Oscar nominated films include “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” which also distinguished themselves at the box office. That might be the most cogent takeaway from 2023, a year that was rarely at a loss for excitement, on- and off-screen.
Nolan and Gerwig weren’t the only filmmakers who swung for the fences in 2023: Bradley Cooper created a kaleidoscopic portrait of Leonard Bernstein inwhich left audiences stunned not just by its intellectual inquiry into the structures of oppression but by its raw emotional power. These movies proved that there’s still room in cinema for ambition, imagination and recklessly piratical risk-taking.
We’ve had our share of titillation, too: Emma Stone’s child-woman character in “Poor Things” “furious jumping” from bed to bed in a lusty journey of self-discovery feels simultaneously liberated and creepily voyeuristic; the lesbian sexuality at the center ofand “Love Lies Bleeding” owes as much to raunchy B-movie pulp as to recognizable real life. Barry Keoghan’s pathologically seductive antihero inwas so pansexual that he even got it on with a tub of cold bathwater .