'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!

FEEL THE BERNSTEIN

Now in the multiplexes; opening December 20 on Netflix:

Maestro--Bradley Cooper's imitation of Leonard Bernstein conducting is uncanny. Cooper captures Bernstein's histrionic, self-dramatizing, ecstatic style perfectly, and gets across how he used his gestures and facial expressions and body language not just to lead his musicians through a score but to tease the interpretation and intensity he wanted out of them.

The conducting scenes in this film, directed by Cooper from a script he wrote with Josh Singer, also suggest that the podium gave Bernstein a sense of liberation which he may have known in few other areas of his life. Cooper's performance, in general but particularly in these passages--especially a lengthy recreation of a celebrated performance of Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony"--is luminous.

I'll admit that it's taken me a while to come around where Bradley Cooper is concerned. But after A Star is Born and Nightmare Alley it was impossible to deny both his talent and the intelligence and heart with which he deploys it. Aided here by Kazu Hiro's amazing (and laughably controversial) prosthetic makeup, he gets across the conductor's mix of authority, of self-conscious, performative sophistication and of boyish wonder, and makes you see what made him beloved, both publicly and by his friends and family. You see what made him difficult, too.

Very wisely, Cooper chooses not to direct in the same florid manner that Bernstein conducted. Despite some flashy transitions, most of Maestro unfolds in long, sustained takes, beautifully shot by Matthew Libatique from a discreet distance; we're made almost into eavesdroppers at times. This directorial reserve balances the extravagant acting superbly.

The movie isn't a conventional biopic; there are no explanatory dates or places onscreen, no follow-up summary at the end, and only incidentally does it trace Bernstein's career highlights. The focus is on the relationship between Bernstein and the Costa Rican-born stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who married him in 1951. The other characters, though well-drawn and convincingly played--Sarah Silverman is a good fit as Bernstein's sister Shirley--are decidedly subordinate to the leads.

According to the film, Montealegre was well aware, going in, that Bernstein was a gay man (though his affairs were not exclusively same-sex even before she came along). "Let's give it a whirl," she says breezily to him toward the beginning, and you think, uh-oh.

On the whole, they don't seem to have done too badly; they had three lovely kids, sensational careers, countless friends, and they seem to have profoundly loved each other. But entering into a marriage with somebody of uncongenial sexuality cannot come without turbulence, and this can only be compounded when they're a titanic cultural legend.

It's possible that even the movie itself succumbs to this, a little. With her brittle yet mirthful, keenly observant, wholeheartedly engaged line readings, Mulligan is marvelous; the spine and centering force of the movie (she's top-billed in the credits, even over Cooper). But we learn far less of Montealegre's remarkable career or her activism than we do about Bernstein. The movie sees her in relation to him, and doesn't always make clear how formidable she was in her own right, not just within the marriage but in the world at large.  Even when part of the point of the movie is the perils of putting yourself in the shadow of a legend, the person at the podium tends to get the attention.