Sorry, Napoleon (yawn), you failed to conquer, while despite Tom Cruise actually leaping off a cliff on a motorbike, the latest Mission: Impossible didn’t quite succeed either. It was female filmmakers who smashed it in 2023, with three of our top four movies directed by women. This is a personal selection; some choices you’ll wholeheartedly agree with, while you’ll be flabbergasted by others. Feel free to argue (among yourselves).
20. Cocaine Bear
Everyone assumed this rampaging grizzly high on Peruvian party powder would be a turkey. Wrong. The spectacle of someone strapped to a stretcher being launched out of the back of a moving ambulance to meet their maker really, really shouldn’t be funny, but it was a gross-out triumph. As were the “my dusty beaver” jokes.
19. Beau is Afraid
Controversial, but Joaquin Phoenix (not his finest year) is way better in this than Napoleon. Ari Aster’s surreal three-hour odyssey of anxiety was a massively indulgent piece of Marmite cinema. However, while the haters were busy detesting it, they missed some heart-breaking moments of staggering genius.
18. Lie With Me
Shame on the 99.99 per cent of the world who didn’t see the most satisfying love story of the year. Olivier Peyon’s tale of a middle-aged writer who returns to his hometown after 35 years to confront the haunting memories of the enigmatic young boy he fell for is deeply touching. And it’s French, and they tend to do these things rather well.
17. Past Lives
Another low-key but devastating take on lost love through the optics of time, Celine Song’s debut tracks a teenage crush across decades and continents from Seoul to New York. This might top many critics’ lists, but for me the slow burn only scorched my soul in the utterly swelling climax.
16. Once Upon a Time in Uganda
This doc is two smoking barrels of madcap joy. In the backstreets of Kampala, Isaac Nabwana makes hilariously violent, YouTube action movies. When a superfan New Yorker partners with him, what follows is a hearteningly wacky tale of odd couple friendship you simply couldn’t make up. Meet the would-be kings of exploding heads.
15. Dream Scenario
Would you like it if the unbearably massive talent of Nicolas Cage started appearing in your dreams? Nope, and neither do the thousands of people in this. A bit The Truman Show, quite a lot Charlie Kaufman, Kristoffer Borgli’s film is a tripped-out blast. And Cage plays it wonderfully deadpan straight. Hand me the Zopiclone!
14. Name Me Lawand
I defy anyone not to be moved by Edward Lovelace’s documentary. Five-year-old Kurdish boy Lawand was born deaf and his life in Iraq was one of abject isolation. Watching the smiles flow out of him as he learns to communicate and make friends at Derby’s Royal School for the Deaf (while also fighting a heartless deportation order) is as life-affirming as cinema gets.
13. Talk to Me
Haven’t we seen this before, teenagers messing about with a spooky embalmed hand for supernatural shits and giggles? Indeed, but Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou give it a totally disturbing, kinetic slant and Sophie Wilde leads a brilliant young cast. Horror of the year.
12. Rye Lane
The romcom, reborn in Peckham! Raine Allen Miller’s wildly inventive debut following two heartbroken youngsters who meet in a toilet and spend a day gallivanting across south London is relentlessly effervescent and hilarious. Sample line: “Did you know that we know more about Jupiter than the human anus?”
11. Oppenheimer
What?! Only No11?! No, not a contrarian ploy. While Christopher Nolan’s behemoth was incredible in parts (the wobbly-screen bomby bits with Cillian Murphy’s cadaverous haunted face), there was way too much interminable questioning of Doctor Robert by dull grey men trying to prove he was a commie. Murphy should still get the Oscar though.
10. Wonka
The best thing to happen to Britain all year. What we need right now is a good old dose of feel-good fun, and this delivers a gigantic sugary blast of the stuff. Timothée Chalamet is the sweetest Wonka of them all, Olivia Colman is deliciously wicked and the songs are choco-lollockingly catchy. And Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa is just doompety doo-da dazzling.
9. The Eight Mountains
As glacial and sublime as the peaks of the title, this Belgian story of the fraught lifelong friendship between two boys who meet in the Italian Alps is a gentle epic. Bruno bullishly believes his fate is to live and die on the same mountain, while Pietro is the city kid searching for his elusive truth among a whole world of real and imagined summits. Profoundly human.
8. Barbie
Was it the most outrageously successful advert ever for a company flogging genital-free lumps of plastic or a searing feminist rallying cry? Go figure. What Barbie definitely did was make the world laugh. And props to Greta Gerwig for being gutsy enough to give Ryan Gosling’s Ken the best lines: “When I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I lost interest.” Beach off!
7. Eileen
William Oldroyd’s erotic death plunge to freedom (adapted by Ottessa Moshfegh from her Booker-nominated novel) was a smouldering, darkly atmospheric Hitchcockian joy. When swaggering “femme fatale” (or is she?) Anna Hathaway struts into a dead-end late Sixties town to awaken mousy Thomasin McKenzie’s primal urges… well, as Eileen’s father warns her, “Love will make you crazy.”
6. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Into the Spider-Verse was an animated revelation, bringing a genuine visual flavour of the original Marvel comics. Bolder, bigger, more boggling, this follow-on upped the game like a deranged hyper-swarm of Sharpie-wielding nerds. Yes, the story wasn’t quite world-changing, but the multiple Spideys (an Indian one, a Spider-Punk) were a brain-popping riot and those insanely good graphics? A proverbial feast for hungry eyes.
5. The Great Escaper
Back in 2014, 89-year-old D-Day veteran Bernie Jordan made headlines when he did a runner from his care home to Normandy for the 70th anniversary of the landings. Ninety-year-old Michael Caine plays Bernie with such humble grace and, in her final role, the late Glenda Jackson delivers close to a career best as his wife Irene. A masterclass in acting from the heart, you can’t help but weep.
4. How to Have Sex
Jetting off to the sun for boozy thrills, painful spills and reckless shagging is a rite of passage for many a teen, and Molly Manning Walker’s thumping debut is as accurate a depiction as you’re likely to get. Three girlfriends awaiting GCSE results land in Crete and hit the horny party scene hard, but for one (Mia KcKenna-Bruce, utterly superb) the reality of first sexual encounters – let alone questions of consent – is bitterly sobering.
3. Reality
Who would have thought this conceit would work? In June 2017, the FBI rocked up at Reality Winner’s house to question the NSA translator about a leaked intelligence report. Two hours later, she was in handcuffs. The dialogue in Tina Satter’s debut is verbatim from the interrogation transcript; nothing more, nothing less. The result is transfixing; largely down to Sydney Sweeney’s mesmerising lead performance. In an era of fakery and misinformation, cinema doesn’t get much more verité than this.
2. Anatomy of a Fall
At an icy alpine chalet, a husband plummets to his death from an upper window. The only “witnesses”: his wife Sandra and blind (and therefore “unreliable”) son Daniel. The cops come sniffing, bizarre re-enactments follow, and Sandra is charged with murder. French director Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winner is mesmerisingly intelligent film-making – forensic in its emotional depth. In a righteous world, Sandra Hüller and Machado Graner as mother and son should get Oscars. I only left the cinema twice in 2023 completely blown away: after Anatomy of a Fall and then…
1. Killers of the Flower Moon
In a year of bladder-busting movies, this 206-minute historical epic was the one worth practising those pelvic clenches for. Dripping with five-star accolades, it is indeed Martin Scorsese’s finest work since at least Goodfellas. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are masterful as the crafty fool and his sinister controller who want the dirty black gold beneath the ground of the Native Americans in Osage Nation by any means necessary – and, yes, the bodies pile high. But it’s Lily Gladstone who is truly majestic as the local girl via whose heart they intend to secure the oil, and she surely will win that Oscar.
