Time ranks Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves as best movie of 2023

US based Time magazine has nominated Finnish Director Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) as the best movie of the year 2023.

The magazine published the list of the 10 best movies of the year where Fallen Leaves has been ranked number 1.

“A tentative romance between a woman who’s making the best of dreary workaday life (Alma Pöysti) and a metalworker whose perpetual drunkenness keeps him underemployed (Jussi Vatanen), plus a dog who helps his human bridge the expanse between loneliness and the contentment of solitude: those are the main ingredients of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, and he works magic with them,” the Time magazine wrote in its review of the movie.

Terming Kaurismäki as the master of the deadpan humanist comedy, the review said that the type of picture that people may think of as merely odd or charming.

“Yet so much of life is made up of little revelations that form the core of who we are. This is Kaurismäki’s gift: to catch those moments, seemingly snatching them from the wind, and put them onscreen so that we, too, will know them when we see them,” the Time magazine wrote.

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro secured second place in the list followed by The Zone of Interest, Priscilla, Revoir Paris, Past Lives, Killers of the Flower Moon, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Dreamin' Wild and Passages.

Earlie in November, The European Film Academy nominated Fallen Leaves as one of the Best European Films for the European Film Awards. The winners will be revealed in the award ceremony scheduled to be held in Berlin on December 9.

Fallen Leaves tells the story of two lonely people who met each other by chance in the Helsinki night and tried to find the first, only, and ultimate love of their lives. Their path towards this honourable goal is clouded by the man's alcoholism, lost phone numbers, not knowing each other's names or addresses, and life's general tendency to place obstacles in the way of those seeking their happiness.

This gentle tragicomedy, previously thought to be lost, is the fourth part of Aki Kaurismäki's working-class trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, and The Match Factory Girl).