2023 Was a Bad Year for Movies. Here Were the Best.
When it came to movies this year, the junk outstripped the gems. But three films rose above the muck.
Paul Giamatti plays a schoolteacher in The Holdovers, one of 2023’s most pleasant surprises. (Focus Features)
It’s been such an awful year for films that entertainment journalists are defensive. After all, their livelihood is tied to the state of our media. I’ve been reading their specious arguments about how 2023 has been not that bad if you think about it because, after all, other years in film history were worse.
Haven’t you ever heard of the Great Depression? How bad do you think 1931 was, with a film industry going bankrupt and a largely destitute population that couldn’t afford to see movies anyway? Huh? Huh?
There’s also the widespread argument that, actually, the film industry is finally recovering better than expected from production delays caused by COVID and WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the proof is that large numbers of people actually went to see a few movies in 2023. That’s the bar we tend to set in America lately for all sorts of things — if it ain’t dead, it must be thriving; if it’s not an utter catastrophe, it’s a triumph:
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