Here’s the roundup of the last nine movies I watched at the end of 2023:
- The 2006 Black Christmas remake is extremely bad, leaden with confusing flashbacks and indistinguishable characters, and it’s easily the worst of the three movies that bear that name.
- Oppenheimer is incredibly cinematic for a movie this long that’s largely built on testimony and public hearings.
- Polite Society is a lot of frenetic fun.
- There are some pretty good performances in Maggie Moore(s), even if it kind of feels like everybody is there as a favor to somebody else, and a few decent enough laughs, even if the whole thing feels more likea mild diversion than anything else. It often feels a lot like Fargo-lite.
- The Holdovers is a melancholic, sometimes bittersweet holiday delight.
- Dream Scenario didn’t quite come together for me in the end—and might need a repeat viewing—but it’s fun and strange, and it’s got one of the better recent Nicolas Cage performances.
- You have to give Martin Scorsese for continuing to stretch himself as a filmmaker, and for continuing to ask really difficult questions, as he does in Killers of the Flower Moon, about the nature of evil. It’s also great that he centers the film more around the Osage people—although he probably could have done so even more, not least because Lily Gladstone is fantastic in the film.
- For a movie that very deliberately offers no conclusive answers, Anatomy of a Fall is very satisfying. It’s a smart and tense puzzle whose point is that it can’t be solved.
- A Haunting in Venice is a little much at times, as Branagh plays way into the horror movie motifs and odd angles, but it’s also pretty entertaining.
I also re-watched the other two, much better versions of Black Christmas—the 1974 original and the 2019 remake. I’m maybe a little more fond of the remake, which I think does some really interesting things above being a slasher movie and has a real point of view, but the original has a really great creepy scuzziness to it. You probably couldn’t ask for two movies with ostensibly the same subject (if not plots) but with such incredibly different philosophies. Both are well worth your time, while the middle 2006 child should be locked away and forgotten.
