The Numbing Sameness of Year-End List Season
What happened to the spirit of discovery?
Don’t you just hate end of year list season? I don’t know what it’s like for dance critics or art critics, or for people who love to go out to new restaurants or get really excited about like, apps … and I only get to some degree what it’s like for music and literary people, but as a film critic December is a drag. The same fifteen movies that have already been discussed endlessly, all year, many of which can’t in reality hold up to even a few hours’ scrutiny and were consciously or unconsciously made for easy consumption and easy praise, these films which by year’s end have become so dissolved, absorbed, and thoroughly incorporated into the cultural bloodstream nevertheless get hauled out again and assembled into different orders in the form of institutional critics’ lists.
You could write your own now without even thinking. Oppenheimer, Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, May December, Poor Things, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall … it wearies the soul and agitates the mind to bear witness to such a withered spirit of discovery among the figures positioned as authorities on the subject. Then again, is discovery necessarily a part of the job? The answer varies from publication to publication, but for some, and for some sensible reasons, the answer is no. Institutional critics have their readerships, and the job is to serve them informed analyses of each week’s big releases. Some make time to spotlight local screenings and under-seen streaming picks, and to advocate for undistributed and unreleased films screened at festivals and outside of the traditional theatrical circuit. But they are not obligated to do so. Yet many other critics, especially those at native digital publications with no attached print subscriber base, are under no such obligation, and nevertheless stick to what comes through their inbox, what gets thrown up online, and what premieres at the theater down the street.
The result at the end of each year is what feels like a bland, stifling consensus punctuated by occasional pockets of unique thought. I wanted to see if that feeling is actually borne out by ~the data, so I read the top lists at 15 major publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Variety, The Guardian, the Atlantic, etc, totaling over 200 picks. The films I mentioned above, plus Ferrari, Maestro, The Holdovers, and American Fiction show up practically everywhere. The remainder of picks comprise of a smattering of movies that are less universally liked but still belong to the cultural bloodstream category — Showing Up, Asteroid City, Priscilla, The Boy and the Heron, Dream Scenario, Eileen — and then some others that are even less universal and less known, but if you are a film lover or critic and read about this stuff all the time, might as well all be Scorseses — Monster, Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros, Fallen Leaves, A Thousand and One, The Taste of Things.
Of all the picks across all the lists, I’d say about 50% are that core group of 10-12 consensus picks, 40% come from the less picked but still known categories, and the remaining 10% are wildcards. But that 10% aren’t odd, unique, under-seen movies that critics dug to discover. They are for the most part still films from the less picked but still known categories. They were merely unpopular, so only picked once or twice, and by virtue of their rarity across all lists stand out. I’m talking about Skinamarink, The Burial, Dreamin’ Wild, Fair Play, Joyland, etc.
I had an assumption that every big year-end list is basically all the same movies in different arrangements. The Results of My Research indicated, as I said, that this assumption was both right and wrong. Right in that it’s mostly the same movies in different arrangements, but there are enough one-off picks to take that claim off the scale. When I list out all the movies included on ranking I read, that list is long. Because the core group of films that show up everywhere is small, the wild cards and lesser-picked segment of the list looks staggering. Over 100 different movies across just 15 lists. By definition that’s variety. A reflection of a vibrant critical culture in which all corners of the filmmaking landscape are being thoroughly explored and assessed. Yet 2023’s best-of long list inspires the same numb pain, the dullness of dreary sameness inspired by each list in miniature. Films like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Oppenheimer, and Little Richard: I Am Everything have wildly divergent narrative and aesthetic properties. They were produced on different economic scales for different audiences, set different goals for themselves and achieve them in disparate ways. So why when they appear next to each other on a list do they feel like different swatches of the same color? Variations on the same theme?
The problem with year-end lists, I realize after scanning them over and over again, is not the specific films being picked, but what kind of films seem to be eligible for selection in the first place. The movies that end up on these lists each year can mostly be seen easily in a theater or on a streaming service. Some you can only see if you live in L.A. or New York. Some only critics granted international film festival passes can see. The vast majority come to viewers via a distribution deal and thus get some form of marketing. Only an infinitesimally tiny quantity of the films included among all the major lists this year constitute real discoveries. Films that that the critics who picked them clearly sought out, whether by scouring the depths of the internet, attending local screenings of unreleased or WIP films, making time for screenings in the experimental and non-competitive sections at festivals, or some other means. Films like Dwayne LeBlanc’s Civic (picked by Richard Brody), the essay film The Future Tense (picked by the folks at The Guardian), Pretty Red Dress, (picked by Richard Lawson), or Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s Stonewalling (picked by Manohla Dargis).
So the problem is that the movies loved by critics are too easy to see? Not exactly. Many critics live in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Austin, and other metropolises that have thriving independent film scenes. Yet you almost never see the hyper-small, hyper-cheap, often extraordinarily energetic and unique films that play at very easy-to-access local venues on these lists. Well, many year-end best lists have an “And Where to Watch Them” addendum that acts a selection criterion. Yet these same lists frequently feature unreleased and thus unwatchable festival films like Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, which doesn’t release until March, or Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, which doesn’t even have U.S. distribution yet. Plus, spending a ton of money to fly halfway around the world and queue all day outside theaters at festivals isn’t exactly an easy way to watch new films. And further, you almost never see films that screen in the experimental sections at these festivals on these lists, like Cannes ACID or TIFF’s Wavelengths, and they’re just as easy to see as the Glazers, Wenders, and Triets. Additionally, made-for-TV movies are some of the easiest to see films out there, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a year-end list. There are finally hundreds of international films that release on streaming and rental platforms each year that take just a couple extra clicks to access, and this year’s lists were absolutely deprived of international picks. Across the 15 lists I culled from, which added up to over 150 films from 200+ total picks, these were the films that represented the world outside of the United States and Europe: Bhutan (The Monk and the Gun), Tunisia (Four Daughters), Mexico (Tótem), Japan (Love Life, The Boy and the Heron, Monster, Stonewalling), Argentina (The Delinquents), Iran (Holy Spider), Pakistan (Joyland), South Korea (Return to Seoul), and Chile (The Eternal Memory).
The problem then isn’t one of access, but imagination. There is a lack of curiosity about the expanded world of filmmaking as it truly appears and operates, not as the steady intake of PR screening links and invites that stack up in our inboxes would have us believe it appears and operates. Most filmmakers are not going to get a $150 million budget from Warner Bros. Most filmmakers are not even going to raise $15k on Kickstarter. Most films are not made in America. Most films do not end up on Netflix or Apple TV+. Most films are not the beneficiaries of marketing campaigns. Most films will not find you. You have to find them! It is not too much to ask the self-appointed tastemakers, analysands, and stewards of contemporary film culture who have the editorial latitude to dig deeper into the actual berth of each year’s new releases. The further you get away from the studio slop pipe and experience films being made in completely different economic, cultural, and creative contexts the more that films like Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Killers of The Flower Moon actually all start to look the same, anyway. The American studio system has its grammar just like the made-for-TV space, the made-for-streaming space, and each region’s indie scenes do. Do I feel ludicrous putting Doug Campbell’s Nanny Dearest next to The Zone of Interest on my own list? No, honestly, because I wouldn’t watch a film like Glazer’s the same way I’d watch a film like TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, and I’ve watched enough Lifetime movies to appreciate what a breakthrough Nanny Dearest is for the format. So why does the latter not even enter the field of vision of the critic, but the former made several year-end rankings?
Curiosity, imagination, and effort. You have to not only be able to imagine a world beyond your own immediate interests and access, but be curious about it. And then you have to make the effort to engage with it. Build up a taste for it and begin to discern what’s superlative from what’s standard. Of course an enormous amount of effort was put into excavating the hidden depths of the big films that came out this year. And many of the big films are worth putting effort into. Many wonderful pieces have been written about films like The Zone of Interest, Passages, and Barbie. But assessment and analysis are only one part of the job. Or at least they should be.
Institutional film criticism is missing the zest for discovery that exists elsewhere online, in person at thoughtful exhibition spaces, and in work in publications like In Review Online, Cinema Scope, Sight & Sound, MUBI Notebook, The Servant, and more. Every day I’m witness to the robust and dynamic sense of excitement around the discovery of older films online. New restorations, re-releases, fresh commentaries and analyses, an unearthed film reel or shitty rip on effedupmovies or rarefilmm. Why does this spirit not extend to new releases? Have we really — we, the self-positioned authorities on worthwhile cinema — become like the floating bodies in Up, parked at the trough like livestock content to sample whatever the factory wants us to taste? I encountered tons of fascinating lists this year through informal means — on Twitter, Reddit, and in conversation with friends and peers. And I know there are plenty of critics who dug deep in their watching this year and produced fascinating, stimulating lists to match. Just look at Laura Staab, Ashley Clark, and Jordan Cronk’s submissions to the Sight & Sound best of 2023 poll. But with the exception of the BFI, why does the spirit of discovery feel withered at the center of critical discourse?
I would like to recommend that we all try a little harder this year. And I mean all of us. If I’m honest about my top ten, it bores me too. Saint Omer, May December, R.M.N, The Zone of Interest… Yawn! Film festival movies!!! There are dozens, hundreds of films from all corners of the globe and internet I could have watched this year instead of the crap I let Film Comment tell me was worth my time. And of course it was worth my time! But we are film critics. Our jobs cannot just be about assessing film after film brought to us on little silver platters by studios and elite programmers. Our jobs cannot just be about assessing, period. They have to be about discovery too. We cannot reserve our awe and excitement for the watching and consideration of films alone, we have to channel it into discovery. Why? Because it cannot be this boring again next year.
