Category Archives: 2023

2023

Done Dirty Down Under: Charming Leads of “Anyone But You” Trapped in Australia and Bad Script Together

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The song “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield plays a supporting sonic part in Will Gluck’s romantic comedy Anything But You (C), which is fitting as the film feels so unwritten one might be surprised to find it wasn’t actually authored by AI. The two leads, Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell), despise one another and are stuck on a destination wedding holiday together in Sydney, Australia where they have to “fake it till they make it” to keep the peace. Occasional spurts of amusing physical comedy plus exasperating shifts in motivation keep the proceedings consistently uneven. After watching the movie, I read it was based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (oh, Beatrice and Benedick and lots of overheard conversations!), which makes the lack of creativity in the formulaic, circuitous script even more dumbfounding. But the real feature here is the preternaturally attractive and charming lead couple at the heart of the movie; both give their all – bronze bodies, snappy come-ons and comebacks – to propel the paltry plot. Otherwise the film wastes both rom-com veterans such as Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths as well as its exotic port of call; there’s a scene in which hikers look over what’s supposed to be a gorgeous view of a valley,  but it’s a quite unremarkable view of basic treetops.  Because somehow, despite their unmotivated actions, we still find ourselves rooting for Sweeney and Powell; and the movie gets a little better, a little more loose and limber, toward the end. It’s all a bit of a voyeuristic dirty window into a charismatic screen couple in need of better agents.

2023

Clooney’s “Boys in the Boat” is Adrift

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It’s pretty and patriotic, which may be just enough for some moviegoers seeking old-fashioned family entertainment. But director George Clooney can scarcely salvage The Boys in the Boat (C-), a true-life Depression era tale of a ragtag Washington State rowing team on a potential collision course with the Berlin Olympics. The stakes should feel rightly leviathan and rarely do. A rudderless coach/mentor story, an undercooked love story and most notably a lack of depth in showcasing team camaraderie are among the central failings of a movie about winning. The crew sport doesn’t quite provide sufficient cinematic gusto either; there are only so many ways to row, row, row one’s way to so-so dramatic results. The coach character played by actor Joel Edgerton, usually a fascinating screen presence, rarely rises to the occasion. Callum Turner is fairly effective embodying the steely, stoic protagonist and makes the most of his underwritten central role. As his love interest, the plucky Hadley Robinson provides the radiant working definition of a role being sidelined. The epic score over oars, head-scratching pivots in plot and pacing, lack of clarity about the hard scrabble kids’ disadvantages against their well-heeled East coast contemporaries, an arbitrary monologue about crafting a seaworthy vessel and the nonchalant arrival of Hitler as a Hail Mary to raise the stakes are all on the low-simmer punch list as the story drifts. There’s a particularly inconsequential passage of the characters fundraising that fails the Dr. Evil test of putting financial figures in proper context. Forgive it the clunky present-day bookends under murky makeup, the unfinished plot points or a number of squandered opportunities, though, as there’s a decent family story about the value of personal integrity and hard work buried within Clooney’s film. The movie definitely needed elements as propulsive as its real-life heroes.

2023

Trio of Talented Actresses Give “Color Purple” Movie Musical New Life

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There’s very little resisting Alice Walker’s most iconic work in any of its forms: the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the 1985 Oscar-nominated movie, the elaborate Broadway 2005 musical stage show or its even more acclaimed stripped-down 2015 revival. So don your lavender, orchid, magenta and violet hues and grab your best friends to enjoy another inspiring telling of this ode to sisterhood in a crowd-pleasing auditorium. Nobody ever told Shakespeare he’s been interpreted too much. Director Blitz Bazawule’s 2023 film adaptation of the book-turned-musical The Color Purple (B) does show some signs of wear, despite some jubilant applause-worthy moments. His fresh lens on the tale gets a little lost in translation as he tries to plumb the depths of the sharply drawn characters while giving them their due as singers too. For those just hopping on the bandwagon, the story traces forty years in the life of Miss Celie (Fantasia Barrino) who is torn from her sister and children in the rural South in the early 1900s and faces hardships including an abusive husband “Mister” (Colman Domingo). With support from a sultry singer named Shug (Taraji P. Henson) and her stand-her-ground stepdaughter Sofia (Danielle Brooks), Celie ultimately finds extraordinary strength in the unbreakable bonds of a new kind of female empowerment. This new production includes three iconic and melodic moments of sonic uplift so potent and a final reel so tearjerking and triumphant viewers may forget the film’s sluggish start. Bazawule reveals his exposition a bit too much like a “greatest hits” for those who know the story rather than discovering it fresh as the characters would experience it. He also doesn’t land exactly how to effectively execute the musical numbers – are they real or fantasy? lived-in or larger than life? – until he hits the stride of barnburners “Hell No,” “Push Da Button,” and “I’m Here.” This re-imagining is handsomely photographed, poignantly acted and has a stirring finale. Barrino is so good in the final reel that one might wish she was extended more of a showcase early on in the film. This new Purple is recommended for the timeless story, the strength of the ensemble and bursts of greatness that blossom just when you need something beautiful to savor.

2023, Industry News

Southeastern Film Critics Name Top Ten Best Films of 2023

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NOTE: This was the first year Silver Screen Capture joined this voting body.

The Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) has named Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as the Best Picture of the Year. SEFCA’s eighty-nine members located across nine Southeastern states also recognized Christopher Nolan for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Additionally, the film earned Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey, Jr. and Best Ensemble for its star-studded cast that includes Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Aldren Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, Tom Conti, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh and others. Behind the camera Oppenheimer took the top prizes for Best Cinematography (Hoyte Van Hoytema) and Best Score (Ludwig Goransson).

“This fall featured three big films from three grandmasters of cinema,” said SEFCA President Scott Phillips. “Martin Scorsese released Killers of the Flower Moon. Ridley Scott brought Napoleon to the big screen and Michael Mann hits theaters next week with Ferrari. Despite this bumper crop from heavy-hitting auteurs, Christopher Nolan’s film from six months ago is walking away with eight SEFCA awards. Oppenheimer is a stunning cinematic achievement. Our members recognized that in July, and they are rewarding it in December.”

‘When asked about the film year that was 2023, SEFCA Vice President Jim Farmer said, “2023 will be remembered by many as the year that featured the commercial, critical and cultural phenomenon known as ‘Barbenheimer.’ But it was also a season that offered a stunning amount of high-quality films, with master filmmakers near the top of their games, fresher faces making strong impressions and performers showing new dimensions. It was a pleasure to take in all that 2023 had to offer.”

Those “fresher faces” include writer/director Celine Song whose debut feature, Past Lives, lands at # 4 on SEFCA’s Top 10 of 2023, and writer/director Cord Jefferson whose debut feature, American Fiction, placed seventh in the SEFCA Top 10. The diverse list also includes an animated film (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) and two foreign films (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest).

Read SEFCA’s full list of winners below. Visit SEFCA on the web at SEFCA.net to learn more about its members as well as past winners. You can also follow SEFCA on X at @SEFilmCritics.

Top 10 Films of 2023

1. Oppenheimer

2. Killers of the Flower Moon

3. The Holdovers

4. Past Lives

5. Barbie

6. Poor Things

7. American Fiction

8. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

9. Anatomy of a Fall

10. The Zone of Interest

Other wins from the SEFCA:

Best Actor: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer

Best Actress: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer

Best Supporting Actress: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Ensemble: Oppenheimer

Best Director: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Original Screenplay: David Hemingson, The Holdovers

Best Adapted Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Documentary: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Best Animated Film: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Foreign-Language Film: Anatomy of a Fall

Best Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema, Oppenheimer

Best Score: Ludwig Goransson, Oppenheimer

2023

“Thank You, I’m Sorry” Plumbs Bleak Topics in Delicate Comedy

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By Christian Waltermire, Guest Critic

If Swedish film Thank You, I’m Sorry (C+) can be considered a comedy, it’s certainly dry with a layer of bleakness. There are plenty of heartwarming moments as we follow Sara (Sanna Sundqivist) navigate the death of her husband along with the new integration of her estranged sister Linda (Charlotta Bjork). Being in the late stages of pregnancy along with a 5-year-old son, she quickly realizes although reluctantly that her future endeavors can’t be undertaken alone.  Sara’s bitterness and flat almost emotionless tone is a center point of the conflict between all characters; her projection on each one of them as she attempts to give harsh advice only serves to reveal her own insecurities as well as qualms with her overarching life path. Linda and Sara have had minimal interaction since childhood considering Linda’s decision to live with her father following the divorce of their parents, which leaves Sara harboring resentment towards both her abusive alcoholic father and also towards her sister who merely seems to want to assist and reconnect with her. Along with a mother-in-law who is constantly attempting to interject with psychological analyses, Sara slowly begins to open to these individuals that merely want to assist with her grieving process and pregnancy. By the time the end credits roll, viewers may see the importance of letting go of one’s resentment and accepting the benevolent assistance offered in the face of one’s own pride.

2023

Chalamet is “Wonka” in Charming Candy-Colored Prequel

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Expect an everlasting gobstopper of a smile on your face as the greatest showman of the chocolate-loving world headlines a delightful new origin story. Paul King’s musical fantasy family feature Wonka (B+) stars Timothée Chalamet as the titular confectioner who arrives in Europe to realize his dream of opening a candy shop but finds himself choc-blocked by a series of rivals. Chalamet is absolutely enchanting, summoning his theatre kid charms to embody a crooning, inventive optimist, not yet cynical to the ways of the world or banishing anyone to the fudge room. Partnered with the fabulous young actress  Calah Lane in a series of adventures, they gracefully spark imagination and engage in deft wordplay. The whole ensemble is a hoot, including Olivia Colman as a wicked innkeeper, Rowan Atkinson as a priest with a sweet tooth and Hugh Grant as a surly Oompa-Loompa. King’s whimsical palette and maximalist production design sets the stage for fabulous surprises and sly humor around every corner; and Jody Talbot and Neil Hannon (frontman of Irish band Divine Comedy) bring uplift in the form of old-fashioned Broadway-style songs. When the plot shifts into all-out heist mode for a while, it’s a little less interesting; but like a string of taffy, Timmy springs it right back into sentimental health. This is definitely the non-ironic family feature of the year with just enough bite to keep everybody satisfied.

2023

Brotherly Love, Wrestling Nostalgia on Display in “Iron Claw” Drama

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Wrapped in the ring-slinging theatrics of the wrestling world in its heyday, Sean Durkin’s biographical sports drama The Iron Claw (B) is ultimately a moving meditation on brotherhood. Chronicling the true story of the Von Erich family wrestlers, all bred to be polite, strong warriors by their domineering father (a fierce performance by Holt McCallany), an ensemble including the very committed troupe of Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson experiences the highs and lows of the dangerous sport. Efron gets maximum screen time and, aside from his brotherly bonding, is most engaging opposite Lily James as the woman who tries to draw him out of his single-minded shell. The movie never rises to heights of astonishing creativity or breakthrough filmmaking craft, but you will believe in the hard-scrabble tale of this family, and Durkin extracts earned emotional beats out of the brothers’ cursed existence. As the film depicts small-town Texas origins colliding with the hefty machinations of a federation in the making, those who have grown up watching this particular form of glam-macho entertainment will find its story engaging and its happenings nostalgic. Credit Efron in particular for drawing audiences into a tale of hometown boys lured into a larger than life scenario, reminiscent of tragic tales like The Outsiders or Boogie Nights. Even though the actors are ostensibly faking it, you will see their reality clearly. 

2023, Rent It Tonight

With “Maestro” Biopic, Cooper Takes on Too Much and Not Enough

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There’s a lived-in performance at the center of Bradley Cooper’s latest opus about a troubled artist, even if the film’s construction doesn’t capture its subject quite as closely or precisely as the moviemakers would like to think they do. Cooper stars in and directs Maestro (B-), a quasi-biopic about the complicated composer Leonard Bernstein, especially seen through the lens of the heterosexual love of his life and mother of his children, Costa Rican TV actress Felicia Montealegre, played with grace and charm by Carey Mulligan. The film toggles between black and white and color largely to match the chronology of its time periods, with magical monochrome origins giving way to a more murky, rusty “Hollywood in the 70s” aesthetic. The two central actors are superb, but their soapy plot and tragic trajectories don’t reveal much about them as artists. The humanity of how they bond when the stakes are highest makes for some of the most affecting sequences. The film will largely be remembered for the intimacy of several loving conversations and one bombastic sequence of the master musician conducting. Otherwise it’s caught in a kind of middle ground with impressive performances at not much service of a theme.

2023

“Poor Things” Thinks It’s Funnier and More Insightful Than It Is

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Prepare to be charmed and alarmed. Poor Things (C+), the Victorian steampunk comic fable by Yorgos Lanthimos, connects on a very specific polarizing wavelength. Emma Stone plays a deceased and withchild young woman re-animated to life with the sensitivities of her adult body and the newly activated brain of her unborn child fusing and allowing her to explore the world anew with abject wonder. With equal parts daffy comedy and utter creepiness, Willem Dafoe portrays the mad scientist responsible for the protagonist’s rebirth; and Ramy Youssef and Mark Ruffalo are among the hapless male suitors attempting to make sense of the feral femme. The movie wants to be audacious and sublimely feminist and thumb its nose at prudishness, but its bizarre comic tone keeps viewers at a veiled distance. An overlong passage in which the film’s heroine chooses to become a prostitute seems to undercut the film’s thesis of absolute freedom. Stone’s specific mannerisms and many of her wry observations are memorable, but a little of this outlandish content goes a long way. Lanthimos fashions a creative universe with many quirky ports of call but too often sets his characters adrift into unsavory discoveries. Many viewers will undoubtedly be smitten with the originality of this comic curiosity, but the atonal strings music and frequent sequences seen through a fisheye lens promise to give this critic post-traumatic stress.

2023

“Zone of Interest” Feels Like a College Thesis Film Project Stretched to Feature Length

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There’s rampant NIMBY sentiment, a dubious quality of life and hardly an HOA covenant that holds up under scrutiny in the most bizarre suburb depicted on screen since Stepford or Skinamarink. Jonathan Glazer’s sanctimonious historical drama The Zone of Interest (C+) operates under the high-concept conceit of what it was like to be next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp in the height of its horrors. The film is an austere, distanced dissertation on human complicity in an evil enterprise that rarely transcends its largely plot-free existence. The commandant of the concentration camp (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller) nonchalantly go about their day-to-day life in a house and garden next to the site where mass genocide is taking place. Friedel and Hüller have thankless parts, with Hüller’s real-life Weimaraner dog the only sympathetic creature in the film’s foreground. Inert as it is, the movie is nonetheless gorgeously lensed, and the sound design is incredibly exacting as viewers constantly sense the shrieks and struggles going on outside the fences of the Nazi family’s pristine oasis. It’s unsettling, to be sure, but it doesn’t get any more interesting as the film progresses. There have been many Holocaust films with actual protagonists and various you-are-there techniques, but this is a POV first: depicting the human horrors at a distance with no sequences depicting good and evil interacting in the same frame. The premise of a home sweet home minutes from atrocity succeeds only in activating one’s mind about what’s not on the screen. It’s a noble notion and curious experiment, but it’s a sterile and staid sit.

2023

Atlanta Film Critics Circle Celebrates “Oppenheimer” with 2023 Awards

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Today the Atlanta Film Critics Circle (AFCC) announced its seventh annual awards for the top film achievements of 2023, in which Oppenheimer, the biopic thriller about the life of the titular nuclear physicist, father of the atomic bomb, was selected best picture. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the blockbuster film dominated the AFCC’s awards in eight categories, including Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Actor (Cillian Murphy), Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.), Cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema), Ensemble, Screenplay (Christopher Nolan), and Score (Ludwig Göransson).

Rounding out the best films of the year for the group in ranked order were: Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, Past Lives, Barbie, May December, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall and Poor Things.

The Best Supporting Actor race resulted in a tie between performances in two of the year’s iconic films, with Ryan Gosling winning Best Supporting Actor for his role in Barbie as Ken and Robert Downey Jr. winning for his portrayal of politician Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer.

Lily Gladstone won two awards from the AFCC, securing both Best Lead Actress and Best Breakthrough Performer for her work in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Other winners include director Celine Song’s Past Lives, which won Best First Feature, Da’Vine Joy Randolph for Best Supporting Actress in The Holdovers, French film The Anatomy of a Fall for Best International Feature and John Wick: Chapter 4 for the AFCC’s second-ever Best Stunt Work award. The movie Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie won Best Documentary.

2023

First-Time Filmmaker’s “American Fiction” is a Sly Indictment of How White People Want Their Black Stories

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Nearly three decades ago, Robert Altman’s poison pen dark comedy The Player decimated the notion of authentic Hollywood endings in which characters get what they deserve. Building on this grand meta tradition, writer/director Cord Jefferson’s subversive comedy American Fiction (B+) confronts the relationship between contemporary Black authors, their fraught notions of cultural representation in modern culture and the preposterous prism of white guilt placing unrealistic limits about how far the writers can go to transcend stereotypes. The high-concept plot in which the sanctimonious hero harbors a criminal alter ego and fictional characters “from the hood” sometimes spring to life from his mind into his writing room largely serves its purpose even if it sometimes leaves its protagonist pretzeled into remaining believable within the story’s constraints. In a brilliant performance of nuance and subtle physicality, Jeffrey Wright portrays an idealistic novelist fed up with establishment industries profiting from “Black entertainment” that relies on tired and offensive tropes. Under a pseudonym, he writes an urban opus of his own to showcase the heights of hypocrisy in the publishing world, and his character grapples with a series of results both profound and outlandish. The best sequence pits Wright and the talented Issa Rae in one-on-one repartee about “selling out” that speaks volumes; tellingly it’s the film’s one discussion about art with the spotlight exclusively on two minorities. Sterling K. Brown and Leslie Uggams are among the standouts in the wonderful ensemble, adding heft to the family drama surrounding the lead character’s literary conundrum. Their domestic ups and downs wouldn’t ever get the greenlight without the high-concept surrounding them, posits the filmmaker. The razor-sharp daggers pointed at material designed to be “Oscar bait” coupled with depiction of critics looking to applaud avant-garde authorship deliver ample episodes of cringeworthy comedy, and it’s all imminently watchable, entertaining and insightful. With Wright as the magnetic anchor for the pointed parody, Jefferson delightfully pulls off one of the most memorable movies of the year.