MIDNIGHT REVIEWS My Top Movies of 2023
Midnight Reviews features reviews and thought pieces written and edited by a parent, at night, after bedtime.
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Anyway, here are my top five movies of 2023, along with five more I wish I caught.
5. Napoleon (2hr 38mins)
A stellar cast under the direction of one of the great living directors, taking what could’ve been a rote biographical movie featuring Napoleon Bonaparte rampaging through Europe and Africa but instead making something very, very different. It does feature what you’d expect from a Ridley Scott film, as in confident worldbuilding, sumptuous visuals and pacing that doesn’t make this feel like it’s almost three hours. But there are other factors that make a delightfully great mix with a historical epic.
Despite the obvious links to Gladiator, the Scott movie this most closely resembles is The Martian for its humour and the way it chooses to examine its titular character. It’s not quite an out-and-out comedy. But the way Joaquin Phoenix and Ridley Scott both handle Napoleon enables us to see him as a near-unbeatable military commander with a chip on his shoulder and a mother complex that means any romantic relationship he has involves, shall we say, its quirks.
There is also a terrific, understated performance from Vanessa Kirby as Josephine, giving us an anchor as well as another perspective on the man who ended his life in exile, wearing a rather fetching hat.
For a full-length review, click here.
4. Barbie (1hr 54 mins)
This was the one that took everyone by surprise. A film that somehow manages to have its cake and eat it too, as Greta Gerwig is given the keys to the Barbie kingdom and promptly gallivants around to her heart’s content.
While we’ve seen this sort of quality before from things like The Lego Movie, this is something that fully embraces the type of off-kilter story that deep down I hoped could’ve been told with these characters. The Lego Movie was a great story to tell, but fell into the trap of leaning too close to the commercial aspect of things. With Barbie this commercialism was equally unavoidable but the fact that it moved in the direction it did was an absolute joy.
We get Margot Robbie managing the careful balancing act of making Barbie human enough for us to connect, strange enough that we find her funny and scared enough to really sell the existential dread she feels throughout. In the end, this is a story about someone who realises their perfect world isn’t perfect and does their best to try and change things for the better. And we get a turn from Ryan Gosling that there are glimpses of in things like The Nice Guys and The Big Short, but here he’s given licence to be (all together now): sublime!
3. Oppenheimer (3hr)
The more fortunate of the two Barbenheimer releases, in that Barbie in retrospect was always going to be a box-office behemoth, Oppenheimer is proof that sometimes all you need is a strong idea for a story (and the aforementioned cultural phenomenon).
Christopher Nolan has somehow, since his billion-dollar Dark Knight, been somewhat immune to the box-office bomb and through this has been able to manoeuvre himself to make pretty much whatever story he likes. This time it was a focus on the person he called ‘the most important person who has ever lived.’
For all the technical wizardry on display during the bomb test scenes, it was the sequences featuring tense conversation that stood out for me. The images of Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy on wondrous form) being interrogated, Lewis Strauss (a stripped-down Robert Downey Jr. performance) having his plans fall out from underneath him and of course that scene where characters discuss the possibility of someone other than America having the bomb made their mark.
There was much talk post-release of whether Nolan treated the victims of the two bombs with respect by not showing any Japanese perspective. Arguments were made for each side, but this is ultimately a story about the maker of the bomb (hence, the title). Reports state that, yes, J. Robert Oppenheimer was invited to Japan decades later but the events of the movie are from his perspective and his perspective was a lot of boring-looking rooms full of incredibly smart people making decisions that would affect millions of people he would never meet. To show the bombs going off in Japan would be flirting with making a spectacle whilst simultaneously avoiding the truth of the story.
2. Godzilla Minus One (2hr 4mins)
To say things transition nicely into the number two spot would be a little dark. But Godzilla Minus One was a complete surprise, as I went in not even having seen any marketing beyond a few posters. This is a post-war drama that just happens to feature a fire-breathing monster, dealing with themes as heavy as expectations of duty, nuclear devastation and facing down what seems like certain death with bravery. It is a brilliant piece of cinema. It’s terrific soundtrack perfectly sums up what the film is about; at times anxious, big and bold, an ode to past Godzilla films and finally even managing to be subtle during the quieter, character-driven moments.
It manages to balance the fantastical with the real, with Ryunosuke Kamiki’s pilot Shikishima facing inner turmoil having backed out of crashing his plane on a kamikaze run whilst also dealing with numerous run-ins with the titular kaiju. The sheer scale of this creature is perfectly communicated and exudes terror, an existential terror that never goes away. This takes its cue from other monster movies, the obvious perhaps being Jaws, but manages to up the ante with the weighty themes it brings along. That’s how you make a monster truly terrifying: metaphors.
For a full-length review, click here.
1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2hr 20mins)
It’s these sorts of movies they should be teaching in film-making classes. To say that Across the Spider-Verse manages to tell a Spider-Man story with a twist would be a massive understatement, as the film makers here build successfully on everything they did with Into the Spider-Verse.
Whilst before it was Miles Morales and Peter B Parker on show, this time around it’s Miles (a brilliant Shameik Moore) and Gwen Stacy (an equally-wonderful Haille Steinfeld) as the two main focuses and it’s the inner conflicts inherent in their relationship that grip from the offset. Why hasn’t Gwen visited Miles? Why is she so coy about the possibility of him joining the team?
We then get introduced to the main villain, the ‘only Spider-Man who isn’t funny.’ Seemingly thrown in at the end of the first movie as a little gag, Miguel O’Hara is very much another focal point of the story. The character design, animation and vocal performance all work together to lend a menacing presence that even from his first appearance make you unsure of what’s really going on behind the eyes. He has been perhaps driven mad; a Spider-Ahab who has spent too long with his eyes on the one prize.
It’s here that we get introduced to the concept of canon events, events that absolutely must happen to every single version of Spider-Man, otherwise universes get destroyed. And it’s on looking back at the film again that you realise the call-backs to the first film that’re peppered throughout (a Spider-Man being tied to a punching bag, for example) are not simply fan-service, but hinges that enable the story to hold itself together, just like the canon events described in the film you are watching. This is a meta-level theme about storytelling being introduced at the same time as the characters’ stories are progressing and the fact it all makes sense is another piece of brilliance from the film makers.
Despite the hype, Across the Spider-Verse manages to live up to it with the little surprises it brings along to ensure this isn’t just a retread of the first film. Pavitr Prabhakar and Hobie Brown are two delightful additions to the long character list without taking too much of the spotlight from our protagonists. Hobie Brown in particular seems to start off promising to be nothing more than a comedic foil for Miles, before delivering him through some key character growth, smirking, and walking off. There were a lot of promises made for the third film; the wish I had was that Hobie would come sauntering back into frame.
Daniel Pemberton’s soundtrack is masterful. Whilst the last film had him jumping from place to place balancing private detectives, cartoon pigs and vengeful crime bosses, here he’s as confident as ever creating new soundscapes for us to enjoy. From the big and brash action moments, to those aforementioned character themes that fit together while still working individually, even the incredibly understated way that Miguel O’Hara’s cue sounds less like a Spider-theme and more like a distorted version of the previous film’s villain.
Speaking of distortion, this film is so jam-packed with things to love that we even get a meta-commentary on what is sure to be one of the villains of the next instalment with The Spot. Ignore him at your peril, yet the movie even goes out of its way to ignore him before he’s revealed in full glory during the film’s final sequence. The first film seemed to be deliberately choosing villains based on whether they were B-list and whether they had certain powers, but with The Spot we get a villain that could potentially be both existentially challenging (I thought animation was just for kids?) and incredibly interesting in the context of the animation medium.
As you can probably tell, I could go on and on about this film talking about how masterful every aspect of it is but I’ll simply finish with high hopes for Beyond the Spider-Verse; high hopes I had for this film that were well and truly fulfilled.
Notable Absentees
Killers of the Flower Moon (3hr 26mins)
Martin Scorsese with two of his all-time great partners in Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro. Need I say more?
May December (1hr 57mins)
Similar to the above in that there’s a terrific director and cast. The concept of this film sounds like three interesting movies in one and I hope Todd Haynes managed to balance it successfully.
The Boy and the Heron (2hr 4mins)
Oh, to be able to sit myself down and allow myself to be mesmerised and pulled in by Hayao Miyazaki once again. For those who see the word ‘anime’ and are perhaps unsure of what to expect, or for whatever reason put off by it, try any of the many Studio Ghibli movies on offer.
Anatomy of a Fall (2hr 31mins)
I have seen nothing but spell-bound reviews for what sounds like an incredibly tense drama about the fallibility of memory.
The Creator (2hr 13mins)
Whilst some see it as flawed, I am always curious about the next piece of wonderful world building from the consistently interesting Gareth Edwards. To see him play in his own playground after the underappreciated Rogue One and the entertaining but flawed Godzilla, The Creator looked to be at the very least original and individual.
