This Week: FALL MOVIE PREVIEW 🍂 🎥

October is a great month to be a movie fan, with buzz from fall festivals, rumblings of next year’s Oscar race, and plenty of time to enjoy some spooky favorites 🎃

So, join us as we recap our favorite movies of the year so far, what we’re looking forward to most, some early thoughts on awards season, and a few Halloween streaming recommendations to make your skin crawl 🧟

THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR SO FAR 🎞️

We’re three-quarters into the year, and even though there are plenty of films we still need to catch up on (like Dumb Money, The Creator, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, and A Haunting in Venice), we wanted to recap the best of what we’ve seen so far by ranking our 23 Favorite Films of 2023 💣

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster hit Oppenheimer was a clear consensus for number one, followed by the spectacular second entry in the Spider-Verse franchise, and the indie romance Past Lives. Two more franchise entries—John Wick: Chapter 4 and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One—rounded out our Top 5 after impressing us with over-the-top spectacle 🎇

Some other exciting films we wanted to call out:
- Our favorite rom-com? Rye Lane
- Best comedies? No Hard Feelings and Bottoms
- Horror? Talk to Me
- An underrated performance? Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One
- Most underrated blockbuster? Dungeons and Dragons
- Need a “WTF did I just watch?” Try Master Gardener or Infinity Pool

IMPORTANT MOVIES TO LOOK OUT FOR 🤩

We scoured the fall fest line-ups and upcoming release schedule to see what the rest of the year had to offer, and while we found many more intriguing titles than we had the space to list, these ranked as our 23 Most Anticipated Films of 2023 🔭

Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, is our most anticipated 2023 film after receiving rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival, followed by Poor Things (the latest from The Favourite director, Yorgos Lanthimos), The Zone of Interest (an Oscar contender for Best Picture, Director, and International Feature), and Scorsese’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon.

The rest of the year also features a number of films from big-name directors—David Fincher’s The Killer, Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Todd Haynes’s May December, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon—as well as some highly anticipated performances, such as Austin Butler in The Bikeriders, Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall, Zac Efron in The Iron Claw, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, and Annette Bening in Nyad.

(WAY TOO) EARLY OSCAR PREDICTIONS 🏆

With five months to go until the 96th Academy Awards, we thought we’d try our hand at predicting the winning films in all the major categories—but keep in mind, there is a lot of time for things to shift, so we do not recommend betting your life’s savings on these predictions! 😆

As of now, we have Oppenheimer leading the field with six predicted wins, including Best Picture, Director, and Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr.’s scene-stealing role as AEC chairman Lewis Strauss.

With Dune: Part Two being delayed to next year due to the ongoing actors’ strike, we expect several of the technical categories (like Score and Sound) to go to Oppenheimer 🎼

Killers of the Flower Moon is sure to be a big deal this awards season, but we’d be wary about predicting it for too many statuettes. Still, we do think Lily Gladstone will be recognized for Best Actress and Scorsese will finally win his second Academy Award for co-writing the film’s screenplay.

Many awards pundits believe Best Cinematography is a lock for Oppenheimer, but don’t be surprised if Killers of the Flower Moon swipes it out from under Nolan’s nose 🐎

Poor Things is the current dark horse in the Best Picture, Director, and Actress races (the latter for Emma Stone’s reportedly strange yet compelling performance), but we’re not ready to predict it in any of those categories just yet…

However, the film’s momentum overall could help it score in a category like Costume Design or even Visual Effects, which is perhaps the biggest toss-up of the night now that Dune: Part Two is out of the running 🔮

Many are predicting a sizable Oscar haul for Barbie, however we may be a bit more reserved in our estimations. We think it’s a shoe-in for Original Song and maybe Production Design. Plus, there is a world where the Academy rewards Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s flashy screenplay over the more intimate Past Lives (and yes, Barbie is campaigning in Original Screenplay, NOT Adapted!) 📝

To be honest, honing in on a Documentary and International Feature frontrunner this early in the season is like picking a needle in a haystack, but we are pretty confident that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will ride its universal acclaim straight to Oscar gold.

In perhaps our biggest gamble, we are predicting Colman Domingo will win Best Actor for his role in Rustin, where he will play gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Most other pundits are split between the “big three” of Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer), Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon), and Bradley Cooper (Maestro).

We are also predicting Danielle Brooks in a wide-open Best Supporting Actress race for The Color Purple, in which she reprises the role that earned her a Tony nomination in 2016. Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers), Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer), and Taraji P. Henson (The Color Purple) also have a shot at the win.

SPOOKY STREAMING RECOMMENDATIONS 🕷️

Who doesn’t love a good movie recommendation? And whether you’ve got Netflix, Hulu, Max, or even Tubi, we have hand-picked some truly scary (and not-so-scary) recs for you!

WHAT WE WERE WATCHING LAST YEAR 🕰️

🚨 BONUS LIST ALERT 🚨

…and that’s all folks!