 2024 is well underway, which means we look forward onward to what's coming out in the movie space this year. But we should also pause and reflect on what really worked last year, at least from the films I saw, by giving 10 movies that not only hit expectations, but surpassed them. Here are my best movies of 2023. It's unfortunate that this list has the start on such a disgusting note, but I made a huge mistake last year when I wrapped up my 2023 best of on a live stream. I put Puss in Boots on there. Puss in Boots came out in 2022, late December, sure, but I didn't review it, I didn't see it until 2023 early, so I thought I wrongly assumed that it came out that year. It was a foolish mistake, one that is a critic I should be absolutely ashamed of and ridiculed for, pointed at and mocked, and you're free to do all of those things. You're also free to subscribe to the channel because I post tons of movie reviews, reactions, honest takes, roasts, live streams every single week, and I make mistakes, and I own up to them, and I'm honest about it because at the end of the day we're just talking about movies. It's subjective, it's fun, hopefully, and I'm here to entertain the best that I can. Hopefully I check those boxes for you. If so, let's begin with the number 10 spot. Much in the same vein as Puss in Boots, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem goes all in on the 2D aesthetic. It looks freaking phenomenal. I love that it has the look of an old comic book, but it also brings in the 3D quality. It really marries the two together, pairs quite nicely with the anchovy pizza. This is a great movie. I took my kids to it. We all felt the pizza power. We had a good time seeing our four Ninja Turtles on the screen again. I like that the voices match the Turtles personalities more now. They're not these Michael Bay monstrosities smashing around like they're Hulk. It feels quaint. It feels like teenagers at school. April was fun with them. I love the villains in this. No Shredder, yet they made it better. No Shredder made it better, but I have no doubt that he'll show up in the later film and he's gonna be awesome. The comedy was solid. It landed pretty much every time for me and the kids. I can't see Ninja Turtle Peeris coming into this movie and saying, yeah, it's bad. I just don't. I refuse to believe anyone doesn't like this new movie. Highly recommended if you're into the Turtles or if you're into this 2D look that Spider-Verse really popularized a couple years back. You'll have a good time with this one. Over the decades, Evil Dead has kind of sneakily become a really solid franchise in the horror space spanning what four or five films now plus a TV show. You have Ash coming and going throughout it. The Chainsaw being one of the big staples of the franchise and obviously the Book of the Dead. This new one taking place in essentially just an apartment building, really a room in an apartment building for the majority of the film really works wonders. I really like the family, which is almost an impossible task it seems for modern films. I find myself hating protagonists more than liking them nowadays. So it's a testament to this one that I thought the main protagonists here were all pretty likable in their own ways. Even the frustrating ones that made the dumb decisions you don't want them to. Still at the end of the day, I was like, okay, this kid means well or he's just making bad choices, but I'm still on board with this. Acting was really good. I liked the mother in this. She was creepy yet you still felt bad for her. The gore was in check. It was in place. Eyeballs are getting spit out of people's mouths. Eyeball transfer that Tony Hawk would be proud of. There's good atmosphere in it too. It's not outright scary, but it just has a cool vibe to it. Even the title screen coming up rising out of the lake really sets the tone, really sets the stage for an awesome film and awesome it is. It was my favorite horror movie for sure of 2023 and I'm excited to see where this franchise goes from here. Really anywhere. I mean it seems like no matter what they do, it kind of works. In the number eight spot, taking the place of Puss in Boots and actually moving up a spot is The Holdovers, a film I did not see until a couple days ago. I need to tell myself at the end of this year, Adam do not put The Holdovers on best movies of 2024 because it's a 2023 release. Don't make the same Puss in Boots mistake all over again. Much like Last Wish, I was able to check this one out in the cock. The Holdovers is on Peacock as of speaking, as of making this video, so it might still be there. You can check it out in the cock with your family. And I think it's a family film. It's a rated R movie for sure. There's some vulgar language. It's a little crass, but nothing really. There's no sexual content. There's no real violence. It's really just for some swear words here and there. It has a great message. It's got a great story. It's got some dimension to it, which is often missing from newer films. The characters are flawed, but they're not unlikeable to the point where you actively root against them. It's just kind of an old school feeling movie. It takes place in the early 70s, which helps with the old school style. No one's on their phones 24-7. It's a slow pace. It's a little over two hours long. And it works. Everything really works. I liked Paul Giamani here as kind of the douchey professor. He doesn't like his students because they're all preppy, and he believes that they don't struggle like us regular blue collar people do, or have a backstory like his, some history that they just can't appreciate the same way he can. And of course, he will learn as the movie unwraps, because it takes place during the holidays. It's a Christmas film, if you want, if you say so. He's going to learn that some of these students do in fact share some of the pain that he does. It's a good coming-of-age life lessons film that you can kind of dissect afterwards and really appreciate as you pull it apart, as you tear some of the gift. I'm really going all in on this Christmas metaphor. Okay, let's continue. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are back, baby, with air. The film about boring, Nike marketing team. You can't even get through it. The exciting story of the Nike marketing team trying to get their shoe line back on track. It's on paper and sounds so lame, but I'm a sucker for a good true story or based on a true story, and I'm a big sucker for marketing films. We don't have enough of them. I really was intrigued by Matt Damon when it came out, the TV show, because it was set in an old-school marketing agency, but it doesn't really go into that very much. Turns out Don Draper just likes to drink and have his way with a bunch of different women, not so much do the marketing and the sales. That's the stuff I like. The fact that we have basically a two-hour movie at Nike about a bunch of schlubs trying to sell a shoe line featuring Michael Jordan, and that's the fucking picture. Yeah, I'm all in on this. I dug this film. I like that they kept Michael Jordan in the background. They shot him from the back. You never see his face because he's so iconic. It would be weird. It would be an impossible task to cast someone else other than Michael in the role, and Michael is as great as he probably looks still. He's no sprite chicken. He's no 17-year-old kid. Every man hero, Matt Damon, once again playing a great role here, he always knocks it out of the park. It's no exception this time around. This is also one of those movies kind of like Oppenheimer where random actors just kind of stop by. That I wasn't expecting. Blinken, you'll miss Chris Tucker just randomly thrown into the film. I love that. I also have to give a shout out to Viola Davis as Michael Jordan's mother in this. She's always awesome. No exception here. A powerhouse and really showcases what a beast Michael Jordan's mother was when it came to getting the best deal possible for her son. Fantastic. Watch Air. Another animated flick makes the cut with across the spiderverse, the follow-up to Into the Spiderverse. This one's bigger. It's louder. It's more animated because there's just more of it. It's a long movie. It's over two hours. That's pretty unheard of for an animation film that's not Studio Ghibli. I dug this movie a lot. The only thing that sours me on it is the fact that it doesn't have an ending. This is a cliff hanger. It's a two-parter. That was the popular thing to do in 2023. Movies that you didn't even know were going to be two-parters were, such as Fast and the Furious X. Remember that? Anyone remember Fast and the Furious X? That was a two-parter. A two-beat continued. Then you had the new Mission Impossible movie. Of course, here we are with Spider-Man. This one is a really great first act to a hopeful, beautiful final. Technically, it's the second act because you do have Into the Spiderverse, but this is the one where they're going with the two-parter thing in the middle of the trilogy, which is a little weird, but I'm with it. I'm cool. I love Miles in these movies. I love the new Spider-Man variants they brought to the table. I'm excited to see how they bring back the old crew from the first film, which is teased at the end of this one. You can find this movie for sure on Netflix. It might be on, I don't know, I feel like I've seen it in three or four different places, so it's definitely available, but top of the line animation and music in this movie, I will say the animation is so creative that it's almost a pro and a con. The con side of it is every world has a unique feel and a unique flavor to it, and while they are beautiful on their own as an entire cohesive package, it's a little bit herky jerky because they're so separated. There's nothing like cohesively bringing it together. It's kind of like Solid Snake and Smash Bros. if you're a gamer. Little weird seeing Solid Snake in the game. They didn't really tie it one to one, same with some of the other Fire Emblem characters, but I digress. This is a great film. The characters are so likeable. The parents are fantastic. Again, Miles really is the heart and soul of this whole thing. He really drives it. I like the creative twist they put on this movie where he is a one-of-a-kind Spider-Man. The rest are Peter Parker's and he was an absolute mistake. A bug in the system. A bug. A spider. That's good. It's just good. George Clooney shot out of a cannon with boys in the boat. Came out of nowhere. I saw this at one of those Regal Monday mystery things. They're usually disasters. This one was a pleasant surprise. I remember seeing the trailer, had a remixed old school song. I can't remember what it was playing. I think it was a Tom Petty song. But I won't back down. And then it goes into some drama. Your boys will never be good enough to row. And then it shows them like working really hard, rowing. Come on, we can do this. And that's the boys in the boat. Check it out. This is just a feel good movie. I think on Rod Tomatoes it might be Rodden. I put a fresh score on there. I don't give a shit what these other guys say. I don't care if it's basic. Sometimes I want basic. Alright? Not everything has to be this deep profound psychological thriller or whatnot. Sometimes I just want a good old fashioned Rudy. Sometimes I just want a league of their own. A cool Runnings. Remember the Titans. Remember those films? The ones where you could watch a group of individuals rise up against all odds. A Rocky Balboa story? That's what the boys in the boat is. Is it formulaic? Sure. Are the characters maybe a little too goody two shoes? Of course. Do I care? No. Because at the end of the day, parents want to sit down and sometimes just just cheer for something, you know? In a world full of misery and despair and war and hate and bigotry and isms and asms and and what-sits, I just want some boys in the boat rowing their asses off. And this delivers. Well done, George Clooney. You got my fresh? We all know the MCU has had a bit of a rocky run as of the last few years. Starting out on such a high note and really hitting its crescendo at Endgame and then occasionally having some leaps and bounds and then dips and dives and I don't know why I'm doing this whole like Dr. Seuss shit lately, but let's keep moving. But one man who stayed consistent through all of this is James Gunn delivering not one but two, but Trey, Guardians of the Galaxy films that are absolute fire. This isn't just my favorite MCU trilogy. I know some people like to lean to the Captain America side of things. I feel that Guardians is far more consistent. Just tonally and just everything is just far more consistent. But it's also one of my favorite comic book superhero trilogies. Scratch that. One of my favorite trilogies, full stop. There's not a lot of other ones there that hit the mark three times over. You look at X-Men, falls apart in the third act. You look at Spider-Man falls apart in the third act. Although I've forgiven a lot of its shortcomings, it still falls apart in the third act. James Gunn gets to come back after being unceremoniously fired from Disney for some tweets he made a decade or two earlier, gets picked up by DC, makes a kick ass Suicide Squad movie, then gets to come back for more Guardians of the Galaxy. And now of course he's back with DC again, but he was able to at least finish these awesome characters. All these characters that were previously unheard of by the majority of folks, unless you're really into comics, I had no idea who the Guardians of the Galaxy were until that movie hit. And now I've played a video game, I've seen some of the comics, they're everywhere. The fact though that James Gunn was able to get this done so well with the right amount of drama, comedy in the appropriate spots, not undercutting that drama and letting these characters have time to breathe, giving Rocket a fantastic backstory, giving Quill some really great emotional moments. Chris Pratt owns this role. Gamora's back, Nebula, Drax, the whole gang is fantastic. I don't have a negative. It looks more mature, yet it retains some of that color but it's more subdued. James Gunn grows as a director and so do his movies. I think this trilogy is about as flawless as it can possibly get. Yeah, I'm hooked on a feeling and that feeling? Guardians of the Galaxy. It's not really a feeling. Let's move on. All right, now we're in adult territory. We have hit the mature audiences, the critic movies, the movies built for awards. And we start with Killers of the Flower Moon. We have Martin fucking Scorsese here. All right, this isn't some little Piddle Paddle Barbie movie. This is Killers of the Flower Moon, an epic with Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro. It is just balls to the wall drama based on a true story. It is intense. It's got some grandiose music. It's got beautiful cinematography. It tells the story in a slow, methodical fashion that really eats at you as you watch this tribe get freaking taken for everything they're worth by some real garbage men. It's a powerful movie. It's a movie that Scorsese wanted to tell. A story he's wanted to tell for a long time and he nails it, of course, like he almost always does. There's no major twists or turns. It doesn't use some sort of creative narrative storytelling that takes things out of order. It's just by the numbers, by the book, perfect filmmaking from a master at his craft. If people don't have Oppenheimer anywhere on their top 10 list by the master himself, Christopher Nolan, they are either lying to themselves. They're lying to you or they haven't seen it. Now I guess there is a fourth option. They just have different tastes and that's perfectly reasonable as well. Listen, it's subjective. Art is subjective. What works for some won't work for others and it's just for us to determine where we stand and that's it. There's nothing more to it. Oppenheimer, for all intents and purposes, is about as good as it can be. When you film a movie or when you are studying filmmaking, I should say, you turn to people like Christopher Nolan and look at how he frames up his shots and how he tells the story, how he beautifully and meticulously calculates his scenes to kind of mirror each other and play off of each other. He bounces back and forth like a 3D baseball car between black and white, past scenes, present scenes, future scenes. He's all over the map, yet it all has this like symmetry to it, this beautiful poetry. What's that dumb thing Lucas used to say? It's poetry at rhymes or something when he was talking about the prequels and the sequels and sidequels or whatever they're called. No, Nolan knows what it is. Lucas is kind of pretending what it is when it comes to the prequels, but when you look at Oppenheimer, it's just there's a rhythm to it. It's like a good song. It just keeps going and that's appropriate because Nolan's known above anything else for having these awesome scores built in. It's baked into the recipe. When you watch Dark Knight or Interstellar or Inception or the Prestige, there is music that is constantly accompanying each scene. It might be two guys sitting down for a cup of coffee, but he's using that music to make something far more grandiose because it's not just these guys drinking coffee. It's these guys maybe planning how they're building an atomic bomb that could one day wipe out millions of people. It's about two guys arguing while they determine what's the best mathematical equation we can use to get to our point B. There is so much more being said in the unsaid with the music, with the framing, with the way he moves the camera and it is absolutely all there. Oppenheimer is a brilliant piece of filmmaking from a brilliant filmmaker. Is it a perfect movie? Well, that depends on who you ask. I think the story is interesting, but not super captivating to the point where I'm like, wow, this is a Shawshank redemption. I'm more interested in the fact that how it's filmed and how it looks than even the story itself. Now that said, I'm not taking away from the performances because those are just as solid. When it came to movies in 2023, the Oppenheimer experience was like no other. Going to this film, this meaty, huge movie, and to kind of like unwind and relax with Barbie afterwards, a silly, schlocky, campy movie, it was just such a nice contrast. Barbie is not a top 10 for me though, but Oppenheimer absolutely is. The biggest surprise on my list is my number one and that's The Iron Claw, a movie about a family riddled with trauma, a movie about brothers coming to terms with a supposed curse. Obviously, I don't believe in curses and I don't believe curses are real for that matter, but these brothers did, or at least they let it get to them. So what we have here is a story of wrestlers, a family of wrestlers, trying to make it to the top to get that belt and bring it home for their controlling, manipulative father who constantly competes with his own kids and pits them against each other for his love and affection. A mother who's just a shadow, a shell of her former self after her youngest son died. I thought Zac Efron knocked it out of the park here. He blew me away with his performance. It is subdued. It is paired back, but rightfully so. All the characters, I thought, kept it grounded. It kept it realistic. And I was just fascinated by the story of how these guys, how these kids really let the trauma of the past, let history kind of dictate where their future would take them. And it was tragedy. They tried to outrun it, but in that sense they end up running right toward it by turning to drugs, by falling down the same path as there's predecessors did, by going into the ring, by getting injured, by just mentally being unfit and unhealthy. From a filming standpoint, it's also brilliant because you are getting these shots that I thought were going to be, okay, A24 scares me in a good way. Sometimes they're going to make something so out there, so off the wall or so artsy that I'm just going to be pissed. And other times, such as Iron Claw, they get it. They bring me into the scene without losing me. I get shots blurred out of our lead hero going off the ropes, but I still feel that impact. They still feel what he's feeling. It's blurry for a reason. He's tired. He's worn. There's just, there's logic behind the shots. And that's often gone missing nowadays in films. And then of course, there's the emotional stuff. This is a movie that can bring a grown man to tears very easily. There's several scenes where I have a brother of my own as well. And there's just something special about that kind of relationship where you will go to the ropes for them at the drop of a hat. If that phone call is picked up, you'll be there in a heartbeat. And so there's some really touching moments in this film. It's done with respect out of the family. And the movie has great messaging here, messaging of letting go of forging your own path of rising above what people think of you and your family and these curses or whatever else you think is plaguing. This is easily my number one pick of the year because even though I really respect and appreciate what Scorsese and what Nolan brought to the table as always, this is the one that emotionally hit me the hardest. This is the one that made me feel things other than admiration and just respect for the craft. It got me to a level where I believe these characters with their fake dumb wigs were genuine. Were the real article. And so yeah, the iron claw, brilliant, loved it. Can't wait to watch it again. Well, there you have it, my top 10 movies of 2023. Have you seen any of them? Have you seen most of them? Have you seen all of them? Let me know in the comments below. Please like the video and share your list with me. I'd love to see what you have to say. Maybe it's completely different. I saw a lot of movies in 2023, probably more than any of the previous years as of lately at least. And I still didn't see half of what was put out there. So yeah, this is not the be all and all list. It's just a list that maybe you can look at and say, okay, I was on the fence as to whether or not to see this one. I think I agree with Adam most of the time. So maybe he's steering me towards something that I'm really going to like. And hopefully that's the case. Let me know. Please like the video, subscribe. Again, if you haven't, if you're new here, I would love to see you stick around. I post a lot of stuff all the time. Big movie fan. If you are, join me. It's a good time here. If you really like what I'm doing, think of becoming a patron at patreon.com slash adam does movies. You can sign up for as little as $1 a month. It's just a great way to support the channel. I'm a one man operation and say, Hey, Adam, it's a new year. It's a new me. It's a new you. Let's work on it together. Let's work on us. You can also find a lot of these videos and audio form on Spotify, Apple podcasts, other podcasting services. So look for Adam does movies. I'm on Instagram. I'm on tiktok. We have a discord. I'm on everything. Now, you can look around. If you're on a platform, maybe look for me there and you might find me. Okay. Thanks for watching. I'll see you soon.