A Fresh Round of Lists and Awards

When the more than sixty members of the NSFC cast their ballots for Best Picture, Past Lives came out on top—but it was a squeaker, as Celine Song’s debut barely edged out over Best Director-winner Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. “Every setting, every face, every instance of body language, every color, rings perfectly true in Past Lives,” writes film historian Luke McKernan about his favorite film of the year, and Past Lives also tops lists from the Guardian’s critics and Michael Nordine. Writing for Talkhouse, actor Daniel Brühl calls the film “sheer perfection.”

IndieWire has gathered lists from thirty-seven directors, and for Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse), The Zone of Interest is “unique, impeccable, and utterly consuming filmmaking. A perfect and staggering articulation of the banality of evil.” It’s #1 on the lists from Tim Grierson and Scott Tobias. Allison Anders (Border Radio) singles out Sandra Hüller, who not only stars in Glazer’s film but also in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. “Both films are troubling and gorgeously made, and call on us to be more, to look beyond our illusions of what we see in front of us,” writes Anders. “And the conduit is this utterly remarkable actress. In each role she is steadfast in her commitment to her character’s inner and outer life. We have not seen the likes of her in ages.”

Hüller won Best Actress from the NSFC and Anatomy of a Fall won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Non-English Language, which was less of a surprise than the Globe for Best Screenplay. Cowritten by Triet and Arthur Harari and topping the list from contributors to Cineuropa, Anatomy is one of five films that Christian Petzold names as favorites in the collection of thirty-five directors’ lists put together for Films in Frame by Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal. For the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Michael J. Anderson, Petzold’s own Afire is the best film of 2023: “A writer, director, and actors’ film equally, Afire adds some of Petzold’s most lyrical and surreal images, the year’s most vibey needle drop, and a final act narrational recalibration that is worthy of the filmmaker’s 2014 masterpiece, Phoenix.”

The NSFC’s choice for Best Film Not in the English Language is Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, which tops two major polls, the annual La Internacional Cinéfila overseen by Roger Koza and desistfilm’s. “No director can make you laugh and sob at the same time like Kaurismäki,” writes Sukhdev Sandhu for Prospect, and “somehow, with bone-dry wit, skeins of tenderness, and his ability to make working-class Helsinki seem one of the world’s great cinematic cities, Kaurismäki fashions a pitch-perfect romance about hope in a time of hopelessness.”

Samy Burch won Best Screenplay from the NSFC, and Charles Melton, who costars with Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman in Todd Haynes’s May December, won Best Supporting Actor. The #1 film of the year for the editors at Little White Lies is “a discussion-point movie par excellence and another crowning achievement in the career of its director. Our only prayer now is that the award season set take notice.”

The Globes did not. May December went home empty-handed on Sunday evening, and if you missed the ceremony, Slate’s Sam Adams will fill you in: “Sunday’s broadcast was meant to be the debut of the new, improved Globes, and while they might have been marginally more respectable, they were also something the show’s former incarnation never was: boring.”

The new voter base of 300 international journalists—forty-seven percent female and only forty percent white, as Guy Lodge points out in the Observer—went all in for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, awarding Globes for Best Motion Picture, Drama; Best Director, Motion Picture; Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama (Cillian Murphy); Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture (Robert Downey Jr.); and Best Original Score, Motion Picture (Ludwig Göransson).

“A conversation-driven three-hour biopic that moves like a thriller and hums with the dreadful ominousness of a horror story, Nolan’s subjective character study of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a layered treatise on ambition, ingenuity, regret, honor, and treachery,” writes Nick Schager at the Daily Beast. “Shrewdly utilizing the famous faces of an all-star cast, Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame keep the film flowing across multiple time periods, compounding past and present tenses in a headlong rush of information and incidents,” writes Sean Burns at WBUR. “How often do you get this excited while watching people argue over security protocols and math?”

Oppenheimer’s accidental twin, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, scored two Globes, one of them richly deserved: Best Original Song, Motion Picture, for Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For?” And the other one? Cinematic and Box Office Achievement? It’s been giving this meme a workout. But it’s the “movie of the year for me,” declares independent producer John Wyver, adding that he finds it “outrageously enjoyable, and extraordinary in being a film that critiques capitalism and the patriarchy from inside the system (discuss!) and achieves an eye-wateringly significant box office.”

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things won Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, and Emma Stone won Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy. Poor Things is “a comedy of heart and mind, weirdness and womanhood, from a director not previously known for his sense of humor and an actress not previously known for her daring,” writes Ty Burr. “What we have here is a steampunk Candide reverse-engineered for an era that has lost faith in everything and a movie that for all of its wide-angle frippery and furious jumping is splendidly rational.” It’s also the #1 film of the year at ScreenAnarchy.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon had a fine but not great weekend. Lily Gladstone won the Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama, and the NSFC gave its award for Best Cinematography to Rodrigo Prieto. “I’m astonished by the ways Scorsese continues to push himself and his audience in this phase of his career,” writes Philip Concannon, and Killers also tops the lists from Jason Bailey,Glenn Kenny, and Keith Phipps. 

Andrew Scott, the star of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, won the NSFC’s award for Best Actor, and two Globes went to Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, one for Paul Giamatti and the other for Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who also won Best Supporting Actress from the NSFC. At Talkhouse, filmmaker Tom Gilroy calls the film “an oversized present wrapped in Dead Poets Society paper and Good Will Hunting ribbon, but what’s inside is pure Samuel Beckett.”

The Globe for Best Motion Picture, Animated, went to Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which arrives at the end of David Ehrlich’s video countdown of his twenty-five favorites, always a highlight in the first days of each new year. The NSFC gave its award for Best Nonfiction Film to Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros and presented a Special Citation for a Film Awaiting U.S. Distribution to Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, which, for Filipe Furtado, is “a very wise, very touching movie” that “moves and shakes me deeply.”

If you don’t yet have your fill of lists, you’ll find more from contributors to the Arts Desk, the Arts Fuse,Bright Wall/Dark Room,Hammer to Nail (more), In Review Online,Screen (more), and the Toronto Film Review. You’ll have seen Barack Obama’s list, and more titles and broader overviews of 2023 come from Geoff Andrew,Peter Bradshaw,Zach Campbell,Mike D’Angelo,Roderick Heath,Robert Horton,Wendy Ide,Craig Keller,Peter Labuza,James Slaymaker,Srikanth Srinivasan,Ryan Swen, and Blake Williams.

Slate’s Movie Club wrapped over the holidays, friends of Metrograph have notes on their favorite moviegoing experiences, and Michael Sicinski writes about twenty-five “Great Experimental Films of 2023.” The Notebook invited contributors to dream up fantasy double features, pairing a favorite film from 2023 with a first-time viewing of an older film.

Kristin Thompson carries on a beloved tradition with “this year’s contribution to the inexplicably popular series of ten-best lists for ninety years ago.” Among the best films of 1933 are Yasujiro Ozu’s Dragnet Girl, Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living, and Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. At the BFI, Pamela Hutchinson celebrates ten films turning 100 this year, including F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, and Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped.