My Favourite Albums, Movies and TV Shows of 2023

Every year I like to do a write-up on music, movies and TV shows that I enjoyed in the year. It has become a ritual and it’s a ritual that I like. Choo always tells me not to bother because nobody cares. She might be right but this has evolved to become a personal ritual to give something back and I do love writing. So let’s do this… again. If you have been reading what I wrote in the year these lists won’t have many surprises because I am an open book when it comes to music, movies and TV shows I love.

Allow me to say on the onset that this is going to be a list of my favourite entertainment and not necessarily the best of the year. Taste is subjective and I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of today’s audiences. Actually, it can be daunting to put a list of my favourites out there because my credibility is on the line, but I am absolutely fine with it. I am writing this as a celebration of another incredible year in entertainment and God knows we need it after a couple of dark years.

Let’s start with the music front first and I have been dilatory in this department. Of all the new albums I have listened to, only two resonated with me.

Matt Berninger of The National understands me. He knows what it means to be stuck in a rut you can’t get out of. Not since their 5th album High Violet, has the band hit the high watermark. They have reached it again with their 9th and this came after a lean year when the band suffered a creative block. Story goes that lead singer Matt Berninger opened up Mary Shelley’s titular novel and found inspiration from the first few pages that involved the book’s narrator adrift and lost at sea. Hence the title of the album.

The melancholy will hit you first and the morose words will envelop you, but after that initial phase you will realise this is an album full of hope and pithy observations on loss and longing.

Singers and bands hardly make thematic albums in which all songs will blend together in a singular focus. Everybody is making the next big hit. First Two Pages of Frankenstein is an album through and through that feels cohesive. If you take a song out it will feel like it’s missing a vital piece. There are so many great songs here with zero fillers. The collaborations with Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift are stunning stuff, especially the duet with Taylor Swift who is probably returning a huge favour to Aaron Dessner who worked on Swift’s outstanding Folklore.

The drumming is phenomenal, like a frantic beating heart. The music feels forlorn but yet hopeful, and this is music that won’t feel out of place in a church. Berninger’s rich baritone feels like laments and cries. The melodies soar like monoliths.

I know of people who found this boring, but I disagree. It might be just shy of High Violet’s austerity, but it is just a couple of steps from that greatness and it is an outstanding entry into their impressive canon.

This is The National performing the entire album:

Depending on your disposition you might be turned off by the album cover, but the cover perfectly encapsulates the theme – a celebration of sex, dance, sweat, community, queerness, love and friendship. It’s total hedonism but it is also an embrace of carnal pleasures and the joy and healing that come from it.

Troye Sivan’s third album Something to Give Each Other is one big disco-ball glittery pop album. I had a mild trepidation that after 5 years he couldn’t surpass the superb Bloom, but track after track put me in such a nice place. This is Troye Sivan, full of confidence, ready to soar and he does.

There is an unmistakable retro feel to the album complete with sound effects taken from Giorgio Moroder’s bag of tricks but the tracks don’t sound dated in the 80s. It’s like he took a time machine back to the 80s to borrow the vibe and rewrote everything in his own contemporary hand.

This is an album that takes risks and it is all the more better for it. I thought Bloom can never be topped but Sivan has definitely done it. This is a young man who knows exactly who is he, who he wants to be and he is totally comfortable in his own skin. I love that audacity and bravery, and it is evident in every song here.

I will just embed one song to give you an idea of what to expect. I have a feeling it might be too much for some of you, but not me. This is the best pop album I have heard this year.

I will skip the Chinese albums this year because I didn’t hear anything that stood out.

And now for the movies. Again, I will just choose six (because they make the perfect collage 🤣) out from a shortlist.

Surprise, surprise. If I have to choose between Suzume and The Boy and the Heron, it is the former for me. Makoto Shinkai has crafted a story that examines trauma, grief, healing and ultimately finding out who you truly are in the huge scheme of things. It is also a genre blender with fantasy in the foreground, a road-movie in the background and a coming-of-age story at its heart. It is a spiritual sojourn through a land who has rebuilt around the devastation of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake but never quite erased the pain and sorrow of losing loved ones as evidenced in the dilapidated relics where nostalgia hanged like a thick blanket. I saw this twice and the second time still blew me away.

Oppenheimer (2023) is Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus and it is a brilliant and singular character study of man’s hubristic nature. It’s a full-on assault on the senses by a filmmaker who at this stage of his career doesn’t pander to the audience anymore and is ever mindful of the cinematic experience. It’s a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, but Nolan has rewritten the genre of biopic here on so many levels. With so much talking, exposition can become dry, but Nolan’s urgent prioritising over timing coupled with a pulsating music score always drives the plot. It almost feels like a new way of storytelling.

Barbie (2023) is about Barbie suffering an existential crisis that leads her to question her world and her existence. How a toy goes into the real world and has her world view altered is an idea that has been explored many times, but Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach took the plastic world of Barbie and frankly made it look bombastic and fantastic at the same time. Using a world symbolic of a doll’s reality, Gerwig went to town by engaging in themes like gender inequality, patriarchy, sexism and more. How it delves on the heavy themes and yet keeps everything buoyant in hilarity is a deft masterful act. Barbie is imagination in over-drive and it continually surprises at every turn. It is also a helluva magic trick that frankly I didn’t want to see how it’s done, preferring to surrender to the illusion. Barbie succeeds both as sheer inventive escapism and also as a cinema of female (and to a lesser degree, male) empowerment.

Writer-director Celine Song has crafted an exquisite debut that is endearing but resounding in the way it describes yearning without a note of artifice. The pace is exquisite, mirroring a person grappling with the weight of choices and commitments. The direction is assured and I have a strong feeling the story is a deeply personal one. The cinematography is marvellous with beautifully crafted shots that could frame the couple’s tension amidst picturesque sceneries providing counterpoints. The music is gorgeous, almost a character in itself and it’s never manipulative, moving in a diegetic manner in tandem to the simmering emotions. The acting is wonderful because so many times the actors’ body language and long bouts of silence are saying more than words. If yearning and longing can be given definition and colours, Past Lives has all of them.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023) captures an elusive time and place so remarkably well. Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s second film has hit another home run. Her understanding of the internal turmoils going on in a girl studying in elementary school is spot-on and how she captures all the details in such sweet tenderness is a gift. The movie succeeds in making me walk with Margaret as she struggles to find meaning, purpose and religion. It’s wistful and sincere without a tinge of manipulativeness and twee. The movie presses all the red hot buttons but never becomes cloying or forces any idea down your throat. A crowd pleaser that doesn’t feel derivative and the warmth will stay with you for a long time.

A Guilty Conscience (毒舌大状) restores my faith the HK is not just about big-budget crime dramas. This one serves up bravura entertainment by the truckloads and does not forget about wearing its big heart on its sleeve. The story is about a scumbag lawyer who breaks good after his negligence causes an innocent woman to go to jail. The ending is a foregone conclusion but the journey to the destination is totally worth the trip. As much as it is about how justice prevails, it is also a double middle finger up yours against the rich, the powerful and the morally callused who think the road is paved only for them.

Honorable mentions: Air, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, John Wick: Chapter 4, Sleep, The Burial, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Boy and the Heron, Not Friends

Now for the TV shows…

Beef is a show about bad decisions and allowing pettiness to get the better of us. It is a simple premise but the execution is a slab of juicy medium rare steak cooked to sizzling perfection. The plot spirals to unpredictable terrains and vacillates from nail-biting tension to drama to comedy.

The story of Jubilee situates in the era before and after India’s independence, the golden age of Indian cinema. It is a love letter to filmmaking in the past. It is full of character studies, characters who are blinded by ambition and are willing to be treacherous to get ahead. This is a showcase of the power of human self-preservation. Above all else, the thematic element that hits me the hardest is how it deconstructs the myth of the superstar from every angle you can think of. This is the best show on Prime that nobody knows about.

Succession is a top tier show on dysfunctional family dynamics and every Monday evening this show is our therapy pill – seeing super rich people shoot themselves in the foot. Usually the discussion will start on Monday morning when we will “write” what happens to the Roys over breakfast and see if we were right in the evening. The final season is a helluva rollercoaster ride with ep3 a high watermark. I hated the finale at first, but I have completely changed my mind. It is brilliant finale that never panders to the audience and it bowed out on its own terms.

The Bear S2 picks up from the end of S1 with Carmy discovering rolls of money hidden in tomato cans by Mikey and his dream of starting a restaurant is taking shape. S2 is all about making the fine-dining restaurant dream a reality and you will get front row seats to all the hair-pulling moments. S1 was dynamite, a lightning in a bottle. S2 not only recaptures the lightning but aims for the stars and it got there. This is the only show this year that only entertained me, but also taught me many valuable life lessons.

Happy Valley S3 comes 7 years after S2. All in all, it’s 3 seasons, 18 episodes, spread over 9 years and S3 is the swan song to what is one of the best detective procedurals I have had the pleasure of watching and it is testament to one of the most powerful duets in TV world – writer-director Sally Wainwright and actress Sarah Lancashire. If you want to see how 7 years disappear into wisps of smoke, watch this, no, experience this. The love for all the characters is evident and every arc is beautifully depicted. The closure is one for the ages and how it interrogates the themes of family and morals is sheer masterclass. This is a show that doesn’t get discussed enough and those who love this show I consider them family.

Blue Eye Samurai gobsmacked me. I wandered into this because I had nothing to see and I suddenly remembered my friend recommended it. The level of animation is next level stuff and every aspect serves a compelling revenge narrative. It is the perfect smorgasbord of drama, comedy, mystery and action. Every episode has an action spectacle that made my jaw drop and at this precise moment I am salivating over the cliff-face fight between Mizu and the Four Fangs. It has strong female characters and shows their fight against the male-dominated status quo. And I live for those sage teachings of the sword master and where else can you see a young man with no hands who wants to be a samurai.

Honorable mentions: A Small Light, Barry, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, Made in Heaven, Moving, Good Bad Mother, The Glory, Reservation Dogs

Every year, I don’t just catch new shows, I will also seek out shows that I have missed. Just like last year I want to take this opportunity to give my last word on a great one I discovered this year.

Someday or One Day (想见你) (2019-2020) is a 13-episode Taiwanese series with staggering scores – 9.2 on Douban (the IMDb equivalent for the Chinese world) and 8.6 on IMDb. So you know I am not pulling a rabbit out of my ass.

I have written a synopsis in a previous post, but on hind-thought I am of the opinion the show actually works best if you go in blind. Just know that it is a love story that has fantasy elements involving time travel.

One needs to be patient with this because it doesn’t rush out of the blocks to wow you. Instead, it lulls you in with a brilliant premise and a vivid showcase of growing pains and a story of first love. As with all shows which feature time travel, the great ones know how to use the narrative device creatively to the point you are not looking at the nuts, bolts and gears, but revelling in the storytelling of which this show has it in spades.

What was accomplished here is quite staggering and I am convinced that one can’t talk about the best TV shows about time travel without mentioning this Taiwanese show and I am putting my head on the block and proclaiming that Someday or One Day should be mentioned in the same breath as other time travel behemoths like Dark and Signal. The best shows that use time travel as a plot device know this element serves the bigger story and the mechanics of time travel has to be clever and the story so compelling that you won’t bother to look for loopholes. I am sure there are, just that I choose to be oblivious to them.

A friend said Dark is way above this show in the Top 10 of time travel shows, perhaps so but I told him the difference here is that Someday or One Day is absolutely relatable unlike Dark. Who hasn’t felt the growing pains of our teenage years, fallen in love when we were wet behind the ears and roam the wilderness of our youth not knowing where to go? I might have many good friends now, but the friends I made during my teenage years still hold a special place in my heart.

This show has a bit of everything and does everything it dabbles on convincingly. I loved how even in the last 2 episodes the show continued to do some heavy-lifting, not content in just driving towards the finishing line – it delves into depression and how suicide is not the answer even if death is; I loved how sometimes you get to live another life and loved it so much you don’t want to give it up; I loved how even when you are a teenager you can still love deeply and love goes beyond appearances and I loved that your love for someone doesn’t end if the other person is no longer around. There is so much to love in this show and the time travel element never overwhelms the narrative. The songs and music used are so apt and the acting by the cast is pitch-perfect, especially Ko Chia-Yen who simply uses her hairstyles, mannerisms and facial expressions to convey who she is. For a complex show about time travel, I never felt it was dumbed down in order for audience to get it. I am so glad I discovered this and if I had seen this in 2019 it would have landed up in my Top 10. I always feel part of what I do is to point people to the good stuff on TV and at the cinema, and hopefully someone will check it out; this isn’t good stuff, this is great stuff. I know there is a Korean remake on Netflix now but my rule is to always watch the original. This is where it all began.

Stream this on Disney+ (but I am not sure if it’s available in your part of the world). It’s ok, you don’t have to thank me.

That’s all, folks. I am now waiting for Slow Horses S3 to be done and I will reactivate my AppleTV+. Feel free to point me to great music, movies and shows that I didn’t know about or maybe share what’s your favourites this year. As much as I love sharing, I also love reading what moved you.