2023 was a pretty good year for movies, both in the visionary and conventional modes.

Don DeLillo once wrote a short story about a sad, lonely man who spent all his days obsessively watching films, cataloguing the films he watched and then making notes on them, notes that only he ever read. Not sure why that’s on my mind… anyway, here are a list of 23 films I watched for the very first time in 2023.

Both books center around a mystery and its untangling by a heroic protagonist, but the more interesting similarity is that the screenwriters behind each film adaptation chose to forego all mystery, sideline the hero, and tell the whole story from the villain’s point of view.

The most astonishing thing about “Oppenheimer” is how thoroughly Nolan was able to avoid fabrication or simplification, while shaping complex history into an exciting epic that could break box office records.

The few highly visual scenes that do occur in the book stand out and practically beg to be adapted on film.

If it’s an obvious fact that Full River Red is propaganda, it’s also true that films, like people, can speak from both sides of their mouths.

Rather than the ultimate slow movie, Jeanne Dielman is the ultimate slow-burn thriller.

Since there’s a possible future where movies are replaced altogether by faddish miniseries that linger in the mind as long as an Instagram story, in the meantime we should take what we can get.

n 2022 I watched many great movies for the first time, and here are the 22 greatest, RANKED. And these rankings are VERY MEANINGFUL. Anyway, these are all terrific and if one person reads this list and watches one of these movies, I’ll have done my job.

When it comes to The Whale I find the critical condemnations odd, inconsistent, lacking justification and also symptomatic of current narrow trends in conventional taste.

In theory, Nope could rely on theme over character and still succeed as a crowd pleaser, but whether it could do so with themes that are unclear is another question (or perhaps not much of a question, going by the film’s mixed reception).

Adrian Lyne’s “Deep Water” is that odd film which closely adapts its source novel’s plot while ignoring what the book is actually about.

Look, it’s not that complicated: these are the 21 best non-2021 movies I watched in 2021; so this list of 21 movies doesn’t have any 2021 movies in it, only 21 movies I watched in 2021 that I liked that weren’t released in 2021. Get it?