2023 is halfway over and Oscar pundits across the globe are licking their lips for the six months of juicy awards bait still to come. On the menu are new offerings from the likes of Scorsese, Fincher and Lanthimos, with Barbenheimer just around the corner and another Elvis biopic on course for Venice. Inevitably, one will come out on top and sadly, it probably won’t be Barbie.
Before the bloodbath however, we wanted to take a look back at the best of the rest; the ten films which launched outside of awards season but nonetheless stood out amid the horde of Ant-Men and Shazams. The parameters for this list includes any film made available for viewing between January to June this year, omitting anything which competed at the 2022 Academy Awards for entirely arbitrary reasons.
Caveats: I haven’t yet seen Past Lives or How To Blow Up A Pipeline, though I’ve been assured both are wonderful. One hasn’t had an Irish release, and the other had limited showings. Both will be getting separate coverage in due course.
10. EVIL DEAD RISE
Between Scream VI, M3gan, Infinity Pool and several others still to come on this list, 2023 has been a seminal year for nasty, blood curdling horror. Where better to start then, than with Evil Dead Rise? Lee Cronin’s smart revival of Raimi’s classic series brings back all the pivotal elements of the originals (a confined location, a tight-knit group doomed to turn on one another, chainsaws), but reinvents them for an unsuspecting new audience who will never look at a cheese-grater the same way again.
9. BEAU IS AFRAID
As perplexing as it is perverse, Midsommar director Ari Aster works with fellow known-freak Joaquin Phoenix to demonstrate that absurd comedy can be just as frightening as any plain horror fare. The first forty-five minutes rank easily among the more immersive nightmares in recent cinema history, while the two hours which follow ask us to wade through exponentially more extraordinary worlds, including an Oz-like fantasy and a Nathan Lane sitcom. The effect is a restless fever dream, irresistible to turn from, lest you miss whatever comes next.
8. ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET?
Based on Judy Blume’s novel of the same name, Margaret makes a mockery of the countless Americans who would see it banned from their schools. The story is sweetly warm and well-balanced, capturing with soft sincerity the anxiety of a teenager stretched in a thousand directions. Abby Ryder Fortson is a triumph as Margaret, and Kelly Fremon Craig (previously responsible for coming of age tour-de-force The Edge of Seventeen) continues to establish herself as one of the great new writer/directors on the scene.
7. CARMEN
Paul Mescal’s first lead role this side of his Oscar-nominated turn in Aftersun does not disappoint, though the real scene stealers here are Melissa Barrera (of Scream fame) and composer Nicholas Britell, who imbues this southern border reimagining of Bonnie & Clyde with an operatic quality which is at once utterly romantic and so very foreboding. He proves an excellent match for director Benjamin Millepied and lead choreographer Marina Tamayo, whose dances are nothing short of enchanting.
6. RYE LANE
They say a romcom lives or dies on the chemistry of its leads, and while that may be true it helps to overwhelm your audience with so many quirks and flourishes that even the cynics among them can’t help but feel charmed. The world of Rye Lane is an expression of its leads; Dom (David Jonsson) is a quiet man who knows London like the back of his hand, and Yas (Vivian Oparah) is a troublemaker who never saw a nice plant she couldn’t steal. Their walk through a London ridden with graffiti, eyesore shopfronts and vaginal art shows is a gorgeous metaphor for the classic pairing of a guy complacent in life and a girl who wants a better one.
5. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: VOL 3
As someone who stayed aboard the Marvel train for longer than most, it seems fitting that Guardians 3 releases just as the franchise has sunk to its lowest ebb yet. The originals stand as two of the few comic book films to adhere to actual cinematic craft standards (with credit to director James Gunn’s fondness for practical costumes, set design and storyboarding), and this exquisite final entry rises above the majority to serve as both a rare gem for the genre, and also as a possible gravestone for this now-diminished MCU.
4. SKINAMARINK
Edited by Satan himself (IMDb tells me he went under the pseudonym of ‘Kyle Edward Ball’), Skinamarink is a fiendish achievement in horror storytelling. Told entirely through static shots of mostly obscured frames, it portrays two children left alone in a dark house, chattering among themselves as an unseen spectre lures them from place to place. Dismissed by some as mere jumpscare trickery, the terror of Skinamarink is in the artful anticipation of each cut; for every mundane shot of furniture, we could get a handprint on a knife, a shadow by the door, or the gleeful screaming of a phone with eyes. It’s a masterful experiment in perspective, and it made me want to cry.
3. POLITE SOCIETY
A joyous treat of childhood fantasy storytelling that skims through the conventions of a half-dozen genres in its efforts to portray the mind of its scattered, but totally endearing young protagonist. Polite Society is full of fist-pumping mixed martial art combat and giggle-worthy plot twists, but it is to the credit of director Nida Manzoor that with such a big canvas, she has no trouble tethering everything to the relatively smaller story of two British-Pakistani sisters with very different ideas for the words ‘growing up’.
2. ASTEROID CITY
As if to prove that no TikTok trend-chaser can hold a candle to the real thing, Wes Anderson’s latest has emerged ranking among his very best. Boasting another of his enormous casts, Asteroid City is the first true display of the haze that was COVID for everyone, but most particularly artists, and with a ‘traditional’ Anderson story as its artifice, breaks down the many people and problems that go into every corner and detail of a film. Not to leave out its less Letterboxd-y audience members of course, Anderson’s film also features Jeff Goldblum squeezed into the latex of a mo-cap alien. Yummy.
1. SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE
An unsurprising choice, but to my mind the correct one. The musicality of Across The Spiderverse has infected me utterly; from the drumbeat rhythm that underscores the unravelling myth of Miles Morales like a Greek epic to the ferocious screechings which invade Miles’ world like his villains, this is ironically a movie just as immense when watched with closed eyes. That would of course be a disservice to the 1,000+ animators who have built something so unique and so dynamic here, capturing within frame some of the most fluid and thrilling motion ever put to camera, but also the softer humanity of its central romance. At the risk of hyperbole, Gwen’s watercolour-tinged prologue - which initially eschews action in favour of drama which could as easily have been done in live action - is the ultimate proof of the power animation has to elevate good material into something profound. No pressure to Greta Gerwig, but that’s a high bar to bound.
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