'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!

barbenheimerflowermoonemmaryanjustken…

The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I'm an enduringly proud founding member...

...has announced its 2023 Award winners and Top Ten list. As always, some of the selections represent my voting--I'm especially glad my colleagues agreed with me about Da'Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers--others do not, but there's a lot of good acting and moviemaking represented on this list.

While I'm on the subject, I think the PFCS Awards need a name. The Pheenies? The Nixies? The Dry Heaties? Just spitballing...

I'll post my own Top Ten list after the New Year. Happy Holidays everybody!

FLOWER MOON SHADOW

Opening this weekend:

Killers of the Flower Moon--In the 1870s the Osage Nation settled on a large reservation in northeastern Oklahoma consisting of land thought to be of little value. But in the late 1890s, it was discovered to be sitting on an ocean of oil. Because the Osage had retained mineral rights to the land, by the early '20s they found themselves to be the wealthiest people, per capita, on the planet.

It need hardly be said that opportunistic white folks moved in fast to snatch this bounty through a variety of schemes, perhaps the vilest being the practice of marrying into an Osage family and then murdering the spouses and other heirs. Because the case was eventually broken by the nascent FBI, the story was briefly dramatized as one episode in The FBI Story, Mervyn LeRoy's 1959 chronicle (and whitewash) of the Bureau, starring James Stewart.

Martin Scorsese's account is not so brief. Scripted by Eric Roth and Scorsese from David Grann's 2017 book, the director's three-hour-plus Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic nightmare, solemn and heartbroken yet charged up with a fierce and sweeping vitality. The style feels different from his previous work, yet somehow it's still unmistakably a Scorsese picture.

The focus here is on Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI vet who arrives in Osage country to work for his uncle, the cattle rancher William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Ernest soon marries an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and starts a family with her. A dull, malleable sort, Ernest seems to genuinely love Mollie, yet all the while they're married he's secretly serving as a thuggish henchman for the sanctimonious Bill Hale, who condescendingly professes love for the Osage while conspiring in the deaths of Mollie's mother and sisters and others in the community. Eventually and inevitably, Mollie also becomes a target of Bill's plans.

Killers is shot in chilly shades of gray and sepia by Rodrigo Prieto, edited by Scorsese's longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and moved along by a brilliant, pulsing score by Robbie Robertson, to whose memory the film is dedicated. Yet despite the presence of these cronies, this isn't business as usual. Scorsese doesn't give us the kinetic flashiness of his gangster sagas here. There's no darting, antic camerawork, no wall-to-wall narration.

But this isn't a staid historical drama either; the tone is feverishly immediate and chaotic, almost hallucinatory at times, and there's a tinge, especially in the scenes between DiCaprio and DeNiro, of deeply grim comedy. Scorsese's comic edge doesn't distance us from the horror, either, as perhaps it could be accused of doing in Goodfellas or Casino. The murders and other violence are presented with an angry bluntness, as nothing but sordid, wasteful and evil.

Essentially, what Scorsese gives us here is a vision of life in hell, not just a hell of butchery and menace, though this is amply depicted, but of the fractured spirit and toxic guilt generated by racial terrorism and piracy. The agony of this life is reflected in the superb performances of DiCaprio and the serene, gravely beautiful Lily Gladstone. DeNiro is at the top of his form as the genially satanic Bill Hale, and the enormous cast includes fine turns by Tantoo Cardinal, William Belleau, Cara Jade Myers, Brendan Fraser, Scott Shepherd, Sturgill Simpson, Katherine Willis and Barry Corbin, among many others. John Lithgow appears as a prosecutor; he's always welcome but gets less of a chance than usual to flex here.

There's also a strong supporting performance by Jesse Plemons as Tom White, the Texas Ranger turned G-Man who led the BOI (later FBI) investigation. The case was an early success for the Bureau, depicted here as a largely unknown agency at the time (Grann's book is subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI), and Plemons, speaking softly and politely but firmly from under his Stetson, lightens this bleak and grueling movie's mood just enough to get us through; we at last feel a dawning of hope for justice and salvation. He shows up just in time.

One more note: I was expecting, and hoping for, the usual afterword before the end credits, explaining what ultimately became of these people. Kudos to Scorsese for coming up with a more creative and witty way to present this information. It's an ingenious coda to this great and terrible American tale.