The Best Movies of 2023

Dec 26, 2023

Putting together a best-of list can be difficult in one of two ways: either you have too few movies worthy of inclusion or you have too many. The latter is preferable, even if it’s a little heartbreaking. Judged by that standard, 2023 was a banner year.

1. Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)

A movie that doesn’t seem to end. More than any film in recent memory, Past Lives left me me wondering what was next for its characters as the credits rolled — and how sharply it might diverge from what they’d already gone through. Just because our lives take place in the present tense doesn’t mean our future incarnations won’t faintly recall them as little more than an echo; perhaps all we can do is try to make them worth remembering at all.

2. Talk to Me (dir. Danny and Michael Philippou)

Horror of the highest order, the kind that leaves you feeling both giddy and unsettled — as though you’ve allowed some strange force into your life and aren’t sure whether you want it to leave.

3. Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)

There’s more than one way to lose your life to a bomb.

4. The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne)

A spiritual successor to Sideways reuniting Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti wasn’t on my bingo card for 2023, but its late-November release and Christmas setting made it a truly welcome end-of-year gift. There’s simply no one better than Giamatti when he’s given the right material, which Payne understands better than any other filmmaker.

5. Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki)

Has less ever been more?

6. Eileen (dir. William Oldroyd)

The most genuinely unexpected twist in recent memory. “I bet you have beautiful dreams,” Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) says to Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) in the snow one night. “I bet you dream of other worlds.” What is a great movie if not a beautiful dream of another world?

7. The Iron Claw (dir. Sean Durkin)

What happens inside the squared circle is rarely as compelling as what happens outside of it, a truism no one has ever exemplified quite like the Von Erichs. Wrestling’s most tragic family has its story told with sensitivity and grace in The Iron Claw, though not in its entirety — the real-life band of brothers included a fifth member whose heartbreaking chapter of the tale was omitted from the film, presumably to maintain suspension of disbelief that such a devastating series of events actually took place. If the movie feels somehow unfinished as a result, well, so were several of the lives it immortalizes.

8. About Dry Grasses (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest three-hour masterwork (does he make any other kind of movie?) can speak for itself:

As it turns out, the truth is as brutal as it is boring. You’ll realize this like everyone else. Time will pass, and if you survive in this land of unending setbacks you will still turn yellow and dry up in the sand. You will find yourself at the midpoint in your life and see you’ve gained nothing but the desert inside you.

9. R.M.N. (dir. Cristian Mungiu)

The Romanian New Wave hasn’t been new since at least 2007, when Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, but the bloom has yet to leave the rose. R.M.N. proves that Mungiu remains at the movement’s forefront, once again shining a spotlight on social ills that are both unique to his homeland and distressingly universal. The acronymic title refers to nuclear magnetic resonance (rezonanță magnetică nucleară), which is used in MRI scans; it’s also an abbreviation for Romania. Mungiu’s diagnosis is grim, but his examination is never less than evocative.

10. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel)

No one makes documentaries like Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, which might be a good thing. It’s doubtful that anyone else could pull off their uniquely immersive brand of nonfiction, and even the kind of moviegoer who can handle a film like Caniba couldn’t do so more than once every every few years. Named after a set of 16th-century anatomy books whose title translates to “The Fabric of the Human Body,” their latest consists of the most intimate, detailed surgery footage you’ll ever see — much of which is so zoomed-in as to transcend initial feelings of disgust and become enlightening in its abstraction.