Alexander Payne's The Holdovers tops the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association's list of the best movies of 2023.
I’m a voting member of the group, and so I’m sharing my personal list of the year’s best below. As you'll see, I am also a big "Holdovers" fan — it checks in at No. 8 on my list. But the film the group chose as its No. 2 is the one I picked for the top spot:
1. Oppenheimer – Writer and director Christopher Nolan expertly weaves together three connected but distinct stories – the rush to develop the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s sham security hearing a decade later and Lewis Strauss’s commerce secretary confirmation hearings. All along, the moral weight of hastening the end of the world hangs in the air.
2. Poor Things – What would happen if a grown woman suddenly took on the mind of a child and had to not only learn anew how to move through the world but to also consider anew the social mores everyone else just takes as settled? That’s the spot Emma Stone’s Bella finds herself in in director Yorgos Lanthimos’s wildly creative adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel. Stone and Mark Ruffalo are standouts in a cast full of standout performances.
3. Maestro – Bradley Cooper directs and stars in this look at the complicated artistic and romantic life of Leonard Bernstein. Cooper’s developed Sean Penn and Joaquin Phoenix-level range in following up his roles in “American Sniper” and “A Star is Born” by playing the famed composer and conductor here. Meanwhile, Carey Mulligan provides the story’s emotional center as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre.
4. Past Lives – Writer and director Celine Song’s semiautobiographical film came out in the spring and stuck with me the whole year. In it, she contemplates how her life might have turned out had her family not immigrated from South Korea to Canada, separating her from her closest childhood friend.
5. Saltburn – It’s basically The Talented Mr. Ripley, but this tale of a college student’s obsession with an upper-crust classmate comes with a lot more laughs – most often provided by the comically unaware family matriarch played by Rosamund Pike. It’s worth noting that writer and director Emerald Fennell also played Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown – one of the world’s expert gatecrashers of privilege.
6. Beyond Utopia – The documentary follows a South Korean pastor’s efforts to help refugees flee North Korea through a series of smugglers, police allies and various undercover agents. His dedication is obviously laudable – as is the bravery of the filmmakers, who tag along to document one family’s journey from North Korea through China to Southeast Asia and, ultimately, freedom.
7. Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann’s bestselling book of the same name keeps readers in suspense as to why exactly members of the Osage nation are dying in rapid succession. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation takes a different approach – revealing the murderous grift in the first few scenes and allowing the audience to spend the rest of the film contemplating the banal evil of white supremacy.
8. The Holdovers – It sounds like the setup for a comedy: A boarding-school teacher, his smart but distracted student and the cook who cares for them are stuck together over the holiday break. But real connection happens when this trio – each with very different pasts – learns to understand one another in order to make it through to the new year.
9. May December – Todd Hayne’s thinly-veiled reimagining of the Mary Kay Letourneau story is most satisfying because it leaves viewers plenty of space to contemplate why the players in this tawdry tabloid tale do the things they do. The melodrama is amped up to 11, but what do you expect from the director of Far from Heaven and Carol?
10. The Boy and the Heron -- Hayao Miyazaki has retired and unretired plenty of times, so whether or not this is his last film is anybody’s guess. But if it is, the animation master goes out on a high as he looks back at his own childhood as his family fled the bombs destroying Tokyo during World War II. As in other Miyazaki stories, just when you think the ground rules of this universe have been established, the rug gets pulled out from under you. But if the literal truth is fluid, the more rewarding emotional journey is rock solid.
Honorable mentions: Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, Nyad, Rustin, Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
