From Barbie to Spider-Man, Across the Spider-Verse to Killers of the Flower Moon, the art of cinema in 2023 was triumphant.
The movie business was in chaos in 2023, but the art of cinema was triumphant. Audiences rejected expensive corporate blandness in favor of films that took chances and spoke from the heart. But before we get to the best of the year, let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum.
What’s worse than one Ezra Miller? Two Ezra Millers.
Worst Picture: The Flash
2023 was the year the superhero bubble finally burst. Warner Bros. scrapped Batgirl to bet the farm on walking PR disaster Ezra Miller. They lost $200 million on what is easily the worst film of the decade so far.
The King of the Monsters tearing up the club in Godzilla Minus One.
Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Godzilla
It was looking like Cocaine Bear’s year until the King of Monsters dropped an all-timer. The big guy dazzled in Godzilla Minus One by getting back to his roots — punishing mankind’s hubris with cleansing atomic fire.
Teo Yoo and Greta Lee tug heartstrings in Past Lives.
Best Original Screenplay/Best Ensemble: (double tie) May December, Past Lives
Todd Haynes and Celine Song both constructed delicate hothouse dramedies around a core of three fantastic actors. In Haynes’ May December, Natalie Portman is an actor researching a juicy role who discovers her subjects, played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, can’t be reduced to two dimensions. In Song’s Past Lives, Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are childhood sweethearts in China separated when one family immigrates to America, and John Magaro is the husband caught in the middle when they reunite 24 years later. Both stories are told with remarkable economy, and perfect performances.
The gang starts a fight club in Bottoms.
Best Comedy: Bottoms
College friends Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott, and Ayo Edebiri teamed up for this wicked high school satire about a pair of loser lesbians who start an after-school fight club to get laid. The young cast is razor sharp, and it features the year’s most unexpected comedic performance by NFL legend Marshawn Lynch.
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
Biggest Bomb: Oppenheimer
We’re not talking box office — Christopher Nolan’s three-hour experimental film about a nuclear physicist who loves Hindu literature made $954,000,000 — we’re talking actual explosive devices. The Barbenheimer phenomenon proved that audiences are hungry for something different and are smarter than studio execs give them credit for.
Nicholas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)
MVP: Nicolas Cage
Cage has frequently been the best part of uneven films. In 2023, he was an uncanny Dracula in the otherwise forgettable Renfield and a reluctant psychic celebrity in Dream Scenario. The man’s a national treasure.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Best Animated Film: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
An astonishing visual achievement requiring a record 1,000 animators, the film escaped the superhero doldrums with a witty script and the best cliffhanger in recent memory.
Emma Stone turns in a career performance as Bella in Yorgos
Lanthimos’ Poor Things.
Best Performance: Emma Stone, Poor Things
The Best Actress category at the Academy Awards is going to be awfully competitive. My favorite was Emma Stone as a creature with the body of a grown-up and the brain of an infant. Her progression from peeing on the floor to discussing philosophy in the salons of Europe is as technically challenging as it is emotionally compelling.
Margot Robbie as Barbie.
Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Barbie
Directors wear many hats, and none wore them better than Gerwig, the first woman to ever helm a billion-dollar picture. Balancing the satirical edge of Barbie with pathos and empathy while also staging sweeping musical numbers and recreating the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a rare feat. How did she get all that stuff past the studio?
Lily Gladstone, Robert DeNiro, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Best Picture: Killers of the Flower Moon
In an extraordinarily good year for cinema, Martin Scorsese’s epic of love and betrayal among the Osage stood above the rest. What started as a story about the birth of the FBI opened into an examination of the soul of America. At the center of this maelstrom of greed and exploitation is an unlikely love story between Leonardo DiCaprio’s thick-headed bushwhacker and the extraordinarily coy Lily Gladstone as the wealthy Native American woman his Machiavellian uncle, played by Robert DeNiro, has marked for death. Scorsese switches genres at will, going from romance to Western to howcatchem to courtroom drama, and nailing every beat. Along the way there are several deeply committed performances by Native American actors, and stunning cinematography which shows the 81-year-old Scorsese is still eager to experiment.
With the arrival of Godzilla vs. Kong in theaters and streaming, I sat down to revisit the classic 1962 film King Kong vs. Godzilla with someone who has never seen it. Mason Barton is nine years old — the prime target audience for kaiju films. He reviews movies in his new podcast with Stephen Hildreth, a filmmaker who partners with Mason’s father Chad Allen Barton in the Memphis production company Piano Man Pictures. I edited our conversation for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen this movie.
Stephen Hildreth: I have never seen this movie.
Mason Barton: GO KONG!
CM: You’re rooting for Kong. What do you know about this movie?
MB: Absolutely nothing.
CM: Stephen, what about you?
SH: I know nothing about this movie.
MB:King Kong and Godzilla are going to fight, and they’re most likely going to end up fighting something else, because they would never say who would win or who would lose.
97 minutes later…
CM: OK! Mason and Stephen, you are now people who have seen King Kong vs. Godzilla. What did you think?
MB: It was great! I liked the stuff that didn’t make sense. It was funny, weird, and had really good fight scenes.
CM: The fight scenes were outstanding.
SH: They were really great.
CM: Some of the best in any Godzilla movie, I think. And they used everything! They had guys in suits, they did some stop motion. At one point, it was just a couple of hand puppets going at it. And the octopus! That was a real, live octopus, wasn’t it?
SH: Yeah, that was impressive. All of the practical effects were kind of amazing, like the entire sequence with Kong, where it’s rear projection, and we’re looking through the train car. Cut around to the reverse, where they have the little doll for him to carry, to look like the woman. That was all brilliant. I loved the real, live octopus.
MB: Wait, what?
SH: The octopus that attacks Kong on the island was a real, live octopus.
MB: Is it that big?
SH: No, they just shot it to look big. They’re pretty big, but not that big.
MB: I have a question. The balloons they used to carry Kong—why were they yellow?
SH: I think those were weather balloons.
CM: So, Mason. You were rooting for King Kong. Do you think Kong won?
MB: Oh yes. He beat up Godzilla so hard, Godzilla just straight up left.
CM: That’s true. But there was that earthquake there at the end, so we don’t really know what happened while they were fighting underwater. I feel like if there hadn’t been that convenient electrical storm, Kong wouldn’t have won. He got re-energized. But since when does Kong get power from electricity? He’s like, Electro-Kong.
SH: WWE owes a lot to movies like this. It’s scripted like a wrestling match. Hulk Hogan totally stole his honk-it-up move from Godzilla. Watching this, I’m convinced. There’s a lot of little contrivances, but I’m willing to accept it to see two giant monsters fight one another.
CM: You’d think they could unite in their love of property damage. At the end, when they’re fighting over that giant pagoda, both of them were just like, “Yeah, let’s just smash this pagoda, then get back to fighting.”
SH: That reminded me of one of those bonus rounds of Street Fighter where you get points for just smashing the car.
Be glad that’s not your pagoda.
CM: Mason, why were you for Kong?
MB: Because I think he’s just cooler. And it’s a little bit unfair. Godzilla’s got like, five powers. And King Kong still just came around and beat the crap out of him.
CM: Stephen, what was your rooting interest?
SH: I was rooting for property damage.
CM: We’re all winners.
SH: There was a part at the beginning where I thought they were teasing that they would both be fighting Mechagodzilla. Maybe that was something they were teasing for the new one?
MB: I thought that the entire time, too.
SH: Like it was going to be, oh no, this is not really Godzilla. It’s evil Mechagodzilla.
CM: No, this was 1962. Mechagodzilla didn’t come along until about 1973. Terror of Mechagodzilla, in 1974, was Ishiro Honda’s last Godzilla film. It’s actually really good. All the Ishiro Honda films are. I mean, you could tell which parts were the Japanese parts and which parts were the American parts, couldn’t you?
MB: Yeah.
CM: The American parts were just three white guys standing in front of a sheet. But Ishiro Honda was a genius. He was also Akira Kirosawa’s favorite assistant director. He went from Terror of Mechagodzilla to Kagemusha and Ran.
SH: There are some really nice compositions in this.
CM: It’s gorgeous!
SH: And the matte paintings! Especially on the island, when they get there. We just reviewed the first Coming to America for our little thing. That was the one knock that I really had for Craig [Brewer]’s version. When you get to Zamunda in the second one, the palace doesn’t feel as epic as it does in the first one, Maybe it’s because it’s CG. Really, the palace, it’s not that big on the set. It’s just a matte painting beyond that, but I’m a sucker for a good matte painting. Cause they’re just gorgeous and they look fantastic. The ones in this were all incredible.
CM: All of the special effects were just perfectly executed. There’s just something about the guy in the Godzilla suit, stomping on little miniature buildings, you know?
SH: When he falls into the hole, after they have that whole blast setup to trap him, it has such a human quality, even though it’s this giant monster falling into hole. ‘Cause it is just a guy in a suit. Maybe it’s something like that that makes me identify with Godzilla. His face is a little inviting to me. Kong’s is kind of horrifying, a little bit…
MB: A little weird.
Kong faces off against an actual octopus on Skull Island.
CM: Have you seen the original King Kong?
MB: I tried to watch it for a little bit, but I couldn’t get into it.
SH: Black and white? Stop motion animation?
MB: Yeah.
CM: Do you not like black and white?
MB: No, there’s been one or two I’ve seen that I liked.
CM: What don’t you like about them?
MB: Usually, they’re so old, the sound is real bad. It’s not like I don’t like the black and white photography, as long as the sound quality is good.
CM: I get that. They perfected shooting in black and white long before they perfected sound. So you’ve never seen any Godzilla movies?
MB: None. The only thing I’ve ever seen close to this stuff is Kong: Skull Island.
CM: Well, you were the target audience for this in 1962. As time went on, they got a lot weirder. Three years later was Invasion of Astro Monster, which is probably my favorite. It’s got goofy aliens in UFOs, and I just love it. But at some point, you should go back to Ishiro Honda’s original Japanese version, Gojira. Have you ever watched a film with subtitles before?
MB: Yes, and I do not like it.
CM: Well, if you feel like trying it, the original Godzilla is an entirely different vibe. It’s genuinely scary. So, are you going to see Godzilla vs. Kong?
MB: Yes! I’ve already put a bet on it.
CM: You got your money on Kong for that one, too?
MB: Yes, but what I’m also thinking that they’re just going to team up and fight somebody else. And then that means that the person I bet with, we’re both going to get $15.
Kong calls this move the “Arbor Day.”
CM: Did you feel like Godzilla was the bad guy in this movie?
MB: Yes.
CM: And what about Kong? Did he feel like a bad guy?
MB: Not really.
CM: Kong is always sympathetic, because he was just minding his own business, and people come and Kong-nap him from his island. And whose bright idea is it to take the giant ape into the middle of New York City, anyways? Hey, let’s put him on Broadway! It’s just stupid. Carl Denham is the real villain of King Kong.
CM: I thought one thing was interesting. If you watch King Kong now, when they’re on Skull Island at the beginning, the racist caricature of the natives is really obvious. I can totally see a Black person watching this and saying, I’m not finishing it. You kind of have to divorce the special effects masterpiece part of it from that part. But in this film, they felt like they had to do the Kong origin story again. So they felt like they had to go and do that part again, too. But it’s Japanese people trying to do it. So maybe it’s not as racist, or it’s racist in a weird way I don’t even understand.
Kenji Sahara and Tadao Takashima get their first glimpse of King Kong.
SH: They’re still doing like, a form of brown face with those characters, but they’re Japanese people doing it.
CM: Some of those people were just different flavors of Asian, with darker skin, without much makeup. But some of them were obviously people who were painted up. And what’s even weirder is, it felt like a critique of colonialism, almost. Here were these guys in pith helmets giving cigarettes to the native children. Classic colonialist move. Those guys looked like buffoons. But when they were making the American cut, they were like, leave that stuff in there! Americans can relate to that! Those English punch-ins, they probably cost like $200 total. It was two white guys in front of a curtain explaining what happened.
SH: Yeah. It seemed like there were a lot of news reports in this.
CM: They’re not in the original. It’s more of a traditional …
SH: … flowing story.
CM: I guess the American producers thought there needed to be a play-by-play and color commentary on this thing.
SH: I wanted the United Nations Wide World of Sports, where Howard Cosell calls the fight between King Kong and Godzilla. That was the one thing that I was aching for at the end of the film. You get a little bit of that from the guys in the helicopter.
CM: I was just rooting for all the humans to die.
SH: They’re the real villains. Kong is the reluctant hero. Godzilla, he was asleep and his home, and they just busted up into his place…
CM: … with atomic weapons. And now he’s all radioactive. Like Mason said, the atomic fire breath really gives Godzilla the advantage. He can just roast Kong from afar.
SH: That’s why in the new one, they give him an axe.
CM: Kong’s got an axe?
SH: A giant axe, and he blocks Godzilla’s fire breath with it.
CM: I mean, why not just give him a lightsaber?
SH: And a Captain America shield. Let’s just throw all the properties in there.
Godzilla demonstrating the Flying Lizard technique.
MB: I would say the best scene of the entire movie is when Godzilla kicked King Kong. That looked amazing.
CM: And the tail flip!
MB: That was good too!
CM: It’s fun to watch it and say,”That’s how they did it!” And it’s fun when you say, “I have no idea how they pulled that off.”
SH: Their trickery was amazing. That was a great thing to see. I’m really glad you asked us to do this.
CM: OK, final verdict, Mason, would you recommend other people watch King Kong vs. Godzilla?
MB: Yes, and you should watch it before you watch Godzilla vs. Kong.
