Michael Darvell Looks Back at the Year of 2023
It was a year for blockbusters with many high-profile titles exceeding the more than comfortable time-span of under two hours. Several films went over the limit including Saltburn at 127 minutes, Tár at 128, Maestro at 129, Ferrari at 131, The Fabelmans at 151, Napoleon at 158, Oppenheimer at 180, Babylon at 189 and Killers of the Flower Moon at 206 minutes. No doubt their directors or screenwriters thought they needed that extra time above and beyond the usual average of one hour and forty minutes in which to tell their stories. Admittedly some warranted the grand scale approach. For instance, you couldn’t cover all of Napoleon’s activities in just 90 minutes, and Spielberg’s long family drama probably earned its keep, seeing that it sustained our interest throughout. Babylon was built on excess, decadence and depravity which, as we know, takes a lot of time to achieve, although by the end we had really had enough. There was only a minute dividing the two films about conductors, and of the pair, Maestro, about a real musician, Leonard Bernstein, was more credible than Tár, the fictitious biopic about Bernstein’s reputed student Lydia Tár.
These last two, along with Oppenheimer, Ferrari, The Fabelmans and Napoleon, could be described as drama-documentaries, although there were enough real-life documentaries to witness – rather than actually enjoy – during 2023. Top of the list and for me the film of the year was 20 Days in Mariupol, a blistering account of the fall of the Ukrainian port as witnessed by the journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues. They were trapped in the city during the heavy bombing that eventually razed the place to the ground with casualties of over 25,000 deaths. Another astonishing documentary was To Kill a Tiger, Naha Pahuja’s coverage of an appalling incident in India where a young girl is raped by three teenage boys and told to marry one of them to save face for the village. It is a moving but almost incredible piece told without any excessive hysteria by those involved or the filmmakers. Other documentaries that impressed include Ella Glendining’s Is There Anybody Out There?, about a woman with dwarfism, and Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about a pharmaceutical dynasty responsible for an opioid epidemic. The UK fielded some notable films, including Ken Loach’s The Old Oak, about systemic racism; Femme, a frightening study of homophobia; Adura Onashile’s Girl, about a black mother and daughter in Glasgow; Kindling, Connor O’Hara’s celebration of friendship; Allelujah, Alan Bennett’s sort of comedy drama about the NHS; The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, about an old man visiting a long-lost friend who is about to die; Wonka, with Timothée Chalamet, which got some criticism in some places but is still an enjoyable romp; and Empire of Light, set in a 1980s seaside cinema, was memorably nostalgic; and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget was Aardman Animations on top form.
Elsewhere, Poland produced a magnificent human drama in Michal Gazda’s Forgotten Love, while fellow Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski provided the '“ah” factor in Eo, his account of a journey following a donkey, in a nod to director Robert Bresson. Two courtroom dramas that impressed were Anatomy of a Fall and Saint Omer – both got a thumbs-up verdict from yours truly. David Fincher gave us the best thriller of the year with Michael Fassbender as a travelling hitman in The Killer, another bullseye for Netflix, who also gave us two delightful Italian films, Mixed by Erry and Nuovo Olimpo. Brendan Fraser earned his Academy Award as a grossly obese man in The Whale. Now, it wasn’t all sweetness and light in the cinema of 2023. The major disappointments for me were Todd Field’s Tár, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, but then I never appreciated his 2019 Bait.
Michael Darvell’s Favourites: