Best New(ish) Movies I Watched in 2023

I already did my annual list of the ten best older movies I saw in 2023, so here is a list of the newer movies I saw this past year. They are separated into five tiers based on quality and listed alphabetically within each tier. (Check JustWatch.com to see where they are currently streaming.)

Tier 1: Cinematic Masterpieces

A Dark Song (2016) directed by Liam Gavin

I sat stunned as the credits rolled, amazed at how great this low-budget indie horror film was. It is an absolute masterpiece, maybe my favorite horror movie ever—at least of the new millennium. I was on edge throughout, legitimately frightened—all without a single jump scare. It is an occult horror movie about black magick and rituals, but they take the subject matter extremely seriously and clearly did research to make it seem realistic—which makes it all the more haunting. [Slight Spoilers Ahead] The story is about a grieving mother who hires an occultist to perform a ritual to summon her guardian angel to ask a favor so she can speak to her murdered son—and get revenge against his killers (who used him to perform an occult ritual). The ritual in the film is based on an actual ritual from The Book of Abramelin, which the famous occultist Aleister Crowley performed in real life. I find the world of occult ritual magic fascinating but also frightening. Occult horror scares me more than most other subgenres because the type of dark magic portrayed in the film might actually exist. Whether such dark forces are real or not doesn’t matter, because there certainly do exist occultists who believe them to be real and actually perform these magical rituals—but to what end?

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Top 10 Movies (At Least 10 Years Old) I Watched in 2023

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With 2023 winding down, it is time for my annual list of the ten best movies (at least ten years old) that I watched this past year. As always, this is not a list of the best movies ever, just those I chose to watch in 2023. I ranked the top ten, but the order doesn’t matter as much as the “tiers,” which I separated into five groups: I) Cinematic Masterpieces, II) Great Films, III) Just Good, IV) Flawed But Watchable, and V) Disappointing (Don’t Bother). The ordering of films within each tier are interchangeable. [Use JustWatch.com to see if/where these films are currently streaming.]

Tier I: Cinematic Masterpieces

1. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) – Directed by Werner Herzog

This is an amazing piece of cinema. It feels like a documentary following actual Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century searching for El Dorado. The opening shot is stunning, as hundreds of people descend a steep mountain trail carrying all their supplies. With so many of today’s movies shot on green-screen using CGI, the verisimilitude of this film was a breath of fresh air—literally. You feel like you are there in the verdant jungles of the Amazon with the actors—because the film was shot on location in the jungles of the Amazon. As a result, you feel the same constant dread that the crew felt, of trekking into the complete unknown, not knowing what danger may be lurking in the thick forest or around the next river bend.

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Incubate Stories Subconsciously Before Writing

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When I get a new idea for a fiction story I become obsessed. I am flooded with inspiration, developing the story in my mind while researching online, and rapidly taking notes for a potential plot and characters. I can see a flash of the entire story in my mind like a movie, and I feel the urge to follow this burst of obsessive inspiration to write the story ASAP. Sometimes I do write it right away, while other times I set the notes aside to finish whatever else I was working on at the time (because I am always working on something else). I have found the latter to be more productive for my creative process. It is better to wait and incubate the story for some time rather than rush in prematurely.

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Excavating The Exorcist

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In honor of spooky season I will be exploring the Exorcist franchise. The 1973 original is a classic horror movie I had never seen until this year. Actually, I’d seen bits and pieces, specifically the infamous scene of the possession in Regan’s bedroom. That is part of the reason I avoided seeing the film for so long. As I’ve detailed before, I was not a fan of horror movies when I was younger, but even when I got into horror I avoided the demonic possession subgenre, perhaps because I found it particularly horrific. Demons seemed more realistic than zombies or vampires, and—if real—being possessed by an evil entity is probably the most terrifying horror scenario of all. Demonic possession movies could even be a case of “hyperstition”—or a piece of fiction that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and manifests itself in reality. Demons like those depicted in The Exorcist may not have existed before, but after the popularity of the movie, they surely exist now—at least in the imaginations of the viewers. I also avoided The Exorcist because there have been so many copycats over the years, vastly inferior retreads that further pushed me away from the possession subgenre as a whole. Plus with all the parodies and references that have permeated pop culture, I felt like I had already seen the movie. But because The Exorcist is so highly rated, and I am a horror fan, I finally saw the film in full for the first time this year, and I can confirm it is more than worthy of its high praise.

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Why Isn’t Bitcoin Fixing This (Yet)?

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A common meme among Bitcoin enthusiasts is the phrase “Bitcoin fixes this,” used in response to any current societal problem. Whether it’s an economic issue, political conflict, or social ill, many bitcoiners believe the root cause is the money supply and the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policy—therefore a decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can provide the solution. “Fix the money, fix the world” is another popular meme phrase among bitcoiners.

However, Bitcoin and its supporters have their critics. Many do not care for the “Bitcoin maximalists,” their toxicity, and their repeated claims that “Bitcoin fixes this” for every societal problem. I cannot claim to be a full-on Bitcoin maximalist since I hold several alt-coins, but I am a Bitcoin mostlyist—as the majority of my crypto hodlings are BTC, and I think Bitcoin is the best and most important cryptocurrency in the world. I agree with the Bitcoin maximalists on most things, including that bitcoin will fix many of society’s current problems, which are often economic in nature. (Read Robert Breedlove for more on this.)

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Algorithmic Fiction is Not For Me

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Welcome to the age of algorithmic fiction. Thanks to tools like GPT-4, a human writer with a library of previously written books can simply write a one-page outline for a new novel, and AI can write an entire novel in their style. In many cases the book will be good enough to pass as if it was written by the human authors themselves, allowing writers to publish more frequently. However, GPT fiction will only work with formulaic writers whose books are all similar. In other words, those writers who were already writing algorithmic fiction before the aid of AI.

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Pseudonymity Makes People More Honest

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There is a misconception that anonymity on the internet inevitably leads to toxicity. But pre-Facebook and social media, most people on the internet were anonymous. Or more precisely, they were pseudonymous, meaning they used a continuous username and avatar, but that name/image was not tied to their real-life identity. In the 1990s and early 2000s it seemed absurd to reveal your real name/face online. Yet under that pseudonymous internet, on average, people were more honest and cordial than they are today when everyone posts under their real names. Contrary to intuition, there was less toxicity when more people were anonymous.

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Sunk Cost Writing: Use AI to Kill Your Darlings

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One of the most difficult parts of writing is “killing your darlings.” That might mean cutting out a part you liked to make the story as a whole better. Or, more generally, it can simply mean deleting the boring parts of your story. (As Elmore Leonard said, there should be no boring parts.) Perhaps one of the greatest upsides of writing with AI is that it can help eliminate the “sunk cost fallacy” that authors often face with the words they have already written.

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Indiana Jones and the Rewatching of Movies

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I used to work at a job where I had to watch cable TV all day. (It sounds more fun than it was.) One of the networks I had to watch would often replay the same movies over and over again. At that time I was studying screenwriting and wanted to write movies myself, so it was instructive to watch a single movie multiple times to deconstruct it and figure out what the filmmakers did right or wrong, how and why. I tend to avoid rewatching movies unless it’s one of my absolute favorites, and even then, only years later when I don’t remember it too well. But for this job, I wound up seeing the same movie multiple times in a single day, or two days in a row, or several times over the course of a week/month/year. I saw both good movies and bad movies this way—and some movies that I thought were good when I first saw them, but by the fifth or tenth time realized it wasn’t very good in the first place. One movie (or group of movies) that I repeatedly watched at my job was the Indiana Jones franchise.

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E Nihilus Infinitum: Social Media and U.S. Fiction

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In “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” David Foster Wallace’s brilliant 1990 essay¹, he hypothesized that fiction writers (like himself and myself) are natural oglers or people-watchers. Writers used to have to observe people in the real world, in public, to get the material for their fiction. But fiction writers (like him and me) are often self-conscious types with social anxiety, which was why television was such a godsend for people like him. With TV, self-conscious writers could ogle and people-watch from the comfort of their own homes without the other people seeing them. In this sense, DFW argued, television is a form of voyeurism.

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