Ten-best lists may be silly, but denying their uses and pleasures always struck me as sillier. And so, with the year half over, here are my favorite new movies of 2023 so far, listed in some semblance of alphabetical order (in some cases, I’ve paired two movies that seem to be in conversation with each other). As ever, I’m astonished by the range of good and even great movies I’ve seen already, and excited for the many more still to come:
‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’
A cinematic shock to the senses, this latest work from the documentary filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel (“Leviathan,” “Caniba”) deservedly won the Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. But don’t let that — or the movie’s many unblinking, up-close scenes of human surgery — scare you off. More than just an endoscopic-horror tour de force, it’s also a deeply moving portrait of medical experts in action, reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman in its understanding of the agony and the necessity of human work. (“De Humani Corporis Fabrica” is still playing in select U.S. theaters.)
