2023 was a jam-packed movie year, all things considered. Superheroes fell from the heavens, studios spammed the nostalgia button, while some truly unexpected successes broke the algorithms and box office.
Looking back on my anticipation for last year, I was SO ready to ride high for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Hell, I was hoping The Flash would at least make good on Michael Keaton’s Batman returning. Instead I got burned out by the easy nostalgia plays, which I know isn’t going away anytime soon (*cries in Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice*). This, fortunately, opened up room for other movies to work their magic. If you told me five years ago that I’d go nuts for a Dungeons & Dragons movie, I’d have shoved you into a locker.
I broke some long-standing rules of mine in my Favorite Movies of 2022 list. Before I kept stringently to 10 picks. Now it’s all jazz to me. If my picks push 20, then they push 20. Who cares about the sanctity of a “Top Ten.” For 2023, I instituted a new rule: I have to watch a movie at least 2-3 times before considering it on my Favorites list. It’s kinda why this took so long. Movie watching can be an expensive hobby and a waiting game. ($7 Tuesdays and free streaming trials, that’s how I save money 😭)
I’d encourage anybody to do this experiment with me. A movie can be AWESOME the first time, then drop off completely on a rewatch—either because you’re not watching it with a crowd anymore, or the hype dried up. A movie can also be shit on a first viewing, then wind up an underdog simply because you gave it another shot. Case in point, there are movies that made my halfway 2023 list that didn’t go the distance for me. Sorry, Creed III. And thank you for your service, Plane and 65 🫡
Because of my new rule, it means I have to leave out The Boy and the Heron and The Zone of Interest. Didn’t get a chance to rewatch Hayao Miyazaki’s latest masterpiece, nor Jonathan Glazer’s timely (and frightening) movie about genocide. Considering these two won big at the Oscars, it’s no sweat off their backs. There was still plenty for me to love and rave.
Without further overdue, here are my favorite movies of 2023:
HONORABLE MENTIONS
SCREAM VI — On the outside of my faves because it’s missing the satirical burns of its predecessor. Scream VI, however, is as brutal a slasher movie as they come. The set-pieces are meaner (the bodega scene and Gale’s apartment are all-timers) and the slayings are viciously bloody. It’s ending too, when a pair of final girls get their killer retribution, is oh so satisfying. Wes Craven would’ve been a proud dad.
AIR — I had my fun with Air, a biopic about a shoe that had no right being this entertaining, or this magnificently cast. Matt Damon and Jason Bateman are so good that they make us forget this is Product Placement: The Movie. It’s uncomplicated viewing with all the predictability and sentimentality of a sports drama. Air is destined to light up TNT Sundays.
THE EQUALIZER 3 — Initially wasn’t a fan of these movies, but I think what Antoine Fuqua has done with them is incredible. What started as an 80s spy thriller has fully morphed into an action-horror movie with Denzel Washington hunting down bad guys like a slasher villain. If everything is just a feel-good nostalgia trip now, then Equalizer 3 says fuck the nostalgia, here’s Denzel jamming a gun through somebody’s eye and firing through the socket. Good shit.
THE LIST
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GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3
James Gunn’s MCU swan song is a balm in the current multiverse phase. An irreverent standalone entry that laughs in the face of continuity, and does laps around the CGI glop of Ant-Man: Quantumania. Fans say they don’t want this comic book craze to end, but that’s missing the potential of what endings can do: make this shit feel like it has stakes again. You can feel Chris Pratt giving his all knowing this is the gang’s curtain call. In the interim of these movies, he’s pursued leading man roles that his Star-Lord was slyly parodying; his homecoming proves he’s still got that Andy Dwyer charm. Karen Gillan’s Nebula emerges as the soulful member of the team, while Dave Bautista has grown exponentially as a performer across the trilogy.
Volume 3 is a miracle of a director’s singular vision. If these movies are just gonna copy and paste each other, then why not have a space station made out of living tissue for the sheer revulsion of it, or drop an F-bomb just ‘cause. Or build a Noah’s Ark parable with a rotten-mouth raccoon as our biblical messenger. (All deference to Maestro but Rocket was Bradley Cooper’s best performance of 2023.) There are other ways to go bigger and bolder that don’t involve multiplying universes. Gunn’s exiting stewardship is a loss for Marvel, and a gain for DC. Considering he was fired due to a bunch of joke tweets, only to get rehired and deliver the best movie since Avengers: Endgame, James Gunn truly had the last laugh.
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M3GAN
Lotta you might’ve forgotten about M3GAN but I never did. I went Gaga over this Yassified Terminator. (Am I saying this would fit nicely on the path to Skynet and the war against the machines? No, but it would be fucking funny.) This is as January a movie can get and I say that with the highest of compliments. Sure, M3GAN could’ve been cruder and bloodier, but I admire how it slays its way down the middle. With every studio trying to launch extended universes, movies now do too much that they fail to be coherent at all. There’s comfort, then, in a movie that aims low and hits its mark with flying colors. M3GAN is a riot, a hoot and a holler, and a titanium comedian of her tech generation. Bring on M3GAN 2.0 where she’ll be the good guy this time ✊
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KNOCK AT THE CABIN
Knock at the Cabin stayed with me longer than expected. Eric, Andrew, and their adopted daughter Wen retreat to a weekend getaway where the fate of the world comes knocking. A pack of doomsdayers, led by an astonishing Dave Bautista, force this family to solve the imminent trolley problem: one of them must die, or it’s The End for everybody. Eric and Andrew are a gay couple, which is to say they’ve faced crazies like these all their lives. The only proof of the apocalypse initially is glimpsed on TV. Is this for real or one hell of a coincidence? The interpretation gets richer from there as the weight of the universe crashes on this cabin in the woods. M. Night Shyamalan’s latest became more and more fascinating to me as his 2nd shot at The Happening i.e. an inexplicable event that disparate souls are forced to reckon with. It’s also a personal reckoning of themes of faith that he’s long charted since The Sixth Sense and Signs. If belief in the divine makes us do the unspeakable, then our belief in each other, Shyamalan seems to say, is the only salvation we have left.
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ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE
The superhero genre at this point has to either evolve or be unafraid to be itself. Across the Spider-Verse does both. (Considering the number of spider heroes in this, you could argue Spider-Verse is the most itself it could ever be.) Top to bottom, this movie is quippy as its web-crawler, and far-out imaginative as the co-op web action they spin. But the wildest thing by far is how this multiverse journey has profoundly personal stakes. The trolley problem, having reached critical mass with Thanos, becomes a paradox in the Spider-Verse. If the person you couldn’t save makes who you are, then why can’t a whole spider society save Uncle Bens and Aunt Mays and Peter Parkers and Gwen Stacys a thousand times over? Miles Morales is naive to try to change destiny. Not only does that make him Spider-Man, it’s the spider wrench that this superhero machine needs to feel alive again. The genre, in my opinion, should stop trying to colonize film & television and start taking stock of itself. Across the Spider-Verse found plenty of gold within.
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THE IRON CLAW
If wrestling has long been considered Smackdown soap opera, then The Iron Claw turns the arena into Shakespeare. Patriarch Fritz promises he’ll lead his boys to greatness in the wake of a family tragedy—one doomed to recur for the Von Erichs. It’s the ultimate masculine (and American) mindset, that winning and bulging pecs will trump all, even death. Fritz, played by a tyrannical Holt McCallany, is less an uplifting coach than he is King Lear. He seemingly passes down the glories of wrestling to his boys, only to strong-arm his way back to center ring and rig the sport against them.
Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson as the Von Erich brothers is damn perfect casting. In all of their Greek god musculature, all three look like timid overgrown boys who dutifully say “yes sir.” The Von Erichs take Fritz’s every lesson to heart, “men don’t cry” chiefest among them. (An impossible lesson to uphold given what’s to come.) Efron’s Kevin will struggle with his father’s conditioning, and his emotional nuance in a real-life story that has none is remarkable to witness, and so profoundly heartbreaking. The Iron Claw is up there with Warrior, another tale of brotherhood forged in the trials of an abusive father, and certainly in the same weight class with The Wrestler as a pile-drive to the heart. “I used to be a brother,” Kevin says to his own set of boys. I bawled my eyes out.
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BARBIE
I knew Greta Gerwig was gonna charm me at the movies. I didn’t realize she’d go full Mel Brooks. Say what you will about parodies in general, they poked fun at popular culture, including themselves. Parodies are so rare now that our only release-valve is a Lego Movie. Barbie isn’t just a sendup of the titular doll, but anyone who ever played with toys i.e. all of us. It’s the other side of Toy Story where one’s imagination can only get you so far, or sustain you for so long. Gerwig bursts that bubble with some sugary sweet jabs at Mattel, white feminism, and toxic masculinity. (The Snyder Cut joke is its own masterpiece.)
Barbie’s world may come crashing down but the movie is far from cynical. It keeps things light on its feet, giving it the earnestness to indulge in an old Hollywood musical, or have a tender coming-of-age moment—with the conviction of our brightest stars who own every dance bop and Matchbox Twenty ballad. This, to me, is the Robin Hood: Men in Tights sequel made 30 years later. (Tell me “I’m Just Ken” isn’t “Men in Tights” Redux.) There are gags plucked right out of a Mel Brooks movie, or Monty Python; Ryan Gosling, too, is as effortlessly smirking as Cary Elwes. At a time when comedies have vanished from the marquee, it is so so so invigorating to howl in a packed theater. Sure, we might’ve gone overboard propping up Barbie, but that only made the movie funnier. The genius of Gerwig 👌
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MAY DECEMBER
It’s unsurprising that Todd Haynes’ latest got zero acting nominations at the Oscars. Because May December crucifies the actor methodology. Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is going deep for her next role: Gracie (a COMMITTED Julianne Moore), a former teacher who had sex with her student. Gracie and Joe (a heartbreaking Charles Melton) are a family of five, and Elizabeth’s “passion project” based on their tabloid affair will wreck their house of cards. May December examines the exploitative nature of movies based on true stories. Are your intentions good for wanting to tell the truth, or is your ego courting sensationalism? Elizabeth, of course, wants to do her actorly diligence by “understanding” Gracie’s motivation—that motivation being why she slept with a 13-year-old.
Samy Burch’s script had me spellbound in its high melodrama and perverse punchlines. I get why you wouldn’t find this funny, but there is a comedic throughline. Elizabeth is the star of a Grey’s Anatomy show but for veterinarians, and later we hear audio of her winning something like an MTV Movie Award. The eventual production of her passion project in the end looks like a porn parody of the thing. Worse, her best imitation of Gracie happened when the cameras weren’t around. The movie ends with Elizabeth doing take after take, chasing an authenticity that was beside the point after all. May December is Tropic Thunder for the provocative Oscars drama, and a Comedy Central Roast for method actors (Portman being an eviscerating roastmaster) that ought to keep Jared Leto on his toes. Haynes and Burch should’ve won awards for that alone.
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TALK TO ME
There are so few original horror movies that succeed, fewer that creep into my nightmares. I’m happy to report that Talk to Me shook me, electrified me. A wicked new party trick lets people commune with the dead, which makes for SICK content in our endless doomscroll. Follow the (flimsy) rules and everybody gets their 15 seconds of fame. Break ‘em, however, and those on the other side will do more than @ you.
Talk to Me is upfront about Gen Z as the second-screen generation. There are those who seek distraction for kicks, likes, or as a way to cope. Like Mia, whose grief for her OD’d mother is teased by the embalmed hand. Talk to Me is also about the dangerous shit we flirt with at that age. Drugs, sex, knives, ouija boards; why is it so cool to be on the edge in our nascency? Does that take us further as button-pushers and 5G explorers seeking the next viral frontier… or is the current generation just THAT bored??? As the proverb goes, these kids fuck around and they find out relentlessly, mercilessly. This is Drag Me to Hell for TikTokers and YouTubers. Though I personally don’t recommend it, Talk to Me is one of the few films that might be just as scary to watch on your phone.
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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
D&D is such a reference point for other media (and shorthand for “nerd”) that it would’ve been easy to punch itself into the ground. Instead, Dungeons & Dragons is a medieval fantasy with a heart of gold and an indelible sense of humor, brought to you by the duo who did Game Night. The jokes come punching out of the world and its scoundrelly characters, and maybe at a movie star or two.
Chris Pine was on the cusp of super(hero) stardom once upon a time. He’s charismatic and winning as ever and VERY game for the tomfoolery. As is Hugh Grant, a scene-stealing villain with an ego the size of a final boss. Dungeons & Dragons (gotta get rid of that subtitle) also seeds in the future star status of Sophia Lillis, whose doe-eyed optimism is refreshing in a blockbuster era that mocks itself to score cheap points with the mainstream. Most reassuring of all, the movie reignites the supernova that is Michelle Rodriquez. Aside from Widows, other movies have barely tapped her range. This, more so than Pine, is Rodriguez’s action vehicle.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have assembled a rollicking raiding party whose misfortune is to roll 1s at every turn, in a swashbuckling adventure that’s part Lord of the Rings, part Pirates of the Caribbean, maybe a lil Mask of Zorro. This was the blockbuster surprise of the year, one that stole my heart for simply being sincere. If you’ve got turn-based mechanics, use ‘em literally; if you’ve got audacious abilities or weird spells with weirder rules, USE THOSE TOO. Please for the love of god no more superheroes laughing at their own names and more Chris Pine barding out.
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THE KILLER
David Fincher’s The Killer asks the crucial question, “what if a guy sucked at his job?” Michael Fassbender’s unnamed hitman tells us he’s a pro—dousing us in rise-n-grind mantras aplenty—then proves otherwise. How good is he really, or any of us, in a modern age where it’s easier to be a hitman than it is to rise through the ranks of late-stage capitalism. (Fassbender poses as service workers and circumvents a high-rise for the wealthy by buying some shit online.) Fincher’s taut style has never been better executed, or so mightily controlled. There’s a hitman throwdown shot like a mini-Panic Room, while other successful assassinations are rendered like ASMR videos. How stuff so lurid can be both addicting and calming to watch is the alchemy of Fincher.
It’s work or die in the gig economy, and the Killer’s particular function is where those two meet. But he’s no more special than the rest of us. He has a boss, income, works killer overtime. Even when he murders his boss (who hasn’t felt that!) he’s not disrupting the system than he is feeding the corporate beast every step of the way. The Killer is Fincher’s funniest movie since Fight Club (or The Game, once you know the twist), a black comedy about the delusional and sociopathic world we’ve been living in since “hustle culture” doomed us all. “Stick to the plan” makes for a nice slogan or workplace poster in that regard. Or words on our tombstone.
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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING
Dead Reckoning didn’t quite light up the box office like Top Gun: Maverick, but it set my eyeballs on fire. When the movie opens with a giant salute to The Hunt for Red October (a dad movie masterpiece), I knew Christopher McQuarrie was forever my guy. The shit only gets bigger from there. Cruise, at this point, has gone up against every action movie villain in the dictionary, save for one that puts him up there with Schwarzeneggar: artificial intelligence. Sure, it might be cheesy to hear Ethan and crew say “The Entity” every 5 minutes, or drop phrases like “this is what it wants us to do” to maximum usage. The whole notion of pushing things to the highest point in this franchise is so Cruise can jump off it—but not before Ethan thinks about all the beautiful baddies he’s lost in his life. It’s cheesy good fun, and quite literally peak ‘90s action movie shit.
From England to Norway, to Abu Dhabi and Venice; Dead Reckoning has scope and grandeur that soundstages on The Volume can’t capture. It’s the kind of wanderlust that pulled me in as a kid watching Jackie Chan movies and James Bond. It’s what I’ll happily take these days over the multiverse. If superheroes and Star Wars have subsumed the action genre—because these movies come with 3-4 set-pieces in the formula—then practicality is the only separator. That’s why McQuarrie refuses to do things the easy way. Perhaps that’s why Cruise himself is going to space. If the Spy Movie is the last bastion for globe-trotting thrill rides, then Cruise and McQuarrie will squeeze every last breath from the genre. And I’ll see them at the movies 🫡
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EVIL DEAD RISE
After four movies and a TV show, you kinda know what you’re in for with Evil Dead. The wicked thrill of Evil Dead Rise, however, is how it blows past those expectations. We start in a cabin in the woods with familiar camerawork and a MEAN opening that leads to the raddest title card ever put to film. Then Lee Cronin takes the book of the dead and drops the franchise in an anti-Evil Dead setting. So how does Sam Raimi’s vile baby work in an urban environment? Like gangbusters.
When Ellie turns into the Mama Deadite to Rule Them All and does the nastiest cat-cow pose you’ve ever seen, I knew we were in good hands—and that Evil Dead Rise was gonna shred harder and harder. Endearing moms and precocious kids are not safe in this movie, the same way open skin anywhere isn’t safe from demonic mutilation. There’s something reassuring about that. I should explain: I’ve had my fill with “elevated horror,” a groaning term unfairly put upon certain movies, but also a genre that filmmakers wound up chasing. It led to stuff like 2021’s Candyman or 2022’s Men where the ideas take over the movie. No, I’m NOT using the term “woke,” I just think some movies get lost in the social commentary. Social commentary is fine. (Look up: George A. Romero.) But your horror movie gotta be scary first.
In Evil Dead Rise, Ellie is a single mom and Beth is her wayward sister who’s expecting. This isn’t new, but it’s enough to ground us in their dynamic before hell breaks loose. Who or where Ellie’s husband is is irrelevant. She’s with her kids and that tells us all we need to know about her. And whatever Beth will choose to do about the pregnancy doesn’t matter. Instead, she shows us that she’ll face the obstacles head on with a boomstick. (The movie also could’ve painted Ellie’s kids as brats who give her a hard time. Turns out they’re adorable, which makes what will happen to their family unit all the more upsetting.) This is a horror movie with its priorities straight. This isn’t a treatise on motherhood or trauma; it’s an Evil Dead movie where traumatic things happen, and happens to have excellent motherly parallels.
We don’t need characters speaking in Twitter threads to tell us what this is about. We just need characters who’ve had it up to here, showing us what they’re made of in a gory 1v1 showdown. Maybe this is why I responded to Malignant the way I did. It’s definitely why I loved Barbarian, now this. Evil Dead Rise spoke to me in chainsaw and it blew out the back of my skull like a Slayer song, or a Mortal Kombat fatality. More horror movies could learn a thing or two on a trip to Home Depot, imo.
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JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4
I expected John Wick 4 to rip. I didn’t expect this to be a Neo-Western martial arts odyssey. Baba Yaga is the Ronin, the Man with No Name, and Thomas Anderson rolled into one. Chapter 4 eclipses its predecessors by embracing the ensemble potential of an action epic. There’s only so much a magnetic movie star can do, especially when Keanu Reeves’ character is a stoic one. World-building in this franchise prior meant introducing another stone tablet of “rules” that govern these hitman Hiltons across the globe. (The first movie says there’s only one rule. The next movie says “actually, there are two!”) Chad Stahelski threads a few more, then serves up a creme de la creme of action stars who straight up RULE.
Hiroyuki Sanada is the biggest flex in the cast; you want gravitas, there’s no one better. Scott Adkins once again shows off how versatile his body is, even in a fatsuit, and an action star is born in Rina Sawayama. But it’s a soulful Donnie Yen and newcomer Shamier Anderson who sweep Chapter 4 for me. As Caine and Nobody, respectively, they represent the two pathways for John: serve long enough and eventually you’ll be “free,” or price yourself for the highest bidder and you can “retire.” Neither leads to paradise; it’s the same deadend. ALL are chained to the High Table because punks like Bill Skarsgard can take advantage of the rules and bend you to his will. Even John, he who broke the rules in Chapter 2 only to offer himself up for servitude again in Chapter 3. The revelation in this final chapter(?) is that the only way out is through. And my, does Reeves shoot his fuckin’ way out… and fall, and get hit by cars, and fall and fall and fall.
I don’t know which sequence I like better. The Osaka Continental set-piece, which is really 3 of them rolled into one. The punishing club beatdown, literally mirroring the beats (and beat-drop) of the first movie. Or the Arc de Triomphe, or the Sacre Coeur, or the Dragon’s breath shootout—Stahelski’s over-the-top tribute to John Woo. All I could say at the end of Mr. Wick’s Greek journey home: bravo.
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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
In some way, shape or form, Martin Scorsese has been telling the story of America – a story of greed, violence, and the moral rot intrinsic to the nation’s founding. Killers of the Flower Moon is a 1920s mirror of America’s original sin, and further, a cataclysmic Native American horror story.
Indigenous people were doomed to be uprooted once the settlers came. The Osage, ironically, stumbled upon wealth after being displaced in Oklahoma… and the vultures came circling like another land of opportunity. But neither Mollie Kyle nor the Osage leaders could’ve foreseen the birth of a new animal in the 20th century: the sociopath. Initially, Mollie’s sisters believe Ernest Burkhart’s intentions are good (“he already has money”), the same way tribal leaders assume William Hale to be their ally, he who’s learned their ways like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But the question isn’t why were the Osage so naive? It’s why evil was allowed to operate in plain sight.
Scorsese knows what he’s doing by casting Travis Bickle as cunning patriarch William Hale, and Jack Dawson as Ernest Burkhart—who’s also a Wolf of Wall Street. Robert De Niro is at his most sinister here; the lightbulb moment he has watching the Tulsa race massacre is chilling. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio shatters the last remnants of his heartthrob vestige by playing a village idiot who’s far from innocent. (The way Killers of the Flower Moon employs the personas of both actors is a film class unto itself.)
Scorsese dispenses with the bravado and rhythm of his earlier work. Minus the verve of Goodfellas and Casino, the systematic murder of the Osage hits like a biblical plague. The strokes aren’t subtle because Hale’s greed isn’t subtle. Because justice wasn’t swift, nor the legal proceedings fair or just. (Familiar faces in Hale’s cohort are on the same jury convicting Hale and Burkhart.) Scorese was right to abandon the triumphant version of this narrative from the FBI perspective—the same bureau that went on to use Mollie’s story in a self-celebratory PR campaign. Brutally and brilliantly, he goes for the jugular.
I thought Silence was Scorsese at peak devastation. Killers of the Flower Moon was the toughest sit of 2023 due in large part to Lily Gladstone’s searing performance. Her Mollie has less and less to say because what else is there to say except endure this reign of terror that began before and will surpass her lifetime. (Gladstone’s face throughout is a whole acting course study.) A torrential storm came for the Osage that hasn’t let up in the present. Rather than ignore our history—or pretend to absolve our sins—Scorsese pleads us to sit with it.
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OPPENHEIMER
I thought The Dark Knight was the movie Christopher Nolan was born to make. I thought the same of Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, hell even Tenet… Turns out Nolan was warming up this whole time, and proceeded to cook with all kinds of gasses for the magnum opus that is Oppenheimer.
Nolan’s usual MO is on display here: practical moviemaking, A-list stars up the wazoo, IMAX aspect ratios, a grandiose score, and, of course, the time fragmentation (the movie ends at the middle point in the story). Maybe he’s perfected his trade; he’s certainly honed in on his visual storytelling where everything macro to micro is made cinematic. The camera push-in on the bomb’s assembly mirroring the closeup on the apple a.k.a. what God warned man not to touch. The flashes of light echoing the moment of detonation—the specter of the Trinity Test haunting Oppenheimer for the rest of his life. Or a wallop of an ending featuring visions of a world rapidly catching up to the future cross-cut with our mutually assured destruction. Rain to missiles, radius to ripples; only Nolan can pull this off at this scale. Frankly, he’s outdone himself.
That Nolan can mine drama out of something we know has happened (of course the test works!) is a testament to how immersive his storytelling is. I could’ve watched David Krumholtz hand-feed our protagonist oranges, or Josh Hartnett build the entire cyclotron (MVPs of the movie for me). This is the kind of film we lament doesn’t get made anymore. No, not the biopic—though I don’t know if anyone’s ever done one on a bomb before. Oppenheimer is an ensemble picture that Hollywood used to put out all the time (see: The Firm). Also a courtroom drama that used to be a phase in the industry once upon a time (again, see The Firm). Or more simply, it’s a film that basks in good old-fashioned sets and the great wide outdoors.
To Nolan and crew, the form (and format) IS cinema, not the IP itself. I had never been more assured as a viewer that this cathedral I call home can, in fact, be a home again to something more than extended universes and post-credit scenes. Something experiential, perhaps even vital. I’ve crowned “roller coaster” movies on these year-end lists of late. Make no mistake, this is a propulsive ride through the most consequential moment in human history. And it sinks you ALL THE WAY DOWN when it cuts to black.
Oppenheimer was the movie of 2023. A movie that’s essentially just dudes talking in rooms, and low-key about how many dudes you can recognize scene to scene—with the craft of a master guiding you moment to moment. “Just remember, it won’t be for you. It’ll be for them,” Einstein cautions to Oppy. Nah, smart guy. This one was for me.
ADRIAN MANUEL 