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Top 10 Films of 2023
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April 2024 Streaming Guide That Shelf
Top 10 Performances from Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
It’s been a long time coming, but Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Taylor's Version) finally hit Disney+ this past weekend, amassing a record-breaking 4.6 million views in just three days. An even more impressive stat when you realize the stage spectacle-turned-cultural-phenomenon clocks in at a whopping 3 hours and 31 minutes, a serious commitment for curious cinephiles and super Swifties alike. If you haven’t already sold your soul to attend a show and are wondering which tracks from Taylor’s extensive…
The Best Films of 2023: A Year in Review
Let’s cross our fingers that 2024 is good for the movies. Just when it seemed like movie theatres were recovering from a few years of rolling COVID-precautionary closures, Hollywood executives brought their might and greed down against the writers and actors who helped make 2023 such a great year for movies. The guild strikes in response to the studios made for a pretty brutal Fall with festivals and releases generally offering limited coverage opportunities for dramatic films, which were already…
TIFF 2023: A Playlist of Memorable Soundtrack Moments
As has become a September tradition at That Shelf, we’re taking time out of our recovery to revisit our favourite needle drops from the many memorable films we screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). So now that the People’s Choice picks have been announced (American Fiction was tops!) and the final film screened, it’s time for a well-deserved rest. So relax, put your feet up, and settle in for a playlist of songs that hack immediately back to…
Moanin’ over Moana? Disney’s been doing remakes for 100 years
It’s been a weird year to be a Disney fan. Putting aside the corporate drama — like Bob Iger’s return as CEO in November and the continuing feud in Florida with Gov. Ron DeSantis — we’ve seen the company struggling at the box office, despite several high-profile releases. The once-untouchable Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t selling tickets like it used to, The Little Mermaid failed to make a splash, and Pixar’s return to theatres, Elemental, is underperforming financially (so far, anyway)…
The Criterion Shelf: LGBTQ+ Favourites That Shelf
The Best Films of 2023 So Far: Uncle BlackBerry Who Can Recall His Past Lives
If you thought going to the movies in 2020, 2021 or 2022 was weird, take a look at theatres in 2023. At least in Toronto, a homegrown movie like BlackBerry is packing them in, while rooms showing the latest Marvel movie have a vacancy rate that’s usually reserved for Canadian films. Audiences are back and the movies are back, so pass the popcorn because 2023 is only halfway done!
Asteroid City Is Wes Anderson’s Wacky Ride with Meta-Theatre
The stage was set for Wes Anderson. The auteur de quirk’s latest film, Asteroid City, opens with a prologue that admittedly threw this reviewer for a loop. A host (Bryan Cranston) advises the audience that Asteroid City, the film you’re about to see, is actually a play. Anderson’s film is a film-within-a-film. Or, rather, it’s a play-within-a-film. The conceit seems like a smart continuation of the formal sophistication Anderson displayed with The French Dispatch. After paying homage to the literary world with an anthology…
Lists
Top 10 Films of 2023 10 films
All contributors at That Shelf were invited to submit their picks for the top ten best films of 2023. We…
TIFF 2023: The Films We Saw (and Reviewed) 61 films
A list of all of the films we saw and reviewed at TIFF 2023. For all reviews, head here.
The 25 Best Biopics of All Time, Ranked 25 films
This list features biopics that have the genre formula down to a T and others that truly defy convention. There…
TIFF 2023: What We're Most Excited to See 14 films
Best Films Of 2022 47 films
The movies are back! 2022 began with a flash freeze on moviegoing just as films like Parallel Mothers, Licorice Pizza,…
Apple's 2022 "Made in Canada" Spotlight 12 films
AppleTV is celebrating Canadian film over the next 12 weeks with their 2nd annual "Made in Canada Spotlight". Re-watch or…
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Recent reviews
Madame Web is the third entry into a Spider-Man-less cinematic universe made up entirely of Spider-Man characters and the returns keep diminishing. For all of the goodwill that Tom Hardy‘s (inspired?) performance as Venom created, Morbius poisoned Sony’s efforts irreparably. When the Madame Web trailer debuted, the mood around the film soured to mockery. You know the line. When Julia (Sydney Sweeney) asks Cassie (Dakota Johnson) about a man in a Polaroid, Cassie replies, “He was in the Amazon with…
Concerts bookend the musical biopic Bob Marley: One Love, but audiences expecting to see the king of reggae to go out with a Bohemian Rhapsody-style bang won’t get the payoff. There’s lots of build-up to the 1978 One Love concert after the 1976 Smile Jamaica concert opens the film. But not much of either one appears Bob Marley: One Love.
Instead, Bob Marley: One Love looks at the time in between. It’s a story, produced by a cavalcade of Marleys,…
Serving, slaying, and rocking the world of drag, filmmaker Reem Morsi’s Queen Tut intricately weaves the complex world of identity through a wholesome exploration. Films that represent LGBTQ+ communities often struggle to find the balance between being overly devastating (and sadly accurate) with their representation of homophobia or contrarily altogether ignoring discrimination. Only a select few films navigate this with a nuanced approach like Moonlight, Call Me by Your Name, and now, Queen Tut. This film exquisitely threads the needle…
They say that the spice of Arrakis is highly addictive. Prolonged exposure to the famed melange of planet Dune reportedly heightens the senses. One can therefore assume that after spending so much time swirling in the sands of Dune and basking in the essence of Frank Herbert’s popular sci-fi world, Denis Villeneuve and company are regular spice fiends. So too is anyone, really, who’s committed themselves to being immersed in this world. Dune is a drug, but it has never…
Liked reviews
"How doth ye like yon apples?!"
Simultaneously one of the great action parodies because beyond the expertly crafted Looney Tunes visual gags, on a filmmaking level it's frequently indistinguishable from the real thing (god McTiernan) and one of the best movies about a movie star literally wrestling with their own Hollywood fantasy image and myth. "You've brought me nothing but pain!"
15-YEAR OLD ME: "Oh boy! A RESIDENT EVIL film and a remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD! I hope this means there will be a new wave of zombie films!"
*A FINGER ON THE MONKEY'S PAW CURLS*
Zack Snyder can craft a fun action scene, but I am baffled as to why he wanted to make ARMY OF THE DEAD.
It's a zombie heist film (There's potential there!), with a charming gang of actors (I do love Dave Bautista!), buckets…
So weird, so Danish, and yet, not even Anders Thomas Jensen’s weirdest Danish film.
All contributors at That Shelf were invited to submit their picks for the top ten best films of 2023. We received 13 ballots with a spread of 55 different films receiving at least one vote. (Plus a bunch of films netting honourable mentions.)
Please join us in celebrating the year in film with our voted-on Top 10 of the year.
For our full look back at the year in film, head here: thatshelf.com/the-best-films-of-2023-a-year-in-review/