Welcome to the 2023 SiftPop.com Sifties!
This year, the SiftPop writers came together to nominate five movies for Best Narrative Experience. A film’s narrative often plays a large role in its overall quality, and we wanted to recognize that with this award!
Since she is both writer and director, most of what works narratively in Past Lives can be directly attributed to Celine Song. The film follows Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), two childhood friends who are reunited for one fateful week after 20 years apart. When our main actors aren’t even sharing the screen, the film still gets the viewer to buy into the main relationship. Despite that, when they do meet up, you’re on pins and needles. Everything about this movie lingers. The shots linger. The dialogue lingers. Not in a pejorative way, but in a way that leaves you tensed up and simultaneously hanging on for what is to come, and thinking about what you’ve just seen. It’s an emotional ride that takes a nuanced look at what it means to be loved and the idea of soulmates, and it all adds up to being one of the most moving movie experiences of the year.
Martin Scorsese has made many long movies in his career, but what’s unique about the length in Killers of the Flower Moon is that its used to make you feel sick by the end. You watch for three and a half hours as a group of Native people is slowly and systematically decimated. The audience is given proper time to develop sympathy for the Osage, as well as more than enough time to develop the same amount of, if not more, hate for the white men who carry out this eradication. And the entire movie is made even better by the ending, in which Scorsese uses his own face to acknowledge that this narrative really shouldn’t have been his to tell in the first place, and that the voices of the oppressed and the slaughtered have been silenced and marginalized for way too long. It’s as sobering and effective an ending that you’ll come across in a major Hollywood release.
Screenwriter David Hemingson and director Alexander Payne do an outstanding job of crafting an amazing story about the power that teachers can have on people who truly need a role model in their lives. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is tasked with watching students who don’t have a place to go for the holidays. Barton Academy has strict rules and structures to live by. When he has to watch troublemaker, Angus (Dominic Sessa), Paul is put in a situation that changes both of their lives for the better. The slow shift in Paul and Angus’ relationship is amazing — it starts as hostile, but slowly evolves into being filled with respect and eventually friendship. When they start to open up to one another, and when Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) gets into the mix, The Holdovers truly starts to take off as a narrative. Hemingson sets the table for showing how strict Barton is with their professors and students, and then gradually how Paul lets go of the rigid mindset to take care of Angus the best way he can. The ending offers a glimpse at a teacher who is at his wits end with the system, but still cares deeply about his students.
No 2023 film pulls off a narrative balancing act quite like Anatomy of a Fall. On the surface, the story is about a woman (Sandra Hüller) put on trial for the murder of her husband after he mysteriously died from a fall at their home. While the trial is about that, and the impact it has on Sandra and her blind son (Milo Machado Graner), the way the French legal system operates allows for it to be about so much more. While her lawyer (Swann Arlaud) and the lead attorney for the prosecution (Antoine Reinartz) snipe back and forth at various witnesses as they try to make their respective cases, they’re allowed to be much more speculative than American audiences are used to seeing. The difference means Sandra’s not just on the stand answering about the particulars about the incident in question, but about her reputation as an author, her relationship with her now-deceased husband, and her relationship with her son. It’s a masterfully woven story by writer/director Justine Triet, who co-wrote the film with Arthur Harari, and the film is one of the true narrative achievements of the year.
How do you make a three-hour biopic about physics and a nuclear bomb interesting enough to rake in almost a billion dollars at the box office? The answer is hiring Christoper Nolan and half of Hollywood alongside him. That may just do the trick. Oppenheimer came, saw and conquered everything in its path (besides Barbie). On a serious note, this is an incredibly quick three-hour film, as you hardly feel that dreaded runtime. Nolan not only gives us many things to ponder, but he also shows the “movies are getting way too long” crowd that if the movie is good, nobody cares. That was the secret, as this movie is not “just” about the nuclear bomb and how it was done — it is a harrowing tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his inner battle of knowing nobody should have a nuclear bomb, but the Nazis shouldn’t have it at all costs. Oppenheimer is about this and much more, so it is no wonder the three-hour runtime did not bother almost anyone, as the movie is paced so well that you want to rewatch it again and again.
Make sure to check out the previous 2023 Sifties winners, and don’t forget to check back tomorrow for the winner of Best Performance!
You can also listen to the SiftPop writers’ top five movies of the year on the SiftPop Writers’ Room Podcast!