Farewell to a Great Year in Movies

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. This is the very last entry. Read the first entry here.

Chers collègues,

Of all the calumnies committed in this year’s Slate Movie Club, none has outraged me more than Sam’s dissing of alphabetization as a way to organize one’s Top 10 of the year list, as Mark, Esther, and I all did. Cowardly, you say? Pistols at dawn!

As long as we’re hurling down gauntlets about such silly distinctions, I’ll say that using the 26 letters of our beloved English alphabet as a system for ordering one’s movie choices constitutes, for me, more than an escape from quantification; it’s a form of protest against it. If I were using as a criterion my own personal blown-awayness upon first viewing, my No. 1 pick would probably be Killers of the Flower Moon, a film whose last hour I wept my way through in a mixed state of sadness, horror, and sheer gratitude at the degree of collective artistry on display. If the grounds for choosing were, instead, technical finish and perfection, the admirably crafted courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Fall might take the spot instead. And if my sense of wonder at being transported to a place movies seldom take us was the reigning criterion, I would have to go with the small-scale but ravishing Mexican drama Tótem, which shows us the events of a long day of birthday-party preparation as seen through the eyes of a 7-year-old girl. But I refuse to opine, by assigning ordinal numbers to these three different modes of experience, on what movies exist in order to do. They are here to accomplish all those things, and countless others.

By way of saying goodbye this year, I thought I would respond briefly to one point made in a post from each of you (including our worthy interrupters, Dan, Nadira, and Sam.) As a hat tip to Sam, I’ll alphabetize my replies by first name.

Bilge: Since watching Ferrari, I’ve been thinking about your passion for Adam Driver’s lead performance (his second time playing an Italian luxury-goods magnate, after the all-but-unwatchable mess that was Ridley Scott’s 2022 House of Gucci). As you note, it’s not that the actor ever quite convinces us he’s Italian, or in his late 50s; it’s that the operatic quality of Driver’s performance matches Enzo Ferrari’s outsized obsession with his work, the reputation of his family’s company, and fast cars that go vroom.

The idea of valorizing a style of acting that’s shaped by dictates other than realism comes in handy in thinking about Nicolas Cage in Dream Scenario, a deliberately uncanny, over-the-top turn that, when I saw the movie at a regular theatrical screening, had the audience in stitches at nearly every line he spoke. His character somehow doesn’t fit into the fictional world that surrounds him, and that disproportion is what lets the movie’s highly symbolic premise make emotional if not logical sense. In this compulsively readable interview, Cage talks about choosing his late-career roles with an intention to “explore the fringes of film performance.” He’s not interested, he insists, on hewing to the received idea that the best actor is the one who most doggedly creates the illusion of everyday human behavior.

(Lest this be mistaken as a post in praise of all technically imperfect acting, I should add that perhaps no human being has ever seemed less Italian than Shailene Woodley as Ferrari’s longtime mistress, and I don’t mean that in an avant-garde “exploring the fringes” way. Rolling out homemade pasta dough or gathering plums from the trees outside her villa, speaking in an accent that appears and vanishes multiple times in each line of dialogue, Woodley’s Lina seems to exist not in mid-20^th-century Modena but behind the counter of a weed dispensary in La Jolla.)

Dan: Your defense of Past Lives, however skillfully and passionately argued, may be unneeded by anyone outside our small circle, given how beloved that movie has been all year by nearly everyone who’s seen it. When I first watched it back in early spring, I too was impressed by its trio of deeply lived-in performances and its perceptive take on the melancholy displacement peculiar to the America-bred children of immigrant parents. But I will disclose that, on the email thread among us Clubbers, Esther, Bilge and Mark all agreed with me that the script of that diaphanous love-triangle drama—without question an impressive first feature from the playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song—felt curiously underwritten. One of them called Past Lives “a promising set-up waiting to be populated by real people.”

In particular, I not only wanted but needed to know more about Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the childhood friend of Greta Lee’s protagonist who, after she left South Korea with her family, seems to have spent the next 20-plus years unrequitedly pining for her. Without getting more of a sense of what Hae Sung’s life was like outside of that long-nursed crush, that character, however moving the actor’s performance, remained a story contrivance, created to place Lee’s Nora in the position of being torn between two men, two cultures, and two versions of herself. While I won’t deny that the movie’s near-wordless final scene made me cry, it was a sadness born from the structural situation—who hasn’t had the experience of mourning a now-impossible alternate version of our own romantic past?—rather than from any real sense of who it was Nora was losing when Hae Sung got into that Uber.

Esther: This veers a bit off-track from our Movie Club discussion, but since I agree with you point for point on all you have to say about Lily Gladstone’s exquisite use of stillness in her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon and the so-wrong-it’s-right-ness of Joaquin Phoenix’s weirdly shticky Napoleon (“You think you’re so great just because you have boats!”), I’ll use this paragraph to let you know that one of the peak movie moments of my year was being in the audience while you interviewed John Patrick Shanley, the screenwriter of Moonstruck, after an unforgettable 35mm screening of that movie at Manhattan’s historic Paris Theater. Your thoughtful questions got Shanley—a man with an unparalleled gift of the gab—to wax philosophical about his memories of writing that script as a young first-time screenwriter, of being a part of the casting and filming process (a traditional part of the job that screenwriters this year had to go on strike to retain), and of watching as, to his complete shock, the modest family comedy he had penned turned into a monster box-office hit, won him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and lived on for four decades and counting as a beloved classic. If anyone who’s reading this habitually ducks out of post-movie Q&As—understandable, given the looming threat of some shame-proof schmo in the audience chiming in with not-a-question-but-a-comment—I urge them to remember that once in a while a creator, a critic, a great film, and a packed house can create an irreproducible moment of magic.

Mark: Because your last post touched on American Fiction, a movie I wasn’t able to see until too late in the year to consider it for either awards or lists, I want to record here my simultaneous delight and frustration with that smart and ambitious but, to my mind, not quite finished-feeling film. Everything connected to the main character’s family and romantic life—not just Jeffrey Wright’s dryly hilarious lead performance as the beleaguered novelist Monk Ellison, but the note-perfect supporting turns from Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Erika Alexander—is as beautifully observed and sharply acted as a viewer could desire. But when it comes to the movie’s other main story arc, a satire of the way Black creators get co-opted and exploited by the publishing and entertainment industries, Cord Jefferson’s screenplay sometimes seems to go out of focus. I agree that John Ortiz is marvelous as Monk’s agent, but the scenes where the two of them navigate the hypocrisy of such lily-white cultural institutions as corporate publishers, literary prize committees, and Hollywood movie studios seem painted with too broad a brush for the jokes to fully land. And the out-of-nowhere metafictional ending, with Monk himself providing various options as to how his story might play out, may have read well on paper (the Percival Everett novel the film is based on concludes with a similar gambit), but in film form, the proliferation of endings leaves the audience in a liminal space that’s frustratingly abstract.

Nadira: Your observation that this was the year of the “stealth musical” is well taken, and has planted in my mind a new subgenre to be on the watch for. I wonder if, like me, you have always found it hard to trust people who can resist the dopey allure of musicals. Here’s hoping there is more onscreen belting, both stealthy and overt, in our moviegoing future. Maybe Timothée Chalamet can consider his singing in Wonka a voice warmup for harmonizing on a space-worm–themed number with Zendaya in Dune 2? And if any 2024 movie is well positioned to smuggle in some pop-star belting, it’s Joker 2, with Lady Gaga co-starring as Harley Quinn. Don’t just dance out your homicidal despair on those Joker Stairs, Joaquin—sing on them too!

And Sam: I can’t say I agree with you, or apparently anyone else on earth except the equally unimpressed pal I saw it with, about Passages. Franz Rogowski’s character struck us not as a toxic-but-seductive charmer, but as a completely charmless douchebag whose narcissism was so overt it was hard to believe sensitive, thoughtful people like Ben Whishaw’s and Adèle Exarchopoulos’ characters would put up with his obnoxious bullshit. Still, I really appreciated how you fit your praise for that chaotic fuckfest into a larger argument—which I do agree with—about the striking resurgence of the body, in all its needy, insistent, embarrassing physicality, in this year’s movies. There are powerful moments of storytelling through the depiction of physical intimacy in many of the films we’ve touched on here, including May December and All of Us Strangers, and some others we haven’t, like the winsome Jennifer Lawrence raunch-com No Hard Feelings or the disappointing yet intermittently hot trilogy-ender Magic Mike’s Last Dance. And as you note, Sam, the resurgence of the concert movie—not only Eras and Renaissance but A24’s release of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense—feels like the hopeful dawning of a new age of theater-aisle booty-shaking.

Endings aren’t easy, as demonstrated by the many 2023 movies that, for whatever reason, failed to stick their landings: Showing Up, Poor Things, Bottoms, Saltburn, American Fiction. So I’ll keep my own ending brief and not metafictional: I truly loved getting the chance to kibitz with you all about the year in film. There are lots of events looming on the 2024 horizon that make it a hard year to look forward to with enthusiasm. But the new year in movies, perhaps to a greater degree than has been the case for a few years now, is something to be anticipated with unabashed joy.

Dancing in the aisles,

Dana