The Mafia Mamas We Overlooked Along the Way

Three films that deserved more love in 2023

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There was something off about seeing movies in 2023. I suppose that part of it was that I was watching movies in theaters on a somewhat regular basis, which I had stopped doing since early 2020. But the other big thing that stuck out was the gulf between what was hyped and what wasn’t allowed to get hyped up. Barbie and Oppenheimer obviously made it through the fire more than OK, but since stars weren’t allowed to do press for films during the strike, there were a few films that maybe didn’t get enough attention or just came and went without much notice. Killers of the Flower Moon was always going to do OK because there’s a legion of people like me who talk about “Marty” like he’s a dear friend and who have had New Yorker subscriptions as the one constant since their early-20s. I think Wes Anderson made his strangest, saddest, and most beautiful film with Aestroid City. It was paced so oddly that I had to stop watching the first time because it didn’t feel like his other stuff, and I appreciated that. The Killer is one of my favorite David Fincher films overall, and I wish we had ten movies a year like The Holdovers and American Fiction (smart, funny, either is or could be a literary adaptation about people in academia and/or the literary world). I can list off a few other movies I loved, but every publication had thoughts on Beau is Afraid and May December, so I wanted to take a second to give some credit to three movies I enjoyed the hell out of that I don’t think got the appreciation they deserved.

Add Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem to the Great New York Movies canon

Hardly a flop and the critics seemed to love it, the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot hardly needs anybody to defend it, let alone me, a 43-year-old who was dressing like Leonardo for Halloween until about 12. I felt a little bit like a goon even going to see it in the theater, where I assumed I’d be older than most of the audience by at least 30 years—but I quickly found that wasn’t the case. It was an even split of kids and, well, people around my age who loved T.M.N.T. growing up. And while I was half-expecting Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to give us some pastiche of the cartoon version I watched as a kid, with plenty of stoner jokes mixed in for the parents who had to sit through the movie with their children, I was very surprised when I found out they made a really great New York City movie. I felt similarly surprised when I saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and how well they did with Miles Morales truly seeming like a real New York City kid. But the Turtles did an even better job, mixing in lingo that I hear my teenage neighbors using so well that I had to see if they consulted with Desus and/or Mero on getting that right.

The perfect WW2 neo-Western complete with lots of Nazis getting killed

The Nordic film Sisu came out across Europe in 2022, but since it didn’t hit America until early in 2023, I’m calling it a film from this year. It passed the Diamond Test—any movie where Nazis make up the bulk of people getting brutally murdered is a great movie—with flying colors. But what I wasn’t quite expecting was some beautiful-looking neo-Western complete with a silent main character straight out of a Sergio Leone movie, and with a real First Blood vibe laced throughout. Jorma Tommila as the older former Finnish commando who just wants to be left alone to find gold and maybe a little sliver of peace is the sort of grizzled old gunslinger on one last adventure character that I can’t get enough of. Except his adventure is running into a bunch of retreating Nazis as they’re at the end of the war, and they simply pick the wrong guy to mess with. It’s violent, but it’s beautifully done.

Mafia Mama is a perfect plane movie

The second I learned there was a movie called Mafia Mama and saw the poster, I knew I’d be watching it on an airplane. Certain movies just hit differently on planes, and as a big fan of both Toni Collette and fish out of water movies that maybe involve mobsters, this was catnip for me. It wasn’t great, but it was fun and silly and it filled a few spare hours of my life when I had nothing else to do. I’ll likely never watch it again, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need. Not every movie has to be a masterpiece, but if you can sit and watch the whole thing on a plane without turning it off, then I think that counts for something. And for what it’s worth, not every plane movie needs to be watched while you’re 30,000 feet in the air. If I had nothing to do and this was on some Sunday afternoon and I was just sitting on my couch, I’d say, “Well, I could rewatch a Marty movie for the umpteenth time…or I could try something silly and fun.” Then I’d go with the latter. If it sucks, then just put on the Marty movie.