Yes, it’s early days but after highlighting the 30 best 2023 films we’ve already seen, there’s one clear frontrunner when it comes to the finest U.S. release of the year. Albert Serra’s mesmerizing Pacifiction, far and away our consensus favorite of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is set on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti and follows the journey of a French bureaucrat with a hypnotic vision. Now set for a February 17 release by Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films, the new trailer and poster have landed.
As Rory O’Connor said in his review,” Pacifiction is what Albert Serra might describe as an unfuckable movie. “Unfuckable is, you take the whole thing or you don’t take it but you cannot apply a critical judgment in an easy way,” he explained to us in 2019, “because it is what it is and it doesn’t look like any other film.” Pacifiction does not look like any other film. It doesn’t taste or smell like other films, either, even Serra’s own distinctive body of work. It premiered in a Cannes competition that has been high on wattage but low on power, crying out for a sensation. Pacifiction is that sensation: a film unlike any other this year, appearing near the end of proceedings, with the festival’s final furlongs already in sight; it is the closest the selection has come to delivering a masterpiece.”
See the trailer below.
Pacifiction opens on February 17.