By Ed Boitano

The best films of 2023 proved to be an eclectic and exciting mix of thought provoking cinema. Narratives ranged from genocide, lost loves and rebirth, immigrant experiences, stories pulled from headlines and a teacher with a distracting lazy eye at a small boarding school in New England. The year was rich with directorial vision and personal styles: the unblemished truth by documentarian Frederick Wiseman, lonely science fiction from Andrew Haigh, the exploding imagery of Martin Scorsese, Justine Triet’s moments of tensity, the Bressonian minimalism of Aki Kaurismäki and Jonathan Glazer’s dialectical montage with the collision of image and sound.

Only time will tell if the list of films stands the test of time. As Jean Renoir once said, The best films are those that leave a lasting impact, that linger in your mind long after the credits roll.

15 TOP FILMS FROM 2023

1. The Zone of Interest:
   Jonathan Glazer (UK)
2. Past Lives:
   Celine Song (US)
3. Killers of the Flower Moon:
   Martin Scorsese (US)
4. Fallen Leaves:
   Aki Kaurismäki (Finland, Germany)
5. May December:
   Todd Haynes (US)
6. All of Us Strangers:
   Andrew Haigh (UK)
7. Anatomy of a Fall:
   Justine Triet (France)
8. Showing Up:
   Kelly Reichardt (US)
9. Passages:
   Ira Sachs (France)
10. Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros:
    Frederick Wiseman (France, US)
11. Poor Things:
    Yorgos Lanthimos (UK, US, Ireland)
12. Return to Seoul:
    Davy Chou (France, Germany, Belgium, Qatar, Cambodia)
13. The Holdovers:
    Alexander Payne (US)
14. Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars”:
    Jean-Luc Godard (France, Switzerland)
15. Oppenheimer:
    Christopher Nolan (UK)

BEST DIRECTOR

Jonathan Glazer/The Zone of Interest

Runner-up: Martin Scorsese/Killers of the Flower Moon

BEST DIRECTORIAL DEBUT

Celine Song/Past Lives

Runner-Up: Raine Allen-Miller/Rye Lane

BEST MALE ACTOR

Franz Rogowski/Passages

Runner-Up: Cillian Murphy/Oppenheimer

BEST FEMALE ACTOR

Greta Lee/Past Lives

Runner-Up: Sandra Huller/Anatomy of a Fall & The Zone of Interest

BEST SUPPORTING MALE ACTOR

Robert De Niro/Killers of the Flower Moon

Runner-Up: Robert Downey, Jr/Oppenheimer

BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE ACTOR

Tilda Swinton/The Killer

Runner-Up: Rachel McAdams/Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

BEST ACTING DEBUT

Park Ji-Min/Return to Seoul

Runner-Up: Dominic Sessa/The Holdovers

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Rodrigo Prieto/Killers of the Flower Moon & Barbie

Runner-Up: Hoyte Van Hoytema/Oppenheimer

Best Original Screenplay

Samy Burch/May December

Runner-Up: Celine Song/Past Lives

Best Original Score

Mica Levi/The Zone of Interest

Runner-Up: Robbie Robertson/Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Editing

Thelma Schoonmaker/Killers of the Flower Moon

Runner-Up: Laurent Senechal/Anatomy of a Fall

Best Sound Effects

Johnnie Burn/The Zone of Interest

Runner-Up: Mark Ulano/Killers of the Flower Moon

Most Disappointing Film

Silent Night/John Woo

Runner-Up: Barbie/Greta Gerwig

The post Traveling Boy Selects Top Films From 2023 appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself. – Robert Bresson

1Killers of the Flower Moon was Robbie Robertson’s final soundtrack for director Martin Scorsese. The founding member, main composer and lead guitarist of the rock group, The Band, scored the film shortly before his death, and Scorsese dedicated the film to him. Killers of the Flower Moon closed with the Osage song, Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People), composed by Osage Nation Tribal Members, Scott George, Kenny Bighorse, and Vann Bighorse. Roberston felt that the music of the Osage is the best display of their extraordinary quest for survival. Robertson, who is both a tribal member of the Cayuga and Mohawk Nations and a Canadian of Jewish ancestry, was the music producer on over ten earlier Martin Scorsese films. Rest in peace, Robbie. You gave us the history of many forgotten artists, some dead and gone, and endowed us through your own songs and music in understanding the roots of rock and roll.

2 Paul Giamatti’s lazy eye in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers was an artificial one, a blinding contact lense worn throughout the film. His portrayal of a despised classics teacher at a small New England boarding school with a distracting case of amblyopia, a type of poor vision that usually happens in just one eye, was intended to represent his low self-esteem, alienation and desire for solitude. Later, in the film, Giamatti’s teacher is instructed to chaperone the only student, an unruly one (breakout star, Dominic Sessa) left at the school during a lonely, snow-covered Christmas break. Neither are fond of one another, but eventually the lazy eye begins to illustrate the positive development of their relationship, when the student asks which eye he should look at when they are speaking, symbolizing a sign of respect between the two.

3 Past Lives is the directorial debut of South Korean-Canadian-American film director, playwright, and screenwriter, Celine Song. Song wrote the screenplay for Past Lives about two childhood friends with puppylove feelings for one another in Seoul, South Korea, who reunite 24 years later in New York. The reunion becomes complicated and soul searching when the now adult man realizes his former South Korean girlfriend has an American husband. Song based the film on her own life experiences when her South Korean family moved to Ontario, Canada when she was 12-years-old. Past Lives was selected as best picture of 2023 by The National Society of Film Critics.

4 After too long of an absence, Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki, returned to the cinema with Fallen Leaves, his 20th full-length film and a continuation of his Proletariat series. Highly influenced by Robert Bresson, Kaurismäki is best known for his minimalistic style, with an unblinking camera that seldom moves, rock and roll and characters without displays of emotion; who are usually left alone, facing tragedies and setbacks, yet never give up and eventually survive. Kaurismäki’s visual theme continues in Fallen Leaves, where a Helsinki single woman is fired from her zero-hour contract supermarket job for distributing expired food items still on the shelves to the poor. She meets an equally lonely and depressed manual laborer who is frequently fired for drinking on the job. Fallen Leaves is billed as a dramatic rom-com, but it’s important to note that it is a Finnish dramatic rom-com of the Kaurismäki kind.

5 In Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, the patient camera of 93-year-old documentary film director, Frederick Wiseman, photographs a passionate debate between head chefs at a three Michelin stars French restaurant, a restaurant which has been run by the same family for four generations. It is an important debate, for it’s about the truth in the texture, color and depth of flavor in food. In another moment, an heir apparent son is emotionally shaken when his chef father changes a sauce which he’d spent three weeks creating. Later, Wiseman’s three-person documentary team visits a cold storage cave, and finds that each of the stored cheese has its own moment of truth.

6 The year 2023 proved to be a stellar one for German female actor, Sandra Hüller, where she appeared in two very different films, playing two very different characters. In The Zone of Interest, she was the wife of Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss, who lived with her family in a cottage and palatial grounds on the other side of the wall from the Auschwitz concentration camp; and in Anatomy of a Fall, another kind of wife, on trial for murdering her husband. Her body language in both is profound: In Zone, lumbering, almost vulgar, without any form of ambiguity; and in Anatomy, initially wounded, then strong, outraged and upright with conviction.

7 In Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ high-concept, absurdist black comedy, Poor Things, the narrative follows Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman in Victorian London who is reborn through a brain transplant and embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery. A veteran of Lanthimos’ 2018 film, The Favourite, Stone’s body language is nothing less than remarkable, where she whirls and twirls throughout the film, a combination of a ballerina and a contortionist. But the sound of her smoky voice required little acting; as an infant, Stone suffered from infantile colic – defined as episodes of crying for more than three hours a day, for more than three days a week, after three weeks in an otherwise healthy child – and consequently developed nodules and calluses on her vocal cords.

8 British Director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is his first feature film in ten years, following Under the Skin (2013), Birth (2004) and Sexy Beast (2000). Cautious, cerebal and always in control, Glazer is an auteur whose films are unmistakenly his own. In The Zone of Interest there are two different narratives, a dialectical collision of image and sound. Glazer leaves it to us to find meaning, and, in a sense, invites us to join him as the architect of the film. Film director, critic and theorist Jean-Luc Godard once commented about his own films: You listen to the images and watch the sound.

9 It was not necessary for director Todd Haines to reminds us in interviews that he was influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Winter Light in making May December. The film’s visual design had explained that, but it was the literary content by screenwriter Samy Burch, about actress Elizabeth Berry (Natale Portman), researching a role about the still controversial Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), which helped us understand Haines’ cinematic journey of grief, adultery and ambiguity, with few options for second changes. The narrative is based on the real life, Mary Kay Letourneau, who, at the age of 36, was sent to prison for having sex with 13-year-old Joe Yoo, later giving birth to their first child in confinement. In the film, after Joe, now an adult (in a landmark performance by Charles Melton) and actress Elizabeth have sexual intimacy, Joe abruptly leaves the room when she refers to his experiences as a story, replying that the story is his real life.

In the opening scene of Ira Sachs’ Passages, German actor Franz Rogowski plays Tomas, an egotistical film director who brazenly controls, frustrates and embarrasses an actor in front of the cast and crew, dictating, over and over again, how to play a simple scene. Later, in Tomas’ own personal life, he becomes frustrated and loses his own emotional control when his husband will not follow his directions on how they should live their life together, after informing him he had a rare sexual liaison with a woman, which evoked hidden feelings inside him. Tomas takes on Shakespearian proportions, filled with doubt, self-loathing and violence.

No doubt, I missed many key performances in 2023; so, T-Boy readers, feel free to send in your favorite list of the best films and performances of 2023, to Ed****@Tr**********.com

The post Beneath the Best Films of 2023 appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden. – Robert Bresson

German actor Franz Rogowski delivered the best performance of 2023 as an egotistical, controlling film director who loses control of his own life in Ira Sachs’ Passages. Yet, there were many other remarkable performances in 2023, which I notated in Traveling Boy Selects Top Films From 2023 and Beyond the Films of 2023.

But, let’s keep the accolades going, which should begin with Greta Lee’s soul searching South Korean-American wife in Past Lives, and continue with Cillian Murphy in the tile role in Oppenheimer as the conflicted, haunted and womanizing J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his friendly colleague, but really an adversary, the self-aggrandizing Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr.; and the less than conflicted Robert De Niro’s William King Hale, the real killer in the Killers of the Flowers Moon, Julianne Moore’s despised and wounded mother in May December, Tilda Swinton’s nervous contract killer who sits across the table from another contract killer, Michael Fassbinder, whose taken his own oath to kill her in David Finchers’ otherwise disappointing, The Killer.  

And, there were many other stunning performances of 2023 which still color my thoughts today: Swann Arlaud’s calm and charismatic French defense attorney in Anatomy of a Fall; the physical and emotional transcendence of Park Ji-Min’s Freddie in Return to Seoul; The Holdovers‘ redemptive ensemble with Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Naheem Garcia and a photograph of a fallen American soldier who was unable to get a student loan; the entire cast of Oppenheimer, with special attention to Tom Conti’s brief, but powerful performance as Albert Einstein, Josh Hartnett ‘s supportive nuclear physicist, Alden Ehrenreich’s expositionary fictitious aide and Matt Damon’s no nonsense head of the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves — a 1914 alumnus of Seattle’s Queen Anne High School; yours truly, a QA graduate of ’71.

It was difficult not to be affected by the scream of Adam (Andrew Scott) at his own reflection in a train window in Andrew Haig’s All of Us Strangers; another best-of-its-kind performance from Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, Michelle Williams’ fourth collaboration with director, Kelly Reichardt, as a troubled, yet self-driven sculptor in Showing Up, German-born South Korean actor, Teo Yoo’s heart-wrenching acceptance and farewell in Past Lives; the often overlooked Annette Bening, as a world-class athlete in Nyad; and Osage Nation Tribal Members as actors, who gave us history and meaning in the Killers of the Flower Moon.

Plus, the many dogs who played key roles throughout the films of 2023 – in particular Dilla, the Höss family dog in The Zone of Interest and Messi, as Snoop, the service dog, in Anatomy of a Fall, perhaps the real performance of the year.

No doubt I missed many key performances; so, T-Boy readers, feel free to send in your favorite list of 2023 performances and films, to **@tr**********.com

Visit Beyond the Films of 2023.

The post Beyond & Beneath the Best Films of 2023 appeared first on Traveling Archive.