My Year In Movies 2023

by Larry Lee

I.

Was 2023 a good year for movies?  Many people have told me that it was, but perhaps they  are experiencing a “Barbenheimer” hangover.  For me, I think every year is a good year for movies.  That makes whittling things down to a “ten best” list a daunting and, really, impossible task.  To illustrate the problem, here are the top ten (or so) lists from four top film reviewers in the legacy print media, with some random comments:

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

• Killers of the Flower Moon
• Oppenheimer
• Menus-plaisirs - Les Troisgros
• Occupied City
• A Thousand and One
• Asteroid City
• May December
• Showing Up
• Orlando, My Political Biography
• Stonewalling

Comments:  This list includes just two movies that garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture.  Oppenheimer is a good choice and will perhaps win the statuette in a few weeks.  Regarding Killers of the Flower Moon:  Ms. Dargis is the only one of my four selected professional film critics to name this film to their end-of-year list.  Its nomination was predictable given its production pedigree, its director (Martin Scorsese), its famous cast (DiCaprio, DeNiro), its subject matter, the publicity machine at its back; in short, its overall heft.  Many reviewers and critics have omitted Killers from their top ten lists, and readers patient enough to get to the end of this essay will note that it fails to make the grade from me as well.  I found Killers much, much too long, too repetitive, and given the confused, amoral simpleton at its center (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), not nearly as engaging as it should have been.  For those interested in

seeing a tight, engaging thriller about a different but very real problem affecting Native Americans with characters you care about, I recommend the outstanding Wind River (Prime rental) from 2017, with Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen.  You will be moved, informed, entertained, and spend almost two hours less in front of your TV than had you watched Killers of the Flower Moon. 

But back to Ms. Dargis’s list:  I don’t think it’s helpful to include movies that are not available to the general public, like Menus-plaisirs - Les Troisgros or Orlando, My Political Biography.  Sure, Ms. Dargis is in New York, enviable for its abundance of art house and repertory theaters, but inclusion of these movies on her list feels like some arty egghead, showing off.  Although some critics were impressed with Todd Haynes’ May December, I found it overrated, depressing and slightly boring, an unfortunate deviation from his previous efforts Far From Heaven (2002), Carol (2015), or even Dark Waters (2019).  Showing Up, the latest from “slow cinema” auteur Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy (2008), First Cow (2019)), boasted an A-list cast (Michelle Willians, Hong Chau), but seemed pointless.  And slow.

Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

• All of Us Strangers
• The Boy and the Heron
• The Zone of Interest
• Oppenheimer
• Showing Up
• Afire
• Past Lives
• The Eight Mountains
• De Humani Corporis Fabrica
• Poor Things 

Comments:  This list, from a major newspaper in America’s second media center, is subject to the same access/availability criticism noted above (has anyone heard of, or seen De Humani Corporis Fabrica?  How could I even see that?) and repeats Ms. Dargis’s questionable admiration for the numbingly slow Showing Up.  But Mr. Chang’s list includes Past Lives and The Eight Mountains, two very good movies that appeared on my 2023 Half-Oscars™ list.  (See below.)  They slid out of my year-end top ten, but are well worth seeing.  Afire, Christian Petzold’s latest, was also a fine movie, and adds to his admirable recent oeuvre (Barbara (2012), Transit (2018), and Undine (2020)). 

Mr. Chang’s list also includes two films that have garnered much end-of-year, Oscar-season, praise: 

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things.  I understand the impulse to honor what is likely Miyazaki’s final work — he just turned 83 years old — after an enviable career of amazing animated features.  He won an Oscar for Spirited Away in 2003, was nominated for Howl’s Moving Castle in 2006 and (my favorite) The Wind Rises in 2014.  He also won an Honorary Oscar in 2015.  But the animation in Heron is much like all of his previous works and the story felt random and borderline pointless.  Although Heron is nominated for the Animated Feature Film Oscar, a better choice would be Spider-Man: Across the SpiderVerse: more creative animation and a much more engaging story. 

Poor Things, nominated for Best Picture, also deserves comment.  Although admittedly a movie of great visual creativity, this fractured take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein took, for me, an unfortunate turn when Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter character, who has a child’s brain in a full-grown woman’s body, discovers carnal pleasure.  Although I admire the commitment Stone, as an actor, showed this character, as well as her trust in director Lanthimos, I felt the movie at that point became overly prurient, and thus less interesting and less enjoyable.  Although I understand the Bella character is learning about everything the world, being a human, and a woman for the first time, I felt the movie devolved into Bella just learning about, and enjoying, sex.  One struggles to recall a nominee for the Academy’s top prize that had as much sex and nudity.  

Barbie (not on Mr. Chang’s list) was the year’s most audacious movie, calling out mindless patriarchy and pervasive misogyny in a most unique and entertaining way.  But in a year where the director/creator (Greta Gerwig) and star (Margot Robbie) were inexplicably left on the outside of Oscar looking in, that Poor Things, a movie where a woman toys with a man using her sexual availability and then survives in the world by having sex for money, received multiple nominations is extremely disappointing.   

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

• American Fiction
• The Holdovers
• You Hurt My Feelings
• Anatomy of a Fall
• Barbie
• Oppenheimer
• Joan Baez: I Am a Noise
• Past Lives
• Reality
• Air
• Origin

Comment: Ms. Hornaday, WaPo’s lead movie critic, has a much more conventional top ten list, though it runs to 11 titles.   Five of her listed movies (American Fiction, The Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, and Oppenheimer) were all nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.  Indeed, she is the only one of these four

critics to include Barbie.  Two of her movies (You Hurt My Feelings, Past Lives) were on my 2023 Half-Oscars™ list and thus understandable choices.  Air is a enjoyable look back to recent history — the development of the first Air Jordan shoe by Nike — but not really top ten stuff unless you’re a sneakerhead. (Google it.)    

Origins, also on Ms. Hornaday’s list, is director Ava DuVernay’s admirable film based on author Isabel Wilkerson’s bestseller "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," published in 2020.  Although theoretically eligible for an Oscar nomination (according to the Academy’s website), it was not actually released generally into theaters in the U.S. until the middle of January 2024.  So I, admittedly rather randomly, have decided that this movie belongs to the present year and is therefore not eligible for my top ten list for 2023.  But the movie is wonderful and thought-provoking, a creative globe-trotting mix of fictional narrative and documentary, and will almost definitely make my Half-Oscar™ list for 2024.

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

• Maestro
• Oppenheimer
• One Fine Morning
• The Quiet Girl
• May December
• Dream Scenario
• Asteroid City
• A Good Person
• The Disappearance of Shere Hite
• Nyad
• What Happens Later

Comment:  Mr. LaSalle, a quirky Bay Area critic known for his affinity for French movies, Pre-Code Hollywood movies, and actresses in general, has an odd list for 2023.  Maestro and Oppenheimer were both honored by the Academy (and make my top ten list as well).  The Quiet Girl, nominated for an Oscar last year for International Feature Film, is a quiet yet wonderful movie you definitely should see (stream on Hulu, rent on Amazon Prime), but is from 2022.  One Fine Morning, a French movie directed by Mia Hansen-Love and starring Lea Seydoux (stream on Amazon Prime), is also worthy of your attention but also from 2022.  A Good Person, starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, is a touching and realistic portrayal of a normal person who, due to personal tragedy, falls into addiction.  It nearly made my 2023 Half-Oscars™ list and, needless to say, it is worth seeing.  For fans of Pugh, she has much more to do here than lounge around naked, as she does in Oppenheimer.  You can stream it on Amazon Prime.  I have more to say about Dream Scenario below.

Asteroid City, on Mr. LaSalle’s list, shows us that director Wes Anderson is continuing his journey into highly stylized filmmaking (see 2021’s The French Dispatch), with actors delivering lines unemotionally while standing in two-dimensional sets that are obviously sets.  It feels more and more like fans of Anderson’s movies (his live action ones, anyway) are in some sort of weird and exclusive club, so this movie is definitely worth seeing if you feel that you are in the club.  And maybe not, if you let your club membership lapse after The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Three of Mr. LaSalle’s top eleven choices feature actresses of a certain age:  May December (Julianne

Moore), Nyad (Annette Benning), and What Happens Later (Meg Ryan).  As previously mentioned, I was disappointed by May December.  Nyad, about long-distance ocean swimmer Diana Nyad’s multiple attempts, when in her 60s, to swim from Havana, Cuba to Florida, is a well-acted, true life drama about an obsessive, fairly unlikeable athlete.  Both Annette Benning and Jodie Foster have been nominated for Oscars and, in another year, Nyad might have been considered for Best Picture nomination.  That the movie lacked a theatrical release and went straight to Netflix probably hurt its chances for that.  But although it doesn’t make my top ten, it is worth seeing.  

I’ll wager readers have not seen (or even heard of) What Happens Later.  Meg Ryan, who also produced and directed, probably intended the movie to return her to her rom-com pinnacle (When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle).  But while the film had its amusing moments (like when the airport PA announcer begins speaking to her like the voice of God), and it was nice to see her in a movie again, I’m afraid the emotional impact of her cute head-tilt and hair toss live forever in the past, much like her original face before plastic surgery.  You can rent What Happens Later on Amazon Prime. 

II.

Before getting to my top ten list, let’s revisit my Half-Oscar™ list from earlier in 2023.

10. Emily  (Showtime, Prime rental, Kanopy)  
  9. Past Lives  (Prime rental) 
  8. The Eight Mountains  (Prime rental)

  7. You Hurt My Feelings (Prime rental) 
  6. Rise (En Corps)  (Kanopy) 
  5. Hilma (Prime rental) 
  4. Chevalier  (Hulu, Prime rental) 
  3. Other People’s Children  (MUBI, Prime rental) 
  2. The Lost King  (AcornTV, Hulu, AMC+, Prime rental) 

  1. How to Blow Up a Pipeline  (Hulu, Prime rental, Kanopy)

I realize many of these movies were released almost 12 months ago and memories of them are fading.  And as in most years, there were many good movies released in the second half of the year, surpassing most of the entries on my Half-Oscar™ list.  By going on record with these films, however, I created a kind of presumption of quality, and later-released movies have to overcome that presumption.  Fortunately, as noted, it was a good year for movies.  

Still, two films (How to Blow Up a Pipeline, The Lost King) have staying power in my mind.  Perhaps a suspense/thriller like Pipeline is an uncomfortable fit for Oscar — it’s unusual for the Academy to reward genre pictures (comedies, action, sci-fi, etc.) — but Oscar compatibility is not a criterion for a top ten list.  That said, The Lost King slots comfortably into a category of past honorees of quirky British stories with plucky heroines, like 2013’s Philomena (Judi Dench), 2009’s An Education (Carey Mulligan), and 1983’s Educating Rita (Julie Walters). 

A Word About Kanopy:  Three movies from my 2023 Half-Oscar™ list can be seen, free of charge, on Kanopy.  If you’ve never heard of Kanopy, well, now you have, and you can thank me later.  Kanopy is a free streaming service affiliated with your public library.  All you need is the app—either on your phone, tablet, computer, or smart TV—and a library card from your local public library.  I access Kanopy on Roku.  Register for Kanopy with your card and an amazing library of movies is at your disposal for free streaming, limited only to 10 per month.  Mostly foreign, classic, indie, and documentaries, but there is some oddball stuff in there as well.  You can see Emily, Rise (En Corps) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline on Kanopy and save a few bucks as well.  [Editor's note: some libraries do not subscribe to Kanopy, but prefer an alternate free streaming site called Hoopla. If your library is one of those, Hoopla is also worth checking out. Hoopla also offeres e-books and other downloadable material in addition to movies and videos.]

My Top Ten for 2023

10.  The Teachers’ Lounge  I originally had a three-way tie for 10th, between this movie, The Holdovers and Other People’s Children.  The Holdovers is a fine, if conventional, movie, the kind they used to make.  I especially loved how director Alexander Payne made the movie look like one from the 1970s, right down to the font of the titles.  It’s the odds on favorite to win two acting Oscars (Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph) which, by itself, is a reason to see the movie.  Other People’s Children, from France and starring Virginie Efira, is a tender and touching movie about modern family relationships.  But let’s face it, a three-way tie for tenth place is cheating, and ten is ten.  So after some thought, I think The Teachers’ Lounge sneaks into my top ten.

A German film nominated for the International Feature Film Oscar, The Teachers’ Lounge is a taut, realistic thriller that has, at its origin, a situation that happens all the time in public schools.  (Indeed, I heard the director Ilker Çatak speak and he said a similar thing happened to his class when he was in middle school in Istanbul.)  When the grownups, largely but not entirely people of good conscience, respond thoughtfully to the events, things nevertheless spin out of control in fairly realistic ways.  Small grievances are magnified, lines are drawn, enemies identified, and it feels like there is no way out.  Although The Zone of Interest will likely win the Best International Film Oscar (based on pre-ceremony hype and its nomination for Best Picture), The Teachers’ Lounge would be a worthy choice.  As of this writing, it is still in theaters.

9.  Rustin  I’m so sad Rustin was not nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, for the possibility, however remote, of seeing Barack and Michelle Obama onstage as executive producers is an intoxicating one.  But that delicious fantasy aside, Rustin is a moving and admirable retelling of a pivotal period in the life of a great American whose life story, and critical role in 1963’s March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom, had until now been lost to history.  Bayard Rustin was a gay Black man who faced down so many detractors and those who sought to undermine him for that reason, including (depressingly) the leadership of the NAACP, and eventually achieved an important step on our nation’s road to racial justice.  Because of Bayard Rustin, we have a collective memory of Dr. King telling us “I Have a Dream. . . .”  Stream it on Netflix, and think about what ex-Presidents can do with their free time once they are out of office.  Compare and contrast.

8.  Perfect Days  This movie, from 2023 but currently in theaters, is unlike all the other movies on this list.  Quiet and gentle, repetitive, even meditative, it tells the story of a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo.  Every day.  Over and over.  But he has managed to find personal satisfaction in his life, a measure of grace, even joy.  There are hints of his backstory suggesting he is, or was, a man of greater conventional substance.  But the beauty of the film is that it is not about who he was, or could be, where his life is headed, or not headed.  Instead, we see someone who is satisfied with himself, his seemingly simple life, and his place in the universe.  Others with whom he comes into contact are affected by his serenity, and project their concerns on him.  In that way, the movie is a little like 1979’s Being There, with Peter Sellers.  Directed by acclaimed German director Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire (1987), Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Salt of the Earth (2014)), Perfect Days was submitted for Oscar consideration by Japan, and is the first submission from that country not directed by a Japanese person.  If you’re interested in a gentle yet satisfying movie, with no violence, sex, aliens or weird deviant behaviors, this is it. 

7.  The Lost King  This is just one of two movies that survive from my 2023 Half-Oscar™ list, so I’ll just repeat my views from six month ago:  this wonderful tale, based on a true story, tells the story of Phillippa Langley, a middle-aged woman who is just being worn down by life.  “After her latest setback, she is at a complete loss where to turn but, somehow, gets the idea that she can find the final resting place of King Richard III, the location of whose mortal remains has been a mystery for hundreds of years.  Richard has been tarred as a child-killing, hump-backed usurper to the English throne by none other than William Shakespeare.  But was he?  Langley (Sally Hawkins) is, of course, dismissed as a crank if not a crazy lady.  But is she?  Even a broken clock is right twice a day (to repeat an aphorism from pre-digital, analog days).  Hawkins portrays Langley with intelligence, pathos, and vulnerability, and her focus and nervous energy undergird an impressive performance.  Directed by Stephen Frears (Florence Foster Jenkins, Philomena, High Fidelity), and costarring Steve Coogan as her admirably supportive ex-husband.” 

6.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline  This movie topped my 2023 Half-Oscar™ list, and remains—to me—one of the best movies of 2023.  Although not on Oscar’s radar, it seems that every year, a movie no one else is talking about gets its hooks in me and simply won’t let go.  Last year, it was Montana Story, with Haley Lu Richardson.  The year before:  Ad Astra, with Brad Pitt.  In 2020:  director Paul Greengrass’s News of the World with Tom Hanks.  In Pipeline, we are confronted with a disparate group of young people who firmly and sincerely believe that the United States, and the world, are not moving fast enough to avert a climate catastrophe.  So they hit upon a plan to draw attention to the problem and hopefully achieve some course correction.  Can we say they are wrong?  Clever and thrilling, with unpredictable twists and turns, the movie addresses as timely a topic as Barbie (mysogyny, toxic masculinity), American Fiction (racial prejudice, cancel culture), or Oppenheimer (nuclear annihilation, government duplicity) do.  It also stars a group of young up-and-comers that need no computer-generated de-aging to appear onscreen.  

5.  Maestro   Following 2018’s A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper is now two for two as a director, and rarely

has an actor moved into the director’s chair with more immediate and sustained success.  (Another recent example:  Greta Gerwig, although her acting career did not have the same wattage as Cooper’s.)  Maestro is a fascinating examination of the life of a giant of the American creative world of the mid-twentieth century, whose life was much more complicated than we ever knew.  Leonard Bernstein was a creative genius who would not be contained by socially accepted limits of music or personal relationships.  Thus, not only did he conduct classical music, he composed it as well.  And not only did he compose classical music, he also composed popular music (see West Side Story).  Not only did he have a fabulous wife and family, but he also had a succession of male lovers.  Cooper is wonderful as Bernstein, and Carey Mulligan is deserving of her nomination for Best Actress nomination as his extremely tolerant wife, Felicia Montealegre.   

4.  American Fiction  There have been moments lately, when things are quiet, that I feel in my bones thatAmerican Fiction was the best movie of the year.  There is something about the tone of the movie, the wry humor, the humanity, and subject matter, that spoke to me.  How to deal with racial injustice?  Cancel culture?  Snowflake college students?  Performative anti-racism?  The difficulty of maintaining one’s integrity and true self when financial temptations abound.  Aging and increasingly infirm parents.  Troublesome, selfish siblings.  The movie has it all, and handles it with dry, glancing humor.  Jeffrey Wright is wonderful in the lead and his Oscar nomination is gratifying, although he likely will not win against a group of stellar co-nominees:  Bradley Cooper for Maestro, Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer, Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers, and Coleman Domingo for Rustin.  It was never a truer statement than that it was an honor for Wright just to be nominated.    

3.  Barbie  By now, we all know about Barbie.  Had it been released in October, we would still be in full-on Barbie-mania.  But enough time has passed that we now have the backlash to the Barbie craze, and people feel comfortable informing their friends that, by the way, they did not like, nay, hated Barbie.  Hence the Oscar “snubs” for Margot Robbie (Best Actress) and Greta Gerwig (Director).  Perhaps there is still enough time for a backlash to the backlash.  A double feature with Barbie and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) would be interesting, for many of the same people I know disliked both films, and both movies had a certain look, a certain sensibility, and women in their centers.  Is it an age thing?  An intolerance of this kind of satire or storytelling?  Maybe make it a film festival with JoJo Rabbit (2019) and Promising Young Woman (2020).  Do we sense a trend?

I think Barbie and these other movies indicate, if not a sea change, something like a ripple in The Force or a tear in The Matrix, indicating that a new style of moviemaking is upon us, one that is popular with young audiences.  And these movies draw people into theaters, hungry for a communal cinematic experience and not just the feeling one gets, sitting alone, streaming a movie at home.  

2.  Oppenheimer  Christopher Nolan has crafted a monumental adaptation of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, creating an immersive movie that is the odds on favorite to win the Best Picture Oscar, and may sweep the major awards.  Indeed, the movie is so immersive that the viewer can easily get lost in the crowd of physicists working at Los Alamos, but the story of the creation of the first atomic bomb in human history is, nevertheless, strangely thrilling.  The nuts and bolts of the massive endeavor, the personalities of the various scientists, the life or death stakes, the morality of introducing the world to the nuclear age, the political fallout after the war was over, this is a complex and important story made comprehensible by Nolan’s script and direction.

Considering the thing almost 80 years later, it is easy to forget that it was never a given that Oppenheimer and his team would succeed in his quest to manipulate atomic fission to the point where the U.S. could deliver a controlled nuclear explosion in a distant land.  Who knows when World War II would have ended had Oppenheimer failed?  How many more Americans would have died?  And who knows what would have happened if Hitler had created the bomb first?  (On this point, I recommend the six-episode Norwegian series called The Heavy Water War:  Stopping Hitler’s Atomic Bomb on MHz Choice, or rentable on Prime.)  With so much at stake, seeing Nolan’s depiction of the bomb exploding for the first time is, as I said, strangely thrilling, if for no other reason that we realize that nothing would ever be the same.    

1.  Anatomy of a Fall   The Academy has shown remarkable acumen in nominating not one but two movies that are not in English (and Past Lives is partially in Korean).  I wonder if this is part of a happy trend.  The other non-English speaking nominee, The Zone of Interest, is a very interesting movie and surprisingly experimental for a Best Picture nominee.  But Anatomy of a Fall is head and shoulders above Zone (and Past Lives).  French director Justine Triet has given us a remarkable movie that presents as a traditional, old fashioned courtroom drama.  Did the wife kill her husband by pushing him out of a high window?  Did he slip?  Or did he jump?  The movie gives us plausible alternatives in the style of Rashomon, but it is a tribute to the clever writing and standout performances that we don’t really know the answer, even after the movie ends.  Gripping from the opening scenes, actress Sandra Hüller is remarkable and should (but likely won’t) win the Oscar.  (Remarkably, she played a very different character in The Zone of Interest.)  Although there was no pre-nomination Oscar buzz, French actor Swann Arlaud, who played the prosecutor, was simply remarkable.  

Much like other courtroom dramas, there is potential deception baked into the story, as we the audience must decide who is telling the truth and who is not.  But Hüller’s character, Sandra Voyter, is a complicated character with whom we identify.  A published writer, she is remarkably self-aware and hyper-verbal, to the point where her husband feels left behind.  There are hidden family traumas that must be brought to the surface, but who is to blame, and who blames whom, may be key to the proper resolution of the case.  Highly recommended. 

Worth a Look

In addition to my top ten, every year brings many other worthwhile movies.  Here are some small ones that flew under the radar that I quite enjoyed:

Landscape With Invisible Hand  (Prime)  What would life be like under a benevolent alien occupation? 

Even if our new overlords were not violent or physically aggressive, our society would change in so many ways.  Landscape is a sometimes-amusing, often-thought provoking look at one possible scenario, with sly comments on our present influencer culture, the fleeting, ethereal nature of teenage love, the need to learn the language of one’s occupiers, and the sometimes context-dependent nature and value of art.  And I love how the alien overlords are portrayed:  not humanoid (like in E.T. The Extraterrestrial or Star Wars), not big bugs (like in District 9 or Starship Troopers), not weird blobs (like in Arrival).  No, they are . . . something else.  (Scratch, scratch)  Certainly not for everybody (full disclosure: my wife did not like it), but there weren’t many films from 2023 that were more original.     

Dream Scenario  (Prime rental)  Nicholas Cage extends his remarkably varied career (Moonstruck (1987), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), The Rock (1996), Adaptation (2003), Pig (2021)), with this slow-burning, ever-evolving tale based on an a single intriguing premise:  How would your life change if you suddenly, inexplicably, involuntarily, began appearing in other people’s dreams?  Could that be a good thing?  More to the point:  Should you hire an agent and try and monetize the situation?  A sly and funny comment on our society’s celebrity culture, but be forewarned, the movie morphs into something much, much darker.  Cage would easily qualify as a dark horse candidate for a Best Actor nomination this year were the field not already so strong.    

Eileen  (Prime rental)  This is an old fashioned film noir starring Thomasin McKenzie as a young woman in a dead-end life.  Her mother has suddenly passed away, so she left college to return to her boring hometown to care for her father, a down-spiraling alcoholic.  She’s stuck in a depressing clerical job in the state prison sited in her drab little town.  It would appear there is no hope for her.  But then a bolt of lightning flashes into her life in the form of Anne Hathaway as a strange and charismatic new prison psychiatrist.  But, as I said, this is an old fashioned film noir, and when it hits you, I doubt you will have seen it coming.  

The Origin of Evil  (AMC+, Prime rental)  It seems we can’t get enough of stories involving smart but crazy poor people insinuating themselves into the families of the superrich.  2022 brought us Anya Taylor-Joy’s character in The Menu.  This year, Emerald Ferrell’s Saltburn is the latest to mine The Talented Mr. Ripley motherlode, but I enjoyed The Origin of Evil much more.  In French and starring Laure Calamy (My Donkey, My Lover and I, Two Tickets to Greece, Call My Agent!), this enjoyable flick keeps you guessing until the final scene, and the beverages were much less icky than in Saltburn.  (If you’ve seen Saltburn, you’ll know what I mean.)

Flora and Son  (Apple TV+)  Two of the songs from the movie were shortlisted for the Best Song Oscar, and either one could easily have made the grade over some that were eventually nominated.  (They are “High Life” and “Meet in the Middle”; you can find them on YouTube.)  But even if you are not a Best Song Oscar aficionado (and why would you be?), the movie is quite enjoyable.  Starring Eve Hewson (daughter of U2 frontman Bono) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, this gritty look at the Irish working class still manages a give us some lush romance amid the graffiti-filled empty lots.  If you liked 2018’s Wild Rose with Jessie Buckley (and why wouldn’t you?), you’ll like this movie.