On the politics side, many films since Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” have explored the relationship between men in rooms planning out everything from policies to wars and the people who are affected by them outside those four walls. Yet 2023 had a sharper focus on those rooms, and how the men in them are hardly all that great.
One of the most impressive films of the year, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” does this by making the movie mostly subjective: Its centerpiece is the Trinity test of the atomic bomb, sure, yet the titular scientist only experiences his creation’s devastating effect on Japan — and, by extension, the entire world — through his neuroses and hallucinations. Where “Oppenheimer” is deliberately claustrophobic, Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” don’t shy away from depicting the consequences of egotistical and/or evil men setting their plans into motion from the comfort of their palaces and homes. “Napoleon” has extensive battle sequences bolstered by on-screen statistics of people killed, while “Flower Moon” shows the brutal murder of Osage people combined with the historical whitewashing of the events that followed.
Elsewhere, Daniel Goldhaber’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” shows its conspirators enact a plan that began in a series of small meetings, building to a literal and figurative explosion. Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” sees the automobile magnate callously disregard the safety of his employees and race car drivers for the sake of his own ambition. Despite the obvious exterior spectacle that both “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” build to, both films feature lengthy scenes of people speaking portentously inside hotel rooms, board rooms, and — as it happens — trains. Even Japan’s “Godzilla Minus One” features group meetings about how to solve the problem of that delightful metaphor-for-war, Godzilla.
2023’s most insidious movie, Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” takes this disconnect between people with political power not understanding the effects they have on the outside world until it’s too late to heart, following the day-to-day life of an Auschwitz Commandant and his family who live directly outside a concentration camp during Nazi rule. Where many Holocaust films choose to depict the atrocities committed by the Nazis, “Zone” keeps them out of sight (though not out of earshot), just as its characters do, making the tension between the interior and the exterior incredibly taut.