all the movies i watched in 2023 

I’m lucky enough to have a three-screen independent art-house cinema located within about a 20-minute drive from my home, so I’m familiar with most of the films you discussed. “The Boy and the Heron” has been playing in town for a couple weeks now. It’s being offered in original Japanese dialogue with English subtitles, as well as an English-dubbed version. Offering moviegoers these two options seems to be a growing trend. When the Irish language film “An Cailín Ciúin”-“The Quiet Girl”-was released in Germany back in November, theatres showed either a dubbed or a subtitled version, though most German moviegoers preferred to hear the original Irish language with subtitles. Myself, when watching a foreign language film, I prefer to hear all the voice tones, inflections, and other unquantifiables of the actors’ original speaking voices, even though the accompanying subtitles may not reflect everything that they’re saying. I’m inclined to agree with you that English subtitles in some English language films might be a boon to moviegoers. When I saw “Saltburn” recently, I’m pretty sure I missed a few plot point details simply because I couldn’t always make out some of the actors’ muttered lines of dialogue. Getting back to “The Boy and the Heron”, I’m afraid I’ve never developed a taste for Japanese animation, perhaps because my three kids-now all adults-never did. When they were small, I bought them a VHS copy of “Spirited Away” produced by the famed Ghibli Studio (the same place where Salama and Kenan hope to work one day in “As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow”), thinking they would enjoy this award-winning animated feature. Alas, they watched the movie once just to please old Dad, and it’s sat on the shelf ever since. My two daughters’ tastes always ran much more to “Sailor Moon” cartoons. “American Fiction” just opened here and I plan to see it next week. I’ve seen trailers for “Eileen” and expect to see it in the coming month. I like the dark, brooding, film noir look and feel of the story. I recently saw “Braid”, which is billed as a story about the struggles of three women living in various parts of the world-India, Italy, and Canada-and how their fates all come to be intertwined. The film left me feeling uplifted, though I have to admit there was just the faintest whiff of a Hallmark Channel Original Movie about the production, despite the grittiness of the scenes filmed in India. Another film I saw last year was “The Menu”, which was praised by critics though I found it disappointing. It reminded me of the old Agatha Christie mystery, “And Then There Were None”, except that I didn’t think that any of the characters were bad enough to have deserved the grisly fates that befall them. Also from last year, I really enjoyed “Living”, a British film set in 1953 about an elderly, mid-level manager in a municipal government bureaucracy who’s spent his entire career literally pushing paper. Then a doctor’s report informs him he has only months to live, and he embarks on a desperate effort to give his life some meaning before it’s too late. The poignant mood of the film is lightened by the role that younger people play in the main character’s life. I also enjoyed another British film called “The Eternal Daughter” starring Tilda Swinton in the dual roles of a middle-aged daughter and her aging mother trying to resolve decades old problems in their relationship. There’s a dark, supernatural air to the film and it ends with a bit of a surprise twist. Yet one more British film from last year I really enjoyed was “Scrapper”, about a 12-year-old girl living with her mother in a present-day UK working class neighbourhood. After the mother dies, the girl uses a variety of subterfuges to conceal from the authorities the fact that she’s living on her own. Then the girl’s long-lost father shows up. One of the main reasons I enjoyed this film so much was because the young girl, Georgie, reminded me so much of some of the scrappy, scruffy, spirited kids I used to work with as a Children’s Aid worker. “Past Lives” was a film I found tremendously moving with a beautifully told story and sympathetic characters. Who hasn’t wondered, at some time or another, how their life might have been different with another person, or hasn’t thought regretfully of the road not taken, the opportunities missed, the risks avoided in favour of playing it safe, or the life decision gambles that didn’t pan out. Anyone watching this film can’t help but reflect on their own life story and how they would rewrite certain passages of it if they could. As much as I enjoyed “Past Lives”, however, the film I enjoyed most from last year was the Irish language film, “An Cailín Ciúin”-“The Quiet Girl”-based on Claire Keegan’s long short story, “Foster”. When I first saw this film last March, I was caught totally off guard by the emotional impact of its story of a young girl from a poor rural family in Ireland packed off to spend the summer of 1981 with her mother’s cousins, a middle-aged childless couple named Seán and Eibhlín, who live on a dairy farm a three-hour drive away. It’s a simple story, but beautifully told with a heartbreaking ending, and the film was nominated for a Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 2023. The story, the cast, the characters, the cinematography, the musical score, and the Irish country setting have lingered in my mind ever since. It's another film that brought back bittersweet memories of the kids and families I used to work with as a child protection worker. There was a foster family I used to work with who ran a dairy farm, just like Sean and Eibhlin.

I don't watch movies, I watch films.