Pete Docter’s 2015 masterpiece, Inside Out, presented the inner workings of the mind as an office and anthropomorphized the emotions that drive us as employees. It had the sort of universal appeal that Pixar wants to return to, but not for the reasons that they think. Misidentifying the reason for the blockbuster success of Docter’s film has lead Pixar and first time director Kelsey Mann to craft Inside Out 2 with more emotions but significantly less emotionality.

Alice Rohrwacher’s last feature, Happy as Lazzaro, has grown in my estimation more than just about any film of 2018, in part because of the way she infuses a fantastical surrealism into otherwise ordinary sequences of life in the Italian countryside. Somewhere between a dream and a nightmare for both the audience and the characters, Rohrwacher’s stories often double as cinematic hypnotism. With La Chimera the Italian auteur, another fable centered on a sort of plundering of rural Italy, uses this same mysticism to explore the holes we dig ourselves into in service of the past. 

Smack dab in the middle of the Trump era, filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine trained their cameras on an ambitious bunch of teenage boys in Texas participating in a weeklong program designed to simulate American government. Shot just before the pandemic ground everything to a halt, and released in the darkest depths of it, Boys State found a moment to reflect the insidious ways in which the politics of the day influence the politicians of the future and offered a glimmer of hope that the future generations might yet offer a balm for the divisions of the moment. Four years later, Moss and McBaine have found another eerily perfect moment for Girls State, examining if the politically engaged girls of America might form a more perfect union in an equally divisive time.

Aging has long been a fascination of cinema as it is the one affliction inescapable from all. Not so equal parts a badge of honor and a sign of weakness, reaching your 80th or 90th decade elicits starkly different treatment. The elderly are targeted by scammers, preying on unfamiliarity with technology and an assumption of mental deterioration. As if that is not bad enough, children and grandchildren begin to treat their elders like they’re fragile. Both of these situations are where the titular Thelma (June Squibb) finds herself in Josh Margolin’s feature debut. 

​Long before the Zoomers and iPad kids, a whole generation of children learned to type through the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing educational game. I have fond memories honing my keyboard credentials during a middle school typing class nearly two decades ago under the tutelage of Mavis Beacon. Similar experience could likely be recalled by many millennials across the United States, including Jazmin Jones, the director of Seeking Mavis Beacon.

After a year off we are back with our annual Oscar nomination recap! Last year saw a massive pool of truly phenomenal films, making it difficult to project how Academy voters would winnow down the field of tremendous stories and performances. As always that process picks up some duds and omits some wonderful pieces of art. For the most part, this year was more good than bad and many of the seemingly biggest snubs came in stacked categories. A bit too much attention went to Oscar bait-y Maestro and another film got a baffling pair of acting nominations, but generally it was a day to celebrate in the above the line categories. 

As always I will break down the favorites, the potential upsets, the surprises and the snubs in each of the acting categories, Best Director and Best Picture. Surprises can be good or bad so long as the nomination was the most unexpected of the bunch. I will try to highlight as many different films as possible so the snub identified may not be the only one or even the most notable. Finally, and importantly, if you think something has been snubbed, you have to be willing to take something nominated off the board. All of my snub picks will also indicate what picture or performer I would take out to accommodate. 

​Finding thematic connection in any given year is always a fools errand, but there is something of a theme to the films that resonated with me in 2023. I found myself latching onto stories about self-determination and definition, especially but not exclusively through art. Some of the most entertaining and moving films this year saw their characters grapple with who they are through their deeds, creations and often destructions. As with most things in film this year, no better example exists than Barbenheimer, half of which made this list with the other half not far behind. Barbie saw a consumerist idea of a woman seek out a life in which she can create ideas for herself, Oppenheimer traced a man whose creation ushered in great and terrible destruction and found himself defined by the devastation he sowed. Whether a through-line truly exists or not, the theme of creation and consequence spoke deeply through my favorite films. Regardless, 2023 was a year of immensely beautiful and wide ranging storytelling on screen. Here are the very best film had to offer this year:

Grief has long been one of the most well trodden roads traversed by filmmakers. Cinema loves to look at broken people piecing themselves back together or filling in some loss like the final piece of a healing jigsaw puzzle. Many of the great characters of film history are wounded birds desperate to fly again. Forged in the fire of loss and pain, great heroes emerge stronger for what they have endured. 

Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography has explored the deep thematic well of grief, but has often opted to mine deeper. My Neighbor Totoro is a film that leaves the pain on the periphery and focuses on the ability of children to shield themselves from forces that might hurt them.  With The Boy and the Heron, Studio Ghibli’s great auteur asks not how a broken child might repair himself, but whether a shattered life is worth resurrecting at all.

By the time Hunham (Paul Giamatti) and Tully (Dominic Sessa) wander through an ancient art museum in Boston, its already achingly apparent that the yearning for connection felt by the pair is an eternal truth. The Roman Empire was made up of people, and people invariably seek out connection. “There is no new human experience” Hunham declares and perhaps he’s right. The Holdovers is set in the winter of 1970 but in reality the ideas it explores are timeless. 

Boys have been sent off to die at war for as long as war has existed and the people left in their wake have always been splintered by loneliness. An early scene sees the graves of a collection of young men killed in World War I and II before expanding out to all the boys of Barton boarding school gathering for the funeral of a young alumnus killed in Vietnam. A long line of carnage that the carefree students step over to get to their winter vacation. Not all of them are so lucky.