I’ll be conducting my annual mid-year critics poll in regards to the best films of 2023. Ballots will probably be sent out a few weeks from now.
Yes, we’re almost six months into the year. It’s gone by very fast and I can’t say it’s particularly been one filled with movie highlights. If you wanted to watch great films then you had to actually seek them out at the arthouses.
So many films get released every Friday, now more than ever before, but most of the good ones get buried in favor of the latest blockbuster. The 12 titles, that are my highlights of the year so far, only include one big studio film, the rest are indie and foreign-language.
In no particular order —
Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry,” Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, Paravel/Castaing-Taylor’s De Humanis Corpis Fabrica, Tina Satter’s “Reality” Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blowup a Pipeline, Tarik Saleh’s Cairo Conspiracy, Eric Gravel’s A Plein Temps, Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s Tori et Lokita, Dos Santos/Thompson/Powers’ “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” Jalmari Helander’s “Sisu” and Dominic Moll’s La Nuit Du 12.
I’m of course not counting the films that I saw at Cannes and Sundance, which still haven’t been released. I’m only counting the ones that had distribution in the US between January 1st and June 2nd.
Take note, I haven’t seen Celine Song’s “Past Lives” which is the most acclaimed film of the year. I missed it at Sundance and then missed the press screenings when I was at Cannes. Bad timing. I’ll get around to it soon.
This is where you come in, what have been your personal best films of 2023 so far?