It took me a year to publish my 2022 Year in Review. We obviously backdated it to maintain the illusion of chronological continuity, but the truth is it took me about a year to finish, and even then I only completed it when Nick finally asked if we could delete the draft off the site to keep things organized. The structure was always there. None of the movies changed (well, I did remove The Banshees of Insherin, which didn’t stick with me into the next year). I just didn’t feel moved to post it. It’s not that 2022 was a bad year for new movies. There was plenty to watch, and I had great experiences sharing them with my friends and family. I just wasn’t confident about how to recap it because my movie diet is frankly so much more than whatever happens to be playing at a given time. Increasingly so. My appetite for new movies has been constantly decreasing over the past few years. It’s at an all-time low.

For a few years there, I tried to watch everything I possibly could — an affliction aided by a lack of children and the sheer amount of screeners made available to me as a member of the Indiana Film Journalists Association. If you look at my Letterboxd history, you’ll notice I watched close to 500 films in 2019 and not much less each year in the years directly preceding it. I was a movie-watching machine. Send me a screener and I’d watch it.

What has burned me out is that a lot of the films we’re provided every year just aren’t particularly good. Don’t get me wrong: I still watch a good amount of them. I still find movies to enjoy and highlight. 2023 in particular provided some really great ones! But the grind of moving through a large library of new-release titles just to find the five or six that everyone is going to recommend anyway at the end of the year became exhausting. Writing a year in review became less fun. I don’t have the time or talent to write something as exhaustive and meaningful as Nick’s take on the tradition, for instance.

So I took my ball and went home. But now I’m back, having settled on what these essays are going to be for the time being. I still watched over 300 movies this year. When my sons are asleep, all I want to do is watch movies. When I have a day off, all I want to do is watch movies. When I have a chance to hang out with my buddies, well, the first thing that comes to mind is what movies we have on our watchlists.

Without straining to watch every movie that just happened to find distribution in 2023, I’ve instead started letting my tastes lead me into new areas, new cinematic adventures. Like last year, I’m going to provide the year in review, reflecting specifically the movies that defined my year. Some happened to be new releases, some just new to me, and some new perspectives on old favorites.

.These are a few movies that meant something to me in 2023.

But First …

As always, I want to write about the year in Midwest Film Journal. We published 6 group columns this year, including essays celebrating the 10th anniversary of our annual No Sleep October column. Nick finally completed uploading all of his back catalogue of reviews to our site, which number in the hundreds. We surpassed our readership from all previous years again, which was nice to see despite publishing substantially fewer articles. We added a few new writers into our bench of essayists, including Joshua Polanski and George Dibble, who are very welcome additions.

Where do you start with Nick’s essays this year? His in-depth look at the Psycho saga for No Sleep October? His sort-of defense of Meg 2: The Trench? His look at the early-aughts disaster classic The Core? Look, I’ll link to his Oppenheimer review later in this essay. He edits everything that ends up on the site and led the way on pretty much all of our group projects this year, too. He deserves a break — and yet he’s currently scheduled to review almost every new release in January. Good god.

I’d like to highlight Sam’s essays on Dream Scenario, May December and The Little Mermaid. Those aren’t his only reviews (or, in the latter’s case, his most positive), but they’re all great looks at their respective films. I’m mostly sharing The Little Mermaid because it still makes me gleeful that he actually saw that one, given how grumpy he is about a lot of new blockbusters. Of course, he’s mostly right to be.

Lou continued to give us incredible writing on all fronts, including updates to his Roll ‘Em and Screen Plays columns. I was especially happy to see him write his long-promised take on the Hammer Films set of Frankenstein movies. He’s been with us for a long time, but in the small world of Indiana film criticism, I’m still sometimes surprised Lou writes with us. I’m looking forward to finally getting him to write words about some damn, dirty apes in 2024.

I’m actually a little jealous that Mitch got to write about Poor Things, the best new release of the year, but I don’t think I could’ve tackled it at his level anyway. He took a lot of proverbial bullets this year, reviewing The Flash, The Last Voyage of the Demeter and Strays — the last of which at least served as a spiritual follow-up to his Dog Days of Summer column from a few years ago. Then again, he also introduced the Fuck, Yeah! Film Festival crew to an iconic new horror monster, Nightbeast.

Aly’s been on sabbatical for the last few years while doing all the hardest work with our youngest, but she did manage to make time to write about The Fall of the House of Usher, the only show we’ve actually found time to watch together during that time, and she did a wonderful job about it.

On a personal level, I published over 140 essays. Down from the past few years, but a better lot on the whole, I’d say. The experience of watching and writing about Ahsoka was a highlight on the Serial Consumer front, and I’m pretty proud of most of what I wrote this year. I even wrote a review of Secret Invasion so negative that Marvel blackballed me from previewing its future Disney+ output.

The best thing I wrote this year was probably my 1,000th on Midwest Film Journal, about Criterion’s 4K Days of Heaven release. Honestly, I spent most of the year rewatching Godzilla movies with my son, who will even watch them without dubbing. In that regard, I was truly living my best cinematic life.

What a year for Midwest Film Journal. I love running this site and I love publishing alongside these writers.

2023

Barbie

We never published a full-length review of Barbie on our site. I’m not sure why. Doesn’t matter. The film is incredible. It could’ve just been a pink version of The Lego Movie, Will Ferrell and all. Instead it manages to deliver on every conceivable level. I hope it wins every possible award and never gets a lame sequel.

Days of Heaven

You can read my essay here

I don’t have anything else to say about the film that I didn’t write in my earlier essay. But after I wrote that essay, I started falling into Sam Shepard’s written words, including his plays and short stories. I plan on continuing to read them into the new year. By happenstance, my Dad showed my oldest son The Right Stuff around the same time; whenever my son catches a glimpse of Shepard’s author photos, he asks why I’m reading books about Chuck Yeager. It’s delightful.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

Although my first exposure to the work of Shah Rukh Khan was his action epic Pathaan earlier this year, I wasn’t really obsessed until I watched his career-making turn in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. I subsequently turned to SRK’s vast filmography whenever I wanted to watch something different. His goofy, lovable performance is matched perfectly with frequent scene partner Kajol. The music numbers are catchy and memorable, particularly “Rik Ja O Dil Deewane,” which I watched almost every night during to decompress for a while. Great movie. Great actor. I’m excited to see more down the line.

Ebola Syndrome

You can read my essay here

It’s rare these days to find a movie that makes me feel utterly ashamed for being so entertained, and that’s not for lack of trying on my part. Ebola Syndrome will be hard to beat. I laughed! I wondered if I should cry! I wrote about it in-depth and it still feels like a movie I don’t want people to know I watched. Debuting it at this autumn’s Fuck, Yeah! Film Festival was an all-time fraternal experience.

Godzilla Minus One

You can read my review here

I loved Godzilla Minus One, but it’s also on this list to represent the amount of Godzilla I watched throughout 2023, which was a lot. My 4-year-old discovered Big G back in June and hasn’t really looked back. We watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters from start to finish a half-dozen times, along with basically every Showa-era film and Godzilla vs. Biollante multiple times. Every day was Godzilla this, Godzilla that. I spent the year endlessly explaining every monster and every movie. It was fucking awesome.

House of Dracula

Given that editing my output constitutes a part-time job, Nick might be surprised to know I’ve written plenty of other essays that never ended up on the site. Essays I just haven’t cracked yet. The best one — and maybe one I’ll salvage for No Sleep October in the future — was about my experience watching through several of the Universal Classic Monsters series this October. What started as my annual rewatch of The Wolf Man and Frankenstein ended up being a journey through both franchises and their various intersections, culminating in House of Dracula. By no means the best of the franchise, HoD nonetheless clicked with me in a shocking, meaningful way, thanks in large part to John Carradine’s tragic, strange, haunted American Dracula. Everything about his take on the character is so wrong it makes it right, a standout in a film that also includes Frankenstein, mad science and a ridiculous redemption for Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man himself. A totally crazy movie. I think about it often.

John Wick: Chapter 4

You can read my review here

I watched this one twice in the theatre. Pretty much the pinnacle of American action films in the last decade. The best of the series, powered by incredible ingenuity and a melancholy spirit I hope they never tarnish with additional sequels. Donnie Yen finally gets the role he’s deserved in a film produced this side of the Pacific. I’m not sure if anyone else in the action sphere would be worthy of his character’s place in the mythos.

Radioactive Dreams

It’s a wonder I never watched the late Albert Pyun’s low-budget masterpieces before this year given my dedication to watching schlock. I couldn’t choose which of these to represent this phase of my summer. I watched Nemesis first and was blown away by the hysterical mixture of kickboxing, Blade Runner, seemingly dangerous explosions and ridiculously choreographed gunfights. I immediately followed it with Radioactive Dreams, which feels like a predecessor to the genre mashups that define a lot of contemporary popular fiction. The film is a lot of fun even if the current copies available online are at a poor resolution and the ending is totally inexplicable. Nothing spectacular, but that wasn’t Pyun’s game. Also notable for one of my favorite posters of all time and an incredible earworm by Sue Saad and the Next.

Oppenheimer

You can read Nick’s review here

Watching Oppenheimer at the Indiana State Museum IMAX was a truly remarkable spectacle. Ludwig Göransson’s epic score powered me through the late summer. Read Nick’s review.

Poor Things

You can read Mitch’s review here

This is my only awards-season addition to the list, an utter surprise given how little I’ve liked the past films of Yorgos Lanthimos. He really leveled up here, creating a beautiful, strange, demented fantasy world filled with colorful characters and career-best performances by everyone involved. Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo are unbelievable. The dark complement to Barbie. Best fart jokes of the year.

Here are a few other movies I really loved this year. Honorable mentions, I guess: