It would be great to look back on 2023 and conclude that the medium, art form and business of cinema was in great shape – but it would be verging on the Panglossian, I fear. Cinemas are closing left and right (in my neighbourhood, at least), audiences have dropped off, and the release schedule has been pretty lacklustre too (we may partly thank the recent strikes for this, of course). Is this situational or just the ongoing after-effects of the pandemic?

I don't really know, but times do seem to have changed. The last time I did one of these in quite this way, in 2018, I had seen 83 films that year (even though I spent a whole month in the Kyrgyz Republic, basically a film-free zone for an English speaker). This year the total wasn't much over 60, which admittedly is down to changes in my own lifestyle as much as the slimness of the pickings in the actual cinemas.

We can only hope that things pick up, with the future year promising to be interestingly different – almost no movies from Marvel or DC, most obviously, and the other big studios trying to adapt to the changed circumstances of the post-viral world. Already some big releases have been delayed – Avatar 3 was intended to be out this Christmas, but has been pushed back to next winter, and something similar is going on with the next Mission Impossible.

So, anyway, what follows is a quick look at the handful of films I saw this year that never got covered in the column – well, there may have been a couple more, but they would have been at the start of the year in the period where the Post reviews are currently scrambulated. The discerning reader will note my habitual kindness to the editor of the Post by trying to avoid inflicting full-length reviews of superhero movies on him; the downside is that they all turn up here as a consequence. Swings and roundabouts, as ever.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: Marvel's first film of the year, which I personally quite liked despite it getting some of the poorest reviews and lowest returns in the studio's history. Paul Rudd and his extended family find themselves sucked into a micro-universe which is dominated by Jonathan Majors' villain; this was intended to set up the meta-plot for the next phase of films but Majors' recent conviction for assault has resulted in the studio dropping him and what's going to happen next is anyone's guess. I still think it's a decent mid-table Marvel film and better than many of their recent offerings, but I am in the minority here. The visual weirdness of it may well prove off-putting for many people.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom: DC's last film of the year, not to mention the death rattle of the whole Zach Snyder epoch for the company. As such it can't help feeling like a bit of a pointless afterthought – it's already been announced that Jason Momoa and the rest of the cast won't be reprising these roles again. Of course, none of this would matter if this film was a winning, vivid, fun film in its own right – but it isn't. An old enemy of Aquaman, searching for a weapon to use against him, basically gets possessed by an underwater version of Sauron, and decides to accelerate the climate crisis mainly so the film can take a swing at appearing to be relevant to the modern world. How this squares with a neon-hued extravaganza dripping with giant crickets and our hero riding into battle on the back of a neighing seahorse is not obviously clear. In most ways this is technically competent but it has no new ideas and nothing else to say for itself. In cinemas now, but not worth the trip.

The Marvels: Marvel's last film of its annus horribilis feels more like a contractual obligation or a cross-promotional marketing gimmick than a story that anyone was burning to tell. Captain Marvel, her teenage superfan Ms Marvel, and someone who was briefly another version of Captain Marvel in the comics find their atoms entangled on a quantum level, causing all sorts of confusion as they attempt to fight a forgettable villain who's out for revenge, probably. Tonally it's all over the place, feeling badly misjudged, while you basically need to have a Disney+ subscription to know who everyone is at this point. There are individual elements which are quite entertaining, but you walk away wondering what the point was. A genuinely intriguing post-credits sequence somehow manages to make it all even more irritating and disappointing.

The Old Oak: Ken Loach's last film, we are told, features no CGI worth mentioning, no aliens, mermaids, multiversal intrusions, or anything like that, and so weirdly feels like a bit of an oddity this week. Syrian refugees are relocated to the north of England where they are met with a mixture of hostility and compassion. As solidly authentic as you'd expect, with the usual cast of little-known faces and non-professional performers, and Loach isn't afraid to engage with some complex issues that don't admit to easy or comforting answers. It's still not what you'd actually call entertaining in the conventional sense, but it feels like the kind of film we should see more of.

Shazam: Fury of the Gods: With a sigh of relief we return to more familiar territory with DC's first film of the year, another outing for their version of Captain Marvel. This time, consequences from the first film (not tremendously well recapped, it must be said) result in the re-emergence of three mythical goddesses who are set upon stealing the magical power our hero shares with his foster siblings. And it's good-natured fun, quite well-mounted, and the performances are decent. Once again though, you do get the sense that more effort went on the special effects and the cross-movie continuity than doing a really interesting and effective story for this actual story. This has obviously not been an outstanding year for this particular genre, with studios seemingly making them because they're currently popular rather than because they have any compelling ideas for them. If this doesn't change then the proverbial superhero fatigue may become a reality. (Ye Editor will probably declare he's had superhero fatigue since the 1990s.)

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: The last film of this round-up relies immensely on the utterly dependable Jim Broadbent for its effectiveness. His retired bank manager lives a quiet life of reserved respectability until one day he receives a message from a terminally ill former colleague – and so he sets off to walk virtually the length of England to see her, causing his wife much consternation and embarrassment. It starts off looking like a whimsical British version of something like The Straight Story, with the story consisting of Broadbent's various encounters with the people he meets on the road – but it goes into some surprisingly dark and psychologically serious territory. Even so, there's arguably less to this film than meets the eye, and the slightness of it is mainly concealed by Broadbent being so good. He's great; shame the rest of it isn't up to the same standard.

Awix

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