Blinding Lights — 2023: The Year in Film

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman.

Hard as it is not to despair at the ongoing desecration of cinema as mere content, Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s gargantuan, form-challenging biopic of the father of the atomic bomb, was a potent reminder of what can be achieved on the biggest of screens. Even leaving aside the Barbenheimer box-office boost, the film of the year was a stinging rebuke to both the franchise obsessed and the cinema averse, an apocalyptic Cold War thriller that used the full force of Nolan’s technical virtuosity and proclivity for time-fracturing narratives to reinforce the terrifying reality that, once unleashed, the bomb couldn’t be uninvented. 

Auteur of the year, though, was Wes Anderson, who returned not just with the Oppenheimer adjacent Asteroid City, a 1950s-set alien invasion movie replete with its own low-tech mushroom clouds, but also with his Netflix-funded quartet of Roald Dahl adaptations drawn from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Both projects further cemented Anderson’s position as the most distinctive, uncompromising filmmaker currently working.

At 81, Martin Scorsese was no slouch in this department either, burnishing his reputation as America’s greatest living director with his lacerating Killers of the Flower Moon. Ostensibly his first western, he thoroughly deconstructed the genre, building the story around Lily Gladstone’s quietly complex turn as an oil-rich Osage woman targeted by her feckless husband (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his power-hungry uncle (Robert De Niro). Exposing the ruthless venality at the heart of this true-crime story, Scorsese even implicated himself in a remarkable epilogue underscoring the role entertainment has played in distorting the creation myth of America.

Scorsese contemporary Steven Spielberg was also on self-reflexive form with his semi-fictionalised biopic The Fablemans, which demonstrated why he’s ‘Steven Spielberg’, not some middlebrow hack delivering yet another groaning eulogy to their favoured era of cinema (get your coats Sam Mendes and Damien Chazelle). Telling the story of his own prodigious youth, it gave us a remarkable opportunity to see Spielberg reckoning with the power he’s wielded as the most naturally gifted filmmaker of the modern era. 

Likewise, it was great to see David Fincher apply his obsessive visual eye to the droll existential hitman movie The Killer. A pure movie-movie, it also functioned as a Fight Club-style takedown of the spiritual malaise of late-period capitalism, something teased out by a last-act cameo from Tilda Swinton, who further demonstrated her versatility by starring opposite herself in The Eternal Daughter, Joanna Hogg’s intriguing and ghostly sequel to The Souvenir.

Indie mavericks Ti West, Todd Haynes and Todd Field also made spectacular returns with extravagant horror and horror-tinged tales of women losing control. Pearl, West’s and co-writer/star Mia Goth’s bonkers prequel to last year’s horny, porny slasher movie X, provided a psychologically astute origins story for its randy eponymous villain. Haynes’s psychodrama May December was no less subversive, the outré performances of Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore transforming a sordid tale of sexual predation into an elegantly deranged character study. Field’s horror-movie-mimicking Tár, meanwhile, provided another great showcase for Cate Blanchett as a famous conductor suddenly finding herself out of tune with the world around her. It also gave us the scene of the year: Lydia Tár’s merciless takedown of a snowflake student’s narcissistic refusal to engage with Bach.

Tár wasn’t the only film challenging cultural narcissism. Nicole Holofcener’s delightfully funny relationship comedy You Hurt My Feelings slyly satirised the creative industries’ ongoing obsession with trauma narratives, though it was Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli who really skewered this zeitgeist. Newcomer of the year for the one-two punch of Sick of Myself and the Nic Cage-starring Dream Scenario, he offered absurdist, blackly comic takedowns of the self-obsession of the social media age.

Happily 2023 gave us several great debuts. Celine Song’s Past Lives was an exquisitely executed unrequited love story, one that throbbed with the ache of modern classics In the Mood for Love and Before Sunset, yet did something new with its bittersweet exploration of the way life complicates not just matters of the heart but matters of cultural identity. Then there was the formal daring of Tina Satter’s Reality, which used the verbatim transcripts of a 2017 NSA whistleblower interrogation to provide an unnerving look at how destabilising it is to live in a world where wall-to-wall fake news makes us constantly doubt what’s happening before our eyes. 

Onscreen sex made a (slight) return too. In addition to Pearl, William Oldroyd’s Eileen was suffused with furtive sexual desire and even Christopher Nolan got in on the act with that mid-coitus translation of the Bhagavad Gita in Oppenheimer. But it was Ira Sachs’ lusty, sexually fluid love-triangle drama Passages that unabashedly put it front and centre. Explicit though it was, what made it feel weirdly revolutionary was the casual way Sachs made sex part of his characters’ everyday lives. 

Then again, perhaps that's not so weird given the main characters in the year’s most hyped and successful film had no genitals at all. Yes, the Margot Robbie-starring Barbie was the all-conquering hit of the year and though its runaway success will guarantee Greta Gerwig career freedom going forth, the film itself was disappointingly half-baked, its promising conceptual ideas barely thought through and its feminist platitudes cloying and regressive, with Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach even subjecting one young Barbie-hating female character to the same humiliating put-on-a-pretty-dress transformation that should have gone out with The Breakfast Club.

By comparison, Kelly Fremon Craig’s light-touch adaptation of Judy Blume’s seminal coming-of-age novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was genuinely moving and quietly radical, its winning heroine’s anxiety and excitement over the impending arrival of her period the basis for a wonderfully subtle and generous exploration of the awkwardness of adolescence. No one went to see it, but coming at a time when Blume’s novels are still being targeted by US politicians who think books are bigger threats to children than guns, its existence was a minor miracle.