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Searching

Searching is a movie with a simple premise: A man's high school daughter goes missing, and he spends the bulk of the movie searching for her. As basic as that premise is, the film was done very well, and John Cho did an excellent job with it.

I See You

I See You is technically a horror movie, but it felt more like a mystery/thriller than a horror to me. The first half shows the life of a family - a family with real problems navigating their lives and encountering increasingly odd and eerie things. The second half explains those things. It's difficult to talk much more about the film without giving everything away, but it stood out to me enough that included it in this list over many other movies I watched in 2023.

Ant-man and The Wasp: Quantumania

Quantumania came out at the beginning of the year, and at this point, it doesn't even feel like it was in 2023. I think I've seen it at least two or three additional times at home since then.

Quantumania was, to me, the least good film in the Ant-Man trilogy, and that was due largely to the weird lighting and overreliance on special effects in the quantum realm. The lack of David Dastmalchian really hurt the film as well. Kurt was always my favorite.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3

While it wasn't up to the high bar set by the first two Guardians of the Galaxy films, I really enjoyed the third movie in the Guardians franchise. Rocket's backstory was a major tearjerker, and my 11-year-old told me it was the best movie she'd ever seen. Jub jub.

Standout characters were Cosmo the Soviet space dog and Adam Warlock, who Will Poulter portrayed far better than I'd have expected. The scene where Mantis bade Bletelsnort fall in love with Drax was hilarious, and the scene with the Guardians leaping through vacuum while Spacehog's In the Meantime played was brilliant.

Totally Killer

I first put Totally Killer on as a background movie while doing something else, expecting it to underwhelm. I was pleasantly surprised.

What initially grabbed me about the movie was that it was a slasher horror type film with time travel. It turned out to be an odd mix of Scream and Back to the Future. And while it was by no means the best movie of the year, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

Us

I enjoyed Get Out, and I loved Nope, but I hadn't seen Us until this past year. It's difficult to discuss the movie much without giving away the entire insane premise, but I did really enjoy the freakish horror.

The Marvels

Being the Marvel fan I am, I was always going to see this film in the theater on opening weekend. Rather than being epic like Avengers: Endgame or outstanding in the way that Captain America and the Winter Soldier was, The Marvels was just a fun movie. It was a good time with some excellent humor, and Iman Vellani's character and her whole family stole the show. Looking forward to seeing this one again once it's out on streaming.

Roald Dahl Films

I've enjoyed Roahl Dahl's books since I was a kid, but my favorites have never been James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Matilda. My three favorite Roald Dahl stories have always been Danny, The Champion of the World, The Hitch-Hiker, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

When I saw that Netflix had made The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar into a film, I was very excited. Although I remembered the story, I'd forgotten the story's title. I remember being probably eleven years old and practicing staring at a candle, seeing if I could get superpowers.

The other three Roald Dahl stories that Netflix made into films are The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison. While I do remember reading The Swan and thinking how horrible the whole story was, and I vaguely recall Poison, I don't remember The Rat Catcher at all.

The way these four short films have been directed is odd, to say the least. Then again, it's Wes Anderson. Characters go back and forth from acting out their part to narrating it, breathlessly reading text from the book while looking directly into the camera. It comes off as an odd mix of storytelling and stage play. Costume and scenery changes happen in front of the audience, and there's no attempt to mask any of it.

They did get some excellent talent to act out the parts. Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Feinnes star in multiple stories, often taking more than one role.

The Creator

The creator had an incredibly interesting premise: the war between humans and AI. This premise has been done well, rarely. It's been done poorly far more often. And while certain portions of The Creator were well-executed, the flaws outweighed the well-done bits.

My chief complaint is the prevailing sentiment in the film that the artificial intelligences are just like us. They're basically just different humans. There is no examination of what might differentiate a machine intelligence from an organic intelligence, and for my part, that really is the most interesting aspect of it all. Call it a missed opportunity.

Leave The World Behind

They marketed this film pretty heavily when it was first released, and that's when I watched it. There were a lot of things about the movie I liked quite a lot, and a number of things I didn't. Mahershala Ali is one of the things I liked. Since first seeing him on The 4400, I've been a fan.

Disaster films are their own genre, and cyberattacks are a new subcategory in that genre. So much of the disaster I really liked: the outages, the oil tanker, the Tesla scene. But there were other aspects that seem like they were written by someone with the technical knowledge of a teenager living in 1965.

And as good a film as I think it was, I'd really have liked to see some kind of conclusion rather than the movie nonsensically ending at what should have been an important moment.