News

Seattle Film Critics name Top Ten Films of 2023 and honor Lily Gladstone with Hartl PNW Spotlight

by Josh

This afternoon, the Seattle Film Critics Society (SFCS) announced the creation of a new award to specifically honor the outstanding work of a person with local ties to the Pacific Northwest. Named for the late John Hartl, the Seattle Times film critic whose wrote film criticism and features for the paper for decades, the Pacific Northwest Spotlight award will be presented annually by the SFCS board to acknowledge an exceptional body of work, rather than a single film or performance, that represents the region.

The inaugural award will be presented to Lily Gladstone, who’s already having an exceptional year with critical recognition and looks to be a lock for an Oscar nomination (if not a win) for Killers of the Flower Moon. Gladstone moved to Snohomish from the reservation of the Blackfeet Nation when she was in middle school and began to explore acting during her time at Mountlake Terrace High School. She’ll will be in attendance to receive the award and take part in a post-film Q&A following a screening of her new film Fancy Dance (which premiered at Sundance and played the Seattle Queer Film Festival this fall). The awards screening will take place at the SIFF Cinema Uptown on December 27 at 7 p.m.

Further, SFCS opened the next phase of phase of their (our, I’m a member) awards season with nominees for the year’s best films. The winners of SFCS awards will be announced January 8th. For now, though these are the best consensus view of SFCS’s thirty-seven local critics. In alphabetical order:

  • American Fiction (dir. Cord Jefferson)
  • Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig)
  • The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne)
  • Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese) 
  • May December (dir. Todd Haynes)
  • Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)
  • Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)
  • Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson)
  • The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Stay tuned for the SunBreak’s individual lists and roundtables wrapping 2023 in film!