best movie reviews 2023

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The best movies of 2023

From ‘Tár’ to ‘Barbie’, this is our ranking of the essential films of the year.

Oh, we are so back. It took a few years, but 2023 felt like the year that Hollywood finally found its footing post-pandemic – which is ironic, considering Hollywood also shut down for large parts of the year. Before all the strikes hit, though, there were indications that the movie industry was coming back to life. There was the #Barbenheimer phenomenon, of course, which helped power the domestic box office to its strongest overall numbers since 2019. But in terms of pure moviemaking, the year was particularly strong. Martin Scorsese dropped another masterpiece , while Across the Spider-Verse made comic-book movies fresh again (at least until Madam Web , anyway). Past Lives made audiences swoon, while small-time charmers like Theater Camp , Scrapper and Rye Lane reasserted the vitality of indie filmmaking. And don’t forget the one about the dancing killer doll !

Overall, it was a great year for movies – even the Oscars were enjoyable. But what movies were the greatest? Here are our picks.

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Best films of 2023

1.  Tár

Call it 'A Portrait of the Artist In the Midst of Being Canceled’. In Todd Field's psychological character study, Cate Blanchett is Lydia Tár, a genius-level composer, EGOT winner and insufferable narcissist whose icy demeanor hardly fractures as accusations of sexual impropriety threaten to shatter her career. Blanchett's Oscar-nominated performance has rightly earned the lion's share of plaudits, but the superb acting is buoyed by Field's subtly off-kilter visual style, lending the ‘ripped from the headlines’ narrative a hint of Kubrickian uncanniness.

2.  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Building on the mash-up of animation styles that made Into the Spider-Verse so ridiculously vibrant and throwing in a multitude of new ones – stop-motion LEGO-mation, anyone? – this dizzying, dazzling sequel is the persuasive case for superhero movies than the played-out genre desperately needed. The Miles Morales version of Spidey, voiced again with a sense of wonderment and real soul by Shameik Moore, zooms across multiverses and meets several hundred parallel Spider-people in a personal quest with universal stakes. The gags and pop-culture references – delivered with trademark Lord and Miller irreverence – come so thick and fast, you’ll need several viewings to unpack them all. Which will not be a major burden with a movie this entertaining.

3.  Oppenheimer

Any year in which both the box office and the Academy Awards are dominated by a three-hour doomscroll through the life of the inventor of the atomic bomb should be considered a very good year for movies. It’s not just the tough subject matter that makes Christopher Nolan’s all-time-great biopic such a surprising blockbuster but the enormity of the themes contained within it: war, genocide, guilt, nuclear fission, the Red Scare, the Spanish Civil War, the apocalypse, love, marriage et al . Cillian Murphy, brilliant as J Robert Oppenheimer, wears it all in every line on his face, especially the ‘guilt’ part – he’s the walking embodiment of the phrase ‘your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’.

4.  EO

Thanks to Banshees of Inisherin , Triangle of Sadness   and this disarmingly powerful four-legged odyssey from veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the humble donkey has become a cinematic colossus of late – a kind of doleful-eyed, carrot-chewing Brando. The genius of EO , which follows one little donkey across Europe, is in using its furry hero as a mirror to reflect back at us the state of the world in all its beauty, pain and ineffable sadness. It shouldn’t be half as bewitching and emotional, but honestly, it ruined us. 

5.  Killers of the Flower Moon

Are we starting to take Martin Scorsese for granted? Shut out at the Oscars, and made the butt of more hacky ‘movies are too darn long now’ jokes, his account of the murders that plagued the oil-rich Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s is nevertheless ‘just’ another late-period masterpiece from cinema’s greatest living director, a darkly atmospheric true-crime epic informed by one of America’s original sins. Scorsese’s usual gang of A-listers, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons, are all typically excellent, but the soul of the film is the previously unheralded Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman quietly haunted by the suspicion that she’s allowed the devil into her heart, home and community. 

6.  Return to Seoul

A diaspora tale of real psychological acuity and emotional eloquence, this captivating drama perfectly articulates the hurt of a young adopted Frenchwoman as she returns to the country of her birth and struggles to reconcile with the past. French-Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou follows his brilliantly-drawn protagonist, the spiky, chaotic Freddie (Park Ji-Min), as she shrugs off Korean customs, her drunk-texting birth father and a continued sense of rejection from the mum who won’t acknowledge her in the hope of wrestling back control of her inner life. Like Freddie, it’s a film that will only grow in stature with the passing of time. 

7.  Anatomy of a Fall

Finding flaw in Justine Triet’s ( In Bed with Victoria ) brainy, provocative and elusive Palme d’Or winner is no easy task. It’s hard even to define it. Murder-mystery? Courtroom drama about an innocent woman ( Toni Erdmann ’s Sandra Hüller) suffering from institutionalised sexism? That question sits at its murky heart. A man falls from the balcony of his Alpine chalet and suspicion falls on his writer wife. Cue a forensic examination of a rocky marriage, as well as a knotty character study of a refreshingly complicated woman. Triet teases us with morsels of information that may (or may not) be important, like an arthouse version of Cluedo. Keep your wits about you and it’s one of the most satisfying cinema outings of the year.   

8.  Past Lives

Getting compared with Wong Kar-wai’s classic romance In the Mood for Love loads seriously unreasonable expectations on a first-time filmmaker. But Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song’s tender-hearted romance holds up to them purely for its emotional intelligence and wisdom and its sheer empathy for its characters. The central relationship plays out over several decades between Korean New Yorker (Greta Lee) and the childhood sweetheart (Teo Yoo) who never left Seoul, and the husband who struggles to give her space to explore her feelings. A love letter to two people and two cities – Seoul and New York – in all their messy glory, it’s one we’ll be revisiting in years to come.

9.  May December

• 4 out of 5 stars
• Recommended

Todd Haynes’ latest melodrama – the ripped-from-the-headlines story of a suburban woman, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), living in the shadow of an underage sex scandal – sounds maudlin. But Haynes, working off a brilliant screenplay from Samy Burch, injects the film with enough self-conscious camp to qualify as a comedy (at the Golden Globes, anyway), even as it explores heavy themes involving sexual power dynamics and self-delusion. It’s a complex, richly character-driven story, with Charles Melton quietly stealing scenes as Gracie’s now-adult partner and Natalie Portman as an oily TV actress preparing to play Gracie in an indie drama. But it’s hardly snooty – and the hilariously sensationalistic score is one of the year’s best running gags.

10.  The Boy and the Heron

11.  Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

• Action and adventure

Tom Cruise’s willingness to do literally any bastard-mad thing to entertain us finds its purest expression in the seventh instalment of the consistently excellent Mission: Impossible movies. He sprints, freefalls, races and horse-rides through a series of gawp-worthy action set pieces, occasionally while handcuffed to Hayley Atwell’s terrified franchise newbie, all expertly executed by writer-director Christopher McQuarrie. And the plot? Hard to say, this being the first part of a Dead Reckoning twofer and with multiple strands yet to be tied together, but it’s smart-baffling in the best M:I tradition. Kudos, too, to charisma machine Esai Morales, who somehow makes dialogue about A.I. sexy as the superbad, Gabriel. Roll on Part Two .

12.  How to Have Sex

A sunkissed hangout movie that sours and spins out of control like the worst kind of night out, Molly Manning Walker’s debut is where bubblegum fun strays into a minefield of sexual assault, trauma and heartbreak. Terrific newcomer Mia McKenna-Bruce is Tara, a high-schooler celebrating finishing her exams with a mates’ holiday to Crete. On the menu? Booze, partying and saying farewell to her virginity. Enter the seemingly charming Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and exit all the good vibes. A coming-of-age drama they should teach in schools, How to Have Sex is not a bit less cinematic for its educational message.

13.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

• Documentaries

There’s so much going on in Laura Poitras’s doc, it speaks volumes for the quality of the filmmaking that it all hangs together so dexterously . Iconic photographer Nan Goldin is its subject, protagonist and guide, as the film takes in a tour of New York’s ’70s counterculture, ex-addict Goldin’s quest for justice against the odious Sacklers, the family behind America’s OxyContin epidemic, and the nuts and bolts of social activism. It’s moving, enthralling and artful – in every sense of the word.

14.  Rye Lane

Who said the romcom was dead? Putting an authentically South London spin to the Before Sunset formula of two strangers meeting, chatting and slowly falling for each other – ie with loads more chicken shops and Supermalts – Rye Lane is sparky, romantic and pisstakey in all the ways that London is. David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah provide charm, jokes and very relatable insecurities as two young Black Londoners, Dom and Yas – who slowly size each other up and – eventually – like what they see. Their Salt-N-Pepa karaoke scene is a mic drop moment in every sense. 

15.  Godzilla Minus One

Possibly the  angriest  Godzilla we’ve seen, this Toho reboot of the Japanese icon represents a triumphant homecoming for the kaiju after a series of murky and mediocre Hollywood blockbusters. Under the skilful oversight of VFX wizard Takashi Yamazaki, who writes and directs, the action beats are thunderous and the effects look great – and are always in the service of a surprisingly touching human story nestled amid the colossal destruction. One seaborne chase borrows from Jaws and isn’t embarrassed by the comparison. 

16.  Fremont

Played by real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada, Donya is an interpreter forced to flee the Taliban and start afresh in America in this soulful, black-and-white study of loneliness and connection. With British-Iranian director Babak Jalali’s meticulous compositions and a faint, slackerish energy best embodied by Gregg Turkington’s drowsy, Jack London-loving psychologist who helps Donya tackle her undiagnosed PTSD, Fremont is not flattered by the Jim Jarmusch comparisons. It’s the kind of lo-fi gem that would have built a steady rep in the old days of video stores. It deserves to be discovered on streaming.

17.  They Cloned Tyrone

It got lost amid July’s Barbenheimer noise but this raucously entertaining, needle-sharp Blaxsploitation riff is ripe for discovery on Netflix. An almost uncategorisable mix of crime thriller, satirical comedy and near-future sci-fi, it’s the handiwork of a first-time filmmaker of real promise in Juel Taylor. He rescues the term ‘woke’ from the right-wing commentariat with a They Live -adjacent storyline in which John Boyega, Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx team up to uncover a conspiracy to control Black consciousness via… well, that would be spoiling one of the year’s best in-jokes. 

18.  The Fabelmans

It’s been an era of filmmakers recreating their childhoods on screen (and let’s face it, it’s mostly boyhoods we’re talking about), with Alfonso Cuarón, Paolo Sorrentino and Lee Isaac Chung all parlaying their own younger lives into Oscar-worthy dramas in recent years. But of all of these cine-reminiscences, Steven Spielberg’s feels the most alive to the possibility that it might even be misremembering or misinterpreting events – and thus it feels like the most guileless and honest of the lot. With Spielberg’s on-screen surrogate, Gabriel LaBelle’s Sammy Fabelman, to the fore, its many moments of hurt and wonderment are dazzlingly realised.

19.  Reality

Euphoria ’s Sydney Sweeney is electrifying as 25-year-old NSA translator Reality Winner, who was questioned by the FBI in 2017 over leaked documents relating to Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. Tina Satter’s anxiety-inducing thriller expertly transfers her ‘verbatim theatre’ stage production ‘Is This a Room?’ into a kind of verbatim cinema, drip-feeding dread in a real-time recreation of Winner’s first interrogation. It’s signals the arrival of a singular talent in Satter, and offers further evidence of Sweeney’s brilliance. Oh, and that double meaning title? Chef’s kiss.

20.  Theater Camp

Borrowing equally from the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest and modern single-camera sitcoms like Parks and Recreation , this spirited little comedy is pretty far from being something you’ve never seen before. But writer-directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman have clearly studied those influences closely, and they obviously know the small-stakes art world they spend the movie affectionately mocking on an intimate level. Following the attendees of a theater-focused summer camp in the Adirondacks as they plot a last-minute tribute to their ailing founder (Amy Sedaris, who’s sadly not around much), it mines the inherent humour of passionate people whose ambition far outstrips their resources. Needling drama kids (and drama adults) is like shooting fish that have been shoved into a high school locker, and the movie does indulge in some fairly broad cliches, but it never feels cruel, and the biggest laughs often come from just how big-hearted it is. In this vicious age, niceness can go a long way – and Theater Camp is some very nice stuff.

21.  The Old Oak

British cinema’s own old oak, Ken Loach delivers a (possibly final) film as inflamed and vital as ever. Some would argue to its detriment, with the line crossed from social realism and into straight polemic in its depiction of a struggling northeast English community reacting to the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees. But Loach and his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty aren’t here to spin subtle, elliptical yarns. The Old Oak is another clarion call inspired by real-life crises that are impacting working class people and that directness is its greatest strength. And throughout, the cast of first-time actors bring unvarnished warmth to its moving moments of human connection. Who else is making films like this – and who will make them when Loach finally hangs up his clapperboard?

22.  Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

What unexpected joy and wisdom this stop-motion animation delivers. Expanding a 2010 short and perhaps taking a cue from Aardman’s classic Creature Comforts , it introduces us to a sparkly little mollusc called Marcel (voiced by co-creator Jenny Slate) and her gentle Nanna Connie (Isabella Rossellini), left behind when their community of shells disappears overnight. Enter documentary maker Dean (Slate’s co-creator Dean Fleischer Camp) to join the quest for this missing shell utopia. Cute by never cutesy, and with a surprisingly sharp wit, it’s cinematic soul food that’ll have you going back for a second helping.

23.  Saint Omer

The directness of French filmmaker Alice Diop‘s courtroom drama – a film of long, unblinking takes and zero showy camerawork – shouldn’t be confused with simplicity. Knotty and morally challenging, Saint Omer traverses some of the biggest cultural fault lines of modern Europe – race, migration, religion – in its story of a young woman (Guslagie Malanda) accused of leaving her child to drown on a Normandy beach. It’s based on a real-life court case that Diop herself attended and her recreation engages both the brain and the heart. Just try shaking it. 

24.  Barbie

It was the biggest movie of 2023, and one of the year’s major pop culture events in general, but for all its world domination, Barbie ended up being one heck of a strange movie. Maybe we should have expected it – after all, with Greta Gerwig writing and directing, along with her husband, Noah Baumbach, serving as co-writer, you knew it wasn’t just going to be a film about, like, an inspirational fashion model. But who could have predicted the feminist fantasia we actually got? Set in a matriarchal land of living dolls, where everything is blissful and neon and perfect until the fears, insecurities and toxic masculinity of the real world encroach, it’s a wickedly smart, unabashedly silly satire smuggled to the masses inside a fuschia-coloured disco ball. Margot Robbie is pitch-perfect as ‘Stereotypical Barbie’, practically sparkling with cheery glamour even while suddenly plagued by thoughts of death and the reality of existing as a woman. And Ryan Gosling is possibly even better as the Kenniest Ken to Ever Ken, just radiating vacant himbo energy in every scene. It’s maybe not the best movie of 2023, but it’s the movie you’ll most associate with the year – and we don’t mind it one bit.         

25.  Women Talking

While not exactly an escapist night at the pictures, Sarah Polley’s tough, talky, ‘The Crucible’-esque feminist allegory all but dares you to reach for your popcorn. Sit up and pay attention, it demands – and anyone prepared to lean into its dialectics is rewarded with an elite group of actors (Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand and Ben Whishaw) debate a still-scarily-resonant case of sexual abuse in a religious commune. Faith, female rage and the meaning of forgiveness have been rarely chewed over with quite this simmering power.

26.  Passages

Characters don’t have to be likeable or good to be great.  Love is Strange  director Ira Sachs gets it, delivering a so bad he’s grand antagonist for the ages in self-centred Tomas. Portrayed by mercurially intriguing German actor Franz Rogow ​sk i ( Great Freedom ), he’s a Paris-based filmmaker and hot mess who’ll crack it at an actor for not walking down the stairs artfully enough. Thinking nothing of taking a lover –  Blue is the Warmest Colour  star Adèle Exarchopoulos – while leaving hubby at home (Ben W h ishaw), he ping-pongs between them, causing maximum damage to all three. But you can still see why they would. Beautifully written, framed and performed, it’s a thoroughly French, knotty affair.   

27.  Saltburn

28.  The Royal Hotel

‘It’s a mining area so you’ll have to be okay with a little male attention.’ As understatements go, the parting words of the recruiter who sets up American backpackers Hanna ( Ozark ’s Julia Garner) and Liv ( Glass Onion’ s Jessica Henwick) with a job pulling pints in a remote Aussie pub is a doozy. Director Kitty Green made the excellent post-Weinstein thriller The Assistant , also with Garner facing down some despicable bastards, and here she puts a feminist lens on a beery, blue-collar kind of male toxicity. Like the Outback tinnie-sploitation classic Wake in Fright , The Royal Hotel is a brilliantly nightmarish night at the boozer.

29.  Enys Men

There’s something haunting and ancient in the soil of Britain and it’s captured mesmerically in a trippy tale of isolation and disturbing plant life that plays like a druid’s cheese dream. It could only be the work of Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, whose debut drama, Bait , was a handmade treasure back in 2019. Here, he uses the same vintage aesthetic and 16mm cameras to craft a worthy companion piece to any of the great ’70s folk horrors, as Mary Woodvine’s botanist goes full The Lighthouse on a remote island. 

30.  Subject

This gripping, intelligent doc interviews the subjects of some of the most famous docs of recent years about their lives through a lens. The stars of The Staircase , Hoop Dreams and Capturing the Friedmans reveal what it’s like to be at the eye of a non-fiction narrative story, testimonies that are delivered with compassion and insight. Equally interesting on the issues of telling someone else’s story (duty of care, whether participants should be paid),  Subject captures the documentary form at a crossroads, hopefully finding its way to a more caring, culturally sensitive future. Filmmakers could do a lot worse than watch Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera’s engrossing film as a cautionary tale.

31.  War Pony

This social drama set on the Native American reservations of South Dakota reflects the outside status of America’s indigenous people in stark, emotionally searing terms. It follows two mostly-unconnected Lakota boys – 12-year-old Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) – as they eek out a life for themselves, living hand-to-mouth in grinding poverty but boyishly hustling like the heroes of an old Italian neorealist masterpiece. Co-directors Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, and their Native American screenwriters Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, sweeten the tough stuff with hope and cautious optimism. Blunt yet lyrical, it’s a deeply rewarding watch.

32.  Alcarràs

A juicy organic tomato of a movie that deservedly won Berlin’s Golden Bear, Carla Simón’s channels the Spanish filmmaker’s own experiences growing up on a Catalan farm to give life to one hard-working farming family. A new landowner's attempt to install solar panels threatens the farmers' livelihood in a movie that succeeds as a family drama and a deconstruction of capitalism. With incredible performances from the non-professional actors playing stressed-out peach farmers, Simon crafts a worthy follow-up to her sparkling childhood memoir Summer 1993 . 

33.  Queendom

Agniia Galdanova’s gorgeously shot documentary captures both the desolation of Russia’s tundras and the bravery of Gena Marvin, a drag artist who’s as colourful as her hometown is grey. As Putin stirs up anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, she turns up to a paratroopers rally dressed only in duct tape the colours of the Russian flag. But behind her swagger there’s a softness, and Queendom captures so many quiet moments of faltering connection with her bewildered, smalltown family too. It’s painful and beautiful all at once.

34.  Joyland

It’s complicated enough when stay-at-home dad Haider (Ali Junejo) finds fulfilment as a backing dancer to trans performer Bibi (trans actress Alina Khan) in Lahore. When he also finds love with her, the fabric of his life – and his family’s – begins to unravel. Faced with Pakistan’s draconian censorship laws, Joyland had to struggle to the screen, but you’d never know it from its effortless humour, compassion and craft. A bold snapshot of Pakistani society, masculinity and gender in flux, it would feel progressive if it’d been set in Paris or Palm Springs. 

35.  The Eight Mountains

36.  Air

Does it sound like an unquestioning hymn to capitalism? Yep. Does it get close to deifying Michael Jordan? That too. But there’s something in Ben Affleck’s pacy, loose-limbed retelling of Nike’s efforts to sign a young Jordan from under the noses of more powerful rivals Adidas and Converse that blasts past any reservations. That secret sauce is a simple but infectious joy in sharp dialogue and characterisation that feels like a throwback to Hollywood’s ’70s golden age. It doesn’t hurt to have Matt Damon schlebbing-up winningly as Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike NBA savant willing to risk everything for Jordan’s signature, and Affleck himself in as a wonderfully droopy version of Nike founder Phil Knight. Championship rings for all involved.

37.  Scrapper

Not so much ‘magical realism’ as magical and realistic, Charlotte Regan’s debut paints in much brightest colours than you’d perhaps expect from a film about a young girl swerving social services in an east London estate. Full of big laughs, it’s a loose-limbed depiction of that girl, 12-year-old Georgie (the brilliant Lola Campbell), as she reluctantly reconnects with the dad she’s never met ( Triangle of Sadness ’s Harris Dickinson). The offbeat bond that develops between them is a reminder of Taika Waititi’s Boy , with Regan’s affection for her characters making for a movie with a generous heart and an irrepressible spirit.

38.  The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan

The best Alexandre Dumas adaptations in decades – sorry, Dogtanian and Paul WS Anderson fans – this swaggering French adventure flick has everything you could want from a swashbuckling caper. The improbably sexy cast has Eva Green as the pipe-puffing Milady, executing Cardinal Richelieu’s devilish scheme against a gauche monarch, the English, the Protestants and our heroes themselves, the Musketeers – here featuring a moody Vincent Cassel and a flamboyant Romain Duris. We came for the all-star line-up and stayed for the blur of sword fights, horse chases and smart storytelling choices. Roll on part deux later this year.

39.  The Beasts

A nerve-shredding modern Spanish parable that offers a gradually suffocating fog of xenophobia, resentment and envy, this year’s Goya Award winner is set among scrubby, hardscrabble farmsteads of Galicia. Inglourious Basterds ’ Denis Ménochet essays a brooding kind of restraint as teacher-turned-farmer Antoine in the face of increasing intimidation. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s carefully constructed slowburn thriller is full of great performances, too, especially from Marina Foïs as Antoine’s dogged wife and Luis Zahera as the sinewy, menacing neighbour who hates everything the couple stand for. 

40.  Evil Dead Rise

41.  Revoir Paris

Fresh from Paul Verhoeven’s sexy nun psychodrama Benedetta , Virginie Efira takes things down a notch or two as the survivor of a Bataclan-style massacre at a Parisian bistro. Full of sensitivity in its depiction of the lonely path walked by a PTSD sufferer, French director Alice Winocour’s enthralling drama is alive with empathy. And it’s the Caesar-winning Efira who centres it all as a woman emotionally imprisoned by her trauma, with Benoît Magimel providing soulful support as a fellow survivor who helps her through. 

42.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Inspired by Swedish author Andreas Malm’s eco-manifesto, which suggested that non-violent protest was doomed to fall short in the face of the climate change catastrophe, co-writer/director Daniel Goldhaber and his diverse young cast ( American Honey star Sasha Lane is a standout) craft an urgent thriller exploring the personal toll of committing to an existential cause. The source text was dynamite, while this is more of a slow burn. But when it catches fire, it’s both a compelling thriller and a clarion call to action. 

43.  The Mission

‘There’s a fine line between faith and madness.’ That line in this enthralling doc is physical as well as metaphorical, and it’s crossed by zealous 26-year-old American missionary John Chau when he set foot on the Indian Ocean’s remote North Sentinel Island clutching a Bible in 2018. As Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the co-directors of 2020’s equally thoughtful doc Boys State , chart, the evangelical urge to spread the Christian gospel resulted in Chau’s death at the hands of indigenous islanders who saw his very presence as an existential threat. And, as The Mission suggests, wasn’t it? As an elegy for a young man full of promise and a critique of the religious groups that sent him into danger, it’s powerful stuff.

44.  The Creator

• Science fiction

One of the low-key delights of the year has Gareth Edwards rediscovering his early promise after the bruising experience of Rogue One and the murky misfire that was 2014’s ​​ Godzilla . Sure, it adds a few noughts to the budget, but The Creator is more of a part with his excellent guerilla-style debut Monsters , combining clever visual effects with glorious real-world locations to build a believably dystopian futurescape and then embroider it with an intimate story of grief, surrogate parenthood and timely questions of identity. The plot, in which John David Washington’s broken-down ex-soldier bonds with an all-too-human superpowered A.I. (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), is Philip K Dick-meets-Apocalypse Now, with eye-popping Asian locations that make it a killer travelogue as well as a satisfying cerebral action-sci-fi.

45.  The Whale

It would have been so easy for Darren Aronofsky’s adapted-from-the-stage chamber piece to get swamped by its prosthetic, fat-suited artifice and one-location staginess. That it doesn’t is down to a career-best performance from international treasure Brendan Fraser. He makes you take grieving, apartment-bound college tutor Charlie, a man facing up to his own mortality, to your heart in just a few scenes, supercharging this fable of human frailty and reconciliation with endless empathy and emotion. We’re not crying, you’re crying. 

46.  M3GAN

A toy inventor ( Get Out’ s Allison Williams) creates a sentient A.I. doll with creepy eyes and the grip of an industrial vice as a companion for her bereaved niece. What could go wrong? J ust about everything, as this giddily mean-spirited Blumhouse horror charts. Despite having Saw ’s James Wan’s boody fingerprints all over it as co-creator, it reins in the nastiness in favour of big laughs, including some instantly meme-worthy doll dances. Roll on M4GAN. 

47.  Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Cinematically, the fantasy genre has tended take itself very seriously, but   Dungeons & Dragons   comes at its swords and sorcery with a refreshing and exuberant irreverence. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein respect their role-playing tabletop game source material, but also mirror the sense of levity and improvised invention you get while playing it. With the help of an amiable ensemble, the jokes come as thick and fast as the FX-driven action. Game for a laugh, indeed.

48.  Broker

Hirokazu Kore-eda has a knack for taking gritty slices of social realism and sprinkling them with a kind of escapist stardust. Who else could turn the story of actual baby traffickers into a bubbly feel-nice yarn in much the same way Shoplifters parlayed hard-scrabble lives into a quiet heartwarmer full of wit and heart? Here he heads to Busan, South Korea, and borrows Bong Joon-ho’s old mucker Song Kang-ho to headline another touching, wryly funny tale of surrogate families. Charles Dickens would be proud to have written a character like Song’s larger-than-life adoption broker Sang-hyun.

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Hollywood reporter critics pick the 10 best films of 2023 so far.

THR’s reviewers choose faves from the first half of the year, including a Michelle Williams-Kelly Reichardt collab, Miles Morales’ latest adventure and an aching love-triangle drama.

By David Rooney , Sheri Linden , Lovia Gyarkye , Jon Frosch , Leslie Felperin , Jordan Mintzer June 26, 2023 6:45am

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A transcendent chamber piece, Aleem Khan’s feature-length directorial debut is graced with an exceptional lead performance from Joanna Scanlan as an English woman who converted to Islam for marriage years ago — only to discover, when her husband dies, that he was living a shocking double life. It’s a miraculous study of grief, jealousy and ultimately compassion, all executed with very little dialogue.­­ — LESLIE FELPERIN

ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET

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Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor take us not only deep inside the world of invasive medical procedures in several Parisian hospitals, but as far inside the human body as a feature-length documentary has ever gone. For those who can stomach it, this fascinating look at modern surgery is a memorable experience, making us ponder our own humanity as we watch people reduced to pure flesh and blood. — JORDAN MINTZER

In the late 19th century, a young priest travels from Denmark to Iceland, where his mission is mocked by nature and the corruptibility of his faith in Hlynur Pálmason’s mesmerizing elemental epic. That description suggests brooding portentousness, but there’s a marvelously odd vein of sneaky humor running through the film, along with an unpredictability that keeps you glued. It’s a work of grim majesty that exerts a powerful hold. — DAVID ROONEY

OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

Anchored by a superb Virginie Efira as a 40-ish teacher whose bond with her boyfriend’s young daughter awakens unexpected maternal yearnings, Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film confirms her gift for injecting formulas with freshness and charm, smarts and sexiness. It has all the contours of conventional Parisian dramedy, but gradually deepens into something much tougher and wiser. — JON FROSCH

PALM TREES AND POWER LINES

It’s difficult to convey the multilayered beauty of playwright Celine Song’s exquisite debut feature, beyond urging people to see it for themselves and experience its transfixing spell. The melancholy romantic drama features Greta Lee as a woman observed at three points in time, with Teo Yoo and John Magaro as the men whose fates are tethered to hers across two continents. It’s a film that prompts you to reach back into your own life, to ponder forks in the road and consider how a different course might have altered your identity. — D.R.

Leading a cast of mostly nonprofessionals with take-no-prisoners intensity, Julie Ledru plays a motorbike rider who claims her place in the brotherhood of outlawed dirt bike “rodeos.” The strife and hustle of Paris’ suburbs have been portrayed before, but never through the eyes of such an uncategorizable protagonist. Lola Quivoron’s exhilarating genre mashup is a crime story, a character study and an existential mystery, a celebration and a lament both gritty and transcendent.­­ — SHERI LINDEN

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Even when it feels leaden with backstory, this thrilling second chapter of the Spider-Verse series, in which Miles faces challenges across the multiverse, vibrates with the same freewheeling energy as its predecessor. The result is a visual feast, with an impressive layering of styles and a hero at its center who remains very much worth rooting for. — L.G.

This story first appeared in the June 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe .

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The 50 Best Movies of 2023, According to 158 Critics from Around the World

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2023 was a tumultuous year for the film industry, with lengthy writers and actors strikes bringing Hollywood productions to a grinding halt and forcing fall festivals to proceed without their typical red carpet star power. But amid all the chaos, it slowly emerged as one of the best years for cinema in recent memory. Just take a look at the 50 best movies of 2023, as determined by IndieWire’s annual critics survey .

158 critics voted in our end-of-year poll, and the resulting top 50 films of the year are the closest you’ll find to a truly global critical consensus about the year’s best films.  

The concept of Barbenheimer — that “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” would release on the same day, July 21 — grew in the minds of cinephiles in the months leading up to both films actually unspooling on screens. How extraordinary is it that these films actually lived up to the hype? They are well represented on our Top 50 list below, with “Oppenheimer” at number two and “Barbie” at number eight respectively.  

Christopher Nolan’s film went on to receive 13 Academy Awards nominations , while “Barbie” scored eight. For those upset at Greta Gerwig not receiving a Best Director nomination, our 2023 Critics Survey may not offer much consolation: Yes, Gerwig appears at number six on our Best Directors list there … but that is outside the Top 5 cutoff for the Academy Awards (where Justine Triet appeared at the Oscars, instead of Todd Haynes as on IndieWire’s list).  

It’s also extraordinary that, for so many, “Killers of the Flower Moon” met expectations as well, after years of anticipation that included a wholesale rethinking of the script and story focus. It topped our Top 50 list as the best film of 2023, as well as the Best Director list for Martin Scorsese. It notched entries on the Best Cinematography and Best Screenplay lists, too, but of particular note is Lily Gladstone, who came in at number two on the Best Performance list, just behind Emma Stone for “Poor Things.” It’s been a race between the two of them for the Best Actress Oscar , with both winning Best Actress in a Drama and Best Actress in a Comedy, respectively, at the Golden Globes, and Stone winning the Critics Choice Award and the BAFTA for Best Actress (where Gladstone wasn’t nominated). Gladstone has picked up momentum near the end of the season with her Best Actress win at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, however.  

So, in many ways, IndieWire’s 2023 Critics Survey set the stage for much of the Oscar race to come. Where it’s most exciting, especially in this Top 50 list below, is how it goes beyond Oscar contenders to suggest films that aren’t a part of that race, but are every bit as fulfilling to cinephiles and maybe more so. Take “Pacifiction,” which appeared as the best film of the year on the ballots of five of the critics who voted, as well as in lower positions on many other ballots, and notched a spot at number 18 accordingly. Or “The Settlers,” which was Chile’s submission for Best International Feature, yes, but failed to get a nomination — yet is as engaging and eye-popping as any action film made in Hollywood last year, and with deeper ideas. Or “Eileen,” a particular IndieWire fave that was also overlooked by the Oscars, but gave us the year of Anne Hathaway’s primal scream.  

Keep reading for the 50 films that critics selected as the best of 2023, ranked in ascending order. Each voter had to fill out a ranked top 10 list, where 10 points were assigned for a first-place choice, nine points for a second-place choice, and so on to generate a numeric score for each film that determined the order of the Top 50. Use the resulting list below to catch up on the best in cinema from 2023, and read more about what placed in other categories such as Best Director, Pest Performance, and Best Cinematography here .

This list features editorial contributions from Wilson Chapman, Alison Foreman, and Samantha Bergeson.  

50. “Eileen”

Director: William Oldroyd

Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham

Read IndieWire’s Review : Director Oldroyd has toned down the deliberate repulsiveness of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” author Otessa Moshfegh’s second novel, but you still get the sense here of a young woman fascinated by the disgustingness of life and as a means of expiation for underachieving — and for staving off boredom. But she also gets off on degrading herself, which is part of the film’s sick pleasure. Enter Rebecca Saint John (Hathaway), the new psychologist at the prison, who has an almost Jackie Kennedy-esque aura about her, a platinum-blonde flipped bob, and cigarette-wielding charisma that just oozes out of her. Eileen (McKenzie) is almost immediately intoxicated, and the feeling is mutual, because Rebecca, unlike her father, doesn’t flinch at Eileen’s depraved underside. When she catches Eileen poring over bloody crime scene photos in the prison’s archives, Rebecca entreats Eileen for an invitation to drinks. Eileen and Rebecca have a heady, woozy chemistry reminiscent of Todd Haynes’ lesbian romance “Carol,” and yes, those comparisons are going to stick because, like Rooney Mara’s Therese Belivet, Eileen is a young woman pulled out of her self-made shell by an older, more confident one. It’s impossible to talk about the gasp-eliciting twist “Eileen” takes — when Rebecca invites Eileen over to her house for Christmas — without spoiling the whole thing. But let’s just say that a criminal subplot is introduced, and it brings Eileen and Rebecca more intimately together, turning “Eileen” into a kind of cracked queer Christmas noir. 

49. “Close Your Eyes”

Director: Victor Erice

Cast: José Coronado, Manolo Solo

Read IndieWire’s Review: “Close Your Eyes” is neither an autobiographical cine-memoir à la “The Fabelmans” nor a teary-eyed tribute to the magic of the movies in the vein of “Cinema Paradiso.” Yet, as if by accident and divine purpose all at once, it also becomes both of those things by the end. Set at the dawn of the streaming age and shot with the funereal sterility that came with it, “Close Your Eyes” openly laments the loss of a more tactile film experience (the kind that included actual film), but only so that it can honor the way certain images take root inside us when seen under the right circumstances, as inextricable from our being as a soul from its body.

48. “The Settlers”

Director: Felipe Galvez

Cast: Mark Stanley, Alfredo Castro, Camilo Arancibia, Benjamin Westfall

Read IndieWire’s Review : Felipe Galvez’s Chilean Western “The Settlers” may remind some viewers of a Boetticher film when they’re watching it: following three men on horseback on a cross-country journey, it dramatizes questions of identity and belonging, and how these things can be written in violence. Most Boetticher-like, in a tight 98 minutes “The Settlers” says more than a lot of films double its length. It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time, as provocative for its ideas, dialogue, and characterizations, as for the beauty of its empty landscapes. “The Settlers,” for all its artistry, is also a deeply felt work of activism with a message that needs to be heard in Chile. – Christian Blauvelt

47. “La Chimera”

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

Cast: Josh O’Connor

Read IndieWire’s Review : It begins with a man played by Josh O’Connor — famously not Italian — dreaming of the woman he loved and lost. His name is Arthur, her name was Beniamina, and this idyllic vision of their reunion is rudely interrupted by a ticket-taker aboard a gorgeous country train as it rumbles across the Florentine countryside during the mid 1980s. Legend tells of a buried door that connects this world to the next, and this surly archaeologist is so hellbent on finding it that he’s become the leader of a ragtag gang of tombarolis — lovable grave-robbers, essentially — in the small village where his Beniamina once lived. He offers the group his sorcerer-like ability to dowse the location of ancient treasures, and in return they do the digging for him. Stealing 2,000-year-old pots and statues out of the earth isn’t exactly legal work (Arthur is returning from the latest of his many stints in jail when the film begins), but the group makes a decent profit by selling whatever they find to a mysterious local fence named Spartaco, who operates like a Bond villain from their secret lair atop the local animal hospital. 

46. “The Eternal Memory”

Director: Maite Alberdi 

Cast: Paulina Urrutia, Augusto Góngora

<a href=”https://www.indiewire.com/video/the-eternal-memory-paulina-urrutia-forgot-filming-doc-1234927706/” target=”_blank”>Watch IndieWire Art of the Doc&rsquo;s Interview with Subject Paulina Urrutia</a>: The film centers on a Chilean couple, Augusto G&oacute;ngora and Urrutia, who grapple with G&oacute;ngora&rsquo;s Alzheimer&rsquo;s diagnosis. The duo have been together for 25 years, but Urrutia, an actress-turned-Minister of Culture and the Arts in Chile, is awaiting the day her love does not recognize her anymore.

45. “Saltburn”

Director: Emerald Fennell

Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Carey Mulligan, Alison Oliver

Read IndieWire’s Review : Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” is a movie sustained by the friction between identity and reinvention, and therefore a fitting second feature by a filmmaker whose Oscar-winning debut made it hard to tell if she was an underachieving dramatist or an overachieving provocateur. Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” is a movie sustained by the friction between identity and reinvention, and therefore a fitting second feature by a filmmaker whose Oscar-winning debut made it hard to tell if she was an underachieving dramatist or an overachieving provocateur.

44. “The Eight Mountains”

Director: Felix Van Groeningen

Cast: Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi

Read IndieWire’s Review : “The Eight Mountains” lovingly adapts Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, a valentine to brotherhood and a shape-shifting tale of self-discovery, resilience, nature and love — platonic but more steely than any rock you could climb – that somehow rarely feels like it treads a single step of the endless stream of movies and literature capturing the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of all of those just mentioned things since time immemorial.

43. “Beau Is Afraid”

Director: Ari Aster

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan

Read IndieWire’s Review : “Beau Is Afraid” is quick to reveal itself as a fundamentally different beast than “Hereditary” and/or “Midsommar” (and not just because the movie is so unrepentantly Jewish that every one of its cuts feels like it was performed by a mohel). That change of pace starts with Aster’s decision to forego a straightforward genre narrative in favor of an unclassifiable Odyssean mindfuck. While the film’s plot couldn’t be simpler — a 49-year-old virgin named Beau Wassermann (Phoenix) journeys to his mother’s house across a country gone mad — its frazzled and strictly episodic telling owes more to Charlie Kaufman and Albert Brooks than it does to any of the ancient Greeks. 

42. “Four Daughters”

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Read IndieWire’s Review : “Four Daughters” orbits the trauma of a Tunisian woman named Olfa and her youngest daughters, Tayssir and Eya. Some years ago Olfa’s two eldest daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, left to join ISIS — or, as this documentary posits, were “devoured by the wolf.” Filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, never seen but often heard from her safe space behind the camera, decides to re-tell the story of how this came to be.

41. “A Still Small Voice”

Director: Luke Lorentzen

Cast: Margaret “Mati” Engel

Read IndieWire’s Review : “A Still Small Voice” is ultimately such a life-affirming film can only be explained by the climactic scene in which it finds its title. It’s a moment of profound acceptance that follows what might seem to be a moment of unsalvageable rejection; a moment delivered in a trembling whisper, meek in its way but still loud enough for us to hear its message that failures aren’t necessarily endings, and endings aren’t necessarily failures. 

40. “Ferrari”

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Patrick Dempsey

Read IndieWire’s Review : Ultimately, while “Ferrari” indeed centers on the man of its title, that title also extends to the same-named dynasty that made Enzo’s empire possible, the people he touched, the women left strewn by his death drive. Driver’s performance is a fine one, flanked ever by emotional guardrails even in stressed-out moments like when Enzo eyes his stopwatch for his racing Ferraris’ latest speed times. But Cruz hijacks the wheel from her co-star in a grief-dazed but always alert and forceful turn, her face a stony wall that tells of great pain. (A wonderful closeup of her staring at Dino’s mausoleum brings on a wave of conflicting emotions that tell her whole story.) The cast benefits greatly from Mann’s bottlenecking approach to one slice of Enzo’s life, as domestic and professional stresses merge in what was eventually a triumph for his company, putting Ferrari back at the front of the auto arms race against the likes of Maserati, but a tragedy for his restless, never-satisfied being. 

39. “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros”

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Read IndieWire’s Review : Billed as a “farm-to-table” documentary on account of its loose, semi-linear trajectory from the markets and vineyards of Roanne to the restaurant dining room in which they’re ultimately transformed into something much greater than the sum of their parts, Wiseman’s slow-cooked but satisfying “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros” occupies a generous space between his sober portraits of American institutions (e.g. “At Berkeley,” “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library”) and his more epicurean films about the French arts (e.g. “Crazy Horse,” “Ballet,” “La Comédie-Française ou l’Amour joué”). Its characteristic focus on the tension between tactile labor and abstract crises — between day-to-day upkeep and spiritual survival — is present from the opening moments, but so is its characteristic refusal to artificially define the contours of that tension. 

38. “20 Days in Mariupol”

Director: Mystylav Chernov

Cast: Mystyav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, and Vasilisa Stepaneko

Read IndieWire’s Review : Chernov frequently blurs the most severe injuries, but it’s the puddles of blood, dead animals and lifeless limbs half-buried by rubble that indicate the sheer scale of suffering in Mariupol. His jarringly stoic narration and haunting original music by Jordan Dykstra add to the sense that, in Mariupol, nothing is left. This is not a film about President Zelensky’s Churchillian leadership or the heroism of first responders (though if you look, there is some of that).

37. “About Dry Grasses”

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Cast: Deniz Celiloğlu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici, and Ece Bağcı

Read IndieWire’s Review:  At nearly 200 minutes in length, “About Dry Grasses” (or “Kuru Otlar Üstüne”) is par for the course for Turkish virtuoso Nuri Bilge Ceylan. He returns, once again, to the icy frost of his Anatolia-set Palme d’Or winner “Winter Sleep,” for a story that beats with similar frustrations towards power in the grand social scheme. However, he weaves this theme into his background tapestry, favoring instead a talkative and often discomforting tale of a small-town art teacher, his 12-year-old female student, and an accusation of impropriety that might be false on its surface, but is rooted in truths the camera sees. 

36. “Bottoms”

Director: Emma Seligman

Cast: Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Nicholas Galitzine, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Jordan Gerber, and more

Read IndieWire’s Review: At the bottom of the film’s knotted plot and raunchy jokes, however, lies a rather poignant story about female friendship and empowerment. Though it starts as a genuine desire to protect themselves from a rival school that is literally kidnapping and beating up students (free of consequence, one might add), the girls get more out of the club than just good fighting skills.

Though the focus is always on PJ and Josie — Sennott and Edebiri are phenomenal, with the film serving as an “Ayo and Rachel Are Single” reunion — the supporting cast really makes the movie shine. From the rest of the fight club members, each one with their own unique personality that manages to become more than archetypes even when they don’t have that much screentime, to the football players baffled and enraged by the girl’s fight club taking attention away from their games, “Bottoms” has a terrific ensemble.

35. “A Thousand and One”

Director: A. V. Rockwell 

Cast: Teyana Taylor, Will Catlett, Josiah Cross, Aven Courtney, and Aaron Kingsley Adetola

Read IndieWire’s Review: Terry and Inez’s story is only one of many, but it serves as a microcosm for the specific economic struggles of any Black lower-middle-class Americans trying to keep up with gentrification’s engine and NYPD indifference to Black people. “A Thousand and One” culminates in a gutting conclusion that turns the entire movie on its head — it’s one best left entirely unspoiled — and serves as a sobering reminder of how fucked-up beginnings can hopefully bring about better endings. Cross is effective in a key scene surrounding this revelation, but it’s Taylor who anchors Rockwell’s direction and screenplay with her powerhouse performance. Taylor has worked with the likes of Tyler Perry in comedies, but it’s her seeming kinship with Rockwell (and Taylor’s own story as a New Yorker) and a performance as fiercely committed to the project as Inez is to Terry that signal a major acting talent.

34. “Trenque Lauquen”

Director: Laura Citarella

Cast: Laura Paredes 

Read Cahiers du Cinema’s Best Films of 2023: “Trenque Lauquen,” Citarella’s four-hour mystery about the search for a missing botanist in Argentina, landed in the top spot after premiering at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. 

33. “De Humani Corporis Fabrica”

Director: Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Read IndieWire’s Review: Perhaps the most striking footage of all parallels one of the most famous moments in art cinema — in Salvador Dali’s 1929 “Un Chien Andalou,” where a woman’s eye is sliced open in a dreamlike sequence. But in “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” the moment isn’t fleeting or simulated. The eye is taped wide open with wide dilated pupils, the lens slowly cut open and painstakingly repaired. Where Dali’s slice was a momentary flinch, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s scene is a hypnotic experience, and watching the images is more intense than grotesque. But even with the technological marvels and precise surgical skill, there is still a sense of meat being butchered. The camera doesn’t flinch at gelatinous substances tethered to flesh, which slowly decays around it, all tentatively kept alive by little vessels pumped by a muscular mass that could stop at any moment. The film’s existential fascination with anatomy has classic roots. Leonardo Da Vinci to Michaelangelo employed grave robbers so they could similarly cut open the human body and discover its secrets.

32. “Priscilla”

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, and Dagmara Domińczyk

Read IndieWire’s Review: Comparisons to the more opulent and electrifying “Marie Antoinette” are inevitable, as both movies are about teenage girls who are trying to appease their kings, and both movies look at their hermetically sealed historical figures through a (somewhat) modern lens that sees through decades or centuries of mythmaking in order to render the emotional reality of their respective situations. But from a certain perspective, “Priscilla” is also the polar opposite of Coppola’s 2006 masterpiece. While Marie Antoinette was forced to Versailles against her will, Priscilla Presley’s ultimate dream was — like many girls her age in 1963 — to live in Graceland as Elvis’ wife. And while Marie Antoinette spent the brunt of her short life struggling to reconcile a sense of personal identity with the one conferred upon her by the royal palace, Priscilla Presley, who’s still alive today (and an executive producer on this film), spent the brunt of her short marriage realizing that she didn’t have to. 

“Priscilla” may not be one of the better movies that Coppola has ever made — it’s vague where her previous coming-of-age stories have been knowingly precise, scattered where its predecessors revealed new insight with each scene, and gloomy where those other films were galvanized with pockets of light — but it stands apart from the rest of her work as the uniquely sensitive and self-honest portrait of a girl who starts to realize that she may have outgrown her greatest fantasy. 

31. “Kokomo City”

Director: D. Smith 

Read IndieWire’s Review: D. Smith knows how to make a person stand up and pay attention. From the rollicking opening scene of “Kokomo City” — her luminous documentary portrait of four Black trans sex workers which she shot, edited, and directed — it’s clear the terms are being set by a visionary artist who just happened to funnel her interdisciplinary talents into filmmaking for this particular project. How lucky we are that she found this medium.

“Kokomo City” may be her filmmaking debut, but this songwriter innately understands the rhythms and beats that make compelling cinematic storytelling. You can see it in the staccato contrast of light and dark in her elegant black-and-white photography. You can hear it in the unexpected needle drops and deep-cut tracks, and you can feel it in her lyrical cuts that find small moments of beauty in everyday compositions. Make no mistake, Smith announces wordlessly from behind the camera: I have arrived to change the game.

30. “Godzilla Minus One”

Director: Takashi Yamazaki

Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sasaki, and more

Read IndieWire’s Review: Every entry in the sprawling, oft-rebooted franchise has wrestled with the question of scale as it finds its place on a spectrum between “human story plagued by giant lizard” or “giant lizard story nagged by humans,” a balance easily miscalculated. The twenty-story-tall poster boy’s recent exploits in Hollywood have managed to have it neither way instead of both, overdosing on lore while dawdling with characters who cannot hope to be as interesting as their reptilian upstager… 

Of course the big guy’s home studio of Toho understands this better than anybody, as evident in 2016’s reinvigorating “Shin Godzilla,” in which bureaucratic red tape held up the defensive countermeasures as a comment on the mismanaged Fukushima meltdown of 2011. With estimable brawn and brain, its follow-up “Godzilla Minus One” returns to the primal scene of nuclear devastation to ponder the value of an individual life in the face of mass death, and finds a handful worth fighting for. 

In judging the nobility of self-sacrifice against the ambiguous morality of kamikaze warfare — posed as an injustice not to its targets, but rather to the Japanese soldiers spent like bullet casings by an indifferent state — writer/director Takashi Yamazaki does more than find a renewed purpose for an IP asset impervious to irrelevance. He’s reconciled the series’ pop thrills with the heaviness of its political subtext more skillfully than anyone since the rubber-suit days by melding the two into an ideological spectacle to rival Sergei Eisenstein’s, both in its foregrounded populist leanings as well its rousing, cathartic montage in action.

29. “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”

Director: Radu Jude

Cast: Ilinca Manolache, Nina Hoss, and Uwe Boll

Read IndieWire’s Review: It takes flair to concoct visual-gag-after-visual-gag within episodic riffs on the raw deals suffered by the gig-economy-classes in modern day Bucharest. Radu Jude blends absurdist humor with keen social integrity, like a sharper Romanian riposte to Ruben Östlund, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange (Ilinca Manolache, sensational) builds to a 40-minute final shot in which tragicomedy is heaped upon tragicomedy to unbearably brilliant effect.

Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope.

28. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”

Director: Raven Jackson)

Cast: Charleen McClure, Moses Ingram, Reginald Helms Jr., Zainab Jah, Sheila Atim, and Chris Chalk

Read IndieWire’s Review: A whispered symphony of sense memories that cycles through the decades like rain water — heavy with images and ambient sounds that trickle down from the generations above before they’re absorbed into the earth and suffused back into the air — the vague but vividly rendered “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” runs a little drier every time writer-director Raven Jackson loops back to squeeze another drop of meaning from the textures and traditions that connect a Black Mississippi woman to the place where she was born (and vice-versa).

Her name is Mackenzie, she’s played by a small troupe of different actresses over the course of Jackson’s freeform debut, and the body they share between them serves as a kind of living conduit between then, now, and whatever comes next. Her story is filtered through a too-studied slipstream of a movie that makes its vignettes feel as neatly arranged as the verses of a poem, its scenes spanning from the ’60s to the ’80s but all located in an eternal now that quickly does away with the linearity of flashbacks or forwards.

27. “You Hurt My Feelings”

Director: Nicole Holofcener

Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Owen Teague, and Jeannie Berlin

Read IndieWire’s Review: Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has long been one of our foremost chroniclers of the minutiae of everyday life, someone uniquely equipped to marry the very funny with the very honest, the sort of creator who makes things that hurt, in both good and bad ways. For her first original feature in a decade — she’s been making plenty of TV in recent years, and in 2018, directed and scripted the Ted Thompson adaptation “The Land of Steady Habits” — Holofcener returns to classic territory: a New York City story about neuroses and good intentions and the slights that keep us at night. It’s, of course, about love.

And while “You Hurt My Feelings” is not without all the things Holofencer does so very well — all that honesty, all that understanding of the texture of everyday life, plus Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the spotlight, where she belongs — it also feels decidedly low-key for such a insightful filmmaker. The shagginess of it, the missteps, the rambling bits are pleasurable enough, and there are plenty of laughs and insights here, but there’s also nothing new. If you like Nicole Holofcener films, you will like this one, and there’s comfort in that, if not an edge of disappointment, too.

26. “John Wick: Chapter 4”

Director: Chad Stahelski

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, and more

Read IndieWire’s Review: The “John Wick” franchise has evolved from a small-scale tale of revenge for the death of a wife and the killing of a do  to a globe-trotting epic that spans continents, dozens of characters, and an intricate mythology. In its fourth chapter, director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves bring this franchise back to its roots while expanding the world and the story to bigger and bolder places. The result is not only the best movie in the franchise, but the best American action blockbuster since George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

After going to war with essentially the entire world, and causing the deaths of hundreds of people, “Chapter 4” finally starts pondering the question of just how far John Wick is willing to go for revenge, how many people close to him he’s willing to endanger, and whether it was all worth it. At this point, this is no longer about the killing of his wife and dog, it’s about burning down a system that always resented Wick for abandoning it.

25. “Godland”

Director: Hlynur Pálmason

Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Vic Carmen Sonne

Read IndieWire’s Review : The life and work of writer-director Hlynur Pálmason seems suspended in a liminal space between his homeland of Iceland and the neighboring Scandinavian nation of Denmark, where he studied filmmaking and has now raised a family. And nowhere is that interstitial status more evidently reflected than in his third and finest feature yet, “Godland,” an arrestingly beautiful and philosophically imposing bilingual historical drama about the arrogance of mankind in the face of nature’s unforgiving prowess, the inherent failures of colonial enterprises, and how these factors configure the cultural identities of individuals.

24. “The Taste of Things”

Director: Tran Anh Hung

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel

Read IndieWire’s Review : There is something to be said for a simple dish made with the best ingredients by a trusted hand. Just as a perfect omelet made by a lover is more satisfying than an eight-hour feast laid on by a Prince, so it follows that a film like “The Pot-au-Feu” works, not in spite of, but because it focuses on executing its basic premise with enrapturing attention to detail. This is a story about love and food, which it presents as the same thing.

23. “Maestro”

Director: Bradley Cooper

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Vincenzo Amato

Read IndieWire’s Review : Bradley Cooper exerts and exhausts his soul to not only direct and co-write “Maestro,” about the great composer and New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, but also to star as the complicated musical legend widely known for writing the score for “West Side Story.” Much ado has already been made about the prosthetic nose the gentile second-time feature filmmaker dons to inhabit the specific skin of the Jewish maestro, who died of a heart attack in 1990 at 72. This feat of sculptural makeup effects by artist Kazu Hiro is an unnecessary distraction that never stops reminding you that the person underneath is actually Bradley Cooper, not Bernstein.

Nose aside, “Maestro” is a technical triumph in terms of checking all the boxes of multihyphenate-ism — Cooper funnels himself into the project at every creative level — but this handsomely made Oscar-tailored package actually belongs to another person entirely, and that would be Carey Mulligan, playing Bernstein’s wife of nearly four decades, Felicia Montealegre.

22. “Perfect Days” (Wim Wenders)

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano

Read IndieWire’s Review : Wim Wenders‘ latest, “Perfect Days” plays like the culmination of filmmaker’s long tryst with Japanese virtuoso Ozu Yasujirō, which includes Wenders’ 1985 Ozu documentary “Tokyo-Ga,” and manifests here as a distinctly Ozu-esque observance of life and rhythm. First commissioned as a short film project celebrating Tokyo’s state-of-the-art public toilets — the great social equalizer — Wenders snatches the concept and doesn’t so much run with it as much as he strolls with it in the park while contemplating dreams, the dignity of labor, and the fleeting joys of waking moments.

21. “The Killer”

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard

Read IndieWire’s Review : Like the “Jeanne Dielman” of assassin movies, “The Killer” centers on how the self-started glitches in one character’s routine cause their carefully ordered world to fall slowly off its axis. David Fincher’s sleek if small genre exercise plants us into the orbital sockets of an unnamed killer-for-hire, played by Michael Fassbender, whose self-deceptions catch up to him amid a contract job gone just about an inch wrong in Paris.

There are few surprises in this straight-line thriller, well-executed within a millimeter of its life as ever by the “Gone Girl” and “Social Network” director. Here, the perfectionist, you-might-say-control-freak director punches up a nimbly sketched screenplay by “Seven” scribe Andrew Kevin Walker that evokes no sympathy for its protagonist, played with Zen-cool by a no-pulse Fassbender.

20. “Afire”

Director: Christian Petzold

Cast: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel

Read IndieWire’s Review : Gently dunking on a writer of near-apocalyptic pomposity over the course of a languid seaside vacation, Petzold’s latest film plays a bit like “Barton Fink” by way of Eric Rohmer, though the slight dramedy never quite equals either of those highs. Still, this smoldering tour through the life of the mind marks an endearing change of pace for the talented filmmaker, who trades the capital-H history of “Phoenix” and romantic fantasy of “Undine” for a more subdued — and sometimes surprisingly funny — character study.

19. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret”

Director: Kelly Fremon Craig

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Abby Ryder Fortson, Kathy Bates, Benny Safdie

Read IndieWire’s Review : Judy Blume never talked down to kids or adults, and such is the spirit that drives Kelly Fremon Craig‘s film adaptation of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” It’s an adaptation that Blume long resisted, at least before “The Edge of Seventeen” filmmaker and her mentor and producer James L. Brooks pitched their idea to her, but Blume’s book translates beautifully to the big screen with same zip, pep, and good humor of Blume’s books.

18. “Pacifiction”

Director: Albert Serra

Cast: Benoît Magimel, Pahoa Mahagafanau, Marc Susini

Read IndieWire’s Review : What do you want when you already have paradise? That question looms over Albert Serra’s singularly mysterious cinematic immersion into Tahiti, “Pacifiction.” The indigenous Polynesians living there would likely argue that this paradise hasn’t been theirs in a long time. Serra, the Catalan filmmaker behind such boundary-pushing works of experiential filmmaking as “Honor of the Knights” and “Story of My Death,” is yet another outsider coming to their shores, but he avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most movies set in some tropical locale. “Pacifiction” is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.

17. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”

Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Oscar Isaac, Issa Rae

Read IndieWire’s Review: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is awash in stories — its first five or so minutes, an ostensible prologue, is a dynamic tragedy in miniature, and that’s just the first five minutes — all built around an idea one of its characters tosses out during a similarly information-packed voiceover: They’re going to “do things differently.” It’s precisely what the film‘s predecessor, the rightly Oscar-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” did four years ago, taking a well-worn concept (a Spider-Man origin story? again?) and turning it into an actual masterpiece built on a wealth of stories, new and old, told with legitimate energy and innovation. And it’s what Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson attempt to replicate in their sequel, an aim that pays off mightily.

16. “American Fiction”

Director: Cord Jefferson

Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, 

Read IndieWire’s Review : In “American Fiction,” the comic and tragic go hand in hand. Each moment is layered with meaning, socially, politically, and emotionally. The film, based on the novel “Erasure” by writer and professor Percival Everett, is part satire, part romantic comedy, all combined with thoughtful family drama. With an all-star cast and talented writer at the helm, “American Fiction” is poised to become an audience favorite.

15. “Passages”

Director: Ira Sachs

Cast: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, Adèle Exarchopoulos

Read IndieWire’s Review : A signature new drama from a director whose best work (“Keep the Lights On,” “Love Is Strange”) is at once both generously tender in its brutality and unsparingly brutal in its tenderness, the raw and resonant “Passages” is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones.

14. “The Boy and the Heron”

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Ko Shibasaki 

Read IndieWire’s Review : It’s true that “How Do You Live?” — which tells an original story that borrows its title from Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel of the same name, and has been inexplicably rechristened “The Boy and the Heron” for its international release at Studio Ghibli’s behest… despite the fact that Yoshino’s book acts as a crucial plot point in a film whose climax hinges upon an obvious stand-in for its writer-director literally asking the audience “How do you live?” — isn’t Miyazaki’s best film. It lacks the full kineticism of “The Castle of Cagliostro,” the fury of “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” the adventure of “Castle in the Sky,” the Totoro of “My Neighbor Totoro,” the effervescence of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” the romance of “Porco Rosso,” the grandeur of “Princess Mononoke,” the beguilement of “Spirited Away,” the floridness of “Howl’s Moving Castle,” the hamminess of “Ponyo,” or the emotional mega-wattage of “The Wind Rises.” 

Crucially, however, “The Boy and the Heron” contains aspects of all of those things (in addition to more overt references to the anime godhead’s previous work). And while this dream-like warble of a swan song may be too pitchy and scattered to hit with the gale-force power that made “The Wind Rises” feel like such a definitive farewell, “The Boy and the Heron” finds Miyazaki so nakedly bidding adieu — to us, and to the crumbling kingdom of dreams and madness that he’ll soon leave behind — that it somehow resolves into an even more fitting goodbye, one graced with the divine awe and heart-stopping wistfulness of watching a true immortal make peace with their own death. 

13. “All of Us Strangers”

Director: Andrew Haigh

Cast: Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott, Carter John Grout

Read IndieWire’s Review: God bless British Andrew Haigh, whose best films — “Weekend,” “45 Years,” and now the quietly shattering “All of Us Strangers” — are the rare work of a modern director who knows how to get out of their own way. Haigh’s simple but penetrating dramas couldn’t be more specific in how they depict the strangeness of intimacy and the intimacy of strangeness, and yet they’re also palpably unfilled in a way, like a half-empty room that someone you were looking for just left. In that light, it should come as little surprise that Haigh is so well-suited to an ineffably personal ghost story about the absences that can shape our entire lives if we let them.

12. “Showing Up”

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Cast: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Andre 3000

Read IndieWire’s Review : “First Cow” may not have been anywhere near as soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film about desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul. Or, a fowl, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up,” a slight knowing smile of a movie starring Michelle Williams as a stressed-out Portland ceramist with a pageboy haircut who reluctantly finds herself nursing an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite career.

11. “Fallen Leaves”

Director: Aki Kaurismäki

Cast: Alma Pöysti, Martti Suosalo, Jussi Vatanen

Read IndieWire’s Review : Indeed, she gets fired from the supermarket for stealing expired food, and he struggles to stay sober long enough to get through an entire shift at the construction site where he works with his friend, Houtari (Kaurismäki veteran Janne Hyytiäinen, wonderful here as a wannabe lothario who possesses a divine confidence in his karaoke skills). But hope, much like “Fallen Leaves” itself, is only ever believed to be lost, and happiness is never far at hand. 

10. “Asteroid City”

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Brian Cranston, Steve Carrell, Margot Robbie

Read IndieWire’s Review: Like any movie by Wes Anderson, “Asteroid City” is the epitome of a Wes Anderson movie. A film about a television program about a play within a play “about infinity and I don’t know what else” (as one character describes it), this delightfully profound desert charmer — by far the director’s best effort since “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and in some respects the most poignant thing he’s ever made — boasts all of his usual hallmarks and then some.

9. “The Holdovers”

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa

Read IndieWire’s Review : Set in the winter of 1970 and shot to look as if it had actually been made back then, Alexander Payne’s nuanced and hyper-literate “The Holdovers” takes great pleasure in defying every impulse of modern cinema from even before the moment it starts (the studio fanfare includes a “throwback” Focus Features logo, which is a cute little in-joke about a company that wasn’t founded until 2002). And yet, it might take even greater pleasure in embracing some of the movies’ most time-honored tropes and traditions. 

Chief among them: The inviolable rule that anything a school teacher “casually” tells their students in the first act of a film must speak to a core idea of the film itself. In that light, be sure to take notes during the opening scene in which Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) quotes Cicero to the “vulgar philistines” in his Ancient Civilization class. “Non nobis solum nati sumus.” “Not for ourselves alone are we born.” No spoilers, but that’s definitely going to be on the final exam of “The Holdovers,” which gradually thaws into a slight but sensitive tale about a trio of lonely souls who teach each other to push through their lives’ most isolating disappointments.

8. “Barbie”

Director: Greta Gerwig 

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell, Kate McKinnon, America Ferrera

Read IndieWire’s Review : Gerwig, as ever, has assembled a stellar supporting cast. All Barbies delight, but the Kens, appropriately enough, launch a real sneak attack, especially Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Michael Cera nearly makes off with the whole thing as the singular sidekick Allan. There’s also a murderer’s row of below-the-line talent: Opuses can and will be written about Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Jacqueline Durran’s costumes. “Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch.

It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic.

7. “Anatomy of a Fall”

Director: Justine Triet 

Cast: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner, Antoine Reinartz

Read IndieWire’s Review : Rounding out her own impressive hat trick, “Toni Erdmann” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller dazzles in a role clearly written with the performer in mind. She plays Sandra, a German-born, France-based bisexual novelist accused of killing her male partner in a way eerily foretold by one of her novels. And if that description calls to mind another icy-blond (in a performance, incidentally, that also shook the Cannes Film Festival, back in 1992), the echo is both wholly intentional and entirely irrelevant. Indeed, “Anatomy of a Fall” is filled with such anti-portents — coincidences or clues, depending who you ask, echoes or empty noise, depending on who’s listening.

6. “The Zone of Interest”

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam

Read IndieWire’s Review : A narrative Holocaust drama that’s defined by its rigorous compartmentalization and steadfast refusal to show any hint of explicit violence, Jonathan Glazer’s profoundly chilling “The Zone of Interest”stands out for how formally the film splits the difference between the two opposite modes of its solemn genre — a genre that may now be impossible to consider without it. No Holocaust movie has ever been more committed to illustrating the banality of evil, and that’s because no Holocaust movie has ever been more hell-bent upon ignoring evil altogether. There is a literal concrete wall that separates Glazer’s characters from the horrors next door, and not once does his camera dare to peek over it for a better look. It doesn’t even express the faintest hint of that desire.

5. “May December”

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, Charles Melton

Read IndieWire’s Review: A heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp that teases real human drama from the stuff of tabloid sensationalism, Todd Haynes’ delicious “May December” continues the director’s tradition of making films that rely upon the self-awareness that seems to elude their characters — especially the ones played by Julianne Moore. 

4. “Past Lives”

Director: Celine Song

Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magro, Moon Seung-ah

Read IndieWire’s Review : Of all the writers retreats in all the summer towns in all of New York, he had to walk into hers. As the sun fades on a perfect Montauk night — setting the stage for a first kiss that, like so many of the most resonant moments in Celine Song’s transcendent “Past Lives,” will ultimately be left to the imagination — Nora (Greta Lee) tells Arthur (John Magaro) about the Korean concept of In-Yun, which suggests that people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before

3. “Poor Things”

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley

Read IndieWire’s Review : “Poor Things” is the best film of Lanthimos’ career and already feels like an instant classic, mordantly funny, whimsical and wacky, unprecious and unpretentious, filled with so much to adore that to try and parse it all here feels like a pitiful response to the film’s ambitions.

2. “Oppenheimer”

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon

Read IndieWire’s Review : At first, I thought that if J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t exist, Christopher Nolan would probably have been compelled to invent him. The exalted British filmmaker has long been fixated upon stories of haunted and potentially self-destructive men who sift through the source code of space-time in a desperate bid to understand the meaning of their own actions, and so the “father of the atomic bomb” — a theoretical physicist whose obsession with a twilight world hidden inside our own led to the birth of the modern age’s most biblical horrors — would seem to represent an uncannily perfect subject for the “Tenet” director’s next epic. And he is. In fact, Oppenheimer is so perversely well-suited to the Nolan treatment that I soon began to realize I had things backwards: Christopher Nolan only exists because men like J. Robert Oppenheimer invented him first. 

1. “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons

Read IndieWire’s Review : It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns “Killers of the Flower Moon” into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it. 

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• What Is Cinema?

The Best Movies of 2023

By Richard Lawson

The best movies of 2023 run the gamut from intense dramas to should-have-been studio blockbusters to quietly perfect slice-of-life studies. Some are splashy prestige productions with the backing of a major awards campaign; some are quirky passion projects, as idiosyncratic as the filmmakers who created them. (In a few thrilling cases, they’re both things at the same time.) Existential unease, literate thrills, devastation and the sublime: they’re all here in this year’s best of 2023 list, ranked from wonderful to even better. Happy watching.

21. Reality

A bold conceit is carried out with precise technical direction in Tina Satter ’s adaptation of the play Is This a Room, a harrowing chamber thriller that stages the transcript of NSA whistleblower Reality Winner ’s initial interrogation and arrest. Sydney Sweeney leaves Euphoria histrionics behind to give a measured, tightly controlled performance, deftly mapping a young woman’s dawning realization that her life is about to change, terribly and forever. Satter adds a few cinematic flourishes, but otherwise keeps the film stern and focused, solemnly observing the consequences of speaking truth to power. Starkly presented and small in scale, Reality nonetheless feels huge and vivid, a light breaking through a dark and tangled web of lies and misinformation.

20. Blue Beetle

If we simply must have superhero movies, may they all be as lively and appealing as Ángel Manuel Soto ’s rollicking adventure. Blue Beetle is sharp in its political argument—framing gentrification as a continuation of colonialism’s long and insidious project—but also abundant with silly humor and genuine sentiment. Xolo Maridueña is a bright and engaging lead, while Adriana Barraza steals scenes as a kindly grandmother possessed of hidden mettle. A rare superhero movie that successfully blends action and message, Blue Beetle was of course a poorly marketed box office dud. Clearly, some studios don’t recognize a good thing when they have it.

19. Pretty Red Dress

We have seen aspects of Dionne Edwards ’s film before: a marriage straining under the weight of unspoken desire, impossible dreams reached for and unrealized. But Pretty Red Dress synthesizes what might be called cliché into something wholly original. Natey Jones and former X Factor star Alexandra Burke richly render a married couple—one just out of prison, the other pursuing her West End acting ambitions—as they navigate a pivotal moment in their relationship. A thoughtful study of masculinity and sexuality, Pretty Red Dress is above all else a deeply humane film, letting its characters yearn and wish with all the contradiction and nuance of real people in the real world. Edward’s film, her debut feature, is one of the year’s hidden gems, waiting to be discovered in all its intricate facets.

18. Sharper

A movie of the sort they don’t make often enough these days, Benjamin Caron ’s twisty con game is a literate pleasure . The cast— Justice Smith,Briana Middleton,Sebastian Stan, and a fabulously shifty Julianne Moore —perfectly balance the sexy and the sinister, tearing into a clever script with panache. Caron, mostly known as a TV director in the UK, has a keen sense of rhythm and an eye for composition. Sharper is polished and sophisticated but never forgets that it is, at root, a seamy little B-movie. Which is great! May there be more compact, nifty films like this, ones that tell a good story and don’t skimp on aesthetics ( Sharper was shot on film) like so many streamer-original movies do. Hopefully we’ll someday reach a time when films like Sharper are given proper theatrical releases again.

A film about both sexual abuse and early onset dementia, Memory has all the trappings of overegged melodrama. But writer-director Michel Franco chooses subtlety over excess, pulling in close on two characters, played with understated grace by Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, as they contend with the limits and regrets of their lives. Set in wintry little corners of Brooklyn, Memory has a keen sense of place—and a sense of true purpose, examining the wear and tear of adulthood with sober compassion.

16. Monster

The great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda offers up another poignant assessment of life’s bumpier dimensions . This time, there is an air of mystery to the story, a secret uncovered through intriguing shifts in narrative perspective. What is eventually revealed is a close friendship, and maybe something more, between two tweenage boys both coping with loss. At once delicate and brimming with feeling, Monster has a deep affection for all of its characters, even the ones who behave rashly or carelessly. Which is to say, all of them—and all of us.

15. Perfect Days

Decades into a storied career, director Wim Wenders finds new vim on the streets of Tokyo, traversed by a solitary (but not exactly lonely) toilet cleaner (played by Koji Yakusho ) as he goes about his work. Told as a series of linked short stories, Perfect Days finds poetry in the banal, though not in the condescending fashion of so many other so-called tributes to the everyday working man. An existential murmur courses under the modest action of Wenders’s film, prodding the audience toward a sincere appreciation of the small moments that comprise any life in the world. The closing minutes of Perfect Days are among the most moving of the year, as a man wordlessly takes stock of all he’s experienced and putters along toward more.

14. Four Daughters

Kaouther Ben Hania ’s film is a beguiling blend of documentary and deliberate artifice. To tell the harrowing story of a Tunisian woman, Olfa Hamrouni, who lost two daughters when they joined the Islamic State, Ben Hania has enlisted actors to reenact some of the events leading up to Hamrouni’s estrangement from her children. We also see the hired actors interacting with the real family, all engaged in a lively and at times uncomfortable discourse about parenting and politics. A fascinating survey of post-Arab Spring Tunisia and a probing commentary on memory and storytelling, Four Daughters makes grand use of its meta premise.

13. Poor Things

Emma Stone totters and lurches toward greatness in Yorgos Lanthimos ’s strange and strangely moving bildungsroman. Stone plays a Frankensteinian creation (a baby’s brain placed inside the skull of an adult body) who, as she grows, becomes a literate and libidinous woman of the world. Lanthimos takes inspiration from the lookbooks of Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton to create a dark fantasy version of continental Europe, through which Stone merrily makes her way, delivering a perhaps career-best performance as she goes. Grim but never bleak, clever but not smug, Poor Things is a nervy experiment that yields oddly beautiful results.

12. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Romanian provocateur Radu Jude takes us on a rambling, funny, creepingly depressing tour of Bucharest in the passenger seat of a well-used car driven by the arresting actor Ilinca Manolache. She plays a production assistant interviewing potential subjects for a workplace-safety-training video—everyone she speaks to has been somehow injured on the job, and is now mired in a hell of legal bureaucracy. Jude takes aim at his country’s frayed social infrastructure, the plundering greed of foreign companies benefiting from cheap labor, and at a media-sick public who have become calloused to the terrible things that flash across our screens every day. Mordant and trenchant, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World does not offer much comfort beyond the grim catharsis of gallows humor.

A family gathers for a birthday party that may actually be a final goodbye to a beloved son, brother, and father in Lila Avilés ’s astonishing second feature. Avilés sets her camera darting and wandering around a middle-class Mexico City home as various relatives go about their day, busying themselves with anything other than worrying about the man slowly dying in the next room. Tótem is a riot of noise and motion, but none of it drowns out the sadness at the film’s center. Avilés builds toward a climax that is as dazzling as it is devastating, a moment of familial connection both profound and terribly fleeting.

10. Asteroid City

Wes Anderson ’s latest is both a return to form and a thoughtful expansion of the director’s humanist impulses . The story of disparate people (played by a starry array of actors) trapped in a tiny desert town at the height of the Atomic Age, Asteroid City considers matters of grief and loneliness, romance and existential wonder. Contained in its lovely diorama box is a winsome picture of life in almost its entirety, all the strangeness and sweetness and arrhythmia of being. What’s more, Anderson’s structural flourishes— Asteroid City is a play within a television broadcast within a film—do not alienate as they have in recent past efforts. Instead, Asteroid City finds true meaning in its layers, offering something like a consoling pat on the shoulder—or a willowy embrace—in difficult, confusing times.

9. Showing Up

Kelly Reichardt offers up perhaps her liveliest, warmest film yet with this wistful, softly comedic look at the making of things. The director’s frequent collaborator Michelle Williams is all watery sighs and huffs as a sculptor who lives in Portland, Oregon, earning a living at a local arts college and spending her spare time tending to her creative output. Reichardt lovingly teases the pretensions and neuroses of a milieu she knows well, while also saying something rather grand (in a quiet way) about what ends art is supposed to meet. Lilting yet sharp, Showing Up is a must-watch for anyone tinkering away at their own passions.

8. You Hurt My Feelings

At first glance, writer-director Nicole Holofcener ’s witty, beautifully acted comedy seems like a mere light romp through monied Manhattan. But as she always does, Holofcener has deeper things on her mind . You Hurt My Feelings is a sharp and often poignant study of the mechanics of love, how its eagerness to support and encourage can sometimes have the exact opposite effect. It’s a clever and thoughtful movie about white lies and well-meaning indulgence, wise in its detailed observation of human behavior. And what a human Holofcener has cast in the lead: Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who is also excellent in Holofcener’s Enough Said ) gives a radiant star turn, as naturally dexterous with the film’s peppery comedy and she is with its bleary drama. It’s an immensely charismatic performance, one that would, in a just world, be recognized by awards-giving bodies at year’s end.

7. Anatomy of a Fall

While there is certainly some suspense in Justine Triet ’s riveting film , it’s more drama than thriller, an inquest into the unknowable. How well do we really know those closest to us? How well do we really know our own hearts, our own capacities for love and anger? Sandra Hüller anchors Triet’s film with a fierce intelligence, never betraying moral judgment of her character—a woman accused of murdering her husband in what may actually have been a terrible accident. Hüller’s is one of the great performances of the year, as shifty and multifaceted as Triet’s ever-morphing film. Anatomy of a Fall is either a murder mystery or the sad story of a mishap, a look at a marriage brought to the worst breaking point or at one cruelly interrupted mid-sentence. Either way, Anatomy of a Fall is dazzling, provocative entertainment, a worthy winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or and whatever other awards it picks up in the coming months. 

6. Earth Mama

An auspicious feature debut from filmmaker Savanah Leaf, Earth Mama is a grounded look at motherhood, poverty, and adoption. Tia Nomore, also making her film debut, sensitively plays Gia, a woman at a major crossroads. She’s in recovery and is working to clean up her life in order to get her children out of foster care and make way for a new baby she’s due to deliver any day. As she struggles to find work and hold onto her housing, Gia must confront the possibility that perhaps her baby would be better off with another family. Leaf has not made some gritty, exploitative movie that makes a novelty of Gia’s circumstances; Earth Mama is instead carefully observed and pitched in a credible timbre. Leaf has made an empathetic film about choice, which Gia still possesses despite being denied so much else.

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5. Passages

A romantic drama without much romance, Ira Sachs ’s beguiling character study examines the heedless man at the center of an interpersonal storm. The great Franz Rogowski —preening, pitiable, vibrating with restless energy—plays a film director, Tomas, who disrupts the relative contentedness of his marriage (to Martin, played by Ben Whishaw ) by embarking on an affair with a Parisian school teacher, Agathe ( Adèle Exarchopoulos ). Relationships crack and heal and crack again in this intelligent, funny, evocative film . Full of sex and talk (the foundation of so many couplings), Passages rambles, in its high-minded way, toward a mysteriously poignant conclusion: an image of a man somehow stuck in ceaseless motion.

4. The Zone of Interest

A dreadful film in the most literal sense, British artiste Jonathan Glazer ’s fourth feature concerns itself with the man who runs Auschwitz and his family, a happy clan of Germans who enjoy lush grounds, a well-appointed home, even a swimming pool. The boggling horror happening just over the garden walls is never seen—but is palpably felt, mostly through horrifically effective sound design. Glazer’s film is a period piece, but it is also keen with awful relevance to today; the director is ringing something like an alarm bell, hoping to shake people out of complacency, out of the assumption that evil will flamboyantly announce itself rather than insidiously seep in, corrupting every seemingly normal thing it touches. The Zone of Interest is a marvel of form, but Glazer does not prize style over substance. His film is clear and urgent in its themes, its insistence that the noise we hear in the distance isn’t as far off as we’d like to believe.

3. The Holdovers

It’s been a long while since director Alexander Payne last served up a prickly little slice of life. The Holdovers is a welcome return to the forms of Nebraska and Sideways, tart and bleary at once. Paul Giamatti , doing his most appealing work since Private Life, plays a sorry, drunken boarding school teacher tasked with watching one left-behind student over winter break in the early 1970s. Newcomer Dominic Sessa is a gangly, endearing revelation as that problem student, while Da’Vine Joy Randolph provides invaluable support as a cafeteria worker tasked with feeding these messy men while tending to her own profound sorrow. Payne’s worldview has been softened by age; where he might have gone mean 20 or so years ago, he instead turns to ragged empathy. He finds the grace in the shambolic, depicting a tired, downtrodden older man as he allows the springy obnoxiousness of youth to coax him out of stasis. The Holdovers is a very good Christmas movie and a great New Year’s one: a look at resolutions that may really stick this time.

2. Past Lives

One of t he most striking debut features in years , Celine Song ’s decades- and continents-spanning romantic drama took Sundance by storm in January. Although “storm” implies something aggressive, which Past Lives , in all its delicate emotional insight, certainly is not. Instead it’s a sad, swooning, graceful look at the journeys of immigration and aging, telling a story about two old friends and maybe lovers. The film follows Nora (played as an adult by Greta Lee ) and Hae Sung (played as an adult by Teo Yoo ), early adolescent pals in Seoul who are separated, seemingly forever, when Nora’s family moves to Canada. Past Lives traces their initially tentative and then wholehearted reunion years later, as they reconcile the realities of their adult selves with their dreamily remembered youth. Song swathes her film’s metaphysical questions in gorgeous, summery light, crafting a lilting portrait of life in its infinite dimensions and sliding-doors possibilities. Past Lives is a must-see gem of a film, one that augurs many good things for its fledgling creator. 

1. May December

From one angle, May December is a dark comedy about sexual mores and tabloid nosiness about the business of others. From another, Todd Haynes ’s film is a bitterly sad portrait of a life brutally compromised by childhood abuse. And another: The film is about the lie of moviemaking, its necessary bending of the truth and its tendency to pretend it’s doing otherwise. There are many more ways to approach May December (shrewdly written by Samy Burch ), a transfixing and shape-shifting film, sly and sophisticated. Natalie Portman, playing an actor researching a role she hopes will launch her into the prestige echelon, works wonders, making manifest all of our predatory hunger for sordid detail, our eagerness to assign a moral framework that defines our decency against others’ lack of it. Julianne Moore ferociously plays a woman who once did something monstrous but may or may not still be a monster, while Charles Melton gives the film its beating, broken heart. Coy and vaguely sinister—while still also kind, still attuned to the multitude of ambivalences contained within each character— May December could probably be endlessly unpacked, so varied are its tones and textures and piercing insights. What could have been a nasty little bit of camp is instead something wise and heady, a complex film whose mind whirs at breakneck speed.

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The 15 Best Movies of 2023—and Where to Watch Them

Put bluntly, picking the best movies of 2023 was tough. The double-whammy of Barbie and Oppenheimer gave the box office a long-overdue, post-Covid-19 jolt, only to be followed by a pair of months-long strikes in Hollywood that shut down production on nearly all the films in the works for 2024 and beyond. Even now, with the strikes over, the industry is scratching its head at what happened and what’s to come.

Still, amidst all the noise, 2023 provided a wealth of quietly beautiful films. Even as Hollywood fretted over the possibility of artificial intelligence upending filmmaking and giving writing and acting gigs to bots, it’s impossible to watch the movies on this list and not feel such a possibility is faintly ridiculous. This year’s best releases were full of so much ambition and emotional intelligence it’s hard to argue that the value of human input in filmmaking is heading toward obsolescence. Packed with highly accomplished debuts from younger directors, and full of brilliant ideas, the best movies of 2023 were compelled by art’s old chestnut: humans struggling to understand their place in the world.

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In 2017, David Grann published Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI , a true-crime yarn set in 1920s Oklahoma, a period when members of the Osage Nation were being killed for their oil money. Grann’s central character, Mollie Burkhart, was an Osage woman desperate to understand the deaths in her family; a twist reveals that her beloved husband, Ernest, is complicit. Martin Scorsese made a bold decision while adapting Grann’s work: He removed the whodunit aspect, instead letting the audience see exactly how Ernest came to menace his wife, anchoring the movie in the dim-witted villain’s perspective. It shouldn’t work, but in zeroing in on Ernest (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), Scorsese creates an almost unbearably harrowing portrait of all-American evil. A feel-bad masterpiece.

Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a successful writer married to Samuel (Samuel Theis), a failed writer. When Samuel is found dead outside their home one snowy day, Sandra quickly goes from grieving widow to prime suspect and is forced to reveal the most intimate details of her complicated marriage, including the resentment she had toward her husband for an incident that left their son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) partially blind. Ultimately, it’s Daniel who serves as the final word in what happened on that tragic day—and what will happen to his mother. This twisty, impeccably acted courtroom drama won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and was a hit when it was released in its native France in August, but it made just a modest art-house splash in the US. But its success in the earliest days of the awards season—including accolades from the European Film Awards, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle, and the Gotham Awards, as well as four Golden Globe nominations—indicates that splash will have a ripple effect.

It would be remiss not to include Oppenheimer , which divided the WIRED office and the internet. Some saw it as misogynist and shallow; some saw it as a blockbuster auteur’s return to form. Whatever your opinion, director Christopher Nolan took an esoteric biography about a scientist trying to get security clearance and turned it into more than $950 million at the box office .

Kelly Reichhardt and Michelle Williams—the indie world’s Scorsese and DiCaprio—collaborate here for the fourth time, and the result is a deeply layered and subtly poignant gem. We follow Lizzy (Williams), a doggedly persistent artist, as she preps for an upcoming show. Her artistic endeavor, small clay women molded into evocative poses, is obstructed by family, work, and life in general. Showing Up captures the universally recognizable seesaw between the anxiety that life is slipping through your fingers, happening to you, and the joy—evidenced in moments of Lizzy’s contented sculpting—that things are going just as they should.

Perhaps no one expected a film based on Mattel’s iconic doll to become a feminist lightning rod, but here we are. What made director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie , which she wrote with her partner Noah Baumbach, such a cultural flashpoint is that it walks such a fine line. It is both so progressive it had conservatives lighting dolls on fire and also not feminist enough . For those in the middle, though, it was a washed-in-pink sendup of patriarchy full of Indigo Girls sing-alongs and Zack Snyder jabs that really took hold. It also took home nearly $1.5 billion at the box office and started talk of a Mattel Cinematic Universe. Welcome to the Mojo Dojo Casa House, I guess.

Raven Jackson’s directorial debut is a feast for the senses. Over the span of 92 minutes, the award-winning poet and photographer channels her artistic talents to create this breathtakingly shot recounting of one Mississippi woman’s life, from the seemingly mundane (adolescent adventures) to the moments you never forget (the death of a loved one). Though Jackson is spare with her dialog, the result is a lyrical movie that is reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s earliest work. The film—which was produced by Moonlight ’s Barry Jenkins—was a hit at Sundance earlier this year and was named one of 2023’s best indie films by the National Board of Review, but it managed to stay firmly under the radar during its brief theatrical run in November.

Filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), are living a comfortable life in Paris, though possibly too comfortable. At the wrap party for his latest film, Tomas meets a young woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and the two begin an intense affair, creating a complex love triangle. Though Tomas and Martin split, they continually find themselves coming back together. The film is a painfully human exploration of the complexities of love, with impeccable performances all around—most notably from Rogowski, who has landed on some critics’ lists as a possible Oscar contender.

In 2018, when Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse hit theaters, it changed perception about what Spider-Man movies, and animated films, could be. No longer led by Peter Parker, a kid from Queens who gets bit by a radioactive spider, it was led by Miles Morales, a kid from Brooklyn who met a similar fate in another part of the multiverse. Across the Spider-Verse continues Miles’ story and his quest to be his own kind of hero and save the multiverse, and his timeline, from a terrible fate. Fun, heartbreaking, and a thrill to watch, it’s one of the best Spider-Man movies ever and is so beautifully animated it’s breathtaking.

Never before in the history of cinema has the phrase “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs” felt so ominous or so perfect. The latest from director Todd Haynes ( Carol ) centers on Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actress who travels to Savannah, Georgia, to shadow Gracie, the woman she’s about to play in an upcoming film. Loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau , Gracie is a middle-aged woman married to a younger man whom she first met when he was 13 and she was in her thirties. Their twins are about to graduate high school, and during the week before the ceremony that Elizabeth spends with the family all sorts of complex and unsettling details emerge—some of the most unnerving about Elizabeth herself. Wicked and chilling, right down to its score, May December is full of surprises and two impeccable performances from Portman and Moore.

With its pastel hues, A-list ensemble cast, and a plot that’s like going for a meandering stroll with someone who tells long, pointless stories, Asteroid City is—depending on your viewpoint—either quintessentially Wes Anderson or unbearably Wes Anderson. On the surface, it’s about an alien spaceship landing in a retro-futurist version of small-town America. But it’s layered and intricate: a movie about a documentary about a play, with Jason Schwartzman as war photographer Augie Steenbeck (and the actor playing him), and Scarlett Johansson as Hollywood star Midge Campbell (and the actor playing her). The overall effect is like some fine work of French patisserie—a macaron, maybe: sweet, pretty, gone.

Director Savanah Leaf’s latest centers on Gia, a 24-year-old mother and recovering addict caught up in San Francisco’s foster care system. Gia has two kids she can see only sporadically; she is pregnant with a third. She must decide whether agreeing to adoption will help her case of increasing contact with her other two. Leaf’s achievement is to capture the inhumane pressure that leads people to act self-destructively. The viewer feels that pressure throughout and faces no choice but to understand what Gia must do.

Horny teen-sex comedies have been around for at least a half-century—which makes director Emma Seligman’s reinvention of the genre all the more impressive. In Bottoms , queer pals PJ (Rachel Sennott, who cowrote the script with Seligman) and Josie ( The Bear ’s Ayo Edebiri) decide to start a fight club at their high school as part of an elaborate scheme to hook up with hot cheerleaders. What the teens don’t count on is the plan actually working and that the best course of action is to try to undo the revolution they ignite. Real-life friends Sennott and Edebiri are an onscreen duo to be reckoned with and get a huge assist from retired running back Marshawn Lynch, who gets to spread his wings as a comedic actor (after his hilarious performance in an episode of Netflix’s Murderville ).

This is Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited return to film following 2013’s critically-beloved Under the Skin . Here he takes on an Everest: the Holocaust. This story is based on the novel by Martin Amis, who passed away this year, and follows Rudolf Höss and his family as they live an idyllic life on the edge of Auschwitz. In the tradition of films like Shoah , Glazer never quite looks the horror in the eye. There are merely visions of smoke and barbed wire, and a deeply unsettling chorus of muffled screaming. Much of the most starkly vicious moments come from the script: At one point, Höss cannot concentrate at a party; he is too busy sizing up how the high ceilings would make it challenging to gas the guests.

The first feature of Australian YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou is an intelligent, brilliantly realized, nasty little shock of a horror film . The central threat is an embalmed severed hand, which, when you hold it and say the film’s title, lets you converse with the dead. The kids treat it like a designer drug, filming their hallucinatory freak-outs on their phones. If that makes it sound like there’s a lot that could go wrong, be sure—it all does.

After years of brilliant films, Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli landed at the top of the North American box office with The Boy and the Heron . Reportedly the final film from studio cofunder Hayao Miyazaki, it brought in $12.8 million in its opening weekend, a first for an original anime film. It’s deserved. Telling the story of a boy, struggling to cope with his mother’s death, who meets a heron who shows him a magical world, it’s everything fans have come to expect from Ghibli. Lush, gut-wrenching, and full of just the right balance of fantasy and reality, it’s classic Miyazaki.

Kate Knibbs, Amit Katwala, and Angela Watercutter contributed to this guide.

By Matt Burgess

By Andy Greenberg

By Matthew Gault

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• Entertainment

The 10 Best Movies of 2023

N o year-end best-movie list is definitive, because no year of moviegoing experience can be reduced to bullet points—nor should it be. Particularly now, when we can watch so many new movies without leaving our homes , the experience of watching has changed drastically, and in ways we may never be able to fully reckon with. When you finish watching a movie at home, you may still be thinking about it as you tee another one up, or head off to bed, or patter into the kitchen to make a sandwich. But a movie watched in a theater, in the company of other human beings, takes up space in a different way. As you drive away, or head to the bus or subway, a great movie—or even a terrible one—follows you. It expands to fill the air, rather than shrinking back into a little box. This is the space in which its greatness, or the overwhelming force of its mediocrity, is fully revealed to you.

You can watch a great movie at home and fully acknowledge its greatness: after all, streaming older movies, or watching them on physical media, is how most of us learn about movie history . But a year of new movies, whether you watch them at home or not, should be much more expansive than your living room. Following are 10 movies—plus a large handful of honorable mentions—that kept me thinking in the hours, days, and months after I watched them. These are the movies that followed me home.

More: Read TIME's lists of the best TV shows , podcasts and video games of 2023.

10. Passages

It’s impossible to get through life without messing a few things up. But how much messing up is too much? At the center of Ira Sachs’ sometimes funny but also piercing Passages is a self-centered filmmaker, played in a dazzling performance by Franz Rogowski, who windmills through life with reckless disregard for the feelings of those around him, including his husband (Ben Whishaw) and the young woman who has temporarily entranced him (Adèle Exarchopoulos). At best, he’s exasperating; at worst, he inflicts deep and lasting pain. And still, you feel something for him. His electricity is also his curse, and as this love triangle unfolds, it may leave you feeling the charge and the anguish all at once.

Read TIME's review

Stream on Amazon Prime .

9. Dreamin' Wild

There are two types of people in the world: those who view rock’n’roll dreams as small things you eventually grow out of and those who never stop living them, even if they confine their dream time to the spiral grooves of sides A and B. Bill Pohlad’s Dreamin’ Wild —based on real-life events, and starring Casey Affleck and Walton Goggins—is for the second group, a story about what happens when two people who sought pop stardom as teenagers get a second chance in middle age. Music can mean a lot in one lifetime: it can break dreams, but it can also mend them.

Stream on Hulu .

8. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Movies dealing with the specifics of women’s experience are still a relative rarity on the movie landscape. How many studio execs are going to leap at the chance to finance a film about the onset of menses and—by suggestion—its lunar twin, menopause? Featuring a superb cast (including Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie , and Abby Ryder Fortson), Kelly Fremon Craig’s adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1970 coming-of-age classic is largely about the confusion of adolescence—but also, more subtly, it addresses what it means for women to say goodbye to all that as they hit middle age. This is a great movie for young people, but maybe even a better one for those who find themselves look-ing through the far end of the telescope.

7. Killers of the Flower Moon

To watch Lily Gladstone (above) in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is to recapture a thread of history that has, until recently, eluded most of us. Scorsese has made a somber, poetic adaptation of David Grann’s account of how a group of greedy white men systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation in early 1920s Oklahoma. As Mollie Burkhart, a rich Osage woman whose family was gradually killed off around her, Gladstone gives face to a million stories that have been conveniently forgotten in modern America. Scorsese’s mournful epic also features bigger movie stars, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. But Gladstone’s Mollie is the soul of his film, and he knows it.

Read more: Martin Scorsese Still Has Stories Left to Tell

Stream on Apple TV .

6. Past Lives

In writer-director Celine Song’s stirring debut film, a Korean immigrant who has built a life for herself in Toronto and New York ( Greta Lee ) reconnects with the childhood friend she left behind years ago (Teo Yoo); her husband (John Magaro) stands by, a witness to the subterranean crackle of their connection. In any life, there are an infinite number of roads not taken—we can be on only one road at a time. Song’s movie is all about the mournful beauty of missed opportunities, a recognition of the truth that yearning is part of life. Without it, all we’re left with is false certainty, perhaps the greatest dishonesty of all.

Stream on Amazon .

5. Revoir Paris

The brother of French writer-director Alice Winocour survived the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris; unable to communicate with him as he hid, she had to wait to hear if he'd made it out alive. In Revoir Paris , Virginie Efira gives a shattering performance as a woman who survives a similar, but fictional, attack—though the meaning of survival here is complex. Efira’s Mia can’t recall much of the horrific event; the experience was too traumatic. But over time, she finds her way back to life, and to feeling, by connecting with others whose lives were also broken by the tragedy. Without preciousness or platitudes, Winocour and Efira plumb the stark and sometimes painful truth of what it means to commit to the world of the living.

Read more: The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades

4. Priscilla

Elvis is everywhere, even 46 years after his death. But what about Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, the woman he met when he was a 24-year-old soldier stationed in Germany and she was just a girl of 14? Sofia Coppola’s film , adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir , brings this story to the screen with infinite tenderness. Jacob Elordi plays Elvis, a great artist and a messed-up man who mistreated the woman he loved most. But the movie belongs to Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla, preternaturally self-possessed as a young teenager but both wiser and more resilient by age 27, when her marriage to royalty ended. Spaeny walks us through this extraordinary but also painful span of time in one woman’s life, one satin-slipper step after another.

Stream on Max .

3. The Zone of Interest

The everyday things many of us want and need—plenty of food, marital companionship, a safe and comfortable home —are the same things German SS officer Rudolf Höss, the longtime commandant of Auschwitz , and his wife Hedwig wanted for themselves and their family. In Jonathan Glazer’s ghostly, ice-cold film—adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel—Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig, who runs her household with starched-linen efficiency, vaguely cognizant of the horrors being perpetrated beyond her garden walls but viewing them as an annoyance rather than an atrocity. Christian Friedel’s Höss is highly inventive when it comes to pleasing the higher-ups; his ideas are a fuel for evil. The Zone of Interest isn’t just a semi-fictionalized view of history. It’s also a story for the here and now—a reminder that happiness built on the suffering of others is no kind of happiness at all.

Pledging your life to another person is not for the faint of heart. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro , less a biopic than a window into a complex, passionate marriage , is a modern rarity: an example of a starry, big-ticket production put to use in telling a truly grownup story. Cooper stars as conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein , complicated and charismatic as both an artist and a man. Carey Mulligan gives one of the finest performances of the year, a portrait of both steeliness and human fragility, as the Costa Rican–Chilean actor Felicia Montealegre, who became Bernstein’s wife and the mother of his three children. This is grand-scale filmmaking that’s also bracingly intimate.

1. Fallen Leaves

A tentative romance between a woman who’s making the best of dreary workaday life (Alma Pöysti) and a metalworker whose perpetual drunkenness keeps him underemployed (Jussi Vatanen), plus a dog who helps his human bridge the expanse between loneliness and the contentment of solitude: those are the main ingredients of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, and he works magic with them. Kaurismäki is the master of the deadpan humanist comedy, the type of picture that people may think of as merely odd or charming. Yet so much of life is made up of little revelations that form the core of who we are. This is Kaurismäki’s gift: to catch those moments, seemingly snatching them from the wind, and put them onscreen so that we, too, will know them when we see them.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer , Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener , Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things , Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant , Lisa Cortes’ Little Richard: I Am Everything, Frances O’Connor’s Emily , Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning , Anh Hung Tran's The Taste of Things, Ava DuVernay’s Origin , Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

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The Best Movies of 2023

By Richard Brody

Though a year in movie releases is a small and arbitrary sample size, it’s nonetheless clear that, at the moment, the art of cinema is in good shape in the United States. The overwhelming commercial success of two of the year’s strangest big-budget films, “ Oppenheimer ” and “Barbie,” released on the same day this summer, is an obvious sign of the vigor of the cinemascape. But the more crucial indicator of vitality preceded their release by several years—namely, the moments when these projects got the green light from their respective studios. Both films’ subjects are as unusual as their styles: one is an existential exploration of a major figure in the worldwide expansion of American power, and the other is about a scientist. One has blown far beyond the billion-dollar mark, and the other is approaching it, at precisely the moment that the superhero-industrial complex seems to be tottering. But the studios are hardly the artistic center of the American cinema; they’re just one element in an environment that is fostering ongoing artistic progress.

A major reason for this creative energy is found behind the scenes, in the realm of production: the panoply of systems, which makes a wide range of movies in a wide range of ways. Even when the major studios have seemed to be choking on franchises, they have produced idiosyncratic releases; the year 2022 alone brought “ Nope ,” “ Amsterdam ,” and “ Don’t Worry Darling .” Deep-pocketed streaming services that can afford to compete with the studios—and even outbid them—have an incentive to prove themselves as purveyors not just of quantity but of quality, including by competing for awards. As for independent production companies, they can—and must—take chances on inexperienced filmmakers with big ideas and on audacious projects by acclaimed filmmakers with the name recognition to help sell them.

This year’s best movies are bold undertakings both onscreen and off. Apple put up a whopping two hundred million dollars to make Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which, notwithstanding its star power, was hardly a safe bet from a purely box-office point of view but is valuable to the company for the favorable publicity that it garners, for its direct potential to attract subscribers, and for its indirect potential to attract talent. Warner Bros. invested a hundred and forty-five million dollars to realize Greta Gerwig’s wildly decorative yet deeply considered take on Barbie, even though little in Gerwig’s two previous features, “ Lady Bird ” and “ Little Women ,” suggested the ability to pull off such an extravagant fantasy. Wes Anderson, who’s now an independent filmmaker working at a high level, made “Asteroid City” for just twenty-five million dollars; his madness is in his method, his ability to make such a film of vast scope on such a sub-studio (and sub-streaming) budget. Three films produced or co-produced by A24, on budgets largely unspecified but doubtless under ten million dollars, are all works of exceptional and daring artistry: “Showing Up,” “Earth Mama,” and, especially, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” which, from the strict perspective of inventive narrative form, is by far the most distinctive film of the year. (Next to it in originality are Anderson’s short Roald Dahl adaptations—produced by Netflix.)

The branch of the business that’s less vigorous at the moment is that of ultra-low-budget, do-it-yourself filmmaking. It’s the sector that, in the past two decades, has given rise to the careers of some of the most illustrious and original filmmakers of the time, such as Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, and the Safdie brothers. They and others like them have revitalized American movies and the cinema at large. But success breeds its own troubles; in the past half-dozen years, I’ve noticed that the D.I.Y. sector has itself been in need of revitalization. Its early-two-thousands generation worked in an up-or-out world: a dismaying number of excellent filmmakers had trouble making careers; meanwhile, the successors of those who moved up haven’t yet emerged. It’s impossible to will a revolution, or any sort of innovation, into being.

From the perspective of the viewer, or even of the critic, a year in movies has a built-in unity—one cycle of releases—but those releases involve multiple years of production. Long gone are the days when John Ford directed three major movies (“ Stagecoach ,” “ Young Mr. Lincoln ,” and “Drums Along the Mohawk”) in a single year. Except for Hong Sangsoo (who has lately been averaging two movies a year, on scant budgets, sometimes with crews of only three or four people) or, this year, Anderson, most filmmakers are fortunate to make a movie every few years. The value—not necessarily of dollars in budget but of importance in a filmmaker’s career—of each film, of each given onscreen moment, is greatly increased, and much filmmaking has, as a result, grown tight.

What’s missing from even most of the best American films is a sense of swing, for exactly this reason: swing is a matter of spontaneity, and movies that are years in the making tend to have less of it. (The new movie in which I find the most of it is “Passages”—by the American director Ira Sachs, who made it in Paris mostly with European actors.) Even the fact that shooting schedules are painfully short, for economic reasons, exacerbates the problem; when directors with an ample cast and crew have to work very fast, they also require extremely precise planning. The flipside of this loss of spontaneity is that filmmakers have time to think about what they’re doing and where they stand in regard to it. ( Scorsese’s drastic preproduction transformation of “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a prime example.) As it happens, this reflectiveness is very much in tune with the politics of the time, which often spotlights the position of filmmakers in relation to the world they depict—a tendency abetted by social media, with its expanded range of critical discussion.

As fierce or stringent as the political cinema of earlier generations may be, what seems to distinguish the current version is a sense of mirroring, of dramatizing not just an inner world but the standpoint from which it’s conceived. The strongest political insights of today’s movies involve a word that has become ubiquitous in the attempt to understand inequality and injustice (and that has, as a result, become a target of the censorious right): “systemic.” Filmmakers working at opposite ends of the budgetary spectrum, such as Gerwig with “Barbie” and Savanah Leaf with “Earth Mama,” do more than take on political subjects; they find ways, whether exuberantly comic or tensely dramatic, to connect their protagonists’ conflicts to institutions. Anderson has always been a filmmaker of revolt, and in “Asteroid City” he presents a confectionary version of the military-industrial complex, the paranoid repression that it helped to enforce in the nineteen-fifties, and the spirit of defiance that motivates young prodigies—and even some mid-career artists.

The particularity of the current political moment can be seen if one compares the tag scene at the end of Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” with the one at the end of a film he made a decade ago, “ The Wolf of Wall Street .” In the earlier one, Scorsese implicates the world at large in the moral failings depicted in the film; in the new one, he implicates himself personally. Yet as the personal cinema moves—all to the good—from self-celebration to self-questioning, its tone changes. That may be a reason for the decline in D.I.Y. filmmaking. The sense (or the illusion) of working outside or without established systems doesn’t favor the display of a system’s workings. At such a moment, ingenuous artists risk seeming naïve—unless, like the now established generation of once independent filmmakers, they aim at a radical transformation of the world of movies and actually achieve it.

1. “ Killers of the Flower Moon ”

Martin Scorsese’s vast adaptation of David Grann ’s nonfiction investigation of the violent encroachment of white Americans on the oil wealth of the Osage Nation unpacks American history as a widespread criminal conspiracy and distills it into a drama of marital mysteries as disturbing and resonant as those of “ Eyes Wide Shut .”

2. “ Asteroid City ”

Wes Anderson’s exquisitely filigreed and ardently romantic view of a grieving family and a lonely actress at the science-fiction-adjacent setting of a young astronomers’ conference mines the weirdness of the nineteen-fifties—an enduring and still active complex of troubles and tropes hiding in plain sight in the era’s movies and in its political paranoia.

3. “ Barbie ”

The irrepressible outpouring of giddy but principled inspiration in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster—a vision of the earnest passions embodied in child’s play and the progressive power of girls’ uninhibited imagination—feels like the first display of her comprehensive artistry and like a new dimension in modern cinema.

4. “ All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt ”

Spanning half a century in the life of a woman in rural Mississippi, Raven Jackson’s first feature unites family lore and the legacy of history with a breathtaking romantic melodrama—and does so with a bold command of time and intensely sensitive image-making.

5. “ Showing Up ”

From the modest premise of a sculptor preparing her work for a show while also working at an art school, Kelly Reichardt explores the bonds and the conflicts of a tight-knit community, the burdens of family, and the inescapably fruitful frustrations of life’s impingement on art. The depths of an artist’s soul have rarely been filmed as finely.

6. “ Passages ”

The American filmmaker Ira Sachs’s turbulent melodrama set in Paris—in which a German movie director married to a British man embarks on a reckless romance with a French woman—unleashes torrents of violently mixed emotions and yields a vertiginous, ecstatic sense of liberation.

7. “ Civic ”

There’s a feature film’s worth of style and experience crammed into the twenty-minute span of Dwayne LeBlanc’s first film, a classic tale of a young man’s return home (to South Central Los Angeles) conveyed with an audacious and original sense of form.

8. “ A Thousand and One ”

A. V. Rockwell’s first feature, spanning about two decades in the life of a mother and child in Harlem, fiercely depicts the ardor of family life and the fragility of family ties amid political pressures on the community, including oppressive policing, gentrification, and the trauma of incarceration.

9. “ Earth Mama ”

Savanah Leaf’s début feature, the drama of a young woman’s fervent efforts to regain custody of her children and to maintain a bond with her newborn, offers some of the most expressive closeups in recent movies, along with a sharply detailed analysis of bureaucratic obstacles to the legal unity of families that Black women face.

10. “ Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game ”

For their first feature, the brothers Austin and Meredith Bragg dramatize an extraordinary byway of history: the longtime illegality of pinball in New York City and its legalization, in the mid-seventies, through the efforts of a journalist who loved the game. The film employs a daring narrative framework to present a bittersweet, vibrantly scrappy re-creation of the times.

11. “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher,” “Poison”

With this quartet of short films adapted from stories by Roald Dahl, Wes Anderson invents a new kind of cinematic storytelling—characters are both onscreen narrators and participants in the action—and portrays the cruelties of Dahl’s world as those of life at large.

12. “ Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros ”

For his forty-fourth documentary, the nonagenarian filmmaker Frederick Wiseman embeds with the chefs of a three-star French restaurant. Filming trenchantly and editing daringly, he uncovers the vast range of knowledge (scientific and culinary), experience (artisanal and administrative), and passion (artistic and personal) that energizes the enterprise—and finds the place of haute cuisine in the cultural pantheon.

13. “ Petite Solange ”

The coming-of-age story of a teen-age girl in a small French city against the backdrop of her parents’ divorce gets both a melodramatic twist and a classical grandeur through Axelle Ropert’s poised and discerning direction.

14. “Ferrari”

Now in his eighties, Michael Mann makes his best film in decades with this grandly romantic yet death-haunted biographical story about Enzo Ferrari’s effort, in the fifties, to rescue his company by winning a major auto race.

15. “ Orlando, My Political Biography ”

The philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s first film, a docufictional and reflexive adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s historical fantasy “ Orlando ,” features more than twenty trans or gender-nonconforming actors in the title role. Integrating their personal reflections into Woolf’s story, the filmmaker pulls its drama into the present tense and even into a visionary future.

16. “ Walk Up ”

The prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, working cheaply and spontaneously, delivers one of his most wide-ranging stories—of family conflicts and long-lost friends, the frustrations of filmmaking and the passion of art, the bewilderment of youth and the burden of age—in and around a single multistory building in Seoul.

17. “Origin”

To dramatize the real-life story of how the journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote her nonfiction book “ Caste ,” the director Ava DuVernay boldly blends the contours of a bio-pic with documentary-based aspects of the author’s research.

18. “ Priscilla ”

The life of Priscilla Presley, as overshadowed in adolescence by Elvis’s attention and in adulthood by his inattention, is presented by Sofia Coppola as a poignant synecdoche for the subordination of women in the culture at large.

19. “The Color Purple”

The director Blitz Bazawule , with his second feature, approaches the Broadway razzle-dazzle of the stage musical with stylish inspiration and gets hearty, exuberant, grounded performances from his superb cast.

20. “ Our Body ”

Claire Simon’s documentary, set in the gynecology ward of a French hospital, explores a vast range of women’s-health and gender-related concerns, including abortion and gender confirmation, and looks closely at the invasive intricacies of medical technology—as well as the filmmaker’s own treatment there for a serious illness. ♦

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By Katy Waldman

The Best Reviewed Movies of 2023

From barbenheimer to the boy and the heron and everything in between, here's the best of the best in 2023..

2023 was another great year in the world of movies, but it will undoubtedly go down in history as the year that brought us the global phenomenon known as Barbenheimer. Yes, the combination we never knew we needed of Barbie and Oppenheimer was a match made in heaven that took us all by a pink and explosive storm. These two films may have led the pack, but there were a ton of other great movies that also made this a year to remember. And that’s where our list of the best reviewed movies of 2023 comes in.

For this particular roundup, we’ve decided to only include movies that we scored a 9 or 10. Per our review scale, a 9 means the movie was “Amazing” and a 10 means it was a “Masterpiece.” These coveted scores are our highest recommendations, and hopefully this list will ensure you don’t miss what were some of the best movies of 2023.

It only feels right to start with the Barbenheimer of it all. While Barbie may have won our Best Movie of the Year in 2023 , as well as the global box office with a stellar worldwide total of $1.4 billion, Oppenheimer was the only one to walk away with a 10.

Reviewer Siddhant Adlakha said Oppenheimer was a “disturbing, mesmerizing vision of what humanity is capable of bringing upon itself, through its innovation, and through its capacity to justify any atrocity.” Barbie, on the other plastic hand, still took home a very respectable 9 from reviewer Alyssa Mora, who said it was a “masterful exploration of femininity and the pressures of perfection.”

There was only one other 10 in 2023, and as far as what it was, we only have two words - Baba Yaga. Very much in the fashion of how Keanu Reeves’ legendary character is an unstoppable force who takes down all who stand in his way, John Wick: Chapter 4 defied all the odds and secured the only other 10 from IGN in 2023. Reviewer Tom Jorgensen said this film “stands above its predecessors – and the past decade’s worth of action films as a whole – as a modern epic” as its “incredibly staged action scenes, engaging ensemble, and stylish production design coalesce into a modern action masterclass.”

The rest of our best reviewed movies all earned a 9, and a handful of them were based on events and people from history. One of the most high-profile movies in this category was Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is centered around the murders in a Native American tribe in Oklahoma. Adlakha said the film “revisits the Osage murders of the 1920s with a masterful hand, and a shockingly frank approach to violence and white supremacy.”

This month’s The Zone of Interest was the final film to get a 9 in 2023, and it tells the haunting story of a commandant of Auschwitz who is working to build a dream life for his family right next to the Holocaust’s deadliest camp. Reviewer Chase Hutchinson said it is “one of the most monumental films ever made” and one of the most “starkly horrifying, sickening, and monstrous” stories you’ll ever witness.

Maestro was directed by and stars Bradley Cooper as conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein. Reviewer Hanna Ines Flint said its “dynamic cinematic language speaks to the heart” and that the “caliber of Bradley Cooper's direction is matched by a transformative performance as the great American composer opposite a dynamite Carey Mulligan as his actress-wife.”

Horror was another genre that stood tall this year, and it was all led by our first 9 in 2023 in Scream 6. While reviewer Amelia Emberwing said it did “ultimately fumble the reason for Sidney Prescott’s absence,” that didn’t take away from the wonderful new Core Four cast that helped the sequel hit “all the right emotional beats” alongside “dialing the brutality up to eleven.”

IGN's Best of 2023 - Every IGN Award Winner

Evil Dead Rise came next and was another beloved return of a longstanding franchise. Reviewer Matt Donato said it was “both a familiar and refreshing Evil Dead sequel that delivers all the gore you’d expect with a measured dose of the humor that makes this series a fan favorite.” Talk to Me was a new horror tale that told what happens when a group of friends figure out how to conjure spirits with an embalmed hand. Reviewer Kenneth Seward Jr. said it was a “unique take on possession” that put a focus on the “struggles associated with grief and depression.”

Famed horror writer/director Ari Aster followed up his terrifying Midsommar with the Joaquin Phoenix-led Beau Is Afraid, and Adlakha said it was a “deeply personal horror-comedy at a wildly ambitious scale.” Rounding out the horror bunch was When Evil Lurks, a film that took us to a farm where a demonic infection was doing some terrible things to the local livestock… and more. Donato said When Evil Lurks is a “capital ‘H’ horror film that risks it all and hits the jackpot, pummeling its audience into submissions and still leaving us asking for more.”

Jumping to more joyous fare, we were treated to some great laughs these past 365 days. One of the more lightweight moviegoing experiences of 2023 was Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, which we said very well may be the “most Wes Anderson movie.” Reviewer Jordan Hoffman wrote that it is “deceptively hilarious, and includes all the visual flair one would expect from this veteran auteur director and such a large cast of renowned actors.”

Adlakha said that Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers was an amazing “coming-of-age comedy-drama” that gave us a “career-defining performance” by Paul Giamatti. Richard Linklater’s Hit Man was another one that kept us smiling throughout its runtime as it mixed “romance with screwball comedy and a bizarre story of identity crisis that results in one of the most entertaining movies of the year.”

2023 also gave us what we once thought was going to be Hayao Miyazaki’s last film in The Boy and the Heron. While it turns out the legendary animator is already hard at work on his next project, that didn’t stop reviewer Rafael Motamayor from saying it was “Studio Ghibli’s most visually complex film to date” and that it also contemplated “the legacy of a legendary filmmaker and the world he is leaving behind.”

The Boy and the Heron was joined by other top-tier animated films, including Suzume. Seward Jr. said that this film, which follows the struggles of being a teenager that are compounded by the “occasional world-ending monster,” was one of the “most captivating animated films released this year.” Netflix’s Nimona was another standout in 2023 and turned out to be an excellent adaptation of the graphic novel by Noelle Stevenson. Reviewer Samantha Nelson said it was a “sweet and funny science-fantasy film that boldly fights the monster of intolerance.”

Motamayor also found a lot to love in The First Slam Dunk, the sequel to the iconic ’90s manga and anime that followed the members of the Shohoku High School basketball team. In his review, he called it a “high-octane thrilling sports anime film with mind-blowing animation that serves as a great conclusion and introduction to a classic ’90s anime.”

The last three movies we’ll be discussing all have stuck with us well past when their credits rolled. The first one up is Fingernails, a film starring Jessie Buckley and Jeremy Allen White that our reviewer Rafa Sales Ross said was a “sleek sci-fi feature that sets out to question the differences between passion and love through a near-future dystopia where couples can scientifically test their connection.”

May December is next and it follows an actress played by Natalie Portman who is shadowing a controversial tabloid figure played by Julianne Moore. Adlakha called it an “unnerving, campy triumph” that is a “melodramatic piece about searching for both honesty and dishonesty, and about which one is truly more revealing.” Lastly, we have Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, an “emotional rollercoaster dancing between reality and invention.” Reviewer Lex Briscuso also noted that “the consequences of a fractured marriage make for a deeply engrossing watch impossible not to get sucked into.”

And there you have it – IGN’s best reviewed movies of 2023! While we wait for the treasures we hope 2024 brings us, be sure to check out which films sadly made it onto our worst reviewed movies of 2023 list.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

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2023 was a great year for moviegoing — here are 10 of Justin Chang's favorites

Justin Chang

Film critics like to argue as a rule, but every colleague I've talked to in recent weeks agrees that 2023 was a pretty great year for moviegoing. The big, box office success story, of course, was the blockbuster mash-up of Barbie and Oppenheimer , but there were so many other titles — from the gripping murder mystery Anatomy of a Fall to the Icelandic wilderness epic Godland — that were no less worth seeking out, even if they didn't generate the same memes and headlines.

These are the 10 that I liked best, arranged as a series of pairings. My favorite movies are often carrying on a conversation with each other, and this year was no exception.

All of Us Strangers and The Boy and the Heron

Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in All of Us Strangers, left, and 12-year-old Mahito in an otherworldly realm in The Boy and the Heron. Searchlight Pictures; Studio Ghibli hide caption

An unusual pairing, to be sure, but together these two quasi-supernatural meditations on grief restore some meaning to the term "movie magic." In All of Us Strangers , a metaphysical heartbreaker from the English writer-director Andrew Haigh ( Weekend , 45 Years ), Andrew Scott plays a lonely gay screenwriter discovering new love even as he deals with old loss; he and Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell constitute the acting ensemble of the year. And in The Boy and the Heron , the Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki looks back on his own life with an elegiac but thrillingly unruly fantasy, centered on a 12-year-old boy who could be a stand-in for the young Miyazaki himself. Here's my The Boy and the Heron review.

The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest portrays life next-door to Auschwitz, left, and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. A24; Universal hide caption

These two dramas approach the subject of World War II from formally radical, ethically rigorous angles. The Zone of Interest is Jonathan Glazer's eerily restrained and mesmerizing portrait of a Nazi commandant and his family living next door to Auschwitz; Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan 's thrillingly intricate drama about the theoretical physicist who devised the atomic bomb. Both films deliberately keep their wartime horrors off-screen, but leave us in no doubt about the magnitude of what's going on. Here's my Oppenheimer review .

Showing Up and Afire

Michelle Williams in Showing Up , left, and Thomas Schubert in Afire. A24; Janus hide caption

Two sharply nuanced portraits of grumpy artists at work. In Kelly Reichardt 's wincingly funny Showing Up , Michelle Williams plays a Portland sculptor trying to meet a looming art-show deadline. In Afire , the latest from the great German director Christian Petzold , a misanthropic writer (Thomas Schubert) struggles to finish his second novel at a remote house in the woods. Both protagonists are so memorably ornery, you almost want to see them in a crossover romantic-comedy sequel. Here's my Showing Up review .

Past Lives and The Eight Mountains

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in Past Lives , left, and Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli The Eight Mountains. A24; Sideshow/Janus Films hide caption

Two movies about long-overdue reunions between childhood pals. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are terrifically paired in Past Lives , Celine Song 's wondrously intimate and philosophical story about fate and happenstance. And in The Eight Mountains , Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch's gorgeously photographed drama set in the Italian Alps, the performances of Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi are as breathtaking as the scenery. Here are my reviews for Past Lives and The Eight Mountains .

De Humani Corporis Fabrica and Poor Things

A surgeon in De Humani Corporis Fabrica , left, and Emma Stone in Poor Things. Grasshopper Film & Gratitude Films; Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures hide caption

Surgery, two ways: The best and most startling documentary I saw this year is Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which features both hard-to-watch and mesmerizing close-up footage of surgeons going about their everyday work. The medical procedures prove far more experimental in Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos ' hilarious Frankenstein-inspired dark comedy starring a marvelous Emma Stone as a woman implanted with a child's brain. Here is my Poor Things review .

More movie pairings from past years

Justin Chang pairs the best movies of 2022, and picks 'No Bears' as his favorite

Justin Chang pairs the 10 best movies of 2021 — plus 1 film that stands alone

A Terrific Year For Smaller Films: Critic Justin Chang Pairs 10 Favorites From 2020

Double Feature: Critic Justin Chang Pairs His Favorite Films Of 2019

Movie Reviews

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"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig ’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example. The costume design (led by two-time Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran ) and production design (led by six-time Oscar nominee Sarah Greenwood ) are constantly clever and colorful, befitting the ever-evolving icon, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (a three-time Oscar nominee) gives everything a glossy gleam. It’s not just that Gerwig & Co. have recreated a bunch of Barbies from throughout her decades-long history, outfitted them with a variety of clothing and hairstyles, and placed them in pristine dream houses. It’s that they’ve brought these figures to life with infectious energy and a knowing wink.

“Barbie” can be hysterically funny, with giant laugh-out-loud moments generously scattered throughout. They come from the insularity of an idyllic, pink-hued realm and the physical comedy of fish-out-of-water moments and choice pop culture references as the outside world increasingly encroaches. But because the marketing campaign has been so clever and so ubiquitous, you may discover that you’ve already seen a fair amount of the movie’s inspired moments, such as the “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” homage and Ken’s self-pitying ‘80s power ballad. Such is the anticipation industrial complex.

And so you probably already know the basic plot: Barbie ( Margot Robbie ), the most popular of all the Barbies in Barbieland, begins experiencing an existential crisis. She must travel to the human world in order to understand herself and discover her true purpose. Her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Ken ( Ryan Gosling ), comes along for the ride because his own existence depends on Barbie acknowledging him. Both discover harsh truths—and make new friends –along the road to enlightenment. This bleeding of stark reality into an obsessively engineered fantasy calls to mind the revelations of “ The Truman Show ” and “The LEGO Movie,” but through a wry prism that’s specifically Gerwig’s.

This is a movie that acknowledges Barbie’s unrealistic physical proportions—and the kinds of very real body issues they can cause in young girls—while also celebrating her role as a feminist icon. After all, there was an astronaut Barbie doll (1965) before there was an actual woman in NASA’s astronaut corps (1978), an achievement “Barbie” commemorates by showing two suited-up women high-fiving each other among the stars, with Robbie’s Earth-bound Barbie saluting them with a sunny, “Yay, space!” This is also a movie in which Mattel (the doll’s manufacturer) and Warner Bros. (the film’s distributor) at least create the appearance that they’re in on the surprisingly pointed jokes at their expense. Mattel headquarters features a spacious, top-floor conference room populated solely by men with a heart-shaped, “ Dr. Strangelove ”-inspired lamp hovering over the table, yet Will Ferrell ’s CEO insists his company’s “gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo” are evidence of diversity. It's a neat trick.

As the film's star, Margot Robbie finds just the right balance between satire and sincerity. She’s  the  perfect casting choice; it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner completely looks the part, of course, but she also radiates the kind of unflagging, exaggerated optimism required for this heightened, candy-coated world. Later, as Barbie’s understanding expands, Robbie masterfully handles the more complicated dialogue by Gerwig and her co-writer and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Noah Baumbach . From a blinding smile to a single tear and every emotion in between, Robbie finds the ideal energy and tone throughout. Her performance is a joy to behold.

And yet, Ryan Gosling is a consistent scene-stealer as he revels in Ken’s himbo frailty. He goes from Barbie’s needy beau to a swaggering, macho doofus as he throws himself headlong into how he thinks a real man should behave. (Viewers familiar with Los Angeles geography will particularly get a kick out of the places that provide his inspiration.) Gosling sells his square-jawed character’s earnestness and gets to tap into his “All New Mickey Mouse Club” musical theater roots simultaneously. He’s a total hoot.

Within the film’s enormous ensemble—where the women are all Barbies and the men are all Kens, with a couple of exceptions—there are several standouts. They include a gonzo Kate McKinnon as the so-called “Weird Barbie” who places Robbie’s character on her path; Issa Rae as the no-nonsense President Barbie; Alexandra Shipp as a kind and capable Doctor Barbie; Simu Liu as the trash-talking Ken who torments Gosling’s Ken; and America Ferrera in a crucial role as a Mattel employee. And we can’t forget Michael Cera as the one Allan, bumbling awkwardly in a sea of hunky Kens—although everyone else forgets Allan.

But while “Barbie” is wildly ambitious in an exciting way, it’s also frustratingly uneven at times. After coming on strong with wave after wave of zippy hilarity, the film drags in the middle as it presents its more serious themes. It’s impossible not to admire how Gerwig is taking a big swing with heady notions during the mindless blockbuster season, but she offers so many that the movie sometimes stops in its propulsive tracks to explain itself to us—and then explain those points again and again. The breezy, satirical edge she established off the top was actually a more effective method of conveying her ideas about the perils of toxic masculinity and entitlement and the power of female confidence and collaboration.

One character delivers a lengthy, third-act speech about the conundrum of being a woman and the contradictory standards to which society holds us. The middle-aged mom in me was nodding throughout in agreement, feeling seen and understood, as if this person knew me and was speaking directly to me. But the longtime film critic in me found this moment a preachy momentum killer—too heavy-handed, too on-the-nose, despite its many insights.  

Still, if such a crowd-pleasing extravaganza can also offer some fodder for thoughtful conversations afterward, it’s accomplished several goals simultaneously. It’s like sneaking spinach into your kid’s brownies—or, in this case, blondies.

Available in theaters on July 21st. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Barbie (2023)

Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language.

114 minutes

Margot Robbie as Barbie

Ryan Gosling as Ken

America Ferrera as Gloria

Will Ferrell as Mattel CEO

Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie

Ariana Greenblatt as Sasha

Issa Rae as President Barbie

Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler

Hari Nef as Doctor Barbie

Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie

Alexandra Shipp as Writer Barbie

Michael Cera as Allan

Helen Mirren as Narrator

Simu Liu as Ken

Dua Lipa as Mermaid Barbie

John Cena as Kenmaid

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A deceptively dark thriller that's also loaded with laughs, Hit Man is an outstanding showcase for leading man Glen Powell -- and one of the most purely entertaining films of Richard Linklater's career.

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Based on the book by the best-selling author of Wonder, this uplifting movie shows how one act of kindness can live on forever. Based on the book by the best-selling author of Wonder, this uplifting movie shows how one act of kindness can live on forever. Based on the book by the best-selling author of Wonder, this uplifting movie shows how one act of kindness can live on forever.

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• Trivia Originally set for a release on September 16, 2022, it was pushed to October 14, 2022. Later that month, the film was quietly removed from the schedule and pushed to August 25, 2023, due to underperforming at the Fall (2021 box office and pushed again to an unspecified date due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.
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The Best Films of 2024, So Far

Our critics pick nine films that they think are worth your time on this long holiday weekend.

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By The New York Times

Looking for a good movie to pass the time this Memorial Day weekend? The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, have you covered. Here are their top picks for the year so far. All are in theaters or available on demand.

In theaters; June 7 on Netflix .

The story: Glen Powell is a philosophy professor who moonlights for the police in New Orleans when he finds himself undercover posing as a hit man in this Richard Linklater movie. An encounter with Madison (Adria Arjona), a housewife looking to hire him, raises the stakes, comedically and romantically.

Alissa Wilkinson’s take: “If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now.” Read the review.

‘Civil War’

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'Godzilla Minus One' Review: The best Godzilla film ever!

'godzilla minus one' review: director takashi yamazaki's 'godzilla minus one' won rave reviews during its premiere in tokyo and usa in 2023. now, the much-awaited film is premiering on netflix. read our review..

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• 'Godzilla Minus One' is streaming on Netflix
• It is hands-down the best Godzilla film you'd have witnessed
• The story of 'Godzilla Minus One' is set around the end of World War II

Release Date: 7 Jun, 2024

When 'Godzilla Minus One' dropped on Netflix with no big announcement or promo, it caught many, including me, by surprise. After all, this was THE Godzilla film everyone was waiting for. With a limited release worldwide, fans of the franchise were hoping that it gets a theatrical release in India. But for now, we have to make do with the OTT version and be happy! So why is 'Godzilla Minus One' such an important feature in this franchise? And what sets it apart from the other Godzilla movies? Let’s dive deep!

Godzilla leads the pack when it comes to monster movies that are based on a creature. For years, Japanese filmmakers have been obsessed with this giant that is sea and land-borne, which wreaks havoc and destroys cities. The recent 'Godzilla vs Kong' universe even took this prospect to a newer level and introduced possibilities of radiation and its aftermath. But 'Minus One' is a different Godzilla film .

The film doesn’t want us to only clap and jump in our seats when the monster arrives. The story is set around the end of World War II where a guilt-ridden pilot tries to give himself a second chance only to find that there is no real escape from the demons of his past. The story and writing are so sharp and at the same time create a world where we get to see a lot of what the Japanese common folk went through as a result of the war.

The film won the Best Visual Effects at the Oscars 2024, and you can tell why. The makers don’t go overboard with the pyrotechnics and keep it subtle. When you see Godzilla for the first time, you are in absolute awe of him. His eyes and his moves feel more real and menacing than ever before. The fight scenes, especially the ones set in the ocean where they try and prevent the creature from coming to the shore, are terrific. Takashi Yamakazi creates an almost perfect Godzilla film that does ample justice to its 1954 beginning.

At a time when the West is so heavily invested and relying on VFX in storytelling, it’s heartening to see a filmmaker balance both in a creature film that is expected to sway audiences towards visual effects. If you haven’t watched any Godzilla film before, then this is a terrific introduction to its universe and if you are a 'Kaiju' fanatic, then 'Minus One' is the perfect antidote to your Godzilla withdrawal symptoms.

5 out of 5 stars for 'Godzilla Minus One'. Published By: K Janani Published On: Jun 7, 2024 ALSO READ | Oscars 2024 Highlights: 'Oppenheimer' bags Best Picture, wins 7 awards

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Netflix’s best new movie arrives with a near-perfect 98% on rotten tomatoes.

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When I first saw the poster for Netflix’s Hit Man, it looked like something you might find on Amazon Prime Video’s digital store after scrolling over eight times past a bunch of other films.

Then, reviews started coming in. The movie currently stands at a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes with 175 reviews from critics, a stunning achievement for any movie, especially a comedy, and of course there is one magic ingredient here. No, not Glen Powell, though I’m sure he helps. But rather this is a film from Richard Linklater.

Linklater is the exceptionally famous director of movies like School of Rock, Boyhood, Before Sunrise/Sunset and way back in 1993, the forever-classic Dazed and Confused. Now, he’s back with what will no doubt be the most-watched movie in America when it tops Netflix, and these reviews are simply stunning. Audience scores are also coming in and currently sit at a 95%, indicating it will be a hit among viewers as well.

Hit Man stars Powell as a professor who pretends to be a hit man for the police department, but things get dangerous when a woman (Andor’s Adria Arjona) enters his life and enlists his “services.”

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Powell is currently the hottest male talent in Hollywood after his turn on Top Gun: Maverick and his blockbuster romcom with Sydney Sweeney, Anyone But You. He is absolutely everywhere right now, and has another big project coming up in the form of Twisters. He’s also attached to a Running Man remake. Arjona, meanwhile, is perhaps an underused part of Andor, but I absolutely knew she was going to be a star while watching that show. And here she is, plus she’s about to lead the upcoming Criminal series for Amazon.

It’s just so exceedingly rare to see a comedy review this well in this day and age, but if anyone was going to pull it off, it was going to be Linklater. I have no doubt at all that this will soon become the #1 movie on Netflix after its debut today, and will likely stay there a while. I’m not sure if it’s designed to have a sequel, though Linklater almost never does those, and one should certainly not happen without him.

I’ll give Hit Man a watch over the weekend and render my own verdict later. My colleague Erik Kain was one of the rare critics that didn’t like it , but I’m going to wait to read why until after I can make my own initial judgement.

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Review: In ‘Flipside,’ the untold stories of a wanna-be documentarian coalesce into wisdom

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Midlifers, be forewarned as Chris Wilcha’s “Flipside” amiably rolls along: Before this essayistic, personal documentary about creativity and compromise even hits its stride, you’ll find yourself in a commiserative funk about whatever grand dream of artistic fulfillment you set aside to make a living. (Note to self: There’s still time to write that murder-mystery musical.)

“Flipside” is no downer, however, about roads not taken (or even left unpaved). Using the malleable metaphor of a used record store, where love and nostalgia tame that old smackdown between art and commerce to a friendly draw, and the forgotten sits right alongside the accomplished, Wilcha breezily excavates why life can feel so full of promise while also being frustratingly incomplete. He folds in a message of gratitude that tints this sneakily affecting movie with a forgiving sense of color and light.

The shop that is the movie’s namesake is a cramped altar to vinyl located in New Jersey, a treasured hangout from the music-obsessive Wilcha’s youth. And yet, over the years, his efforts to immortalize it on film (to help it stay alive) kept stalling, until it began to symbolize for him a nagging pattern in the filmmaker’s life: so many personally meaningful documentary ideas started and never finished, while the gigs that paid the bills — directing commercials — filled his schedule.

Exacerbating that guilt for Wilcha, who narrates “Flipside” over a snappy assemblage of archival clips, is his proudly anti-consumerist, irony-fueled stance of Generation X. He established his indie bona fides with his Slamdance-winning 2000 debut feature “The Target Shoots First,” which chronicled his first year at a music-biz job.

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A career in advertising was hardly what he expected, even as the 30-second world put food on the family’s table and occasionally allowed for jobs of note. (Wilcha has two Emmys for the short-lived TV version of the acclaimed radio show “This American Life.”) He owes his move to the West Coast to job opportunities from Judd Apatow , who speaks on camera about his own view of sidelined ambition, being a hungry young stand-up who came to realize that writing for others was his true calling.

There are other mini-portraits, too, of creative figures who cross Wilcha’s orbit and speak to the film’s peculiar nexus of achievement, circumstance and self-reflection, including oddball comedian Uncle Floyd, whose fame window was brief but whose cult status inspired a David Bowie song; TV impresario David Milch , plagued by demons and Alzheimer’s disease but driven by generosity; and god-tier jazz photographer Herman Leonard . The clips of Leonard, who speaks eloquently of his art form’s reliance on patience for the right moment, are from — what else? — a proposed film about him that Wilcha never completed.

Of all his shelved hard drives, however, Wilcha’s movie about the record store felt like the one that got away. We see him revisit the store and its crusty, defiantly hype-challenged owner, Dan, and learn that it’s become even harder for it to survive since the opening of a newer, shinier, Internet-savvy used-LP shop around the corner. As Wilcha renews his commitment to his abandoned film, he muses whether becoming a marketing-savvy sellout might also be what saves a beloved bastion of his youth.

He’s also smart enough to know that whether Flipside stays in business isn’t the real story but, rather, how an opportunity in life that feels like an A side might become a B side, and vice versa. It’s all music, Wilcha’s sweetly philosophical movie seems to be saying — and being present enough to listen.

'Flipside'

Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes Playing: In limited release Friday, June 7

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We're halfway through 2024. Here are the 10 best movies of the year (so far).

The sauciest tennis movie maybe ever. A queer bodybuilding revenge thriller. A very different Bible tale.

When it comes to the films of 2024, these are a few of our favorite things.

Last year was an amazing year for movies . This year, though, has been a little rough. People are freaking out over box-office receipts, and high-profile flicks – most recently, "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" and "The Garfield Movie" – aren't exactly raking in the cash; in fact, only five films in 2024 have cleared the $100 million bar domestically. And the movies themselves have been just OK on the whole. Usually, Hollywood backloads the really good stuff, and after " Madame Web ," "Argylle" and other rather middling fare, more quality is desperately needed.

Thankfully, there have also been some standouts. Here are 2024’s best movies so far, definitively ranked:

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10. 'The First Omen'

"The Omen" franchise receives a nice refresh with this prequel to the original 1976 movie. Nell Tiger Free stars as a young American novitiate at an Italian orphanage who becomes embroiled in a rogue Catholic Church conspiracy to birth the antichrist. There's plenty of nun horror and a jaw-droppingly gonzo finale, but feminist undertones and a timely take on religion bring depth and relevance to a demonically effective chiller.

Where to watch: Hulu , Disney+

9. 'The Book of Clarence'

Jeymes Samuel's thoughtful and subversive take on the biblical resurrection story stars LaKeith Stanfield as Clarence, a streetwise Jerusalem man in Jesus' time. Seeing the power and swagger Jesus has, Clarence proclaims himself "the new messiah," tries his hand at miracles and runs afoul of the Romans in a spiritually touching Everyman story anyone can relate to, whether you’re a believer or not.

Where to watch: Netflix

8. 'Late Night With the Devil'

David Dastmalchian makes everything he's in better, from the "Ant-Man" movies and "The Suicide Squad" to "Oppenheimer" and "The Boogeyman." He gets a hell of a lead role in this discomforting and mind-bending retro horror movie, starring as a 1970s late-night TV host who is tired of losing in the ratings to Johnny Carson and brings on a supposedly possessed girl in a Halloween gambit that spirals supernaturally out of control.

Where to watch: Shudder

7. 'Drive-Away Dolls'

Director Ethan Coen's goofball crime comedy is a playfully madcap turn on the “Thelma & Louise” model, with Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley playing lesbian friends needing to get away from their everyday lives. Driving a rental car to Florida, they find something weird in the trunk and wind up on a campy, noir-spattered road trip. (Extra cool points for including a fun bit from cameo king Matt Damon.)

Where to watch: Peacock

6. 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga'

In the prequel to "Mad Max: Fury Road," Anya Taylor-Joy takes over Charlize Theron's title role as young Furiosa embarks upon an epic revenge quest that involves vehicular mayhem, explosive action sequences, rampant road rage and the weirdest villain Chris Hemsworth will probably ever play . It's no "Fury Road" but "Mad Max" mastermind George Miller again delivers a wild and worthy dystopian thrill ride through the Wasteland.

Where to watch: In theaters

5. 'Hit Man'

Glen Powell may be a rising star after "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Anyone But You," but the real talent scouts have been on board since his wise ballplayer in Richard Linklater's "Everybody Wants Some!!" They team again for an irresistible noir comedy and Powell's most wide-ranging role to date, a nerdy philosophy professor who moonlights as a fake assassin on cop crime stings and falls for a "client" (Adria Arjona) wanting to off her hubby.

Where to watch: In theaters now, on Netflix Friday

4. 'Challengers'

Just when you think sports movies are all the same, director Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me By Your Name") serves up an art-house topspin with his engaging, hot-blooded tennis melodrama . Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor star as young doubles partners and Zendaya is the teen singles sensation who creates an emotionally complicated love triangle that unfolds in fierce fashion on and off the court over several tumultuous years.

Where to watch: Apple TV , Fandango at Home , Amazon

3. 'Love Lies Bleeding'

Eyes lock between pumped-up Midwestern bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian) and introverted gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and a love connection sparks. Then everything falls apart, and bodies start hitting the ground, in director Rose Glass' sultry, sweaty and sufficiently bizarre neo-noir thriller . Come for the bullets and barbells, stay for O'Brian's fantastic star-making turn, deftly capturing the troubled soul underneath Jackie’s muscles.

2. 'Civil War'

With his riveting cautionary tale , director Alex Garland takes our current political and cultural divide to a disturbing place and makes audiences confront what an actual modern civil war would look like. The thriller doubles as a journalism movie, too, with Kirsten Dunst turning in an outstanding performance as a world-weary photographer who takes a rookie (Cailee Spaeny) under her wing on the dangerous road to a scoop for the ages.

1. 'Dune: Part Two'

For a much-anticipated epic sci-fi movie, director Denis Villeneuve's 2021 "Dune: Part One" was aggressively average. (Heck, that David Lynch "Dune" was more enjoyable.) But all is forgiven now, Denis: "Part Two" is a sprawling, sandworm-filled triumph . Timothée Chalamet finally finds his way as the messianic Paul Atreides – plus digs into the thorny issues that come with being a savior figure – in a gripping, action-packed sequel exploring power, colonialism and religion.

Where to watch: Max