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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

top movie review 2023

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

9. Dreamin' Wild

top movie review 2023

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.

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

top movie review 2023

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

top movie review 2023

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

6. Past Lives

top movie review 2023

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.

5. Revoir Paris

top movie review 2023

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

top movie review 2023

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.

3. The Zone of Interest

top movie review 2023

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.

top movie review 2023

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

top movie review 2023

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 10 best movies of 2023

Peter Travers shares his take on the best 10 films of 2023.

It was a phenomenal year for movies.

With the long shadow of the pandemic in retreat, cinema came back in all its infinite variety, filling theaters to such an extent that the term "Barbenheimer" was coined to describe two summer movies that opened on the same day and shattered box-office records.

Few had much hope for "Barbie," a film about a doll, or "Oppenheimer," an epic about nuclear doomsday. But look at them now, heading into the Oscar race with dollar signs attached to their rave reviews.

Both rank high among the year's best, joining another classic about America's violent past from beloved master Martin Scorsese and an achingly tender romance from South Korean newcomer Celine Song, whose young talent is just beginning to blossom.

MORE: Golden Globes nominations 2024: Snubs and surprises

So here, starting with No. 10 and working our way up to the top spot, are my picks for the 10 best movies of 2023.

10. "Barbie"

A Hollywood hack could have turned the backstory of a Mattel doll into a quick-buck opportunity. Instead, trailblazing director Greta Gerwig gifts us with a hot-pink fantasia of feminist art that refuses to play it safe as Margot Robbie's doubt-plagued Barbie teams up with Ryan Gosling's clueless Ken to keep you thinking long after the laughs die down.

PHOTO: Ryan Gosling as Ken and Margot Robbie as Barbie as shown in a scene from Warner Bros. Pictures' "Barbie."

And the dudes who think Gerwig's takedown of the patriarchy means she's a hater of men aren't paying attention. Gerwig is a woman of heart and mind. Listen up and you might just learn something.

9. "May December"

Todd Haynes' slippery tease of a movie has been classified as a comedy. So how does that explain the tears falling from your eyes? Focus on the heart-crushing performance from Charles Melton as a stunted manchild still reeling from his marriage to a woman (a thorny, complex Julianne Moore) jailed for seducing him when he was just a seventh grader.

PHOTO:  Charles Melton as Joe in "May December," 2023.

With Natalie Portman hitting a new career peak as the manipulative actress prepping to bring that skewed love story to the screen, you'll be thrown thrillingly off balance.

PHOTO: Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo in "May December," 2023.

Editor’s Picks

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Review: Director Todd Haynes is a virtuoso at walking the tightrope between humor and heartache in 'May December'

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'Napoleon' review: Time capsule-worthy battle visuals, hypnotic performances

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8. "The Holdovers"

Already hailed as a new holiday classic, this fresh triumph from "Sideways" director Alexander Payne delivers warmth that shouldn't be mistaken for weakness. Paul Giamatti shines as a Grinchy teacher who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit Dominic Sessa's Angus, a student with nowhere to go. And Oscar frontrunner Da'Vine Joy Randolph is the school cook who can't laugh off her pain as the film turns cliches into hard truths.

PHOTO: Paul Giamatti in a scene of "The Holdovers" movie trailer.

MORE: Review: 'The Holdovers' has the makings of a new holiday classic

7. "The Zone of Interest"

Jonathan Glazer is the kind of risk-taker who creates a film about the Holocaust and then makes his point by not showing us anything about the horrors taking place as Nazis exterminate Jews at Auschwitz. Instead Glazer focuses on commandant Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) as he and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children go about the mundane business of living as if they couldn't see the smoke and hear the screams coming from just next door. Echoing the scary rise of antisemitism today, this urgent warning is hard to watch and impossible to forget.

PHOTO: Sandra Huller in "The Zone of Interest," 2023.

MORE: Review: 'The Zone of Interest' is hard to watch, but impossible to forget

6. "Maestro"

As star, director and co-writer, Bradley Cooper tops his career in this raw and romantic crescendo of a movie about conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein. The Oscar belongs to Cooper for his heart-full-to-bursting tour de force as the maestro whose passions can't be confined to one kind of music or one sex.

PHOTO: Bradley Cooper appears as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in "Maestro."

Carey Mulligan is his emotional equal as the wife who lives with Bernstein's angels and demons. Alive with glorious music, Cooper's labor of love catches us up in the experience of watching a genius in the exhilarating act of inventing himself.

MORE: Review: 'Maestro' is Bradley Cooper's heart-full-to-bursting tour de force as Leonard Bernstein

5. "American Fiction"

There's a rush of fresh comic thinking in writer-director Cord Jefferson's dazzling debut feature. In his best and most bracing film role to date, Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a Black novelist who feels angry and frustrated that his well-reviewed books never sell. It seems the public only ponies up for stories that juggle tropes about Black poverty and violence. So Monk joins the enemy club under a pseudonym and hits paydirt with hilarious and pointedly satiric results. This tale of an artist selling out his principles will make you laugh till it hurts.

PHOTO: Erika Alexander, as Coraline, and Jeffrey Wright, as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, in a scene from "American Fiction."

MORE: Review 'American Fiction': Jeffrey Wright should be on his way to an Oscar nomination

4. "Anatomy of a Fall"

No list of the greatest film actors of 2023 would be complete without Hüller (also starring in the aforementioned "Zone of Interest"), who burns up the screen in Justine Triet's forensic anatomy of a marriage. Told through the compulsively watchable tale of a wife on trial for killing her husband by pushing him out a window, the film pins you to your seat. As a successful author forced to deal with the failure of her far-from-better half (Samuel Theis), Hüller gives a performance you can't shake. The same goes for the devilishly clever script by Triet and her husband Arthur Harari, who merge a brilliant battle of the sexes with a courtroom thriller for the ages.

PHOTO: Scene from "Anatomy of a Fall."

3. "Poor Things"

Prepare to be wowed by Emma Stone's nakedly unafraid performance in this rowdy and rapturously beautiful blast of feminist whup-ass from director Yorgos Lanthimos. Stone plays a pregnant and suicidally unhappy wife who plunges to her watery death only to be reanimated by a nutjob scientist (Willem Dafoe) who swaps her dead brain for that of her unborn child and waits until she can take baby steps into a sexual and psychological awakening.

top movie review 2023

Lanthimos is a master provocateur who doesn't make movies like anyone else. You won't know what hit you.

MORE: Review: Emma Stone delivers a performance you'll never forget in 'Poor Things'

2. "Past Lives"

Writer-director Celine Song gets it gloriously right her first time out, crafting a lyrical work of art out of her own life as a 12-year-old girl who leaves her family home and her boy crush Hae Sung in South Korea to grow up in Canada. The luminous Greta Lee stars as the adult Nora, who's now a playwright in New York City and married to Arthur (John Magaro), an American, when Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) decides to visit Nora in Manhattan.

PHOTO: "Past Lives," 2023.

The movie spins on that pivotal reunion, uniting Nora and Hae Sung through bonds of language and culture that basically cut Arthur out of the equation. Delicate business is being transacted in this transfixing beauty of a film.

MORE: Review: 'Past Lives' is one of the best movies of the year

1. A tie between "Killers of the Flower Moon" and "Oppenheimer"

They are the twin peaks of this banner film year. I couldn't rate one over the other. Greatness is written all over "Killers of the Flower of the Moon," Martin Scorsese's sorrowful epic about the long history of U.S. mistreatment of Native Americans. Underlined by stupendous acting from Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Oscar favorite Lily Gladstone as an Osage oil heiress caught in a murderous trap by greedy white men, "Killers" is classic Scorsese.

PHOTO: Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from  “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

"Oppenheimer" is classic Christopher Nolan, a generation younger than Scorsese but also possessed of the mind of a visionary and the soul of a poet. You can see it in Nolan's brilliant, bruising take on J. Robert Oppenheimer (a flawless Cillian Murphy), the conflicted architect of the atomic age.

PHOTO: Cillian Murphy is seen in the Universal Pictures move trailer, "Oppenheimer".

Just as Scorsese unearths the tangled roots of American racism, Nolan triggers the nightmare of nuclear annihilation that we still can't wake up from.

PHOTO: Cillian Murphy stars as Robert Oppenheimer stars in the film "Oppenheimer".

Through the past, these all-time, filmmaking giants speak profoundly to right this very minute.

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Hollywood reporter critics pick the best films of 2023.

A romantic collision of past and present, a subversive feminist fairy tale, a metaphysical ghost story, an epic retelling of a horrific footnote in American history and a sublime anti-rom-com are among this year’s highlights.

By David Rooney , Jon Frosch , Lovia Gyarkye , Sheri Linden December 13, 2023

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Any year in which an unlikely summer double bill became a global moviegoing event — with one film soaring toward $1.5 billion in worldwide grosses and the other closing in on $1 billion — can’t be considered bad news for Hollywood. But the Barbenheimer phenomenon aside, bad news plagued the film industry for much of 2023.

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Theatrical grosses remained inconsistent, struggling to regain pre-pandemic momentum for most genres except horror (all hail, new scream queen M3GAN ; a big hand for Talk to Me ), and even the once-reliable cash cow of the superhero blockbuster sputtered more often than not.

The Marvels was a major flop for the MCU, as was The Flash for DC, and although many of us found Blue Beetle an unexpected delight that overcame our weariness with folks in spandex and capes, the movie’s considerable charms failed to translate into healthy ticket sales.

No one knows what’s a safe bet at the box office anymore.

Still, the annual task of whittling down the year’s releases to a Top 10 was more challenging than ever. As is invariably the case, the best of them were festival discoveries. My list is bookended by Sundance premieres, with titles from Cannes, Venice and Telluride occupying every spot in between.

This was a year to celebrate auspicious debuts by women filmmakers whose command of the medium was matched by thematic maturity and an ability to coax transfixing performances from their female leads. In addition to Celine Song’s Past Lives and Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama , both of which appear on my list, that includes Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt , Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean , A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One and Tina Satter’s Reality .

The documentary field delivered too many highlights to name, but the nonfiction films that stayed with me included Wim Wenders’ visually seductive Anselm ; D. Smith’s intimate portrait of Black trans sex workers, Kokomo City ; Maite Alberdi’s shattering glimpse into one couple’s lives together, The Eternal Memory ; and Jesse Shortbull and Laura Tomaselli’s searing indictment of the theft of sacred land from its Indigenous owners, Lakota Nation vs. United States .

Two music docs were among my most exhilarating viewing experiences this year — Lisa Cortes’ rip-roaring bio of a singular rock pioneer, Little Richard: I Am Everything ; and Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s you-are-there account of a sui generis marathon concert by one of our most original performers, Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music .

Finally, seasoned documaker Roger Ross Williams segued into narrative features with the uplifting Cassandro , giving Gael García Bernal his best role in years, as a trailblazing queer lucha libre wrestler.

Read on for my ranked Top 10, plus 10 honorable mentions, followed by those of my brilliant comrades in the THR critics’ trenches, Jon Frosch, Lovia Gyarkye and Sheri Linden. I know I speak for all of us in saying 2023 was such a stellar year for movies that our lists could easily have been twice as long. — DAVID ROONEY

2. Poor Things Yorgos Lanthimos has been irreverently thumbing his nose at genre constraints since his Greek Weird Wave breakout with Dogtooth . But nothing in his unique filmography can compare with the fantastical flights of this inspired riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Led by a spectacular high-wire act of physical comedy, intellectual curiosity and gleeful licentiousness from a never-better Emma Stone, this adventurous adaptation of Scottish cult author Alasdair Gray’s novel is part absurdist comedy, part picaresque feminist Candide and 100 percent breathtaking original. There’s not a weak link in a supporting cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Kathryn Hunter and Christopher Abbott.

3. All of Us Strangers There was no tighter ensemble this year than Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy in Andrew Haigh’s dreamy metaphysical ghost story. While it’s a companion piece of sorts to the Brit writer-director’s 2011 breakthrough, the instant queer classic Weekend , the new film mirrors its contemplation of romantic love with an equally thoughtful probe into familial love. Imaginatively adapted from a Japanese novel, this emotional depth charge plumbs the complex relationships between gay men and their parents with uncommon compassion, while also reflecting on the scars of a generation that came of age during the AIDS crisis.

5. Fallen Leaves Six years after Finland’s poet of the proletariat murmured about retirement following his typically idiosyncratic Syrian refugee story, The Other Side of Hope , Aki Kaurismäki returns with an expertly chiseled tale of romantic missteps that lead — with patience, playfulness and humor simultaneously deadpan and steeped in melancholy — to the exultant possibility of love. Laced with winking cinephile references to the director’s auteur heroes, this deceptively modest film is both dour and droll, every frame finding beauty in a dingy milieu that seems frozen in time. As the lonely souls fumbling for connection, Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen are gloriously attuned to Kaurismäki’s wavelength, while his own dog nails a scene-stealing supporting role.

7. Showing Up Comedy has not factored much in the films of Kelly Reichardt, but the director’s latest collaboration with frequent muse Michelle Williams and Pacific Northwest author Jon Raymond has a low-key vein of humor that often recalls the eccentric American microcosms of vintage Robert Altman. Set around the now shuttered Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, it tracks the frantic preparations of Williams’ flinty sculptor for a solo gallery show as she deals with the headaches of her messy family, her fellow artist landlord (a hilarious Hong Chau) and a wounded pigeon. Rich in seemingly casual but telling observations, the film is equal parts funny and affecting; it might be Reichardt’s most personal work in its depiction of the challenges of making art amid chaos.

9. Perfect Days A serene film for chaotic times, Wim Wenders’ best narrative feature in years returns to the Japanese capital, almost four decades after he retraced the footsteps of Ozu in the documentary Tokyo-Ga . The great Kōji Yakusho plays a middle-aged man living a life of monastic austerity, greeting each new day with gratitude in his morning routine and approaching his job of cleaning restrooms in the city’s public parks with almost religious devotion. Little by little, hints are dropped of the more complicated earlier existence he left behind, as the rewarding drama becomes a poetic, unexpectedly moving account of one man’s hard-earned peace and contentment.

10. Passages Another German actor, like Hüller, who had a major breakout year is Franz Rogowski, playing the narcissistic film director at the center of Ira Sachs’ bruising Paris-set drama. Rogowski’s Tomas is an emotional wrecking ball, blithely beginning a relationship with Adèle Exarchopoulos’ French schoolteacher without anticipating the wedge it will drive into his marriage to Ben Whishaw’s seemingly more mild-mannered English printmaker. Caustically amusing, sexy, sad and unflinchingly intense, this is an intimate study of the formation and collapse of a romantic triangle, played with an invigorating absence of sentiment by three actors at the top of their game.

Jon Frosch’s Top 10

1. Killers of the Flower Moon 2. Anatomy of a Fall 3. Passages 4. Afire 5. May December 6. Fallen Leaves 7. Showing Up 8. The Zone of Interest 9. Kokomo City 10. All of Us Strangers

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Asteroid City ; The Holdovers ; Maestro ; Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros ; Oppenheimer ; Other People’s Children ; Past Lives ; Poor Things ; Totém ; You Hurt My Feelings

Lovia Gyarkye’s Top 10

1. Showing Up 2. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt 3. Earth Mama   4. Passages     5. Our Body 6. Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros   7. Anatomy of a Fall   8. Fallen Leaves 9. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret 10. Totém

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): The Boy and the Heron ; Fair Play ; Killers of the Flower Moon ; May December ; Monster ; Oppenheimer ; Orlando, My Political Biography ; Our Father, the Devil ; A Still Small Voice ; A Thousand and One

Sheri Linden’s Top 10

1. Showing Up 2. May December 3. Anatomy of a Fall 4. Killers of the Flower Moon 5. Past Lives 6. Oppenheimer   7. Pacifiction 8. Asteroid City 9. Passages 10. The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): The Boy and the Heron ; A Compassionate Spy ; The Delinquents ; Maestro ; Occupied City ; The Peasants ; Rodeo ; The Taste of Things ; The Teachers Lounge ; The Unknown Country

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The Best Movies of 2023

By Richard Brody

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon. DiCaprio is kneeling down holding Gladstone's hand....

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.

Ben Whishaw and Franz Rogowski one sitting on a bed nude the other standing in Passages.

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.

Sir Ben Kingsley and Dev Patel in Poison. They stand side by side.

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.

Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley in Priscilla. She sits in the back of a car with many fans outside of the vehicle.

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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Best films of 2023

The best movies of 2023

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

Don’t call it a comeback, but 2023 was the year audiences came back to the movies. That’s a quantifiable fact: in North America, total domestic box office hit the highest marks since before the pandemic. But even if you didn’t look up the hard numbers, movies just felt bigger than they have in a long while. Barbie   and Oppenheimer  led the charge, of course, becoming not just the biggest movie event of the year but maybe the most significant pop culture happening behind Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. By itself, that’s major – any time a black-and-white biopic about the inventor of the atomic bomb and a garishly coloured satire of a 60-year-old toy franchise become inextricably linked, that’s a good sign for cinema’s resurgent health.

But it wasn’t just Barbenheimer. Across the Spider-Verse  gave the flagging superhero genre a shot in the arm. Martin Scorsese dropped another masterpiece, M3GAN   reinvented the killer doll movie for the A.I. era and went mega-viral, while small-time charmers like Theater Camp ,  Scrapper and Rye Lane  reasserted the vitality of indie filmmaking. Even in the wake of the writer and actor strikes, it seemed like there was a spark at the multiplex again. These are our picks for the best.

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Best films of 2023

Tár

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.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

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.

Oppenheimer

3.  Oppenheimer

Even on IMAX, the seismic themes and ideas spill over the sides of Christopher Nolan's most spectacular, cerebral and haunting blockbuster yet. Cillian Murphy is brooding and briliiant as the titular physicist, J Robert Oppenheimer, charting his quest to build America the A-bomb in a science-fact thriller that’s paced like a chain reaction. The film’s jaw-dropping centrepiece – the first atomic bomb test – gives you a sense of what the first audiences to see  2001: A Space Odyssey  must have felt 50-odd years ago. In a world of CGI, Nolan opts to recreate it using practical effects (a don’t-try-it-at-home mix of gasoline, aluminium powder, magnesium and propane). Like the movie itself, it leaves you shaken to the core.

EO

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. 

Killers of the Flower Moon

5.  Killers of the Flower Moon

Already a hot favourite for Oscars across most (all?) categories, Martin Scorsese’s 1920s true-crime epic is meticulously crafted, beautifully played and entirely gripping – even over a potentially bum-numbing three hours and 26 minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are on top form as two very different kinds of amoral scumbag, both up to their necks in the blood of Osage Native Americans, but it’s newcomer Lily Gladstone who centres the film with a soulful, delicate performance as a taciturn Osage heiress with the moxie to survive this orgy of greed and violence.

Return to Seoul

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. 

Anatomy of a Fall

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.   

Past Lives

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.

May December

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.

The Boy and the Heron

10.  The Boy and the Heron

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

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 .

How to Have Sex

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.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

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.

Rye Lane

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. 

Godzilla Minus One

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. 

Fremont

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.

They Cloned Tyrone

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. 

The Fabelmans

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.

Reality

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.

Theater Camp

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.

The Old Oak

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?

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

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.

Saint Omer

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. 

Barbie

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.         

Women Talking

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.

Passages

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.   

Saltburn

27.  Saltburn

The Royal Hotel

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.

Enys Men

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. 

Subject

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.

War Pony

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.

Alcarràs

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 . 

Queendom

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.

Joyland

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. 

The Eight Mountains

35.  The Eight Mountains

Air

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.

Scrapper

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.

The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan

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.

The Beasts

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. 

Evil Dead Rise

40.  Evil Dead Rise

Revoir Paris

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. 

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

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. 

The Mission

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.

The Creator

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.

The Whale

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. 

M3GAN

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. 

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

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.

Broker

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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Intertwining again … Past Lives.

The 50 best movies of 2023 in the US

There was an extraordinary epic, a mesmeric emotional drama with Andrew Scott and an astonishing performance by Emma Stone on our list of must-see films of the year More on the best films of 2023 Read the UK cut of this list The best culture of 2023

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

The animated sequel offers a dazzling and inventive adventure that provides an antidote to superhero fatigue. Read the full review

Wim Wenders delivers a striking look at the work of German artist Anselm Kiefer in a stunning and superbly controlled documentary. Read the full review

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Judy Blume’s timeless novel gets a smart and sensitive adaptation with a standout performance from Rachel McAdams as a mother trying to deal with her daughter’s journey into adulthood. Read the full review

Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

American Fiction

Jeffrey Wright gives a career-best performance as a writer struggling with the backwards demands of the publishing world in writer-director Cord Jefferson’s incisive debut. Read the full review

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

A group of activists plot to destroy an oil pipeline in Daniel Goldhaber’s explosively entertaining eco-thriller. Read the full review

Explosively entertaining … Ariela Barer in How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Middle-class incomers to a remote village in Spain’s “wild west” expose fear, resentment and nationalism in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s disturbing true-crime drama. Read the full review

The tenderness, wisdom and instinct to survive of two teenage Native Americans is beautifully observed in actor turned director Riley Keough’s debut feature. Read the full review

Awe-inspiring … Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV

Documentary about the awe-inspiring vocation of the Korean avant garde disruptor, who foresaw the internet and meme culture’s importance in the 1970s. Read the full review

Orlando, My Political Biography

Paul B Preciado’s unusual and inventive documentary uses the work of Virginia Woolf to present the stories of 26 trans and non-binary people.

Complicated national loyalties … The Future Tense

The Future Tense

Semi-dramatised essay film by Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy explores complicated national loyalties alongside those of an extraordinary rebel. Read the full review

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Touches all the senses … All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.

Raven Jackson’s lyrical and leisurely debut drama follows the loves and losses of a woman living in Mississippi. Read the full review

The Deepest Breath

The dangerous act of freediving is explored in a visually immersive new film taking us down to the depths and examining what causes those involved to take such major risks. Read the full review

Bike dreams … Julie Ledru in Rodeo.

Real-life rider Julie Ledru plays a young tearaway on the outskirts of Bordeaux, drawn to take desperate risks with a criminal biker gang. Read the full review

A thrilling, eye-opening documentary follows the fight for freedom of the press within the Muscogee Nation, delivering insight and suspense.

The Taste of Things

Trần Anh Hùng’s delectable period drama follows the romance between a chef and her boss with indelible performances from Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel. Read the full review

A gay man cheats on his husband with a straight woman in Ira Sachs’s fiercely sexy and heartbreaking tale of young Parisians. Read the full review

Strange Way of Life

Dusty lusty tale … Strange Way of Life.

Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke sizzle in Almodóvar’s queer cowboy yarn, a dusty lusty tale of long-lost lovers bound by a bloody fate. Read the full review

Ridley Scott dispenses with the symbolic weight attached to previous biopics in favour of a spectacle with a great star at its centre. Read the full review

You Hurt My Feelings

Bittersweet … You Hurt My Feelings.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies lead grownup marital-pain comedy whose bittersweet punchlines stress the bitter component. Read the full review

Charming prequel to Roald Dahl’s celebrated chocolate-focused kids story, with Timothée Chalamet immensely likable as the youthful version of the top-hatted sweetmaker. Read the full review

Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard give excellent performances in Michel Franco’s absorbing drama about two lonely people finding each other. Read the full review

Oppenheimer

Agonising success … Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Flawed but extraordinary, Christopher Nolan’s account of the physicist who led the Manhattan Project captures the most agonising of success stories. Read the full review

The Teachers’ Lounge

A nervy German thriller that follows an idealistic young teacher as she tries to get to the bottom of a theft at school. Read the full review

Pretty Red Dress

Natey Jones as Travis in Pretty Red Dress

Terrific performances from Natey Jones, Alexandra Burke and Temilola Olatunbosun match this big-hearted music drama about masculinity. Read the full review

Tremendously shot and terrifically acted, this Neapolitan gangster drama from Mario Martone shatters the rose-tinted spectacles. Read the full review

May December

Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are potent in Todd Haynes’ drama, Portman as an actor spending time with Moore’s married sex offender as research for playing her in a film. Read the full review

Fumino Kimura as Taeko and Kento Nagayama as Jirô in Love Life

Japanese director Kôji Fukada has crafted a richly painful and quietly comic human drama filled with tangled and tragic chaotic life twists. Read the full review

There are hints of early Jim Jarmusch in Babak Jalali’s dreamy fourth feature about a fortune cookie writer looking for love, with fine supporting turns from The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White and Gregg Turkington. Read the full review

Alina Khan as Biba and Ali Junejo as Haider in Joyland

Saim Sadiq’s film explores the unsettled social and sexual identities of a widower and his children with delicacy and tenderness. Read the full review

Pacifiction

Benoît Magimel’s French high commissioner confronts the end of his personal Eden in Tahiti, in Albert Serra’s distinctive film. Read the full review

Incredible But True

House hunter … Léa Drucker in Incredible But True

Giddy comedy about middle-aged house hunters who find more in a bargain buy than anyone but director Quentin Dupieux could have dreamed of. Read the full review

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s knotty, perspective-shifting tale of a mother, a teacher, a child and an incident that brings them together delivers a heartbreaking gut punch. Read the full review

School-run thriller turns into high-stakes motherhood drama, with Laure Calamy in an acutely relatable story that grips. Read the full review

Agonising … Joanna Scanlan in After Love

Joanna Scanlan gives a tremendous performance as a Muslim convert, who agonisingly uncovers the secret life led by her late husband Ahmed, in a lacerating portrait of a life built on marital lies. Read the full review.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

The seductively quirky sad-serious tone of Haruki Murakami is evident in this animated adaptation of his surreal tales, as a constellation of characters try to save Tokyo – including a lost cat and a giant talkative frog. Read the full review

Lost … Benedetta Porcaroli as Amanda

A wealthy young woman, friendless and lost after studying abroad, sets about recovering an old friendship she thinks she once had. Read the full review

Carla Simón’s award-winning story of a peach farmer struggling to make ends meet asks many important questions about our relationship with the land and the human cost of progress. Read the full review

Heartfelt … Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre in Maestro

Bradley Cooper’s head-flingingly heartfelt Leonard Bernstein biopic offers an eerily exact impersonation of the composer, and gets to the heart of the sacrifices great artists feel they need to make. Read the full review

The Eight Mountains

A meditation on our capacity for love shapes this sweeping story of two friends, torn apart by family and life’s journeys but bound by something deeper. Read the full review

Michelle Williams plays an artist struggling with personal issues as she prepares her show in Kelly Reichardt’s absorbing low-key drama. Read the full review

Anatomy of a Fall

Compelling … Sandra Hüller and Swann Arlaud in Anatomy of a Fall

Sandra Hüller compels as an author accused of murder in Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning psychothriller, about a suspicious death whose only reliable witness happens to be blind. Read the full review

Hlynur Pálmason’s fictional account of a Danish pastor sent to Iceland in the 19th century is superb in its compositions and nuanced depictions of hostility. Read the full review

The Boy and the Heron

Bittersweet … Mahito (left) and Heron in The Boy and the Heron

Swan song release from Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki, a bittersweet tale of a kid searching for the spirit of his dead mother, killed in a Tokyo bomb attack during the second world war. Read the full review

Poor Things

Emma Stone gives an astonishing performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s offbeat adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s fantastical novel about science, sex and gender. Read the full review

20 Days in Mariupol

Film-maker Mstyslav Chernov risked everything to document Russia’s attack from within the besieged Ukrainian city, recording unthinkable horrors in this vital account. Read the full review

All of Us Strangers

Ghosts … Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers.

Andrew Haigh’s mesmeric, emotionally devastating drama follows Andrew Scott’s lonely gay screenwriter as he encounters the ghosts of his long-dead parents. Read the full review

The Holdovers

Alexander Payne’s dazzling return to form focuses on a trio of misfits (played by Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and newcomer Dominic Sessa) as they’re forced to spend Christmas together. Read the full review

  • The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s haunting take on Martin Amis’s novel sits us with a Nazi family living outside Auschwitz, an uncomfortably effective exercise in confronting the banality of evil. Read the full review

Killers of the Flower Moon

Hard truths … Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star in Martin Scorsese’s macabre western about serial murders among the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which reflects the erasure of Native Americans from the US. Read the full review

Delicate … Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in Past Lives.

Celine Song’s feature debut, about two people whose lives intertwine again after years apart, is delicate and sophisticated, but also simple and direct. Read the full review

  • Best movies US 2023
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  • Documentary films
  • Period and historical films

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The Best Movies of 2023

top movie review 2023

By Richard Lawson

Past Lives May December and Poor Things.

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

Pere Mallen Rupert Friend JeanYves Lozac'h Jarvis Cocker Seu Jorge and Maya Hawke in Asteroid City 2023.

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

‘You Hurt My Feelings.

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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. 

The Best Movies of 2023

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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Franz Rogowski and Adele Exarchopoulos in Passages 2023.

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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.

The Best Movies of 2023

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. 

The Best Movies of 2023

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

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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.

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The Most Anticipated Movies of 2023

The year boasts a wealth of superhero titles, plenty of explosive action, some spine-tingling horror, and even a few throwbacks to franchises of old, so start marking your calendars..

top movie review 2023

TAGGED AS: Film , films , movie , movies

The past couple of years have been unusual, to say the least, and like most other industries, Hollywood has had to make a number of adjustments. We saw Warner Bros. commit to streaming all of their major 2021 releases simultaneously on HBO Max, with mixed results, while other studios incorporated some combination of theatrical and digital strategies. That has changed a bit so far in 2023, as we’ve seen studios release some big box office winners through July. Read on for the Most Anticipated Movies of 2023, and as more titles are announced and information is released, we will continue to update this page, so check back often!

[Updated 10/2/23]

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See January-September

Dicks: The Musical (2023)

Larry Charles, the man who worked with Sacha Baron Cohen to bring us movies like  Borat ,  Bruno , and The Dictator , sets his sights on the big screen musical in this not-so-subtle twist on  The Parent Trap . Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp — the creators of the play upon which the film is based — play a pair of competing businessmen who discover they’re long-lost identical twins and decide to swap identities in order to bring their divorced parents back together.

The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

After capping off his trio of Halloween films, director David Gordon Green jumps right into another beloved horror franchise. As with his tackling of the Michael Myers story, The Exorcist is a follow-up to the original — and the 1973 original only — and will reportedly unfold as the first of a trilogy, with Ellen Burstyn set to reprise her starring turn.

TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR (2023)

If you missed out on seeing Taylor Swift in person during her Eras tour — and a lot of people did — then you’re in luck. You can see her in all her glory on the big screen in this concert film that weaves together some of the best moments from the tour.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Based on David Grann’s broadly lauded best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon  is a sobering appraisal of America’s relationship with Indigenous peoples and yet another artistic zenith for Martin Scorsese and his collaborators.

Pain Hustlers (2023)

Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts director David Yates delves into decidedly less fantastical territory with this based-on-true-events crime drama that centers on a woman who takes a job at a pharmaceutical start-up in Florida and finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy. The film stars Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, and Andy Garcia, among others.

Priscilla (2023)

Last year we got Elvis , and this year we get Priscilla . Sofia Coppola’s latest film is an adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s memoir and something of a passion project for Coppola. The film, which largely charts Presley’s relationship with Elvis, premiered at the Venice Film Festival to rave reviews and looks to be another Awards contender.

The Killer (2023)

Following up on his Oscar-winning Mank for Netflix, David Fincher turns to something a little darker. We don’t know much about this film, except that it’s a neo-noir thriller based on a French graphic novel series, and it will star Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton, among others.

The Marvels (2023)

The MCU ain’t getting any smaller, as Marvel plans to release five films in 2023 alone, including this sequel to Captain Marvel , which has Nia DaCosta (2021’s Candyman ) at the helm and Brie Larson returning as Carol Danvers. The film will also be the big screen debut of Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel after her eponymous Disney+ series debuts in 2022.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)

Franchise vet Francis Lawrence returns to direct this  Hunger Games prequel based on the novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins. The story primarily follows a young Coriolanus Snow (originally played by Donald Sutherland) and his involvement in the Hunger Games as a game-changing mentor years before the events of the original series.

Next Goal Wins (2023)

Taika Waititi takes on a decidedly more grounded film after last year’s Thor: Love and Thunder in this adaptation of the 2015 documentary of the same title. The story follows Dutch-American soccer coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender), who is hired to help turn around the American Samoa national team, which is considered one of the worst in the world.

Napoleon (2023)

Joaquin Phoenix reunites with Gladiator director Ridley Scott for this historical drama about the famous French general-turned-emperor. The film will be a chronicle of Napoleon’s rise to power, told through the lens of his volatile relationship to his wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). The film is also reported to have several big battle sequences, which Scott should be able to manage with plenty of flair.

Wish (2023)

Just as the meta  Lightyear  looked at the character that inspired the character Tim Allen voices in the  Toy Story  movies,  Wish  will tell the origin story of the wishing star that factors into so many Disney fables.  Frozen’s  Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck are writing the script for the animated film while Oscar winner Ariana DeBose will star.

Not to be outdone by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé dropped an unexpected trailer for a concert film documenting her Renaissance World Tour, the highest-grossing concert tour by any woman, the day after its final performance on October 1. Let the Beyhive rejoice… and show up in theaters on December 1, when the film debuts.

The Bikeriders (2023)

Austin Butler and Jodie Comer headline an all-star ensemble cast in this drama inspired by the eponymous nonfiction photo-book, courtesy of writer-director Jeff Nichols ( Take Shelter ,  Mud ). The story traces the history of a Midwestern motorcycle club during the 1960s through the viewpoint of a woman (Jodie Comer) married to one of its members (Austin Butler).

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

The latest iteration in the Japanese Godzilla franchise comes to us courtesy of writer-director Takashi Yamazaki (he also did the visual effects!) and takes place just after the end of World War II. As Japan struggles to recover from the effects of the war, the kaiju we all know and fear suddenly appears and wreaks destruction across the land.

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s reportedly final film was famously not promoted in any way — before the first teaser dropped just days ahead of the film’s TIFF premiere, the only thing we had to go on was a poster image and the fact that it was inspired by a 1937 novel. We now also know the film’s release date, and while those looking for a description of the film can find it online easily, we’ll choose to let audiences discover the film for themselves (and you can always check out the teaser above).

Poor Things (2023)

Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail wrote, directed, and produced this thriller based on the novel of the same name about a family whose vacation at an Airbnb is interrupted by the property’s owners, who have arrived with news of a mysterious widespread blackout. The cast includes Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke.

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Wonka (2023)

Timothée Chalamet steps into the offbeat shoes of a young Willy Wonka in this origin story, which captures the budding chocolatier as he crosses paths with the Oompa-Loompas. Olivia Colman, Sally Hawkins, Keegan Michael-Key, and Rowan Atkinson round out the grade-A cast, while Paul King, who enjoyed massive critical success with his two  Paddington films, takes the helm.

The Color Purple (2023)

The musical, which nabbed a Tony for its revival on the Great White Way in 2016, makes its way to the silver screen just in time to close out the year. Be on the lookout for R&B phenom H.E.R., who makes her screen debut in the early-1900s-set Southern epic.

Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (2023)

After the success of  Army of the Dead , Zack Snyder’s next project for Netflix is this space epic based on an original story of Snyder’s own. The story centers on a peaceful colony who, threatened by a tyrant, send a young woman to neighboring planets to recruit an army. The film is scheduled for a limited theatrical release before it streams on Netflix, but we don’t know when that will be yet.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

James Wan returns to the director’s chair for another go at the world of Atlantis and the DC superhero Aquaman (Jason Momoa), who will be joined by Amber Heard (Mera), Patrick Wilson (Ocean Master), and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Black Manta).

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The 10 best movies of 2023: ‘The Holdovers,’ ‘Oppenheimer’ and more

Rebounding from the covid slump, 2023 was a banner year for indies, docs, foreign film and first-time filmmakers.

top movie review 2023

I cannot tell a lie: 2022 was kind of a bummer, movie-wise. As the year ended, I was hard-pressed to come up with 10 titles I genuinely loved. The pickings were so slim, I worried about the future of the movies, not just as art or mass entertainment, but as communal events that are central to our culture.

What a difference this year made. Whether it was hordes of 8-year-olds storming the screen at their local ’plex to sing along with Taylor Swift, or a little movie about a former U.S. government agent rescuing children from sex traffickers, suddenly people had reasons to go to the movies again. What they found, as often as not, were women trying to break free of societal constraints (Barbie, meet Shere Hite! Have you two seen “Poor Things” yet?), a theme that seems to have reached full expression in the years following the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements.

Adventurous audiences found plenty to value in the independent sphere, whether it was outstanding documentaries like “ The Mission ,” “ Kokomo City ,” “ The Eternal Memory ,” “ Sly ” and “ The Disappearance of Shere Hite ,” or foreign-language films like “ Other People’s Children, ” “ L’immensitá, ” “ Close ,” “ No Bears ” and “Fallen Leaves.” (Save space on that list for the upcoming “Zone of Interest.”) And this was a banner year for first-time filmmakers, who brought exceptionally strong voices and visions to rivetingly original stories: A.V. Rockwell gave Teyana Taylor a dazzling showcase in the tough and tender mother-son drama “ A Thousand and One ”; Jamie Dack created the year’s most disturbingly effective portrait of sex trafficking with “ Palm Trees and Power Lines ”; comedian Ray Romano made an assured directing debut with the sweetly nostalgic family drama “ Somewhere in Queens ”; Charlotte Regan and Raven Jackson made wildly different but equally poetic and powerful films about girls coming of age in “ Scrapper ” and “ All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt ,” respectively.

Any one of those films could easily have ended up on my top 10 list this year, which was a stunner, not a bummer. Here’s hoping the trend continues apace.

Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste” stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson herself, in a story that weaves her personal story of loss and grief into her search for a theoretic construct for oppression that transcends race. The result is a film that, like Wilkerson’s mission, invents a new language, combining drama and documentary to get at some of the most profound and politically complex realities of human experience with depth, emotion and raw honesty.

Where to watch: in theaters

This was the year of product placement, from the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos movie to the delightful comedy-drama “ BlackBerry ,” about the eponymous, still-lamented handheld device. With “Air,” director Ben Affleck told the story of the Nike Air Jordan basketball sneaker with verve and alert intelligence, convening Matt Damon, Chris Messina and Jason Bateman in terrific supporting roles and then sending it all into the stratosphere with Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother, Deloris. This is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore, until they do. Thank goodness.

Where to watch: Prime Video

Tina Satter adapted her own play for this movie about National Security Agency leaker Reality Winner , portrayed in an astonishing performance by a de-glammed Sydney Sweeney. Unfolding in real time, as Winner is apprehended and questioned by FBI agents in her Augusta, Ga., home, the film is taut, tense, borderline tragic and often absurdly funny. Sweeney, so adept at playing bad girls, is a revelation as a young woman who’s vulnerable and canny in fascinatingly equal measure.

Where to watch: Max

7. Past Lives

Like Satter, writer-director Celine Song made a notably promising feature debut this year, with a movie that seemed built from small moments, all of which accrued to a devastating final scene. Greta Lee stars as a young woman whose family emigrated from South Korea to Canada when she was a child. When she reconnects with her long-lost might-have-been-boyfriend (Teo Yoo), her marriage to an American writer (John Magaro) is upended. Delicate, deeply felt and beautifully calibrated, “Past Lives” left an impression all the more indelible for being made so softly.

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus , Google Play , Prime Video , YouTube

6. Joan Baez I Am a Noise

The 1960s folk icon embarks on her final tour in this superbly constructed film by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle, but what starts out as a goodbye chronicle turns into something far more revealing and surprising than viewers expect . Still galvanizingly charismatic in her early 80s, Baez holds nothing back in this disarmingly intimate film, in which she explores her lifelong anxieties and buried traumas, as well as her early rise to stardom; her relationships with men, women and family; and the continuing mystery that is that sublime, still-powerful voice.

No one knows Joan Baez's story like the friend who put it on film

5. Barbenheimer

What, you thought I had forgotten? When it came to cultural currency, no proof of concept was more thrilling than 2023’s most ecstatically received twofer. A movie about Mattel’s most cherished plastic doll had no right to be as smart, aware, hilarious and structurally ungovernable as Greta Gerwig’s “ Barbie ” — millions of people not only ate it up, but also went back for more. What better palate cleanser than “ Oppenheimer, ” Christopher Nolan’s technically pristine, densely layered portrait of Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed with haunting verisimilitude by Cillian Murphy. Robert Downey Jr. commanded the screen as Oppenheimer critic Lewis Strauss, and Emily Blunt went from blowzy to ballistic as Oppenheimer’s fiercely loyal wife Kitty. A lean-in movie that rewards the undivided attention it demands.

Where to watch “Barbie”: Apple TV Plus , Google Play , Prime Video , YouTube

Where to watch “Oppenheimer”: Nov. 21 on Apple TV Plus , Google Play , Prime Video , YouTube

4. Anatomy of a Fall

Sandra Hüller is note-perfect as the prickly, prideful, unapologetically space-taking writer at the center of Justine Triet’s tricksy murder mystery . The whodunit question is whether Hüller’s character pushed her husband out the window of their snowbound chalet; the real questions have more to do with love, family, sex roles and the norms — and ties — that bind. Triet’s portrait of a marriage exerts an appeal similar to Hüller’s enigmatic wife and mother: chilly and seductive at the same time.

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus , Google Play , Prime Video

3. You Hurt My Feelings

Nicole Holofcener’s latest dramedy stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies as a writer and therapist whose marriage hits a rough patch when she overhears him candidly critiquing her latest book. My devotion to Holofcener has been well-documented elsewhere; suffice it to say that she has once again managed to combine pain, humor and wince-inducing recognition in a film of observant wit and wisdom .

Each generation is defied by its movies. Here are 57 that shaped me.

2. The Holdovers

Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph co-star in this 1970s-set picaresque by Alexander Payne (working from a script by David Hemingson). Giamatti and Randolph play a teacher and cook at a snooty New England prep school who are trapped there over winter break; hilarity doesn’t ensue as much as simmer under the surface, as a troubled student — played in a fabulous breakout performance by newcomer Dominic Sessa — tests his elders’ boundaries, culminating in a classic Payne road trip of healing and discovery. Funny, sad, exhilaratingly humanistic, “The Holdovers” brims with life.

Please don’t call Alexander Payne’s ‘The Holdovers’ a return to form

1. American Fiction

Of all the feature filmmaking debuts this year, the most triumphant is Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure,” about an African American writer’s attempt to game the racist parameters of the White liberal publishing world, while simultaneously dealing with some gnarly family issues. Jeffrey Wright finally gets the starring role he’s so long deserved in a movie that somehow manages to be a sharply pointed satire while also being incredibly warm and appealing. This is the kind of movie that succeeds gloriously in checking all the boxes, even as it makes fun of checking all the boxes — and that’s a fact.

Where to watch: Dec. 15 in theaters

That’s the best of the best. Here are more of our favorite movies of 2023 — films that got 3 stars or more from The Post’s critics.

Four people (Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Paula Beer and Enno Trebs) gather at a vacation cottage on the Baltic Sea in a film Ann Hornaday calls a “ quietly atmospheric study of artistic isolation and ego .”

Joanna Scanlan gives a BAFTA-winning performance as a woman who discovers that her recently deceased husband had a second wife and family. Thomas Floyd praises Scanlan’s “ steely performance as a widow pulling at the threads of her late husband’s carefully woven double life .”

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Ann Hornaday says the rhythms and gestures of writer-director Raven Jackson’s feature debut — an impressionistic portrait of a girl coming of age in rural Mississippi — suggest “ looking to the likes of Terrence Malick, William Faulkner and Maya Angelou for their elliptical meanings .”

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

In Kelly Fremon Craig’s film adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved 1970 coming-of-age novel, Kristen Page-Kirby says, “ The film’s laughs come from empathy, not derision .”

Noémie Merlant and Kit Harington play new parents in a film that Ann Hornaday says “ morphs from a social critique of how American society fails women along the entire spectrum of reproduction to a nuanced — and often uncomfortably candid — portrait of a new mother navigating profound anxiety, alienation, self-doubt and barely containable rage .”

Beyond Utopia

The journey of a family fleeing North Korea to Thailand provides the spine of this engrossing documentary. Mark Jenkins calls the film “ sort of a found-footage horror flick, except that both the footage and the horror are real .”

Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson star as Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, best friends who invented the once-ubiquitous BlackBerry smartphone, in a comedy Ann Hornaday calls a “ funny, insightful corporate biopic .”

Bobi Wine: The People’s President

This documentary follows the titular Ugandan singer turned presidential candidate in his losing 2021 campaign. Mark Jenkins says the “ mix of intimate portrait and raw street warfare proves visceral, dynamic and sometimes upsetting .”

Writer-director Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature chronicles the misadventures of two unpopular high school lesbians (Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri). Olivia McCormack calls the film “ an eccentric little satire: simultaneously relevant and irreverent .”

The Boy and the Heron

Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki comes out of retirement (again) to tell another magical tale, set in what Lucas Trevor calls “ a magical world lurking just below the surface of our own .” Set during World War II, this one revolves around a boy struggling to come to terms with the death of his mother.

Set during Augusto Pinochet’s violently repressive regime, the story follows a homemaker (Aline Küppenheim) whose sense of political disengagement is upended when she agrees to nurse a wounded young man (Nicolás Sepúlveda), in hiding from the authorities. Ann Hornaday says the film “ isn’t interested in shock value as much as how the personal and political mesh together, with increasingly tense results .”

Actor Michael B. Jordan makes a strong directorial debut, reprising his role as boxer Adonis “Donny” Creed in this third installment of the “Rocky” spinoff series. Ann Hornaday says that Jonathan Majors plays Donny’s nemesis “ with a fascinating combination of menace and sensitivity .”

Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

Documentarian Nancy Buirski’s kaleidoscopic film examines the cultural legacy of the Oscar-winning 1969 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. It’s an analysis of the “generational shift from tough-guy actors like John Wayne to vulnerable performers such as Hoffman and Voight,” Mark Jenkins says the film presents “Midnight Cowboy” as “ both an indicator and an instigator of social change .”

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

The documentary presents a portrait of the sex researcher and author of “The Hite Report.” Ann Hornaday says the film is “ fascinating on myriad levels, most obviously in the way it illuminates how Hite transformed herself from a lonely little girl in a repressed household to a dashingly romantic figure on New York’s Upper West Side, where her Pre-Raphaelite beauty allowed her to model while she pursued her academic studies .”

Dream Scenario

Nicolas Cage plays a nondescript Everyman who starts turning up in other people’s dreams in a film Ann Hornaday calls a “ smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy .”

The feature debut of writer-director Savanah Leaf focuses on a mother in crisis (Tia Nomore) who is crushed under the weight of her responsibilities. Omari Daniels says the film presents “ an unflinching and quiet view of the complications of motherhood .”

Emma Mackey plays the title character, author Emily Brontë, in what Ann Hornaday calls a “ provocative revisionist biography .”

The Eternal Memory

Ann Hornaday calls Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi’s film an “ alternately tender and tough documentary portrait ” of a couple grappling with the slow disintegration of Alzheimer’s disease.

Fallen Leaves

Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film is another example of the Finnish filmmaker’s signature storytelling: a “ dispassionate, highly stylized, quietly operatic love story .”

The Five Devils

Michael O’Sullivan calls Sally Dramé, the young star of this French film about a strange young girl with a heightened sense of smell that allows her to not only replicate any aroma, but perform a kind of time travel, a “ remarkably self-possessed newcomer .”

Flora and Son

This Irish dramedy follows the relationship among a single mother in Dublin (Eve Hewson), her unmanageable teenage son (Orén Kinlan) and a guitar teacher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whom the mother meets online. Ann Hornaday says, “ As a profane, slightly blowzy modern-day Holly Golightly, Hewson develops a seductively credible chemistry with Gordon-Levitt .”

Godzilla Minus One

Lucas Trevor says that this Japanese reboot of the venerable monster movie showed us “ there’s still an audience for movies that combine concise and creative action with emotionally resonant characters .”

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant

Michael O’Sullivan says this tale of a wounded soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal) who returns to Afghanistan to bring the interpreter who saved his life (Dar Salim) back to the United States may be manipulative — skillfully, entertainingly and at times almost overbearingly so. “ But oh, boy, does it work .”

Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting

This documentary explores a subject that has been much in the news: high school, college and professional sports teams called the Indians, Redskins, Braves, Chiefs and the like, and the movement to remove the offensive portrayals of Native Americans. Mark Jenkins says that the “ lively if somewhat lumpy ” film packs lots of information and even more emotion.

It Ain’t Over

Thomas Floyd says that Sean Mullin’s documentary portrait of Yogi Berra, the baseball player known for his malapropisms, “ zips through Berra’s life without ever feeling rushed. When it comes to Mullin’s well-paced depiction of a misunderstood legend, Berra’s words put it best: ‘You can observe a lot by watching .’”

It Lives Inside

A common trope of horror — the demonic entity — becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience in this tale of an Indian American teen (Megan Suri) whose classmate (Mohana Krishnan) begins carrying around an ominous-looking Mason jar. Lucas Trevor calls the film a “ great addition to an unfolding new canon ” of elevated horror.

John Wick: Chapter 4

Keanu Reeves returns to the title role of a supremely lethal fugitive assassin in this fourth installment of the vibrantly violent action franchise. Michael O’Sullivan says that, at nearly three hours long, “ there is more time to lavish on the films’ fans exactly what they want, in spectacular fashion .”

Ali Junejo plays a shy and quiet man who falls for an exuberant trans woman (Alina Khan) in what Mark Jenkins calls a well-acted, novelistic drama about “ the “repression of human individuality by a regimented traditional society .”

Four Asian American friends (Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu) set out on an international adventure in a raunchy comedy that Olivia McCormack calls “ a heartwarming film about identity and friendship wrapped in a package of penis jokes. ”

Killers of the Flower Moon

Ann Hornaday says that Martin Scorsese’s thriller based on David Grann’s nonfiction book about the murders of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma “ dramatizes a grievous truth — about the depravity, destruction and self-deception that undergird the American idea — that has been buried for too long, especially in movies .”

Kokomo City

D. Smith’s debut documentary about Black trans sex workers follows four subjects in Atlanta and New York. Ann Hornaday says the film “bursts not just with the indomitable energy of the smart, mesmerizingly beautiful women Smith has cast, but with the contradictions of their lives.”

The Lady Bird Diaries

Dawn Porter’s mesmerizing documentary portrait of former first lady Lady Bird Johnson is based on Johnson’s own recorded audio journal. Ann Hornaday says one of the most delightful surprises in the film is “Lady Bird’s keen power of observation.”

Leave the World Behind

Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la star in a dystopian thriller about the possible end of the world. Michael O’Sullivan says it’s “ the human dynamic that is the most chilling and, in the end, almost hopeful .”

Let It Be Morning

This satisfying comedy-drama centers on Palestinian guests who become stranded at a wedding in an Arab village deep within Israel’s borders. Mark Jenkins says the film is “ grounded in geographic and emotional reality .”

L’immensitá

Penélope Cruz plays an unhappily married mother of three children — the eldest of whom (Luana Giuliani) is undergoing a gender transition — in this drama based on writer-director Emanuele Crialese’s own experiences coming of age as a trans teenager in 1970s Rome. Ann Hornaday calls it “ a small but all-encompassing portrait of how life feels in a certain time and place — when the broken pieces of one’s true self are invisibly coming together, even when getting them to fit feels too overwhelming to contemplate .”

The Little Mermaid

Ann Hornaday says that Halle Bailey, the star of this live-action remake of Disney’s beloved 1989 animated classic, delivers “ a lovely performance that’s all the more accomplished for being delivered amid crashing waves, sweeping vistas and the crushing expectations of generations of fans .”

The Lost King

Sally Hawkins stars in the true story of Philippa Langley, an English amateur historian who in 2012 discovered the lost gravesite of King Richard III. Ann Hornaday calls Hawkins’s performance “ alternately elfin and flinty .”

Bradley Cooper directs and stars in this biopic about conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan). Ann Hornaday says, “ It isn’t a Great Man tale — if anything, it’s an ode to a Great Woman. Instead, it’s something deeper, messier and more unresolved. It’s a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center .”

Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros

Tim Carman says Frederick Wiseman’s quietly observant documentary about a family of acclaimed French restaurateurs shows us “ the inner workings of a very particular, very rarefied food chain, one in which human consumption and profit are not the sole motivations .”

The Mission

Mark Jenkins calls this documentary about John Chau, who was murdered after traveling to a remote island off the coast of India to spread the Gospel to the island’s people, a tale of “ extreme Christianity .”

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One

Ann Hornaday says that this action sequel may be formulaic, but “It’s fast, it’s furious, and it’s a lot of fun.”

Mark Jenkins calls this Japanese drama, which unravels a mystery surrounding a troubled fifth-grader , “delicate and engrossing.”

Next Goal Wins

Michael Fassbender plays a washed-up soccer coach assigned to rehabilitate the American Samoan national soccer team after a humiliating loss in this silly-sweet underdog sports comedy, based on a true story. Michael O’Sullivan says the film “ isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — ‘Be happy’ and ‘There’s more to life than soccer’ — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it .”

In this biopic about open-water swimmer Diana Nyad, Ann Hornaday says star Annette Bening delivers a “ salty, vanity-free performance .”

Other People’s Children

Virginie Efira plays a woman who develops a deep connection with her lover’s adorable 4-year-old daughter (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves) in what Ann Hornaday calls a “ quintessentially French ” drama.

Palm Trees and Power Lines

Ann Hornaday calls this story of sexual grooming a “ film of disarming candor and power .”

In Ira Sachs’s story of a lovers’ triangle, star Franz Rogowski brings what Ann Hornaday calls a “ feral, provocative energy to a character who can be irresistible even when he’s at his most irritatingly demanding and mercurial .”

A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings

Filmmaker Aviva Kempner tells the story of how her mother and uncle — both Polish-born Jews — survived the Holocaust, in a documentary that Mark Jenkins calls “ frequently compelling .”

Poor Things

Ann Hornaday says that Emma Stone goes for broke in Yorgos Lanthimos’s “ funny, unsettling, ugly, fantastically constructed cabinet of cinematic wonders ,” which tells the time-traveling tale of a woman striding awkwardly — then fearlessly — into the modern age.

Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé

For those who missed the opportunity to see Beyoncé in concert, Sofia Andrade says that this behind-the-scenes documentary about the singer’s Renaissance tour, “ directed and written by the queen herself, is a strong Plan B. (Or should we say Plan Bey?) ”

Romanian New Wave auteur Cristian Mungiu’s drama follows Matthias (Marin Grigore), a man who returns to his small village after walking off his slaughterhouse job in Germany, only to find the townspeople roiled by the presence of foreign workers. Ann Hornaday writes: “ So much fear and misplaced anger are at play in Matthias’s increasingly hysterical behavior that ‘R.M.N.’ might as well be an X-ray of contemporary America .”

Mark Jenkins calls this French drama about the subculture of ATV riders in the suburbs of Paris “ kinetic, intimate and immersive .”

Lola Campbell plays a motherless 12-year-old girl who reunites with her father (Harris Dickinson) after a long absence in this British drama, which Ann Hornaday says gives viewers “ uplift without moralizing .”

Justice Smith, Briana Middleton, Sebastian Stan, Julianne Moore and John Lithgow star in this twisty if formulaic tale of con men and women. Michael O’Sullivan calls the film’s cast the “ ace up its sleeve .”

Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a ceramic artist stressed out by the impending opening of her solo exhibition, and Hong Chau is her blithely oblivious neighbor, fellow artist and landlord in a film by slow-cinema virtuosa Kelly Reichardt that Michael O’Sullivan says traffics in a “ strange and strangely visual poetry .”

Somewhere in Queens

Ray Romano’s directorial debut, the tale of a boisterous Italian American family whose love language is shouting, delivers what Michael O’Sullivan calls “ something honest, something recognizable, something real .”

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

This animated sequel that reunites teenage webslinger Miles Morales (voice of Shameik Moore) with Gwen Stacy, a.k.a. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), is a lot of movie, says Ann Hornaday, “ You’ll want to stay in this world forever .”

The Starling Girl

Eliza Scanlen plays a 17-year-old girl living in a fundamentalist Christian community who shares a mutual attraction with her pastor’s 28-year-old son (Lewis Pullman). Ann Hornaday writes, “ As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, ‘The Starling Girl’ plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s ‘Women Talking.’ ”

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Davis Guggenheim’s documentary portrait of the star of the “Back to the Future” trilogy is told via a mix of interviews, scripted reenactments and archival footage. Michael O’Sullivan says Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1990, “ still has an immensely likable and funny on-camera persona, and now he is using that gift — along with a different one, this nakedly honest film memoir — to share hope, joy and perhaps a sense of acceptance with others. ”

This Gen-Z horror film centers on a group of adolescents who try their hand at the supernatural by summoning spirits through what is said to be the embalmed hand of a medium. Olivia McCormack writes, “ It’s the ingenious combination of horror and human connection that makes ‘Talk to Me,’ well, something to talk about. ”

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

To fully appreciate “The Eras Tour,” a simultaneously intimate and spectacular documentary of Swift’s record-breaking, earth-quaking, career-spanning victory lap of the past year, Ann Hornaday says it’s best “ to simply surrender to the whole thing: the sparkly cowboy hats, the boots, the friendship bracelets and the screaming. (There will be a lot of screaming.) ”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Kristen Page-Kirby says the animated film about talking-turtle superheroes is like “Barbie”: “ not just as visually innovative and just as funny, but it has a similar mission: to examine and celebrate the complexity of an experience — in this case, what it’s like to be a 15-year-old boy — through the lens of a pop culture phenomenon. To a lesser extent, it’s also about what it’s like to parent one. ”

Theater Camp

This wryly knowing mockumentary centers on the lovably kooky adult counselors and child campers at a struggling summer drama program in the Adirondacks. Michael O’Sullivan says the film’s eccentric world of show tunes and show people is “ big enough (and funny enough) for everyone. ”

A Thousand and One

Ann Hornaday calls first-time feature filmmaker A.V. Rockwell’s gritty urban drama about a mother struggling to raise her son in 1990s Harlem a “ triumphant debut .”

To Kill a Tiger

This Canadian documentary follows a child-rape case in India, a country where — according to a broadcast reporter glimpsed in the film — a woman is raped every 20 minutes. What’s extraordinary about the film is the victim’s and her father’s determination, Mark Jenkins writes, “ and the possible changes for good that may result from it. ”

We Are Fugazi From Washington, D.C.

This immersive concert film celebrating the beloved D.C. post-punk band Fugazi was curated from footage shot by the group’s fans and aspiring filmmakers. Michael O’Sullivan says the movie captures not only Fugazi’s “chugging, muscular music,” but also “ the democratic spirit epitomized by the band, known for its low ticket prices and all-ages-welcome policy. ”

Part rom-com, part father-of-the-bride farce, this comedy from writer-director Kenya Barris and producer/co-writer/star Jonah Hill follows the romance and wedding plans of Hill’s Ezra, a hip-hop-loving Jewish podcast host, and Lauren London’s Amira, a Black stylist in L.A. Michael O’Sullivan calls the film a “ master class on wedge issues and our shared humanity, delivered by comedians who know that laughter can be at once a bitter pill and the best medicine. ”

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top movie review 2023

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The Best Films of 2023, So Far

Our critics picked six films that you can catch up with over the long holiday.

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A woman in black sunglasses sits in a diner with her daughter to her right, and a bodyguard behind her at a table.

By The New York Times

As the summer may bring a little extra time to catch up on movies, our critics have selected a handful of options worth your time. All are available in theaters or on demand.

‘Asteroid City’

In theaters

The story: Wes Anderson’s latest follows the staging of a play about the goings-on in a small desert town in the 1950s. But that play is actually shown as if it were a movie, one featuring Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hanks and many more.

Manohla Dargis’s take: “Written by Anderson, the film is about desire and death, small mysteries and cosmic unknowns and the stories that we make of all the stuff called life. Part of what makes his work memorable and often unexpectedly touching is that his filmmaking — the stylized way he orders the world with his richly populated cast of collaborators — expresses how he navigates the world’s confusions.” Read the review .

‘Showing Up’

Available to rent or buy on most major platforms.

The story: In this film from Kelly Reichardt, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor in Portland, Ore., who navigates the pitfalls of her day-to-day while preparing for an art exhibition.

Manohla Dargis’s take: “‘Showing Up’ is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie.” Read the review.

‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’

The story: Based on the popular Judy Blume novel and set in 1970, the movie, directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, follows the travails of Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) as she fumbles her way through the transitions of adolescence.

Lisa Kennedy’s take: Fortson “carries the day, or rather the school year. In her face, Margaret’s glimmers of dawning self-awareness and hurt ring true. From the moment the soon-to-be sixth grader utters the movie’s first prayer — which ends with the entreaty, ‘Please don’t let New Jersey be too horrible’ — Fortson’s Margaret proves to be a protagonist who is as incidentally funny as she is authentic.” Read the review.

‘Polite Society’

Available to stream on Peacock.

The story: Two sisters, Lena (Ritu Arya) and Ria (Priya Kansara) share a bond. But when Lena falls for a wealthy physician, something shifts in her. With marriage on the horizon, Ria, through a series of action spectacles, sets out to stop her sister’s wedding.

Amy Nicholson’s take: It’s “a rollicking genre mash-up” that is “set in an enclave of well-to-do Muslim Londoners who play along with the comedy’s title until they get cranky. Then come the punches and neck chops, the bruises and broken glass, the ludicrous wire-fu that allows a matron in a brocade lehenga to fly through the air. It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor , into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.” Read the review.

‘Full Time’

The story: In Éric Gravel’s film, Julie (Laure Calamy), a single mother and the lead chambermaid of a five-star hotel in Paris, must navigate the overwhelming demands of her routine.

Beatrice Loayza’s take: “The film is a portrait of modern labor that moves with the breathless tension of a Safdie brothers joint. But instead of gangsters and cocaine, it finds a flurried momentum in one ordinary woman’s everyday obligations, which threaten to break her when a nationwide strike throws her tenuous act off balance.” Read the review.

‘Sanctuary’

The story: Hal (Christopher Abbott), a wealthy heir, and Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), a longtime employee, vie for control over their uncommon relationship in this twisty duet directed by Zachary Wigon.

Jeannette Catsoulis’s take: “Both actors are excellent, but Qualley is chameleonic in a role that requires her to slide seamlessly from playful to stern, cunning to confrontational, penitent to downright scary. At times, as when Hal erupts with unexpected violence, her face freezes and we can almost see her contriving ways to regain control of a suddenly dangerous situation. If she’s to succeed, she’ll need more than a talent for debasement and humiliation. Sexual but not sexy, ‘Sanctuary’ is fantastically dynamic and emphatically theatrical.” Read the review.

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Movie Reviews

2023 was a great year for moviegoing — here are 10 of justin chang's favorites.

Justin Chang

Clockwise from top left: Past Lives, Showing Up, All of Us Strangers, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Afire, Poor Things.

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

top movie review 2023

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

top movie review 2023

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

top movie review 2023

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

top movie review 2023

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

top movie review 2023

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 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

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

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

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

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the ten best films of 2023.

top movie review 2023

How does one sum up a year that felt as tumultuous and unpredictable as 2023? It honestly did feel like an artistic turning point as franchises once deemed too big to fail fell apart, giving way to unpredictable blockbusters and heartfelt cinematic statements from some of the world's best filmmakers. The list below is really a portrait of the year, one in which two debut films stand alongside works from acknowledged masters. A list that includes films that made millions of dollars alongside ones that are only now building an audience. A list that travels the world to elevate stories that resonate with universal truth and undeniable specificity at the same time. These are the films selected by the regular film reviewing staff of RogerEbert.com as the best of the year. Come back on Thursday to see the specific lists of all of the regular critics, plus those from our extended family of contributors. And click through on the links below, when available, to watch the best films of 2023.

Runner-ups: "About Dry Grasses," "All of Us Strangers," " Anatomy of a Fall ," " The Boy and the Heron ," " Fallen Leaves ," " Godland ," " Kokomo City ," " Priscilla ," "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse," and " A Thousand and One "

top movie review 2023

10. " All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt "

Watching Raven Jackson 's debut feature film, "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" (produced by Barry Jenkins and developed through the Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Residency for Screenwriting), is one of those startling cinematic experiences calling into question how filmmakers typically tell stories. We don't realize the dominance of visual cliches until a filmmaker comes along and does it her own way. Chantal Akerman did it with "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," Julie Dash did it with " Daughters of the Dust ," Lynne Ramsay did it with " Morvern Callar ". Their cinematic language is as distinct as a fingerprint. 

The kaleidoscope of images in "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" shows the past existing alongside the present, memories bleeding forwards and backwards. Repeating sensory motifs rush forth in this story of a young girl growing up in the rural South: hands touching the dirt, preparing a fishhook, braiding hair, trailing through the river water, a mother's hands washing her daughter's back, loved ones clasped in wordless embraces. You get to know everyone through their hands, as radical a style as Terrence Malick's sunlight-through-tree-leaves and whispering voiceovers. "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" is a kinesthetic experience. You see smells, feel sounds, dirt roads are to be tasted. Of course, Jackson also gives us memorable characters, steeping us in the family's grief and joy, loss and sweetness. 

Raven Jackson is also a published poet. One of her poems, "After the Fire," opens with:

Plants Mama should have swallowed as seeds swelled from mud like legs.

She’d sit on the porch, a green jar of pickles bouncing on her knees, tires eating stone.

The sensibility of "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" are in those evocative words. Jackson has made a film only she could make. It can't be duplicated. It is hers and it is to be treasured. ( Sheila O'Malley )

Now streaming on:

top movie review 2023

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

Sincerity is what shines through brightest in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

Adapting a book that’s meant so much to so many for so long might have been a daunting task, but writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig tapped into the truth in Judy Blume ’s classic and treated it with the complete respect it deserves—not reverence, mind you, because she made a few tweaks to inventively expand the beloved story. Those changes only made the experience richer, more emotional and hilarious, with moving results.  

What’s so enduring about the film, and the 1970 coming-of-age novel that inspired it, is its relatability across generations. When I read the book as a tween, I saw myself in 11-year-old Margaret (played with awkward charm and deep authenticity by Abby Ryder Fortson ) as she navigated the many obstacles of adolescence. When I watched the movie as an adult—as the mother of a teenager—I saw myself in Margaret’s mom, Barbara, as she did her best to guide her child through this hormonal minefield. Rachel McAdams gives the best performance of her lengthy and varied career here: She’s earthy, funny, sexy and heartbreaking. The supporting performances that get a lot of attention during awards season tend to be the big, showy ones, but what McAdams is doing here is exquisitely subtle in every moment.

The whole cast is terrific, including Benny Safdie as Margaret’s sweetly dorky dad, Kathy Bates as her quick-witted grandmother and Elle Graham as the frenemy who’s more complicated than she initially seems. These all feel like real, interesting people in a real, lived-in place. That’s one of the other miracles about “Margaret”: the way it vividly depicts its 1970s setting without going over the top into period kitsch (thanks to the detailed work of production designer Steve Saklad .) In a movie in which couch shopping serves as a symbolic subplot, “Margaret” lets you sink into a familiar feeling of comfort. ( Christy Lemire )

top movie review 2023

8. " Barbie "

For once, the advertising tagline got it exactly right: “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.” 

Barbie encompasses multitudes because she reflects all of the conflicted feelings that we have about who we want to be. Is she empowering because there is a Barbie in every possible aspirational profession or is she dooming us to despair because we can never live up to her airbrushed pink perfection? America Ferrara ’s frustrated speech about the impossible standards expected of women encapsulates many of the movie’s themes. 

But, like Barbie herself, the film is irresistibly enticing, with gorgeous settings and delightful songs.  In Barbie world, every day is perfect, and all problems are solved—for the Barbies. The smart script by Noah Baumbach and director Greta Gerwig shows us that characters can be isolated and unsatisfied even in an outwardly perfect world. We can laugh at the insecurity of Ryan Gosling ’s pitch-perfect Ken or the played-with-too-hard but somehow therefore wiser Weird Barbie, but they demonstrate the intensity of the wishes we project onto our toys. Then there’s the unloved Allan and quickly discontinued puberty Skipper, to remind us that as much as we may decry the commercialism of dolls like Barbie, consumers cannot be persuaded to buy everything corporations think up. The movie is so much fun it is easy to overlook how smart it is about humans and how our toys help us define our dreams. ( Nell Minow )

top movie review 2023

7. " Poor Things "

A sexually liberated, lightly sci-fi Art Nouveau period piece is strange enough on paper. Filter that concept through the stylized performances and aggressive fisheye lensing of Yorgos Lanthimos , and you’ve got a true oddity of a film. “Poor Things” isn’t weird just to be weird, however. Every eccentric touch, from the anachronistic costuming to fairytale settings that unfurl like the pages of a pop-up book, reflect a stage in the evolution of our heroine, Bella Baxter ( Emma Stone ), from the reanimated corpse of a suicidal London housewife to a feminist firebrand and a true woman of the world. Bella is a singular force, and the world around her reflects that.

In a lesser actor’s hands, an environment this fantastic might threaten to swallow a character. But Emma Stone’s performance unfolds in stages, too, from the hesitant movements and sudden flashes of understanding of a newborn baby to the cool, bemused confidence of an undaunted woman. The men around Bella all exist on a spectrum, from Jerrod Carmichael ’s hardened cynic to Mark Ruffalo ’s hilariously fragile lothario who’s finally been beaten at his own lusty game. And each of them has something to teach Bella, although her journey—and “Poor Things,” for all of its much-ballyhooed sex scenes—isn’t really about them. Bella, being a Frankenstein’s monster type, doesn’t have a soul to worry about. And her explorations and adventures are free from the conventional restraints of Judeo-Christian morality. What is the journey of life all about without a God to lead the way? Let Bella Baxter show you. ( Katie Rife )

top movie review 2023

6. "The Zone of Interest"

In recent interviews, Jonathan Glazer , the writer and director of the eerie, cold-blooded Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest,” sometimes emphasizes how unsure he was, both about what motivated him as well as if he could even complete the project. You might be uncertain, too, if you chose to make a disturbing fictional drama—and sometimes black comedy—about real-life Nazi Commandant Rudolf Höss ( Christian Friedel ) and his wife Hedwig ( Sandra Hüller ), who lived with their family in a well-maintained home at the Auschwitz concentration camp, with a vegetable garden and a pool.

“I genuinely don’t know why it’s in me,” Glazer told Screen Daily ’s Mark Salisbury . “There must be something in it that’s driving me forward. And often I’m not even sure what that is.” In pursuing his artistic compulsions, Glazer has captured the surreal disconnect between the life that the Hösses clearly preferred to be living and the one that was literally outside their door.

Glazer’s cast sometimes improvised with his encouragement. They were also filmed by Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal , mostly with ten hidden cameras. The soundtrack, featuring a nightmarish sound design by Johnnie Burn and a typically bracing score by Mica Levi , adds another layer of disorienting, hyper-real dissonance.

The point of “The Zone of Interest” may be to confront us with its grotesque, bourgeois protagonists’ behavior, but the resulting drama often feels like a Kubrickian horror movie about the divide between what we recognize as human and what we’d rather not think about. ( Simon Abrams )

top movie review 2023

5. " Asteroid City "

In the second half of his nearly 30-year career, Wes Anderson has continued to refine and evolve his style, often by taking lessons that he learned while directing animated movies (“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “ Isle of Dogs ”) and applying them to his live-action projects, which increasingly embrace a not-meant-to-be realistic, almost-storybook aesthetic (“ Moonrise Kingdom ,” “ The Grand Budapest Hotel ,” “ The French Dispatch ”). He’s become more formally radical with each new project, using framing devices, multiple narrators, nods to other media, and other techniques to comment on storytelling at the same time that he tells the audience a story. That the story is often quietly devastating is a testament to Anderson’s understanding of his own methods—you’d think that a director who conspicuously foregrounds his technique would be incapable of moving audiences, yet here we are, wiping a tear away. “Asteroid City” might be the most innovative and quietly mysterious film Wes Anderson has ever made. 

It alternates a 1950s, black-and-white, squarish-format “televised theater” production (about the short life of a playwright who never finished a play titled Asteroid City ) with a widescreen Technicolor-ish fable, also called “Asteroid City,” set on a military base that gets locked down due to an extraterrestrial visitation, trapping a group of genius kids and their parents. The dialogue and production design amount to a cinematic encyclopedia of mid-20th century art and pop culture references, from the New York Method school of theater and the heyday of live TV drama to the “spiritual death in small-town America” genre of fiction, theater and film drama, represented by touchstones like “ The Misfits ,” “ Picnic ,” and “ The Last Picture Show ”. As the movie unfolds, the viewers begin to realize that neither the black-and-white nor the color sections are intended as “reality,” and that they aren’t going to get any explanations or summations, or for that matter, any hand holding at all. It’s up to you to meet the film halfway, give yourself over to it, and make it make sense to you, on your own level and in your own way. You know, art. ( Matt Zoller Seitz )

top movie review 2023

4. " May December "

It's fascinating to watch people try to put Todd Haynes' latest masterpiece in a box. Is it camp? Is it a drama? A comedy? There's almost a meta level to this conversation because it's a film about an actress who thinks she can put people in a box too. The Juilliard trained Elizabeth Berry ( Natalie Portman ) comes to visit a woman named Gracie ( Julianne Moore ), who she thinks she's figured out by researching her crime and its tabloid coverage. The lesson of "May December" is that no one is that easy, especially people who don't operate in what we would call the normal world. 

Much has been made of Charles Melton's brilliant turn as a man named Joe caught in a vulnerable eternal adolescence because he was forced to grow up too quickly, but Moore's predator is just as removed from reality as she manipulates her husband and her children constantly for her own selfish needs. These are people moving in emotional quicksand—Joe reaches for any branch that could pull him out while Gracie pushes away any potential safety for either of them.

The fact that Elizabeth ends the film with no better understanding of Gracie and Joe than when she arrived in Georgia is essential to this film's success and the daring tone of Samy Burch's script, the year's best. No wonder she can't figure out who Gracie and Joe are—they have no idea themselves. ( Brian Tallerico )

top movie review 2023

3. " Oppenheimer "

Christopher Nolan ’s epic follows its titular character, J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), through the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II. As Oppenheimer trudges through scientific discovery and battles of ideology and ambition, what ensues is a three-hour orchestra of personal and professional histories, troubling tangos of guilt and pride, and a novel look at the horrors of war. “Oppenheimer” is both a searing political portrait of the United States colonial machine and a damning dossier of its titular character’s actions and interiority. 

Nolan’s filmmaking is trademarked by his penchant for grand-scale storytelling. Through each second of its extensive runtime, “Oppenheimer” delivers feats of narrative, performance, cinematography, and, ultimately, pathos. It’s a mammoth film, spanning multiple timelines and a broad array of characters. Yet there’s not a single detail within its complex and wide-ranging web that feels extraneous. And this is not only a testament to the mastery of Nolan’s writing, but also a deeply emotional consequence of how one of history’s most notorious events had no small players. 

There are shots in “Oppenheimer” that should never be forgotten. Intense portraiture backed by an award-worthy performance from Murphy is now woven into this year’s filmic memory. With various tensions building on every side of its story, Nolan doesn’t cast his lead in a definitive light, allowing the audience to engage with history and draw their own impossible conclusions. Questions of discovery and culpability collide with fierce uncertainty in “Oppenheimer,” a staggering achievement in character, context, and execution. ( Peyton Robinson )

top movie review 2023

2. " Past Lives "

There is a knowing slipperiness to writer-director Celine Song ’s debut “Past Lives.” Though Nora ( Greta Lee ) and her family leave South Korea, moving away from her childhood best friend Hae Sung ( Teo Yoo ), this film is not about immigration. Though Nora and Hae reconnect years later via Skype, this film is not about longing. And even though Hae eventually ventures to New York City for one last chance with Nora—despite Nora being married to Arthur ( John Magaro )—this, dismayingly, is not a romance. Desire without lust; flirtation without consummation; these are the ambiguities that some have assumed are pesky glitches rather than intentional features. 

It’s why I cringe whenever I see someone refer to “Past Lives” as a love story. It’s not, and knowingly so. Because “Past Lives” works on a far trickier, subtler spectrum than many have interpreted. This is a film about the act of mourning. Its complications arise not from a character discovering the inevitable; but from them grieving the unavoidable. Within that tight boundary, imposed by Song, an aching Yoo and a tender Magaro must navigate a frightening uncertainty: What if the woman they love adores another? Lee’s Nora, of course, is wrestling with a separate, abstract struggle. She is in a different film, a different time, and unlocking a different deadlock—balancing losing what she never had and what she may never experience. “Past Lives” is Nora’s elegy for her past, present, and future. It’s a film whose poeticism is written in the finite space between acquiescence and acceptance and in the tension between a creator’s desire to depict her life's reality and in the daydream possibility film so often demands. ( Robert Daniels )

top movie review 2023

1. " Killers of the Flower Moon "

Martin Scorsese ’s monumental adaptation of David Grann ’s non-fiction bestseller contains a bounty of viewing pleasures, but in the main it is something like an anti-entertainment. For the first two hours or so of its 206-minute running time, Scorsese forges a form of slow cinema. The machinations and sins of Ernest Burkhart and William “King” Hale (Scorsese stalwarts  Leonardo DiCaprio  and  Robert De Niro ) are laid out in studious and merciless detail, and often conveyed in static-camera tableaux that evoke not just Griffith and DeMille but Straub and Huillet. The crimes against the Osage Nation members who were the rightful owners of oil-rich Oklahoma land are committed in practically plain sight, and with almost droning repetition. Why isn’t anybody doing anything? Well, yes, that’s a good question. 

Whether you think Scorsese is making you uncomfortable in order to contend with man’s inhumanity to man or to make you undergo a form of white guilt depends on where your head is at, and your response might not be the one you’d prefer. It’s all about the perspectives the filmmaker chooses. Lily Gladstone ’s performance as Mollie is a sonata of stillness and indignation—“No investigation,” a reprise repeated in voiceover early in the film, is said with her voice—and Mollie’s kiss-off of Ernest is the greatest of its kind since Alida Valli walked away from Joseph Cotten in “ The Third Man .” But while in “The Third Man,” the viewer gets to digest the look of utter disdain on Valli’s face as she walks on by, here we don't have the option of sharing any kind of satisfaction or vindication with Mollie. Here, as all through the movie, form serves function. Because Mollie isn't merely walking away from Ernest but from us. We are obliged to sit with Ernest in his befuddlement, and with the subsequent knowledge that this criminal will, in real life, die a free man, as will his mentor in murder. ( Glenn Kenny )

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The Best Films Of 2023

Best Films Of 2023

There it is – the credits are rolling on 2023, another year packed with incredible movies. The last 12 months have seen stirring and spectacular cinematic feats unfold across our screens – rollocking adventures, searing historical dramas, side-splitting satires, nerve-shredding horror films, tearful farewells and joyous gatherings. Looking back on the best films of 2023 offers another reminder of the breathtaking breadth of the current cinematic landscape – an array of new voices, legendary names, and visionary artists working at the top of their game, delivering stories and characters that transported us to all-new worlds. It’s like Tom Cruise said: “Movies. Popcorn.”

With a new year ready to begin, Team Empire gathered to vote on the best films of 2023 – and, as ever, we’re going from UK release dates, any film that received an official launch here from 1 January until 31 December. The list is comprised of Top 10s submitted by every member of the team, with each vote assigned points rankings and aggregated into the official Empire Top 20 list you see below. Looking over it all, it’s hard to argue: cinema is in a very special place.

20) Society Of The Snow

Society Of The Snow

Christmas. Such a jolly holiday, fun and festive and heart-warming. The perfect time, then, to release J.A. Bayona’s Society Of The Snow , a devastating film which clobbers you with trauma after trauma, ripping your nerves to pieces. But! This exceptionally bleak dramatisation of the aftermath of a horrendous plane crash actually is fantastically heart-warming. And there’s certainly a lot of snow. Perfect Christmas content, then. It is, though, a lot : in 1972, a plane transporting 45 people crashed in the Andes. Over the next 72 days, the survivors – stuck in an impossible situation, with little hope of getting through it – faced the most extreme physical and spiritual hardship imaginable. In portraying their ordeal, though, Bayona gives us a film that illustrates what human beings are truly capable of. It’s incredibly inspiring, and emotionally exhausting. And it may well put you off flying for life. But it will fill your heart. A towering, powerful piece of work.

19) Blue Jean

Blue Jean

On Tyneside in the late 1980s, closeted PE teacher Jean (an extraordinary Rosy McEwen) is trying to navigate the end of the Thatcher years, when Section 28 legislation forbade the “promotion” of queer sexualities in schools. When a new student, Lois (Lucy Halliday), arrives at Jean’s school and then turns up in the local lesbian bar, Jean tries to become a mentor to her — only for the delicate balance of her hidden lives to be undone. Georgia Oakley’s debut is a meditative, layered piece of work which peels away at the defences Jean has put up around herself to survive in a hostile Britain, and McEwen is electrifying, carrying almost every frame. The grainy feel and melancholy palette add to the oppressive period setting, but there is queer joy to be found here, too – in the scenes in which Jean is surrounded by her community, as she eats takeaway with her girlfriend, and, ultimately, when she embraces who she is.

Read the Empire review

Pearl

Ti West’s X arrived last year as a slasher with much on its mind — chewing on notions of old age, sexual repression, and bodily autonomy delivered in a straight-up ‘70s murder-spree. 1918-set prequel Pearl is even better, West and Mia Goth teaming up to dig into the psychological morass of X ’s homicidal octogenarian in her younger years. The result is a film presented in an early Technicolor visual palette, with over-cranked colours and throwbacky sound cues — not just a stylish gimmick, but a reflection of the movie-life that Pearl herself wishes she was living. As her obsession with becoming famous (and getting her rocks off — notably, at one point, with a scarecrow) reveals a dark undercurrent in her psyche, the reality of her mundane life closes in — leading to a load of blood-letting. It’s beautifully crafted, with fascinating characters and an astonishing performance from Goth, whose expression during the closing credits will go down in cinematic history. Pearl herself says it best: she’s a starrr .

17) Anatomy Of A Fall

Anatomy Of A Fall

A gripping courtroom drama that makes multiple references to 50 Cent’s ‘P.I.M.P’, Anatomy Of A Fall above all else showcases the immense talents of Sandra Hüller (catch her next in Jonathan Glazer’s chilling The Zone Of Interest ). Its premise is simple: a troubled marriage ends with the suspicious death of the husband after falling from the attic window of their family chalet. A heated case ensues, in which Hüller’s Sandra protests her innocence, while her partially blind son is caught in the crossfire. And don’t get us started on prize-winning pooch Messi, who won the Palm Dog at this year’s Cannes for his role as Snoop the family hound. The film is at once a masterful puzzlebox and a suspense-fuelled character study, and Justine Triet and Arthur Harari’s razor-sharp writing keep you enthralled until the final act.

16) The Fabelmans

The Fabelmans

One thread of Steven Spielberg’s career in his autumn years has been a yearning to wander through his own past. Ready Player One paid tribute to a pop culture period when he was king, and West Side Story allowed him to play in a storyworld he’d loved as a kid. The Fabelmans, though, is the closest he’s come to a proper cinematic autobiography. Mitzi and Bert Fabelman take their boy Sammy to see The Greatest Show On Earth at the pictures, and light a fire in him to tell stories of his own. Soon he’s making 8mm movies, and after the family moves to Arizona and traumas start to pull them apart he seeks more and more solace in them. It’s a lovingly done coming-of-age movie suffused with what we’re obliged to call ‘That Spielberg Magic’, its sweetness undercut with real, piercing sadness.

15) Women Talking

Women Talking

A group of women quite literally, well, talking in a barn may not sound thrilling, but take our word for it — Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel is an emotional rollercoaster. Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara head up an excellent cast playing Mennonite women that have been suffering ongoing sexual assaults at the hands of male members of their colony, who must decide whether to forgive their abusers, or leave their home for good. This is confident, no-frills filmmaking from Polley, who keeps the setting and cinematic flourishes to a minimum, allowing the devastating dialogue, strange sense of humour, and outstanding performances to shine through, communicating the violence of the crimes against the women without ever doing so in an exploitative way. A slow, quiet burn that will shake your soul.

14) Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

What this existential exoskeleton lacks in shoe size, he makes up for in heart. Dean Fleischer Camp’s boundary-pushing stop-motion animation is a winning blend of visual splendour and worldbuilding, and the creative talents of Jenny Slate, whose voice fills our small calcified warrior with wit, warmth and wisdom beyond his years. Don’t be fooled by the film’s seemingly twee set-up; Marcel is undeniably cute but the film, which is co-written by Slate, treads a thoughtful path through loss, pain, and a quest for identity. That it was able to muscle its way onto an Oscar nomination list alongside animation from Guillermo del Toro (a staunch and vocal Marcel fan), DreamWorks and Pixar, only goes to show that with its scrappy spirit and ambition, this high entry on our list has touched the masses. You might say that we, too, fell for Marcel.

13) Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3

This is how you say goodbye. For years, we’ve been awaiting James Gunn’s final farewell to the intergalactic A-holes he transformed into household names a decade ago – and it was worth every second. Tonally, Guardians 3 is a brilliant balancing act: it’s deeper, darker, sadder than any of the previous outings of Star Lord and friends, containing some of the most upsetting material in the MCU; and yet, it’s still the colourful, cosmic Guardians we know and love, off on one last adventure together to save Rocket Raccoon. For a while now, it’s been clear that the misanthropic rodent was the character Gunn most connected with – and here he becomes the narrative drive, hovering between life and death as the circumstances of his creation are unearthed. Beyond the incredibly emotional performances and killer needle-drops (from the ‘Creep’ opening, to the ‘Dog Days Are Over’ finale), Guardians 3 also boasts the best action of Gunn’s career in the ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’ corridor fight. Any chance of an encore?

12) Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

While D&D ’s big screen legacy has traditionally been nothing for bards to write songs about, that all changed when John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein signed up for this immensely enjoyable and altogether less serious dungeon crawl (fun-geon crawl?). With their Game Night faces on, the pair successfully equipped this irreverent high fantasy heist caper with a screenplay of +2 charisma and a cloak of greater chuckling. From Hugh Grant’s scheming villain (think Phoenix Buchanan if he had a Red Wizard of Thay at his beck and call) to Regé-Jean Page’s absurdly literal paladin, and Sophia Lillis’ shape-shifting druid (the focus of a an exhilarating, form-flipping chase sequence), Honor Among Thieves is populated by an almost obscenely likeable clutch of cut-throats and rogues and boasts a gag-rate that hits more times than a level nine magic missile.

11) Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

The run-up to release was all about that stunt, fevered reporting about Tom Cruise’s daredevil mountain/motorcycle interfacing. In the movie itself, though, that moment — as grandiosely bananas as it is — is just another beat in a long series of knuckle-whitening thrills. McQuarrie and Cruise, the Hitchcock and Stewart of adrenaline, have now got this stuff down to a fine art. And even though the film struggles slightly to differentiate itself from previous instalments, there’s a calm mastery at work here that forces you to submit, from the Hunt For Red October -riffing opening sequence, to a high-tech airport cat-and-mouse game with multiple cats and multiple mice, to the train-set demolishing finale. Lord knows how they intend to top all this with the story’s concluding chapter, but only a fool would (dead) reckon against them. Let’s just hope Mark Gatiss, in the most ‘Is that Mark Gatiss?!’ role ever, gets more to do next time around.

10) Talk To Me

top movie review 2023

How does it feel watching Talk To Me ? Well, half of it is a pure cinematic high, gripping you by the hand before dragging you into its wildly kinetic world. But in its most painful moments – and boy, does it have those – it also feels like your head being repeatedly slammed onto a table while a nefarious soul corrupts your very being from the inside. So, an instant horror classic then. Director brothers Danny and Michael Philippou arrive fully formed with their feature debut, transferring the anything-goes anarchy of their YouTube work into a film that is remarkably controlled, teeming with life – and thrumming with death. Sophie Wilde is exceptional as teen Mia, who gets more than she bargained for when she and her friends mess around with a spooky hand that can channel lost spirits. When it – inevitably – goes horribly, nightmarishly wrong, you’ll be wishing for it all to stop, but desperate to see it to the bitter end.

9) Rye Lane

Rye Lane

When London gets romanticised, it always tends to be the same bits of the capital. Snooze. Raine Allen-Miller’s debut feature brings some Before Sunset vibes south of the river and reinvents the British romcom in the process. Over a day and night spent around Peckham and Brixton – shot with real wide-eyed love by Allen Miller, who moved to Brixton aged 12 – weepy sadsack Dom (David Jonsson) and peppy, impetuous Yas (Vivian Oparah) meet-cute in a gender neutral bog and wander around comparing love-scars before planning a caper to get Yas’s copy of A Tribe Called Quest album The Low End Theory back from an ex. On the way, there’s a cameo from a certain member of Brit romcom royalty which is delicious in more ways than one, and a soundtrack which bangs very, very hard. Dazzlingly inventive and with wit and energy to burn, Rye Lane is smart, sharp and very funny.

8) Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Deep breaths, everyone — this one blindsides you. Whatever your knowledge, or memory, of Judy Blume’s (and excuse us but it is practically the law that we have to use the next word) seminal 1970 novel about a 12-year-old American girl’s coming of age, this is an absolute heart-smashing gem from writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig. Are You There God? brings you in to Margaret’s (Abby Ryder Fortson, a future superstar) little world – where cup-sizes and impending menstruation mean everything – from the start, charming and enchanting you, making you feel like you’re one of the family until, at the end, when it’s time to let go, you can’t bear to leave. And know this: if you feel this isn’t the subject matter for you, that you’re not the demographic, you do yourself a disservice — this is a wonderful, fully-realised, perfectly executed piece of work that gets you right in the guts. A beauty.

Barbie

Sublime! What better way to describe Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie in just one word? Packed with pure invention, comedy, drama, dancing, and tons of heart, this is not the film based on the iconic doll that we were expecting – but one that absolutely delivered as one half of the summer’s oddest double-bill. Margot Robbie simply is stereotypical Barbie, a perfect feminine creation enjoying her life in the matriarchal Barbie Land, until the anxiety and fear from the woman playing with her in the real world – America Ferrera’s Gloria – starts to seep in, and turns everything upside-down. Robbie is exceptional, Ryan Gosling is having perhaps the most fun anyone’s ever had on screen, and the whole cast of Barbies and Kens commit entirely to this heightened, hilarious world. And, underneath that pink, plastic exterior lie genuinely moving musings on being a woman, a mother, a partner, and a human. Like we said: sublime.

TAR

Time, is the thing. And even though TÁR was released in the UK all the way back in January, its impact lingers on. Cate Blanchett gives an all-time best performance as Lydia Tár, a conducting maestro on the cusp of the biggest recording of her career — but it all falls apart when her past indiscretions and controversial teaching techniques catch up with her. Forcing you to sit in the glorious, uncomfortable nuances of themes like gender politics, power dynamics and cancel culture, Todd Field’s epic character study is brimming with stuff to make you think, as well as plenty to make you feel — seeing Lydia’s mastery of her conducting craft is a thing to behold. Come for the long takes and impeccable writing, stay for the standout movie song of the year: ‘Apartment For Sale’.

5) Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

Into The Spider-Verse should have been an impossible bar to cross – but the minds behind Miles Morales’ animated adventures somehow pushed it to even greater heights with the sequel. Across The Spider-Verse is a bold, brilliant blockbuster that feels lightyears ahead of the competition — boasting mind-boggling animated action, whip-smart gags, and touching character beats. This time, Shameik Moore’s Miles is sent careening across the multiverse, hurtling through Mumbattan, Nueva York, and darker dimensions beyond that — assembling a new band of Spider-pals (Daniel Kaluuya’s Spider-Punk and Karan Soni’s Pavitr Prabhakar are the standouts) while deepening his bond with Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld). There’s spine-tingling spectacle (Miles’ escape from Spider Society), achingly emotional moments (Rio’s speech about watching her son grow up), and art styles to literally take your breath away – most notably, the blossoming watercolour splashes of Gwen’s world. An audacious work of art, and a top-tier superhero story to boot.

4) How To Have Sex

How To Have Sex

British independent cinema is in the rudest of health right now, and Molly Manning Walker’s feature debut is a standout example. An energetic drama about the trials and tribulations of teenage girldom and female friendship, it follows Tara (an outstanding Mia McKenna-Bruce) as she goes on a pivotal holiday to Malia with friends Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis). They drink, they dance, they drink again – but when things heat up with their hotel neighbours, Tara is pushed to (and beyond) her limits. It’s a riveting, emotional, stomach-churning story of one girl’s discomfiting experience with sex and consent, but has had such an impact because of how deeply it resonates with so many. The highs and lows of the trip are executed in equal measure, euphoric club sequences and drunken laughter giving way to quiet, sombre reckonings. It’s a sign of incredible things to come from Manning Walker and McKenna-Bruce alike.

3) Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre is full of dark and terrible machines, from the chrono-portals of Tenet to the dream-tech of Inception . This summer saw the master of science-fiction become the master of science-fact, Nolanising history by zeroing in on the story behind a real-life weapon more horrifying than anything he’s depicted yet. Oppenheimer may be based on fact, but it pulses with genre thrills and suspense, ratcheting up the tension as a team of scientists create something unthinkably powerful: maybe even a world-killer. The true brilliance, though, is what Nolan does in the film’s back half, after the Trinity Test comes to its white-hot conclusion. The seemingly noble race to create the atomic bomb over – like Raiders Of The Lost Ark , a Nolan favourite, our hero is trying to obtain a weapon of mass destruction before the Nazis – ‘Oppie’ is left marinating in his own guilt and confusion, attacked in a closed-room hearing (and mocked in the Oval Office) by the same people who had been cheering him on. Headed up by a mesmerising Cillian Murphy (surely no actor can do more by simply staring at puddles), the vast ensemble make big and tiny moments alike pack a punch. A colossal feat of filmmaking, a profound, complex slab of storytelling, and Nolan’s most mature film yet.

2) Killers Of The Flower Moon

Killers Of The Flower Moon image

Every second of Scorsese’s latest opus thrums with purpose. His telling of the story of the Osage Murders – the 1920s killings that saw the oil-rich Native American Osage people systematically slaughtered by White Americans intent on inheriting their headrights – is a supremely powerful piece of work, unflinching in portraying the callous capitalistic history of the United States with clear resonances in the present day. While the headline event is Scorsese finally uniting Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in one of his features – as the cowardly Ernest Burkhart and his sinister scheming uncle ‘King’ Hale, respectively – it’s Lily Gladstone who looms largest. Her Mollie Burkhart – an Osage woman, wife of Ernest, watching her family members fall one-by-one around her – is a force of nature, Gladstone imbuing her with equal parts fight and fear. There’s undeniable care and conscientiousness and controlled rage in the storytelling here, proving the filmmaker still in his prime at 81. And the final reel will knock your socks off.

1) Past Lives

Past Lives

If you wanted to be reductive, Past Lives is essentially just a love triangle movie. But there’s so much more to it: Celine Song’s extraordinarily powerful film finds its impact in its understatement. In one of the most memorable scenes, Arthur (John Magaro) reflects on the more bombastic alternate version of this story: “Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later and realise they were meant for each other. In this story I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.” His wife, Nora (Greta Lee) dismisses him with an easy, familiar smile. “Shut up,” she laughs.

This is a film self-aware enough not to go down such an obvious route. Instead it finds its own rich authenticity across a decades-spanning story. Yes, there are childhood sweethearts — Nora, who emigrated to the US from Korea as a child, and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who stays in Seoul — and yes, there is unspoken chemistry between the two, when Hae Sung visits her, now married, in New York. Their scenes together hold a strange, electric tension. But there’s a relative ordinariness to the characters’ lives, and each of the three respond to the complex situation that arises thoughtfully and generously. They are recognisably human.

This is a drama in which not much happens, in which people simply talk and catch up and occasionally exchange meaningful looks, in which there is no dramatic bust-up or fights or explosions. But with gorgeous performances from the three leads, sumptuous yet minimalistic cinematography from Shabier Kirchner, a swooning score from Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen, and an astonishingly confident steady hand from debut writer-director Song, Past Lives leaves an impact as deep as an asteroid crater: a quiet film that rings loudly in your ears, long after the moving finale.

WJTV Jackson

Best movies of 2023, according to critics

(STACKER) — Looking back on 2023, it’s fair to say the year was one for the film history books. From the box office-breaking Barbenheimer weekend to the writers’ and actors’ strikes that lasted a large part of the year, countless defining events majorly impacted the industry. Alongside these headline-making moments were 12 months of incredible film releases.

“Maestro” audiences bore witness to a “career-best performance” by Carey Mulligan, with Jeffrey Wright’s jaw-dropping turn in “American Fiction” following suit. There was the buzzy “Saltburn” and “May December,” Greta Gerwig’s flawlessly directed “Barbie,” and the gorgeously shot “Poor Things.” In fact, there were so many good films this year it would be almost impossible to name them all, let alone compile a comprehensive list of the very best — so we’ve left that job up to the critics.

Using Metacritic data, Stacker appraised all the new films released in 2023 and ranked the top 25 by Metascore, with ties broken by the number of reviews and further ties remaining intact. (Data was collected on Dec. 13.) There are sure to be several films you’ll recognize as blockbuster hits, like “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” There are also several lesser-known titles— from “Beyond Utopia” and “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.” Along with some likely Oscar contenders like “The Zone of Interest,” there are also films you may be surprised didn’t make the list.

Read on to see whether your favorite blockbuster is #1 and discover a few hidden gems along the way.

25. ‘Beyond Utopia’

  • Director: Madeleine Gavin
  • Metascore: 84
  • Runtime: 2 hours, 5 minutes

In this unique documentary, viewers follow several North Koreans as they risk everything to escape their homeland. All the footage in the film is original — none of the harrowing scenes are recreations, and it was all shot by the filmmakers or the film’s subjects themselves. The more tense moments are interspersed with talking-head scenes from other defectors that expound on life under the totalitarian regime. Ben Pearson, writing for /Film, called the movie “intense, thrilling, heartbreaking, and vital.”

23. ’20 Days in Mariupol’ (tie)

  • Director: Mstyslav Chernov
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 31 minutes

Another hard-hitting documentary, “20 Days in Mariupol” follows director Mstyslav Chernov as he navigates the nearly abandoned Ukrainian port city after the invasion of the Russian military. His footage captures fleeing civilians, destroyed hospitals, and people attempting to survive in the hollowed-out city. While the film is far from an easy watch, New York Times critic-at-large Jason Farago wrote that the film is a “truly important documentary,” serving as “a model of how we discover the larger truth of war.”

23. ‘The Eternal Memory’ (tie)

  • Director: Maite Alberdi
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 25 minutes

Shot primarily during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this documentary follows the relationship between famed Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora and his wife, actor and politician Paulina Urrutia, as she cares for him after his devastating Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Writing for The Guardian, Wendy Ide described “The Eternal Memory” as “wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures.”

22. ‘Earth Mama’

  • Director: Savanah Leaf
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 41 minutes

“Earth Mama” is an A24 drama following a young woman who finds herself leaning heavily on her Bay Area community as she navigates her pregnancy and attempts to reunite with her two older children in foster care. Both subtle and intimate, the film explores the complexities of motherhood, love, and grief. New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis called Savanah Leaf’s feature film directorial debut “very moving and adamantly political.”

21. ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.’

  • Director: Kelly Fremon Craig
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Based on the classic 1970 coming-of-age novel by Judy Blume, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” follows a middle school-aged girl as she navigates a major move, her interfaith religious identity, and the various trials and tribulations of puberty. In her review, Lauren Mechling, senior editor at The Guardian, called the movie “a stunning evocation of the fear and yearning that come with standing on the precipice of adulthood,” and though it was originally intended for preteens, its subject matter is sure to resonate with viewers of all ages and genders.

20. ‘Tótem’

  • Director: Lila Avilés
  • Metascore: 85
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes

In “Tótem,” a 7-year-old spends the day with her extended family as they gather to celebrate what will probably be her father’s last birthday. The film, told from the point of view of a child who cannot quite decipher the adults around her, is an honest, heartfelt look at the realities of an extended goodbye. Never veering into sentimentality, Variety’s chief film critic, Peter Debruge, called the film “intimate [and] emotionally rich.”

19. ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’

  • Director: Nicole Newnham
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 56 minutes

Narrated by Dakota Johnson, “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” is a documentary chronicling the life and legacy of feminist and women’s sexuality researcher Shere Hite. Despite Hite’s “The Hite Report” being the 31st bestselling book of all time as of 2021, most would be hard-pressed to give even a basic summary of its contents. The film has, as Monica Castillo writes in her review for Roger Ebert, brought Hite’s important work back into the light. Castillo called the movie especially “poignant at a time when people are losing reproductive rights, and LGBTQ communities are losing their hard-won protections.”

18. ‘May December’

  • Director: Todd Haynes
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Loosely based on the real-life story of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, “May December” follows a woman whose 23-year relationship began when her partner was just 13, blurring the lines between abuse and romance. Starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, the movie’s thematic content is challenging, to say the least. Still, most critics, like Manohla Dargis in her New York Times rave, agree its disturbing subject matter is delicately dealt with. Its ambiguous ending encourages viewers to even further complicate their perspectives on the family at the heart of the film.

17. ‘Orlando, My Political Biography’

  • Director: Paul B. Preciado
  • Metascore: 86
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 38 minutes

This uniquely formatted, experimental documentary tells the transition stories of 26 trans and nonbinary individuals, using Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” as a unifying framework. For Variety, Manuel Betancourt wrote that director Paul B. Preciado created a “towering manifesto” of a film that blurred genre boundaries and blended the political and the personal with humor and self-consciousness.

16. ‘The Delinquents’

  • Director: Rodrigo Moreno
  • Runtime: 3 hours, 3 minutes

In “The Delinquents,” an overlooked, overworked bank employee plots to steal enough money to live modestly for the rest of his life — and he’ll cut his co-worker in if the other man agrees to hide the cash while he serves his inevitable jail time. However, there’s more to this Argentine film than an action-packed plot; it ruminates on late capitalism and the odd connections between people with quirky humor. Writing for Roger Ebert, Jourdain Searles said the film “plays like a philosophical experiment.”

15. ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’

  • Director: Raven Jackson
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Spanning the course of several decades, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” follows a Black woman in Mississippi from childhood into her adult years. Raven Jackson’s first film has been highly praised for its composition and, as Richard Brody described in his New Yorker review, the way it “looks at ordinary life with such loving care.” In addition to Brody’s assertion that the film is “the directorial debut of the year,” fellow critics, including Monica Castillo for Roger Ebert, have lauded the film’s subtlety and slow, deliberate pacing.

14. ‘Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé’

  • Director: Beyoncé
  • Runtime: 2 hours, 50 minutes

A concert documentary film written, directed, and produced by Beyoncé herself, “Renaissance” takes viewers behind the scenes of the titular worldwide tour, giving them a rare look at the development of the epic scale of what can only be called an experience. Writing for Slate, Nadira Goffe, an associate writer of culture, praised how the movie embraced the singer’s imperfections, dispelling the idea that all celebrities are — and should be — perfect. “Renaissance” also offers up a visual feast that NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour called “maximalist excellence.”

13. ‘Anatomy of a Fall’

  • Director: Justine Triet
  • Runtime: 2 hours, 32 minutes

In this French courtroom drama, a young visually impaired boy struggles with his decision to testify after his mother is accused of murdering his father. “Anatomy of a Fall,” winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, wrestles with the idea of truth and whether it is ever really knowable. Writing for The Guardian, Wendy Ide called the film “electric, restlessly dynamic and compulsively watchable,” neatly stepping around the common pitfalls of legal dramas to create something fresh and complex.

12. ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’

  • Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
  • Runtime: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Following up on the critically acclaimed “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” sees Spideys from the far reaches of the multiverse team up to stop a new threat. Bursting with creative energy and multiple visually arresting animation styles, the film explores what it means to grow up and how much power we have over our own storylines. In his review for The Ringer, Daniel Chin wrote that “Across the Spider-Verse” is “even more ambitious, adventurous, and visually spellbinding than its predecessor — and just as filled with heart.”

11. ‘Mami Wata’

  • Director: C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi
  • Metascore: 87
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 47 minutes

A black-and-white thriller based on Nigerian folklore, “Mami Wata” deals with the water spirit Mami Wata and one village’s growing discontent with her earthly representative, Mama Efe, who serves as the village’s faith healer. Peter Bradshaw raved about the movie’s striking visuals, urgent storytelling, and stripped-down minimalism in his Guardian review, while RogerEbert.com Editor-at-Large Matt Zoller Seitz wrote, “The film casts a spell, and the spell persists to the end.”

10. ‘Fallen Leaves’

  • Director: Aki Kaurismäki
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 21 minutes

The only rom-com to make the list, “Fallen Leaves” follows two Finnish people as they attempt to start a relationship despite numerous obstacles that range from lost phone numbers to alcoholism. In her New York Times review, Esther Zuckerman called the film a “brilliant new gem of a comedy” that balances despair and levity to ultimately “life-affirming” effect.

9. ‘Poor Things’

  • Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
  • Runtime: 2 hours, 21 minutes

Based on a 1992 novel of the same name, “Poor Things” tells the story of a resurrected Victorian woman who embarks on a journey of self-discovery and sexual liberation. Besides calling the film Yorgos Lanthimos’ best, film critic Christy Lemire praised Emma Stone’s “performance of a lifetime” as Bella in her Roger Ebert review. Constance Grady, a senior correspondent of culture at Vox, called the film “joyous in its weirdness, joyous in its exploration and celebration of its strange, strange world.”

8. ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

  • Director: Martin Scorsese
  • Metascore: 89
  • Runtime: 3 hours, 26 minutes

An adaptation of the bestselling 2017 book of the same name by David Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is about the murders of Osage Nation members after oil was discovered on their tribal land. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone, the movie has been held up as a perfect example of how drastically American history changes when the narrator of that history changes. Scorsese’s handling of the heavy subject matter was praised by RogerEbert.com managing editor Brian Tallerico, who called it “a masterful historical drama about evil operating in plain sight” in his review.

7. ‘Oppenheimer’

  • Director: Christopher Nolan
  • Runtime: 3 hours

One of the summer’s biggest hits, “Oppenheimer” is an epic biographical thriller that covers the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in developing the atomic bomb. In addition to its compelling direction and nuanced performances from its leads, Associated Press film writer Jake Coyle praised the movie for how it wrestled with the question of the responsibility of power: whether it be in major things, like the development of the bomb, or more everyday things, like our interactions with our loved ones.

6. ‘All of Us Strangers’

  • Director: Andrew Haigh
  • Metascore: 91
  • Runtime: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Best described as a romantic drama with a magical realism twist, Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” follows a Londoner named Adam as he begins a relationship with his mysterious neighbor and simultaneously discovers that his parents appear to still be alive, despite dying in a car crash 30 years prior. The gut-wrenching film at once inspires feelings of loneliness and connection, which is partly what makes it so remarkable.

“Haigh’s study of loneliness does, in its own strange way, make us feel less alone,” Benjamin Lee, East Coast arts editor at The Guardian, wrote in his review. “It may never get better in the ways we were told it would but if we can stop it from getting worse, then maybe that’ll be enough.”

5. ‘Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros’

  • Director: Frederick Wiseman
  • Metascore: 92
  • Runtime: 4 hours

Directed by 93-year-old veteran Frederick Wiseman, this documentary takes viewers inside the titular French restaurant that’s held three Michelin stars for more than half a century. Earning a rare 100% score from critics and audiences alike on Rotten Tomatoes, “Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros” meticulously showcases what it takes to reach culinary perfection. Writing for Roger Ebert, Matt Zoller Seitz noted the project helps audiences “see through fresh eyes and understand things [they] never thought about or took for granted.”

4. ‘The Boy and the Heron’

  • Director: Hayao Miyazaki
  • Runtime: 2 hours, 4 minutes

A Studio Ghibli project, “The Boy and the Heron” is an animated fantasy film that follows a young boy, Mahito, who, after his mother dies, enters a timeless world via an abandoned tower and befriends a talking gray heron. As with many Studio Ghibli releases, critics have lauded Hayao Miyazaki’s incredible animation and the movie’s poignant themes of coping with grief and loss and eventually, coming to a place of acceptance.

3. ‘The Zone of Interest’

  • Director: Jonathan Glazer
  • Metascore: 93

Jonathan Glazer’s difficult-to-watch film “The Zone of Interest” follows a Nazi commander as he and his family work to build an idyllic home for themselves next door to Auschwitz. Critics have praised the drama for how it unemotionally examines how easily apathy can make us complicit in the horrors of history. Critic Raphael Abraham wrote for the Financial Times: “Glazer has achieved something much greater than just making the monstrous mundane — by rendering such extreme inhumanity ordinary he reawakens us to its true horror”

2. ‘Past Lives’

  • Director: Celine Song
  • Metascore: 94

The drama “Past Lives” follows two people as they go from childhood loves in South Korea to veritable strangers in New York City to something in between. At once incredibly romantic and heartbreakingly sad, the movie is both “delicate, sophisticated and yet also somehow simple, direct, even verging on the cheesy,” as Peter Bradshaw described for The Guardian; it’s a fitting way to encapsulate this singular entry into the cannon that sits in the runner-up spot for 2023 movies.

1. ‘Our Body’

  • Director: Claire Simon
  • Metascore: 95
  • Runtime: 2 hours, 48 minutes

And the best movie of 2023, according to critics? That honor goes to “Our Body,” a documentary about the doctors and patients of a gynecological ward at a public Parisian hospital. The film from acclaimed documentarian Claire Simon has a rare 100% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety’s International Critic Jessica Kiang praised “Our Body,” particularly for “demystifying and de-objectifying the female body” and for its “nonjudgmental, empathetic” approach to the choices pregnant people from all walks of life make regarding their health care.

Story editing by Eliza Siegel. Copy editing by Paris Close.

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Jonathan Glazer’s Auschwitz Drama Borders on the Unwatchable

Portrait of Bilge Ebiri

This review was originally published on May 22, 2023. At the 2024 Oscars , The Zone of Interest won two awards, including Best International Feature.

“What I wanted to film was the contrast between somebody pouring a cup of coffee in their kitchen and somebody being murdered over on the other side of the wall.” That’s how Jonathan Glazer describes his intentions in The Zone of Interest , the Auschwitz drama that got a wild reception from critics at Cannes. The shock of Glazer’s picture is not in the graphic terrors it depicts, but in what it purposefully doesn’t show. He gives us the person pouring their coffee, but only hints at the terrors beyond the wall. And yet, his film is so psychologically searing it borders on the unwatchable.

The Zone of Interest , which A24 will release later this year, is theoretically based on the late Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, and it happened to premiere at Cannes the day before Amis’s passing at the age of 73 . One is tempted to say something about this coincidence, but Glazer appears to have taken pretty much just the setting and the title from Amis; the movie has almost nothing to do with the book, which has an actual plot and characters. It’s a similar approach to what Glazer tried in his previous film, for which he turned Michel Faber’s 2000 novel Under the Skin into a demented, practically experimental horror-sci-fi art film starring Scarlett Johansson. ( Under the Skin was ten years ago; Birth , his previous feature, was 2004. Glazer takes his time with these projects.)

The new film follows, through calm, quotidian wide shots, the daily life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family. It opens with a lengthy, bucolic image of a picnic beside a placid lake. We might marvel at the beauty and peacefulness of this setting — the kind of thing fond summer memories are built on. Over the course of the picture, as we watch birthdays and tea parties and catch snippets of casual conversations, we also hear the constant churn of the death camp behind the walls, occasionally punctuated by distant gunshots and screams. Sometimes, in the evenings, we might notice the plumes of smoke, while the Höss family continues about their business. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), Rudolf’s wife, spends much of her time cultivating and perfecting her “paradise garden,” taking great care with the gorgeous flowers, bushes, and vines, and Glazer makes sure to give each plant a beautiful, loving close-up as she talks about the care they need.

It’s not so much that what’s happening in Auschwitz is ignored, but that it comes up in the most blood-chillingly mundane ways. Women talk about trying on dresses and coats that once belonged to Jewish families. “I’ll go on a diet,” says one when remarking that one coat doesn’t fit her. “Guess where I found this diamond?” someone asks at one point. “In the toothpaste.” They gossip about a Jewish neighbor who used to have book readings, and about how she outbid them once on some curtains. They wonder if she’s “in there.” At night, the boys stay up late in bed, pointing flashlights at their collections of teeth the way you or I might have once read a children’s novel.

Glazer produced the film in unorthodox fashion, with multiple locked-down cameras rolling simultaneously in different rooms, and the actors free to move about and stay in different spaces without a crew present. (The layout of the Höss residence was reportedly based on extensive research into their actual house; this really was how they lived.) The frames still manage to feel highly composed, as if the actors have been blocked to within an inch of their lives; Glazer has clearly boned up on his Haneke. But the images also have the quality of surveillance footage, which adds to the unsettling mood and sets our minds racing.

This kind of formalist approach, cross-breeding narrative cinema and conceptual art, can be hard to maintain without slipping into tedium. But Glazer knows to develop the idea without abandoning his rigor. The evil beyond the walls (and, really, the evil within the walls) makes itself known in almost psychosomatic ways. Hedwig’s mother, who is staying with her daughter, finds herself unable to sleep. When Rudolf finds bone fragments and ash drifting down the stream where his kids are swimming, he fears for their health and makes sure they get a good washing. Later, he has a mysterious bout of nonstop vomiting.

One of Rudolf’s daughters constantly sleepwalks. From her sojourns Glazer cuts to impressively creepy night-vision shots of a mysterious girl wandering the area, placing what appear to be pieces of food in the dirt. She finds a tightly folded-up piece of paper, which contains some music — a composition by a prisoner that she then plays on a piano, each note conveying a line of grim poetry. One world is constantly bleeding into the other.

In some ways, the buzz of domesticity we’re watching is a machine as efficient as the death factory thrumming in the background. When Rudolf gets a promotion to the head office in Berlin, he and Hedwig quarrel. She doesn’t want to leave. Why should she? She’s spent all this time building a beautiful garden, it’s a great place to raise the kids, and they’ve made so many lovely memories here. (“This is our Lebensraum ,” she says, using the word for “living space” that was used to justify Imperial Germany’s expansionism in the early 20th century and became a buzzword for Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s.) It’s the kind of argument spouses have had since time immemorial, and it’s so terrifying here because it feels totally real. The everyday cadences of the film, the trifling conversations about flowers and kids and neighbors and hand-me-down clothes and where to live, are clearly meant to be relatable. In its own sly and subtly devastating way, The Zone of Interest pulls us into its circle of evil.

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Film critic final predictions for the 2024 academy award winners.

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This weekend the 96th Academy Awards ceremony broadcasts on Sunday, March 10th, and this year’s awards look to offer few surprises in above-the-line categories, outside of a few acting categories that are tight contests. The excitement will come from the other categories where I think we might see a few upsets. Here are my predictions for the 2024 Oscar winners, representing films from 2023.

Cillian Murphy stars in "Oppenheimer"

2023 was a rough year at the box office, but wound up offering plenty of exceptional filmmaking. Wile multiple tentpole flopped or underperformed, including even Marvel franchise entries Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels , which combined for just $682 million globally, a three-hour period-setting biographical film Oppenheimer grossed nearly $960 million.

While I disagree strongly with lots of nomination choices at the Oscars and offered my own list of the greatest cinematic achievements of 2023 , the actual nominated films and artists are still mostly among the three-dozen or more movies that stood out as high-quality works worthy of status as contenders.

If you think cinema is suffering, if you say there aren’t enough original stories being told, if you insist “they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” if you argue that IP and sequels and remakes are the only thing getting released, if you ask, “where are all of the new stories being told?” the answer is “EVERYWHERE, if you bother to look instead of riding a bandwagon false narrative that was already worn out decades ago.

A Russian Drone Spotted A Ukrainian Patriot Air-Defense Crew Convoying Near The Front Line. Soon, A Russian Hypersonic Missile Streaked Down.

First, ukraine shoots down two of russia’s a-50 radar planes. then russia prepares a replacement a-50. so ukraine targets its factory., new iphone 16 leak reveals apple s stunning design decision.

With the actual Oscar nominees, plus my own picks for the year’s greatest movies and honorary mentions, there’s three-dozen movies that loudly answer those questions, be it new original works, adapted classic and iconic novels, or visionary renditions of pop culture phenomena.

Pick a couple or three or a dozen, and enjoy.

Now, without further ado, here are my final predictions for the Oscars, minus the short film categories Best Documentary Short, Best Animated Short, and Best Live-Action Short, which I unfortunately didn’t see and therefore don’t want to make random guesses about who might win.

Best Picture — This is surely a lock now, with Oppenheimer destined to take home the statuette. The film has swept most award ceremonies to date and enjoys the combined support of SAG, PGA, and DGA.

Best Director — Christopher Nolan is a lock at this point as well, for Oppenheimer . (I think he should’ve also won Best Picture and Best Director for Dunkirk ).

Best Actress — Although it’s a close race and momentum favors Lilly Gladstone for her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon , I believe Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things is more the sort the Oscars are likely to reward this year.

Best Actor — Cillian Murphy already has momentum over Paul Giamatti’s turn in The Holdovers and Bradley Cooper’s performance in Maestro, and I think the strength of Oppenheimer overall at the ceremony will carry Murphy to victory.

Best Original Screenplay — The Writers Guild is holding its own awards ceremony after the Oscars this year, so it’s harder to predict these categories. I think David Hemingson’s The Holdovers has the momentum and good will to win the day, but Justine Triet and Arthur Harari’s Anatomy of a Fall may pull off a surprise win.

Best Adapted Screenplay — It’s likely a two-way race here between Cord Jefferson adapting himself for American Fiction and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer . I expect American Fiction to take home the statuette.

Best Supporting Actress — Another lock, this time for Da’Vine Joy Randolph and her universally acclaimed performance in The Holdovers .

Best Supporting Actor — Like the film Oppenheimer in which he appears, Robert Downey, Jr. is a lock here.

Best Animated Feature — The odds-on favorite is certainly Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse , and I expect it to win. Since its predecessor won in 2018 and there’s a third chapter next year that’s bound to be an Oscar nom, The Boy and the Heron is a powerful, worthy contender capable of winning on its own merits as well.

Best Documentary — I expect conditions globally and domestically to generate support for 20 Days in Mariupol for it’s intimately stark and shocking depiction of the brutality of Russia’s war of aggression and war crimes against NATO ally Ukraine.

Best International Film — As the only contender also selected as one of the 10 nominees for Best Picture, I think The Zone of Interest is a sure bet to win.

Best Cinematography — I think the unique complexities of Hoyte van Hoytema’s work in Oppenheimer depicting multiple eras will earn him the win.

Best Film Editing — This is a race between Jennifer Lame for Oppenheimer , Laurent Sénéchal for Anatomy of a Fall , and Thelma Schoonmaker for Killers of the Flower Moon , but I feel Oppenheimer will pull out the win.

Best Sound — While Oppenheimer appears to have momentum, I think The Zone of Interest may wind up taking home the statuette in one of Oppenheimer’s few losses.

Best Production Design — I think Oppenheimer is taking home this award as well.

Best Costume Design — Holly Waddington’s outrageously unique magical fantasy designs in Poor Things will probably lose by a hair to Jacqueline Durran bringing 65 years worth of pop-culture toy style and appeal to vivid life in Barbie.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling — Kazu Hiro, Kay Georgiou, and Lori McCoy-Bell look on track to win for their work in Maestro .

Best Visual Effects — I believe Godzilla Minus One — my favorite film of 2023 — with its documentary-like hyper-realistic effects and the near-superhuman efforts of its numerically small but mighty 35-person team will carry it to victory. Napoleon , however, is close on its heels in this race.

Best Original Score — Ludwig Göransson seems destined to take home the statuette for his widely beloved work on Oppenheimer .

Best Original Song — A tight race between composer and Osage Nation tribal member Scott George’s “Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)” and the Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt song “I’m Just Ken.” The momentum is behind “I’m Just Ken” and I suspect it will win, but my heart is rooting for “Wahzhazhe.”

And there you have it, dear readers, my predictions for the 2024 Academy Award winners on Sunday.

I hope your own favorites are in the mix to take home the statuettes on Oscar day, and that you seek out some of the films you haven’t seen yet, because there are so many great ones just waiting to be discovered.

Mark Hughes

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Oscar Winners 2024: The Full List of Winners From the 96th Academy Awards

Oppenheimer, barbie, poor things, the zone of interest, and many more..

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The 96th Academy Awards, also known as the 2024 Oscars, have celebrated the best of the best in the world of movies from 2023. While there were a ton of worthy victories in the 23 categories, Oppenheimer walked away as the big winner.

Alongside securing Best Picture, Oppenheimer also took home the awards for Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Actor in a Leader Role (Cillian Murphy), Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Downey Jr.), Cinematography, Music (Original Score), and Film Editing. These wins also mark the first Oscar wins for Nolan, Murphy, and Downey Jr.

Poor Things followed right behind with four wins including Actress in a Leading Role (Emma Stone), Production Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, and Costume Design. The Zone of Interest was the only other film to win multiple awards as it won International Feature Film and Sound.

You can check out the full list of the Oscar winners below, and be sure to let us know in the comments how you feel the show went!

Oscar Winners 2024

Best picture.

  • American Fiction
  • Anatomy of a Fall
  • The Holdovers
  • Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Oppenheimer - WINNER
  • Poor Things
  • The Zone of Interest

Best Director

  • Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall)
  • Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
  • Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) - WINNER
  • Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things)
  • Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)

Actor in a Leading Role

  • Bradley Cooper (Maestro)
  • Colman Domingo (Rustin)
  • Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers)
  • Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) - WINNER
  • Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction)

Actress in a Leading Role

  • Annette Bening (Nyad)
  • Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon)
  • Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall)
  • Carey Mulligan (Maestro)
  • Emma Stone (Poor Things) - WINNER

Actor in a Supporting Role

  • Sterling K Brown (American Fiction)
  • Robert De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon)
  • Robert Downey Jr (Oppenheimer) - WINNER
  • Ryan Gosling (Barbie)
  • Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things)

Actress in a Supporting Role

  • Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer)
  • Danielle Brooks (The Color Purple)
  • America Ferrera (Barbie)
  • Jodie Foster (Nyad)
  • Da'Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers) - WINNER

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

  • American Fiction - WINNER
  • Oppenheimer

Writing (Original Screenplay)

  • Anatomy of a Fall - WINNER
  • May December

Cinematography

Animated feature film.

  • The Boy and the Heron - WINNER
  • Robot Dreams
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Music (Original Score)

  • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Music (Original Song)

  • The Fire Inside (Flamin' Hot)
  • I'm Just Ken (Barbie)
  • It Never Went Away (American Symphony)
  • Wahzhazhe - A Song for My People (Killers of the Flower Moon)
  • What Was I Made For? (Barbie) - WINNER

Production Design

  • Poor Things - WINNER

Film Editing

Documentary feature film.

  • Bobi Wine: The People's President
  • The Eternal Memory
  • Four Daughters
  • To Kill a Tiger
  • 20 Days in Mariupol - WINNER

Documentary Short Film

  • The ABCs of Book Banning
  • The Barber of Little Rock
  • Island in Between
  • The Last Repair Shop - WINNER
  • Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó

International Feature Film

  • Io Capitano
  • Perfect Days
  • Society of the Snow
  • The Teachers' Lounge
  • The Zone of Interest - WINNER

Makeup and Hairstyling

Visual effects.

  • The Creator
  • Godzilla Minus One - WINNER
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
  • Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Costume Design

Animated short film.

  • Letter to a Pig
  • Ninety-Five Senses
  • Our Uniform
  • War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko - WINNER

Live-Action Short Film

  • Knight of Fortune
  • Red, White and Blue
  • The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - WINNER

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.

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Porn Star Rocco Siffredi’s Netflix Bio-Series ‘Supersex’ Is More Tedious Than Sexy: TV Review

By Aramide Tinubu

Aramide Tinubu

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  • Porn Star Rocco Siffredi’s Netflix Bio-Series ‘Supersex’ Is More Tedious Than Sexy: TV Review 6 days ago

Supersex. (L to R) Alessandro Borghi as Rocco, Gaia Messerklinger as Moana in episode 104 of Supersex. Cr. Lucia Iuorio/Netflix © 2024

Loosely based on the experiences of real-life porn sensation Rocco Siffredi , known as the “Italian Stallion,” Netflix ’s “ Supersex ” isn’t actually very sexy at all. Instead, the seven-part series, created by Francesca Manieri, is a tale about family, masculinity and toxic bonds. While the show, which stars Alessandro Borghi in the lead role, has some interesting chapters, the surrealist elements — including some hallucinatory moments and the bizarre way some of the sex scenes are filmed — make it more than a biographical account. Instead, it’s an overly complex examination of relationships and the vices people indulge in to escape their emotional turmoil.

Series opener “Superpower” acts mainly as a coming-of-age story. Following Rocco’s retirement news, the show zips back to 1974. Ten-year-old Rocco Tano feels trapped in the impoverished rural town of Ortona and lost in the chaos of his family life. His mother is devoted to his mentally disabled brother Claudio, and Rocco lives in the shadow of his charismatic older half-brother, Tommaso (Adriano Giannini). Tommaso is Rocco’s North Star. He represents a type of freedom and hypermasculinity that appears out of reach for the men of Ortona. Tommaso also has the love of the town’s most stunning woman, Lucia (Jasmine Trinca), which only endears Rocco to him further.

In addition to examining Rocco’s family dynamic, “Supersex” zooms in on his fixation on sex, which begins at a very young age. The series unpacks his crush on Lucia and later his discovery of “Supersex,” a pornography magazine starring Gabriel Pontello. The euphoria from observing and later engaging in sex is a feeling Rocco chases across the next three decades. But his sex work comes at the expense of his mental health. It also destroys the romances and familial bonds he tries to form and maintain.

Despite a lifelong admiration of Tommaso’s machismo, his brother’s treatment of Lucia, who funds their lifestyle through her sex work on the streets of Paris, slowly shifts Rocco’s point of view. An invitation to a sex club awakens previously unknown desires. Becoming a porn star gives him financial security, but his inner turmoil stems from trying to live up to the expectations his family places on him.

“Supersex” dwells far too long on Rocco’s dysfunctional brotherhood with Tommaso, giving the toxic and exhausting connection unneeded exposition. Fewer episodes and less time spent on the self-destructive café manager would have kept the storyline squarely on Rocco’s psyche. Moreover, Manieri positions Lucia’s life as a counternarrative to Rocco’s. As with Rocco’s female co-stars, she isn’t allowed the same agency and status he obtains. Women are sexualized and then vilified for being sexual in the same breath. While Lucia eventually finds herself on a new path, it’s not without suffering and sacrifice, difficulties Rocco never contends with. The pair are an intriguing juxtaposition, but this mirroring gets muddled under their dark pull toward Tommaso. Similarly, Rocco’s enthusiasm for rough sex acts is never fully explored.

Still, “Supersex” makes some smart choices. Intercourse and other types of sex are showcased, of course, but these scenes aren’t gratuitous. Instead, they illustrate Rocco’s emotional state as he deals with loss and yearning or even demonstrate his self-worth.

The penultimate episode, “Resurrection of the Bodies,” is the standout and centers on Rocco’s return to Ortona amid his mother’s illness and one of the biggest highlights of his career, winning best European actor at the Hot d’Or Awards. In 53 minutes, Rocco confronts the effects of shame and how so-called family members react to him when he’s no longer playing by their rules.

Though Rocco’s story is solidly depicted, audiences hoping for a bio-series-type narrative won’t find it here. It’s also worth noting that Netflix offers a dubbed English version, but the show is best viewed in Italian with subtitles. Overall, “Supersex” isn’t just an examination of one man’s life and career but a look at the lives people create, however unconventional, when they dare to move through the world as their most authentic selves.

“Supersex” premieres March 6 on Netflix .

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Challengers

Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers (2024)

Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his f... Read all Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.

  • Luca Guadagnino
  • Justin Kuritzkes
  • Josh O'Connor
  • 2 Critic reviews
  • 1 nomination

Challengers

  • Art Donaldson

Josh O'Connor

  • Patrick Zweig

Zendaya

  • Tashi Donaldson
  • Umpire (New Rochelle Final)

Bryan Doo

  • Art's Physiotherapist
  • Art's Security Guard
  • Tashi's Mother
  • Line Judge (New Rochelle Final)
  • TV Sports Commentator (Atlanta 2019)

A.J. Lister

  • Leo Du Marier
  • Woman With Headset (Atlanta 2019)

Christine Dye

  • Motel Front Desk Clerk
  • Motel Husband

Kevin Collins

  • New Rochelle Parking Lot Guard
  • USTA Official …
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  • Trivia To prepare for her role, Zendaya spent three months with pro tennis player-turned-coach, Brad Gilbert .
  • Connections Referenced in OWV Updates: The Seventh OWV Awards - Last Update of 2022 (2022)
  • When will Challengers be released? Powered by Alexa
  • April 26, 2024 (United States)
  • United States
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  • Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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  13. The 15 Best Movies of 2023—and Where to Watch Them

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  14. The Most Anticipated Movies of 2023

    The Exorcist: Believer (2023). Directed by: David Gordon Green Starring: Leslie Odom Jr., Ellen Burstyn, Ann Dowd Opening on: October 6, 2023 After capping off his trio of Halloween films, director David Gordon Green jumps right into another beloved horror franchise. As with his tackling of the Michael Myers story, The Exorcist is a follow-up to the original — and the 1973 original only ...

  15. The best movies and TV of 2023, picked by NPR critics : NPR

    Review Culture. The best movies and TV of 2023, picked for you by NPR critics. December 19, 2023 5:01 AM ET. By . Eric Deggans , Aisha Harris , Linda Holmes , Bob Mondello , Bilal Qureshi ...

  16. The best movies of 2023

    Perspective by Ann Hornaday. Chief film critic. December 4, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST. Illustration by Camilla Falsini for The Washington Post. 2. The Holdovers. 25 min. I cannot tell a lie: 2022 was ...

  17. The Best Reviewed 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 ...

  18. The Best Films of 2023, So Far

    The Best Films of 2023, So Far. Our critics picked six films that you can catch up with over the long holiday. 76. From left, Grace Edwards, Scarlett Johansson and Damien Bonnard in "Asteroid ...

  19. Best movies of 2023: Justin Chang's 10 favorite films : NPR

    Best movies of 2023: Justin Chang's 10 favorite films Film critics like to argue, but Chang says that he and his colleagues agree that this was a really good year on screen.Beyond the Barbie and ...

  20. The Ten Best Films of 2023

    Runner-ups: "About Dry Grasses," "All of Us Strangers," "Anatomy of a Fall," "The Boy and the Heron," "Fallen Leaves," "Godland," "Kokomo City," "Priscilla," "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse," and "A Thousand and One"10. "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt"Watching Raven Jackson's debut feature film, "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" (produced by Barry Jenkins and developed through the Indie ...

  21. Best 20 Movies of 2023

    2. Past Lives (2023) Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrested apart after Nora's family emigrates from South Korea. Twenty years later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront notions of love and destiny. 3.

  22. The Best Films Of 2023

    20) Society Of The Snow. Christmas. Such a jolly holiday, fun and festive and heart-warming. The perfect time, then, to release J.A. Bayona's Society Of The Snow, a devastating film which ...

  23. Best movies of 2023, according to critics

    Using Metacritic data, Stacker appraised all the new films released in 2023 and ranked the top 25 by Metascore, with ties broken by the number of reviews and further ties remaining intact. (Data ...

  24. Review: 'Zone of Interest' Borders on the Unwatchable

    This review was originally published on May 22, 2023. At the 2024 Oscars, The Zone of Interest won Best International Feature. "What I wanted to film was the contrast between somebody pouring a ...

  25. Film Critic Final Predictions For The 2024 Academy Award Winners

    2023 was a rough year at the box office, but wound up offering plenty of exceptional filmmaking. Wile multiple tentpole flopped or underperformed, including even Marvel franchise entries Ant-Man ...

  26. Oscar Winners 2024: The Full List of Winners From the 96th ...

    The 96th Academy Awards, also known as the 2024 Oscars, have celebrated the best of the best in the world of movies from 2023. While there were a ton of worthy victories in the 23 categories ...

  27. 'Supersex' Review: Rocco Siffredi's True Porn Story Doesn't Shine

    Series opener "Superpower" acts mainly as a coming-of-age story. Following Rocco's retirement news, the show zips back to 1974. Ten-year-old Rocco Tano feels trapped in the impoverished ...

  28. Challengers (2024)

    Challengers: Directed by Luca Guadagnino. With Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor, Zendaya, Darnell Appling. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.

  29. Eagle (2024 film)

    Eagle is a 2024 Indian Telugu-language action thriller film written and directed by Karthik Gattamneni and produced by T. G. Vishwa Prasad and Vivek Kuchibhotla under People Media Factory. It stars Ravi Teja in the titular role alongside Anupama Parameswaran, Kavya Thapar, Navdeep and others.. The film was officially announced on 12 June 2023. The background score and soundtrack were composed ...