After a longer delay than I’d like due to the usual reasons (i.e., a case of the morbs), the next entry in my 2023 in Review series is now coming in hot. Hoping to get film discoveries and albums out later this week, and closing it all out with an overall reflection about a rough 2023. If any or all of that interests you, do subscribe below!
Supporting Performances
Honorable Mentions: Paula Beer (Afire), Juliette Binoche (The Taste of Things), Robert Downey, Jr. (Oppenheimer), Jacob Elordi (Priscilla), Adele Exarchopoulos (Passages), Jamie Foxx (They Cloned Tyrone), Claire Foy (All of Us Strangers), Ray Liotta (Cocaine Bear), Milo Machado-Graner (Anatomy of a Fall), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers), Margot Robbie (Asteroid City), Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things), Rachel Sennott (Bottoms), Donnie Yen (John Wick 4)
5. Rachel McAdams | Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Over the last 10 years, Rachel McAdams has turned into a reliable highlight in any movie she’s in, with her performance generally serving as the oboe to which the rest of the film is tuned. In this long-awaited film adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved young-adult classic, McAdams plays beleaguered, newly-minted suburbanite Barbara with a deft touch, nudging her character’s struggles into frame as a counterpoint to her daughter Margaret’s start-and-stop coming-of-age without overwhelming it, vacillating between supporting player and central character in her own subplot with ease. In a film whose tone doesn’t really allow for the big, emotional scenes that mint quote-unquote “great” performances, McAdams stands out as an anchor in her own quiet, inimitable way.
4. Willem Dafoe | Poor Things
Mark Ruffalo’s turn is the showier one here, but Poor Things misshapen-yet-beating heart is Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist Godwin, whose arc towards discovering what it means to be a father despite the extraordinary circumstances behind his becoming one, as well as his own abusive childhood, is compelling enough to command an entire film on its own. In a film where the most monstrous-looking characters are often the most human (and vice versa), Dafoe brings a paternal gravitas to his Dr. Frankenstein expy that echoes even after he largely disappears from the narrative after the first act: Simultaneously monster and man, captor and savior. Dafoe has made an entire career out of that sort of greyness, and he submits another stellar addition to his catalog here.
3. John Magaro | Past Lives + Showing Up
If his turn in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow wasn’t evidence enough, John Magaro is one of today’s finest character actors, with an everyman’s charm and a deceptive range he flexes in two very different supporting roles across two similarly low-key A24 joints. Reuniting with Reichardt in her art-angst comedy Showing Up, Magaro plays Lizzy’s (Michelle Williams) hermetic brother Sean, who their mother considers a brilliant artistic mind but whose paranoid eccentricities have stopped him from creating anything at all in months. Essentially, Sean is the polar opposite of Magaro’s other, buzzier performance of 2023 from Celine Song’s critical hit Past Lives: As the quietly insecure yet maturely level-headed husband Arthur, who finds himself exploring his own complicated feelings when his wife reconnects with an old childhood sweetheart from Seoul. Both turns are plenty rich on their own, but when taken together, they really highlight Magaro’s potential as one of our great “I didn’t know he was in this! I love that guy” Guys for years to come.
2. Julianne Moore & Charles Melton | May December
The titular May-December couple may not be the stars of this story (more on that later in this newsletter), but Julianne Moore and Charles Melton are the rhythm section that grounds the tightrope walk that is Todd Haynes’s ripped-from-the-tabloids dramedy. The great trick of their performances (and why they have to be here as a dyad) is that each of them seems transplanted from entirely different films—Moore from a straight comedy, Melton a straight drama—and converse with each other on both textual and metatextual levels as a result. This is nothing new from Moore, whose collaborations with Haynes always seem to produce these layered, intricately built characters (and some legendary lisps too), but Melton is a revelation, giving an achingly soulful turn whose earnestness only makes the coldness of Moore’s all the starker, and vice versa.
1. Ryan Gosling | Barbie
There was a time in the not-so-distant past where the discourse du jour doubted Ryan Gosling’s aptness for the role of Ken. He isn’t pretty enough, the argument went. They should’ve cast the other Ryan. They weren’t without their merits; throughout his career, Gosling has best been known for playing brooding enigmas (Drive, Blade Runner 2049) or schlubby losers (The Nice Guys, Lars and the Real Girl), neither descriptor being the first to come to mind when thinking of a literal plastic himbo doll.
As it turns out, Gosling doesn’t become Ken here so much as Ken becomes a Ryan Gosling character: A schlubby loser posing as a brooding enigma, with a chauvinist streak lifted from his Crazy, Stupid, Love role to boot. In a roundabout way, the role of Ken is a sort of palimpsest for one of the more idiosyncratic movie-star careers in the modern day: A hunk straight from central casting who nonetheless finds himself regularly drawn to playing creeps, dopes, and weirdoes. This turn is Ryan Gosling’s masterpiece: All wide-eyed idiocy and masculine fragility, each comically flexed muscle and furrowed brow telling the tale of one of our great screen thespians.
Lead Performances
Honorable Mentions: Christopher Abbott (Sanctuary), Sakura Ando (Monster), Simone Bucio (Piaffe), Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers), Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon), Elliott Crosset Hove (Godland), Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall), Greta Lee (Past Lives), Ilinca Manolache (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World), Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer), Vivian Oparah (Rye Lane), Margot Robbie (Barbie), Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers), Emma Stone (Poor Things), Koji Yakusho (Perfect Days)
5. Teyana Taylor | A Thousand and One
Teyana Taylor gives the year’s best traditional (which is to say, Oscar-esque) lead performance in A Thousand and One, A.V. Rockwell’s luminous debut feature that ports a Douglas Sirk melodrama onto the backdrop of the changing New York City of the late 1990s and early 2000s. As Inez, a single mother with a troubled past harboring a dangerous secret, Taylor brings the passion and the fury, her whirling dervish of a turn serving as a love letter to all those who have had to make do in a system that never gave them a chance. It’s a star-making role for Taylor, and the sort of hefty, muscular turn award shows love. In the midst of the looming craziness of the season, I hope her and this fairly under-sung film can find some love along the way.
4. Franz Rogowski | Passages
One of the trickiest assignments for an actor is to play a Guy Who Sucks: A protagonist who is unlikable in the pettiest, most everyday of ways. Straight-up villains are often fun to watch, or at least riveting in the scale of their heinousness. Guys Who Suck are just exhausting and more reminiscent of that friend you’ve been ducking than anyone else. It is a balancing act for an actor, then, between conveying the extent of their mess and not overdoing things to the point of turning them into cartoons, and Franz Rogowski threads that needle with aplomb in Ira Sachs’s very sexy, very European Passages. As the selfish and ultimately pathetic Tomas, Rogowski is able to mine plenty of pathos not by pulling punches, but by showing that his character’s foibles aren’t too far from our own worst impulses. It’s a performance that is both entertaining and discomfiting, difficult yet utterly entrancing.
3. Natalie Portman | May December
After an up-and-down string of roles (including a three-year stretch without any non-MCU film roles beyond as a last-minute replacement in Lucy in the Sky) since her last Oscar-nominated role in Jackie, Natalie Portman reminds us just how good she can be with the right material in Todd Haynes’s masterful dramedy May December. As pretentious TV actress and covert sicko Elizabeth Berry, Portman plays against her usual type of virtuous, capable, and world-weary heroine, transforming herself into an duplicitous interloper whose cold war with Gracie (Julianne Moore)—whom she is meant to be researching for a film role—takes a turn for the voyeuristic and then some. If nothing else, her monologue might just be the best-acted scene of the year, and is the linchpin for the year’s best film: A tricky, intelligent exploration on the perversion, exploitation, and voyeurism that often come with entertainment and art.
2. Margaret Qualley | Sanctuary
Not that it’s stopped her from building an already-fascinating oeuvre of roles in her young career thus far, but Margaret Qualley feels like she was born in the wrong decade sometimes. Her best film work—The Nice Guys, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and now this exhilarating chamber piece from Zachary Wigon—features a particular zest and zip that take advantage of Qualley’s expressive eyes and knack for physical acting by letting her go all out and act big: An old-time movie star beamed straight from a pre-Code screwball into the modern day. For all intents and purposes, Sanctuary is a throwback to that genre dressed up in the aesthetics of an erotic thriller, complete with a battle-of-the-sexes structure, rampant physicality that blurs the lines between sensual and violent, and liberal emotional swings. It’s a perfect marriage of actor and film that Qualley knocks clean out of the park, and in a just world, she would be getting roles like this every year. Nonetheless, savor this one.
1. Michelle Williams | Showing Up
Filmed the same year as her turn as sunny free spirit Mitzi in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, Michelle Williams is almost unrecognizable from that role as longsuffering sculptor and art-school admin assistant Lizzy in Showing Up, her fourth collaboration (and first comedy) with Kelly Reichardt, one of our finest living filmmakers and someone who particularly excels at telling stories about ornery characters negotiating inhospitable situations. While an arts town in the Pacific Northwest is a far cry from Reichardt’s usual unforgiving frontier, Lizzy is under duress in her own way: Her hot water is out, she has a deadline looming, and everyone save Andre 3000’s easygoing kiln-master seems to be more focused on their own thing to give her a break.
Showing Up, then, is simply a cavalcade of quotidian problems that spiral into an understated tornado of anxiety for Lizzy, and out of that slice-of-life material, Williams builds the year’s most fully-formed character: An irritable yet well-meaning artist who has been beaten down but not beaten by the practicalities of art, and who seems compelled to create despite a world that doesn’t always receive the kind of art she makes—miniature sculptures, which could be read as a parallel to the kind of films Reichardt makes—with fully open arms. You don’t need to be an artist for that to resonate. Much like Lizzy’s porcelain figures, the beauty of this one is in the details.
Did I miss anything? Did you also enjoy these roles? Drop a comment below!