Cavalcade of Awesome

So.  Beginning of the year and my favorite movies countdown.  We meet again.

This is my 17th year making this list, guys.  How is that even possible?!  As always, I’m keeping up with my movie watching throughout the year on my Letterboxd account.  Check me out there to see more reviews!

So, on to my list.  Rules are like my books, only movies new to me in 2023 are eligible.  Normally, starting Jan 1 through whenever I post this article, I put a moratorium on 2023 movies that are new to me.  I don’t watch them.  I have to wait until I’m done with this article.  However, this year, I did actually watch a few new 2023 movie that I hadn’t watched within the calendar year of 2023.  So I’m trying new things.  Look at me, all growed up.

First, I’ll do a list of my favorite movies released in 2023.  Then, possibly, depending on how things go, I’ll do a second list of my favorite movies I watched for the first time in 2023.  Those can be from any year.  But in this article I’m focusing on 2023 released movies and a few stats from Letterboxd.

So let’s see what my favorite things to watch in 2023 were. This was a tough decision to make. There were three big tentpole releases that could have made it into this list, but I made a decision to nudge them out and do a couple other movies I felt needed the exposure.

Here are my top 5 favorite movies of 2023. I got most of my images and links from Wikipedia.

Barbie – I don’t know what I expected here, but I did not expect *this*.  It’s lovely.  It’s hilarious.  It’s thought provoking.  I was already getting a major man crush on Ryan Gosling and this just furthered that cause.  It’s amazing what Greta Gerwig did with this movie.  I love what it wanted to say, I love how it said it.  Just a wonderful movie and if pressed, I’d probably almost call this my favorite movie of the year.  Almost, this is a tight top 5.

Spider-man: Across the Spiderverse – Man, they managed to do it again.  The first one was such a masterpiece, I’m like, how are they going to follow that up?  And they managed to do it by making almost every frame of the movie a work of art unto itself.  The way they have art styles blending through the movie and even within one scene, it’s breathtaking.  And they brought in one of the more interesting villains, Spot, and made him crazy and weird and totally awesome.  I can’t wait to see the final installment.

Three Musketeers: Part I – D’artagnan – This was the movie that benefitted from my new rule this year where I could watch movies from 2023 that I didn’t get to before Dec 31 and it could still count towards this list.  I’m a big fan of the Alexander Dumas novel, I read it in college.  And I love all of the adaptations I’ve seen of it.  A particular favorite is the Disney version from 1993 with Chris O’Donnell, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, Oliver Platt, and Tim Curry.  Anyway, this version is not only an excellent adaptation of the novel, but it’s a great movie with amazing sets and costumes, and the cast they got is KILLER.  I thoroughly enjoyed this and look forward to Part II, which doesn’t drop until December, unfortunately.

Air – I’m really getting personal in this list.  You’ll notice neither Fast X nor John Wick 4 have shown up yet.  Air hits every kind of button I have.  It’s a “behind the scenes of a bit pop cultural event.  It’s about the 80s NBA.  It has Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck in a fun role as Phil Knight.  This scratches all the itches for me and it’s a great movie.  I watched it twice last year.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves – Again, I’m picking the movies that entertained me the most here.  This movie looked good, but man oh man, this was better than even I thought it was going to be.  I love the humor.  I love the awesome cast.  The world is wonderful.  The easter eggs for the D&D cartoon were a salve to my battered heart as it’s one of my fav Saturday morning cartoons.  They need sequels to this.  NOW.

There you go.  I did it.  I picked 5 movies to be my favorites this year.  Like I mentioned, that was hard this year.  I had a lot of good choices.  Fast X, John Wick 4, and Mission Impossible 7 all could have been in this list.  I only didn’t include them because I’ve included iterations of these franchises in my list before.  These movies are a given.  I’m of course going to like them.  The above movies I loved and there was no guarantee that I was going to love any of them (well, maybe Spider-man).

Let’s take a look at some of my movie watching stats from my account over on Letterboxd.

Here’s a graph of the number of films I watched throughout the year broken down by week.  My overall total was 233 movies watched, which is exactly the total I got last year.  Weird.  That’s 4.5 movies per week.  My highest weekly total of movies watched in 2023 was 12.  It happened the week of Oct 23-29.  That was me finishing out some Halloween watches.  Next highest total was 10 movies in a week, and then 9 movies.

Here is the list of actors that I watched the most movies of this year. I’m in the middle of an Elvis filmography marathon so that’s why Elvis is way out in front with 16 movies watched.  Seth Green seems an odd #2, but we watched all the Austin Powers movies with the kids as well as a few other of his movies randomly.  Courtney Cox and Roger Jackson are there because I did a Scream franchise marathon with the kids.  We watched all 6 of them.  I also rewatched Mission Impossible 3-6 (Tom Cruise) as well as watching all of Bruce Lee’s martial arts movies.  It’s interesting to see who pops up based on your watching habits.

This is the top 10 list of directors I watched this year.  Again, you see where marathons shape these lists.  Norman Taurog directed Elvis’ movies.  Wes Craven directed the majority of the Scream films.  I watched a couple of the Zorro films, and Mr Deters and Mrs Wermers-Skelton directed the Prep and Landing shorts which we watched over the holidays.

According to my milestones, the first movie I watched in 2023 was See How They Run, a murder mystery starring Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan on January 1.  The last movie I watched in 2023 was Gran Turismo on Dec 29. Surprising I didn’t watch any movies between Dec 29 and Dec 31 last year.  You can see my other milestones there, the 100th movie I watched in 2023 was Air.

Anyway, that about wraps up my 2023 movies list.  I’m kicking around the idea of doing a few “honorable mentions” articles.  Talk about some TV shows I watched, and maybe some other movies and books that I read last year that might be worth talking about.

This entry was posted on February 8, 2024 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Blog Series, Movie Board, movies with tags Movie Board, movies, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.