#films of the year

[dyouknowwhatimean]

my favorite first watches of 2023

@senso1954 tagged me in an all favorites game but i just wanted to do the movies❣

secret ceremony (1968) dir. joseph losey

midnight cowboy (1969) dir. john schlesinger

lemora: a child's tale of the supernatural (1973) dir. richard blackburn

fanny och alexander (1982) dir. ingmar bergman

tampopo (1985) dir. jūzō itami

singapore sling (1990) dir. nikos nikolaidis

freeway (1996) dir. matthew bright

slums of beverly hills (1998) dir. tamara jenkins

the departed (2006) dir. martin scorsese

#not tagging anyone but i'd love to see everyone's fav first watches❣❣ so do it and say i tagged u if u wanna #films of the year #own post

[woundthatswallows]

@horrifically tagged me to post my top 9 watches from 2023 which i will also pop in my films of the year tag as i was gonna do this anyways so it's perfect 🖤 not ranked, but the lady eve is 100% my favorite thing i watched for the first time

the lady eve (1941) dir preston sturges, daughters of darkness (1971) dir harry kümel, the beyond (1981) dir lucio fulci, hedwig and the angry inch (2001) dir john cameron mitchell, lilja 4-ever (2002) dir lukas moodysson, design for living (1933) dir ernst lubistch, it happened one night (1934) dir frank capra, the servant (1963) dir joseph losey, inland empire (2006) dir david lynch

#films of the year #films of the year 2023 #tag game

[c86]

My favourite films of 2022. As always, still plenty of new releases to catch up on alongside my endless watchlist

[ Bicycle Thieves, Nighthawks, Father of My Children, You Won't Be Alone, Umberto D, Hold Me Tight, Aftersun, The Wolf House, The Young and the Damned, Drive My Car, Petite Maman, Naked Childhood ]

#film #poster #watchlist #films of the year #favourites

[disappointingyet]

This is my now traditional list of favourite movies of the year. These are all films that – as far as I can tell – were first commercially available either in cinemas or on streaming in the UK this year. So it doesn’t include eg, Hit Man or The Holdovers. Other than that, these are solely being judged on: did I like them?

As I did last year, I’ve also written about other stuff I have seen that you might be interested in – which this time turned out to be so long I split it into two: Broadly Mainstream & Documentaries and Arthouse & Indie.

2023, then, the year of Barbenheimer (I saw Barbie, didn’t see Oppenheimer). And the year of the great superhero box office crash. Meanwhile, there were two austere French courtroom dramas critics loved, two films about young women born in Korea but raised elsewhere trying to make sense of their identities that also got excited reviews plus an avalanche of movies featuring cast members of Chicago restaurant TV drama The Bear.

I saw plenty of films, and there weren’t many I think I missed out on. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon felt like a film to watch with friends but we couldn’t sort out a time. Eileen and Dream Scenario sounded interesting but non-essential, but BlackBerry I very much did want to see but couldn’t get round to.  Saltburn generated a fair amount of debate, but by most accounts is precisely Ripley x Brideshead set in 2006 with tunes by Flo Rida and MGMT by the director of Promising Young Woman, and that’s a film I don’t need to see. 

Some near misses from this list: The Innocent, Alcarrás and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Oh, yeah, and maybe the most fun I had in a cinema for what was officially a 2023 release was seeing the 4K etc restoration of Stop Making Sense, but a bit of a scrub-up does not equal an actual new movie. And on that note, here’s the list:

1. Kuolleet Lehdet (Fallen Leaves)

This is recommended cautiously – there are other films on this list I would steer most people towards before this one. But it is a movie I absolutely loved. I think it’s the 18th feature film made by director Aki Kaurismäki in a 40-year career, and easily in his five best. If you’ve never seen a Kaurismäki film, the easiest way to describe them is like Jim Jarmusch movies but Finnish. And if you haven’t even seen a Jarmusch film? Well, his movies are slow (but crucially short!). Most of the characters dress like they are living in the late 1950s or early ’60s and drink in bars that seem to come from that time too, but the films are set in the present day. The characters are usually somewhat on the margins of society and often somewhat lonely. There’s not a lot of dialogue. And, this is very important, they are funny as well as melancholy. In short, this is a very distinctive world that you’re likely to find either very appealing or pretty baffling.

Fallen Leaves is a simple story about a woman and a man who meet and have a series of misconnections while other stuff is happening in their lives. It’s very lovely but if you lose patience within the first 10 minutes, I get it, I really do. But I think it’s great. 

Full review here

2. Past Lives

We open with someone speculating about the two men and a woman drinking together in a New York bar at 4am – who are they to each other? Then we are whisked back to Seoul a couple of decades earlier, and gradually make our way to that late night and learn who Na Young/Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) are. Céline Song’s drama is about friendship and love but also very much about the trauma of (bourgeois) emigration – the sense that not only did you leave a place and its people behind, you left a version of yourself there.

It’s an elegant, restrained yet emotionally raw film. I was going to say it feels in places like a three-hander but would be to forget Hae Sung’s drinking buddies, who provide welcome comic relief. And when your quibbles are as nit-picky as ‘maybe one too many magic-hour shots’, then you’re talking a seriously good movie.

3. Rye Lane

Delightful romantic comedy that manages to both play by the rules of the genre and feel fresh. Girl meets boy at an art show and they spend a day and evening wandering around together and getting into low-stakes misadventures. Set and very tangibly filmed in places I know extremely well* and does so without triggering my ageing South Londoner’s prickly defensiveness.  (*In my review, I say that the geography is all plausible. Recently I had dinner with friends who live locally and have seen the film, and they were not buying into the idea that you would buy hot food at Brixton Market and eat it in Brockwell Park – approx 15 minutes walk away. Which I guess makes them even more South London than me...)

Full review here

(Disney +)

4. Fremont

Afghan interpreter for the US military tries to get to grips with life in California. Gruelling social realist drama about trauma and exile? Uplifting/flag-waving account of the power of living free? Broad culture-clash comedy? No? How about ultra low-key indie, filmed in lovely black & white, in which Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) shuffles between her job making fortune cookies and her sessions with an eccentric psychiatrist (Gregg Turkington). The b&w, the gentle eccentricity of many of the characters, how little Donya says even though she is on-screen in almost every scene, have prompted comparisons with Jim Jarmusch, which I think are fair, although there’s much less of the fetish-of-cool stuff here (also, as it happens, in none of the Jarmusch films with a sole protagonist is that character female.) Very little happens, and I really liked it.

5. Anatomie d’un chute (Anatomy Of A Fall)

Bloke falls to his death out of the window of his house up in the snowy French mountains – question is: accident, suicide, murder? If murder, the only suspect seems to be his widow (Sandra Hüller), a writer who doesn’t much like living in France, especially not in the mountains, and also doesn’t feel confident expressing herself in French (the bulk of her dialogue is in English), attitudes that doesn’t seem likely to endear her to the local media or legal system. Because, yes, this is a courtroom drama, if very much not one in the manner of John Grisham. It’s an intense, relentless film, one almost without a score (what music there is – and it’s important to the plot and the film – is mostly diegetic, but there is a little cheating on that). Hüller is very good as the protagonist we’re not meant to be sure whether to root for (although I’m inherently sympathetic to anyone who would rather be in London than stuck up a mountain, however beautiful that mountain is). A few side thoughts: the kid made me think of The Omen, the prosecutor of reality TV  judge Rob Rinder and I would have sworn blind that the defence lawyer was in some band that had an EP out on Creation Records in 1988, only the actor is about 15 years too young for that. 

(It’s a very good film.)

6. Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s latest comes with multiple levels of story within story that felt unnecessary the first time I saw it – on rewatch they made more sense. But the main narrative – of parents and their children fetched up in a sun-baked nowhere town in the 1950s – I found effective and very moving both times. Anderson’s films always have at least an undertone of sadness, but this is probably his most directly mournful picture since Moonrise Kingdom. As usual with Anderson, the cast is ridiculously stacked – Tom Hanks fits in surprisingly well – and there are actors (Ed Norton, Adrien Brody) who are vastly better in his films than they generally are in anyone else’s. I laughed, I cried – no, I really did, and I think this was the only film this year that made me do both.

7. Killers Of The Flower Moon

Is Killers Of The Flower Moon a masterful piece of film-making, a supreme example of Martin Scorsese’s novelistic ability to guide a camera to the details that bring a culture to life, featuring a luminous performance from Lily Gladstone and telling an important story? Yes. Is it a sadistically long* movie that runs you through the same incidents three and sometimes four times, one that inflicts on us many scenes of Bob De Niro and Leo DiCaprio doing that terrible Method-bore jutting lip/downturned mouth thing at each other? Yes, that too. 

It tells an ugly tale from American history – we’re in the 1920s and oil is discovered on Osage land in Oklahoma, making that nation’s members all very rich. Inevitably, tragically, a lot of white folk aren’t having that, and start scheming about how they will get their hands on the wealth. What I wasn’t expecting is that along with the murder the film’s title previews, the plot involved lots of white guys marrying Osage women. It’s fascinating and horrible and Scorsese tells it with great images and some humour and there’s great casting. But it’s still unnecessarily long (think of the span of time covered in GoodFellas – and that came in at a respectable 2hrs 26mins).

*In the debate about whether there should be intermissions in this movie, some people were saying. ‘Who are you to presume to know more about films than Scorsese and his legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker?’ Seems like a fair point… except: these are people who seemed to have thought Polar Expressing De Niro in The Irishman looked OK, so I’m saying their judgement isn’t what it was. 

8. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

By and large, the critical response to Across The Spider-Verse was split between those who felt it was even better than Into The Spider-Verse and those who thought it was good but lacked the ‘blimey, look at everything they are managing to do and oh my god it makes so much more sense to do superhero movies as animation than clunky CGI’ shock-of-the-new of the first film. The latter is basically my position: this is a very good film but Into The Spider-Verse was a near-instant classic.* ATSV is not as funny, and suffers (for me) from the fact that much of it happens at a larger scale and there’s more multiverse stuff to get your head around etc, and it ends on a cliffhanger (boo!) But it’s still easily the best big budget/action film of the year for my money.

(*Although somehow only 7th on my films of 2018 list! In retrospect, I’d move it up, but still only to maybe 3rd – 2018 turns out to have been a great year for films I like.)

9. Reality

If you are phobic to excruciating small talk, you should probably avoid this film. The dialogue comes entirely from an FBI transcript, and the agents spend a very long time trying to put their suspect at ease before finally getting to the questions about what she allegedly did. So many awkward attempted bits of connection about pet ownership and going to the gym…

It starts with Reality Winner (yes, that is the name of a real person), played by Sydney Sweeney, driving home. Before she’s out of the car, two FBI agents have come up to her window. Almost all of film is them and her standing outside her bungalow doing the prelims for the questioning and then finally going inside to interrogate her. It feels like real time but it’s not quite that. The look of the film is quite raw, there’s no score, it feels very plain although there are a couple of welcome weird touches. 

It’s an uncomfortable watch, but if you can stay with it, it’s an impressive and rewarding film.

10. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed

This documentary wants to tell you two important stories. One is about the campaign to get artistic institutions to distance themselves from the Sackler family, the generous donors who (alas) made their money from Valium and Oxycontin. The second is a history of assorted art movements and bohemian scenes of the late 20th-century US. The person whose life connects all this is the photographer Nan Goldin (the art world’s most influential figure, apparently). Goldin’s pictures are also a key part of this film’s visual appeal, and the director Laura Poitras is well of aware of that, and happy to give them the space they deserve. Quite a brutal watch, but worth it. 

Full review here

11. Wham!

The angle this documentary takes gives us the story of Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael as a benign version of Single White Female with a touch of All About Eve crossed with Pygmalion. Here, the person who has had their look and career appropriated turns out to have been coaching the impersonator and at the end wishes them well as they soar off into superstardom. 

That’s how I’ve long understood the Wham! story but this fills in the details and adds some ambiguity: Ridgeley enjoyed songwriting and being tagged the ‘talentless one’ clearly hurt him. The image choices that led some to assume George Michael was gay (many years before he came/was forced out) were actually made by his busily straight bandmate – we were right for the wrong reasons, which is to say wrong. But what I found fascinating is that once George* – who had been strong-armed by Andrew into a music career – started to understand how good he could be, he developed a Michael Jordan-esque competitive fury.

The voices of the two Wham! members provide the bulk of the narrative, added to by lots of excellent archive. The short span of Wham!’s career is a huge plus for a pop documentary - it avoids the usual problem of what to do about the later stuff only the subjects of the film care about. Just like the band, the documentary knows how to stop when the going is good.

*I can’t treat ‘Michael’ as a surname in this context.

(Netflix)

#films of the year #2023 movies #films of 2023 #films of the year 2023 #movies of 2023 #movies of the year 2023

[mysoulismylighthouse]

the baneshees of inisherin (2022)

dir. martin mcdonagh

starring: colin farrell, kerry condon, brendon gleeson, barry keoghan

#films of the year #the banshees of inisherin #colin farrell #kerry condon #brendon gleeson #martin mcdonagh #barry keoghan

[sylvies-kablooie]

i do unironically think the best artists of our generation are posting to get 20 notes and 3 reblogs btw. that fanfic with like 45 kudos is some of the best stuff ever written. those OCs you carry around have some of the richest backstories and worldbuilding someone has ever seen. please do not think that reaching only a few people when you post means your art isn't worth celebrating.

#i often wonder about how many things would be considered classic or high art had they only received the marketing #how many short films that were made for class could have been the most powerful thing you'd ever seen? if you'd seen them? #“you know the greatest films of all time were never made” etc etc #but like. these works of art ARE being made. it's just enjoyed by a smaller audience with equal impact though #i think about this one furry i used to follow on insta who had the coolest worldbuilding ever. it's been years. #thought prompted by that sketch of nimona from ten years ago that was just for a character design #posted to the creator's tumblr and now it's nominated for best animated feature film at the oscars #and by the genuine emotional reaction a fan comic made me feel. how much work had gone into it. how beautiful it was to me. #idk what to tag this but i hope whoever needs to hear it does #writing #writer #fandom #fandom culture #artist

[daincrediblegg]

OK THIS IS NOT A FUCKING DRILL EVERYONE FUCKING REPEAT AFTER ME. THIS IS WHAT YOU WILL DO WHEN YOU WATCH MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL THIS YEAR:

You will navigate to the page on disney plus (and it has to be here. Unless someone has actually uploaded the REAL movie anywhere else you cannot get it elsewhere)

BUT YOU WILL NOT HIT PLAY. You won’t do it. Because it’s NOT THE REAL VERSION OF THE FILM AND DISNEY IS FUCKING LYING TO YOU AS IT ALWAYS DOES

You will scroll down HERE. To EXTRAS instead. You MUST GO HERE. This is non -negotiable

THEN YOU WILL SCROLL DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE EXTRAS AND YOU WILL THEN HIT PLAY ON THIS BAD BOY: THE FULL LENGTH VERSION

And you will watch it. And you will thank me for having been so blind and led astray by that stupid fucking mouse. You’re welcome.

#I’m so mad everyone I’m sorry I’m going to make sure EVERYONE sees the proper version of mcc this year or die trying #literally this song is so important to the narrative and the film is so fucking hollow without it #if you grew up with disney’s bullshit version and thought it was good WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE THIS SHIT #please. please watch the REAL version of this film. it means a lot to me ok #the muppet christmas carol #for the love of god please people

[cassianandfenrysaremyboyos]

Goncharov coming third in tumblr's top 100 movies of 2023 is so damn funny. Imagine being a film studio exec who spent millions making some of the other 97 movies listed below it only to be beaten by a film that cost exactly zero dollars to make and doesn't exist

#goncharov #tumblr #goncharov 1973 #year in review #movies #film #not that studio execs care what movies people are talking about on the unprofitable website but still lmao

[soranatus]

Dreaming of Good Times

A wonderful Pokemon chinese animated short film directed by DaiWei (All Saints Street) and produced by MTJJ / HMCH studio (Legend of Hei) for Chinese New Year.

Youtube link

#chinese new year #lunar new year #pokemon #pokémon #video #animation #pokeani #short film #year of the dragon #rayquaza #pkmn #winter

[bob-the-movie-man-film-reviews]

"Flickering Dreams" Ep. 42: Films of the Year 2023.... The Best and the Very Worst!

Our #flickeringdreams Films of the Year 2023 special! With our collective view of the Best and the Worst Films of the year.

In Episode 42 of Flickering Dreams it’s our Films of the Year 2023 special! I’m joined by: Scott Forbes from The Forbes Film and TV Review on Facebook; Emma Sewell from Emma@The Movies; and The Reverend Andy Godfrey from Konnect Radio and Sorted Magazine. With additional content provided by: Dan Cook from Dan Cook Movie Reviews on Facebook.  . In this episode Bob, Emma, Scott and…

View On WordPress

#FilmsoftheYear #flickeringdreams #bob-the-movie-man #bobthemovieman #Cinema #film review #Films of the Year #Films of the Year 2023 #Flickering Dreams #Movie Review #One Man&039;s Movies #One Mann&039;s Movies #Podcast

[motherbookerblog]

2023 Year Review: the motherbooking stats

Wow, 2023 has been a pretty interesting year. So many random and awful things have happened around the world. All while I’ve been sat here reading as many books as possible. It hasn’t been my best year ever but I definitely did better in December than I expected. Having that 2-week break was a great idea. I doubt I’ll be able to do the same thing next year but I’ll try. Whatever the reason, I got…

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#Audiobooks of the year #books #books of the year #films #Films of the year #top 10 books of the year #top 10 films of the year #worst books of the year #worst films of the year #wrap-up #yearly rundown

[langernameohnebedeutung]

ngl, I'm beginning to take issue with how in conversations about anti-intellectualism almost automatically, the face of girls and women will be slapped on the problem.

#'all those tiktok girls who only like marvel films and' - why do you always say girls and women? are the guys filling opera halls instead? #'women in their mid 20s who still only read YA novels' okay sure that's an example and relevant discussions can be had #but it reminds me of the mocking tone in which people speak of 'chick-lit' to use women's interest as an indicator of lower value #while in fact women are reading more than men in EVERY single genre of fiction. Women are doing a lot of (often unpaid) labour #supporting libaries supporting theatres supporting cultural events #meanwhile there is a pretty big overlap between toxic masculinity and anti-intellectualism #(especially misogyny and homophobia) #especially when it comes to things like ballet or opera or musical or generally dance #in fact it is often the female investment in specific things that makes them less 'valuable' in general consciousness #for thousands of years the theatre was well-respected and a high form of art - and now it's a 'wife-thing' #the father who will teach his son that theatre and dance are for girls - how is that never an example for anti-intellectualism

[woundthatswallows]

fave first watches from january 2024!

shadow of a doubt (1943) dir alfred hitchcock, houseboat (1958) dir melville shavelson, easy rider (1969) dir dennis hopper, the divorcee (1930), charade (1963) dir stanley donen, night tide (1961) dir curtis harrington, nightmare alley (1947) edmund goulding, the boy friend (1971) dir ken russell, roman holiday (1953) dir william wyler

#2024 goal try to not keep posting these super late 🧍‍♀️ #films of the year #films of the year 2024

[nicostiel]

#benoit blanc failing at amogus

#knivesoutedit #glass onion #glass onion knives out #knives out #glass onion: a knives out mystery #daniel craig #benoit blanc #among us #amogus #films #movies #new year #*myedits

[disappointingyet]

These are my favourite films released in the UK in 2022 – as far as I can tell (it’s getting increasingly hard to work out what snuck out when. Taken as a whole, the list looks a bit Nordic, a bit gloomy, short on action. I’ve put together a round-up of some of the other movies I saw this year, including the critics’ favourite and at least one notorious turkey. And, as ever, there was a lot I didn’t see, because I didn’t get around to it or because I didn’t want to. Specifically, I should mention Top Gun: Maverick, which by most accounts is an excellent piece of film-making – but going to watch a sequel to a film I found excruciatingly dull and full of unappealing characters seemed kind of perverse. And The Banshees of Inisherin:  Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is unforgivable racist trash, I didn’t like In Bruges (or his brother’s film Calvary for that matter), so I’m not willing to give Camberwell’s Martin McDonagh another chance.

Anyway, on to the list (and do let me know what you think I might have enjoyed but missed).

1. Licorice Pizza 

Paul Thomas Anderson in fun mode, telling the story of an entrepreneurial teen in early 1970s LA. It’s beautifully specific, and rather than making cheap and obvious jokes  based on stereotypes of the era, it builds punchlines from history. Contains (words I never anticipated writing) a cameo from Bradley Cooper that’s just gobsmacking.

Full review here

2. Hytti nro 6 (Compartment No6)

This is a Finnish train movie set in super-bleak post-Soviet Russia. So yes, you will feel cold and uncomfortable just watching it. Our mismatched travellers are a Finnish mature student exiting a relationship with a Moscow-based academic and a young Russian miner. The question, of course, is how these two will find common ground, but this film – with moments of sharp humour and excellent observation – avoids the obvious and earns your time and patience.

Full review here

3. Verdens Verste Menneske (The Worst Person In The World)

I remain baffled by the title, which does come from a line in the film, but sets off all sorts of false expectations. The central character is no monster (nor, despite what one of the other leads tells her, a particular good person), just a typical contemporary female lead, struggling to find something fulfilling to do as her twenties and early thirties drift past her while dealing with the inadequacy of men, whether as relatives or partners. This is told in 14 sharply written chapters. In particular, the one in which two strangers at a party play at testing what they can do without technically cheating on their partners is great film-making. One quibble and a question: the film sympathises a bit too much with the I’m-just-saying-it-as-I-see-it comix writer dude, and can a bookshop assistant and a barista really afford a flat like that in central Oslo?

(MUBI)

4. White Noise

Middle-aged angst, teen angst, fear-of-the-apocalypse angst, married angst, it’s-the’80s angst, American consumer angst, academic rivalry angst… all these angsts and more are explored in Noah Baumbach’s dark comedy, adapted from a novel by Don DeLillo. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play the couple who know that in many ways they should be happy, but of course that just amplifies their misery. Baumbach does a fine job of recreating the 1980s and manages several switches in scale that could have easily tipped the film off balance. Make sure you stay for the closing credit sequence, which is great although it does make hard to actually read who the key grip or the catering company were. 

(Netflix)

5. Bergman Island 

A filmmaking couple go to Ingmar Bergman’s old stomping ground to get some writing done. All does not go smoothly. Much less heavy-going than that makes it sound, and at least as reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy as it is of Bergman. I found it captivating.

Full review here

(MUBI)

6. Emily The Criminal 

Pleasingly spare, low-budget gig economy and scam economy LA thriller that makes superior use of Audrey Plaza's particular screen presence and vibe. Firmly recommended.

Full review here

7. Les Olympiades, Paris 13e (Paris 13th District)

Shot in very lovely black & white, this is essentially a sweet comedy-drama about the romantic misadventures of a trio of young(ish) Parisians, although it was marketed as something a bit edgier than it really is. Director Jacques Audiard is best known for male-centric crime movies, but maybe the co-writing credit for Céline Sciamma (Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Petite Maman) gives a better steer on what this is like. 

(MUBI)

8. Madres Paralelas 

I’ve been mostly underwhelmed by Almodóvar’s recent run of what could be called anti-melodramas: stories of wild coincidences and personal tragedies told in numb, mostly humour-free fashion. Madres Paralelas worked better for me: he makes an odd choice of framing the central narrative with a very different one involving the same characters. It’s jarring, but I think it ultimately makes its own kind of sense.

Full review here 

9/10. Bodies Bodies Bodies/Triangle Of Sadness

I wasn’t expecting to be repeatedly reminded in 2022 of Very Bad Things, a (not very good) 1998 comedy starring Christian Slater and Cameron Diaz that’s like The Hangover only with a high body count. These films are both vastly superior to VBT, but echo its rapidly escalating nastiness. Both involve the privileged classes placed in situations of extreme discomfort, although the politics of Triangle Of Sadness are more explicit and (it feels) more central to the film than those of Bodies Bodies Bodies.

In BBB, a bunch of twentysomethings gather in big, isolated house just as a storm is approaching. They start playing bodies bodies bodies (known in my time as murder in the dark), only… well, you can guess. There’s a strong 1990s vibe to this, especially the way the movie seems to feel about its characters, while being very 2020s in its casting, the sex lives of the characters and the woman worried her podcast (‘a podcast takes a lot of work!’) isn’t getting any respect from her friends. I really enjoyed this.

If you have seen Ruben Østlund’s Force Majeure or The Square, you’ll know to expect fairly broad satire and the lives of the pampered going very wrong in Triangle Of Sadness. (If you haven’t seen any of them, start with Force Majeure, which is the best of the trio.) TOS ups the stakes on Force Majeure’s ski resort by putting its characters on a luxury yacht. There’s a deceptively low-key beginning in which we’re introduced to Yaya (the late Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson), models in a relationship driven - at least for her - by the potential for Instagram influencer synergy. The intensity builds when they bag a free holiday on the yacht, where Østlund attempts to outdo The Square’s much-discussed party scene. At which point, it’s fair to say that as much as Jean Luc Godard’s Week End and assorted Buñuel films, this is indebted to American gross-out movies. Subtle this film is not, but if you have a strong stomach and a taste for comedy that’s grotesque and openly political, this is a blast.

11. Competencia Oficial (Official Competition)

Take the title of the movie itself plus that of the film-within-the-film – Rivalry – and you’ve got the theme of this Spanish comedy. An aging billionaire decides to fund a potentially prize-winning film in an attempt to cement his legacy. He’s advised to hire the talented-but-eccentric Lola (Penelope Cruz) to direct and she casts a very serious theatrical type (Oscar Martinez) and a mainstream movie star who has houses in LA and St Tropez (Antonio Banderas).  The two actors, inevitably, clash over their contrasting lifestyles and approaches to their craft, with Lola’s interventions pushing up the tension. The film is essentially a three-hander, as the trio rehearse the film in the vast, empty, marble spaces of the rich dude’s foundation. 

It stays more on the leash than I was expecting – there are multiple opportunities for things to get unhinged that the film doesn’t take (or mostly). I did properly laugh a fair number of times, and with Almodóvar seemingly sworn off comedies for good, this does a decent job of filling that void.

#films of 2022 #films of the year #2022 best movies

[taylornation]

We’re looking back on this year and feeling like we just lived 13 lives? 🤯

Thanks for making it best year yet! 🫶 Also, since today is 123123, we gotta say it… 1, 2, 3, let’s go (to 2024), bitch!

#Taylor Swift #2023 #Year in Review #Midnights (The Til Dawn Edition) #Karma (Feat. Ice Spice) #Speak Now (Taylor's Version) #1989 (Taylor's Version) #VMAs #Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour concert film #Spotify Top Global Artist #Apple Music Artist of the Year #Google Most Searched Songwriter #Happy New Year