Trying to cobble together a year-end list for an entire movie calendar can be tricky.
It’s a bit like reorganizing your den. You move around the chairs, tables, lamps and other knick-knacks a couple of times, never fully satisfied with how it looks but ultimately beholden to great being the enemy of finished.
I watched more than 150 films that were released in 2023 in one way or another, still thinking of more I’ve missed and agonizing how to rank so many excellent films against each other as if it’s some sort of competition.
My philosophy on year-end lists is this: it’s a very imperfect process that captures a moment in time more than it crystalizes opinion for infinity.
For example: in 2019, I felt strongly about Knives Out and Little Women being at the top of my list. Now, I’d easily say Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was the best movie that came out that year (and that decade).
Your year-end film list ebbs and flows depending on your mood. I don’t inherently like the idea of pitting films against each other, but it can be a useful exercise to help inform your tastes and quantify a year in cinema.
I pour a lot into what I watch every year, as it’s deeply important for me to be able to cobble it all together in this space for all of you at home. I might have a different idea on how this should’ve gone next week, and therein lies the beauty and the agony of making these things.
The best part was watching the movie for the first time; this is just a collage of what’s come and why it all meant so much to me in the rearview.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
25 Honorable Mentions
- American Fiction
- American Symphony
- Bad Press
- Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
- Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
- Dream Scenario
- Dumb Money
- Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline
- Knock at the Cabin
- Landscape with Invisible Hands
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
- May December
- Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
- Priscilla
- Saw X
- Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
- Tetris
- Thanksgiving
- Theater Camp
- The Starling Girl
- The Zone of Interest
- Wonka
20. Fremont
Perhaps the hidden gem of 2023, Babak Jalali’s deeply resonant story about an Afghan woman building a new life in the United States has something for everyone. It’s free from cheap sentiment but filled with reserves of wit and wisdom as it guides us along a clear bridge to empathize with a journey many of us have not been on. Plus, it’s got one of the best supporting turns of the year from Gregg Turkington. What’s not to love?
19. The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki remains one of the great directors of his time, and it’s always a distinct gift to be able to unwrap a new film from his imagination.
The Boy and the Heron cannot be pinned down on one viewing; it’s too untethered to the traditional beats of Miyazaki’s style to decompress. It’s about legacy, about wishing for those you bring into the world to make it a better place, make it their place, free from the mistakes you couldn’t escape.
It’s also a striking work of fantasy, one that bobs and weaves between the dreamlike and the all-too-real to find hard truths floating in the middle.
This is one that will probably slide up higher in recollection once you spend more time with it. When a generational artist takes you on this type of journey, he means for you to wrestle with it long after he’s gone.
18. They Cloned Tyrone
At the corner of Jordan Peele and James Carpenter, you’ll find the brilliant They Cloned Tyrone. First-time filmmaker Juel Taylor’s electric sci-fi satire pays homage to the genres that came before while presenting sharp commentary about its plot.
Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier’s script is audacious and urgent, and John Boyega delivers simply the finest role of his career as a man who gets thrown into a surreal situation with very relevant underpinnings. This one is a must that needs more love for just how great it really is.
17. Maestro
Bradley Cooper’s sophomore debut strikes as one of the fiercest undoings of the “Great Man” biopics, as he meshes the gregarious genius of Leonard Bernstein’s work with his complicated familial relationships, particularly that with his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre.
Cooper’s performance of Bernstein risks so much; it’s the kind of showy magnetism that so many attempt that also nails the subtle devastation of the text. It’s a high-wire walk that might be dismissed as attention-seeking, but Cooper is just too talented to miss the point of his disappearing act.
The film itself is a whirlwind, one that lauds the singular beauty of Bernstein’s persona while driving home the truth that befalls anyone in show business: nothing is as important on stage as the folks at home. This is a titanic work of ambition and passion, a bit rough around the edges but arresting nevertheless.
16. Bottoms
Bottoms is a gift, a blisteringly funny comedy with two of the best young comic actors we’ve got right now in Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott and a breakthrough performance from, oh yes, former Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch. It is genuinely sublime to watch these folks work.
The true heir apparent to Not Another Teen Movie, filmmaker Emma Seligman throws caution to the wind with this deliriously irreverent, incredibly smart parody of high school movie tropes with a Gen Z filter.
Bottoms really might be the funniest movie of the decade so far. You try making it through this one without tearing up in laughter. It’s impossible. In 20 years, we’ll all still be talking (and giggling) about this one.
15. Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese delivered yet another devastating vision of an American nightmare with Killers of the Flower Moon, which as much a searing indictment of our country’s sordid past as it is a rallying cry to expand the horizons of film for more diverse perspectives to save the medium.
Complete with a sensational trio of performances from Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, Scorsese’s latest is the rare, big-budget epic that helps define the medium. It will live eternal in its closing scene’s admission of failure juxtaposed with a final vision of what could be.
14. You Hurt My Feelings
Nicole Holofcener remains one of the vital artists working in the independent space, as her latest collaboration with Julia Louis-Dreyfus excavated the very relatable horror of processing criticism, good faith and bad, for your work.
Detaching oneself from the job they do can be a most cumbersome process, and Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies do such heartening work as a married couple who must face the grim reality of what happens when one doesn’t jive with the latest installment of the other’s creative output.
Holofcener understands the way we think and interact with each other as well as anyone in the medium, and You Hurt My Feelings is just such a delicate-yet-uncomfortably true work of bristled empathy as we’ve gotten in some time. You are not what you do, but dang it, is that hard to accept.
13. Barbie
What else can you say at this point about Barbie? It will live eternal in our culture and further solidified Greta Gerwig as one of our most important filmmakers working.
Saying “this one shouldn’t work” would be incorrect, as The LEGO Movie proved that you can make a movie like this work like a charm.
However, it’s the rare film that really is better than its glowing reputation, a pretty perfect studio comedy that reaches levels of profundity and artistry that you just don’t often get with films based on intellectual properties.
This movie is more than Kenough. It’s simply generational.
12. Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet’s explosive courtroom drama doubled as a crackling commentary on marriage and the risks of turning tragedy into scandal.
While Anatomy of a Fall has a crackling whodunnit mystery at the center of its drama, it’s almost just as compelling to see how everyone in the orbit of this trial cope with the gravity of what’s been alleged and why.
11. Ferrari
Michael Mann’s latest magnum opus, well, fires on all cylinders as it examines the hubris of Enzo Ferrari and his unassailable drive to push the limits of racing and keep his business afloat like a complex god of his motorized universe.
Of course, there’s always a human cost to achieve the dreams of Olympus, and Mann winds in breathtaking racing scenes with gripping dramatic interactions between Adam Driver’s Ferrari and the people in his circle.
Mann refuses to patch this one together with any sense of resolve or capitulation, challenging the devastating toll Ferrari took to be great on himself and the world around him. The brand endures, even if the man could never justify what it took to make it immortal. Even gods bleed.
10. Godzilla Minus One
Takashi Yamazaki’s spectacular entry into the longstanding Godzilla lineage might just be the best one we’ve ever gotten since the original.
It’s a heart-wrenching story of perseverance in the face of monstrosity, with the big lizard beast going back to his roots of being a ferocious metaphor for the Atomic Bomb.
The necessary companion piece to Oppenheimer, Godzilla Minus One stands as one of the best blockbusters of its time and the biggest surprise of 2023.
9. Air
The old Hollywood shine and roars of competitive fire mark Air, an impossibly entertaining dramatization of how Nike became the shoe brand for NBA superstar Michael Jordan.
While it feels a bit weird getting this emotionally invested in a major company securing a huge marketing deal with an athlete, Air goes so beyond that basic agreement into the tireless dedication of making moments like this real and the tangible progress of what happens when equality reaches the boardroom.
Movie Star Matt Damon is one of the best modes your movie can be in, and getting to see Damon just push it past the limits and deliver a Big Movie Monologue is why we show up to these dang things in the first place.
Review here.
8. Past Lives
The pain of what could’ve been clashing with the joys of what became wrestle throughout Past Lives, Celine Song’s luminous almost-romance that follows two people who just never stood a chance to be together trying to piece together exactly what means in the contexts of their pasts, presents and futures.
Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro make up this not-really-love-triangle between two people (Lee, Magaro) in a loving marriage and two people (Lee, Yoo) who deal with the fact that they may have been there if life had gone differently. Full of impressive grace and deep truths, Past Lives is an emotionally sophisticated work of intense love and loss, one that stretches far past the screen into the world where it certainly applies for many.
Special shoutout to the great Shabier Kirchner for the year’s best cinematography.
7. The Killer
David Fincher simply doesn’t miss unless when he does. At least, that’s how he sees it as he pokes fun at his austere reputation with The Killer, perhaps the most pound-for-pound enjoyable film of 2023.
This is just one of those movies you’ll want to fire up every now and then to watch a master at work making fun of his mastery while also proving that it takes a master to even vaguely come close to pulling off something this self-aware and sensational.
It’s an icy, unforgiving procedural, but it’s also coated with plenty of bitters to zap the moodiness out of the air when necessary. All at once a testament to Fincher’s talents and the most deranged James Bond movie of all time, The Killer boasts the process, however messy it can get.
Even when he shanks it wide right, you know his name.
6. Asteroid City
5. Poor Things
It feels like Yorgos Lanthimos has spent a good bulk of his English-speaking films unearthing the frailty of our species but also wanting to find some good in our hearts, too.
Poor Things is Lanthimos’ most hopeful, hysterical film, which would feel very strange to note when so much of this film is about how ugly the world is and how you must make concessions to survive in it if you don’t want to go mad and starve yourself of any lingering promise of tomorrow.
It’s as rowdy a parable as has been told in the movies lately, digging deep into the fearsome, salacious nature of newfound freedom amid the suffocating, draconian walls of protection and/or possession.
It’s just all it’s said to be and more. Lanthimos is working on another level.
4. BlackBerry
We might not be from Waterloo where the vampires hang out, but we are very ready to champion Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry as one of the absolute best movies of 2023.
The anti-Social Network in a way, BlackBerry channels the rise and fall of the cellular device in such a way that grips you like you’re there and alienates you once it’s time to pull the rug out from under the chase for greatness.
Replete with excellent performances (including the year’s best acting from Glenn Howerton), BlackBerry is essential in all the ways the phone isn’t.
3. Beau is Afraid
Ari Aster’s epic breakdown of arrested development and paranoia is easily his best film yet, one of the towering works of the decade and yet another showcase for why Joaquin Phoenix can literally do anything.
Beau is Afraid is as obtuse an odyssey as you’re likely to go on anytime soon, one that unpacks the painful truths about our relationships to the ways we were raised and how they might set us up to run screaming away from whatever on Earth is trying to chase us.
While you have to wait until the third act to meet Patti LuPone’s sneering matriarch, the entire journey is absolutely unforgettable and, perhaps, so close to home you feel like you’re actually there.
2. Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan is my favorite filmmaker, and Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of his career. Forgive the homerisms, but it was always going to be this high up if it lived up to its potential on this list.
While Godzilla Minus One teaches its audience how to deal with a world where the bomb exists, Oppenheimer shows us how such a world can exist. Nolan’s ingenious format bounces around between creation and reckoning, walking us through a tortured-but-beautiful mind that couldn’t contain its deadly visions once people began to realize what they were and what they could do to dominate the global power structures.
Oppenheimer is a tricky film, one that recognizes its titular scientist’s brilliance while openly deliberating on its immeasurable horror. Once that genie got out of the bottle, we couldn’t put it back in.
Nolan’s film might end on an increasingly pessimistic note to some, but it feels like an earnest plea for change, one that we can obtain if we actually try. It’s the most urgent film of Nolan’s career and easily one of his best. If this is the movie that finally earns him his Oscar, it will be well-deserved.
It’s an all-timer in every sense of the phrase.
1. The Holdovers
When deciding a favorite film of the year, you have to go with your heart. Oppenheimer held this spot for me as long as it possibly could, but the radiant, barbed warmth of The Holdovers will wear you down until you finally scoot over and let it sit right by you by the fireplace.
The Holdovers is one of those once-in-a-lifetime movies, one where everything works so perfectly in unison with the cast, script, direction, setting, sentiments and aura to create a film that literally transports you.
Movies about messy people hit us hardest because we are messy people, stuck trying to figure out a confusing world together. While we might not always have each other forever, sometimes it’s those little pockets in time where you need those particular people the most in that particular moment.
It’s easy to see yourself in any one of these holdovers who find unlikely holiday bonds: Paul Giamatti’s pricky boarding school teacher Paul Hunham, rebellious teen Angus Tully (a revelatory Dominic Sessa) and mourning cook Mary Lamb (a commanding Da’Vine Joy Randolph).
We’re all Paul in moments, Angus and Mary in others. We’ve all felt out of place and lonely in spaces that don’t understand or value us, desperate to connect to someone who even vaguely gets it in the grandest sense. Sometimes, we just need to be together, even if together is a union that feels incredibly unlikely outside of the strangest of circumstances.
The Holdovers isn’t an easy film, bittersweet in its resolution and unforgiving in its practicalities. However, it is a vital one in trying to understand ourselves in the most unusual of moments, the ones where we need those people we’ll never forget and never would’ve considered if not for now.
It really is the best film of 2023 and one I’ll cherish for a long, long time.
