Image provided by Variety.
On March 10, the 96th Academy Awards (Oscars) will take place, honoring the best films of 2023. As usual, the public eye is primarily focused on the prestigious Best Picture award, which has attracted additional attention due to a particularly strong crop of films. Here, I’ll share my personal ranking of the ten nominees for Best Picture — and why they’ve earned that spot.
10. Maestro
Had Maestro come out in another, less interesting, year for movies, it might well be the favorite for Best Picture. The film, which features Bradley Cooper writing, directing, and starring as legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, is pretty much a meat-and-potatoes, Oscarbait-y biopic, with a specific focus on Bernstein’s marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Maestro looks fine, and it features some great performances — while Cooper does a great job, if hindered by an impression that sounds like Jerry Seinfeld with a bad cold, Mulligan steals every scene she’s in. Still, the film just isn’t very interesting. Maestro makes few creative choices and suffers from a chronic unwillingness to take anything resembling a risk.
Here’s something that could’ve been done well: the movie opens in black and white, and later transitions to color. The same technique was used in Oppenheimer and Poor Things to much stronger effect; in the former, it was used to communicate time in a movie lacking linear structure, and in the latter, it signaled an instance of major character growth. Maestro, meanwhile, transitions to color when it reaches the moment in time where most movies were made in color, as the effect would’ve clashed with the look of the ‘60s. This sort of filmmaking permeates Maestro; almost every creative decision makes sense at the surface level, with minimal exploration or experimentation.
While I am willing to forgive flat direction if the film remains compelling, Maestro doesn’t manage to do that. I went into it knowing next to nothing about Bernstein and curious to see what made him so great. Maestro isn’t interested in answering that question; aside from one scene, audiences aren’t ever shown his musical genius, and his political activism is totally absent. While this omission could be understood as part of the decision to focus on his marriage, there’s little substance there; Bernstein and his wife meet, they have a happy marriage, then he starts cheating on her with men (shown via him smiling at a few male characters; in the immortal words of Norm Macdonald, not gay enough!) and they start looking at each other sadly. What compelled him to be unfaithful towards the woman he genuinely loves? It’s hard to tell, really. The best romantic dramas function as intimate portraits of a couple and allow us to understand the motivation behind every action they take. Maestro, by contrast, feels more like watching two distant acquaintances drift apart and audiences are left trying to work together what happened on their own, which makes for a pretty dull film.
9. Poor Things
If there existed an Academy Award for most ambition, Poor Things would be a shoo-in. The latest film from acclaimed Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things is full of mesmerizing sets, outstanding costuming, and some incredibly creative directing, with a bold fisheye lens in one of its first scenes. Unfortunately, all of this is in service of an incredibly weak screenplay and downright painful pacing — the same story is essentially repeated three separate times.
Poor Things is easily one of the most visually impressive movies of the year, oozing with a pseudo-Victorian whimsy that’s consistently a treat to look at. The acting is also strong; Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe especially shine, with Stone as Bella Baxter, a newly-resurrected young woman who rapidly increases in intelligence as the film progresses — she nearly breaks RDJ’s iconic (and unprintable) Tropic Thunder advice to Ben Stiller before becoming increasingly witty, and this character growth never comes off as rushed or unnatural.
Unfortunately, none of this is enough to save the film from itself. Despite being a comedy, Poor Things is at best intermittently funny. Conservatively, 40% of its jokes can be boiled down to “rich and sophisticated people swearing,” which is funny the first time, but not so much the twentieth. Repetition on a much greater scale, however, is Poor Things’ real Achilles heel. A fairly basic story — Baxter meets a man, he turns out to want to control her, and she’s able to escape — is repeated three separate times with three separate men. Consequently, the entire third half of the movie amounts to little more than sitting around and waiting for what we know is going to happen, which quickly turns into simply waiting for the movie to end.
8. Barbie
I know, I know, the eighth spot seems low. To be clear, unlike both Maestro and Poor Things, I did think Barbie was a good movie, and its placement this low speaks more to the strength of other releases than any issues with the film. Director Greta Gerwig does an outstanding job depicting both the fantastical world of Barbie Land and the ordinary world of Los Angeles — some clever lighting tricks really accentuate this. The film’s use of color is another standout, with an absurdly vibrant palette that never registers as forced or unusual. There were also some strong moments of comedy (the “beach-off” joke is one for the ages), an extremely clever soundtrack, and a few shoutouts to the cinephiles in the crowd, which were appreciated.
From a purely conceptual standpoint, Barbie can’t have been easy to pull off — how does a director turn a movie about a product into something more than an extended commercial without, well, not making a movie about a product? That Barbie avoids this is a testament to the abilities of Gerwig and assistant screenwriter Noah Baumbach. The pair came close to nailing it, with occasional winks at the camera and a strong original narrative that incorporates the role of the Barbie doll as a product while managing to tell its own story. Robbie and Gosling also shine as Barbie and Ken respectively, bringing complexity into two characters that seem destined for shallowness.
That said, Barbie stumbles towards the end. I won’t say too much so as to not spoil the film, but the ultimate plan to save Barbie Land is eye-rollingly simplistic; a large part of it boils down to talking women into feminism by reminding them of their accomplishments, with little social commentary of substance. There’s a reason 12 Angry Men takes an hour and a half to show the process of changing someone’s mind — when you do it in one minute, it comes off as rushed. The pacing is also somewhat choppy; the threat to Barbie Land is introduced late enough that its rescue is all but forced into feeling rushed no matter the solution. Barbie’s a fun comedy, but if you’re looking for films with something more to say (or with any serious drama), I’d direct you to the superior Killers of the Flower Moon and Anatomy of a Fall.
7. American Fiction
The Academy is sometimes accused of snubbing comedies, especially less ambitious or experimental ones, and especially when it comes to the Best Picture nomination. Consequently, it’s always special when one does manage to get the nom — Juno in 2008, Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1995, and (my personal favorite) The Full Monty in 1998. American Fiction, the mid-budget debut of director Cord Jefferson, will (like the films listed above) almost certainly not win the prize, but be remembered fondly for decades to come.
An adaptation of the 2001 novel Erasure, American Fiction follows Dr. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a genius writer and college professor who writes an exaggerated parody of the “Black” books he perceives as insulting and racist, only to find that it proves extraordinarily successful with people who aren’t in on the joke. If that sounds like a familiar plot (most directly comparable to Spike Lee’s Bamboozled) to you, you’ll be surprised — the film is primarily a character study of Monk himself, examining his familial conflict, struggles forming connections with others, and view of society. Jeffrey Wright delivers what’s easily one of the best performances of the year, delivering a layered portrayal that perfectly captures the complex nature of the character.
There are some clear flaws, of course. The direction is flat to the point that the film occasionally looks more like an extended TV episode than a theatrically released movie. The more dramatic parts of the story, meanwhile, don’t always work quite as well as one would hope; Wright’s performance does a lot to carry some fairly unremarkable drama beats. On the whole, though, American Fiction is well worth the watch, if only because it’s easily the funniest film on this list.
6. Past Lives
Past Lives, the directorial debut of playwright Celine Song, is a semi-autobiographical romance that tells a deeply familiar story about the return of the past and the universal question “what if?” The film starts from a simple premise: in the year 2000, Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) were two 12 year olds in Seoul with a budding romantic interest in each other. This connection was cut short, however, when Na Young’s family immigrated to the United States, with her changing her name to Nora Moon. They grew apart in the intervening decades (despite a brief reconnection over the internet), with Nora marrying an American writer, Arthur Zaturansky (John Magaro). Now, 24 years later, Hae Sung visits America to meet with Nora again. It seems like a fairly cliche plot (a fact which is lampshaded within the film) that reads as being closer to Hallmark than A24. But don’t let that fool you — Past Lives is a mature and intelligent drama that packs more of an emotional punch than most romances can ever manage; I wouldn’t be surprised if Past Lives winds up talked about in a similar voice as some of the genre legends it’s clearly influenced by, such as Brief Encounter, In the Mood For Love, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the latter of which is given an explicit shout-out here.
Key to the strength of Past Lives is its ability to portray fundamentally rational characters while maintaining the drama inherent in its premise. This is not the kind of romance where hearts are changed by boomboxes or where people move back to their childhood hometown a week after meeting Mr. Right. When Nora talks with Hae Sung on Facebook as a college student, she doesn’t abandon her dreams to be with him. When Arthur feels intimidated by Nora’s closeness with Hae Sung, he doesn’t yell or try to force him out of the picture. We get the sense that the story we’re watching is not the moments that define these characters' lives, but simply one deeply emotional time out of many. This creates, as I see it, a far more compelling story than one featuring grand romantic gestures and epic monologues about true love. The realistic nature of the characters leads to a real sense that we know these people, allowing us to naturally empathize with them on a very deep level.
This also requires, of course, great performances, which Past Lives certainly delivers. Greta Lee is the standout, with an exceptional portrayal of code-switching and a heart-melting emotionality, but both Yoo and Magaro are very effective; Magaro conveys a sort of rational vulnerability that’s hard to put into words. My main criticism of Past Lives, though, is the fairly tight 106 minute runtime, which doesn’t give us enough time to let these emotions stew; there were, unfortunately, a few moments where it felt like the plot moved too quickly, and as strong as the characterization was, there was a definite sense that some additional scenes of characterization would make the film that much stronger. Still, Past Lives remains one of the best romances of the last few years, and unquestionably one worth watching.
5. Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is French, the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and distributed by NEON, but don’t let that fool you — it’s a straightforward, narrative-based, and wholly entertaining courtroom thriller, closer to Hitchcock than anything arthouse. Anatomy follows Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a woman who is accused of murdering her husband after he is found dead from a fall off their balcony, and the subsequent trial, where she is defended by the skilled lawyer Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud). The fate of the case increasingly begins to seem dependent on the testimony of her deaf son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), who found the husband;s body after returning from a walk with his guide dog, Snoop (Messi). Like its namesake, Otto Preminger’s brilliant 1959 Anatomy of a Murder, there’s a focus on the questionable realities of case law; Renzi points out early on that, while the fall could simply have been accidental, the defense needs to portray it as a suicide so as to build a compelling narrative for the jury.
While the premise is, again, seemingly nothing new, it’s elevated by outstanding work from both Hüller and writer/director Justine Triet. Hüller breathes life into the character of Sandra Voyter, showcasing both the complexities of her relationship and her emotional struggles as the case slowly transforms from a murder trial to a family affair. Triet, meanwhile, keeps us constantly on our toes, with a slow and steady rising of tensions, writing that consistently leaves us wonder about the truth of the case, and a plot that manages to make several points about gender, marital relations, and the experience of being “foreign” (Voyter is a German immigrant) without ever drawing the focus away from the eponymous fall and its aftermath. Additionally worth singling out is Messi’s performance as Snoop, which is easily the best canine performance I’ve ever seen — better than The Thing, even! On the whole, it’s just a great film, and one that I can sincerely say I’d recommend to anyone — whether you’re a seasoned cinephile or just looking to have some fun, you’ll get what you want out of Anatomy of a Fall.
4. Killers of the Flower Moon
How does Martin Scorsese do it? The man’s been reliably putting out films since before either of my parents were born, and not a single one has been culturally given the dreaded label “bad” (the closest would likely be Boxcar Bertha, a Roger Corman-produced exploitation film I have not seen and am thus in no position to judge). From iconic gangster films to brilliant character studies, there’s something for everyone in his filmography. While Killers of the Flower Moon might seem like a western (and thus, a break from tradition), make no mistake — this is a crime film through and through, and it might be the most heinous crime Scorsese’s depicted yet.
Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the Osage Indian Murders, a series of 60+ murders of members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma as part of a plot to gain control of the right to oil discovered on the Osage Indian Reservation. Visually, it’s incredibly impressive, with Scorsese oscillating between grand-scale landscape shots straight out of a Hudson River Valley School painting and a more intimate, muted style in scenes focusing on the two main characters, murder participant Ernest Burkhart (Leo DiCaprio) and his Osage wife, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). Like in any good historical piece, meanwhile, Scorsese captures a strong “on the ground” feeling; Killers makes the turn-of-the-century Osage Reservation come alive, which only strengthens the tragedy as death seeps in.
That said, by far the biggest standout in Killers is Lily Gladstone, who delivers an almost hypnotically powerful performance as Mollie Kyle — easily the best performance of the year. Like the movie as a whole, Gladstone’s performance is not overtly emotional or dramatic — it’s subtle, reflective, and deliberately understated. Their brief smiles and the sadness in their eyes delivers more insight into the character than some actors can manage in an entire movie. Killers as a whole mirrors this subtlety; while some critics argued that a whodunnit setup that waited to reveal Ernest’s participation in the murder would be more narratively compelling, that’s not what the film is aiming for. Instead, it’s a brilliant, meditative, and distant film portrayal of a disgusting crime and, more broadly, America’s original sin.
3. The Zone of Interest
The question of the “right way” to depict the Holocaust on film is one that’s been grappled with for decades. There's the sweeping documentary Shoah, totaling over nine hours of interviews and aiming to show the Holocaust in its entirety. There are attempts at tragicomedy, like Life is Beautiful. Schindler’s List, easily the most well-known holocaust movie, tells a dramatic true story while also depicting constant and brutal atrocities in detail. The Zone of Interest, the latest film from the renowned English director Jonathan Glazer, makes a unique choice — it never once shows the genocide directly. Zone is based on the story of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, who attempts to build a life with his wife (Sandra Hüller) and children in their newly built house, separated from the camp only by a wall. The focus remains on the family through the entire film; we do not once get a look behind the wall. That said, the reality of the Holocaust permeates every scene — conversations are interrupted by gunshots, cries, and, perhaps most horrifyingly, an ambiguous and mechanical grinding. At times, too, it enters Höss’s personal life in a way even he cannot ignore, in some of the most terrifying and gripping scenes in the film.
To the extent that one exists, it is difficult to describe the actual plot of The Zone of Interest. Höss and his family don’t change, and we don’t expect them to. Instead, we’re treated to a series of exceedingly banal scenes of domestic life, made horrifying by the reality of what we know is happening behind it all. There’s a clear influence from slow and experimental films like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, with the key difference being that every shallow conversation and glance of the eye is punctuated with a devastatingly subtle reminder of the systematic extermination of millions — and the extreme culpability of everyone we see. While critics may argue that focusing on the perpetrators in this matter is in poor taste, The Zone of Interest clearly knows what it’s doing. It’s unglamorous and lacking an ounce of sentimentality or even excitement. Höss talks about killing millions not with the fanatical passion of a Hitler speech but in the same tone you might use reading a shopping list; Glazier captures both the banality and the evil of genocide in virtually every scene.
I saw The Zone of Interest at the AMC here in Saratoga. Few people were in attendance — me, my friend, and two older couples. One of the couples put their feet up on the seats in front of them. They whispered to each other throughout the movie. They laughed when Höss’s son raised his arm in a Nazi salute, and again when he was shown to be playing with golden teeth. I was naturally annoyed at the time, but looking back, it was a good reminder of how willing we can be to ignore evil when it isn’t right in front of us.
2. Oppenheimer
While Oppenheimer wasn’t my number-one film this year, it’s almost certainly the most likely to win Best Picture, having already taken home the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama and the Best Film award at the BAFTAs. All of this, of course, is deserved. There’s a strong case to be made that it’s director Christopher Nolan’s best movie so far (no small feat) — Oppenheimer is impeccably crafted, with a number of outstanding performances and technical feats. Particularly effective are Cillian Murphy (J. Robert Oppenheimer) and Robert Downey Jr. (Lewis Strauss), who both capture their respective characters extremely well.
Oppenheimer’s greatest feat, however, is in immersing the viewer in the life of its main character. Weaker biopics, like Maestro, fail at this; they tend to focus mainly on telling a story that happens to be true, and consequently fail to capture the depth of the person being portrayed. Those like Oppenheimer and (my favorite biopic), Mishima: A Life in 4 Chapters (the director of which, Paul Schrader, praised Oppenheimer as the best film of the century) don’t just see the subject as a protagonist — they’re the lens which the whole universe of the film passes through. When Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bombed, we don’t see the actual impact of the bombs, but rather Oppenheimer’s own imagined version of what those incinerated by his weapon look like. When he’s aggressively interrogated by HUAC, we’re disoriented by blinding lights. Scenes farther in the future, after Oppenheimer has fallen victim to McCarthyism, are in greyscale. This film isn’t just about J. Robert Oppenheimer, it’s cast in his image.
Oppenheimer also captures the epic feeling Nolan has gained a reputation for with films like Interstellar and Inception, which is certainly harder to do with a biopic about a scientist than a movie about saving mankind or spies entering dreams. Despite the individual focus, Nolan successfully conveys the weight that Oppenheimer’s discovery had on the world, perhaps most powerfully in the film’s ending. One small criticism — while epic orchestral music is a Christopher Nolan staple at this point, the mixing in Oppenheimer occasionally makes it difficult to hear the dialog, which is problematic especially in a character-driven movie. Still, Oppenheimer is an outstanding film, and you will hear no complaints from me if it walks away with the Oscar.
1. The Holdovers
I’ll pull back the curtain for a second: these rankings are not exactly the result of a scientific process. They’re as reflective of my opinion as is reasonably possible, but tastes change and choices are reconsidered. Case in point: I originally put Anatomy of a Fall over Killers of the Flower Moon; it wasn’t until I wrote up my thoughts on Killers that I realized how much the film stuck with me. There’s also an obvious complication when comparing such a diverse slate of movies — Barbie shares basically nothing with The Zone of Interest aside from the medium. Keeping all that in mind, I knew from the second the credits rolled that, barring a genuine miracle, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers would wind up my favorite film of the year.
The Holdovers is billed as a Christmas movie, down to the ornament on the poster and the cheeky (if inaccurate) “Discomfort and Joy” tagline, not to mention the setting, an old-money and perpetually snowy ‘70s New England boarding school perhaps beat only in Christmassy aura by the North Pole itself. But Christmas is hardly important to the plot. All the holiday really does, story-wise, is unite our three protagonists: brainy yet troubled slacker Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), his strict, intellectual, and curmudgeonly Classics teacher, and Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the school cook, whose son was killed in Vietnam. The trio makes up the titular “Holdovers,” who find themselves having to spend a lonely winter break on campus.
What makes The Holdovers a true Christmas movie, in my eyes, is not what actually happens but how everything that happens feels. Where a film like A Christmas Story aims for the magical and saccharine feeling of childhood Christmas cheer, The Holdovers masterfully shows us adult Christmas — occasionally melancholy and crushingly realistic, but still capturing shining moments of a deep, almost indescribable joy and beauty hiding behind thick layers of film grain and tweed.
Like Past Lives, The Holdovers benefits immensely from its realism. The ‘70s New England setting is intricately crafted, to the point of replacing the logos at the start of the film with retro ones (both created for the film; neither Miramax nor Focus Features go back that far). Its characters, meanwhile, are intensely human. They take time to open up to each other, and don’t solve every problem in their lives over a few weeks in December and January. They’re flawed, but for wholly understandable reasons, and awareness of these flaws only bolsters the empathy you feel with them. As in life, the most important moments aren’t always the most dramatic, with subtle conversations being some of the key scenes in the entire film.
The performances of Giamatti, Sessa, and Randolph, meanwhile, are all worthy of discussion. Sessa, in his film debut, delivers a truly outstanding performance of a young student who struggles to connect with his peers and who yearns for the affection he can’t find in his distant parents. Randolph’s performance, meanwhile, is genuinely tragic, capturing the anger, sadness, and, ultimately, numbness of grief. The standout, though, is Giamatti, who’s easily my pick for Best Actor. Every little facet of Paul Hunham is explored — his spite towards the privileged and entitled students he teaches, his genuine passion for the Classics, his loneliness and desire for human connection, and the roots of his stoicism and strict nature. These performances, meanwhile, all build on each other as the characters grow closer; a simple handshake at the film’s end carries a frankly incredible amount of weight. Ultimately, the pure emotional power of The Holdovers, combined with its impeccable crafting, is enough to propel it to my choice for Best Picture, my favorite film of the year, and, in all honesty, my favorite film of the 2020s.