THE TERRIFIC 10
MOVIELAND in 2023 will be best remembered for a record-breaking weekend in July when seemingly normal folk queued around the block to see films about a bombshell and a bombmaker.
The Barbenheimer phenomenon may have shown the power of online marketing but it also points to a rosy future for Hollywood.
Both hit films were original standalone movies made by film-makers empowered by studios to take a few risks.
Meanwhile, Marvel’s cross-media franchise, which has dominated the multiplexes for the past decade, seemed to wane.
Will it expand again in 2024 or has it disappeared up its own black hole?
Who knows? But here are 10 films that I loved in this unusual year…
10. REALITY
The truth is a whole lot stranger than fiction in this seemingly banal but haunting drama set almost entirely in a suburban bungalow.
The dialogue is based on a transcript of a recorded encounter between two FBI officers who turned up at the home of a young woman with a name that no screenwriter would have the gall to invent.
Reality Winner (played by a brilliant Sydney Sweeney) was a translator working for a National Security Agency contractor when she was arrested for leaking documents
OUR TOP FILMS OF 2023 about Russian election-meddling to the press. Watching the net tighten on her lies and evasions is surprisingly gripping.
9. TALK TO ME
After a raft of serious, so-called “elevated horrors”, this stylish, witty and pant-wettingly scary chiller felt devilishly refreshing.
There’s a touch of Flatliners to the premise which involves Aussie teens getting hooked on a sinister game involving a ceramic hand containing the severed hand of a dead medium. It all seems hilarious until a troubled girl called Mia (Sophie Wilde) takes a spin.
8. M3GAN
We pretty much know where this killer doll flick is heading from the off but screenwriters toy with our expectations with a knowing wink. An ambitious robotic toymaker cuts corners by omitting “parental controls” from the circuits of her new android babysitter.
So, when the doll feels overprotective of her new charge, no one can stop her from beating up bullies or brutally silencing barking dogs. They may have borrowed heavily from older films but a witty script and chilling design makes M3GAN greater than the sum of her recycled parts.
7. ANATOMY OF A FALL
Did he fall or was he pushed? That’s the question at the murky heart of this stylish and very tricksy whodunnit.
A Frenchman is found dead in snow under the attic window of his alpine house. Fingers point at his German wife but Sandra Hüller gives very little away with her finely calibrated performance as writer Sandra.
What follows is a chewy character study, a forensic examination of a failing marriage and a very tense courtroom drama.
6. GODZILLA MINUS ONE
He may be 30 storeys high but, this time, I really didn’t see the scaly icon coming.
Released over here with little fanfare, this thrilling Japanese action film took the giant lizard back to his roots.
The trick, which may seem obvious, was to stir in rousing human drama and make the behemoth scary again.
Released to celebrate the 70th anniversary of his movie debut, director Takashi Yamazaki kept the post-war setting, added threedimensional humans and swapped the bloke in the lizard suit for cutting-edge special effects.
It trampled its Hollywood rivals into the dust.
5. BLUE JEAN
“Not everything’s political,” sighs Jean to her girlfriend in this touching and wonderfully acted Brit flick.
As we’re in Thatcher’s Britain during the fevered days of the Clause 28 protests, we know these words will come back to haunt this sensitive young woman.
Jean (Rosy McEwen) is a PE teacher at a Tyneside school where her personal life becomes acutely political when she’s falsely accused of assaulting a girl in the showers.
4. MARCEL WITH THE SHOES ON
For the opening half hour or so, I feared this handcrafted animation could become insufferably twee.
But, after a while, I stopped admiring the animation and was completely taken in by the characters. Marcel is an adorable talking shell who loves his sick granny (also a shell, obviously) and befriends the documentary film-maker who has rented his home on AirBnB.
Marcel feels very real, as do the threats the human world poses to this fragile little chap.
3. PAST LIVES
A masterclass in restraint, this tear-jerking romance had a lot in common with David Lean’s Brief Encounter.
Over three acts, taking place over 12-year intervals, we follow the shifting friendship of two Koreans torn apart by fate and separated by oceans.
2. RYE LANE
The pound shops and halal butchers of South London don’t strike you as an especially romantic setting. But director Raine Allen-Miller hit on the perfect blend of knockout comedy and fizzing romance with her unusual rom-com set in her neighbourhood of Peckham.
Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson are nigh on adorable as adventurous Yas and uptight Dom, twentysomethings who fall for each other on an eventful odyssey through Del Boy’s old stomping ground.
1. OPPENHEIMER
Barbie narrowly missed out on my Top 10 but her running mate felt way too explosive to leave out. Christopher Nolan took big risks with his biopic of the inventor of the nuclear bomb, played by a brilliant Cillian Murphy. Most screenwriters would tidy up the story by distilling real-life figures into composites.
But Nolan uses a huge cast to shine a light on every corner of this earthshattering invention. Oscar winners keep popping up. Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman and Casey Affleck get about five minutes between them but all play pivotal roles in this gripping true story.
FROM BIOPIC TO MONSTER FLICK... WE COUNTDOWN