Over 300 films stepped into the 2023 arena. Ten step out.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

Of those 24 releases, 15 were sequels or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. Eight were superhero films. Two were animated. Two were entirely subtitled. Ten had scenes during or after the end credits. Four were screenings at the 32nd annual Heartland Film Festival, not all of which have received wide U.S. runs as of this writing.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2023, for better or worse. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference…

And now, on with the Year’s Best Movies countdown:

10. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. As a childhood fan of the granddaddy of all tabletop RPGs, I was elated to see the game played right. With its dashing wit and creative retakes on old fantasy standards, the fetch-questing heist flick is deep down a Wizard of Oz riff — Chris Pine wants to go home and reunite with family, Michelle Rodriguez finds her heart, Justice Smith finds brains and courage…and, uh, I guess It‘s Sophia Lillis could turn into Toto if there were good reason. To see which component was most responsible for this impressive comedy epic, I sampled two more films in follow-up: the same directors’ Game Night, which was also funny, slick, and rousing; and the 2000 D&D movie with Jeremy Irons as a 150-pound slab of ham in wizard robes, which is free to watch on YouTube (with ads). I gave up ten minutes in.

9. John Wick: Chapter 4. Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski give employment, purpose, and nonstop showcases to Hollywood’s practical-stunts industry for what might or might not be Wick’s last duels. The first all-out shoot-’em-up series to produce a watchable fourth film since Lethal Weapon 4 somehow sails through nearly three hours of shooting, punching, stabbing, clubbing, dog-chomping, horse-throwing, car-colliding, indoor-waterfall-plummeting, card-playing, terms-negotiating, bespoke-bulletproofing, world-traveling action extravaganza that also features the exhilarating Donnie Yen as Zatoichi with guns, a new moment in the Movie Staircase Slapstick Hall of Fame, and the most satisfying closure that a widower assassin could hope for, whether he lives to appreciate it or not.

8. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Tom Cruise the unstoppable stunt machine and BFF writer/director Christopher McQuarrie took five years to orchestrate yet another grade-A worldwide thrill ride, this time facing off against the most relevant possible villain: an evil A.I. manipulating humanity to its own ends by pitting us against each other. Our Heroes recruit Agent Carter‘s Hayley Atwell to IMF Agent Ethan Hunt’s always impeccable crack support squad/found-family and race to fetch two half-MacGuffins that may determine who rules the world. Viewers seem to have slept on this, probably because of pre-burnout from trailers showing off the same perilous mountain motorcycle jump again and again and again and again and again and again AND AGAIN AND AGAIN and it isn’t even the wildest vehicular scene here. That honor goes to an extended chase involving Cruise, Atwell, a very tiny car, a rampaging Pom Klementieff in a Humvee, Rome’s Spanish Steps, and a front-seat switcheroo that feels like a throwback to some imaginary classic film if Rock Hudson and Doris Day had ever headlined a romantic spy thriller. “Extremely dangerous to stage” doesn’t always mean “Best Scene Ever”. I’m sure the John Wick makers could tell so many stories about this.

“WE’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BOAT! WAY BIGGER! LIKE, BIGGER THAN THE YAMATO!”

7. Godzilla Minus One. I lost count of the number of pro critics who boggled at the idea of a Toho monster flick that was (and I quote) “About Something”, even some who’ve surely seen more Godzilla films than I have. Or have they? Are there no kaiju seminars in today’s California film schools or in Film Twitter basement correspondence courses? Anyway, writer/director Takashi Yamazaki follows up his previous big-idea film The Great War of Archimedes (now streaming on Amazon Prime!) with another, even more righteously emotional indictment of 1940s Japanese warhawk officials, in which a shamed kamikaze pilot must overcome his self-preservation reflexes (it’s only cowardice if knowingly getting yourself killed was a good idea) and lead a team of disgruntled navy survivors in the charge against the famous giant lizard that’s about to do to their homeland what it does best. It’s here to stomp buildings and embody metaphors…and it will never run out of metaphors. It’s a touch melodramatic in spots, but all the Godzilla scenes are [insert at least six adverbs here] incredible.

6. Barbie. It’s an all-powerful merchandising machine and an exploration of feminine identity! It’s a cutesy kiddie babysitter and a satire of corporate exploitation of children’s feelings! It’s a totes-adorbs anti-rom-com about an eternally platonic couple and a Battle of the Sexes in the grand Hudson/Day tradition! It’s 2023’s biggest box-office juggernaut and a nomination-hoarder at the awards ceremonies! It tastes great and it’s less filling! It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping! It typifies the classic conflict of the duality of human nature and there’s Allan!

5. Fancy Dance. While I paced back and forth waiting for Killers of the Flower Moon to arrive gift-wrapped for us Apple TV+ subscribers (which finally happened this past Friday), I leaped at the chance to catch Scorsese’s “new” “find”, two-time top-tier Reservation Dogs guest Lily Gladstone, star in her own vehicle where she doesn’t play second-fiddle to an idiot. Rather, she makes her own short-sighted mistakes that lead to no happy ending, as an Oklahoman ex-con named Jax who goes on the lam to shield her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson, who keeps up) from Child Protective Services when her deadbeat mom up and vanishes. But Jax can’t quite see a clear path to the big goal, Roki’s annual group-dance number in The Big Powwow. Fancy Dance climaxed at a Big Powwow months before Marvel’s Echo followed suit, but one bad move after another leads to more tragic results here. The feature-length debut of director/co-writer Erica Tremblay (a vet of Rez Dogs and AMC’s Dark Winds, both deserving all the thumbs-up) has yet to negotiate either an arthouse release or a streaming sanctuary, but anyone sincerely seated on the Gladstone bandwagon needs this li’l indie film’s name added to their Google Alerts list.

SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB.

4. Oppenheimer. It’s 2024. No one needs the power of Dr. Manhattan to foresee Christopher Nolan’s three-hour multi-timeline biopic and the even-greater-than-usual Cillian Murphy earning nominations across the spectrum of film-award bodies except possibly the Razzies, unless they give one for Unsexiest Sex Scene, for which the other nominees will all be from Poor Things.

3. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The Year’s Best Animated Film and sequel to 2018’s Best Animated Film was the product of 600,000 animators working 300-hour work weeks to render 17,000 Spider-characters in 800 different forms of drawing, painting, digitizing, sculpting, sewing, and/or blacksmithing media, for which they earned around nine bucks an hour before taxes. Give or take. Was it all worth it, in exchange for exceeding any and every expectation, making this beyond-cool superhero-saga middle chapter that might even have topped the original? That’s not for me to say, but among the many best parts I did appreciate from their bloody-sweaty-teary toils, my favorite-of-favorites are the searingly wounded relationship moments played between Hailee Steinfeld and Shea Whigham as Spider-Gwen and her dad, police Captain Arthur Stacy. Their duets perfectly capture the classic, complicated tensions the best Spider-heroes have always had with authority figures, grief, and the soul-crushing, paradoxical burden of being the one person their friends and family most love and hate.

2. Monster. Neither a kaiju wrestling match nor a serial killer biopic, the latest work from Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore-eda is an intricate, supremely empathetic puzzle-box of a drama experienced through three perspectives whose differences are distorted not through subjective Rashomon filters, but through each side’s limited scope and incomplete awareness of all the facts surrounding them. Is it a condemnation of combative school administrators intimidated by the threat of lawsuits from hair-trigger helicopter parents? A taut polemic about how impossible it is nowadays to be a functional, compassionate schoolteacher? A messy 21st-century coming-of-age tale? A reminder that Parenting Is Hard? Or the opposites of all of these? A sorrowful fact of human existence is we never truly know the entirety of someone else’s pain, as we can’t omnisciently walk by their side or through their past. Kore-eda demonstrates how it might feel if we had that power of real connection and full understanding. Sometimes the best we can do is through art.

Saving the best…

1. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. James Gunn’s farewell love letter to his corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is its best installment since at least Avengers: Endgame, maybe even farther back. Our motley crew of super-antihero space rogues were the definitive case study for the thesis that pretty much any existing IPs — no matter how old, obscure, or intrinsically goofy — can be turned into idols of millions in the right hands with the most galaxy-brained wits about them. Three movies and a Christmas special’s worth of misadventures culminate with the shattering of not one but two found-families — not just the Guardians rent asunder as cast and crew imminently depart the MCU for good, but the lab-tortured fuzzy buddies who star in the long-awaited secret origin of Bradley Cooper’s Rocket, whose life and losses are the film’s heartbreaking core. This tremendous space-operatic finale counts among its strengths the cast’s unbreakable camaraderie, Chukwudi Iwuji’s megalomaniacal villain who wrongly thinks he’s right, the utterly madcap “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” tracking-shot Hallway Fight™ that just keeps going and going and going, and good old-fashioned life-saving superheroics. Frankly, I’ve always been a sucker for perfect endings to multipart stories. At my age, perfect endings are as rare as a talking raccoon. But Gunn got it backwards: we should be giving him the best going-away present ever.

…

…and that was my 2023 at the movies. Check back with us in the months ahead and see how many times I can be cajoled out of our comfy living room for 2-3 hours of big-screen splendor without Marvel or DC logos on them, which will apparently be in short supply, which I can handle! I understand sabbaticals can be useful.