Hi Viscerals!

Let's be honest: the less said about 2024, the better.

For reasons both personal and professional, this was the hardest year of my adult life. But as this post is an annual wrap-up of Cinema Viscera business and a countdown of my favourite films of the year, I'll spare you the gory details. 

Here were the highlights:

WE WENT TO THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL!!!

Given I'm currently working with a film distributor - and thus can be accredited as a buyer - and the fact that our 2022 feature Apparitions was picked up by a distributor and given a DVD & digital release in the US & UK - which enabled us to be officially recognised as producers - Pez and I took the opportunity to claim official accreditation and attended our very first Cannes Film Festival (or Festival de Cannes, for La Français out there)!

As we were (and are) still knee-deep in writing screenplays, and only had one-pagers and synopses prepared, we weren't really in a position to pitch our projects just yet, so instead, from a Cinema Viscera perspective, we treated this trip as an exploratory mission, a fact-finding expedition to the biggest film festival on Earth to see how it works, how folks pitch, take as many meetings, see as many talks, and as many movies, as possible. 

As a buyer, I was able to meet with sales agents from around the world, so Pez and I were able to score meetings we would never have gotten back here in Oz, meeting some wonderful people, discussing our pitches and getting some great responses. We saw 12 movies -- well, technically 13, but we bailed on one 20 minutes in to have a lovely late-festival drink at a beachside bar -- met some friends from Oz over drinks and coffees, eavesdropped on all manner of spirited meetings and insane pitches (which happen absolutely everywhere in Cannes; in cafés, bars, elevators, street corners...) and spotted stars (Nic Cage at the premiere of The Surfer, Abel Ferrara having a meeting, Sean Baker, Mikey Madison & co at the world premiere of Anora), and, because we had full market passes, sat in on genre filmmakers presenting their proof-of-concept pitch videos to buyers and distributors, which was massively instructive, all providing us with tons of inspiration to keep writing, sharpen our materials, get brave enough to look for a producer to attach, and pitch our projects far and wide over the next few years.

In many ways, it was a rollercoaster experience of emotions, swinging wildly between feeling Imposter Syndrome and realising we were a lot closer to being in a position to pitch our wares and be part of the festival than we might have believed. Looking forward to our return in 2026... 
​

Completed and unveiling almost a year later than originally anticipated, our 8th short film (and most experimental/weirdest yet?), Three Sisters, was selected by the fine folks at Monster Fest to make its World Premiere at their 2024 edition in Melbourne this last October! It's the third film of ours, following 2021's Apparitions and 2016's Cigarette, to make its debut at Monster Fest, so we really feel like part of the Monster Fest family -- even more so this year, as Pez's daughter Cate O'Connor's debut short film as writer-director, Under The Influence, was selected premiere at the festival as well!

Seeing Three Sisters on the big screen in front of a packed audience was a thrill, as we realised the film actually held an audience who didn't know us, highlighted the beautiful cinematography of Sarah Alkemade, lighting of Dylan James, stellar audio work of Kristina Benton and The Backlot Studios' Mark D'Angelo, and the three lead performances by Shanon Kulupach, Benton and, of course, a certain Perri Cummings. 

We've not received a second festival screening as yet (another fun aspect of 2024), but we're hoping 2025 comes up with a nice surprise and we can show the film to more audiences, because we're incredibly proud of it. 

PEZ FINISHED A DRAFT OF A FEATURE SCRIPT!!!
Can't say too much more about this one, other than it's a script we've been working on for years that is finally taking satisfying, thrilling shape, and I'm so incredibly proud of her. Now, for the rewriting... 

...and those were the Cinema Viscera highlights of 2024! 

Now, let's get to the main reason you're all here... the countdowns!!! 

...wherein I count down the top 20 older films (released before 2020) that I saw for the first time in 2024. 

Oh, and this is the reason there are so many 1969 films in this list. 

 #20: DEATH GAME (1977; Director: Peter S. Traynor)
One of my favourite things Pez and I did this year was see an amazing double-feature (on 35mm!) of this and Daisies (see #11) at London's Prince Charles Cinema -- and they turned out to be incredibly well-matched. This is basically Daisies for psychos, where two hot young women (Sondra Locke, Colleen Camp) mess with the patriarchy by invading the home of a husband (Seymour Cassel) whose wife and kids have left him for the weekend, and sexually manipulate, rape and mentally & physically torture him for two days straight. It's seedy, VERY darkly funny and incredibly tense, and gives you a sense of what an interesting career Locke might've had, had she not met a certain controlling mega star-director-producer. 

#19: IN MY SKIN (2002; D: Marina de Van)
Invites a lot of takes and interpretations, but de Van's contribution to the early aughts' French New Extremity movement is a beguiling work of body horror that's as genuinely melancholy as it is bloody, as de Van (as both filmmaker and lead) interrogates female roles in society, dissociation from one's body and societal environment leading to a craving to feel something, to reconnect with it, with oneself. It's deep AND gory!

#18: BITTER MOON (1994; D: Roman Polanski)
Why did nobody tell me this was funny?! Had the pleasure of doing an audio commentary for this one (with Emma Westwood for Imprint Films' Polanski box set), and discovered a mordantly deranged sex comedy masquerading as an erotic thriller, with a terrific cast in great - and game - form. Polanski's usually terrible at comedy, but there are some audacious/crazy scenes and satire here, feeling like the midway point between his earlier films like Cul-de-Sac and his latter-day dark relationship comedies like Carnage or Venus in Fur. 

#17: THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969; D: Ronald Neame)
What seems like a genteel costume drama from the outset was not at ALL the movie I was expecting. Instead, it's a razor-sharp, acid-dipped warning against the dangers of idol worship and the cult of personality. One hell of a performance from Dame Maggie (and Pamela Franklin), in one of the more truly odd, challenging and admirably complex character studies I’ve seen for some time.

#16: TRUE GRIT (1969; D: Henry Hathaway)
I'm a huge fan of the stunning, elegiac Coen Brothers' 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis' novel, and not much of a fan of John Wayne, so count me as shocked as anyone that this film shotgunned its way to my heart. Along with The Searchers and Rio Bravo, this is Wayne's best role, but Kim Darby as the determined Mattie Ross and (shockingly) Glen Campbell as vainglorious bounty hunter La Boeuf damn near steal it from him. While it doesn't linger in the mind for quite as long as the Coens' take, it's equally as great from scene to scene, a powerful elegy to the myths of the west, like a kinder, gentler Wild Bunch.

 #15: ALICE'S RESTAURANT (1969; D: Arthur Penn)
Penn's counterculture musical, co-penned by and starring folk singer Arlo Guthrie, was a surprise, both a sincere wish for and searing critique of the utopian ideals of the 1960s, soulful, frequently funny and sweet, benefiting hugely from a charming performance by Guthrie, a fascinatingly awkward, wry presence, as well as his witty tunes and incisive point of view - but don't discount Penn's contribution as director and co-screenwriter, given the role he played in deconstructing Hollywood cinema during this period; he and Guthrie make a devastating team. 

#14: SING STREET (2016; D: John Carney)
Just a big bowl of charm from start to finish, Carney's memory trip through starting a high school band in the early '80s -- to impress an unattainable girl, of course, why else would anyone do it? -- uses hit tracks of the era to brilliant effect and, most crucially, the teen band's songs are friggin' awesome. The mostly unknown cast are perfect, the relationship with his older brother (Jack Reynor), who sees his own lost potential in his younger sibling, is fascinating and sweet, but can we all agree that the real love story is between lead Cosmo and the Lennon to his McCartney, Eamon? 

#13: ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969; D: Jean Pierre Melville)
Melville's ice-cold, mournful testament to the heroism of the French Resistance in WWII is riveting in the best tradition of wartime and espionage procedurals, but ultimately far more moving; this isn't about hyper-capable super-spies saving the world but ordinary people forced into life-and-death roles they should never have had to play, just to be able to return to the lives cruelly torn from them by enemy occupation. 

#12: THE HAUNTING OF JULIA (1977; D: Richard Loncraine)
One of my favourite horror discoveries in years is this stunningly shot, bracingly scored, surprisingly somber British ghost story, with more than a little giallo mixed in, with Mia Farrow as a bereaved mother who breaks away from a controlling husband and moves into a house that may or may not be haunted. Tom Conti is a delight as Farrow’s platonic pal, the domestic situation is as beautifully drawn as the supernatural one, and it all ends up in a rather sad place, with an all-timer of a final shot. 

#11: DAISIES (1969; D: Vera Chytilová)
Chytilová's Czech New Wave bombshell of a film -- disruptive in its form, its choice of leads, its f-you attitude, its treatment of food -- is the sweetest, funniest and most joyful angry feminist anarchist statement I’ve ever seen, a delirious collision between flower power and punk rock (a decade before punk) whose influence is still being felt. 

 #10: IRMA VEP (1996; D: Olivier Assayas)
Speaking of punk rock, the spirit is carried through to the '90s with Assayas' funny and fierce satire of moviemaking and auteurism, from the chaos of a film set in turmoil and a crew pulling in different directions, to a once-great director who's lost the plot (a wonderful Jean-Pierre Leaud, who knows a thing or two about nutty auteurs) and an ending that finds the very film itself being defaced. The gravitational force this elusive and entertaining film revolves around, though, is the exquisite Maggie Cheung, playing a Hong Kong movie star struggling to adapt to this very Parisian variety of behind-the-scenes mania and, perhaps, flirting a little too close with the edges of her role and reality. 

#9: BABY FACE (1933; D: Alfred E. Green)
Perhaps the platonic ideal of Pre-Hays Production Code Hollywood cinema, a film where the indomitable Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman who screws her way up the corporate ladder thanks to some Nietzschean advice, yet it's so much more than that; a knowing, subversive, whip-smart satire that hits the patriarchy and gender expectations with both fists, but is unafraid to be gloriously silly and glamorous, with the indomitable Stanwyck putting on her usual masterclass, shifting between comedy, allure and pathos with effortless precision. 

#8: BABETTE'S FEAST (1987; D: Gabriel Axel)
“An artist is never poor.” (A beautiful sentiment expressed here, even if my bank statements disagree.) In a year where sweet and meditative films proved a welcome salve, I was enraptured by this gentle, beautifully crafted tribute to artistry and kindness, as frequently funny as it is poignant and laced with loss. I’ve rarely seen a film critique the folly of piety and suffocation of religious dogma in such a disarmingly kind and human way as this one. A big-hearted, small-stakes triumph.

#7: SWEET COUNTRY (2017; D: Warwick Thornton)
After seeing this and The New Boy this year (the latter, as a 2022 release, is sadly too new for this list, and too old for the next), Warwick Thornton stakes his claim for me as one of Australia's best directors and, along with Ivan Sen, its most potent chronicler of the Indigenous Australian experience and the open gaping wounds that remain unhealed between Black and White Australia. In this tale of an Aboriginal stockman who murders a White landowner in self-defence, Thornton fashions a moving tragedy that not only reflects the racism that still exists today, but is also a thrilling Western chase movie, one which never resorts to tired or strident stereotypes that other films so easily cave into, finding humanity in even the most despicable of characters, and flaws in the most heroic.  

#6: THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953; D: Henri-Georges Clouzot)
I may have done this film a disservice by seeing William Friedkin's perfect remake, Sorcerer, first, but I was thrilled to find this is every bit as great, with Clouzot's brilliant direction of tense action involving huge vehicles, rickety terrain, murky sludge and rocky explosions setting new standards for the form, but even more of a magic trick is the way it gets us to care about these scoundrels, by digging into and breaking down their illusory masculine self-images, not to mention hinting (not-always-so-subtly) at the homoeroticism underpinning their relationships, which lends the film an unlikely pathos. Crackerjack stuff.

 #5: THE CREMATOR (1969; D: Jurai Herz)
A singular film experience like nothing I've ever seen, this jet-black satirical horror-comedy-drama account of the rise of a Prague cremator -- a somewhat vain but seemingly ordinary man who, in the absence of any personal belief system, regards his profession with the reverence of religion -- who finds his vocation to be a growth industry with the arrival of a certain group of fascists looking for the perfect delivery system for their Final Solution. For a while, you're not even quite sure what you're watching, but as this man's tale (and he's in almost every frame, we're strapped to his point of view whether we like it or not) becomes increasingly opportunistic and horrifying, it chills to the bone, leading to an ending that leaves us speechless. 

#4: Z (1969; D: Costa-Gavras)
A crackerjack political thriller from the jump, this (apparently barely) fictionalised account of the 1963 assassination of a progressive Greek political candidate and the fascist Junta that seized power in its wake, is urgently, thrillingly told, from its opening scene (where an official compares protests with weeds that need to be exterminated) to meeting the team heading the resistance, to Jean-Louis Trintignant's straight-arrow prosecutor hired by the right-wing regime to investigate the assassination (an appointment which bites them in the arse), to the ensuing trial of the rulers in charge, it's riveting, tense, surprisingly funny, tragic and one of the most righteously furious films ever made.

#3: KES (1969; D: Ken Loach)
Oh, so this was Loach’s move since day one, huh? Beautifully built character studies about forgotten people, against a backdrop of socioeconomic crisis or decay, where hope battles an ingrained, systemic, thoughtless cruelty, leading to a shattering ending. This one is anchored by an almost unbearably honest lead performance by David Bradley, as a kid struggling at home and school who finds passion and solace in learning to train a pet kestrel, which begins to connect him to his teachers and community, and give him a purpose... but, Loach being Loach, the other shoe is always waiting to drop. Powerful, hearbreaking stuff. 

#2: FACES (1968; D: John Cassavetes)
People seem to really connect with Cassavetes' filmmaking style or really not -- count me as the former, as this blew my brain apart. Absolutely floored by this, such invigorating, inspirational filmmaking. Chock full of show-stopping scenes, probing middle-class American malaise in a way that’s as real and recognisable as it is so bracingly heightened, improvised scenes that run on in a way that continually reveals, surprises and amuses, with a 16mm camera that somehow captures everything at the perfect angle, in beautiful light, even when it’s out of focus or actors are standing out of their light. And for a movie that’s just people talking in houses and rooms, it’s constantly as breathlessly kinetic and propulsively edited as any action picture, performed by a pitch perfect cast. How does Cassavetes create the atmosphere to get these performances?! Can’t wait to see the rest, more excited than I’ve been for any films for some time.

#1: FESTEN aka THE CELEBRATION (1998; D: Thomas Vinterberg)
My favourite older film -- hell, favourite film -- I saw this year is Thomas Vinterberg's extraordinary Dogme 95 launcher, a film that lulls you into a cringe comedy of family errors but, in a blink, goes somewhere much, much, much darker and more resonant... but never loses its wild humour, continually whipping between the two tones with a virtuosic dexterity, delivering a deeply felt story that's heartbreaking in its casual vulnerability, and astounding in its granular detail examining this open wound of a family. Not a single false note is played; while its stripped-back trappings, handheld camera and cacophonous audio may seem loose and haphazard, this must have been as ruthlessly planned and controlled as any Kubrick or Fincher film. The screenplay is airtight and devastating, and once you add these performances and that filmmaking, Festen's tale of expunging family trauma lands on you like a wrecking ball (I love how closely Festen phonetically hews to the English word "fester", a descriptor which could well apply to this family). I was exhilarated by every frame. Looking back, Dogme 95 never had a chance: how could it ever top this??

Readers of last year's column will recall that I decided to keep my annual countdown to a Top 10 this year, due to two factors: a seemingly endlessly hectic schedule and the fact I'm only seeing about 65-70 new movies a year nowadays, compared to the 85-120 I used to see. I saw 70 new movies this year, in Australia and Europe, up from 69 last year and 68 the year before, meaning I'll feel ready to do a top 20 again in 2040 or so. 

I found this to be a pretty good year for cinema, not extraordinary, but very good, enjoying more than half of the 70 films I saw. So, naturally, there are a metric shit-ton of...

HONOURABLE MENTIONS
From #30 to #11:
David Vincent Smith's emotionally raw He Ain't Heavy, George Miller's Fury Road prequel and loose Oliver Twist remake Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Coralie Fargeat's furious and berserk The Substance, Alain Guiraudie's bonkers slow-burn queer-adjacent provincial noir Misericordia, Francis Ford Coppola's even more bonkers utopian passion project Megalopolis, Rose Glass' muscular queer neo-noir fantasia Love Lies Bleeding, Anna Kendrick's chilling Woman of the Hour, Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson's hugely empathetic metatextual family drama Ghostlight, David Hinton giving us the opportunity to watch Marty Scorsese rave about his favourite directors for two hours with Made In England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, Jane Schoenbrun's hallucinatory and vital transnarrative nightmare I Saw The TV Glow, Ivan Reitman's chaotic valentine to the mythos of Saturday Night Live Saturday Night, Adrien Beau's intoxicating neo-classical-horror-comedy genre mash (with added dancing and puppetry!) The Vourdalak, Justine Triet's mesmerising family courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, Alice Rohrwacher's soulful arthouse adventure of a grieving archeological grave robber La Chimera, Guy Maddin & Evan & Galen Johnson's berserk surreal G7 satire (with masturbating zombies!) Rumours, ​Jane Giles and Ali Catterall's absorbing tribute to cult UK repertory cinema Scala!!!, Bao Nguyen's rollicking account of the Ocean's 11 of song recordings The Greatest Night in Pop, Greg Jardin's fiendishly clever and stylish body-swap horror-thriller It's What's Inside, Josh Greenbaum's hugely moving (and, right now, hugely important) road trip documentary Will & Harper, and the better of this year's Sebastian Stan double-feature, Aaron Schimberg's provocative brainworm A Different Man. 

But here were the 10 new release films I loved the most this year:

 #10: STOPMOTION (D: Robert Morgan)
In a horror landscape drowning in trauma narratives, this was one of the more unique takes I've seen on the theme, using a meta-narrative of a stopmotion animator (Aisling Franciosi), making her first film outside of her domineering mother/mentor, who finds her painful past too powerful to keep contained within a mere 24 frames per second. Morgan has a history of making terrifying stopmotion short horror films, and his jump to features has produced one of the most original and chilling films of the year, unfolding with just the right amount of mystery, doling out the right amount of information and letting the rest come through performance, the tortured faces of those anguished puppets, and formal disruption, to make this one of the best new films you'll see on Shudder this, or any other, year. 

#9: LA COCINA (D: Alonso Ruizpalacios​)
Chaos in the kitchen is everywhere right now (and, as zealous a fan of The Bear as I am, I was likely primed for this) but Ruizpalacios goes back to the O.G. 'chaotic kitchen' narrative — Arnold Wexler's 1957 play 'The Kitchen' — setting it firmly in a big Times Square "family restaurant" whose behind-the-scenes teems with racial and class divisions between its white and (often undocumented) immigrant staff, on one afternoon where everything comes apart. Filmed in gorgeous black-and-white, the story swirls around the arrival of a new employee who virtually cons her way into the place and the Romeo and Juliet-style narrative of a Hispanic line cook, a White waitress and the baby they're expecting, and the issue of pending immigration papers, which their boss holds over their heads like a tyrant. Almost unbearably tense throughout, with beautifully drawn, painfully human characters in a teeming, sweaty car crash waiting to happen, leading to some jaw-dropping scenes as this fragile ecosystem unravels — but there are some moments of true grace here, too. Looking back, perhaps no other film I saw this year felt more like 2024 to me.

#8: ALL OF US STRANGERS (D: Andrew Haigh)
Haigh has crafted a beautiful, profoundly elegiac film more akin to the kind of finely crafted Japanese literature it's based upon, a sort of dream-narrative about a writer in his mid-forties (Andrew Scott) reckoning with his life, loneliness and relationships, living in a building seemingly only occupied by one other tenant (Paul Mescal) and paying visits to his childhood home and his long-dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell). The budding romance is touching, but everything to do with the parents left me sobbing inconsolably. The cast are all brilliant, but Scott is truly astonishing in what, for me, was hands-down the year's best performance.

#7: THE ZONE OF INTEREST (D: Jonathan Glazer)
Jonathan Glazer returns to feature directing after a decade's absence to chill and mortify us once again, with this clinical, distanced adaptation of Martin Amis' novel about German commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their family, whose fresh new home is situated right next to his new assignment... that happens to be overseeing the Auschwitz concentration camp and its furnaces. Rarely has the concept of "the banality of evil" ever been more fully and powerfully expressed on film, but it's a grower, a film whose impact doesn't really land on you until long after it's ended (as one initially emerges just stunned, numb, even). 

#6: KNEECAP (D: Rich Peppiatt)
A crackerjack, rocket-fuelled fist in the air for the Gaelic language, the Irish people and indigenous languages everywhere, that is also a vastly entertaining blast of a movie — funny, fast and fookin' furious. The band members acquit themselves beautifully on the big screen, and the more experienced supporting cast ground everything perfectly. I delighted in every beautiful, chaotic moment and immediately bought 'H.O.O.D' the minute I got home. A banger, good craic, all that and more, this.

 #5: MAY DECEMBER (D: Todd Haynes)
We know Haynes serves melodrama better than anyone outside of Almodovar, but here he serves it with an extra dose of arsenic — there are moments here more skin-crawlingly creepy than most horror movies — while interrogating the art of acting, performativity, and the True Crime industrial complex. But it's the trio of tour-de-force lead performances — especially heartbreaking work from Charles Melton — and Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik's supercharged screenplay, both hilarious and horrifying, full of fireball dialogue and finely observed character moments (which Haynes directs exquisitely), that make this a supremely satisfying character study, even if you might feel like taking a shower afterwards.

#4: BIRD (D: Andrea Arnold)
British social realist cinema meets magical realism in the most beautifully persuasive way in this smashing, deeply moving film from Andrea Arnold, her best to date. I can't recall the last time I found a film so unnervingly tense and bleak, yet huge-hearted and soulful, often in the same scene. Franz Rogowski and Barry Keoghan are simply wonderful (I spent the whole film with my proverbial heart in my mouth, terrified something bad would happen to both of them), but this is Nykiya Adams' film. It seems not everyone is willing to go with the big swings this film takes, but I felt it all connected perfectly, with a seemingly hopeful ending that could be (well, it was to me) much darker than it first appears. A complex masterpiece. 

#3: ANORA (D: Sean Baker)
Baker's ridiculously entertaining neo-screwball comedy continues his peerless run of chaotic character studies of sex workers, introducing a potential fairytale scenario that turns into a (frequently funny) nightmare, before subverting even that with his gift for creating multilayered characters trying their best in the difficult situations that life (often for economic reasons) has forced them into. Mikey Madison announces herself as a star with a performance that screams, kicks and charms its way into your heart, but there are no slouches in this cast. Once again, Baker and his team have clearly researched the hell out of this world; the texture of the strip club and this crazy corner of the metropolis that surrounds it, feel so mordantly authentic. Bonus points for the Armenians.

#2: THE HOLDOVERS (D: Alexander Payne)
Just a beautiful, small-scale, affectionate tribute to those who struggle through the bullshit of life, and find purpose and salvation with a chosen few, enough to help us get, if not through life, at least through the night, and then the next. A big-hearted triumph with a terrific trio of characters, perfectly played by Giamatti, Sessa and Randolph, that sneaks up on you emotionally in the way many Alexander Payne films do, marking him as a filmmaker I often find myself under-appreciating (to me, he’s a less chaotic, more humane David O. Russell), whose films are little treasures to be lived in. Absolutely adding this to the semi-annual Christmas rotation. 

...and my #1 film released in Australia in 2024 is...

#1: PERFECT DAYS (D: Wim Wenders)

Call this stunning film “twee” at your peril: there is an aching darkness at the centre of every frame of Wenders’ otherwise beautiful, immersive and humanistic portrait of a Tokyo toilet cleaner who lives a simple, ordered, almost ascetic life — of taking great pride in his work, eating the bare essentials, taking moments to appreciate simple sights and sounds, reading, sleeping — led by a perfectly calibrated performance by Koji Yakusho. 

The character’s every ritual feels like such a deliberate choice rooted in self-protection, or self-preservation (and I say this as someone who, at least in part, aspires to such everyday simplicity… likely for the same reason), that beneath his inherent sweetness and childlike openness to small gestures, there’s a weight of melancholy that he carries into every scene. There’s no way that exquisite final shot lands that hard without it. So, inevitably, this ends up as a celebration and interrogation of such a life. Beautiful, layered work from a legendary filmmaker (who also still knows how to put together a killer soundtrack; aka, basically my CD collection from ages 22-30), that, in a year like I've had in 2024, I sorely needed. 

Happy New Year, Viscerals!

It's amusing to me that the theme of last year's blog seemed to be "exhaustion", because Pez and I are so damn tired at the end of this year that we've forcibly carved out a final week all to ourselves, to just unplug from the world and enjoy each other's company, to collect our thoughts and recharge our batteries before leaping into next year.

We started the year by doing something we'd never done before - seeking professional script consultancy on a couple of our feature film treatments, an act we saw as poking our heads out of our private hidey-hole and dipping our toe into the wider world of film development, as we seek to strengthen our work as we tentatively step into the dark but sadly necessary lottery of applying for film financing - then helped Pez's daughter and Apparitions' lead Cate O'Connor and her partner Dylan James make their debut short film, the Influencer horror-satire Under The Influence, before producing our own short film (our first with an actual crew in the pandemic era), the King Lear-inspired Three Sisters. But for me, it was a new and constantly evolving/expanding day job with Bounty Films that really kept me running on the hamster wheel this year; a gig that quickly went from metadata and upload assistance to handling theatrical releases nationwide. 

I haven't made firm New Years Resolutions for a while now, but this time of year does get you thinking about how you plan to attack the next, and right now I'm thinking a lot about combatting exhaustion, about turning the tide on feeling increasingly overwhelmed. After a few seconds of thinking about 2024 work intentions, I can already feel my stomach twisting, and I don't want to feel this way. I don't know about you, but I'm terrified that my year-on-year energy levels are diminishing just as my creative and professional lives are growing, and I won't be able to keep up.

So many of my New Year intentions seem to centre around time management: about setting task-oriented week-to-week work plans, setting aside set amounts of hours to work on specific tasks on regular days, to get onto tasks as soon as they occur to me rather than wait-and-seeing my way though them, to build in enough time so when new tasks and priorities are inevitably thrown at me (or when things equally inevitably go off the rails) I've got time to sort them out and not get freaked out. The way I manage my professional and creative lives needs to change, or I'm going to burn out by 50 (which is in less than 18 months, by the way, thank you kindly for reminding me, brain). Hustle Culture can well and truly go screw itself; self-care, time management and building in time for rest and reflection rules.

So Cinema Viscera's Year-in-Review felt very sporadic: lots of writing as Pez built not one but two feature film treatments and I hammered away at advanced drafts of a long-gestating Christmas anthology project, me editing a couple of projects and both of us working on producing and directing Three Sisters​, which I can say without equivocation is completely different from any other project we've ever done.

Three Sisters is a weird little Shakespeare-and-Succession-inspired movie that we hope becomes a sort of immersive tragicomic emotional journey, equal parts schadenfreude, sensuality and sorrow. We're in the last leg of post-production and hope to start getting it out to film festivals (because we're masochists - and what other option do we have? YouTube??) in January/February. The shoot was hectic and (yes) exhausting but ultimately very satisfying, and incredibly fun to be working with friends old and new, and trying out new ways of working (such as, this is our first film in 15 years I've not edited!). So far, it's all coming together remarkably well, we're incredibly proud of it, and we can't wait to show you all another side of Cinema Viscera in 2024. In the meantime, here are some stills from the shoot:

So once we complete and deliver Three Sisters, 2024 will be focused principally on writing and developing our current slate of projects and taking the next step to a more elevated level of filmmaking while sharpening our voice, to further trust and fully realise the nutty instincts that make us who we are, not losing them. 

Now, that's quite enough about us. Some of you came here for a film countdown, right?

#20. WHO KILLED SANTA CLAUS? (1941; Director: Christian-Jaque): A gorgeously shot, affectionate pastoral comedy about a small French Alpine village celebrating the holidays, that suddenly turns into a murder mystery. Really draws us into its world of eccentric residents - with its mongrel kids and lovesick residents, this has big Jean Vigo energy, and feels like the kind of thing we'd see from Truffaut 20 years later.

#19. NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE (1976; D: Paul Mazursky): Writer-director Mazursky's biographical look at being a Jewish kid moving to New York to live a bohemian life in the 1950s is no mere nostaglia trip; surprisingly tough and unvarnished, and chock full of incredibly funny dialogue and great casting (Shelley Winters! Young & handsome Christopher Walken! Ellen Greene! Lois Smith! Jeff Goldblum! Antonio Fargas playing a thinly veiled James Baldwin!).

#18. SARABAND (2003; D: Ingmar Bergman): In locked-down July 2020, we began the project of watching all 39 films on the Criterion Collection's incredible Ingmar Bergman's Cinema box set, which finally ended (a month shy of three years later!) in incredibly satisfying fashion with Bergman's final work as a director: a thirty-years-later sequel to his 1973 classic Scenes from a Marriage, it brings back stars Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson for a beautiful extended conversation about ageing, loves and regrets, before dovetailing into their relationships with their grown children - which, given this is Bergman, aren't always ideal. A lovely, witty, meditative swan song to a truly extraordinary film career.

#17. THE SERPENT'S EGG (1977; D: Ingmar Bergman): Back-to-back Bergman! One of two films Bergman shot in Germany, this was a real grower for me, starring David Carradine as an Jewish-American circus performer who moves to Weimar Republic Germany in 1923, strikes up a relationship with Liv Ullman and quickly finds himself in a co-dependent downward spiral, as economic depression and newly emergent Nazism start the walls closing in. Great brief character roles for Glynn Turman and Heinz Bennent, too. Dark and depressing as hell but even more atmospheric and bewitching. 

#16. MARY JANE'S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE (1996; D: Sarah Jacobson): Writer-director Sarah Jacobson's sole feature (before Cancer claimed her at just 32) is the low-fi punk rom-com you never knew you needed; a great, adorable hangout movie about being young, working with people your own age for the first time (at a local cinema!) and falling in and out of love. Should be much more well known, and one can only dream of what further treats Jacobson would've made had she not been so cruelly snatched from us.

#15. DIABOLIQUE (1955; D: Henri-Georges Clouzot): Clouzot's iconic, endlessly ripped-off thriller of two very different women who murder the awful man in their lives - only to find their plans complicated by his disappearing corpse - was a big List of Shame film for me, and finally seeing it this year didn't disappoint. The filmmaking felt surprisingly modern even when I could predict its twists, and both of these qualities give you an indication of how much this film has been pillaged in the seven decades since its release. Creepy and fun, with terrific lead performances by Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot. 

#14. INSERTS (1975; D: John Byrum): Imagine Babylon as a 5-character chamber piece set in a decaying Hollywood mansion and you're getting close. Richard Dreyfuss is a fallen "golden boy" silent director reduced to shooting porn with an erratic ex-movie star (an on-fire Veronica Cartwright) and wallowing in drink, drugs and self-pity, who's challenged by the enigmatic actress (Jessica Harper) dating the gangster (Bob Hoskins) who bankrolls his stag films. A lively, very adult commentary on gender dynamics, artists who believe their own bullshit and desperate aspirants working all sorts of angles, full of declarative monologues, power plays and parry-and-thrusts galore — albeit with bursts of full-frontal nudity!

#13. TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, JULIE NEWMAR (1995; D: Beeban Kidron): No mere Americans-do-Priscilla rip-off, Kidron's film is an unabashedly queer explosion of pure joy from start to finish, with Patrick Swayze (in what might be his best performance), Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo (all straight, cisgender male movie stars) giving 100% committed, fully rounded performances as drag queens who transform a repressed small town (it's basically HBO's We Are Here: The Movie), while making space for Stockard Channing, Melinda Dillon, Beth Grant and Frances Bay to shine in wonderful character roles. As Hollywood studio attempts to reckon with queer and drag culture go, this is one of the sweetest, smartest and most successful.

#12. PUMPKINHEAD (1988; D: Stan Winston): Why is this dismissed as a minor '80s horror film? SFX guru Winston's directorial debut is, for me, one of the very best horror films of the decade, setting up a beautiful father-son relationship, initially careless but increasingly sympathetic teens, Appalachian fairytale mythology and dazzling creature design that seems like a Xenomorph and a Predator had a baby. It has real stakes, stunning production and lighting design, brisk pacing, a complex moral to the story and a terrific lead performance from Lance Henriksen. This pumpkin is ripe for rediscovery. 

#11. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939; D: Frank Capra): Capra’s plea for decency in America’s legislative capital is a prime example of what he did so well; an unconventional but fundamentally decent man meets a forthright woman who brings out the best in him, joining forces to stand up to large corporate or political corruption - supercharged by casting Hollywood’s all-time avatar for decency, Jimmy Stewart, but he's matched by Jean Arthur, playing a strategist who knows all the angles and should be running things in this man's world, stealing the film out from under Stewart, who filibusters his way into our hearts under her tutelage. Manipulative, sure, but not wrong.

#10. THE FIFTH SEAL (1976; D: Zoltán Fábri): One of the more intriguing, downright horrifying philosophical dramas I’ve ever seen; in a just world, Fábri’s film would be much better known. Starts off kind of fun in a low-key, Polish New Wave kind of way with an extended late-night cafe conversation — except these men appear to be almost ghostly, and there’s those sort-of Nazis lurking outside — before descending into a quiet hell, that seems to be WWII in many ways but, well, isn’t, before landing in its harrowing final act, which puts the ethical questions these men were blithely throwing at each other to an unimaginable test. This needs the deluxe Blu-ray treatment.

#9. LADY ON A TRAIN (1945; D: Charles David): A fast-moving One Crazy Night mystery-comedy set on Christmas Eve that isn’t afraid to get unexpectedly sexy (or unexpectedly unsettling, with a certain character’s late reveal), starring Deanna Durbin relishing the chance to shed her teenage sweetheart persona; her mystery-novel-obsessed amateur sleuth here is as charming as she's ever been, but throws a lot more vibe. Also loved David Bruce as the mystery writer who’s a lot less handy than he thinks he is, and the supporting cast of well-known nice guys (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, etc) make a great roll call of suspects. Add this one to your end-of-year Christmas watchlists!

#8. AT LONG LAST LOVE (1975; D: Peter Bogdanovich): Bogdanovich rules. Sure, his wild big-budget musical swing might be shaggy, shaky and overlong, but there's no arguing with the giant smile that wouldn’t leave my face throughout. The production values are huge, its sets and costumes exuberant and expressive, Cole Porter's songs are wonderfully used, the entire ensemble are having a ball and understand the absurd assignment, with, predictably, queen Madeleine Kahn stealing the whole thing — closely followed by the great John Hillerman and Eileen Brennan. I’d be happy to watch the ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ number at The Racquet Club multiple times as its own exhibit. 

#7. CURE (1997; Kiyoshi Kurosawa): Talk about a grower. Like the bizarre contagion that is the film's true antagonist, Kurosawa's spare, slow-burning Japanese horror thriller creeps under your skin and won't get out of your head. Following a quietly seething police detective (the terrific Koji Yakusho) on the trail of a series of murders committed by people who linger by the crime scenes dazed, with no memory of what they did, leading him to a psychological cat and mouse game with an elusive, enigmatic young man. One of those films whose quiet narrative and true meaning really only land on you afterwards, this might be the very best film of the entire '90s/'00s J-Horror cycle. 

#6. DEAD OF NIGHT (1945; D: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer): One of the earliest horror anthologies and the only horror picture ever made by UK giant Ealing Studios, famed for their comedies; comprised of four macabre shorts with a comedic ghost story in the middle (just to remind us which studio made this), all tied together by one of the best wraparound stories I’ve ever seen. As everyone says, the ventriloquist story is the best — that final shot in the cell is as creepy now as it must have been in ‘45 — but the others have their spooky charms, too. As British as Beefeater palace guards and Marmite, this was a ball.

#5. JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973; D: Norman Jewison): Or, A Requiem for Judas. Breathtakingly shot by Douglas Slocombe, with blocking and choreography that makes stunning use of the found locations (in Jerusalem itself!), director Jewison, co-screenwriter Melvyn Bragg and Tim Rice’s book succeed in making the film simultaneously small-scale and huge while capturing the cultish nature of it all. The high-powered '70s rock opera soundtrack is glorious, the dance numbers insanely energetic and the decision to almost entirely forgo dialogue is a winner. A stunning ‘70s musical which couldn’t be more of the time and culture in which it was made - and is all the better for it. 

#4. MUTE WITNESS (1994; D: Anthony Waller): What a delight this was! This exuberant giallo-influenced thriller is exactly the kind of movie I would love to make; shot in Moscow by a debut Brit director in the early '90s — with a brilliant/bizarre surprise cameo shot 8 years earlier — it's as tight as a drum, full of nods to De Palma, Argento and (of course) Hitchcock with brilliantly constructed suspense set pieces, tons of style on a small budget, a twisty (if frequently, enjoyably implausible) plot with likeable and very human characters, good performances, constant escalation and clever writing. Seek it out.

#3. THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (1970; D: Leonard Kastle): Imagine a John Waters movie directed by Jules Dassin (or vice versa) and you're in the ballpark of Kastle's startling one-and-done directorial effort. Outside of being a terrific character study of impressive complexity — and one so artfully shot (by future star cinematographer Oliver Wood) for such a seemingly tawdry micro-budget film — where it really crawls under your skin is in its depiction of the pitiable humanity of its monstrous lead couple (with terrific performances by Tony LoBianco and especially Shirley Stoler - you know Divine was taking notes) and the simple desperate banality of their murders. I did NOT expect this to hit so hard. 

#2. NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947; D: William Goulding): William Lindsay Gresham’s novel and super-scribe Jules Furthman’s script provide a killer noir plot that sees a con man (a terrific Tyrone Power, serving big George Clooney vibes) who thinks he’s the smartest in every room being comprehensively outplayed as he seeks to conquer two sides of the American Nightmare — the rural traveling carnival and the corrupt big city — only to have them eat him alive. Lee Garmes’ cinematography is chiaroscuro heaven, with prison-style bars and ravenous shadows dominating rooms and lurking around every corner. Only falters slightly at the very end, when it takes a more despairingly romantic conclusion — still no happy ending, just softer — than the chilling coda that fading to black on the previous scene would’ve been (the only aspect where Guillermo del Toro's 2021 remake improves upon this one).

#1. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1975; D: John Schlesinger): Holy shit. I don’t want to say too much, as you will not be prepared for the final 18 minutes of this, which could be an epic short film of its own. The team behind Midnight Cowboy — director Schlesinger, writer Waldo Salt and producer Jerome Hellman — bring their caustic view of capitalist ruin to 1920s Hollywood, finding their acidic equal in Nathanael West’s 1939 novel about a crumbling apartment block of Hollywood hustlers and hopers trying to make it in a town that drags out their worst qualities. Brilliant performances across the board in a frequently unsettling, hauntingly weird rumbling storm of a film that quite literally explodes at its climax. The kind of big, bold, feel-bad epic swing that only winning a Best Picture Oscar gets you the cachet to make.

It is with both sadness and relief to say this might be the last time you see me doing this year-end blog in this current form. From next year, it'll be the Cinema Viscera wrap followed by quick, potted Top 10 Older and Newer Films lists.

It almost feels fraudulent for me to make a Top 20 list nowadays, given we're a long, long way from the media-screening-heavy halcyon days of me seeing 110-120 new movies a year - these last two years have seen my totals fall into the 60s (just 68 this year, for the second year running), in a weird correlation with the decline in AFL leading goal-kicker stats - so my natural inclination was to keep this list to a tight 10 or 15... except, I saw a lot of really cool movies this year. In fact, I really liked over half the 65 movies I saw, and loved 16, with four more that I felt deserved particular mention.

For the purposes of this list, "New Releases" are feature films I saw this year that received their premiere paid public release — in cinemas, on streaming, DVD/BD, VoD or at festivals — in Australia during 2023.​

As usual, there are heaps of highly acclaimed films I didn't see, like Past Lives, The Boy and The Heron, Close, Maestro, John Wick: Chapter 4, Polite Society, Reality and You Hurt My Feelings, and didn't get to a whole bunch that had festival screenings this year but will receive general releases in 2024, like All of Us Strangers, Anatomy of a Fall, Dream Scenario, Fallen Leaves, Ferrari, May December, Perfect Days, Robot Dreams and The Zone of Interest, or haven't screened here at all yet, like American Fiction, The Holdovers, The Iron Claw and Origin. 

From the movies I did see, my honourable mentions, counting down from #30-21, were: Barbie, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Chapter One, The Lonely Spirits Variety Hour, Bottoms, Knock at the Cabin, Skinamarink, Air, Showing Up, Blue Jean, Passages. Now, for the 20 that left more of an impression on me than anything else I saw in 2023:

#20. PERPETRATOR (D: Jennifer Reader)
A twisted child of Carrie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ginger Snaps and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, with fun performances, playfully punk humour, exactly the right amount of "what the fuck is going on?" quirk that all resolves satisfactorily, the body horror of puberty and the greater horror of men ready to prey on teenage girls… all building up to a final escape plan that I felt was spectacularly well devised and executed. Alicia Silverstone's fun as a witchy aunt, but Christopher "Piz" Lowell and Audrey Francis as psycho high school officials steal the whole thing. 

#19. THE ORDINARIES (D: Sophie Linnenbaum)
This tonally wackadoo comedy-fantasy-sci-fi-social-drama from Germany is not only one of the most audacious debuts I've seen in years, but also meant a lot to me personally, as it was the first film I ever personally acquired and theatrically released in my new gig with Bounty Films. While its many tones don't always work well together, this story of a girl relegated to Supporting Character status in a dystopian world that works like the movies, her struggle to be a Main Character and what she discovers about the way her world works, is alternately sweet, amusingly meta and dark as hell, but is ultimately a plea for us all to embrace what makes us individuals and be our best selves. 

#18. TÁR (D: Todd Field)
While this didn’t quite get all the way under my skin, I admired the hell out of it. Very much in the key of Michael Haneke, this digs into an egomaniacal Great Artist’s very 2020s descent into hell with a FEROCIOUS performance from Cate Blanchett, with Todd Field’s script and style encouraging repeat viewings — not in an annoying all-semiotic-subtext/dumb-surface-text fashion (as some popular recent filmmakers tend to do), as its story and characters are as incredibly engaging as they are deliciously flawed. Great work all round here, reckon I might dig it more on rewatch.

#17: YOU'LL NEVER FIND ME (D: Indianna Bell, Josiah Allen)
For a micro-budget Australian horror film, I was super impressed by the filmmaking craft on display here — the incredible layered sound design, deep focus cinematography, blocking and shadowy lighting were quite excellent — in addition to the strong lead performances. The film's first half hour and final act were genuinely scary and unsettling,  and even when the script runs out of road a bit in the middle stretch — there's not quite enough there there to sustain it — once it starts its journey home, it nails the landing brilliantly. Can't wait to see what Bell & Allen do next!

#16. A HAUNTING IN VENICE (D: Kenneth Branagh)
My favourite of Branagh's Poirot trilogy; does away with Nile's awful CGI and needless bloat and the absurd (if fun) blockbuster elements of Orient Express in favour of a more grounded (well, by Branagh’s standards) take on Agatha Christie’s super-sleuth that I found thoroughly delightful, even with canted angles and spook-show theatrics intact. The cast are fun (especially Tina Fey), it integrates Poirot’s wartime trauma in a much more organic and poignant fashion than Nile did, takes place against gorgeous Venice locations and an insanely gothic mansion, and the pacing is deliberate but efficiently edited, with brisk transitions. Good old-fashioned, satisfying stuff.

#15. STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE (D: Davis Guggenheim)
My favourite documentary of the year (granted, I didn't watch many), but given the longtime affection I've had for Michael J. Fox as a performer and an activist, that shouldn't be a surprise. Fox’s brutally honest, unvarnished, clear-eyed outlook and Michael Harte’s astonishing archival editing (near-seamlessly blended with linking re-enactments) are the twin engines that power this beautiful portrait of the star’s meteoric rise, life-altering diagnosis and continued advocacy, treatment and personal evolution.

#14. OF AN AGE (D: Goran Stolevski)
Stolevski follows up his brilliant 19th century Macedonian dark fairytale You Won't Be Alone with a deeply felt, disarmingly personal and lived-in love story between two men (played beautifully by Elias Anton and Thom Green), most of which takes place in a car in 1999 — so, y'know, totally the same. The musical nod to Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together is no accident, as Stolevski's film is similarly sensual, grounded in small gestures and looks, and ends on an elegiac note. But this undersells it, it's also frequently laugh-out loud funny as it is swooningly romantic. Few films evoke the rush of falling in love for the first time - or late '90s/pre-millennial Australian suburbia - as well as this one, and as impossibly poignant as the final shot may be, it's the journey you remember. 

#13. THE KILLER (D: David Fincher)
My favourite Fincher since The Social Network. Love Fincher and his Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker's wry digs at connecting everyday capitalism (Amazon, Home Depot, WeWork, Doordash, etc.) to the tools of meticulous murder; it’s never been easier to be seen and be invisible, with the tools of death and destruction delivered direct to your doorstep. It's a simple story but a highly engaging and propulsive one, that sees Fincher working more in the idiom of his old pal Steven Soderbergh. Fassbender is terrific, it has the best fight scene I’ve seen in Hollywood cinema in years, and I’m a sucker for meticulous assassins with no name but brilliant aliases and weirdly specific musical tastes. 

#12: SHIT (D: Susie Dee, Trudy Hellier)
A fierce, fiery, 74-minute gut punch of a film from the achingly empathetic poison pen of Melbourne playwright Patricia Cornelius, featuring a trio of searing performances (from the actors who played these roles for years on stage), theatre director Susie Dee and actor Trudy Hellier's film adaptation of Cornelius' award-winning play feels like the most arresting and vital Australian micro-budget film in years, exactly the kind of clarion call you crave from indie cinema. A powerfully feminist work with anger, acid and attitude to spare, this never coddles the audience, contrasting three bruised, tough women in a holding cell with the mysterious night before, where we gradually see what put them inside, as they reckon with the fucked up lives that have led them here — but what's most surprising is the screw-you swagger this film walks with, reminiscent of something like 1992's Romper Stomper. Seek it out.

#11. TO LESLIE (D: Michael Morris)
I love hard-won redemption stories of fucked-up protagonists, especially one as disarmingly human, empathetic and even funny as this one, with a laser focus on behaviour that gives it life. Working from an open wound of a screenplay, Andrea Riseborough's performance is a sinewy, bruised force of nature, but the film wouldn’t work as well without the quiet grace of Marc Maron opposite her, as a lonely, gentle man who takes a chance on this white tornado of a woman before even really knowing why. It’s nice to have a film that sits with its characters without judgement and offers a plausible kind of hope that a small dream that can, with the right support network, come true. 

#10. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOLUME 3 (D: James Gunn)
​​In a year that finally saw Marvel Studios tumble from its exalted perch and the DC Extended Universe die a grim death, leave it to James Gunn — the surest hands in this corner of the business — to land the plane safely. Gunn has spent three films (and a holiday special!) carefully building this found family of galaxy-hopping mercenary misfit toys, and making this one revolve around damaged cyber-animal pilot Rocket Racoon is a masterstroke of getting to the heart of why this story matters to so many folks around the world, more than a million Avengers crossovers could ever do. Amongst all the shenanigans and wisecracks, a profound sense of loss and grief has always hung around these characters; they've not just lost an Uncle Ben but entire families, worlds, galaxies — and, in Rocket's case, sense of self, a life he was born into (as an animal) that he was never allowed to have. While this third film doesn't perhaps hang together as a story as much as the previous two (it doesn't quite know what to do with Gamora and Peter, a curse forced upon them by one of Avengers Endgame's dumbest plot twists), in a world where so many people are having their rights taken away from them, their homes destroyed and lands eradicated, there is something elementally powerful in Rocket's final liberation — "All of them."​ — that transcends "superhero" cinema. 

#9. THE FABELMANS (D: Steven Spielberg)
Spielberg’s testament film of sorts, his attempt at a Rorschach Test to show how he became the artist he did — a child of art and science, fascinated with tech and the emotions it can elicit, struggling with constantly moving and making friends, with the thrill of wrapping his engineer-entertainer’s head around filmmaking elegantly contrasting and dovetailing with witnessing his parents’ relationship curdling — is a delight, though it could’ve gone a bit harder into showing us the “lonely kid” Spielberg so often refers to his younger self as. Loved the cast, especially Dano and Williams. The ending is an absolute treat (love that casting choice, of course), with a great joke in the final shot. 

#8. POOR THINGS (D: Yorgos Lanthimos)
Just when you think "they don't make 'em like they used to," along comes Lanthimos, one of cinema's great provocative oddballs, who makes movies that feel like magic tricks. Witness this delightfully carnal steampunk-gothic feminist fantasia, an alt-universe version of Bride of Frankenstein where Emma Stone's sewn-together Bella Baxter embarks into the wider world to seek a life of sensation before settling down, only to find a world of craven dickheads who wish to possess and control her for their own purposes, like a dark funhouse mirror of something like Fanny Hill. Stone gives the comic performance of the year (followed very closely by an unhinged Mark Ruffalo), backed by a perfect cast and some truly demented production design and VFX, but it's Stone's work and Tony McNamara's consistently hilarious script that power this twisted beast, even when it gets a bit long in the tooth in the final stretch. 
​
#7: LIMBO (D: Ivan Sen)
Sen's latest outback noir is even more mediative than previous efforts, but no less quietly mesmerising, with an inescapable sense of dread, ruin and weariness invading every monochromatic frame, lurking within all those underground caverns, as hollowed-out as the characters who dwell within them; marked by generations of abuse, displacement and disregard, like the mining sites that make this proud, sacred land look more like an alien landscape, violated by decades of invasion. Sen continues to be Australia's most dedicated genre-adjacent chronicler of the open wounds that throb beneath this land, and the fact he does it with such intelligence, skill and respect for genre makes him a national treasure.

#6. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (D: Martin Scorsese)
​​How does America's best film director keep getting better? Scorsese has always been interested in micro-societies and the violence they inflict on each other, but genocide is an entirely new subject for him to deal with, and he tackles the tragic fallout of the Native American Osage people's sudden oil wealth - swiftly followed by the mysterious deaths of the newly prosperous natives at the hands of their seething, newly-submissive white officials - with a sensitivity, a patience and an inquiry (not to mention an unflinching horror) that has become a hallmark of his later work. While I wish this followed the novel's (at least, initial) lead of seeing the tragedy through Mollie's eyes, the astonishingly great Lily Gladstone has such elemental gravity as a presence, while so effortlessly personable, that she lets you right in, refusing to believe the horrors that she increasingly knows to be true. But Robert De Niro's manipulative politico is also a monster for the ages, a late-career hallmark for one of the greats. The ending at first strikes us as odd, with Scorsese himself narrating the tragedy we've just seen as bullet points in a jaunty mid-century radio play, but this turns the tables on us: no piece of art, no matter how sensitive or careful, can ever begin to hope to do justice to the greatest of all injustices: one society's wilful intention to eliminate another.

#5. SALTBURN (D: Emerald Fennell)
Bless a filmmaker who still knows how to have fun! Fennell returns to capital-C CINEMA in grand style with this supercharged, sexy, slick, splashy and sinister spin on a couple of well-known tales (but to say which feels like a spoiler). Everyone here is perfectly cast -- Keoghan is shaping up as one of cinema's all-time great weirdos, Elordi is the alluring Golden Boy made flesh, Madekwe a perfect foil and Pike and Grant the distracted toffs inhabiting their own self-contained universe, hilarious as they are strangely poignant -- and the setting is as intoxicating as it is rotted (the production design here is brilliant), but Fennell's tale goes places you wouldn't imagine, leading to some of the most devilishly cringey moments I've seen in a film for a good long while. A mischievous psychosexual thriller with style and provocation to burn, this was a total blast.

#4. THE OLD OAK (D: Ken Loach)
89-year-old Loach's final film, about a pub landlord trying to keep his changing community of broken ex-miners and Syrian refugees together before it explodes, feels all the world like a parting wish, a road map for a way forward: a world where we're all kinder, more open to each others' experiences, where we embrace community - a world where "when you eat together, you stick together". But don't think ol' Kenny's gone all soft and sentimental on us, oh, no; this is as tough and upsetting as any British social realist drama you've seen, from one of the best to ever do it. Beautiful, essential filmmaking that takes a global issue and makes it heartrendingly personal. 

#3. FEMME (D: Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping)
Drag queen Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarratt) is beaten by homophobe Preston (George McKay) and his mates, but when Jules spots Preston at a gay bath house months later, he decides to infiltrate his life (Preston doesn't know what Jules looks like without makeup) and take him apart. Gripping from start to end, it's a beautifully structured thriller, rooted in character, that's as complex as it is claustrophobic, carrying poignant subtext about the ways queer people are forced to play hetero roles just to survive in a straight male world, while keeping us on the edge of our seats. It never shies away from eroticism and perfectly dovetails sex with danger, leading to an ending that, in an effort to avoid didacticism, doesn't quite seem to take a position... but I had trouble reminding myself to breathe throughout the climax, so it obviously wasn’t that much of an issue. Powerful stuff.

#2: LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (D: Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes)
For me, the great Australian horror film of 2023 was not the one with the ghostly resin hand, but this, the Cairnes Brothers' brilliantly constructed, breathlessly entertaining late night satanic spook show, anchored by a career-best performance from David Dastmalchian, a longtime favourite supporting player of mine given a lead role perfectly suited to his particular brand of offbeat personability, sensitivity and charisma.  To be fair, no film I saw this year was more For Me, with everything from its Michael Ironside-narrated opening voiceover to its cheesy Don Lane-style 1970s talk show setting, from its real-time construction to the gleeful way it blasts through Satanic horror tropes — what, you mean we can have a horror film NOT mired in trauma, that doesn't feel the need to apologise for having fun, in 2023?? — from its perfectly period-accurate production design to its double-ending, was absolute catnip to me. 

...and my #1 film of 2023 is...

#1. AFTERSUN (Director: Charlotte Wells)
​This is the kind of personally etched memory-scape film we see so much at festivals nowadays, but I’ve never seen it done as well as this, and I’m not sure folks understand just how difficult it is to pull off this seamlessly. Wells gives herself a head start with two brilliant actors in Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, who give achingly lived-in performances, but her hand is always guiding this beautifully observed, soft-stepping sledgehammer of a film. Being a child of divorce, seeing a parent struggle alone, trying to keep it from you by creating as nurturing or optimistic a front as possible… I can no longer access those years of my own childhood, but they’re up in the old synaptic storage vault somewhere, as this film gave that box a good old shake. 

​A film of fragments, for most of its runtime it washes over you, like a summer holiday from your memory… until the last five minutes, when things get a bit more abstract, my tear ducts exploded and I couldn't hold it all in any more. A stunning directorial debut as deeply felt as it is beautifully calibrated, I’m excited to see where Wells goes from here.

Thank you to everyone who made it this far, hope you enjoyed this countdown. From us at Cinema Viscera, we wish you and yours a hugely happy and healthy 2024 - here's hoping our lives and the world at large can sort their shit out.

Love and cinema,
​P&P xo