Review of the year

Thanks to the dominance of franchises, mainstream cinema has barely changed its look or form in the past 20 years. Yet with its hypnotic cutting, soul-scouring closeups and borderline-abstract effects, Nolan’s film felt like something utterly fresh – a lunge forward at the money-making end of a medium blighted by stagnancy.

Meanwhile, in animation, a similar renaissance was afoot. SpiderMan: Across the Spider-Verse took the bold hybrid style of its 2018 predecessor – the mix of computer graphics and hand-drawn art that lent it the texture of a living comic book – and pushed it to inksplattering, pixel-whizzing new extremes. The result was a film that categorically could not have been made 10 years ago. In fact, I’m not entirely sure how they made it even now. And again, we flocked to cinemas to see it.

Overall, 2023 was a landmark year for animation – despite Disney’s travails and the murderously cynical and lazy Super Mario Bros, which did undeservedly big business over the Easter break. We got two further masterpieces from Aardman and Studio Ghibli, in Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, and The Boy and the Heron (which, having been shown at the London Film Festival, arrives in cinemas on Boxing Day), and two wild gambles that paid off gloriously, in Nick Bruno and Troy Quane’s Nimona, and Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume. Perhaps most staggering of all, even the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem was a knockout.

Who wouldn’t you want to be next year? Whoever it was at Sony Pictures that decided it was a fantastic idea, actually, to release three live-action Spider-Man spinoffs in the space of nine months in 2024. Or the top dogs at Marvel, who must be eyeing their slate of seven forthcoming films, at various stages of production, with a newfound sense of dread. Or whoever at the studios is going to be negotiating new contracts with the film crew union IATSE, who will have been watching this year’s strikes with beady interest.

But I’ve no doubt it’ll be a particularly exciting year to be a cinemagoer. Whether what we’ve just witnessed in 2023 represents a brief tremor or an all-out earthquake remains to be seen. But it feels like more change is coming – and superheroes will not, for once, be the ones to save the day.

The year’s most popular film after Barbie was also its most insulting: a wodge of shatteringly brainless baby-sit-o-vision with videogame branding pasted on top.

Super Mario Bros