Movies of 2023: Barbenheimer and beyond

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon – the ballyhooed simultaneous release of Oppenheimer and Barbie, two expensive and well-acted films with sophisticated political messages rendered by leading auteurs – afforded 2023 the façade of audacity. But they came out during the writers’ strike, which signaled, if somewhat below the radar trained on the films, the uneasy and uncertain relationship between streaming and Hollywood. The legacy studios still leaned on predictably risk-averse and creatively impoverished franchise superhero fare, sequels, and star-studded action flicks. Thanks to platform offerings, foreign films, and indies, though, 2023 did turn out to be a good year for movies.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, though both cluttered and narratively fitful, are worthy and intelligent films, the former an animated lesson on the lethal pettiness of history and the latter a lilting third-wave feminist tract that manages to retain wistful affection for the eponymous sex-object doll. The other big English-language movies that stand out are Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, projecting the zombie-like greed and ignorance of white America against the fatalistic stoicism of Native Americans, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, fashioning a monster-of-Frankenstein-like character who embraces life from a blank moral slate and improbably makes choices that favor and flatter humanity, though with a hard edge that make her seem all the more human. Perhaps the most impressive film of the year, however, is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, mainly in German – a brilliantly imagined, defiantly naturalistic dramatization of the genocidal lunacy nested in Nazi Gemütlichkeit and a cautionary essay on the persistent human capacity for normalizing the horrific.

Several inventive and insightful crime movies that reached American screens last year refreshed the genre. They include three French films – Anatomy of a Fall from Justine Triet, The Innocent from Louis Garrel, and The Night of the Twelfth from Dominik Moll – as well as William Oldroyd’s neo-Hitchcockian nonpareil Eileen, made in the USA. Several extraordinary movies offered jarringly edifying takes on adult romance: Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Todd Haynes’s May December, and Celine Song’s Past Lives. All three present realistic characters capable of quiet decency; what a novel idea. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which centers on Leonard Bernstein’s marriage, also falls broadly into this category. Regarding technology’s toll on humankind, Oppenheimer was hardly alone, joined by the smaller-bore BlackBerry from Matt Johnson, a crassly funny look at the first smart-ish phone’s rise and fall, and Dream Scenario from Kristoffer Borgli, a keenly twisted riff on social media and the loss of privacy that boasts Nicolas Cage’s best performance in over 20 years. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City coyly complements the almost histrionically urgent Oppenheimer by encapsulating the desensitizing and displacing properties of the Nuclear Age: everyone in it is either blasé or solipsistic. One unique coming-of-age movie materialized in the form of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, the fraught story of a gay young man told from three points of view with wrenching candor.

Finally, several exceptional movies about art and artists emerged. Christian Petzold’s deftly orchestrated Afire lays into a narcissistic but idealistic young white novelist’s arrested development. In Cord Jefferson’s hilarious American Fiction,an idealistic but desperate old Black novelist cynically gives in to wokeness. Kelly Reichardt’s typically astute and arch Showing Up features a frustrated and weary mid-career painter whose disaffection is somehow blunted by an art community that is as comforting as it is exasperating. Could be she’s onto something.

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.