In 2023, these were CBC Arts' favourite things

Here's a question: what was your favourite thing about 2023? 

For us, it was the movies we watched and the shows we binged — the festivals we discovered and the art that moved us. 

Want more specifics? Read on! CBC Arts staff and contributors have plenty to say about their personal picks for the top arts and culture of the year.

Barbie

The monoculture is dead, right? For ages, I've been convinced it disappeared sometime around the invention of YouTube, assassinated by the algorithm and whatever else. And yet, something miraculously old-school happened in the summer of 2023: everyone was talking about Barbie — or #Barbenheimer, if you prefer, the much-memed battle of the box office. 

It's Barbie that came out on top, however, grossing more than any other global release in Warner Brothers' 100-year history, and now, the film's rolling into awards season as the one to beat, leading the Golden Globe nominations with nine nods.

Beyond the movie itself, I'm still in awe of how Barbie invaded the real world this summer — like the living doll herself, busting out of Barbie Land on neon rollerblades. Well past opening weekend, the de facto movie-night dress code was head-to-toe pink, and all through July and August, I was seeing fans on the streets of Toronto: girl squads filling the sidewalks, lone cyclists speeding to the nearest Cineplex, sexagenarian couples in matching polos. It was everyone in monochromatic magenta, regardless of age, gender expression or nostalgic interest in Mattel IP. 

Granted, cosplaying as a troubled theoretical physicist wouldn't have been much fun. But all the sartorial displays of affection were for a movie that deserved all that hype and more. Directed by Greta Gerwig, from a script she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach, Barbie — like all women — contains multitudes. It's a light comedy that's heavy on style. It is, at turns, philosophical and deeply surreal. (That dream ballet!) But throughout, it's a story told with great heart, imagination and intelligence — a meditation on girlhood and the perils of patriarchy. Nothing that began as corporate branding exercise had any right to be this good, and while I'd happily immerse myself in further offerings from a Barbie Cinematic Universe, signs point to Barbie being a one-off: a brilliant reminder that anything is possible — and yes, a single piece of pop culture still has the power to bring people together.

–Leah Collins, senior writer (CBC Arts)

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

I have always been an enormous Scott Pilgrim fan. I'm a comic book nerd. I grew up going to punk rock shows in Toronto. And when the first book came out in 2004, I was more or less the same age as most of the characters. Ramona, Scott and Wallace all felt like people I knew, and the books made the city seem magical.

But the original Scott Pilgrim books haven't aged super well. The titular character is, in retrospect, a total asshole in almost every way: he's a crap friend, a narcissist who sponges off his buddies, and a man in his 20s who is dating a high-school student. Yes, I realize there's a redemption arc over the course of the graphic novels, but you're supposed to be cheering for this guy right from the jump, in spite of the fact he's a turd.

This year's anime re-imagining of the Scott Pilgrim story turned things on its head. The series acknowledges that Scott Pilgrim was never a good guy and was often the architect of his own misfortune. It gives the show's other characters the kind of agency and depth they didn't have in the books or the 2010 film adaptation. It replaces the original story's toxic nice-guy shtick with a story about friendship and community and working to become a better person.

It was also fast and punchy and infinitely bingeable. The show re-imagined familiar characters without totally re-inventing them, and managed to cover a lot of plot without becoming convoluted. It's the version of Scott Pilgrim we should have had all along.

–Chris Dart, web writer (CBC Arts)

Succession

Succession was always a slow-burning high-stress masterpiece, but nothing evoked my chronic jaw-clench like its last season. After the third episode, the series dove into emotional territory that nearly broke me and somehow managed to raise its stakes. (Fellow fans, you know what I'm talking about, and future fans, I will not spoil it for you.) Did I think I'd ever cry during Succession? Did any of us? 

Between the performances (all of them, literally all of them), the story, the score and Kendall screaming "I'm the eldest boy," the show became an exercise in white-knuckling, and through the heartbreak of the final season, it was necessary to regularly check in with one's self. After all, if you can feel empathy for the worst family — and people — in the world, that might say something alarming about you. Maybe you take television way too seriously, for example — like I do.

–Anne T. Donahue, CBC Arts contributor

Moving

In contrast with its unassuming title, Moving on Disney+ is epic in scope and cinematic in presentation. Despite a dauntingly long season of 20 episodes (each ranging between 40 minutes to an hour), I could've easily watched another 20. If you don't like spoilers, here are the keywords: spy thriller, super powers, family and first love. 

Moving manages to be as heartfelt as it is action-packed, a combination that's satisfying and rare in the comic-book hero genre. It follows super-powered ex-spies (played by Zo In-sung, Ryu Seung-ryong and Han Hyo-joo) who are hiding their teenage kids from various threats. And that's not easy when one of them can't control their ability to fly.

Series creator Kang Full adapted his own popular webtoon to write the show, and the story introduces us to the younger generation before unwinding their parents' mysterious pasts. Episodes 8 and 9 are season highlights, centring on a moodily lit slow-burning romance between two ordinary people who just happen to be working for a secret shadow agency.

Moving is the most successful K-drama on Disney+ (and Hulu in the States). It's also Disney's most-watched show, beating Marvel, Star Wars, etc., in Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Hear more about the program from culture writer Regina Kim, who spoke with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on Commotion.

–Jane van Koeverden, producer (Commotion)

The 2023 Stratford Festival

This year, I attended the Stratford Festival, and I'm embarrassed to admit it took me until 2023 to do something I have been privileged to have had easy access to for half my adult life. 

Stratford isn't so much a festival as it is an entire southwestern Ontario town that comes alive with theatre for roughly half the year — and that's been the case since it was founded more than 70 years ago. I finally discovered this for myself on a weekend this past June, when I took in six performances over two days. There were Broadway-worthy stagings of huge musicals (Rent and Spamalot), radical new takes on Shakespeare (Richard II) and brand new works by prominent Canadian playwrights (Casey and Diana). 

Everything I saw was riveting, and the experience was a welcome reminder of the power of coming together to watch live theatre — after a few years where that was a little touch and go. 

The festival runs from May to October, and Stratford is only an hour by a bus from Toronto (a bus I took because I am very much a 39-year-old who doesn't know how to drive). If you need a little escape from the urban grind, I honestly cannot think of a better staged exit.

–Peter Knegt, producer (CBC Arts)

The Master Plan

The Master Plan is a play based on a book based on the real-life story of Sidewalk Labs, a Google-owned company that tried to take over Toronto's waterfront. Written by Michael Healey and directed by Chris Abraham, the show appeared at Crow's Theatre this past fall, and it was one of the most chaotic yet cohesive works I've ever seen. It was also one of the most fun, despite being a story about big tech trying to exploit zoning bylaws to steal residents' data. 

The play cuts like a Martin Scorsese movie, going back and forth between the perspectives of Waterfront Toronto staff, the CEO of Sidewalk Labs, Toronto city council and a talking tree. But the real drama happened during intermission. 

A woman sitting in front of me told me she works at Waterfront Toronto — and that she was there during the Sidewalk Labs fiasco. She said that The Master Plan was like an SNL skit about her workplace. 

Because I'm a raging gossip, I wanted to share something with her. Before the curtain went up, I'd overheard a Crow's Theatre employee telling a coworker that a "special guest" was coming to that night's show. She shrugged and got up to get a drink.

At the end of the night, as we were all leaving the theatre, I saw a piece of paper stuck on the inside of the woman's chair. I looked closer, and read what was written on it: the name of one of the Waterfront Toronto staffers depicted in the play.

She saw my bulging eyes and sheepishly confirmed that she was the special guest! This is why I love live theatre; the drama never ends. 

–Sabina Wex, CBC Arts contributor

Candela Obscura

Critical Role has set the gold standard for actual plays, streamed web shows where people play tabletop roleplaying games, or TTRPGs, for a wider online audience in real time. The company has come a long way from being a bunch of "nerdy ass voice actors" playing Dungeons and Dragons on Twitch and Youtube. It's now a multi-platform media enterprise with an animated series on Amazon, graphic novels (Dark Horse Comics) and its own publishing imprint (Darrington Press) that produces games, campaign settings and art books. There's even a cookbook inspired by the fantasy world that Critical Role has created through playing D&D.

It's no surprise that Critical Role would eventually release their own TTRPG, Candela Obscura. Created by Taliesin Jaffe and Chris Lockey, and developed by Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall, Candela Obscura takes place in the gothic horror mystery world of Newfaire. The players are investigators within a secret society, and using six-sided dice to determine if they succeed or fail, the game mechanics lend themselves more to roleplaying than combat. While I haven't played the game yet, tuning into Candela Obscura's actual play miniseries is an absolutely compelling and immersive watch.

Complete with period-appropriate costumes, elaborate set design and tragic backstories (because what's a TTRPG without tragic backstories?), Candela Obscura is a macabre tale filled with body horror, intrigue, deception and heart. All the chapters are standalone stories that can be found on the series' Youtube channel. The third one, Tide & Bone, premiered this month — and it's already shaping up to be my favourite. Whichever one you start with, expect to be treated to a masterclass of visceral storytelling, gameplay and roleplay — with just enough sexual tension around the table to fill a Tumblr account.

–Michelle Villagracia, producer (CBC Arts)

Momenta Biennale de l'image

Every two years since 1989, Montreal comes alive with an international visual art event, Momenta Biennale de l'image. For the eighteenth edition this fall, curator Ji-Yoon Han presented Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis, a captivating exhibition focusing on the gaps between our assigned identities and the ones we construct for ourselves.

One of the first things to catch the eye, months before Momenta opened, was the bold and enigmatic design conceived for the biennale by Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey. Yellow and red billboards with a playful font popped up across the city, a refreshing if slightly off-kilter campaign that stood out against homogeneous mainstream advertising.

This queer sensibility aligned itself beautifully with the 23 artists in Masquerades, many who impressively distorted their bodies to address sexual, gender and racial stereotypes. From siren eun young jung's monumental rethinking of traditional Korean women's theatre with LGBTQ+ communities to Séamus Gallagher's revisiting of the 1939 New York World's Fair with a drag reincarnation named Miss Chemistry, Han's curatorial vision coalesced around stunningly bright, immersive environments that both disoriented and inspired the viewer.

Humour was also important throughout the biennale, used as a tool to re-evaluate our relationships with everyday images. Mara Eagle presented Pretty Talk, a 3D-animation that collaged found internet recordings of captive mimicking birds like parrots. For the epic music video L'Empremier Live at Beaubassin, Rémi Belliveau performed as their alter-ego Joan Dularge, a fictitious 1960s star created to fill in a gap in Acadian political rock; it evoked how artists employ online culture or music-video tropes to undo paradigms and construct new ones. 

Repeatedly showing how masks both conceal and reveal, Masquerades magnificently questioned our perceptions of others by exposing us to artists invested in their own wondrous and freeing worldbuilding.

–Didier Morelli, CBC Arts contributor

Care and Wear: Bodies Crafted for Harm and Healing

Surely we're beyond the point when every art project needs to be examined through the lens of the pandemic. And yet, mentally, we're there: in the way we gather, the way we relate to our neighbours, the way we appreciate (or disregard) the vulnerability of our bodies — our shared duty to care for them, and our capability of causing them harm.

Care and Wear: Bodies Crafted for Harm and Healing was the final exhibition of 2023 at the Esker Foundation in Calgary. Eccentric, weird, unsettling and surprisingly moving, it left a mark. Curated by brothers Brendan and Jude Griebel, it featured items from the collection of their rural gallery, the mysterious Museum of Fear and Wonder (located in a former army barracks in Bergen, Alta., that's only open from June to August, by appointment only). 

Rather than artistic works, Brendan (an anthropologist) and Jude's (a visual artist) collection is a variety of historical objects that are "emotionally complicated," or rather, relics from the past that feel like they come alive at night, or have deep unknowable inner lives. Drawing from their archive, Care and Wear celebrated outdated objects of science, warfare, education, health, childhood and entertainment that position the human body as a source of both benevolence and violence, sometimes simultaneously. (Weird Barbie, anyone?)

Carnival games, children's dolls, crash test dummies, anti-smoking models, CPR stand-ins — all from the 1800s to mid-1900s — created a wash of muted browns, beiges and pinks against the gallery's stark white walls. Their chipped and warped uncanny creepiness was repulsive, for sure. And yet, their utility, obsolescence and immobility was somehow equally sympathetic. The combination invited a visceral sense of reflection on our collective attitudes toward bodies: our own, each other's — and how easy it is to dissociate from them.

The show was complemented by another exhibition, like everything alive that we try to hold forever featuring artists Bridget Moser, Stephanie Dinkins and Miya Turnbull. It took similar ideas directly into 2023's contemporary art world through the complications of AI, self care and cultural identity. In a year where arts organizations are tempted to go with crowd-pleasing exhibitions to attract audiences, Esker Foundation leaned into the weird and taboo with Care and Wear, and while it wasn't necessarily "feel good," it was certainly "feel something."

—Carly Maga, CBC Arts contributor

Killers of the Flower Moon

Is Killers of the Flower Moon the best movie of the year? I'm not sure. I'm not even sure it's my place to say. All I know is that no other film this year has sustained as much intensely thoughtful and rigorous debate as Martin Scorsese's powerful, self-conscious and contentious look at colonial violence.

For the script, Scorsese adapts David Grann's true crime book about what became known as the "Reign of Terror" in Oklahoma: a series of century-old murders targeting members of the Osage Nation, orchestrated by white settlers who married into their victims' oil wealth. 

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as one of those settlers, Ernest Burkhart, a rascally war veteran who makes a beeline for Lily Gladstone's Mollie Kyle; first for her heart, eventually for her blood. Their marriage, marked by Ernest's deceit and violence, is the story of America in miniature, and it's told by Scorsese in remarkably careful strokes.

What makes Killers of the Flower Moon so infinitely fascinating is a matter of perspectives: those within the film and those brought to it. Scorsese and DiCaprio famously shifted the perspective from Grann's book, which is a whodunnit following FBI agent Tom White (whom DiCaprio originally intended to play) as he white saviours his way to the truth. Instead, the filmmakers turned Killers into a discomforting chronicle of a crime, one that positions the audience alongside the perpetrator, Ernest. 

We aren't the only ones implicated. Scorsese himself appears in the film's fourth-wall breaking coda as an extractive storyteller framing the narrative, reminding the audience that this isn't his story to tell. But as us settlers tend to, he tells it anyway, in the sincerest terms he could.

There's a messiness within the film as it searches for the right way to tell such a story, and it transcends the limits of the screen. Enter a long and fruitful discourse cycle — a reminder that Marvel has yet to kill film culture. Early unanimous praise gave way to more measured criticism, most importantly from Indigenous voices expressing discomfort with the film's sympathetic take on Ernest and horror at its depiction of violence. There have been lamentations that the story wasn't told from Mollie's perspective and frustration at how Scorsese takes up space. Adam Piron, the associate director of the Sundance Institute's Indigenous program, found ways to appreciate the film's flaws. For Mubi, Piron wrote beautifully about Killers, expressing how the film continues the work that Scorsese's been doing in late-career masterpieces such as Silence and The Irishman — grappling with sin, culpability and faith in redemption.

–Rad Simonpillai, CBC Arts contributor