I try to keep up to date with most of the year’s releases, it’s not easy to do — people saying that there aren’t any good movies anymore just don’t look hard enough for them. They’re out there.
However, IndieWire has 40 titles on their list of 2023’s best films, more than 1/3 of the list is disposable. They’re stretching it. Suffice to say, it did get me in list-making mode and I’m ready to swear by these 20 good-to-great films released, so far, this calendar year. In alphabetical order —
Eric Gravel’s A Plein Temps, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s As Bestas, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry, Emma Seligman’s Bottoms,Tarik Saleh’s Cairo Conspiracy, Paravel/Castaing-Taylor’s De Humanis Corpis Fabrica, John Carney’s Flora and Son, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blowup a Pipeline, Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible— Dead Reckoning Part One, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, Ira Sachs’ “Passages,” Tina Satter’s Reality, Cristi Mungiu’s RMN, Sebastien Silva’s “Rotting in the Sun,” Jalmari Helander’s Sisu, Dos Santos/Thompson/Powers’ Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me, and Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s Tori et Lokita
Going by IndieWire’s rules, I’m just counting the stuff that’s been released as of today, September 25th. There are, at least, 20+ strong films that I saw at Cannes, Sundance and Toronto being released between now and the end of the December. It’s been a strong year at the movies.