Movies I watched in 2023

Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and the very first female director of a major German orchestra.

A meeting with James Baldwin doesn't quite go according to plan for a group of presumptuous white filmmakers in this Paris-set documentary short.

Saura creates and recovers more than thirty images, drawings and photographs that he prints, manipulates, plays with and subsequently films, to produce a story which, while recreating the Spanish Civil War, could also reflect the horrors of universal conflict, seen through the eyes of a child and his surroundings.

A travelogue of Valparaiso, Chile, a city built on steep hills. Life is a constant struggle against geography. Neighbourhoods are reached by series of ramps, staircases, and funicular railway elevators. The poorest residents on the hilltops have trouble obtaining water for drinking and washing. There are community dances, a travelling circus, a race course. Boys feed the harbour sealions; a fashionable woman walks her penguin. The ever-present onshore breeze provides fresh air and an ideal environment for kite-flying. The film's second half is in colour, making the switch with the tale of the city's bloody pirate past.

Siblings building a tree house together over the course of a year. We experience the beauty and brutality of the seasons, as we follow them through their struggles and moments of joy.

A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.

In 1950s London, a humorless bureaucrat decides to take time off work to experience life after receiving a grim diagnosis.

A photo montage of Cubans filmed by Agnes Varda during her visit to Cuba in 1963. The film explores Cuban society and culture post-revolution.

A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.

A powerful New York gossip columnist gives a press agent some dirty work.

Meet a mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, reclusive cousins of Jackie O., managing to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, NY, mansion, making for an eerily ramshackle echo of the American Camelot.

A black and bloody Irish comedy about a sad train journey where an older man, whose wife has died that morning, encounters a strange and possibly psychotic young oddball....

A puritan police sergeant arrives in a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl, who the pagan locals claim never existed.

The true story of Hossain Sabzian, a cinephile who impersonated the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to convince a family they would star in his so-called new film.

The work and obsessions of director Nanni Moretti when the Iranian movie "Close Up" is scheduled to open in the movie theater he owns in Rome. Attention to details and above all a great love for cinema at its best.

An experimental short film by Stan Brakhage which combines flashing light and images.

Trixie believe the only way she can save her older sister from dying of tuberculosis is by preventing the autumn leaves from falling, so one night she steals into the garden in her nightie and fastens fallen leaves to branches with twine.

A woman struggles to find a way to live her life after the death of her husband and child.

A fairy tale that follows the relationship between man and cat.

Dorothy's a film director and a bit of a loser. One night, fueled up on Heineken, she lets loose on her script when a call from her producer kills her buzz: enough with the queer comedies, it's time to start making mainstream films. To avoid sinking to the deepest depths of despair, Dorothy seeks comfort in her favorite TV show Romy the Vampire Slayer. Unfortunately, her own demons show up.

Five assassins aboard a swiftly-moving bullet train find out that their missions have something in common.

A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Jordan White and Amy Blue, two troubled teens, pick up an adolescent drifter, Xavier Red. Together, the threesome embark on a sex-and-violence-filled journey through an America of psychos and quickie marts.

A bitingly funny coming-of-age story of a teenage cartoonist who rejects the comforts of his suburban life in a misguided quest for soul.

The movie centres around Brindsley Forde's character Blue. He fronts a reggae sound system based in South West London (Brixton). The film captures the trials and tribulations of young black youths in troubled London in the early eighties.