by Jacob Jones Hello, all, and welcome back to The Friendly Film Fan! While 2025 has already begun, and most of last year’s films have wrapped their openings, there’s still a lot of ground to cover before the year in cinema can take on even half a shape. There have only been a few new releases to cinemas nationwide thus far, and 2024 still has a few expansions opening at some point next month, so there’s plenty left to look forward to as the year progresses and we move ever onward towards the 2026 awards season (even writing those words gets me excited about it). To that end, while much of that season’s contenders have yet to emerge from the woodwork, as so often happens with these things, a decent chunk of film has already been unveiled, and it’s looking like the year in movies will have cinephiles all over eating well for a good long while. Here are our picks for the Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2025! 10. Wicked: For Good Wicked Part One’s sensational box office success was almost a foregone conclusion, considering the ubiquitous nature of the Broadway musical’s titanic popularity amongst the theater world, and the cultural foothold of the material as it related to the source texts and Wizard of Oz film. But if the movie adaptation from John M. Chu didn’t take great care to show real work and genuine effort went into making it, that box office success could have come with a much lower price tag. Luckily for Universal, the film received loads of critical acclaim for its use of practical sets, masterful makeup and costume design, and the quality of its two central performances, making it by far 2024’s biggest success story in terms of both having a cultural footprint and making a ton of money right as the holiday season began. Part Two, re-titled Wicked: For Good for entirely unnecessary and frankly rather stupid reasons, looks to replicate that success at the same time this year, concluding the story of Wicked with a genuine Part Two as its closer. Wicked was one of my favorite surprises of 2024, giving me the same feeling I had when I walked out of Dune (2021) for the first time in that I couldn’t believe they had actually managed to pull off the adaptation successfully with only a few hiccups along the way. If For Good can manage the same heights as its predecessor – and that is a BIG if – we can expect another major hit for Universal, and for the soundtrack to be blaring through young and gay households for months to come. 9. Marty Supreme While I have yet to revisit Uncut Gems or Good Time since finding them to be a little bit less baked than the impression I was given at first, I am fully aware of the cultural chokehold the Safdie brothers have on movie fandom as a whole, and with Timothée Chalamet on one of the all-time young movie star runs right now, I’m inclined to think that this is yet another inspired choice for the advancement of his already incredible career. While plot details are being kept under wraps, the idea seems to be that Chalamet is playing some sort of ping pong expert, co-starring alongside Gwenyth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, and even Tyler the Creator. Josh Safdie is directing solo on this one as Benny has leaned more into his acting work over the last few years, but with a Christmas Day release date and A24 distributing, we can certainly expect this one to be something very special. 8. The Battle of Baktan Cross You may not have known it if you’re not deep into the movie-sphere the way a lot of us cinephilic sickos are, but Paul Thomas Anderson has a new movie opening this year, and who’s his star but the one and only Leo. Yes, that Leo. DiCaprio is joined by Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, and returning PTA alum Alana Haim in a new film, the plot details of which remain under wraps, just like the last entry on this list. Licorice Pizza, for all the controversy that surrounded the age gap between its two lead characters, was one of my favorite movies released in 2021, and given PTA’s nearly impeccable track record, this one makes the top 10 on cast and director alone. 7. Mickey 17 After continuous delays and release date resets, including the most recent one which saw the film move back onto March 7, swapping dates with Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller Sinners, Bong Joon Ho’s first movie after the sensational Parasite is finally (maybe) coming to the big screen. Starring Robert Pattinson as a man who volunteers to be what is essentially a death test dummy because his life on Earth sucks, the trailer indicated a wildly different tone than we’re used to from the Korean writer/director, but after Parasite’s historic Oscar wins all the way back in 2020, I’m fairly sure any fan of that film will show up for whatever he wants to make now. Of course, it does help that the supporting cast includes Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo, who all seem like they’re having as much of a blast as the movie looks to be. 6. F1 Here’s my only concern when it comes to F1, which stars Brad Pitt and is directed by Top Gun: Maverick helmer Joseph Kosinski: despite the incredible racing footage and the sense of practicality involved in every element, plus the involvement of Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem, and Tobias Menzies in the film, and the mid-summer release date placing everyone’s eyes on the project (which shows faith in its ability to succeed), Kosinski doesn’t have the best track record as a director when it comes to original stories. Maverick was as much a success because of its star – if not more so – than because of its director. While this new “in the actual vehicle”…vehicle is not produced by Tom Cruise, however, who has an incredible track record as a producer in choosing which stories he tells and getting movies made, it is partly produced by Brad Pitt, who has nearly as strong a track record. Given all that, plus the film’s first trailer boasting that amazing racing footage, there’s reason enough to be especially excited for the mere experience of watching F1 on the big screen. 5. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning With a first trailer full of exciting imagery, a remixed version of the now classic theme, and a few tidbits of vague but epic sounding dialogue the way this franchise knows how to do, the ostensibly final Mission: Impossible movie – formerly titled Dead Reckoning – Part 2, as it largely deals with the fallout (wink wink) of its predecessor’s plot – looks to be packing in and wrapping up the entire series and everything it’s represented to movies since 1996 in one last epic ride. It’s clear that between Top Gun: Maverick and this, plus the actor and producer’s new collaboration with Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu, Tom Cruise is thinking about his legacy, his age, and how he wants this era of his stardom to be remembered. We see glimpses of the original Mission: Impossible film, what looks to be the rabbit’s foot from Mission: Impossible III, and a lot of adrenaline-pumping footage of Cruise hanging out of planes, being at the bottom of the ocean, doing shirtless close-quarters knife fights, and finally, asking his team to trust him “one last time.” I doubt this one reaches the highs of Fallout – itself one of the best examples of action filmmaking in modern history – but if it even comes close to something like Rogue Nation or even Ghost Protocol, Cruise and company will be sending this franchise off on an all-too-rare ending high note. 4. Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein In the perfect marriages of directors and ideas, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard one as perfect as Guillermo Del Toro and Frankenstein. Starring Oscar Isaac as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, as well as Mia Goth, Ralph Ineson, Christoph Waltz, Burn Gorman, Charles Dance, Lars Mikkelsen, and Jacob Elordi as The Monster, the film is due to be released later this year, and while no official date has been set, the presence of a set photo from the production having been released does lead me to believe a 2025 release is very much in the cards. According to IMDb, the plot concerns Christoph Waltz' Dr. Pretorius, who tracks down Frankenstein's monster, believed to have died in a fire forty years prior to this film’s start, in order to continue Frankenstein’s experiments. With that premise, and one of the most visionary and artistic directors cinema has to offer behind the camera fresh off an Oscar win for his Pinocchio adaptation, there’s more than enough reason to include this one in the top five. 3. Avatar: Fire and Ash Is it now considered basic to have one of the Avatar movies on one’s most anticipated list? Or to have them on the list for every year they’re due to release, regardless of the length between them or the supposed plot details not always being the most original ideas, functioning primarily as allegories for environmentalism in the modern age? If so, I guess I’m just a regular basic bitch. The fact is, James Cameron is one of the most sure-fire hit makers in the business, claiming both the number one, three, and four spots for the highest-grossing movies of all time with both his Avatar films and Titanic (the second-highest is Avengers: Endgame). People love to claim that the Avatar films have no cultural footprint, but consistently forget what an international phenomenon they are every time they hit theaters, even on re-releases. Cameron is a visual storyteller through and through, showing moviegoers things they’ve either never seen before, or never seen before in quite that way, and has become the gold standard for blockbuster storytelling on a massive scale. It’s true that The Way of Water felt narratively more stretched and had more pacing issues than the first Avatar, but so much of that excess was dedicated to the most stunning visual effects I’ve ever seen that it was far from bothersome. And with a whole new world to explore and develop as the title suggests, following Jake Sully and his family through the rest of Pandora is sure to be yet another billion dollar roller coaster ride. In fact, the only reason this movie isn’t higher up on the list is because of exactly two movies that I can hardly contain my excitement for. 2. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery The third film in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out Mystery series (and second Netflix collaboration), which features an ensemble cast as packed and loaded with talent as the last two, already has an air of intrigue around it so thick that it would make Benoit Blanc’s mouth water. The plot – like many of these films – is currently under wraps, but suffice it to say, with nothing more than a black-and-white photo of Daniel Craig with an entirely different hair style than he had in the previous films, I’m more than ready for a new murder mystery from the man who practically resurrected the genre from an Agatha Christie-less grave. 1. Superman To absolutely no one’s surprise, my most anticipated movie of 2025 is the one that brings back the man of steel in his own solo movie that has nothing to do with Man of Steel, a film that I have a light amount of affection towards for its efforts to take a different approach, but which nonetheless utterly fails in making that approach compelling or even worth continuing for the character. What Superman – my favorite superhero character of all time – needed was someone who understood both the super and the man, and if the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy taught us anything, James Gunn understands duality within characters better than most comic book movie storytellers. But more than simply understanding Clark Kent and Superman, Gunn’s approach looks to be an answer not simply to all the ideas of what people assume Superman has to be but what comic book storytelling over the past twenty years has had to be. If the fantastic teaser trailer is any indication, gone is the cynicism of the DCEU, gone are the sarcastic wit-driven machinations of the MCU, and here is hope, sincerity, the big blue boy scout as he was always meant to be understood: a new, better way forward, for a better tomorrow. That’s something both superhero movies and superhero media over the past decade or so has been sorely missing in terms of plot or thematic resonance, and although the plot of Superman itself is nowhere to be found in the teaser, the iconic John Williams theme is, as are the red trunks that the character wears specifically to make him less intimidating to children. If Superman is truly meant to be a savior figure in superhero storytelling, then showing him saving someone, or showing people asking to be saved by him, shouldn’t be that novel of an idea, and yet when it happens, all I can think is what a relief that the darkness of Zack Snyder’s version of the character is nowhere to be found here. There’s a very large asterisk around whether or not this movie is a success, leading to a footnote that says “box office success and artistic success are two entirely different things,” but if this works as well as it could, it would be a meta event that could shake the foundations of this kind of storytelling for the next twenty years – as Superman saves the DCU from cynicism, James Gunn will be saving Warner Bros. and DC as a filmmaking studio from eating their own tails. And if that happens, we may just have hope again for the future of superhero movies. For all of that and so many other reasons – not the least of which is the debut of Krypto the Superdog – James Gunn’s Superman is my most anticipated movie of year. And those are our picks for the Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2025! What are you most excited for this year? See anything in the Honorable Mentions you think should be on the list? Let me know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! - The Friendly Film Fan Honorable Mentions:
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by Jacob Jones Greetings all, and welcome back to The Friendly Film Fan! Well, it’s finally that time: time to reveal our Top 10 Movies of 2024. It’s been a long and often uneven journey. We weren’t always able to review everything we liked, but we made a concerted effort to focus on what we loved as much as we possibly could. We also didn’t get to see absolutely everything we’d hoped to get to before the release of this list, but that doesn’t mean we’re done with 2024 movies once this list is public; there’s still a good deal to catch up on, and still a lot of quality cinema left to discover as we charge headlong into 2025. 2024 was a tough year for movies in some respects, with the SAG and WGA strikes affecting much of the intended release slate through the calendar year, forcing studios to delay major projects, films to shift release dates back, then forward, then back again, and generally gutting the summer release slate for tentpole projects, leaving a few films like Longlegs, Inside Out 2, Twisters, and Deadpool & Wolverine to hoist theaters aloft on their own shoulders and keep things moving as best they could (unintentionally allowing studios like A24 to fumble hard with release plans for otherwise immense awards-season undertakings like the botched rollout of Sing Sing). But if anything stays consistent in the big, beautiful world of cinema, it’s that nothing is certain, including the future. As we’re thrust into a new era in U.S. politics, Hollywood seems more poised than ever to become a target of the Trump machine, a machine that hates and fears stories that stand up for, celebrate, and acknowledge all different kinds of people while examining what makes humanity turn on itself in the way it has now and excavating how such vitriol and gleeful evil can propel itself to power. Who knows where movies will be four years from now, if indeed this nightmare is to end at that time? And who knows if movies will even be permitted to exist in the same way? In any case, we had 2024, and hopefully, later down the line, we’ll have those years of movies to look back on too. A few notes before we begin. These are not full reviews of the films included; for those films for which we did full reviews, we will link them next to the titles so as to make them easier to find. Secondly, these are not selections for what we believe are the objective ten “best” films of the year – no one can watch literally every single film released in a calendar year to accurately make that kind of judgement, no matter how objective they attempt to be – but rather a list of our ten favorites overall, ranked according to a blend of overall quality and personal taste. If readers would keep those two things in mind, they might understand why certain films which frequently appear on other Top 10 lists do not make appearances here. And now, it’s time. Here, at last, are our Top 10 Movies of 2024! 10. A Different Man Aaron Schimberg’s black-as-night comedy about self-image and insecurity is one of 2024’s most unconventionally entertaining movie experiences. Featuring Sebastian Stan as a man living with a facial deformity, the film turns after he gets a highly experimental surgery, leading him to look like…well, like Sebastian Stan. The face removing sequence in the film is one of the year’s most immediately memorable and genuinely upsetting moments as the audience is forced to sit with it as though a monster is being created rather than “defeated.” The real kicker comes in with the introduction of Adam Pearson to the film, who (both in the film and in real life) possesses the same facial deformity as Stan’s character, but whose life seems entirely driven by the upside of all he’s still able to do. Schimberg’s script and astute direction allow the film to walk an impossible tightrope, never veering into outright comedy but never letting go of its sense of humor about the whole situation. Stan and Pearson both are excellent in their parts, perfectly pairing off each other as Pearson’s charm only seems to drive Stan’s insecurity and deep-seated need for people to like him no matter what he looks like. The first of a few different A24 films on this list, it’s another in a long line of interesting projects for the studio, and a siren call to anyone unaware of Aaron Schimberg to keep a sharp eye out for whatever he does next. 9. Nosferatu Robert Eggers has become one of the great auteurs in movies, a director with a command of craft and dedication to authenticity in period storytelling not often found even through the storytelling medium’s centuries of existence, so when it was announced that he would direct a remake of the classic Nosferatu story, I stayed my mind’s reflexive disappointment that he wouldn’t be doing something original this time around, and allowed myself to look forward to his take on the material. While I don’t ultimately think it is his best work to date, however (that still belongs to The Lighthouse), it is by far his largest project with the most stunning attention to craft that I’ve seen in a film in quite some time. Eggers is not typically a jump-scare enthusiast, but the one time he utilizes the trick in Nosferatu is unexpectedly terrifying, and the implications of the titular character’s mission are not only gross but deeply uncomfortable. Where the film finds its great strength beyond crafts, though, is in the performances of Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult, particularly Depp, whose work in the film should – in any just world – immediately thrust her into the Best Actress conversation. Depp’s performance doesn’t simply underscore the idea of women’s sexual desires in this time period being understood as manifestation of disease but accentuates it with a performance at once attracted to Count Orlok’s power and terrified by that same attraction. And speaking of Orlok, Bill Skarsgård is entirely unrecognizable as the iconic vampire, in both sight and sound. The makeup team did remarkable work, but credit should be given to Skarsgård as well for his terrific voice work. I’m sure there will be thing I notice and re-examine upon the home release of the film, especially in relation to the 1922 original, but for the time being, I can’t think of a better period horror film in recent memory than this. 8. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat The only documentary to make it onto this Top 10, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a remarkable combination of sound and image to tell a story many of 2024’s films aren’t bold enough to tell in such explicit terms. The film focuses on the political machinations of The film focuses on the 1961 assassination of Congolese civil rights leader Patrice Lumumba and all the political machinations that led to it, including and especially the involvement of the CIA in recruiting Black American musicians to infiltrate Lumumba’s inner circle. While the film itself can be overwhelming at first blush, throwing information at the viewer left and right to the point where one occasionally has to pause and rewind just to re-orient themselves in the narrative (if one even has that ability), the sheer level of editing and archival collecting it must have taken to put the whole thing together could land it on this list by itself. As it happens, it’s also incredibly engaging on a narrative level, and a wildly fascinating look into a seldom-discussed yet critical turning point in world events. 7. The Substance The fact that a hard-genre body horror film from the director of Revenge is openly competing for above-the-line Oscars is an amazing indication of just how far the Academy has come the last several years in its embrace of different kinds of storytelling, and Coralie Fargeat’s fast and furious rage-fest against the beauty standards women are held to as they age is more than worthy of whatever nominations AMPAS gives it come Thursday morning. Demi Moore turns in her best performance to date as Elizabeth Sparkle, able to meaningfully connect her own career having done many parts centering on her own body, and bringing all the fury of having dealt with casting directors, costumers, producers, executives, and gross men in positions of immense power to the fore. Meanwhile, Margaret Qualley ascends to superstardom as Sue, cementing herself as an essential actress to watch in whatever she chooses to do, and playing a perfectly self-involved foil to Elizabeth’s self-loathing. Beyond all of that, though, this is a body horror movie, and the second the viewer thinks they’ve seen a relatively tame effect, the film rachets up the makeup by a thousand, somehow topping itself scene after scene, though never getting more disgusting than Dennis Quaid loudly and messily eating shrimp at a lunch table. The makeup work in this movie is on a whole other level, with its wild third act serving as a both a capstone to the film’s ideas and a hard swerve into genre territory. If Coralie Fargeat is nominated for Best Director, it will be a historic moment for genre horror in movie history. Full Review Here 6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Following up an action movie as perfect and unexpectedly masterful as Mad Max: Fury Road would be an impossible task for any other director, so credit given where credit is due; Furiosa may not be as perfect a film as Fury Road was on the whole, but it’s also aiming for something quite different, an epic revenge odyssey spread across decades which is much more character-focused than plot based. Magnificently directed by George Miller, the film is yet another example of how no one in the world understands the Mad Max universe, or indeed the balls it takes to really do this kind of action filmmaking, quite like he does. At 79 years old, Miller is directing sequences like the War Rig chase and the Bullet Farm escape better than even the most skilled people could at less than half his age, and to witness someone so in command of their craft that a nearly three-hour revenge odyssey remains as engaging as this one does is a privilege it’s a shame more people didn’t opt into when the film was in theaters. Anya-Taylor Joy shines as the film’s titular character, able to communicate so much in her face without speaking a word, but it’s Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus who ends up stealing the show in the actor’s finest performance to date, and the final showdown between the two will go down as one of the best endings in all of action filmmaking. Full Review Here 5. Challengers Between this and at the risk of spoiling our number four selection, there was seldom a better time to be a movie fan than this past spring, especially for those with particular admiration for Tom Holland’s new fiancée. Luca Guadagnino’s steamy sports drama starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist as a trio embroiled in a lust triangle in which tennis plays the central cog on which it all turns is not simply the sexiest movie of the year by far, but also the only one without an outright sex scene in its entire runtime. Guadagnino understands the raw excitement of desire better than just about any director working today, and is able to use his skill to thrill his audience by turning the very idea of love and connection into its own tennis match, culminating the whole thing in what is easily the best ending in movies from the whole past year. Almost everyone in this movie is giving career-best performances, and are directed at the perfect pitch for the story being told as Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ best score since The Social Network blares across the speakers. Zendaya and Mike Faist both turn in some of their best work yet as Tashi Duncan and Art Donaldson respectively, but it’s Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig who ends up stealing the show as the devious little shit-heel throwing a wrench into what would otherwise be a normal, healthy relationship dynamic. Between all of that and a crackling script chock-full of great dialogue (“you have a better shot with a handgun in your mouth” is an all-timer) and fully realized characters, it’s no wonder Challengers was easily one of the best movie theater experiences of 2024. If only the Academy felt the same way. Full Review Here 4. Dune: Part Two I’m already planning to crash out if the Academy refuses to recognize Denis Villeneuve’s efforts in directing once again, and the growing likelihood of Villeneuve being passed over – despite making an even better movie than he did with the first Dune – in favor of someone like Jacques Audiard makes it all the more infuriating that AMPAS wouldn’t consider Dune: Part Two one of year’s greatest directorial acheivements; after all, it’s not like some of them haven’t seen the movie or finished it, right?...Right?! In any case, Villeneuve’s second half adaptation of Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi novel (which I’m currently reading) is a masterful step up from where Part One left off, increasing the world-building, the story stakes, the character depth, and the level of artistry to such a degree that the film joins the conversation easily as one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made. Villeneuve’s understanding of the source material is second to none, and there are more than a few action sequences in this film that made my jaw drop in the theater for how masterfully they were handled. But it’s not only the sound, the VFX, the costuming, the makeup, the editing, the cinematography, and Hans Zimmer’s new score that are improved upon from the last film; the expansions made to Chani's character in adapting the book only serve to further enhance the compelling story, which acts as a warning against the idea of charismatic leaders who would sooner burn the world down than bypass a chance at revenge (now where have we encountered that before?). The entire ensemble is giving it everything they’ve got, including and especially Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson, who turn in even better performances here with more interesting stuff to do, but no one outsteps Austin Butler’s magnificent introduction as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, and once he’s on screen, almost every actor finds it difficult to match his freak no matter how good they are, try as Javier Bardem’s deceptively funny Stilgar might. To say much more would be spoiling the film for those who haven’t caught up to it somehow despite its $714 million gross at the box office, but in the shortest terms I can think to put it in, this is essential viewing for all sci-fi, movie, and Denis Villeneuve fans. 3. I Saw the TV Glow Now more than ever, it’s important that trans kids and trans people are seen, heard, and loved by those around them, and the first step in making sure all of those things happen is by recognizing the dysphoria that comes with questioning one’s sexual identity as a queer person in an environment where such things are frowned upon. Jane Schoenbrun’s masterful excavation of that dysphoria is what gives I Saw the TV Glow its power, especially as it relates to trans youth, as we’re shown what burying ourselves out of fear ultimately leads to. The ending of the film in the “Fun Zone” is one of the year’s most outright heartbreaking, shattering with intention the idea that one can truly live not being their full selves without ultimately suffocating themselves in the process. Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine are fantastic in this gorgeous-looking film with frames that will stop your heart, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call it an especially “scary” watch in the traditional or even indie sense, it belongs every bit to the horror genre for the queer community as The Substance or Nosferatu would for those outside of it. Looking at the whole of movies in 2024, there’s still nothing out there quite like this, and I hope sincerely that every person struggling with their sexual or gender identities gets a chance to see this film and feel as though they are not only understood, but cared for. Full Review Here 2. Sing Sing A24’s botched rollout of Sing Sing is the stuff of legend amongst cinephiles, as the film was meant to have a nationwide release over the summer following its TIFF premiere in 2023, which got turned into a limited release as the eventual nationwide date of August 2 only saw the film play a select number of theaters before a planned re-release to only 500 theaters on January 17. Suffice it to say, let’s hope those Academy screenings went off like gangbusters, because the lack of transparency around releasing the film to a wide audience that would have loved to actually get a chance to see it may have just cost it some key awards nominations, including Best Picture, if the PGA ten is anything to trust in that regard. (Amazon’s botched rollout of Nickel Boys is in the same boat.) Regardless of rollout though, Sing Sing is still one of the three best movies released at all in 2024, a film that revels in the fact that humanity needs art in order to be human, and to remind ourselves how we're all capable of dignity. Greg Kwedar’s drama about incarcerated persons at the Sing Sing correctional facility participating in an acting program for rehabilitation is the year’s most soulful and deeply felt film of the entire year, a film that revels in the fact that humanity needs art in order to be human, while art needs a human component to make it come to life, and to remind ourselves how we're all capable of royal dignity. It’s a miraculous achievement for everyone involved, especially those incarcerated who played themselves in the film. Colman Domingo turns in his best work to date, and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin is the acting discovery of the year, immediately ingratiating himself to the audience as the supporting performance of 2024. If and when you do get a chance to see this film in theaters, I would urge you to go immediately; you don’t want to miss how special this one is. Full Review Here 1. The Brutalist While it does seem the AI controversy for which the film received enormous backlash was blown way out of proportion, and despite my having put it at #1 when I was first drafting this ranking, I found myself struggling to justify keeping The Brutalist in this spot in the wake of such news. But then, I considered how I felt when I first saw the film all the way back in December, before anyone knew any of this, and well before director Brady Corbet had to set the record straight on the film’s minimalistic and (it would appear) quite industry-wide use of the tools at their disposal. For my own reasons, I find I cannot deny that experience, and the sheer power with which the film overtook my every waking thought for the week afterwards. The Brutalist remains, to put it bluntly, a monumental achievement of a film, an entirely new cinematic language in itself, harkening back to the epics of old like The Godfather or the ones of yester-year like There Will Be Blood, while simultaneously charting its own unique path forward, all to the sounds of Daniel Blumberg’s immediately iconic score, the best parts of which can all be found in the overture of the film. The epic three-and-a-half hour runtime – punctuated smartly by a 15-minute intermission – flies by in the viewing, and by the time it’s all over, one realizes that they’ve not felt a minute pass that didn’t absolutely need to be there. Personally, I love an epic that knows to embrace its length, rather than fear how many sales it will lose for lack of showtimes, and Brady Corbet is clearly not shy about how expansive his vision for the film – gorgeously shot by director of photography Lol Crawley on VistaVision – needed to be in order to tell this story. Adrien Brody turns in his best performance in the better part of twenty years as László Tóth, a Hungarian architect fleeing Europe post-WWII to come find a better life in America, only to discover that the mythical promise of the American dream is built by rich men on the backs of other people’s work, while Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. is not simply one of 2024’s most despicable characters, but maybe Pearce’s best ever. Special attention must be paid, too, to Felicity Jones as Erzsebet, who doesn’t really show up until the second half, but afterwards becomes the humanitarian focal point as László begins to slowly erode before our eyes. Even Joe Alwyn – while never matching these three – turns in great work here under Corbet’s direction, and while some may find his character a bit exaggerated, I never saw that exaggeration as anything but intentional on behalf of the character himself. There will be a lot to say about The Brutalist in the coming months leading up to the Oscars on March 2 (much of it bad-faith complaints rather than actual criticism, such is the way of film twitter), so I won’t spend too long on it here, but if I could urge readers one point of caution: do not let your first time seeing this be at home on your couch. Different viewing experiences can alter one’s perception of just about any movie, but to fully feel the power of certain films, they need to be experienced on the biggest screen with the best possible sound, and this is one of those films. As I did at my first viewing, I could sit in the corner of the front row again, and still feel amazed at what I was seeing and hearing, such is the sheer power and might of it all, which is just one of so many reasons why The Brutalist is my favorite movie of 2024. Full Review Here And those are our picks for the Top 10 Best Movies of 2024! What movies did you like best this year? Anything you’d recommend we catch up on? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! - The Friendly Film Fan Honorable Mentions:
by Jacob Jones Hello, all, and welcome back to The Friendly Film Fan! As we wind down this journey to our Top 10 Movies of 2024, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate the almost best in movies for the calendar year. Many of these films were some of our favorites of the whole year, but as there are only so many spots to fill out even within the shortlisted titles being considered for the Top 10, more than a few were bound to fall by the wayside. To that effect, we came up with the idea of “pre-honorable mentions,” a space for those films , more than a few were bound to fall by the wayside. To that effect, we came up with the idea of “pre-honorable mentions,” a space for those films that made us laugh, cry, scared us, moved us, impressed us, and challenged us, but just couldn’t make it over the finish line and out of longlist placement. (It’s important to note that this list does not act as a stand-in for the official Honorable Mentions of 2024, which is included with our Top 10 piece as a signifier of what else was included in the shortlist from which we found our choices.) This will be our final list before we unveil our Top 10 Movies of 2024, and there are more films included here than on most other lists, meaning our reflections on them may run a little more brief than usual. So, let’s not waste any more time in giving these films the recognition they deserve as well as we are able. These are the Pre-Honorable Mentions of 2024! Alien: Romulus When it was announced that director Fede Alvarez would be helming a new Alien project under the 20th Century Studios banner (i.e. under Disney), I instantly began looking forward to it – albeit with some healthy trepidation – and while the final product does feature imperfections in some fan service over-reliance that ultimately brings the overall product down a peg, that overall product was well worth the wait. Alvarez both understands the horror of Alien and the action sensibilities of Aliens better than almost any other director the franchise has yet brought in, though the horror elements in Romulus work stronger than the action elements overall. Between Alvarez’ confident pitching of the tones this movie walks, the great performances of its cast (especially David Jonsson), and the film’s fantastic set-pieces buoyed by stellar practical effects, Alien: Romulus is a long-sought victory for Alien sequels that manages to both honor the franchise’s roots while charting a new path forward. The Apprentice I’ve already written about this one in my Top 10 Most Underrated Movies of 2024, so I won’t spend too much time on it here, but suffice it to say, The Apprentice just might be the only piece of media about Donald Trump to release since his first Presidential term to actually examine the heart of his unconventional origins and the events ultimately responsible for his rise to power. Ali Abassi’s biopic centering on Trump’s early life isn’t so much interested in the Trump we know today as how the Ali Abassi’s biopic centering on Trump’s early life isn’t so much interested in the Trump we know today as how the (unfortunately) President-elect became who we know him to be, and places its focus squarely on the relationship between Trump and his infamously mysterious lawyer, the late Roy Cohn. The question alone makes Abassi’s biopic worth watching, but it’s the world-class performances of Jeremy Strong as Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Trump that ultimately put it a step above any other recent piece of Trump-centered media. A Complete Unknown The greatest magic trick that director James Mangold pulls in his biopic about the life of Bob Dylan as the folk icon came up through the 60’s into the start of his electric era is that he doesn’t really make it a biopic about Dylan’s life at all. Dylan by nature has always been a somewhat unknowable figure, and Mangold makes the wise decision not to attempt to figure him out but to showcase just how impossible it was, is, and always shall be to ever accomplish that task, this particular time period in Dylan’s career being the most openly reflective of that notion. Timothée Chalamet, of course, excels as Dylan, never imitating and always trusting the writing from James Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks to carry the character, with Edward Norton turning in what might be his most low-key performance to date, as well as Boyd Holdbrook rivaling Joaquin Phoenix for the best on-screen Johnny Cash in a James Mangold film. Special attention must be paid, though, to Monica Barbaro, who not only learned to sing for the part of Joan Baez, but learned to sing exactly like Baez herself, one of the most iconic voices in music history. She’s really excellent in the film, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see her show up with an Oscar nomination to her name come Thursday. Dahomey Clocking in at barely over an hour, Mati Diop’s Dahomey is among the most beloved documentaries of the year, and it’s not hard to see why. Chronicling the return of 26 artifacts plundered by French colonialism to their original home in Benin, Diop’s urgent call for repatriation is as captivating as it is digestible, partly told through narration via one of the artifacts, partly through a meeting of Benin leaders and citizens concerning the events of the film and what they mean to both the plundered and the plunderer. The sound design is shockingly underrated even from those whom I’m aware have seen the film, and while I can’t say much both due to the film’s brevity and its relatively simple framework, the journey of watching it is one of the most moving one can have in any year it’s viewed. Didi Coming-of-age stories from indie studios are nothing new, but coming-of-age in the digital age is an especially tricky feeling to pull off well without seeming either condescending or simply too inexperienced to tackle such a delicate subject. Luckily, Sean Wang throws Didi into the mix at exactly the right pitch, capturing the adolescent anxiety of growing up in a time where everything around you is now being immortalized, and every decision you make feels like your social life literally depends on it. Joan Chen gives an Oscar-worthy turn as Wang Wang’s mother, and while it’s not an especially revolutionary character for her to be playing, she plays it with such grace and poise that one could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s a performance at all. For YouTubers especially, this movie is a different kind of special. Evil Does Not Exist Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car was among the most celebrated films of 2021, going so far as to earn Oscar nominations for both Best Picture and Best Director, so why is it that his existentially reflective follow-up, Evil Does Not Exist, seems to have passed so many would-be enthusiasts by? One could asset that this is due to Japan’s passing it up as their submission for Best International Feature this year, opting instead to back Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud (which recently announced a summer 2025 release date in the U.S.). Or, as in many cases with smaller films such as this, it could be that the summer 2024 release was so limited that the film simply didn’t gain enough traction for Japan to push a filmmaker whose work has already been widely recognized on the world stage. But if I were to tell it, to really, honestly tell it, I would say that believe it or not, Evil Does Not Exist is simply a much more low-key film than Drive My Car, and without a three-hour runtime to sustain its subtleties, its unassuming, ambiguous narrative could pass people by if they don’t examine it with the same vigor. There’s little risk of spoilers for this one because so little happens in it narratively speaking, but its thematic implications pack a significant amount of weight. It was recently issued on blu-ray through Criterion’s Janus Contemporaries label, so if – like me – you’re a regular collector of physical media, I’d highly recommend giving it a shot. Hit Man Between Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You, and now Twisters, there’s no denying the theatrical appetite for Glen Powell’s movie star charm, but it’s in Richard Linklater’s Netflix crime comedy Hit Man where he turns in his best work to date in that regard. Based on a real-life Texas Monthly story written by Skip Hollandsworth, the film stars Powell (who co-wrote the script with Linklater) as a college professor who moonlights as a fake hitman for the New Orleans Police Department, essentially setting up anyone looking to hire so they can be arrested and taken off the streets. Regardless of how casually the film seems to treat entrapment law in general, the ride itself is a blast, and Powell is clearly having the time of his life, especially when paired with Adria Arjona, with whom he has an unbelievable amount of on-screen chemistry. (I mean, I don’t know who wouldn’t have chemistry with Glen Powell, but still.) It’s a real shame this one never got a theatrical release; it would play exceedingly well with a crowd. Kill Of all the action movies to come out in 2024, Kill was not the best (and no, I have not seen Shadow Strays yet), but it was by far the gnarliest. How confident do you have to be in how good your movie is to drop the title card halfway through, knowing you’ve saved almost all of the best stuff for after that happens? Sure, you could call this John Wick on a moving train, but the truth is the violence enacted here is of a largely different variety. There are kills in this film I have never seen before, including one with a thrown lighter that readers will know when they see it as one of the coolest takedowns in any action movie. Lakshya Lalwani excels in the lead part, and the stunt work is some of the best than Indian cinema has to offer. Kinds of Kindness Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up to the multi-Oscar-winning Poor Things may not be touching the same gold even given how unpredictable the current field is, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value, and it turns out I seemed to enjoy it more than most. The first of the short films within this themed collection is easily its best, touting a Jesse Plemons performance that absolutely could compete for Best Actor in a slightly weaker year (and in fact won him the same award at last year’s Cannes film festival), but the latter two are also just as off-kilter and unpredictably chaotic as that one. If you’re a Lanthimos fan, even if you consider this one of his weaker entries, it’s still an undeniable good deal of fun. Longlegs The most viral marketing campaign of 2024 prior to Wicked’s complete domination in the fourth quarter belonged to none other than Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, and while it is an imperfect film to be sure, I haven’t yet encountered a film whose marketing so perfectly encapsulated just how creepy it actually turned out to be. No, it’s not outright scary or terrifying in a studio horror sort of way, but everything that creeped me out as a child was on full display here, pitched straight at the old 70s shag carpets and windowless basements I used to encounter all the time, and drenched in an atmosphere of dread we could only be carried through by two vastly underrated performances from Maika Monroe and Blair Underwood. The talk of the town for this one, though, is Nicolas Cage as the titular character, able to turn the things that usually make him entertaining or annoying to the opposite side of his fandom into the very things that make his under-your-skin creepiness so effective here. If you’re a horror fan, but somehow missed this over the summer, do yourself a favor and watch it in complete darkness. Memoir of a Snail I came late to the game on Memoir of a Snail, as I wasn’t able to watch it until it finally hit VOD, but once I finally was able to view it, I found myself completely unable to resist its myriad charms. The animation is incredible creative, the story is moving in ways I didn’t expect, and it’s often quite funny, though parents be warned, this is not an animated movie for kids. All told, this is probably the most underrated animated movie of the year without Transformers in the title, and one of the medium’s few genuine successes in 2024. Rebel Ridge Carry-On might well end up being the most popular movie in Netflix history, but it’s far from its best, even within the calendar year of 2024, and while I still have a few of their originals left to catch up on (which unfortunately won’t be considered for my Top 10 due to time constraints), it’s gonna be tough to beat Rebel Ridge, director Jeremy Saulnier’s revenge thriller about a former marine who gets caught up in small-town corruption when the police department enacts a civil asset forfeiture on the money he’s meant to use to bail out his cousin. It’s not exactly the most high-minded concept, but it’s handled in exactly the right way for a movie of its type, and once Emory Cohen yells at Don Johnson’s police chief to put some distance between himself and Aaron Pierre’s hulking frame, the film turns up to eleven and seldom comes back down. This is the movie future movie historians will point to (if they can find it without a physical edition) when they indicate where Aaron Pierre became an action star, and as perfectly pitched three-star rides go, this one is 2024’s absolute best. Sugarcane Watching Sugarcane directly after having finished “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead in preparation for that film left me with an eerie, unsettled feeling, so similar are the two stories in setting and tone. tone. This documentary from National Geographic, which is available to watch now on Disney+ and Hulu, centers on a group of Canadian natives who endured years of mental, physical, and sexual abuse at an Indian residential school on the Sugarcane reserve where many of the natives went missing and were never found again. The film is an investigation into the events surrounding the disappearances, as well as a search for any possible mass grave wherein the native dead are buried. It’s far from an easy watch, but in some small way, its existence offers some justice in telling the story of these Canadian Indians, reckoning with their past and acknowledging the hurt and loss they’ve suffered, even when the responsible parties seem unable to do even as little as that. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story You can read my full review for all my thoughts on this documentary, but suffice it to say, while it missing the Oscar shortlist for this category is disappointing, its presence at almost every other awards body’s events is a heartening thing to see. It may not do anything especially new to the documentary format, or even give us information on the titular Reeve that wouldn’t be easily available in public record, but it’s the way that directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui manage to tell Reeve’s story that makes the film so moving. Able to both excavate the super and celebrate the man, The Christopher Reeve Story deftly demonstrates to us all that, at least for a short while, we really did believe a man could fly. The Wild Robot As animated movies go, 2024 was not an especially strong year, and I don’t think it’s an unpopular notion amongst cinephiles that even within the cream of the crop, there were no outright masterpieces that rose to the top of the pack, no matter how charming or moving they were. What most people did seem to agree on is that neither of the best animated films of the year belonged to Disney or Pixar, and one of those two was Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot, which came to us from director Chris Sanders as he adapted the beloved children’s book with co-writer Peter Brown. The animation in Wild Robot is stunning, painterly without ever betraying the use of CG effects, but not so anti-CG that it looks truncated or any less smooth than it’s meant to. The story itself lacks a little emotional elevation, for my part (even if I do quite like Lupita N’yongo’s vocal performance), but so much of what makes this movie special is about the craft, including Kris Bowers’ excellent score which could Bowers himself an Oscar nomination. If you’re looking for an animated movie to watch with your kids, or even just for yourself, this is the best dialogue-inclusive one of the year. And those are our Pre-Honorable Mentions for 2024! Have you seen any of these films? Any guesses as to what triumphed over them in the Top 10? Let me know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! (Next up: The Top 10 Best Movies of 2024!)
- The Friendly Film Fan by Jacob Jones Hello, all, and welcome back to The Friendly Film Fan! As we wind down our last days to the Top 10 Movies of 2024, we wanted to take this opportunity to show some love to the films that unfortunately did not make the cut for either the top ten themselves or the Pre-Honorable Mentions list that we do each year. Whether these films just didn’t quite live up to what they could’ve been, or we simply liked some others more, that doesn’t mean that they weren’t worth watching, examining, or spending time with along with everything else; there’s just only so many slots available, and only so many films that have the ability to fill those slots. With that in mind, we’d like to recommend to viewers the films below. You may see some entries on this list that we didn’t initially give positive reviews to, or even some that we’ve not mentioned up to now; those films are on this list due to the artistic merit we still believe they possess, worthy of discussion and examination regardless of whether we liked them or not. We also didn’t include any movies that could be found on other rankings based on titles, so if you don’t see any here you’d swear we liked, check out our Most Underrated list or – in the event you’re reading this later on – our Pre-Honorable Mentions list (Top 5 Scenes & Movie Moments entrants may still be included). In any case, we think all of the films listed are worth at least one watch, even if you never see them again afterwards. We won’t do you the disservice of breaking them all down one by one (that would make this piece excessively long), so in the spirit of brevity with which this list was made, let's get started! Underlined titles will feature links to our full reviews of those titles. Here are our Recommended Movies of 2024!
And those are our recommended movies of 2024! We’ll update the list once or twice as we round out the rest of what we wanted to see for the year (those Oscar shortlists can take a bit to get through), but for now, what do you think of these films? Any we missed that you would have included? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading!
- The Friendly Film Fan The Friendly Film Fan Ranks All 10 Films in the Famed “Planet of the Apes” Franchise. By Jacob Jones One of cinema’s most long-standing and storied series, the Planet of the Apes films have one of the most consistent hit records in the history of franchise filmmaking, especially wherein the sci-fi genre is concerned; only once has the series ever put out a generally agreed-upon bad film, and even those entrants that are less beloved than others all have something valuable to offer, whether that be an ambitious swing that doesn’t always pan out or a further exploration of philosophical concepts. Having been around since 1968, when the original Charlton Heston film wowed audiences with its twist ending, the themes and ideas examined by this world and explored by the characters within it continue to resonate with audiences to this very day. Those same audiences now have the opportunity to experience the series’ latest release, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, in all its visual glory on the silver screen, and re-immerse themselves in the world of their favorite intelligent simians, courtesy of director Wes Ball (you can find my full review for the film here). In light of this new Apes film finally hitting screens after a seven year hiatus for the series, I binge-watched all nine previous entries in the franchise over the course of three days. Now having seen Kingdom twice, I have ranked all ten Planet of the Apes films below, beginning with the worst, and of course, ending with the best. Apes Together Strong! Let’s get started. 10. Planet of the Apes (2001) The only outright bad entry on this list, Tim Burton’s perhaps always doomed remake of Planet of the Apes features none of the things that made the original great or any of its follow-ups even passible at their worst. Most notably lacking in the series’ core tenets of philosophical science and exploration of humanity’s nature, the film substitutes these ideas with a generic sci-fi action story which – to be fair – features terrific makeup effects but essentially nothing else worthwhile. The iconic lines are irreparably altered, clunkily-scripted, and none of the performances really land (Tim Roth is particularly bad here). Still, this Planet of the Apes is only a generically-bad sci-fi movie…until the ending happens and throws the entire thing off-balance. In trying to replicate the “it was Earth all along” twist, the story sees Mark Wahlberg’s character (whose name I have yet to recall without having to look it up) actually leave the planet he has been on the entire time in order to re-enter the time-warp storm that sent him there, eventually ending up on what’s implied to be Earth at the end. There’s just one (or several) major problem with this; in the original film, Charlton Heston’s character Taylor never leaves the planet of the apes, which is then revealed to have been Earth all along; how are we supposed to infer that the planet Mark Wahlberg leaves was even Earth in the first place? Did he just go forward in time? Why would the apes just make the same society humans did; isn’t the whole point of their being intelligent apes that they make a different society for themselves? If he went backwards in time as intended, how does General Thade even factor into the Lincoln Memorial in terms of the timeline implied by the film? WHY DO THE APES HAVE A LINCOLN MEMORIAL? Every answer to each question only introduces three new questions, the answers to which all contradict the previous question’s entire premise, fundamentally breaking the film – and my brain – in the process. I long for who I was before the ending of this movie. 9. Beneath the Planet of the Apes On the whole, Beneath the Planet of the Apes isn’t the outright disaster that the 2001 remake of the previous film eventually becomes, but it lacks the vision of its immediate predecessor, failing to make good on that film’s ending or explore further elements of the planet of the apes itself which were previously unseen, at least for most of its runtime. It certainly tries some interesting ideas with having an entirely new protagonist suffer the same introduction to this world that Taylor did and have to navigate it himself (albeit with a lot more help from Nova), but the film fails to explore anything else that Charlton Heston’s Taylor hadn’t already experienced; Nova simply finding John Brent and taking him back to the same ape colony with the same characters we’re familiar with is an understandable choice, but too safe for what this sequel could offer. Most of the film’s runtime after Taylor disappears in the first five minutes is spent above ground as Brent hides out with Zira and Cornelius, re-treading what happened with Taylor during the third act of the previous film in a less interesting way. It’s not until we get to the third act of this film that anything new happens at all, when – in a thoroughly ambitious and bizarre swing – we’re introduced to an underground mutant human society that worships an atomic bomb. (They have magical powers which they say are only illusions, but the mechanics of these illusions are never demonstrated, so it’s still more or less magic.) This part of the movie is definitely the most interesting, but doesn’t feel as though it matches at all with what we’ve experience to that point in terms of any sort of natural progression, and by then, the film has burned up most of its good will by wasting too much time getting there and making Nova an essentially useless character. The tail end of it, with Taylor’s poetically-tragic killing setting off the ultimate doomsday weapon after he’d been so distraught about the results of nuclear warfare in the last film does offer a slight good note for the movie to end on, but it feels like part of a better third act the film doesn’t have. I’ve certainly seen worse sci-fi sequels, but for a franchise this storied, with such an iconic opening film, it’s hard to recommend this follow-up to anyone who asks. 8. Escape from the Planet of the Apes For many, this is considered the best of the original sequels, but for my part, it is without doubt my least favorite. The only reason I’ve listed it above Beneath despite how it frustrates me more is due to my admiration for the hugely ambitious swing it takes with the premise: having Cornelius and Zira go back in time to 1973, before the John Taylor mission ever launched. Reversing the formula to place the intelligent apes into regular human society is an inspired decision, even if the spoof comedy style it introduces at first it has no actual intentions of committing to. The tone switch, once our main characters are on the run in the latter portion of the film, becomes far less interesting after the story has spent the past hour of zaniness rendering Zira less intelligent than any of the humans around her, and the addition of yet another “twist” ending – which by this point one could see coming a mile away – made this one a little more annoying to sit through than its immediate predecessor, even if it does have a little more to offer on the whole. 7. Battle for the Planet of the Apes Many may call this the least successful of the original Apes sequels, due to its looking extremely low-budget and not having a ton going on apart from its battlefield skirmish, but overall, it’s the most well-balanced of any of the sequels offered by the original set of films, even if it’s not the most exciting overall. The story is well-told across the runtime, without ever feeling too long or as though the structure of the film leans too heavily in one direction or the other. The ape/human society discussions are further rooted in the more philosophical musings the series began with, and even though Aldo’s whole plan for the humans makes no sense once you think about it too long, all the Caesar stuff is generally pretty solid. Plus, there’s a certain charm to the human army rolling up to the battle with a school bus as one of their transport vehicles, all Mad Max-style. This one has a lot more in common with the future Dawn of the Planet of the Apes than any other film in the franchise, and while we’ll get to that film later on down the list, this one is not a half-bad prototype on which to base that kind of story. 6. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes While Battle may be overall more well-balanced and a generally better movie than this one, Conquest’s second half goes so hard that I can’t deny its innate power, which elevates it slightly over its sequel. The first half is a bit wonky though, especially in the editing. That’s not to say that nothing about that first half works; the Orwellian ape slavery society we see is interestingly set up, especially since we’re only privy to what we can see in the Century City portion of the world, but what doesn’t work kind of overwhelms whatever is working. At two points, by my count, it seemed as if there were entire transitional scenes missing from the film; a character would say something and the movie would immediately cut to the result of what was said, but without any indication that a cut was even coming. The film also starts rather slow, with Caesar (renamed from “Milo,” thank god) simply biding his time in learning about the ape society itself, meaning he has to spend a lot of time with the human characters that aren’t especially interesting. All that said, once the second half of this one gets going and the revolution begins, the film doesn’t stop until the credits roll. The prison break sequence is one of the great set pieces across the Apes franchise, and while the plaza showdown is overlong, it remains surprisingly tense and thrilling to watch play out, all culminating in Roddy McDowall actually getting to show off some acting chops under the mask and deliver a killer monologue which sets up the next film beautifully. Of all the original sequels, this one is my personal favorite. 5. Planet of the Apes (1968) Though a few of its sequels have terrific individual elements or thrilling sequences in a vacuum, the best of the original Apes films remains the 1968 classic starring Charlton Heston. It’s not exactly as flawless as one might hope on a rewatch – the interior sets seem a little too closed off even for this world, and the pacing isn’t exactly smooth sailing the whole way through (plus Heston’s performance is a tad wooden, even for him) – but it holds up rather well when compared to its immediate counterparts, and is still one of the best sci-fi films of its era full-stop. It really mostly feels more like a series of interesting scenes set in different rooms than one fully fleshed-out story from beginning to end, but that could also be due to what we know is coming later on down the line, and the film’s notorious twist ending buys the movie a lot of good will – it’s all too rare to see a twist like that executed as well as this one was. If you haven’t revisited this one since seeing it the first time, I don’t think a rewatch would be too disappointing. 4. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes As alluded to in the intro for this piece, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the most recent addition to the Apes canon, and falls for me about where the next entry on this list does, though the pacing isn’t quite as strong and some of the character work seems too broadly-painted by the film’s end. Still, these are largely minor complaints in a film which is clearly the first entrant in a series of new Apes stories set many generations after Caesar’s trilogy, and which still features some terrific cinematography, excellent visual effects, and expert-level compositing, as well as really solid performances from the entire cast (especially Owen Teague and Kevin Durand). I don’t want to spoil too much of what goes on in this one, given how new it is, but the journey it takes the viewer on is much more of an adventure film than anything that came before it, and the confidence Wes Ball clearly has in his ability to not lose the audience despite the long runtime is something that can’t be taught to many directors. This is the largest scale at which these films have ever been made and you can see the money spent very wisely up on screen. The official word is that the producers of this new set of Apes films want this to be a nine-film saga, the beginning of which would have been Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and if the storytelling for this second trilogy in that saga can improve enough from here to whatever comes next, in the same fashion the previous trilogy improved, we’re in for something really, truly special. 3. Rise of the Planet of the Apes The first chapter in the Planet of the Apes franchise’s first prequel trilogy, Rise of the Planet of the Apes has us bear witness to the origins of Caesar, the original intelligent ape, as he’s brought up by Will Rodman (James Franco) following an ill-begotten test of a brain repair drug which is implied to have the ability to cure Alzheimer’s. The subsequent rise of Caesar from intelligent ape to leader is one of the great protagonist formations in one of the great starts in movie trilogy history, a start which would only be surpassed by the film’s immediate sequels. Above all else, this movie is exceptionally well-paced, clocking in at just over one hour and forty-five minutes, the efficiency in storytelling never waning for a second. To be fair, this can cause one or two edits to feel a little off, and the speed at which the film moves does cost somewhat in terms of the quality of CG compositing and some backgrounds still looking digitally-rendered, but even the early visual effects on the apes look remarkable for where they began. Hearing Caesar say “no” for the first time still takes my breath away, and the Golden Gate bridge finale is a fantastic action set-piece. The film’s other flaws are a little more noticeable, like the fact that Frieda Pinto’s character feels fairly inconsequential to the story beyond just being James Franco’s girlfriend and isn’t present at all for the Redwoods finish despite having been with Will and Caesar for five years to that point, and the fact that David Oyelowo’s fun scenery-chewing character eventually just morphs into straight-up cartoon capitalism villainy (then again, art imitates life, so what are you gonna do), but they’re not heavy enough to detract from what the film has going for it positively. This is still a terrific first film for this trilogy to open with, and an incredibly fun watch for first-time viewers just now getting interested in this franchise. 2. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes For a long time, this was my favorite of the most recent Apes trilogy, and on some days, it still is, with good reason. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is the first of the two Matt Reeves films in this franchise, and it’s under his astute vision for this world and the characters within it that everything is elevated to another level, from the visual effects to the characters themselves, to the conflicts they have with each other, to the tension from scene to scene, to the performances from both ape and human actors to some of the franchise’s greatest action set-pieces and image-making. At no point during my first ever watch of this movie in theaters did I know exactly where it was going, and on no viewing since have I wanted it to go anywhere else. There are two or three shots in this film that are absolutely goosebump-inducing: the 360 one-shot on the tank, the crane shot above the tower as Caesar and Koba are about to face off, and of course, Toby Kebbell’s Koba – the greatest antagonist in Planet of the Apes franchise history – on horseback, bursting through a wall of flames with a machine gun like a demon spawned straight from hell. Kebbell’s performance matches Andy Serkis’ evolved character of Caesar with a tragic rage no villain in this franchise, or most sci-fi series, has ever had in such nuanced terms, and it can be so easy to get lost in just how good a character Koba is before remembering that it’s all being done by an actor in a mo-cap suit. He still never outperforms Andy Serkis as the mo-cap king, a more insurmountable task with each passing film in this trilogy, but he more than holds his own, as does Gary Oldman despite rather limited screen-time. Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and all the other human actors also turn in good work, but it’s the previous three mentioned that steal the show. And even with all of that, no one steals the show here from Matt Reeves’ directing. From the first moment after the film’s brief virus recap to the last frame, Reeves has total control over this narrative, and knows exactly how to evolve this story organically without playing a single false note, and I have no doubt that it’s this movie that got him the job for The Batman in 2022 (it certainly was the reason I wanted him for it, anyway). If this one is still your favorite, you will not hear an argument from me. 1. War for the Planet of the Apes Having gained some distance from initial pre-release expectations and marketing which didn’t really sell the right movie, War for the Planet of the Apes is my new #1 film in this franchise, and in bingeing them all concurrently, it was an amazing thing to see the final film in the series to this point be the franchise’s strongest. Everything in this film is operating at the top of its game. Somewhat victim to the same misnaming issue that Battle for the Planet of the Apes suffered, the film opens explosively before reminding us that the war we’re witnessing affects characters we care about in deeply personal ways, and it only gets more personally affecting from there. The choice to journey inward, to reckon with the darker parts of Caesar after all this time, instead of forcing a grand-scale spectacle purely off of audience expectation rather than organic storytelling, is a bold choice that reminds the viewer why Matt Reeves was chosen to conclude this story, Caesar’s story. Between Reeves’ direction and Serkis’ understanding of these characters, the filmmaking and narrative storytelling has never been better for this franchise. This is Andy Serkis’ best performance as Caesar bar none (maybe Serkis’ best performance ever), especially in how it’s juxtaposed against Woody Harrelson’s menacing Colonel character, and every expression on his face, be it the best visual effects the franchise has ever had or the performance in itself, is full of unprecedented depth. In fact, so powerful is the sheer level of detail in this film’s visual effects, it’s still a bit baffling that this franchise has never won an Oscar for them (which this one lost to Blade Runner 2049 in an entirely understandable but unfortunate blow for this movie). Steve Zahn’s “Bad Ape” provides some really great comic relief while also still being somewhat of a tragic character himself, and of course, I have to shout out the underrated MVP of this trilogy in Karin Konoval as Maurice. The cinematography and compositing in this one is note-perfect, the pacing moves exactly as fast as it needs to and slows down when appropriate, the film contains some of the trilogy’s most quietly sweet and tragic moments, and this is easily Michael Giacchino’s best score in a live-action film prior to The Batman. Without a doubt in my mind, this is the best film in the Planet of the Apes prequel trilogy and the best Planet of the Apes movie ever made. What a conclusion. And that’s my ranking of the entire Planet of the Apes franchise! How would you rank these films? Any you think are more underrated than others? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading!
- The Friendly Film Fan by Jacob Thomas Jones Greeting, all, and welcome back to The Friendly Film Fan! 2023 sure was a great year for movies, and 2024 looks to be another banger of a cinematic calendar. One of the lead stories of 2023 was the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, which led studios to push certain films into 2024 in order for actors and writers to continue and begin promotional work on both small and larger-profile projects. These projects ranged from the highly-anticipated Dune: Part Two to Luca Guadagnino’s tennis film Challengers, the latter of which was one of the first major moves off of the 2023 slate. However, as a result of those moves, we may be getting more quality cinema in 2024 than even we’re expecting. A few notes on the list order before we begin: given some of those films’ larger prominence and imminent release dates, they may appear lower on this list than you might expect. The fact is, there are others with more mystery surrounding them that adds a layer of excitement some of the lower-numbered entrants don’t necessarily lack, but no longer possess in quite the same way. As well, while some of the films higher on the list have less information available or a lack of current footage, the information that is available is elevates them above other, more obvious candidates. There are also any number of films due to release this year that simply don’t have enough information available yet to be included on this list, and some that may be expected to release this year could get pushed into 2025, so while it’s possible some of these end up on the Top 10 Best Movies of 2024 list, one can’t bank on that. As with the Top 10 Best Movies of 2023 list, there are a few films in the Honorable Mentions section that are listed in numerical order of anticipation due to how much we’re looking forward to them over the other, non-numbered alphabetical entries, but all the films on this list carry some level of excitement for us, so let’s get started. Here are our picks for the Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2024! 10. Horizon: An American Saga Kevin Costner is back in the director’s chair with an epic western event that not only has a theatrical release but already has an announcement trailer from Warner Bros. Given that its multi-part stories have not yet separated themselves in either footage or plot details, I’m just including them both as just one big entry here. With Chapter 1 dropping in June and Chapter 2 finishing the job in August, there’s a lot to look forward to, especially as Costner has invested a lot of his own money into developing the project after having left the series Yellowstone in order to make it happen. We haven’t gotten a proper Western genre epic in a long time, and to see Costner back in the director’s chair on a Western project so long after Dances with Wolves is cause for excitement. Hopefully this will be one of the moviegoing events of the summer (provided its quality is as high as it can go). 9. The Bikeriders The first film on this list to fall victim to the SAG-AFTRA strike of 2023, Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders will be the first feature film the director has released in 8 years, following the severely underrated Loving in 2016. The film – which debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2023 and was slated to release that December – was dropped by Disney following the strikes in what seemed like a revenge move against SAG-AFTRA, later being picked up by Focus Features for a June 2024 release. Inspired by the 1967 photo-book of the same name, the fictional story tracks a biker gang from the streets of Chicago all across America’s Midwest, and stars the likes of Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Mike Faist. Nichols is one of our greatest yet most under-sung filmmakers and this looks to be yet another film of his that utilizes a brilliant ensemble cast and likely excellent script to their fullest effect. 8. Dune: Part Two It may seem odd for Denis Villeneuve’s long-awaited follow-up to Dune to be this low on the list, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not still hotly anticipating its arrival. The first film in this two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel was a remarkably well-crafted production of sci-fi glory that wasn’t afraid to take its time establishing everything we would need to know in order to understand this world, and every element from the cinematography to the score to the sound design heralded the arrival of a new genre classic. Part Two promises to add everything the first film missed – or at least, sort of missed – with a greater emphasis on action, a more thorough understanding of Zendaya’s character Chani and the Fremen people with which she is embedded, and the added cast powers of Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, and Christopher Walken. If these trailers have shown us anything, it’s that Villeneuve was exactly the right person to helm these adaptations, and if he’s snubbed for Best Director a second time, the Academy and I will have words. 7. Mufasa: The Lion King If you weren’t aware, director Barry Jenkins – the man behind Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, and the Prime Video limited series The Underground Railroad – was tapped some time ago by Disney to direct a live-action Lion King prequel film centered around the character of Mufasa. The latter part of that description leaves a lot to be desired in terms of voter confidence, no doubt about it. However, while live-action Disney projects as of late have ranged from poor to not-as-poor in quality, Barry Jenkins is one of the highest-quality filmmakers we have, and unless a Dial of Destiny-level misfire occurs, this is likely to be yet another incredibly poetic, beautiful, and miraculous notch in the Barry Jenkins quality belt. If anything, it will be something to remember. 6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga It’s been nine years since we last had a Mad Max adventure on the silver screen, and if its first trailer is any indication, the theatrical space has sorely missed George Miller’s fast and furious apocalypse franchise. As a prequel to one of the most badass Best Picture nominees ever in Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa tracks the titular Imperator’s journey from her beginnings to her eventual rise within the ranks of Immortan Joe’s inner circle. Sure, some of the CGI in the trailer looks a bit wonky, but this thing comes out in May, so there’s plenty of time for improvements, and with superstar Anya Taylor-Joy stepping into Furiosa’s desert boots – tagging in Chris Hemsworth as the new Max – I have very little doubt that this Mad Max Saga won’t at least mostly satisfy. 5. Blitz You’d be forgiven for not even knowing what this was, since there’s very little publicly available information and absolutely zero footage yet, but what ultimately matters is that Steve McQueen, the man behind 12 Years a Slave, Widows, and the Prime Video short film series Small Axe, is directing a movie about the blitz of London during WWII, and has tagged in Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson to play his two leads. McQueen is one of the most singularly talented and visionary filmmakers working today, and with leads like that – plus a likely Christmastime release date – this thing seems like a major awards player already. We’ll just have to wait and see how much of a player it is. 4. Civil War While Alex Garland’s Men was an unusual but nonetheless interesting miss for the director compared to his previous two works, his remains one of the most consistently quality careers in entertainment, both as a writer and in the head chair. And with A24 expanding their typically indie portfolio to larger-budget projects such as action films and IP-based adaptations, they couldn’t have chosen a better or more innovative filmmaker to launch with. Civil War looks intense, terrifying, and insanely well-put together, its first trailer jolting one into fight or flight almost as easily as its characters (Jesse Plemons might be too good at this job), and with secret weapon Stephen McKinley Henderson on the call sheet, there’s little doubt that this will be one of the most talked-about and impressive movies of the year. 3. Mickey 17 Recently delayed “indefinitely” by Warner Bros. Discovery in order to move up Godzilla x Kong’s nationwide release, Mickey 17 is all but certain to debut in late 2024 as a major awards season player, thanks to the likes of Academy Award Winner Bong Joon Ho – who made a little movie called Parasite (the first non-English language movie to ever win Best Picture) – and superstar Robert Pattinson teaming up for a sci-fi movie that already has an announcement trailer available to watch. Plot details have been kept pretty close to the chest, but I’m hoping more is revealed soon, and I hope what is revealed is as weird and eclectic as the rest of Bong Joon Ho’s filmography. This will be the director’s first fully English-language film, and simply based on him and Pattinson alone, I’m more than confident in its overall quality being high, hence its placement this far up the list. 2. Nosferatu Nosferatu is one of the most iconic films ever made, the first to popularize the titular vampire as a horror icon, and still one of the best vampire films available even though it came out in 1922. There have been other film adaptations of the character before – most notably Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre – but nothing quite like what visionary director Robert Eggers is sure to be cooking up. Bill Skarsgård stars as the character, with the additional cast of Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Willem Dafoe. Dafoe in particular has had some extremely praiseworthy words for Eggers’ directing, and with a Christmas Day release date, Focus Features seems extremely confident in their product. Robert Eggers films are some of the best around, always extremely well-crafted and brimming with commitment to whatever story is being told; this is a perfect fit for him, and I cannot wait to see how he envisions this world and this iconic character. 1. Megalopolis For the better part of two decades, Francis Ford Coppola has been building up his revenues with his and his daughter’s other companies – including a quite popular winery – to self-finance this passion project about an architect who wants to rebuild New York City as a utopia following an unprecedented disaster. There simply is no other spot on this list more befitting for the man behind The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, especially not when he’s working with Adam Driver – whose words of praise for his director should not go unnoted – as his leading man. With all of that information, plus the title itself being a play on Metropolis (another iconic film ripe for re-interpretation), my confidence is quite high. Any movie can suck, including those by some of the greatest filmmakers to ever be in the business; in fact, a few of Francis Ford Coppola’s more recent films have been rather poor. But my instincts on this one, and the knowledge that Coppola’s less quality films were made largely after he ran out of money to make movies on his own, tell me that we’re about to receive a film from Coppola the likes of which we haven’t seen before in the best possible way. And those are our picks for the Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2024! What movies are you looking forward to this year? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! - The Friendly Film Fan Honorable Mentions:
11. Challengers 12. Hit Man 13. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes 14. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim 15. Deadpool 3 16. Twisters 17. The Wolf Man 18. Joker: Folie à Deux 19. Wicked: Part One 20. Gladiator II
by Jacob Thomas Jones Well, here we are. We’ve finally made it to the end. It’s been a long journey getting to this point, across oceans of quality film and vast fields of work that almost landed the plane, but as is the case every year, some truly excellent material had to get cut for this list to happen as it’s meant to. In fact, this year was such an excellent year for film and filmmaking – despite the lead film industry stories from this year being WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that caused more than a few of this list’s potential candidates to get pushed into the 2024 calendar – that in order to whittle the list down to 10, I had to start with a shortlist of 15 and put that list in numerical order first just to find out what went in the #11 spot (#15-#11 are listed below in the Honorable Mentions section along with unranked, alphabetically-ordered selections). This is my favorite list to write every year, and I can’t wait to gush about some of these films for the first time ever alongside the ones I’ll be gushing about even more than I already have. So, without further ado, here are my picks for the Top 10 Best Movies of 2023! 10. May December Is this movie camp? I don’t think so, but it does run pretty close to a brilliant satire. While I don’t know that I’d consider it a masterpiece like the rest of my colleagues seem to, May December puts Todd Haynes in easily his best mode since Carol, and maybe even a better one than that. A film about how exploitation often drives the film industry to do what it does even when it’s damaging to those whose lives are being put up on screen for our entertainment is a risky move from such an established filmmaker, and if you saw the SAG award nominations, actors in particular were none too happy about it. Easily one of the year’s best scripts (and from a first-timer no less!) shines by way of being combined with three of the absolute best performances in any piece of 2023 media, especially Julianne Moore and Charles Melton. Yes, Natalie Portman is excellent as well, but it’s Melton in particular that really shines here, breaking free of his Riverdale stigma to deliver maybe the year’s best supporting performance. There are line readings and moments in this film so devastating they hit you right in the jugular, and the editing is some of the best I’ve seen in any Netflix film. 9. Barbie I flipped between this and Poor Things so many times when it came to what films would be included on this list, it almost gave me whiplash, but while Poor Things is a film I do love and respect a lot, this spot ultimately came down to “favorite” vs. “best,” and favorite won out; I’ve returned to Barbie far more times since my first viewing, and I’ll likely return many more times since the film is just so fun. Yes, one could argue that the film is Feminism 101, but for a commercial Barbie movie to have even this much nuance is something only director Greta Gerwig could have pulled off in exactly this way. This is, without doubt, the best version of this movie we possibly could have gotten with this wide of an appeal. The production and costume designs are immaculate, most of the jokes land like gangbusters, Ryan Gosling’s supporting performance is an all-timer for the man’s career, Margot Robbie is a superstar both in her lead performance and in the film’s production, and Greta Gerwig’s filmography – while I do think this might be the weakest film in it – is already one of the most iconic in movie history. She’s one of the great singular artists of this century, and her achievement of getting her first 3 films all nominated for Best Picture cannot be more worthy of praise. 8. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. For a long time, I struggled with whether or not this movie belonged on this list above other excellent work like Poor Things or even May December, but at the end of the day, this is my list, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. was, to me, the culmination of all coming-of-age stories from the mid-2010s to now, the most befitting of the genre and the most appropriately adapted work in that space to come along in years. I know it’s cliché, but we just don’t get movies like this anymore. Stories that feel like they would have come out in the 90s and made classics by way of repeat viewings all the way up to now. The soft, unobtrusive direction of Kelly Fremon Craig, the unfairly under-awarded supporting performance of Rachel McAdams, the excellent star-making turn of Abby Ryder Forston in the title part, and the warm fallbacks of Kathy Bates and Benny Safdie batting cleanup make this one not only well worth your time, but an excellent one for kids and young adults to grow up on. 7. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse I loved Into the Spider-Verse when it came out; it changed the medium of animation as a whole and set a new bar for what these things could look like, and while I don’t know if Across the Spider-Verse is narratively as tight and well-structured as its immediate predecessor, I never expected in a million years that this team would be able to pull off the same magic trick twice with even larger leaps. This is one of the most stunningly-crafted movies of the year; the sound design is excellent, the animation yet again reshapes and redefines what can be done in this medium, the narrative – one that directly confronts the idea that canon is more important than innovation, that Miles is supposedly “not the real Spider-Man” – is even more mature and brilliant than the last one, the sheer use of color and that magnificent score elevate this one in craft so far above where any animated movie has ever gone, it’s even more ground-shaking that the last one was. It is an absolute crime that this – the second-best score of the year – was snubbed by the Oscars in favor of Indiana Jones, and if they stick the landing on the third film, a film on which I hope they take all the time they need, we’ll be looking at a new contender for the best animated trilogy of all time, and a new entrant in the “Best Trilogies of All Time” canon (not that canons matter), full stop. 6. Anatomy of a Fall I’m not sure what France is doing with their International Feature submissions, but swapping out this magnificently-crafted mystery for the more formalistic The Taste of Things (which I have heard is excellent nonetheless) may go down as one of the all-time bad moves in Oscar submission history. It’s difficult to describe just what makes Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall so damn good without simply fawning over things the film has in it – hot lawyer, all-timer movie dog, show-stealing supporting child performance from Milo Machado Graner, Sandra Hüller showing up to dominate the best performances of the year conversation – but what sets it apart is how it uses both the mystery of the fall itself and the French court system to dissect a relationship and put the very idea of marriage on trial for its life. The script is bound to win the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and when that happens, you’ll hear no protest from me. 5. Maestro I don’t care that this has become film twitter’s villain of the year; I loved this movie, and I shall continue to love it because Maestro blew me away in both its artistry and its ambition. Exquisitely crafted from top to bottom, with some of Matthew Libatique’s most stunning cinematography to date, Maestro is Bradley Cooper not so much dissecting Leonard Bernstein as he is the artist’s struggle, choosing to channel the legendary composer rather than embody him. In his thorough examination of Bernstein’s marriage to Felicia Montealegre – along with all its complications, its tragedies, its highs and lows – Cooper never disappears or transforms, but one can feel the same energy that Bernstein likely experienced flowing through Cooper’s performance at every turn, and Cooper’s direction also supports this notion. Carey Mulligan is as excellent here as she’s ever been, and the Ely Cathedral sequence remains to this day my favorite singular movie scene of 2023. 4. Past Lives For a very long time, Past Lives was my favorite movie of the year, a soulful examination of the choices we make and how those choices shape the people we become. Greta Lee turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as Nora, a young Korean woman whose departure from Korea means having to ultimately part ways with her childhood sweetheart, only for them to reconnect years later when Nora herself has an entire life of her own with a husband she met after breaking things off. The always undervalued John Magaro shines as Lee’s shockingly understanding husband in the face of some incredibly discomforting circumstances, and Teo Yoo gives my favorite singular performance of the year as Hae Sung, the resurfaced childhood sweetheart in question. It will be a long time before I see another film with this delicate of a script that reaches into the depths of my soul as deeply as Past Lives did (at least, in the positive sense), delivering not just one but two of the all-time heartbreaker sequences in the bar scene and the film’s magnificently emotional ending moments. I can’t believe this is Celine Song’s debut feature. 3. Oppenheimer It shouldn’t be possible for a director as revered, respected, and as much a titan of industry as Christopher Nolan is to make their best film 11 movies deep into their career…and yes, I said best film. While I still hold space at the top for the way The Dark Knight shook the ground and changed superhero films forever, Oppenheimer is a genuine masterwork from a director in full command of his craft and easily the best-directed movie of Nolan’s entire filmography. The performances are second-to-none, with Cillian Murphy finally getting his chance to shine as Nolan’s leading man, Emily Blunt once again showing us all why she’s been an Oscar-worthy performer all along, Robert Downey Jr. pulling a complete 180 on his Iron Man persona to demonstrate that if he has anything, it’s the range, and a supporting ensemble so deep and stacked with talent in all the right places they might as well be the single greatest ensemble cast ever assembled for a single motion picture. Josh Hartnett! Matt Damon! Florence Pugh! David fucking Krumholtz! Even the one-scene cameos are powerhouse players! But what sets Oppenheimer’s immaculate cast and insane-level craft work (including amazing editing by Jennifer Lame and Ludwig Göransson’s best musical score to date) apart from Nolan’s other films is its non-confidence about the existence of the atomic bomb. Almost all of Nolan’s other features, even if they deal with some sort of controversial issue, end up feeling like the side they’ve taken is the right one to be on. With Oppenheimer, Nolan confronts head-on the consequences of adding atomic, potentially world-ending weapons to a world that just can’t seem to quit warring with itself. It’s not about the cost of doing the necessary work; it’s about whether the work was ultimately necessary at all, and what kind of world is created when miraculous acheivements are taken out of an artist’s hands for the control of those who don’t understand their power. A singular and visionary work that will be viewed in the years to come as one of Nolan’s greatest films. 2. The Zone of Interest The one film I knew I had to see before finishing this Top 10 list was The Zone of Interest, especially as it’s not even remotely the kind of film the Academy usually clings to – an avant-garde examination of evil’s regularity, a direct gaze into the eyes but not the heart of hell. Immediately after finishing the film, I was struck by something I had not felt in years: anguish, of a kind that rendered me entirely and helplessly speechless for the duration of my drive home. It feels wrong to describe this as one of my “favorites” of the year, or as a film I “loved,” so profoundly distressing was the film to my soul; it would almost feel evil to describe it that way. And this film is evil incarnate; at least, that is the entire subject. The unsettling sound design and haunting score leave one simply paralyzed in horror at what was witnessed, and I have not been this upset by a film since seeing Schindler’s List for the first time; in more ways than one, this film is even more disconcerting. From my letterboxd review: “The Zone of Interest takes one to such a place of thorough and irreparable discomfort that one cannot understand it except in the context of the evil it depicts, an evil bolstered by its lack of viscerality. There's a purposeful avoidance of grandiosity, of emotionality; there is no peek over the wall to offer some validation that the banality we are witnessing is monstrous, even as we can audibly hear its depravity all around us.” While it doesn’t take my number one spot, this is in my mind the best film of the year, and I so desperately hope that those who see it will understand what it is telling them. 1. Killers of the Flower Moon When I first saw Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, I considered it to be a fantastic addition to the director’s late-late period work, but I did not consider it a masterpiece. After a second and finally a third watch in theaters, I can confidently say that not only do I consider Killers an outright masterpiece, I also consider it the best of Scorsese’s late-late period films, those ranging from The Wolf of Wall Street to now. Those who have read my writing know how big a fan I am of the director, so his film landing at my number one spot may seem like no surprise, but for a long time, this sat down at the number three spot and was almost beat out by number two. What I ultimately had to consider was: what makes this my favorite film of the year? Is it the brilliantly-told story which contextualizes the mass murder of an entire people by confronting the fact that it was all too easy to do before the FBI showed up and even after they showed up they didn’t seem to actually care how horrific everything was? Is it the phenomenal work of Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, or the career-making turn from Lily Gladstone outshining them both working with a director for which they were the two muses for years? Is it the note-perfect cinematography, the god-like editing that prioritizes pacing over runtime, the severely underrated sound design, and the incredibly-adapted script which turned this from an intriguing and shocking true-crime tale into one of tragedy and complicity? In truth, it’s all of these things, and one more: the ending. I already wrote extensively about Killers of the Flower Moon’s ending in my Top 5 Scenes & Movie Moments piece, but without the ending, this would be just another fantastic addition to Scorsese’s filmography. With it, it feels almost like a goodbye, like Scorsese is pouring every last bit of his heart and soul into whatever he makes now because he feels that he needs to leave something valuable and worthwhile behind when he inevitably passes. He is confronting both us and himself for even considering this epic tale of tragedy – of the white man’s indifference to generational sufferings perpetrated by those in power against those without, of greed, of complicity, of year after year of an entire people being erased – as entertainment in the first place. He reckons with this and with his own shortcomings in not being able to fully tell the story from the Osage perspective, for he is not Osage, and will not be able to do it sufficiently. At the end of it all, the whole thing becomes a radio show, and Scorsese himself pleads with us all: do not forget these people, and do NOT forget what happened to them. It can be all too easy for marginalized people groups, or those suffering genocide, to be ignored or forgotten by those whose status and personhood will never be threatened in this way. And all of that is what makes Killers of the Flower Moon my number one movie of 2023. Well, we did it! We finished all the Top 10 lists for 2023, and only have one more Top 10 to go! Of course, we also have The Friendly Film Fan Awards nominations, which will be announced live on our Instagram page on January 28 at 2:00 p.m. EST (a full list of nominees will be furnished on the website). What were your favorite films of 2023? Any great work you wanna shout out? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! - The Friendly Film Fan Honorable Mentions:
by Jacob Thomas Jones Making movies is hard. It’s one of the hardest things to pull off successfully, if one manages to pull it off at all with how few of them actually end up getting made. This is partly why so many film critics and pundits opt out of making “Worst” lists entirely. The creation of art is something to be celebrated in itself, and no one wants to tear down people who work incredibly hard to make their movies a reality. The Friendly Film Fan recognizes this wholeheartedly and wishes nothing but the best for anyone attempting to mount a miracle task such as filmmaking. Unfortunately, not every movie can be good, even with a lot of effort; in fact, there were any number of disappointments from the cinematic year of 2023 (you can view that list here), from superhero movies at least temporarily going bust to a lack of vision from some tried-and-true animation studios to brilliant concepts wasted on poor execution. And yet, inevitably, there were also films that were so bad, so poorly conceived and executed, that they managed to be even worse. Our picks for these lists are not direct reflections on the filmmakers themselves or the people who work tirelessly to make these things happen. They are entirely chosen based on the quality of the films themselves as singular art pieces. Here are our picks for the ten worst movies of 2023. 10. Silent Night John Woo is back in the action space with a film whose conceptual beginnings are full of potential but whose execution left a significant amount to be desired. An entire action movie devoid of dialogue is a cool concept, and with the right care, could have been one of 2023’s most underrated gems. Unfortunately, a lack of character development, poor editing choices, and some woefully underwritten stereotypes of villains rendered Silent Night not only one of the year’s largest wastes of potential, but also of audience’s time (even with a decent one-er action sequence thrown in for good measure). 9. 65 The crux of 65’s premise – that Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt are actually members of an alien species that crash landed on earth 65 million years before humanity came to be – is a brilliant one; it’s so brilliant, in fact, that the reveal of this twist in the marketing for the film stings all that much more. Nevertheless, there really could have been something great here, had the script been in any way developed into something resembling an actual story. As it is, 65 is just two hours of these characters being in the same place at the same time while we know as much about them at the end as we did at the beginning. To take a premise like this and not only ruin the twist but then make it boring anyway is a recipe for one of 2023’s most sincere disappointments. 8. The Exorcist: Believer William Freidkin’s The Exorcist is one of the greatest films ever made, full-stop (and might be the greatest horror film ever made if you consider Silence of the Lambs more of a thriller type). So when it was revealed that David Gordon Green, the man behind the Halloween reboot trilogy – of which the last two films were some of the worst of their respective years – would be helming a direct sequel to the 1973 classic, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy. That said, the trailer was full of all the legacy sequel hallmarks every legacy sequel trailer has: a remixed version of the theme, a return of beloved characters, and a reworked tagline harkening back to the original film. Unfortunately, like the Halloween trilogy before it, Believer not only misunderstands why the original material works, its need for shock value and nostalgia bait crowd cheer moments ends up outright disrespecting the material itself. Ellen Burstyn is utterly wasted in this movie for all the marketing played up her return, and the film’s surprise ending cameo felt cheap and manipulative. The other two films in this new Exorcist trilogy are contractually obligated to be made, unfortunately, so this nightmare won’t be over for a while. 7. Retribution How do you do Speed in 2023? If you’re Retribution, the answer is that you steal the premise and forget all the key moments and plot points that made Speed make sense. Liam Neeson’s non-retirement from action franchises continues to be a thorn in not only his career’s side post-Taken, but all of our sides as well since they keep making just enough money that he keeps making more of them. And yet, somehow, they just keep getting worse…and worse…and worse. I really hope that his claim of retiring from action filmmaking and getting back to his dramatic roots comes to fruition soon, cause there’s not much more of this I can take. 6. Love Again This is a bad movie in so many of the ways movies like it are bad movies, so that’s why it’s not as high on the list as some of the others, but if wasted potential wasn’t such a potent problem in this calendar year, it would most certainly be higher. A Celine Dion vanity project to advertise her new song, poorly disguised as a terribly executed story about love and grief, Love Again was sincerely one of the worst movies I saw this year, and if it wasn’t the most interesting character in the whole movie dying in its first five minutes cluing me in to that fact, the insane Skittles advertisements in the middle of otherwise rudimentary scenes would have. I really hope Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ agent starts believing more in her potential as an actress, because between this and Citadel, the year’s entertainment media has not been kind to her. 5. Ghosted With the rise of A.I. in the film world, and especially in the wake of this summer’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, it seems unfairly insulting to insinuate that Ghosted could have been written by ChatGPT, but when the final product is this generic and seemingly driven by algorithms, it’s difficult not to feel that way despite oneself. Pitching itself as a sort of spy thriller rom-com, this film not only wastes the talents of Ana de Armas and Chris Evans but sucks any chemistry they otherwise might have had right out of the room (and that’s saying something, cause they have chemistry in Knives Out). Truth be told, I don’t even actually remember what the plot of the movie is; I just know I don’t wanna watch it again. 4. Spinning Gold The story of Casablanca records, the label who signed Kiss and some other prominent acts, could have been an interesting one if it wasn’t so obsessed with itself to the point of parody. But like any over-indulged musical act, it just keeps going well past the point of comfort, all the while thinking that the real problem with its performance is the audience being subjected to it. Irreversibly miscast, cheap-looking, and filled with high school community stage-theater level dialogue, it embodies the exact opposite of the “show, don’t tell” rule of filmmaking, and I hated every minute of it. Jeremy Jordan, you deserve so much better. 3. Sweetwater If Spinning Gold is overindulgent towards record execs, Sweetwater takes that concept and applies it to the white guys who made sure Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton became a huge NBA star. White savior movies are still all the rage in cinema if you know where to look, but this one isn’t even well-made from a technical standpoint, and the writing verges on parody levels of that kind of storytelling. It constantly goes out of its way to demonstrate how the white coaches and owners of the teams went above and beyond to make Sweetwater the first Black star of basketball, but never once indulges the audience with a show of skill from the titular star himself or seeks to get to know him in any sincere way. I sincerely hope this is the beginning of the end for the white savior narrative biopic, because if they’re this poorly rendered all the time (and keep losing money), they’ll stop. 2) Nefarious What looked like it could have been an interesting – if somewhat rote – film (is this guy insane or possessed?) quickly turned into lazy right-wing propaganda and evangelical posturing the moment the topic of abortion was brought up in the second act. Up to then, the film wasn’t exactly terrible, but it wasn’t attention-grabbing either. Afterwards, it actually goes so far as to insinuate its protagonist was going to murder someone due to possession, but the performances and direction are so poor that it would be obvious to anyone who could spot a grifter that the protagonist just picked up a weapon under the guise of possession so he could go on a fake Glenn Beck talk show a year later, turn his “experience” into a book, and profit. (This is all notwithstanding the fact that the supposed demon’s name is actually just “Nefarious.”) For a moment there, it seemed as if this film was actually trying something interesting; how sad that any intrigue was squashed so quickly. 1. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey Even worse than lazy right-wing propaganda, even more annoying than movies that are over-obsessed with themselves, and even more miserable an experience than movies that misunderstand their source material while trying to take advantage of it in the same genre space…are movies like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Full disclosure: I wasn’t against the idea of this movie when it was first revealed; after all, any concept can be made into a great film, regardless of how odd the premise is initially – you just need the right story, craftsmanship, and care put into the making of it. Even when the trailers began dropping for it, the idea of Blood and Honey being so bad it’s good, as a sort of unintentional comedy, got me excited to sit in a room with a bunch of people to laugh and cheer at how dumb it was going to be. What a shame then, that the movie isn’t even so bad, it’s good. It’s just a miserably bad, lazily-crafted experience with poor characters, poor dialogue, some truly terrible effects, overlong sequences that go nowhere, stupid characters that are only stupid so the plot can happen, terrible production design, worse costuming, poor makeup, and not even one minute of enjoyable slasher absurdism. Unfortunately, it made money, so it looks like we’re getting a sequel. God help us all. And those are our picks for the Top 10 Worst Movies of 2023! What were some 2023 movies you saw and hated? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! - The Friendly Film Fan Dishonorable Mentions:
Every year, there are any number of films that make our longlist for the Best Movies of 2023, but inevitably, do not make it to the shortlist. As unfortunate a fact as this is, we believe these films still deserve to be celebrated – whether that is due to quality, impact, or how much we personally enjoyed them – beyond merely being added to our Recommended Movies list with everything else. This is the purpose of what we are dubbing the “Pre-Honorable Mentions” list; they’re not quite the best films of the year, but boy do we still like them a whole lot. 2023 was chock full of films we think stood out in this respect, so they’re each getting a shout-out here, with a little diatribe as to why they’re included. There are a decent number of these to get through, so let’s dive right in. 20 Days in Mariupol A tense, on-the-ground documentary chronicling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over a 20-day period, 20 Days in Mariupol had me clutching my armrests waiting to see if filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov was going to make it out alive. More importantly, however, is its documentation of active war crimes perpetrated by Putin’s military as they target civilians, bomb hospitals, and destroy critical infrastructure. Given the current genocide taking place in Gaza, the eerie similarities could not be more timely. Asteroid City Wes Anderson continues to be one of the most under-appreciated artists working today by the film industry, evidenced by the fact that Asteroid City – one of his finest works – has picked up little to zero awards buzz since it opened this past summer. While it features many of his trademark Wes-isms, its real power lies in how it deals with grief, the unknown, and the way art touches the soul. Telling the story even if you don’t understand it fully is one of life’s most vital duties, and this film understands that better than almost any. Beau is Afraid When it comes to reckless ambition, there are few directors working in the space today like Ari Aster, and that’s some of the highest praise one can give in this context. Beau is Afraid is one of the strangest, most fascinating, most darkly hilarious, and deeply unsettling films of the entire year, entirely unpredictable and unfathomably inexplicable. Even classifying it within a genre feels wrong. And yet, I couldn’t help but be entirely taken with how out there it all was, like Aster decided now was the time to throw everything at the screen that he ever could just to see what would happen, and with the help of one of Joaquin Phoenix’s most layered performances – at least for me – most of it sticks. Bottoms Easily my favorite comedy of the year that isn’t attempting a multi-genre jump, Bottoms finds Emma Seligman acing the sophomore directorial assignment by embracing absurdity and drawing on the power of Rachel Sennott’s undeniable comic genius. Adding superstar Ayo Edebiri to the mix and drawing some of the best supporting performances for a comedy in years – including a standout turn for Marshawn Lynch – the fight-club-meets-80s-comedy can’t help but be fun. Sure, it’s not super structurally unique, but how it plays within that structure is a hoot to experience. Fair Play While I wouldn’t personally classify Fair Play as underrated, it is one of the more underseen great films of the year, with a screenplay that very nearly makes it into my personal favorites of 2023. Alden Ehrenreich turns in typically solid work, but it’s Phoebe Dynevor who’s the real discovery here, not only outperforming everyone else but elevating herself over the whole affair. I’m already a sucker for fast-talking wall street films with vague dialogue about stocks, trades, markets, etc., but adding a psycho-sexual thriller to the mix was a 4-D chess move I didn’t anticipate. Four Daughters A devastating documentary about a mother whose generationally-ingrained abuse ultimately drove two of her elder daughters to join ISIS (though there was a lot of propaganda involved as well), Four Daughters pulls a fascinating move in documentary filmmaking by having actors stand in for the real-life family with the real-life family coaching them through moments in their lives. Sometimes actors and the family are mixed in a scene, sometimes it’s actors only, but always, the goal is to excavate the trauma borne of these encounters and offer some sort of path for the family’s grief to travel. It’s difficult to describe just how heavy some of these scenes can get, but if you give it a watch, it’s an ultimately rewarding experience. Saltburn Is Saltburn a secret masterpiece, or is it so lost in itself that it fails to make its point coherently enough to make sense? Whichever side one finds oneself on, there’s no denying that this movie has become a lightning rod for young cinemagoers, particularly of the Gen Z variety; you can’t have a conversation about non-superhero movies right now without it coming up, and for good reason. There’s still a lot to love about it beyond its shock-value, from its opulent production design to its beautiful cinematography to the performances of its stellar ensemble cast, most of whom are asked to go uncomfortably transgressive places with their characters. Barry Keoghan, Alison Oliver, and Rosamund Pike in particular do really terrific work here, though Pike’s part is decidedly designed to put her line readings high above the rest. With that, the costume designs, and an effective twist – even if it does ultimately undo the point of the film – it’s hard not to be taken with Emerald Fennell’s sophomore feature. Sanctuary After all the sex scene discourse that plagued the walls of twitter this past spring, this movie stands as a prime example of why their necessity doesn’t really matter if the movie knows how to employ them – their form does. A deliciously into itself erotic thriller, Sanctuary makes terrifically fun use of stars Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott by pairing them with one of the year’s most hilariously horny scripts. There’s not a lot else I can say without spoiling the film, but there’s not much else to the film either, so if erotic thrillers are something you’re into, or you just haven’t seen a good one in a while, Sanctuary is something you should definitely check out. Suzume One of the year’s earliest animated releases from director Makoto Shinkai, whose films Your Name and Weathering With You also had early spring releases in the United States, Suzume is a genuinely stunning and uplifting film about a young girl and a chair; that’s actually not a joke – one of the key characters is a chair. What sets this film apart, beyond its great storytelling and characters, are the same things that set the others apart – stunning animation, and one of the year’s best and most underrated musical scores. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this one, and it still doesn’t have a domestic blu-ray release date, so it may be a long time yet before a rewatch can happen, but suffice it to say, if you saw this one in theaters, you got to experience one of animation’s best in 2023. Talk to Me Without question the best straight-up horror film of the year (we’ll get to that “straight-up” part in a different list), Talk to Me is a genuinely terrifying film that lingers with you just long enough that you have to watch it again. Addiction metaphors in horror are nothing new, but to employ them the way this film does is an inspired choice; the teenagers act like teenagers, and teenagers are susceptible to addictive choices, so even when the characters in this film do something obviously stupid, it fits within the story being told. It also has one of the more talked-about endings in horror as of late, and now that a sequel has been officially greenlit, I’m more than intrigued by where this is all meant to be going. Theater Camp This is one of the rare exceptions on this list that I didn’t give 4 stars or higher to, because it’s slowly become one of my favorite films from 2023 to return to and show other people. While it had a small release over the summer, Theater Camp still feels underseen by wider audiences who would enjoy the mockumentary-style humor, and those of us who grew up in theater – especially those way more into it than even I am – it’s an absolute riot. One can tell that real passion was employed here, in the script and the direction, for the world of theater – all its flaws, its many players, and especially its unsung heroes: the tech people. Jimmy Tatro, Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, and Ayo Edebiri all do exceptionally great work, but it’s Noah Galvin who’s the real discovery here, and it will be regarded as one of the failings of this year’s Academy Awards that not one of the genuinely great songs written for this movie’s inspired production of the stage show Joan, Still was even shortlisted for the Best Original Song category. Wonka While it is true that Wonka isn’t so much a movie about Willy Wonka as it is a Paddington movie with the beloved character plugged into the titular spot, that can’t take away from its charm, its humor, and its heartwarming story of found family and creative passion. Timothée Chalamet’s Willy Wonka may not have the same residual darkness that other iterations of the character have had, but his relentless positivity and comic wit remains just about note-perfect for this story, and the songs – while not the greatest in musical history – are well-written and catchy; I listen to the film’s soundtrack still. Leave it to Paul King to crush all doubters and leave us with a film that can entertain kids just as much as it can subtly charm adults…and in some cases, make them cry a little. Well, those were all the Pre-Honorable Mentions for the Best Movies of 2023. Come back for our final two end of year lists over the next few days, as we dive into the Best and Worst of what 2023 had to offer. Thanks for reading!
- The Friendly Film Fan by Jacob Thomas Jones Each year, there are any number of films that inspire moviegoers to engage in conversation immediately after exiting the theater due to the innate need to share in the experience of what was just seen. You simply have to talk about certain moments, whether they were shocking, heartwarming, profound, awe-inducing, or just plain fun. Sometimes they’re all five, sometimes they’re one or a few combined. In any case, these moments can make our jaws drop, make us laugh, make us think, or give us a catharsis we didn’t even know we were waiting for. 2023’s movies were full of these moments, so many of them that whittling the list down to just five of them has been one of our toughest but most rewarding list-making tasks. A few notes before we begin: these are only the best individual movie moments of the year, so films we loved that stay consistently great all the way through, rather than having standout individual moments, are not included here. In kind, some films that appear on this list may not end up making it to our Top 10 Movies of the Year. But that’s the beauty of lists like these; they give us a chance to highlight films we may not otherwise get a chance to praise in such effusive terms, and ultimately, they offer us an opportunity to re-live, reflect upon, and re-immortalize some of the cinematic year’s greatest hits. Here are our picks for the Top 5 Scenes & Movie Moments of 2023! (Needless to say: heavy spoilers apply.) 5. Ginza – Godzilla Minus One Godzilla Minus One is already off to a hell of a start by the time the titular monster reaches the Japanese city of Ginza, the horrors of the enormous Kaiju’s rampage readily apparent to the viewer. It’s once he reaches that place, however, that Takashi Yamazaki’s film kicks into its highest gear, with the monster taking on the form of a great natural disaster as he wrecks everything around him, reducing the city to rubble, crumbling train cars in his jaws, and rendering the city streets craters as he stomps along. And then came the moment in which every viewer’s jaw hit the floor: the atomic breath. We’ve seen Godzilla’s atomic breath in movies before – 2014’s American Godzilla film features a quite famous moment where the Kaiju defeats another monster using it – but rarely have we seen it rendered this terrifyingly. The dorsal fins begin to protrude from Godzilla’s back, the blue glow illuminating them like a timer, and once he’s all charged up, the soundscape is entirely filled by the audio of what these characters call the “heat ray” being unleashed, which in turn unleashes an atomic explosion, wiping nearly everything out for miles around. As the camera takes a low angle, we witness the majesty of Godzilla as he roars into the sky; he has become the embodiment of nuclear terror. 4. I’m Just Ken – Barbie There are a few different moments from Barbie that could have made this list, but at the end of the day, it’s this showstopping musical dance number in the film’s third act that takes the cake. I’m Just Ken isn’t just lyrically innovative and riotously fun, it also gives the audience further insight into Ken’s frame of mind; plus, every background actor is giving everything to the audience frame by frame. If you look, you’ll notice details that you never noticed before. This is all before the dream ballet dance sequence begins, which may be the best part of the whole thing. The stage is gorgeous, the choreography is iconic, and the conclusion to it all is extremely cathartic. (Look at Kingsley Ben-Adir during the dream ballet’s final chorus – it’s a real treat.) And it’s all led by a stellar turn from Ryan Gosling, who we all knew could do comedy and could sing, but leave it to Greta Gerwig to pull the ingenious move of putting those talents together in one fantastic brush stroke. 3. Finale – Killers of the Flower Moon (There were no actual images of the scene in question available, so I had to use a regular still.) Perhaps the single most powerful conclusion to any film released in 2023, Killers of the Flower Moon sees Martin Scorsese confronting head-on his own complicity in not fully telling this story by concluding that he can’t fully tell this story – after all, he’s not Osage, and it would take a member of the Osage nation to sufficiently fill in the gaps Scorsese is unable to fully understand. Additionally, the film critiques the very idea of itself as a form of entertainment for mass audiences by criticizing the idea of large-scale crimes which have affected entire generations of people being turned into the true-crime tales we obsess over day after day. How complicit are we in trivializing real pain when these events and other atrocities become the entertainment we so desperately cling to? And how can we hope to rise above these issues if even those who seek to understand them cannot tell the full story? To read my words on it, one wouldn’t be able to get a full picture of just how powerful the ending is, but when seen through one’s own eyes, it’s one of the most profound self-criticizing moments in any big director’s recent filmography. How lucky we are that Martin Scorsese is still seeking to educate, and to learn, this deep into his wonderfully storied career. 2. Trinity – Oppenheimer Sometimes a great movie moment doesn’t have one individual thing making it great, but a whole host of different tools and history coming together to wow the audience with a showstopping sequence demonstrating the full power of a filmmaker’s capabilities. Christopher Nolan’s directorial vision is on full display in Oppenheimer, but nowhere does everything coalesce better than in the crescendo that is the Trinity Test. Even with the knowledge of history to back it up, Trinity is a masterfully-edited, brilliantly-scored, and perfectly-acted sequence in which our characters wait with bated breath to discover whether or not their atomic bomb will detonate, changing the world and everyone’s lives for the rest of eternity, whether all their work will be for nothing and they’re about to fire a dud…or whether, upon detonation, it will ignite the atmosphere, ending humanity as we know it. From the moment boots are on the ground to the sound dropping out when the bomb explodes to the second Kitty receives a phone call telling her they’ve succeeded in their quest, we are white-knuckled with anticipation, ready to witness history but knowing the horror it will leave in its wake. It’s a moment so arresting, it literally shakes the foundations of cinema. 1. Ely Cathedral – Maestro Despite the fact that Bradley Cooper’s sophomore directorial effort has become film twitter’s favorite movie to hate for awards season (a notion I thoroughly disagree with and do not share in), there remains one scene, one moment in the whole of film in 2023 that takes everyone’s breath away the minute it begins and refuses to give it back until the six minutes have passed: the Ely Cathedral sequence. Up to this moment, Leonard Bernstein has languished in toil, his life unable to fulfill him, his work unable to make up the gaps in his heart, and his delicate marriage to Felicia teetering on the edge of calamity. It’s difficult for him to hold on to the life he so loves; yet, when he gets in front of an orchestra, everything else falls away, and we are treated to an awe-inspiring groundswell of magnificent performance, direction, cinematography, and sound design. Cooper spends a full six minutes live-conducting the London Symphony Orchestra through Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2 in C Minor ‘Resurrection’,” his performance and the film itself reaching their ultimate crescendo as he and his baton navigate through every note with such passion it would take a stone heart not to be moved in some way. It’s impossible to describe just how arresting this moment is without one experiencing it for oneself, but in seeing Maestro in a Dolby Atmos-equipped theater, the effect was soul-shaking, a completely transportive, unforgettable, and riveting soundscape surrounding and driven by one of the year’s most spectacularly worthy efforts. I still love Maestro for all the supposed flaws it contains, and the Ely Cathedral sequence remains without question the singular best movie moment of 2023. And those are our picks for the Top 5 Scenes and Movie Moments of 2023! What were some of your favorite moments in movies this year? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! - The Friendly Film Fan Honorable Mentions:
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AuthorFilm critic in my free time. Film enthusiast in my down time. Categories
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