Atomic Doll: 2023 in Review
It’s impossible to discuss 2023 in cinema without talking about BARBENHEIMER, the fan-made mashup event of the summer season. With Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer set to release the same day, fans seized on the productive friction between the sparkly pink Barbie and the dark atomic Oppenheimer. The twin release was met with a plethora of memes and a wide array of discourse about modern movies and theatergoing in the post-pandemic era.
Both films wound up being excellent, with Barbie standing out for being better than a toy tie-in movie has any right to be. Greta Gerwig deserves a lot of credit for helming such a project. For the intersection of quality, popularity, and cultural importance, Barbie is my 2023 film of the year: not the best, per se, but definitely a film that will retain relevance in the coming years.
Oppenheimer, by contrast, was a more predictably and conventionally high-quality film. It could be the culmination of Nolan’s career up to this point, but then again, we might just as well say that next time.
We got a new Indiana Jones flick, and to my pleasant surprise it wasn’t utterly terrible. In the era of late sequels, I found Dial of Destiny a rarity in that it seemed to genuinely concern itself to the problem of aging in an action-adventure milieu, and even aging out of it.
I’m sure some Marvel and DC movies came out this year, but I didn’t see them. I saw Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon instead.
Meanwhile, 2023 gave us a conservative hit, Sound of Freedom (among the worst movies I watched all year), and multiple far-right attempts at comedy, including Jingle Smells and Lady Ballers, the latter of which was in fact the worst movie I watched all year. The latter films simply released online to preach to the converted; Sound of Freedom and its “pay it forward” model may have artificially boosted its theatrical numbers. Far-right conservatives are still very bad at art.
An explanation-free top ten list to close things out:
Missing (dir. Nicholas D. Johnson & Will Merrick)
Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)
Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig)
Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
May December (dir. Todd Haynes)
Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson)
Afire (dir. Christian Petzold)
Saltburn (dir. Emerald Fennell)
Beau is Afraid (dir. Ari Aster)