'23 SKIDOO

Before rattling off a list of my top ten movies for the year, I should offer a disclaimer. As with most years, it's based on incomplete information. There are still quite a few significant movies I haven't yet seen. But here, based on what I've seen and how I'm feeling at this writing, is my Top Ten List for 2023.

Killers of the Flower Moon--Martin Scorsese's epic yet intimate nightmare about the Osage murders in Oklahoma in the 1920s is a masterpiece; one of his best works and probably the best movie of the year.

Oppenheimer--Half of the midyear hit duo, this chronicle of the atom smasher of White Sands is a dazzling directorial performance by Christopher Nolan, fracturing his narrative yet keeping us focused. Possibly a hair overlong and anticlimactic, it's riveting at its best.

Barbie--The other half of "Barbenheimer." Greta Gerwig's brightly-colored take on the Mattel icon is crazy, imaginative and deeply goofy, yet in its own way no less serious in its ambitions. Margot Robbie is improbably touching in the title role.

American Fiction--Jeffrey Wright is quietly marvelous as an African-American novelist who so resents being expected to pander to white ideas about the black experience that he does so with a vengeance and becomes a smash. Cord Jefferson's adaptation of the Percival Everett novel Erasure is both rueful and hilarious, often at the same time, and beautifully acted by Sterling K. Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross, Leslie Uggams, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Issa Rae, Miriam Shor and the criminally underutilized Erika Alexander.

Maestro--It's not so much a biopic in the usual sense as a portrait of the marriage of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre. Bradley Cooper is luminous as Bernstein, and his reserved directorial style balances Bernstein's grand self-dramatizing manner beautifully. Yet it's Carey Mulligan's Felicia who emerges as the movie's guiding spirit.

Godzilla Minus One--The Lizard King stands in for postwar despondency in this one-off, one-of-a-kind monster spectacle that's also a surprisingly moving portrait of a nation coming to terms with utter defeat, and gradually starting to rise from its own ruins.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret--Judy Blume's classic for adolescent girls was a long time coming to the screen, but under the direction of Kathleen Fremon Craig it struck just the right note; sweet and lighthearted.

Air--Sneakers have become such a cultural touchstone that it's probably inevitable that we'd get an origin story for athletic footwear. Ben Affleck's account of the development of the Air Jordan line and the issues around it is absorbing and amusing.

The Holdovers--Alexander Payne's '70s-period comedy, set at a private school in Massachusetts, is essentially a vehicle for the performances of Paul Giamatti as a splenetic ancient history teacher, Da'Vine Joy Randolph as a bereaved cafeteria manager and Dominic Sessa as the kid they're stuck with for the holidays. But what performances they are.

Saltburn--After her stunning debut with Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennel's second feature, a neo-gothic take on class, is by comparison a little overwrought and sour. But it's no less brilliant, and it comes together joltingly at the end.

A few others that I found to be worth my time: The Blackening, A Haunting in Venice, Dumb Money, Jules, Theater Camp, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Thanksgiving, Somewhere in Queens, Cocaine Bear, Renfield, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Napoleon and The Boys in the Boat.

A superb 2024 to us all!

G, SPOT ON

Now in theaters:

Godzilla Minus One--To paraphrase Yeats: What rough beast, its hour come round again, slouches toward Tokyo to kick ass?

Who else? This new kaiju flick, from Godzilla's home studio Toho, celebrates the title character's 70th anniversary. Released in the U.S. with minimal fanfare (no screening for critics in my area), this entry tells a standalone story, unrelated to the earlier Japanese or American films, and it feels very different from either series.

For one thing, it's a period piece. It begins in 1945, with Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young kamikaze, first shirking his suicide mission, then freezing up when he's confronted with the supposedly legendary sea monster at a small airbase in the Odo Islands. This lapse results in horrifying losses. Then when Shikishima gets back to the ruins of postwar Tokyo he's a pariah in his neighborhood.

Over the next couple of years, the guilt-haunted Shikishima becomes the reluctant head of an improvised family after Noriko (Minami Hamake), a young homeless woman, takes shelter in his house with an orphaned baby she's picked up. To support them, he takes a job with an oddball minesweeping crew on a small boat, clearing the leftover mines surrounding Japan. Then one day The Big G surfaces, made gargantuan after being irradiated during the Bikini nuclear tests, and heads for Tokyo.

The monster scenes here are spectacular, staged by writer-director Takashi Yamazaki with panache and a feel for dizzying ponderousness. There are some genuine jolts, too, notably Godzilla's first appearance. Best of all, the behemoth's big scenes employ Akira Ifukube's masterly score from the original 1954 film.

But at some level Godzilla Minus One feels less about monster action and more about Japanese society struggling to come to terms with an almost unimaginable defeat. The big scaly guy seems more like a symbol of the magnitude of despondency that had to be overcome for the country to survive and rebuild. This, along with heartfelt acting from an appealing cast and an effective sense of period detail, makes the film unexpectedly moving.

Having a failed kamikaze as the hero set the story up for an obvious payoff that I found troubling from the first scenes of the film: The perceived need for redemption from the eminently sensible decision not to carry out the lunacy of a futile suicide mission. Here, I thought, is the sort of intractable nationalism that makes for good melodrama, but in real life leads countries into war and horror and misery.

I'm happy to say that G-1 is having none of it; while giving full credit to worthwhile self-sacrifice, the film is resolutely life affirming. "This country never changes," one of the characters mutters, about some governmental folly. "Maybe it can't." But that country did change, albeit at a Godzilla-sized price, and this movie gets at the pained yet exhilarating spirit of that change.

My Kid accompanied me to this film, and after checking out the trailer on the way to the theater, she disapprovingly said "I think they're going to hurt him," him being Godzilla. She was right; the monster is not, here, a long-suffering defender of humankind against some bizarre alien or primal abomination, but a rampaging destructive force who must be stopped. Even his roar sounds scarier; it's not the usual nasal, irritable honk. But even so, I too felt sympathy for him during the efforts to destroy him. Something about that big lizard is lovable, even when he's being a bad boy.