure fun. Watching Mutant Mayhem is the first and probably last time I'll think "Wow, I wish I had seen this in 3D." The joy a fun movie can bring you at a low point is real, and this is a good movie, but even if it was trash and I listed it here because of that joy and I knew I wouldn't appreciate this film in the future, under other circumstances, I'd still list it here.

I genuinely don't know how anybody is okay with the world, with how much it costs to live (not to live comfortably, just to live), with how the climate's crumbling faster every day and how you and I are funding genocide. The ceiling is coming down and the air is poisonous and it is unbelievable to me that anybody is breathing. I have to simultaneously mourn my dog and deal with the thousands of dollars in hospital visits and medication that I spent in her last year on Earth. I have to hold a job and try to be a good person and take care of a toddler and, in the two or three hours between when he goes to sleep and I do, I have to fortify myself for the next day. Mutant Mayhem helped with the fortification.

I watched an insipid horror movie called Speak No Evil a few months ago. It started out great and then repeatedly used child abuse as a cheap, easy shock, and I'm not saying we should have less art about troubling, real world terror, but we should definitely have less of that art made by people who don't know what they're doing, who are pushing buttons as provocation for no deeper reason. This movie held a loaded gun to my head and thought it was being smart by telling me that loaded guns are dangerous. Motherfucker, I know. I am alive in a world that punishes people for being alive. I don't need your hokey conservative provocation to teach me about human nature. I am waist deep in the quicksand and only a total dumbass would think they were getting something across by telling me to beware quicksand. There is nothing deeper to Mutant Mayhem. It is not trying to teach me anything or test any of my beliefs or expose my ignorance. It's easily the silliest movie on this list and one of my other picks climaxes with two men peeing themselves on stage. It is the movie that made me happiest and I watched it on the worst night of the worst year of my life. It sits on this list because it's fun to make lists, but in some ways, this is beyond my number one film of the year. Relief is more important than movies and I'm glad a movie was able to provide me some relief.

2. The Royal Hotel (dir. Kitty Green)

I wrote a full review of The Royal Hotel here, and I'm not going to be able to get much more thoughtful about why I love it than that. Here's the final paragraph from that write-up:

"That's been so much of the past few years, that annoyed question of whether we should ban every asshole from the bar, that insistence that yeah, he's being a dick, but not as bad a dick as that other guy over there. The behavior of the worst of us ends up providing cover for everybody else and the discussion is flattened until you're the one, true offender or you're just kidding around, relax. The Royal Hotel is not a subtle movie but it's a movie about the subtleties that allow people plausible deniability when they assess whether they've acted inappropriately. I doubt Green would call her film prescriptive, but the ending, as dramatic as it is, feels that way. I won't spoil it, but by the time you get there, it feels like the only fix to any of the issues Green has empathetically and furiously laid bare."

1. Happer's Comet (dir. Tyler Taormina)

A pocket, portable night, to be used as needed. I said this about Beau is Afraid earlier, but it's true here, as well: I've been waiting for somebody to make a movie like this for a long time. I've tried to communicate that feeling of being awake at 2am and Tyler Taormina nails it here. Happer's Comet is a wordless film about different people who are awake very early in the morning.

Some people are awake because they're watching TV or getting ready for tomorrow, and they seem content, and some people are awake because their car broke down or they're trying to drive home without falling asleep, and then seem tortured. There are echoes across the film's dozen-plus little stories-- you'll see similar art prints in different houses and watch strangers roller skate through opposite sides of town, oblivious to each other. And there will inevitably be echoes to your own life-- somebody in Happer's Comet uses the same CPAP machine I do. It also gets at something that makes 2am heightened and more sedate at the same time, which is people's reluctance to break the silence. Even if they're alone, people don't make much noise in the deep night. You might talk to your dog on a walk at noon, but you move quietly when everybody in your town is asleep.

I get bored easily, but this movie, which I wouldn't blame anybody for getting bored by, had me the whole time, probably because it didn't ask me to feel any specific way. But the feelings come naturally. You're part of the human race from 6am to 11pm and then you're on your own. When I was pulling all-nighters or awake with my crying baby or sitting in an airport at 3am, waiting for a 9am flight, I wondered what everybody else who had to be awake was doing. This movie is a good answer. I don't think it's ultimately a lonely movie. People don't get the gift of collision, but they move in parallel. It's like a nod between strangers. Few things, whether they're works of art or sandwiches or bricks, are as fully realized as Happer's Comet is.