I love lists. Lists bring order to my day: what to do, what to watch, what to read, what to listen to. Lists provide context to larger themes and suss out tiny commonalities. The lists I author, be they for private or public consumption, provide focus — cohesion among chaos. No matter where I go or what I do, I am surrounded by lists. And those lists are surrounded by me.
I loathe lists. For everything included on a list, something isn’t. To provide connections within a larger collection, some things — many things, really — must be left off. Lists are the very definition of exclusivity. Look at any list, and the first thing you’ll notice is what’s not on it.
And so, every December, the same conundrum: What can be achieved with a list of 10 movies? Is this a personal expression of a year of moviegoing, a cross-section of where cinema is now or a prognostication of the medium?
Those musings may sound arbitrary, but it’s not for nothing. I watch a lot of movies, write about them and talk about them. I take the job seriously and try to watch as wide a swath of the cinematic landscape as I can. Except I can’t. Time is finite, patience runs thin, and there is so much to discover that choices must be made. I watch more movies in a given year than most, but that still doesn’t mean I saw everything you did.
That seemed to be the theme for 2023. Much more than in years past, I found myself in conversations where the person talking would be describing something I had not seen. Many were streaming serials I don’t follow; some were franchise installments I was no longer interested in. Others were smaller movies unknown to me. The reverse was also true: Often, someone would ask me what I had seen and could recommend, and my enthusiasm would be met with glazed eyes and confused faces. “Haven’t heard of that one,” they would say. “Is it on Netflix?”
Honestly, I don’t know where movies live these days. Some take long and winding roads through festivals before finally ending up in local theaters for a week. Others bypass theaters altogether and head to a streaming platform. Then there are the movies bought and paid for by streaming services that linger in the theater, waiting for the audience that is waiting for them at home. It’s a weird time to love movies. Filmmakers and critics have worried that streaming services would fracture the common cinematic experience the way news outlets have shattered politics. In 2023, that aphorism came true, not with a bang but with a whimper.
In search of …
Does that fracture imbue year-end lists with importance? Many movies came out in 2023, but here are the 10 you must see? In a way, absolutely — though must see for what? To enjoy the quality of the cinematic medium? Maybe, but I suspect most who come to this list will come in search of something else: to understand what going to the movies in 2023 was like.
If that’s the case, then the movie deserving of that honor above all others is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. It’s a clever movie in parts — derivative in others, probably intentionally — and though the rampant consumerism and meme-able slogans put me off, it would be foolish to deny the movie’s success and draw. That Barbie pulled audiences back to the theater (and in groups!) to over one billion dollars in box office receipts is remarkable.
And yet Barbie is not on my list. Instead, you will find that my top spot belongs to Perfect Days, a quiet day-in-the-life drama about a Tokyo toilet cleaner. Written and directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, Perfect Days might be the only movie on this list I truly wanted to live in. I know many people get career advice and spiritual inspiration from movies — I am one — but Perfect Days was the first time I walked out of a movie wondering if I should cash it all in and move my wife and cat to Japan and clean public toilets. We would be so happy.
Wenders is 78, has worked since the early 1970s and made some of the 20th century’s best movies. Yet this late-career work stands a little taller — ditto for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. While reviewing The Boy and the Heron for this paper, I fixated on the notion that this might be the last movie Miyazaki will make. What baggage does that bring to the movie, and how does that color The Boy’s final moment? When I reread that review, it became clear that those words weren’t intended solely for Miyazaki but for Scorsese and Wenders as well.
A theme emerges
Perfect Days takes place in the modern day, but the movie’s style is rooted in the mid-20th century films of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirô Ozu. Killers of the Flower Moon takes place in 1920s and ’30s Oklahoma, while The Boy and the Heron is set in 1940s Japan. Filmmaking in this century is still grappling with the preceding one — the one that molded and shaped everything about today, from art to war to even a doll that rearranged how women saw themselves. Gerwig visualizes the creation of Barbie through the language of 2001: A Space Odyssey for comedy and context. Both the doll and the movie are foundational in one way or another. And both cast shadows so long we’re still looking for sunlight.
I’m making this all sound pretty dour. That’s unfair because I loved going to the movies this past year. The titles on this year’s list form an ecstasy I didn’t see coming. None more so than Perfect Days, but also The Taste of Things, a sumptuous tale of a French gourmand from Tran Anh Hung; Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ weird and wild spin on Frankenstein, social consciousness and sexual relations; and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude’s clever ding at soulless capitalism.
Then there’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a movie loaded with voltage the way Oppenheimer is loaded with bombast. Walking out of those theaters left me dizzy.
Also included on this year’s list in the 10-spot are two short subjects: The Swan and Incident. The former is one of four shorts director Wes Anderson made from Roald Dahl stories. And while they work together beautifully as a collection, The Swan’s narrative prowessleft me breathless. Ditto for Bill Morrison’s Incident — possibly the hardest title on this list to track down — an analysis of a 2018 police shooting of a Black man from multiple security and body cameras. It’s an astounding work that shows viewers that the deeper you peer, the less you understand. Which happens to be the crux of Celine Song’s Past Lives, a movie that opens with two voices wondering what they are looking at and ends so conflicted that even the characters in the story don’t know.
Like the unnamed voyeurs in Past Lives, I spent 2023 watching and wondering. And the more I saw, the less I knew. It’s all too much to consider at once. So I return to the list in hopes that the all-too-much will become manageable, containable, understandable. It might not. The list omits so many, some that may even stand the grand test of time. Often, we look back at the past and laugh at how small the world must have seemed then. But the world is never small, neither then nor now. It’s beyond comprehension. And while 2023 may have belonged to Barbie, these are the movies that belonged to me.
Michael J. Casey’s Top 10 Movies of 2023
- Perfect Days
- Killers of the Flower Moon
- The Taste of Things
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
- The Boy and the Heron
- Poor Things
- Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
- Past Lives
- Oppenheimer
- The Swan / Incident
