The Best Movies of 2023

Was 2023 the year that saved the movies? It’s a question that stems from a false premise; any prior suggestion that cinema was imperiled—that the multiplex is homogenized, that streamers are destroying theaters, that studios don’t make films for grownups anymore—ignores the immutable fact (or at least this critic’s fierce opinion) that artists have spent the past decade stubbornly churning out high-quality motion pictures. Still, it’s difficult to deny that something happened on July 21, 2023—a moment that, depending on your perspective, either signaled a seismic shift in audience behavior or vindicated your long-held insistence that movies remain alive and well.

I am speaking, of course, of #Barbenheimer, that ungainly portmanteau of two of the year’s most critically and commercially successful pictures, which arrived in theaters on the same day. Rather than cannibalizing each other, they complemented one another, sparking a craze of double features and breathing fresh life into the industry. Here were two movies that, in empirical terms, had nothing in common; one was a brightly colored fantasy inspired by a doll, the other a sober and intense three-hour epic about the birth (and aftermath) of the atomic bomb. Yet people flocked to Barbie and Oppenheimer alike, and in the process they reminded everyone that the simple act of going to the movies remains a cherished pastime—a sacred ritual in which art and commerce need not be mutually exclusive.

A cynic might object that Barbenheimer is a one-off—a big-bang phenomenon with no plausible chance of being replicated in the future. Certainly a survey of the year’s most lucrative productions reveals the usual mélange of superhero flicks and franchise fare, though the underwhelming performances of several such sequels (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, whatever the hell the new Shazam was called) suggests that cinematic universes are losing their stranglehold on the popular imagination. Every relative success (the surprising legs of Pixar’s Elemental, the dancing mayhem of M3gan) can be countered with many more dispiriting financial failures (Beau Is Afraid, Joy Ride, Knock at the Cabin, The Creator, etc.). Hollywood can hardly respond to pressing questions about its future with the answer, “It’s OK, we’ll just make a bunch more movies directed by Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan.”

And yet, I return to where I always land when contemplating the state of the industry at large: a place of happiness and gratitude. Movies these days are simply too plentiful, too wide-ranging, too damn good for me to foretell the medium’s death. 2023 brought us new gifts from renowned masters like Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and David Fincher, all of whom continue to approach their craft with discipline and rigor. Yet while each of their works made my top 20, so did the feature debuts of four different directors whose obvious talent portends more great pictures going forward, assuaging any concern that cinema’s future lies in the hands of a few aging white dudes. 2023 was also an unusually strong year for action films, with three bona fide blockbusters landing in my top 10. And it supplied a bounty of riches from across the world, reminding us of the art form’s global reach.

So maybe 2023 didn’t save the movies so much as reinforce their unwavering value, their permanent cultural significance. Maybe someday theaters will be shuttered, artists will be disempowered, and I’ll struggle to cobble together a list of 20-odd pictures to celebrate at season’s end. But not this year.

Here are MovieManifesto’s favorite movies of 2023:

Honorable mention: All of Us Strangers, Beau Is Afraid, BlackBerry, Blue Jean, Eileen, Godzilla Minus One, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, The Iron Claw, Landscape with Invisible Hand, Monster, Sanctuary, Theater Camp, A Thousand and One.

20. The Killer. Is it a visceral thriller or a black satire of capitalism? Either way, Michael Fassbender is mesmerizing as an assassin who’s rather bad at his job, while the lithe camerawork and electric sound design remind you that David Fincher remains very good at his. (Full review here; streaming on Netflix.)

19. Anatomy of a Fall. A gripping legal procedural that’s also an incisive study of marriage, Justine Triet’s drama tantalizes with its complexity and ambiguity. Did she do it? We’ll never know, and we’ll never stop asking. (Full review here.)

18. Barbie. Somehow, Greta Gerwig turns a child’s plaything into a boisterous and provocative examination of societal gender roles. The themes may be blunt, but the craft is exquisite (those colors! those costumes!), as are the nimble and funny performances from Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. (Full review here; streaming on Max.)

17. May December. In one sense, Todd Haynes’ evisceration of our scandal-obsessed culture is withering. Yet it is also deeply humane, with piercing insight and fully realized characters, given great heft and shape by Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton. (Full review here; streaming on Netflix.)

16. Of an Age. Goran Stolevski’s beautiful coming-of-age story is shot through with tenderness and longing. It is also flecked with anguish, watching earnestly as dreams are found and lost. (Streaming on Prime.)

15. The Zone of Interest. Cheerful, this. But if the exactitude of Jonathan Glazer’s commitment isn’t exactly pleasing, it is nevertheless rewarding, revealing the banality of human evil with electrifying mundanity. (Full review here.)

14. Joyland. Another upper! Yet Saim Sadiq’s storytelling is too compassionate to be punishing. It is also deceptively wide-ranging; what begins as a seemingly simple love affair between an ineffectual man (Ali Junejo) and the glamorous trans dancer who captivates him (Alina Khan) slyly pivots into a wrenching portrait of a woman (Rasti Farooq) doomed to live in the shadows. (Streaming on Criterion.)

13. The Royal Hotel. If The Assistant was a merciless depiction of the pervasive nature of abuse, Kitty Green’s follow-up expands her setting (from a grubby Manhattan office building to the sprawling Australian outback) without sacrificing the intensity of her themes. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are both excellent as women who endure a crucible of humiliation, while Green’s slow-burn approach turns a simple bar into a complex ecosystem dripping with hostility and menace. (Full review here.)

12. The Starling Girl. Did women have a rough year at the movies? Maybe, but they also held the center of stories that emphasized their endurance as well as their subjugation. Laurel Parmet’s study of a dreamy teenager (Eliza Scanlen) reckoning with evils both personal and institutional travels to places of terrible darkness, but it never loses track of its beaming light. (Longer review here; streaming on Showtime.)

11. Emily. Oh great, another period costume drama. No, seriously, I love these. But Frances O’Connor’s portrait of the Wuthering Heights author (played by Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) is more than just a collage of pretty pictures; it’s a forceful melodrama of creativity and ferocity, with windswept currents that whip its literary pages into a hot-blooded passion. (Longer review here; streaming on Showtime.)

10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I liked the first Spider-Verse picture well enough, but its sequel levels up, with even richer and more varied animation, plus a thoughtful story that interrogates the appeal of comic-book lore while also functioning as a suspenseful blast of joyous entertainment. Daniel Pemberton delivers the score of the year, while Gwen Stacy’s watercolor world is worthy of its own museum—one she’d inevitably save from a supervillain yanked into the wrong dimension. (Full review here; streaming on Netflix.)

9. Return to Seoul. Davy Chou’s study of an aimless young woman is intimate and poignant, with a nuanced understanding of its lead character. Yet it’s also sweeping and bold, with multiple time jumps and a story whose breadth seems to stretch beyond the frame. Park Ji-min delivers one of the year’s best performances, a feat all the more remarkable given that it’s her acting debut. (Streaming on Prime.)

8. Asteroid City. A fascinating document of an artist trying to harmonize his whimsical gifts with his far-reaching ideas, Asteroid City is arguably Wes Anderson’s messiest movie. It is also one of his most beautiful, with lustrous colors, magnificent production design, and a camera that hits every mark with precision—even as the characters are stumbling all over the place. (Full review here; streaming on Prime.)

7. John Wick: Chapter 4. One of cinema’s greatest action franchises (locked in perpetual battle with, well, see #5 below) reaches new heights in its dizzying climax. The ornate mythology borders on parodic, but there’s nothing silly about the craft that Chad Stahelski brings to his combat scenes, the gleam of Dan Laustsen’s cinematography, or the growling gravity of Keanu Reeves. (Full review here; streaming on Starz.)

6. Killers of the Flower Moon. Martin Scorsese has seen the enemy, and it is us. But the howling fury of his latest picture doesn’t diminish its narrative energy or its thematic clarity. The three main performances—from Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro—are all perfectly scaled to their characters, even as they make devastatingly clear that the problems Scorsese reveals amount to a whole lot more than a hill of beans. (Full review here; streaming on Apple.)

5. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part One. The allegorical relevance of Tom Cruise waging war against an almighty algorithm is touching, but it shouldn’t obscure the sheer awesomeness of this movie: the glorious images, the elaborate plotting, the majestically choreographed action (that car chase!). The Mission: Impossible films aren’t meant to be taken seriously in terms of story or even character, but they are serious pictures, wielding practical stunt work and inspired imagination in the noble pursuit of entertaining their audience. I choose to accept. (Full review here; streaming on Paramount.)

4. Afire. Christian Petzold’s movies cannot be circumscribed. They are small and taut and spiky; they are also grand and ambitious and enveloping. Afire is ostensibly a narrow picture about an insufferable writer (Thomas Schubert, stupendously unlikable) who’s just trying to get some work done. But thanks to Petzold’s nervy way with a story—and thanks to the emergence of his breathtaking muse, Paula Beer—it transforms into something operatic, without ever losing its prickly intimacy. It’s a movie about the misery of artistic creation; it is also an extraordinary work of art. (Streaming on Criterion.)

3. Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan splits the cinematic atom, delivering a magnum opus that mostly traffics in nerds talking in cramped rooms. Mobilizing an indecently talented cast—led by a never-better Cillian Murphy, but featuring an impossibly deep bench of character actors—Nolan takes the grubby, unsexy work of scientific research and imbues it with an elemental grandeur. It’s an epic achievement on a minuscule scale—a revelatory brandishing of technique that reminds us of the wonderful and terrible things we can do. (Full review here; streaming on Peacock.)

2. Past Lives. Celine Song’s drama of three tangled souls unfolds with quiet confidence, never sensing the need to upset its delicately balanced emotions with artifice. Yet it is also an explosive meditation on the choices we make and the paths we never take. Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro imbue their three-dimensional characters with remarkable grace, while Song’s dexterous screenplay builds with exquisite patience, culminating in the most shattering scene of the year. (Full review here; streaming on Showtime.)

1. Poor Things. “I am Bella Baxter,” Emma Stone declares. So she is. Yorgos Lanthimos’ extravagant odyssey is monumental—a grand picaresque of self-discovery that acquires the stature of myth. Yet its sweeping scope in no way contradicts its fine-grained details: the lavish production design, the marvelous costumes, the acid humor. How can the biggest movie of the year also be the funniest? The answer lies in alchemy—the expertly calibrated mixture of Lanthimos’ fluid direction, Tony McNamara’s sharp script, and Stone’s transformative magic act. It’s tempting to brand Bella a stand-in for any wide-eyed woman leaping out into the world, but she is a singular creature, and her journey is her own. To accompany her on it is a pleasure, and also a gift. (Full review here.)

(For a ranked list of all 134 new movies we watched in 2023, click here.)