Live action anime tennis and the best sports movie since Creed, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers crackles with electricity and searing chemistry among its three leads. Even without its misleading marketing’s emphasis on sex — there’s barely any in the film — Challengers synthesizes eroticism and kineticism through the art of tennis, and into one of the best films of the year so far. Minor spoilers ahead…

It’s taking longer and more out of me to make these videos each year, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop. It’s my annual love letter to the movies. The over 60 films showcased represents the best last year had to offer: from genre blockbusters to tender stories of star-crossed love to unknowable horrors. Here is A Year in Film 2023. In 4K.

My 2024 SXSW coverage begins here with one of the most anticipated films of the festival. As first-time action director and action star, Dev Patel has rocket fuel in his veins. Colliding formal, kinetic grit with adrenaline-fueled passion, Monkey Man is an action movie that delivers in spite of its dim spirituality and flat politics: a whirlwind of bloodletting, throat punches, and kicks to the teeth. Minor spoilers ahead…

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is a masterstroke of bleak, fantasy world-building that continues to translate Frank Herbert’s source material into a rousing epic. A genuine feat of adaptation and engineering that captures the very spirit of the novel’s overwhelmingly strange mythos and whetted knottiness, Dune: Part Two is sci-fi at its finest and most tragic. Minor spoilers ahead…

2023: a tumultuous, but also exciting year for cinema that saw the bottoms fall out of once unstoppable franchises and the rise of new and old masters. Characterized by surprise blockbusters, stinging excavations of the human condition, and a few bold oddities, this year was a cornucopia of great film. So much so that for the first time ever, I’m expanding the usual top 10 to a top 20.

Michael Mann Ferrari disguises the fissures of masculinity in the typical rhythms of biographical fare, but the sheer amount of texture and feeling hidden between the lines — and within Adam Driver’s craggy, steely performance — is staggering. Intimate, somber failings juxtaposed with screeching banshee metal and spitfire ambition, their non-reconciliation a feature and not a bug: a full-blooded film years in the making. Minor spoilers ahead…

David Fincher’s The Killer — a deceptively layered hitman yarn — closes out this year’s New York Film Festival. With a minimalist veneer that belies its toothy takedown of capitalism, hustle culture, and our deteriorating gig economy, Fincher’s latest mines new tensions from the disciplined loner trope. Many will mistake The Killer’s stripped-down trappings for a minor work, but it’s every bit as incisive and wrinkled as Fight Club or The Social Network.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a late style masterwork. A funereal procession of malignant conspiracy and opportunistic genocide disguised as epic western, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour tragedy finds consistently surprising modes to unearth capitalist sin. Shining a megawatt spotlight on the rot underneath American exceptionalism, Killers of the Flower Moon mines the expected powerhouse performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, but it’s Lily Gladstone that burns holes in your consciousness. Minor spoiler ahead…

A thorny balancing act of different tones that drills straight into sordid psychodrama and the elusive nature of performance, Todd Haynes’ May December is a masterpiece of high wire cinema. As expected, Natalie Portman and Juliane Moore are tremendous, but it’s Charles Melton — as a boy stuck in time and a discomfiting stasis — who runs away with the entire thing. May December will make your head spin. Minor spoilers ahead…

Director Kevin Greutert returns to the franchise that birthed his feature-length career with Saw X, a precise and brutal high watermark that knows exactly what its audience wants. Top-tier Tobin Bell, top-tier Shawnee Smith, top-tier traps: it’s the best Saw in years and perhaps since the original. Minor spoilers ahead…

Richard Linklater’s confectionary romcom tears the house down at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. Paradoxically breezy yet unpredictable, Hit Man is a full-blooded rejuvenation of its genre, buoyed by volcanic chemistry and capital “M” movie star performances from Glen Powell and Adria Arjona. A movie about self-actualization and the moral chasms we pave over, it’s sexy, funny, and just a little twisted. Minor spoilers ahead…

My coverage of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival begins with possibly the most horrifying — and masterful — film of 2023. A picturesque idyll conjured by history’s most monstrous as hell seeps around all its corners, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a haymaker display of a filmmaker’s restraint and precision — a masterwork in a career full of them. Minor spoilers ahead…

Greta Gerwig, through the lens of a massive IP tentpole, goes on a non-stop, pointed charm offensive. Strange, earnest, and quite delightful, Barbie takes a playful sledgehammer to gender, coming-of-age, and the very concept of a brand-driven movie. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling put forth superstar performances. Minor spoilers ahead…

Theory vs. practice. Creation vs. destruction. Christopher Nolan’s paradoxically sprawling, intimate Oppenheimer is a stunning deconstruction of the “great man” biopic. Navigating the vast gulf between science and empathy, Nolan’s latest - and perhaps best - delivers a harrowing drama about the moral cost of unleashing upon the world the most horrible weapon it has ever known. Minor spoilers ahead…

With Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise’s crusade for analog supremacy finally becomes text and the results are unbelievable - the last movie star, fighting God and gravity in one of the best action movies ever made. Barreling through sequence after exhilarating sequence of some of the most nerve-jangling stuntwork you’ve ever seen, Ethan Hunt and his IMF team return to face their most dangerous foe yet to reach an immutable truth: there is nothing like walking into, and out of, a Mission: Impossible movie. Minor spoilers ahead…

My favorite horror movie, 2008’s Australian cult sleeper - Lake Mungo - is celebrating its 15th anniversary this week. Within the walls of a mockumentary, dread and sorrow percolate into a devastating crescendo as the Palmer family grapples with the specter of death, and there’s nothing quite like it. A terrifying haunted house yarn that belies its tragic, shattering underbelly, Lake Mungo is a masterwork of grainy apparitions, mounting unease, and quiet restraint. Minor spoilers ahead…

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is astounding. Delivering a multiverse story in service of its characters rather than the other way around, directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson elevate this Spider-sequel with jaw-dropping craft and a keen deconstruction of the wall crawler’s metafiction. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the closest a movie has ever come to the joy of reading a great comic book, splash pages and all.

Almost two decades after Zhang Yimou’s masterwork To Live, Chinese author Yu Hua’s prose returns to Cannes in a different mode through Wei Shujun’s Only The River Flows, the filmmaker’s third consecutive feature to premiere at Cannes since 2020. Eschewing the sweeping canvas of To Live for a mesmerizing, intractable noir, Only The River Flows centers on a mysterious murder in a riverside town, the lackadaisical bureaucracy surrounding the case, and the detective obsessed with solving the killing.