10. The Killer - David Fincher
As was the case with the director's previous work, Deficiency, which took this same spot on the 2020 list, the reason why Fincher's The Killer finds among the selected films for 2023 does not lie in some internal quality of the film, but in its symptomatological interest. A tiresome critic's stereotype is that Fincher, despite certain narrative flaws, is actually a great stylist, that his strategic advantage lies in the domain of stylization that can cover up other shortcomings and once again confirm the director's privileged authorial position.
In that view, The Killer provides a nice opportunity to effectively refute such a common opinion: namely, in this production, Fincher is "reduced" only to style, given that the script by Andrew Kevin Walker at best conceived as such, but that does not imply that you will find in it even traces of brilliance or special virtuosity. Moreover, focusing only on the stylistic signature, The Killer is only then hopelessly empty.
However, this is exactly where the film shows itself as the mentioned symptom of an unpleasant condition, related to proven authors when they are compared to the old masters. So, in comparison with the obvious role model, the Samurai (1967), Fincher's mise-en-scène it seems only miserably trivial in comparison Melville's transcendental style. As well as, to capture the wider context, Scott's abominable Napoleon i Nolan's Oppenheimer they look particularly pale when viewed within the Kubrickian paradigm. As well as Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon can't even reach up to Ford's western from its weakest, final revisionist phase.
9. Leave the World Behind - Sam Esmail
There is always something almost perverse in Hollywood's effort to exploit the Apocalypse for entertainment purposes: the capitalist machinery has never hesitated to (mis)use either dark desires or dark fears. Although it was met with mostly negative reviews, Leave the world behind however, he intriguingly tries to adjust his rhetoric within a more ominous content in that apocalyptic tone, adopted recently in Hollywood.
Za Esmail, a small, forced community (composed of two completely different families), becomes the center of a global drama of chaos, disintegration and breakdown. In the space created by the proliferation of conspiracy theories and media blockade, a landmark for understanding the world is lost: the Apocalypse acquires its most ironic dimension when it denies interpretive transparency to those who pass through it. That's why Esmail can end his film with a small happy ending: at least Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) to be able to watch the last episode of the last season Friends.
8. The Holdovers - Alexander Payne
Nothing in The Holdovers it's not particularly original - moreover, the film profits from the referential recall of, say, a classic Dead Poet's Society - but that wasn't the director's primary goal: for Payne's the realization is particularly important of a certain kind of unpretentiousness, although themes of a strong existential character are covered. At Christmas time, due to circumstances, but also by a kind of destiny, three different people will be left in a festively empty school, to find the power of a new communication that should reveal something new and different in all of them.
Payne's film is a melancholic tribute to the seventies in a recreation that is as cinephilic as it is worldview. If The Holdovers it also has a soothing dose of nostalgia, this is primarily because it tries to evoke a spirit in which it was still possible for the search for one's own identity to be as humorous as it was a philosophical meditation between rebellion and resignation.
7. Cuando acecha la maldad (When evil lurks) - Demián Rugna
Like last year's Australian one Talk To Me, and Argentine When you hit evil tries to bring a freshness of originality to the ossified horror tropes. It is a procedure whose creativity should be especially appreciated, even if the final product does not have to fully realize the initial potential: in the genre context, innovation grows into a particularly precious quality.
Originality to which Mocking comes to When you hit evil it is tied to a mythology of the living dead that leaves the terrain of the usual or Romerian zombie etiology, placing emphasis on a less explored form of demonic possession. Precisely because of this new mythos in a generically already interspersed genre space, Rugna's film has a strong worldview impulse, so the constructed diegetic space is shifted enough to avoid the already schematized semantic points in zombie-narratives, thus the author's visceral points - repulsively embodied in the infectious body of the demonic - acquire a sickening existential connotation.
6. Anatomie d'une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) - Justine Triet
Winner of the Cannes Festival, Anatomies of a chute je whodunnit which is made in the form of a marriage melodrama, and vice versa. Since the murder or death takes place in a snowy, alpine environment, the author Triet as if taking over the distanced analysis as the dominant means of visual description: strikingness Anatomies of a chute it rests precisely on that cold intonation which, from the most suitable angle, looks at people and events.
From the most suitable angle, it simply means that Triet always fills the relative simplicity of the crime plot with an ambivalent melodramatic charge, so that each subsequent narrative movement, instead of closing the enigma, only increases the complexities and contradictions of a failed marriage. It is clear that the legal procedure cannot solve the psychological background: the court drama is only one factor in the complex process of finding the motive. Moreover, Anatomies of a chute implies that even revealing the motive - that key detail in the mosaic of crimes - might not fully shed light on the plot that structures the drama on which the film rests.
5. Poor Things - Yorgos Lanthimos
Although not as aesthetically potent as the director's best films, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and, in particular, The Favourite, poor things confirms the position anyway Lanthimos as one of the world's most important auteurs at the moment. If the film - unlike its predecessors - lacks a little more concentration, it is because Lanthimos is completely on the side of excess: in poor things there is too much of everything, and parables, and sex, and stylistic bravura, for the semantic field to be more precisely or coherently rounded.
Given that the fable itself has been fundamentally shifted through the reinterpretation of Frankenstein as primarily an enlightening and not a horror text, the director's avant-garde approach, paradoxically, acts more like a kind of redundancy than experimental deconstruction.
In this sense - another paradoxical insight - Lanthimos sa poor things it finds its closest companion - both in the frontal refutation of the mimetic perspective and in the aggressive allegorization - of all the films, precisely in Barbie Greta Gerwig: the similarities between the two achievements are much greater than the intonation difference that appears in the disproportion between the ideologically positive monitoring of the development of female (self) consciousness and the always subversively problematic verification of the development of female sexuality in its inherent transgressiveness.
4. El Conde (The Count) - Pablo Larraín
Ever since the famous one Marx's comparison of capitalism to the vampire, the figure of the bloodsucker became a vehicle of strong symbolic value. The nightmarish power of the vampire is not only found in its uncanny incarnation, but also in a widespread connotation that very indicatively enters the space of economics, finance, politics and ideology: the blood-sucking metaphor is powerfully adequate and ominously applicable in various contexts.
Larraín decides here to turn the metaphor into a literal trope, even into a 'denotation': u Count, general Pinochet (jamie vadell) is not like, but really is a vampire who has been spreading his evil influence and exploiting the lives of unfortunate subjects since the French Revolution. Although it may seem that this director's maneuver makes the ideological dimension of the film too readable, where a singular political situation can be explained by an obscure metaphysical segment, Larraín all the time manages to Count it keeps in sufficiently unusual, surreal and ironic waters, so that there is never a decrease in the intensity of the meaning profiling.
3. May December - Todd Haynes
Bravery Haynes, but also the main actresses Natalie Portman i Julianne Moore u MayDecember, it is easy to see: it is only necessary to imagine an inverted gender constellation, and realize that it would be impossible to make a film in that version. But the courage of the director and crew is not only reflected in their willingness to tackle the story of the abuser Gracie (Moore) who, after prison, continues to live "normally" with Joe (Charles Melton), his once minor spouse, but also in choosing a direction that places the already disturbing story in an even more radical framework, which is metapoetic in its essence.
Namely, Haynes insists on his controversial method of procedure of the actress Elizabeth (Portman), who uses every opportunity to get to know as much as possible and immerse herself in the extremely problematic character of a sexual predator. With the help of great music Michel Legrande from extraordinary Losey's The go-between (1971), which received a new arrangement, the director "underlines" the drama of those anthropological and social points, which all culminate in the final staging: a repetition of the scene in which Elizabeth tries to play Gracie as realistically as possible while seducing and "training" Joe.
2. My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock - Mark Cousins
Critical literature of Hitchcock has become unfathomable, a kind of Borgesian labyrinthine library where endless dialogue and interpretative ecstasy (or delirium, as you prefer) take place. Cousins competent documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock tries to "reverse" that hermeneutic situation: here "himself" Hitchcock - whom he evokes vocally Alistair McGowan - interpret his own scenes, shots and motives, he becomes his own critic.
The whole setup - despite all the obvious gimmick - is not so fictional, considering that something similar has already happened in Truffaut to the book which, regardless of all hesitations, evasions and ironic detours, still represents the most complete (poetic) confession of the Master of Suspense. At the best of times, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock it functions as an intriguing illustrated catalogue, as a small but precious lexicon of the director's obsessive motives: by organizing his documentary with the help of the author's six major 'themes' - Escape, Desire, Solitude, Time, Fulfillment, Height - Cousins captures (in depth) something of the sublimity of Hitchcock's aesthetics .
1. Les chambres rouges (The Red Rooms) - Pascal Plante
Plante's the stylization is cold, the observation is precise, the intonation is analytical, the narration is strictly procedural: in a story that deals with the monstrous murders of teenage girls in the "red rooms" of the dark web, is this mise-en-scène mitigates things, because the actual crime is not shown directly, or it makes the entire issue even more terrible and shocking, since in the extremely realistic stylization, space is left for an imaginary and imaginative excess that alone can summon the unspeakable Evil.
Canadian Les chambers rouge is a study of the Kelly-Anne model (Juliette Gariépy) who is obsessed with trying the man who most likely committed terrible crimes: the main character's fascination with Evil is also the fascination with Evil of every viewer who has to face the implications of their own involvement in (fictional) narratives of pathological sexuality: the film is a dark mirror that reflects our character, not only those involved in the diegesis.
Between the killer and the victim is a whole gray area of projection and recoil, curiosity and disgust. It's Kelly-Anna's nickname Lady of Shalott (there is a picture on her computer John Atkinson Grimshaw, and not much better known Waterhouse's masterpiece): Tennyson's a character who cannot look at the world directly, but only in a mirror.
Les chambers rouges brilliantly reconstructs a media-technological situation that grows into an existential one, in which mirroring sends a message to a real address: the key scene in the film is when the 'heroine', locked in her 'tower' with a random friend, watches a snuff video. Plante's film visually rests not on the reading of that footage (which will not be seen), but on what vicariously, specularly stands in place of the horror - the face of Kelly-Anne herself.
Bonus video:
