Best & Worst of 2023
Let’s take a quick look back at the best films to hit Hong Kong screens in ’23 – and a couple of the worst.
Remember when we said 2022 was unremarkable? We take that back. With the exception of a few unexpected hits (Barbenheimer, anyone?) 2023 was a damp squib for movies – and that doesn’t even take into consideration the cookie-cutter flavourlessness Netflix calls filmmaking; I’ll burn incense for your recovery if you watched Heart of Stone, Believer 2 or Rebel Moon. Streamers stocking up on content (they don’t even call them “movies”) aside, true creativity, thematic daring and intellectual curiosity were in short supply in 2023, as was halfway decent, witless action. The year was so unremarkable we had to stretch the idea of “this year” and put a couple of items on the docket that aren’t out here. Yet. Fingers crossed Godzilla Minus One eventually shows up. And no, there’s nothing local here either. That’s for another list… — DEK
👍 ❤️ 👏 THE GOOD…
07
You know some goofy piece o’ junk had to crack the top seven (long story), because every year has them, and every year the fun movies – the first function of movies – get short shrift. There was a fair amount of fun in ’23 and the most fun came early in the year and didn’t get nearly enough respect. Nerds Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley gave us Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and showed everyone how game adaptations are supposed to be done. Funny AF, reverent of the source material without being exclusionary, and unapologetically entertaining, D&D:HaT is blessed with a comically deft cast led by “The Best Chris” Pine, suitably silly VFX, fabulous Easter eggs for D&Ders, an awesome cameo by Bradley Cooper (!) and a perfectly structured script that pays off its jokes. Chef’s kiss. Watching Regé-Jean Page walk straight is everything.
06
Adele Lim’s Joy Ride deserved way more attention and way more cash than it actually got. This shit’s hilarious. To call it the “Asian American Girls Trip” is reductive. It is a road trip flick. It is four girlfriends – played to perfection by Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu – who aren’t white. It does have sexy hijinks, in this case ones you’ll never be able to unsee. But Joy Ride is comedy that’s uproariously funny precisely because of its specificity. It transcends gender, race and sexuality thanks to its authenticity (courtesy of a screenplay by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao), and the effortless balance of broad jokes with culturally attuned observations is welcoming rather than a barrier. You’ll get more from the film if you’re an Asian-American woman, but you’d have to be dead not to find it funny at all. ’Cause this shit’s hilarious.
05
Wu Ershan’s modern adaptation of Xu Zhonglin’s Ming Dynasty novel Investiture of the Gods, Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is exactly that: Modern. Anchored by slinky, horny performances from Fei Xiang (or Kris Phillips), newcomer Narana Erdyneeva, and a greased up one by Yu Shi, Kingdom of Storms is a perfect blend of epic fantasy and classic literature that, like D&D (see: #7), is respectful of its roots but not afraid to let loose and have some fun. There’s a glossy tightness to the film that demonstrates its ambition to be China’s Lord of the Rings – that series’ producer Barrie M Osborne is shepherding this one too – and it has plenty of material to draw on. It’s a martial soap opera but so what? Whether it’s a duology or a trilogy is anyone’s guess but either way, we can’t wait for part two.
04
Yeah, yeah, it’s technically from 2022, but Jafar Panahi’s No Bears hit screens here in April, so it counts. Films about filmmakers dissecting films as a way to reflect on everything from art to politics to identity are a dime a dozen; directors have been doing it since Fellini made 8 1/2, probably before that. But Panahi’s film sneaks up on you, deceptively goofy and footloose to start before turning down a dead serious path towards an examination of the cost of art, the role of art and the responsibility of the artist when confronted with oppression. It’s all very meta, with Panahi playing a filmmaker called Panahi, living and working (by remote) in semi-exile in a small village on the Iran-Turkey border. His inadvertent embroilment with a young couple trying to elope is the tip of an infuriating, heartbreaking iceberg. Easily Panahi’s best, most accessible film.
03
It sucks if you missed Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in IMAX, but it’s going to rack up a boatload of Oscar nominations. With Dune: Part Two not eating up all the IMAX space until March, fingers crossed it gets a brief re-release, because that’s truly the only way to see it. And before anyone gets their panties in a twist: No, Nolan doesn’t acknowledge the Japanese POV about the A-bomb. No, Nolan doesn’t acknowledge the Native and homesteader POVs about displacement at Los Alamos. Both of those are giant stories that demand their own three-hour epics, and neither is what Oppenheimer was ever going to be about. Laser focused despite the runtime and amazingly better in the last act, after the Manhattan Project test – yo, Robert Downey Jr is not just Iron Man – the film is the perfect alchemy of Nolan’s emotional iciness and technical mastery. Do we need to say Cillian Murphy crushed it as JRO?
02
When people argue about how some filmmakers do the same shit again and again and again (looking at you Wes Anderson) you can realistically put Martin Scorsese in that group. He dabbles (Silence, The Age of Innocence), not terrifically, but in Killers of the Flower Moon he manages to dabble (a Native American story in a neo-Western) as well as lean into his well-trod crime thriller strengths. It’s usually hard to justify a three-and-a-half hour running time, but if there’s a scene in KotFM that doesn’t need to be there, I can’t find it. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are fine, but Jesse Plemons does humble-threaten so well it makes you tingle, and Lily Gladstone carries the whole thing on her shoulders as a woman facing down genocide while in a bad marriage she wishes wasn’t. And how do you say “redefining the true story epilogue”? Like this.
01
We know. It’s not out here yet (February 29, baby!), but Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is far and away the best film of ’23. Why? Okay, how about lush, evocative photography by Robbie Ryan (Marriage Story)? Or tremendously imaginative production design by Shona Heath and James Price that Wes Anderson could only dream of? No, no…incredible, darkly hilarious performances by Emma Stone (I don’t even like her that much), Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef and Willem Dafoe? A Frankenstein-esque feminist fable about self-determination that picks Barbie up by the throat, shakes it furiously, slams it to the ground and flicks a cigarette at it? Poor Things needs to be experienced in a cinema, but suffice it to say, Lanthimos strikes again. It’s not for everyone, but nothing – nothing – touches its entertaining creativity this year. Perfection.
… AND THE BAD 🥴 🤢 🤮
03
Look, making a bad film is a hard. No one wants to trash anything that got as far as finished. That’s a feat unto itself. And no one sets out to make a steaming pile, but WTF is with Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania? Is this when Marvel’s admittedly paradigm shifting MCU imploded? Before shitting all over the over-worked, underpaid VFX crews marching to the beat of Disney’s corporate timetable – not a filmmaker’s – or any writers whose work is likely picked over by Marvel boss Kevin Feige, it should be noted the 26th? 27th?…31st!! MCU film feels like a creatively bankrupt, sloppily produced piece of product engineered to serve stock prices above all else (US$91 on 23 Dec). Plus, it’s boring, nonsensical, and has a dumbass floating head. Poor Corey Stoll. Only Fast X is as shameless, but at least it had Jason Momoa in full ham mode.
02
There was very little worse than Shugo Fujii’s Onpaku this year. Half-assed yet overstuffed. Pretentious yet limned by turpitude. Poorly acted but with ALL the acting. Such a hot mess from jump. The Japan-Hong Kong co-production clearly had delusions of greatness. It was loaded up with Dutch angles, alternating film speeds, fluttery camera work meant to signal “depth”, mood lighting that was simply so dark as to be incomprehensible, and a murderers row of characters so confounding we scratched our heads so hard our hair come out in clumps. There are reviewers out there who would defend this crime against humanity as subversive and multi-layered and some kind of genius reinterpretation of regional folklore, but they’d be wrong. It’s a low-rent B-horror movie that trades on (crappy) shock value, delicate racism and misogyny. Fuck this movie.
01
Very little worse than Onpaku except for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. The film had a secret preview screening in Hong Kong ahead of its planned March release date, which was abruptly cancelled at the last minute. No idea why that could have happened. Shocking! What’s more shocking is that this hunk of junk got a release date at all, anywhere, and that director Rhys Frake-Waterfield got the go-ahead for a damn sequel. Baffling from minute one, WtP:BaH isn’t so-bad-it’s-good. It’s just bad. Inept on every level of production and wholly devoid of a coherent story – how five grown-ass women and their luggage fit into a Mini Cooper straight-up hurts the brain – the film is a clinic in concept over execution. Total garbage.