From one perspective, all in cinema is rosy. Fireworks will be lit. Champagne will be uncorked. The pandemic malaise is over. We learned recently that global box office grew 27 per cent in the first quarter of 2023. And yet, we are not rolling in the diverse array of mainstream genre titles that once, not too long ago, kept movie houses’ lights ablaze.
Put simply, a small number of films are still making most of the money. A large portion of that first-quarter haul was, for instance, down to the continuing success of 2022′s Avatar: The Way of Water. The second quarter has been greatly boosted by the adventures of the Super Mario Bros. The industry is, as the year progresses, looking to the likes of Mission: Impossible and Aquaman to keep the tills hopping.
Where are the hit romantic comedies of yesteryear? Where are the detective yarns? Largely on the streaming services, it seems. And in the art houses. Our list of the 10 best films from 2023 so far does indeed feature a romantic comedy. There is a courtroom drama in there. There is a serial-killer thriller. None of those three films made a fortune but their presence confirmed that the medium still throbs with good health.
As ever with a first-half report, the list is dominated by films that premiered at last year’s festivals. Four first turned up first at Cannes. Two at Venice. One at Toronto. There are, however, some fresh discoveries in there, too. And, yes, we also have a Spider-Man film.
All of the top 10 films were released in cinemas. A few of those bubbling under were not. We are still in a state of flux.
10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K Thompson
The first Spider-Verse film showed there is life in Spider-Man beyond the machine-tooled efficiency of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Along the way, it unleashed the decade’s now-unavoidable mainstream conceit. What did we do with ourselves before the multiverse? Once again overseen by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, this sequel to 2018′s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse expands the already teeming visual palette as one version of Gwen Stacy seeks something like redemption. The films are a visual riot. They swarm with wild off-key jokes. But, for all that buzz, the film-makers are in complete control of their antic universe(s). Maybe it ends with a little too much familiar supermayhem. Fans will, however, still be looking forward to a third episode with great and understandable enthusiasm.
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9. Infinity Pool
Directed by Brandon Cronenberg
“I thought more people would walk out. I was shocked more didn’t,” Alexander Skarsgard told me from Berlin Film Festival. Surely audiences are not quite so timid. Yes, Brandon Cronenberg’s unhinged satire includes some explicit sex, the odd engorged full-frontal, a bit of damp evisceration and a few humans being led about in dog collars. But what else would you expect from the director behind Antiviral and Possessor? Cronenberg’s latest confirms our age’s continuing obsession with gutting the super-rich (see also Triangle of Sadness). A party of snoots do the wrong thing while on holiday in a totalitarian nation and end up suffering existential torments. Skarsgard is strong as the chief victim. Mia Goth is off the chart as his tormentor.
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8. Holy Spider
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Mehdi Bajestani deservedly won best actress at Cannes for her turn as a journalist investigating the murders of sex workers in Iran during the early part of this century. Such a tale will inevitably touch on institutional misogyny – a recent fine documentary on the Yorkshire Ripper did the same – but the public indifference to the victim in this true story beggars belief. Some critics were a little uneasy about the brutal realism in Ali Abbasi’s depiction of the murders. Not everyone was ready for the apparent shift in genre for the last act. Holy Spider remains impressive for its ability to work tension in with palpable anger at historical injustice. Deserved more attention.
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7. Enys Men
Directed by Mark Jenkin
“We were keen to distance ourselves from folk horror at first because I felt it was a really pastoral Merry Old England thing,” Mark Jenkin told The Irish Times in January. He did that. He did more. He distanced himself from all predecessors with this deeply puzzling, sparsely populated drama set on a remote Cornish island. Mary Woodvine plays an official making daily observations on weather and fauna as time looks to be entering an inexplicable flux. The medium is part of the aesthetic. Jenkin shoots with a hand-cranked 16mm 1978 Bolex camera and develops all his own stock with similarly rudimentary equipment. The result is a work that looks to have sprang spontaneously from the increasingly mysterious lichen.
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6. Beau Is Afraid
Directed by Ari Aster
Ari Aster’s follow-up to the universally acclaimed Hereditary and Midsommar was, within minutes of its first screening, set beside “swing for the fences” efforts such as Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. That is to say, those who hated it really hated it and those who loved it bandied the word “masterpiece”. Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely neurotic who encounters all kind of existential panic on a journey to his mother’s funeral. “It’s something I anticipated. It was almost by design,” Aster told this writer. “It was not designed to alienate people. But you risk that and you embrace the idea of people being alienated – simply by maybe doing something decisively.” True, later sections go on a great meander. The opening act is bellow-out-loud hilarious, though.
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5. Saint Omer
Directed by Alice Diop
A heavily pregnant writer, seeking material for a contemporary variation on Medea, attends the trial of a young woman accused of leaving her baby on a beach to die. She finds herself increasingly caught up in the young defendant’s traumas as Alice Diop teases out the most morally complex of narratives. Runner up at Venice Film Festival, this gripping, troubling picture, based on the 2016 case of Fabienne Kabou, draws closely on court transcripts. Diop, hitherto best known for documentaries, saw her film selected as the French entry for best international film at the Oscars. It is some measure of the standard this year that it didn’t even make the final five. Startling central performance from Guslagie Malanda.
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4. The Beasts
Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
There are endless reasons to recommend Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s muddy, robust, unflinching drama set in rural Galicia. Never anything less than compelling, Denis Ménochet bosses the drama as a Frenchman ostracised after rejecting an offer to buy up all surrounding land for a wind farm. Anne-Laure Labadie, playing his wife, gradually makes something more interesting still of her character. Luis Zahera smoulders as a menacing local. This is one of those rare titles that justify the familiar critical suggestion that we’re really looking at a western. Windmills stand in for the railroad. The same suspicion of the stranger pervades. Ends with a dizzying shift in perspective and a few starling revelations.
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3. Rye Lane
Directed by Raine Allen-Miller
Just when you’d nearly given up hope of a romantic comedy rejigging the genre, Raine Allen-Miller, working from a honed script by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, happens along with the tale of two amiable oddballs strolling about a picturesque variation on contemporary Clapham. David Jonsson (nervy, uncertain) and Vivian Oparah (more assured but less stable) create interlinking complementary characters for the two young people. Olan Collardy’s roving camera makes a sunny wonderland of urban south London. Hats are tipped to genre staples as the film invents a few of its own tasty moves. It belts along like a breezier Brief Encounter on its way to one of the great dab-your-eyes endings. Just 82 minutes. Not an ounce of fat.
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2. Close
Directed by Lukas Dhont
Two young friends fall out as one gets in with the more popular kids at school. When Lukas Dhont’s intense Belgian drama premiered at Cannes last year, more than a few critics had to be helped out of the cinema in debilitating fits of tears. Many of those felt the picture, on its eventual release, would be a sensation and would stroll to the best-international-feature Oscar. It got the nomination but, though largely well reviewed, Close didn’t connect quite so convincingly as expected. It remains one of the most affecting, and splendidly acted, dramas of recent years. You will probably know where it is headed from early on but the journey remains harrowing.
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1. Tár
Directed by Todd Field
Oh, how original. We end up with the most chewed-over film of the last awards season. No apologies. From a first glimpse at Venice Film Festival, it seemed apparent that Todd Field’s sprawling drama, which focuses on the discontents of a self-important composer and conductor, was going to generate debate for years to come. The questions kept coming. Why does a drama about workplace abuse have a woman as the abuser? Was that ending a tad racist? Is it for or agin cancel culture? “I’m happy that certain groups have claimed it for their own polar opposites. That’s very, very exciting,” Field told The Irish Times. Nobody would have cared if the story had been less gripping or if Cate Blanchett had been less transcendent in the title role. Beautifully made. Often hilarious. A film for the ages.
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