“A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.”— critic and author Robert Warshow

Roger Ebert, the father of modern film criticism, loved that quote. He knew that no critic can ever be objective, and they shouldn’t try to be. Every time we watch a film, we view it through the prism of our own experiences. Critics can lean on their knowledge of film history, their understanding of the technical aspects of filmmaking, and their ardent passion for cinema to comprise an informed judgment on a movie’s merits, but that doesn’t begin to account for the most important thing: why a film sticks with you. What makes it lodge in your gut and stick there for days, months, even years afterward? It’s a thing that cannot be explained because it occurs in that meeting place between an artist—or the team of artists and craftspeople who make a film—and the individual viewer. When you get right down to it, the only difference between a very good film and a great one is how much each of us personally connects to its ideas and how they’re expressed.

For this critic, 2023 was a hard year. I’ll spare you the full details, but it involved the loss of several beloved family pets, the deterioration of one of my most important personal relationships, and a lot of therapy. There was both grief and loss. I withdrew a bit from the world. At some point, I stopped reading the news; at another point, I finished a book on baseball cinema that will be published next year. I leaned in to my passions and away from that which I had no control over. I ceased reviewing new releases and took on the repertory cinema beat here at City Paper. Revisiting the films of the past has been enlightening, but it has also left me feeling a little out of touch.

As a critic, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as groupthink is poisonous to honest discourse. I have found myself out of step with my colleagues on some of the most celebrated films of the year including Oppenheimer (I liked it, but thought the third act nearly cratered the whole thing), Barbie, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Instead, I found myself drawn to smaller independent films that portrayed and probed the simple pleasures of life: art, food, desire, family, love, and friendship. Films like Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. (#5), the warm adaptation of the beloved Judy Blume novel about a Jewish teenager growing up in suburban New Jersey in the ’70s. It’s a film that finds universality in specificity, and not just its perfect replication of ’70s-era fashion, furniture, and cars. It captures the low-stakes anguish of puberty with startling insight. I don’t know what it’s like to buy tampons or worry about being the last person in your friend group to get their period … but I do know what it’s like to buy condoms before you need them and fret that you’re going to be the oldest virgin on the planet. Written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, the film feels like a callback to the era of John Hughes—when we laughed at teenagers so we didn’t cry for ourselves.

One of the great achievements of Are You There God? is in how it expands the role of the mother, played winningly by Rachel McAdams. She has little to do in the book, but the film delves honestly into her ambivalence over being a homemaker and her complicated relationship with her parents. The compassion the film extends her reminds me of All of Us Strangers (#4), a haunting romance about a lonely urbanite (Andrew Scott) who, after striking up a romance with a sexy neighbor (Paul Mescal), finds himself drawn back to his hometown, where his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), who died in a car crash when he was a child, are miraculously still alive and unaged. The romance is steamy enough—Scott and Mescal forge a chemistry that is both emotionally vulnerable and unbearably sexy—but Scott achieves a remarkable transformation in the scenes at home, when he reveals his sexual identity to his parents. It’s somewhere between a wish and a dream, with Scott becoming the 11-year-old boy he once was without the aid of makeup or visual effects.

You don’t need big budgets or movie stars to create dramatic tension. Just look to Palm Trees and Power Lines (#6) and The Teachers’ Lounge (#7). Palm Trees was dropped on Hulu earlier this year after a festival run in 2022. Nobody seemed to notice it, or maybe the subject matter scared them off. It’s about 17-year-old Lea (Lily McInerny), who, bored and disgusted with her school friends, embarks on a romance with a 34-year-old guy (Jonathan Tucker). Discerning adults will realize the trouble from the first time they lock eyes, but first-time feature director and co-writer Jamie Dack shows incredible discipline in letting her story play out through Lea’s perspective. When you get to the horrifying climax, it’s both unthinkable and inevitable. Given the subject matter and the creative tightrope in pulling it off, it’s courageous work from all involved.

The Teachers’ Lounge plays out more like a traditional thriller, though without the explicit threat of violence. The German film by İlker Çatak concerns a new teacher at a public school dealing with an epidemic of theft. Her attempt to catch the thief seems to bring a quick resolution, but nothing is simple in our world as it pertains to children, safety, and criminality. Leonie Benesch is revelatory as the idealistic teacher trying to do the right thing at every turn and somehow getting herself in deeper with her students, their parents, and eventually her colleagues. Is it possible to do the right thing in our world? Is it even worth it? The Teachers’ Lounge asks those questions and smartly doesn’t try to answer them. 

Maybe we should “just keep telling the story.” That’s the advice the playwright gives  the actor in Asteroid City (#9), Wes Anderson’s exploration of terrestrial and extraterrestrial life. Set at a Junior Stargazing convention in a small desert town, Anderson bounces his cast of troubled adults and observant children against each other, while building in a nesting doll narrative structure, and painting some of the richest, most pleasing hues of his career. As I pondered the loss of my beloved dogs this year, did I relate to Jason Schwartzman’s grieving widower? Did I spend a few nights gazing at the stars and pondering my place in the universe? Did I worry about how to tell the children—my remaining dogs—the news? Yes, I did. But I also warmly recalled Anderson’s blue desert sky once or twice, amid months of thinking about how we use art to both heal and relive our traumas. 

Or we could just rely on each other. That’s how the central trio in The Holdovers (#8) gets through a mercilessly cold two weeks at a New England boarding school. It’s Christmas vacation, and they have nowhere else to go. Angus (newcomer Dominic Sessa) has been abandoned by his mother and new stepdad; Mr. Hunham (Paul Giamatti) has drawn the short straw and been tasked with supervising Angus; and cafeteria manager Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, in a performance that’s already winning awards) has to stick around and make sure the men don’t die of starvation. Each character is prickly in their own way, but they quickly warm to one another. Their time (and ours) is spent trying to help each other heal, making The Holdovers the warmest film of director Alexander Payne’s career, if not one of his best. Certainly the one I needed at the end of this year.

There’s also a warmth in Showing Up (#10) and Afire (#3), although it doesn’t seem like it at first. Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up opens on a frustrated sculptor (Michelle Williams) rushing an injured pigeon out of her window so it can die in the street. Afire concerns itself with a miserable writer (Thomas Schubert) whose vacation with his best friend is nearly ruined by his own defensiveness. Neither character is particularly sympathetic at the outset. The only reason they earn our compassion is from how caringly they are portrayed by the filmmaker (Christian Petzold) and actors. Over the course of these films, we get to know and love these fictional artists not because they’re flawless people but because, simply, they are people, with all their flaws and complexities. Williams and Schubert play characters who would be fast friends if they ever met—their insecurities would join them at the hip—but they have to scrape and claw for every little bit of peace in the world. In watching them find it, we might find a little peace for ourselves.

I had the same wish for the anonymous protagonist of David Fincher’s The Killer (#2), and I might have been the only one. Many otherwise intelligent people found this to be a cold and calculating genre exercise. I thought it was one of the warmest and funniest films of the year. The film opens with our anonymous protagonist (Michael Fassbender) preparing for a job, demonstrating and explaining to us in a hilarious voice-over the discipline that it takes to perform his task well. He shares personal mantras—“Forbid empathy”; “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight”—that seem to have been taken from a 21st-century dude-bro self-help book.  He makes clear that these rules are the very foundation of his life—then he proceeds to break every one of them. The Killer is certain he is one thing but shows us with his every decision that he’s actually another. It makes him a fool, a tragic hero, and an avatar for every adult living on this planet.

If you accept the framework of The Killer’s life—that he commits murder for a living—you can see him striving toward connection and compassion within it. It’s there in the way he murders a cab driver quickly and without warning, sparing him from, as another character later puts it, the worst nightmare of being aware of your impending death (wait, isn’t that all of us?). It’s there in his aliases, all of which represent characters from ’70s and ’80s sitcoms. It’s like he’s waiting for some bank teller or rental car associate to recognize the name Sam Malone and share a laugh with him, but they never do. Hardly a genre exercise, The Killer is a self-referential work in which Fincher acknowledges his own reputation as a controlling director and digs under the surface to find the quivering child beneath. He’s there, but you have to look for him.

Speaking of quivering, my favorite film of the year is The Taste of Things (#1), the most tender film of 2023. I regret that it won’t hit most theaters until Feb. 14, but I can’t imagine a more perfect release date than Valentine’s Day. The French romance chronicles the relationship between Dodin (Benoît Magimel), a 19th-century landowner, and his cook and sometimes lover, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche). It opens on a 20-minute scene of the duo preparing an extravagant meal for Dodin and his friends, and while it’s one of the most sensual experiences ever put on film—you can hear every knife cutting through flesh and smell every simmering roux—it never tips over into what we would today call food porn. It’s not a film for people who use pleasure to escape life. It’s for those who believe food is art, and art is life.

So is love. Dodin and Eugenie share a bed every now and then. He wants them to marry. She simply wants to be his cook and lover. Is this simply the most French film ever made, endorsing food as religion and a relationship between a boss and his woman employee as not only acceptable, but ideal? Sure, that’s one way to see it. I’d say it bathes you in ephemerality, arguing in its gentle, naturalistic aesthetic that you can savor life without trying to hold onto it. In the end, life will prove it to you, anyway. Enjoy yourself while you’re here. Get to know yourself and others. Know who the man is watching that movie, for the more you know yourself, the more you can know the world.

Noah Gittell’s Top Ten Films of 2023:
10. Showing Up
9. Asteroid City
8. The Holdovers
7. The Teachers’ Lounge
6. Palm Trees and Power Lines
5. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
4. All of Us Strangers
3. Afire
2. The Killer
1. The Taste of Things