1. How important is it to you to keep up with new movies, and how did you fare in that regard in 2023? (Assume that all new movies—streaming or theatrical—count here.)
STEVEN: I am always at least a year behind, although I’ve done better the last few years, since my wife and I began going to the movies once a week (which results in seeing more new movies). Basically, it’s not important to me to keep up… there are too many “classics” I haven’t seen yet, I’m more likely to watch a Renoir I missed than check out the latest box office smash. As I type this, I have seen 31 movies from 2023, and as I say, that is a much larger number than I used to get.
PHIL: I don’t know how important it once was to me, but I did make an effort to see as many of the year’s noteworthy (whatever that means) films as I could by the end of every year, with an eye towards drawing up a Top 10 for my home page. But only what I thought I might like; if a film didn’t appeal to me, it didn’t matter how many year-end lists it made, I skipped it… Holy Motors (from 2012) would be an example. That would spill over into the new year, and I’d still be catching up through January and February. After COVID, though, I pretty much gave that project up altogether, both the keeping up and compiling a Top 10. I doubt if I saw 15 new films this year.
2. Favourite movie of 2023 and why?
STEVEN: As I type this: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Endlessly inventive, fun to watch, and especially surprising since it’s outside of my usual taste preferences.
PHIL: Two that were pretty close: Showing Up and Past Lives. They were just good, quiet mood pieces. My almost-2023 favourite that I actually saw in 2023 was the Robert Caro/Robert Gottleib documentary Turn Every Page, about their 50-year working relationship and attempt to finish Caro’s multi-volume LBJ biography before one of them died. They didn’t.
3. What were some other personal movie highlights of 2023? What particular moments, performances, etc. really stuck with you?
PHIL: Some performances I liked: Natalie Portman in May December, Jesse Plemons in Killers of the Flower Moon, Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer, Greta Lee and Teo Yoo in Past Lives, Matt Damon and Viola Davis in Air.
STEVEN: Barbie was a cultural phenomenon I could get behind. I was a bit behind the times, but 2023 was when I gave myself over completely to my Jessie Buckley crush.
4. What were your personal disappointments?
STEVEN: I looked forward to The Royal Hotel, since I liked director Kitty Green’s first feature, The Assistant. But The Royal Hotel was mostly a letdown.
PHIL: There’s never a shortage of those, although the level of disappointment diminishes every year–I used to invest a lot of anticipation and expectations in directors who’d made films I love, now disappointment is the norm, so it almost doesn’t even register as disappointment. Anyway: Killers of the Flower Moon, Priscilla, The Holdovers, The Killer, Asteroid City.
5. Barbie/Oppenheimer: As a phenomenon—as movies that prompt people to talk about movies—did this peculiar moment speak to you in any way?
PHIL: I’m always happy when movies are being talked about like they were in the ‘70s, but I wasn’t personally caught up in that, no. I liked Oppenheimer, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever see Barbie—Greta Gerwig’s participation is the only reason I won’t say for sure that I’ll never see it.
STEVEN: As a marketing tool, I thought Barbenheimer was pretty good, but I didn’t care about it. In the end, I liked both movies a lot, but I’m far more invested in Barbie, just as I am far more invested in Greta Gerwig than I am in Christopher Nolan, although I like him fine, too.
6. How closely would you say your own tastes in current movies hew to critical consensus—insofar as there is such a thing? If it helps, consider this question in the context of 2023 critics polls at IndieWire and Sight & Sound.
PHIL: Not at all. It hasn’t for years—although, just as a matter of course, there are always some acclaimed films I like.
STEVEN: [see #7]
7. Speaking of critics, do you regularly read any particular critics on new movies? Who do you go to for recommendations, or to conduct imaginary conversations or arguments with about movies?
STEVEN: This and #6 are two versions of the same question for me. I rely greatly on critics. If someone tells me to watch a movie, I will… it’s a good way to expand my horizons. But when I’m picking for myself, I look at best-of lists. I use Metacritic a lot, because I prefer to be as spoiler-free as possible in advance, so I can look at the admittedly goofy Metacritic “score” and decide what to see without actually knowing much about the movie. As for whether my taste matches critical consensus, sure, but specific to the current year, since I’m usually behind, it takes me a while to catch up. So I have seen 5 of the top 10 movies on the IndieWire list, but ask me again at this time next year, and I’ll likely have seen 8 or 9 or 10.
PHIL: Other than looking in on Armond White’s latest outrage via a link on the I Love Everything message board, I don’t read anyone anymore since David Edelstein stopped reviewing regularly (or at least since I lost track of him after his Last Tango mini-controversy). I do still wonder “What would Kael have thought?” regularly.
8. Do you see more new movies in the theatre or at home (on your TV or computer)? And what are the determining factors?
PHIL: I think I still see more than half in theatres. One of the two rep theatres within an hour of me looks like it may go under, so next year I expect more than half will be at home.
STEVEN: We go to a theater once a week, although occasionally we’ll watch at home. But as I type this, I have seen 183 movies this year, and do the math: if I’ve seen 31 “new” movies this year, I’ve seen 152 “old” movies. The majority of the movies I watch are older. At home, if I have a choice, I’ll watch in 4K on the TV. I have a big screen for the computer, but a much bigger screen for the TV, so that’s where I watch most of them.
9. What were some of your memorable experiences in 2023 with older movies? (I’ll leave it up to each of you to define “older”; pre-’20s at a minimum, I’d suggest.)
STEVEN: In 2023, I revisited several of my favorites from years past. The highlights include The Rules of the Game (1939), Double Indemnity (1944), Rio Bravo (1959), Walkabout (1971), Godfathers 1/2 (1972-4), E.T. (1982), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Children of Men (2006), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Red Cliff 1/2 (2008-9), The Shape of Water (2017), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). My favorites of those are Rules of the Game, Rio Bravo, Walkabout, and the Godfathers. I should mention at least once that I can only answer these questions because of Letterboxd.
PHIL: Sorry to be a downer, but I don’t know if I had any (the Caro documentary was 2021, so not what you’re talking about). Leaving Toronto has a lot to do with that.
10. Now that we’re a couple years or so past peak COVID (or anyway, of social distancing), do you feel that fraught historical moment changed anything in your own movie watching habits? Or has it been back to pre-COVID movie-watching-as-usual? As a moviegoer (or movie watcher) do you feel there is a perceptible then (pre-COVID) vs. now (post-COVID)?
STEVEN: We will still occasionally postpone a theater movie if it looks too crowded, but otherwise, we’re back to normal. We are also extremely vaccinated, for what it’s worth.
PHIL: Huge changes, although with COVID and my move from Toronto to a small town two hours away happening simultaneously, it’s hard to know for sure which had a bigger impact. In any event, I see fewer movies, fewer new movies, and in general am just less engaged.
Tonight is a perfect illustration of then vs. now. It’s 7:45 on a Friday night, and at 9:15, the rep theatre in Waterloo is screening Eyes Wide Shut. How many times have I seen that? Seven or eight, probably. But if this were five years ago and I were still in Toronto, I wouldn’t have given the matter a second thought: I’d be headed downtown right now to see Eyes Wide Shut. I could still make it down tonight—I’m in St. Marys, about an hour west of Waterloo—but decided to stay home. There’s only about 15 minutes difference in travelling time between going from the west end of Toronto to, say, the Lightbox and the time I’d spend in the car tonight, but the drive seems much longer now, and the distance bears that out: 65 km now, 18 km then (I checked). It’s country-road and medium-sized-highway driving now (scenic in the daytime, just dark and empty at night) vs. city driving down the Lakeshore then (much nicer at night). Also, a factor I didn’t even mention, is how little energy I have as I get older. And I won’t even get into a personal issue I have with an employee at this particular theatre… the point is, I talk myself out of more screenings now than I actually follow through on. I’ll instead stay in and watch two or three episodes of The Office—I’m as smitten by Pam the receptionist as I used to be by Katherine Ross and Cybill Shepherd.
11. It was just over a year ago that the latest chapter of Sight & Sound‘s Greatest Films of All-Time poll was released, with the surprise #1 showing of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. What are your thoughts on that selection, and on the results of the poll generally speaking, which clearly signalled a sea change in the electorate (and thus the results)?
PHIL: I wrote a lot about this at the time… I thought it was really interesting (like Jeanne Dielman itself is really interesting) and somewhat silly. And I don’t think it will be the #1 film in 2032, if the poll (and the magazine, and films, and the world—and me)—still exists. There’s a guy—I think it’s a guy—on the message board I mentioned who was all giddy over Jeanne Dielman’s #1 placing, and he seemed to be genuinely convinced that the world had permanently changed and that we could now start to forget about The Godfather and such relics of the past.
STEVEN: I would not put Jeanne Dielman at the top of my list, but I was delighted to see it atop the S&S poll. It’s about time. I was an English professor at a prestigious university that emphasized The Canon, which frustrated me no end. The Canon was changing by then, but I wanted to blow it up. Over the years, I taught dozens of novels, and the majority of them were outside The Canon. Of course, now Jeanne Dielman is canon, but I can live with that.
12. You are given a ballot for the next Sight & Sound poll: What is your own criteria for the list you submit? Is it merely personal favourites or would other factors come into play?
STEVEN: If you remember back a dozen or so years, when Phil, Jeff Pike, and I did a 50 Faves Film deal on Facebook, I obsessed about the difference between “favorite” and “best.” And, just as I did when choosing books in English classes, I felt obliged to vary my list of 50… I didn’t want all of the movies to be by white male directors. I would still think that way if submitting a list. But I would never include a movie I didn’t like.
Again I call on Letterboxd. At the time of the 2022 S&S poll, I made my own top 10. Here it is, in alphabetical order: The Beaches of Agnes, Black Panther, Bonnie and Clyde, Do the Right Thing, The Godfather: Part II, In the Mood for Love, Jeanne Dielman, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Rules of the Game, Stories We Tell.
PHIL: Personal favourites, although I would, to be honest, try to list a few films that I know almost no one else would list—something like 20th Century Women or The Perks of Being a Wallflower. And I’d list a couple of TV shows, Mad Men and The Sopranos.
13. Parting thoughts on the subject of movies c. 2023, or snappy answers to questions I didn’t ask but you wish I had?
STEVEN: Great movies are always being made, you just have to look for them. I’m not someone who thinks Marvel or other franchises signal the End of Cinema. If you don’t like them, watch something else.
A few top 10s that I haven’t already listed above.
–Top 10 of 2023, with the caveat that there are lots I haven’t seen, in order of how much I liked them: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives, Barbie, The Boy and the Heron, Godzilla Minus One, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Bottoms, Joy Ride.
–Movies I wish more people had seen: Performance (1970), The Rapture (1991), Lantana (2001).
–Movies I wish I hadn’t seen: Stardust Memories (1980), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Forrest Gump (1994), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), I Am Sam (2001).
PHIL: “Wes Anderson? Glad you asked… he’s become an embarrassment.”
RockCritics.com 
That is the single greatest GIF ever.