A BAKER'S COVEN: I haven't seen enough movies from 2023 to write a good best-of-the-year list. Fortunately, I've got a while to catch up: The tradition here at The Perpetual Three-Dot Column is to list the best movies of a decade ago, two decades ago, and so on, voyaging backward to the dawn of cinema or til my film literacy peters out, whichever comes first.

When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 2013, it gave its Best Picture award to 12 Years a Slave, a movie I avoided for a long time—all the talk about how "important" and "necessary" it was had me expecting one of those films that's more interested in being good for you than in actually being good. I shouldn't have waited: It turned out to be a riveting story about the ways a system like slavery poisons everyone involved with it. It made it into my top 20. But it isn't at #1:

1. Her
Written and directed by Spike Jonze

Between this and the picture at #3, this lineup of movies has more interesting things to say about artificial intelligence than 90% of the past year's A.I. hot takes.

2. The Wind Rises
Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki

"Humanity has always dreamt of flying, but the dream is cursed. My aircraft are destined to become tools for slaughter."

3. Computer Chess
Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

At first, you might mistake this for a documentary. At first.

4. Inside Llewyn Davis
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

"If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it's a folk song."

5. Enemy
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Written by Javier Gullón, from a novel by José Saramago

2013 wasn't just a good year for A.I.: This and the item at #9 made it a rich time for doppelgängers.

6. Ida
Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski
Written by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz

A road trip across an early-'60s Polish landscape, haunted by a not-so-distant Holocaust and by the even closer crimes of the Stalin era.

7. Stoker
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Written by Wentworth Miller

Shadow of another doubt.

8. The East
Directed by Zal Batmanglij
Written by Batmanglij and Brit Marling

Brit Marling specializes in sharply written screenplays about tight-knit cells that dwell in their own micro-realities—the sort of group that outsiders might consider a "cult." But that's not to say the viewer always ends up siding with the outsiders.

9. Orphan Black
Written by Graeme Manson, Karen Walton, Alex Levine, Will Pascoe, and Tony Elliott
Directed by John Fawcett, T.J. Scott, David Frazee, Grant Harvey, Brett Sullivan, and Ken Girotti

This science-fiction series about assassins, clones, and conspiracies would later fade in quality; I never even finished the final season. But if you treat this year's episodes as an (almost) self-contained miniseries, you won't have to worry about that.

10. The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Terence Winter, from a memoir by Jordan Belfort

Early in this movie, a Forbes exposé of the title character's misdeeds ends up serving as an advertisement for the article's target, with a flood of young brokers begging to work for him. On some level, Scorsese must have realized that this stock-fraud Goodfellas would do something similar for Wall Street. But look: We respect talent here, and the quaalude/Popeye sequence alone is great enough to earn this movie a spot in the top 20. The infomercial arrest boosts it into the top 10.

Honorable mentions:

11. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
12. The Americans (Joe Weisberg, Joel Fields)
13. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
14. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)
15. Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry)
16. Frozen (Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck)
17. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)
18. Twenty Feet from Stardom (Morgan Neville)
19. American Reflexxx (Alli Coates)
20. Skinner Box Head (Sholim)

That item at #12 is a TV show, so the names in parentheses after it are showrunners, not directors. And that item at #20 is a GIF, so the name in parentheses after it is a GIF artist. For years I swore that one day I'd put a GIF on one of these lists, and now I have. We're throwing all the rules out the window, baby!

Of the films of 2013 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.

posted by Jesse 12:07 PM

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