It’s time to bundle all the culture from 2023 into a blender and guzzle it down like Kendall Roy. Yes it’s the Guide’s annual end of year sum-up, where we round up the best films, albums, TV shows and books from the past 12 months. This isn’t to be confused with the Guardian arts desk’s own definitive rankings – here’s film, music, TV shows and classical, with stage, art and games to come. Instead this is a smattering of thing we enjoyed with no rankings attached.
So what went down? Well it was a strange year for film, which frequently seemed to be in a state of either feast or famine. Barbenheimer was arguably the biggest movie event in decades, reminding us of how great the cinema-going experience is. So naturally, Hollywood decided to capitalise on that by … seemingly barely releasing any new films for months afterwards, the result both of the long tail of the pandemic and an actors and writers strike that prevented many studios from properly promoting their movies. Still, there were plenty of great films released in the past 12 months, and this year’s Oscar race looks particularly stacked after a slightly spavined few years.
Compared to the bounty we enjoyed in 2022, 2023 was a little quiet on the big albums front – aside from an hour-and-a-half-long Drake album that everyone seemed to loathe. Instead it was live where the big beasts roamed – and, in the case of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé made a ton of money in the process. A new generation of superstars (Ice Spice, Olivia Rodrigo, PinkPantheress) ascended to the top table, while others, most notably Elton John at Glastonbury, bowed out.
TV also had to contend with the actors and writers strikes, and there was a feeling of a changing of the guard too, as two of the defining shows of the last decade – Happy Valley and Succession – came to a close. More generally there does seem to have been a slowing down of content: after years of speculative streaming companies pumping out show after show, are the boom times truly over? Which might not be a bad thing, given that one of the most frequent complaints we get from readers about TV is there’s too much of it! Still, if your ‘to watch’ list isn’t too long, read on for our favourite shows, albums and films from this year, and perhaps add a few more recommendations to it!
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Film
The longstanding – and some might say now outdated – policy of holding the releases of the big Oscar contenders until after Christmas means that quite a few great films (from Poor Things to All of Us Strangers) will have to wait until next year’s round-up. A case in point from this year: Tár, Todd Field’s brilliantly sharp psychological drama about a controlling orchestra conductor, which seems like it was released years ago but actually landed in January.
Barbie and Oppenheimer barely need mentioning at this stage, but both managed to make forward-thinking mass-market entertainment look easy, as did the dizzyingly inventive animation Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Past Lives and Killers of the Flower Moon (above) were the year’s two big critical darlings, and perhaps rightly so – though it was interesting to read dissenting views about both films’ attitudes towards representation and the sorts of stories told about minority groups in America.
Just when you were waiting for a good tense French courtroom drama, two came along in the same year, in the form of Saint Omer and Anatomy of a Fall. The year’s best documentary was All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which somehow managed to double up as both a career celebration of artist Nan Goldin and a denunciation of the Sackler Family’s role in Oxycontin’s hold on the US. The year’s best feel bad movie, meanwhile, was Passages, featuring Franz Rogowski as a narcissistic director forcing his partner to go along with an uneasy love triangle. And the surprise white knuckle thriller of the year was the indie effort How to Blow Up a Pipeline, about activists’ attempts to disrupt the flow of oil in rural Texas. Careful as you go with those barrels of dynamite!
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Music
This year may have been short of many truly massive album releases, but that just created a bit more space for less attention-grabbing works to shine. It was great to see Wednesday’s country-grunge stomper Rat Saw God appearing on numerous top 10 lists, and the same can be said for Yaeji’s club-focused bedroom pop opus With a Hammer and Jessie Ware’s That! Feels! Good!, as luscious and lascivious a slice of disco you’re likely to hear this side of 1979. Hotline TNT’s huge, loud and enveloping Cartwheel did something similar with the shoegaze genre.
The best rap releases seemed a little off-the-beaten track too, from Earl Sweatshirt and the Alchemist’s sample-filled collaboration Voir Dire, to Billy Woods and Kenny Segal’s digressive, detail-packed Maps and McKinley Dixon’s pleasingly all-over-the-map (as well as Toni Morrison-themed) Beloved! Paradise! Jazz? Meanwhile, the unlikely resurgence of hardcore punk continued this year with some cracking albums, from the heavy pop of Militarie Gun’s Life Under the Gun, to Fiddlehead’s mortality-fixated (but still somehow euphoric) Death is Nothing to Us and MSPAINT’s wildly original synth-punk effort, Post-American.
But there’s one album that I have listened to at least once a week since its release in January. Dead Meat by The Tubs is complete indie catnip – think Hüsker Dü and Richard and Linda Thompson covering lost jangle classics taken from an old cassette you found at a car boot sale. Every melody on the album seems to be in a battle to stay lodged in your brain, and I’d say that its acid lyrics are worthy of prime-era Morrissey, if that wasn’t a bit of an insult these days. It’s great to see it getting some love in a few end of year lists – though not nearly enough of them!
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TV
It will be strange to never again eavesdrop on the Roy family’s caustic squabbling, but it did feel like the right time for Succession to end – and it ended on a high with a rug pull of a third episode supercharging the show as it entered its home stretch. Happy Valley’s final run didn’t try anything quite as jolting but instead succeeded with more of the same: gripping drama, a huge dollop of humour and pathos, and two great central performances from Sarah Lancashire and James Norton. Those two series are likely to be fighting it out at the top of TV end of year lists with The Bear, which became a richer, more varied show in its second season, while still maintaining its trademark haute tension.
It was a good year for daring, form-pushing comedy: Jury Duty’s “mockumentary plus one unsuspecting rube” format was inspired and very funny; Beef (starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, above) took a simple moment of road rage and turned it into a ‘watch between your fingers’ comedy thriller; Dreaming Whilst Black had more to say about race, class, authenticity in Britain in each of its half-hour episodes than most of the rest of TV put together; and Such Brave Girls went there in a way that no British comedy has since the days of Julia Davis. A special mention too for Party Down, returning after more than a decade away, and barely missing a cringe comedy beat.
Much of our TV-viewing was done away from scripted television and towards non-scripted. Which meant reality series like the still-great Race Across the World, but also, more gravely, events in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. And there was a powerful echo from the past too with James Bluemel’s documentary Once Upon a Time in Ireland, a stunningly researched and realised account of the era, capturing both the brutality of the conflict and the road to reconciliation.
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Books
As ever the Guardian books desk is the place to go for an in-depth round-up of the year’s best books, with a truly snazzy graphic too – so if you’re after everything from crime thrillers to children’s books, politics to poetry, you know where to find it.
We weren’t lacking for great cultural books this year. In music, I particularly enjoyed Michael Cragg’s oral history of 90s and 00s pop, Reach For the Stars, and Ed Gillett’s Party Lines, which looked at dance music’s fractious relationship with the state. Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars had great insight and anecdotes around some of the biggest Academy Awards wins and snubs and Werner Herzog’s brilliantly titled memoir Every Man for Himself and God against All, was exactly as out-there as you’d expect of the director (sample line: “I wanted to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings”).
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