My Top 10 Movies of 2023

Favorites from the strongest movie year of the decade.

Dec 31, 2023

It’s somewhat of a truism among critics that every year is a good movie year if you know where to look. But after expressing some real pessimism about the state of cinema in my top 10 list last year, 2023 does feel like a strong return to form after three years of COVID limbo. Audiences turned on comic book movies! They made a true event out of non-sequels!

There feel like reasons for real hope on the horizon, even if a prolonged labor strike needlessly dulled some long-sought momentum for the business. But there’s also plenty to celebrate in 2023, too. My top 10 list showcases a wide range of fronts in which the medium excelled: studio filmmaking, American independents, foreign festival hits, documentaries, the avant-garde, and a debut film. (Many strong and accomplished films sit just outside these high ranks, which would showcase a similarly eclectic background.)

So before this year draws to a close, let us — or, well, at least let me — celebrate the 10 films that stood out the most in a standout year.

#10 — The Zone of Interest (trailer)

I could nitpick elements of Jonathan Glazer’s audacious Auschwitz snapshot The Zone of Interest if I wanted to. I think the film loses some steam when it starts moving from an experiential gallery piece into more of a traditional character-driven drama. But the tedium (dare I say, banality) of the experience feels a part of the point. This is a film daring you to tune it out and turn it off, lulling you into accepting the suffering of humanity’s cries until it drops the hammer with a finale of masterful audience implication. No film made me gasp so repeatedly this year, and with each time it took my breath away, my visceral and intellectual response sharpened.

Available in select theaters.

#9 — The Starling Girl (trailer)

Look, a top 10 list shouldn’t just be pitting movies against one another — and this is not to say that there can only be room to recognize one movie a year about a young woman realizing what it means to control your sexual desire in an oppressively male-dominated and moralistic society. But as the fall wore on, the shocking sensations of Poor Things (exquisite as they are) began to fade slightly while the knotty ambiguities of Laurel Parmet’s stunning debut The Starling Girl did not lose a bit of luster. I’m a sucker for dramas about people wrestling with individual faith in the context of an institutional religious community, and this coming-of-age drama is about as peerless as they come. The film provides a compelling look not only at the tortured journey faced by Eliza Scanlen’s titular teen but also at an extended network of the fellow faithful, most notably Lewis Pullman’s tricky turn as the flirtatious youth minister who has some growing up of his own to do.

Available on Paramount+ and to rent from various digital platforms.

#8 — The Holdovers (trailer)

Alexander Payne has always made movies that comport nicely with my understanding of the world: a little funny, a little sad, and often all at once because life refuses to compartmentalize so neatly. I find it particularly instructive to see his latest “dramedy” as in conversation with Sideways, the previous time he collaborated with Paul Giamatti to tell the story of a depressed and drunken academic looking for connection. This tale of an unexpectedly found family during the holiday corridor feels refreshingly free of the cynicism that dogged Payne’s earlier work. Though his ‘70s-set and inspired film takes pains to make viewers think they’re watching something made a half-century ago, that’s about the only bit of irony he engages in. I foresee an annual rewatch of this one when my spirits start dropping like the mercury.

Available in select theaters and on Peacock Premium.

#7 — R.M.N. (trailer)

Even the most passive observer of European arthouse cinema will note the continent’s fixation on geopolitical issues like the migration crisis. Cristian Mungiu’s masterful R.M.N. provides an incisive state of the (European) union address without ever dipping into polemicizing or finger-pointing. James Carville’s old adage “it’s the economy, stupid” holds true and tantamount as the forces of globalization force populations to look for good-paying work outside their home countries. But it’s also a drive that’s much more base: our animal instincts to survive and protect. That thin line between man and beast does not provide an excuse for the xenophobic populism plaguing a town once a bakery brings in Sri Lankan workers to fill jobs no native citizens will take. But thanks to Mungiu’s gripping cinematic rendering of a Romanian civic ruckus, we’re better equipped with the rooms to explain and understand how people’s impulses lead to beliefs and behaviors.

Available to rent from various digital providers.

#6 — A Still Small Voice (trailer)

I make it a goal to rewatch every movie that charts in my year-end top 10, just to ensure I’m not going off puppy love. With respect to Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice, I just don’t think I’m ready to put myself through this documentary again. (Mind you, there has already been a Holocaust film on this list.) This glimpse into the emotional toll of care, as seen through the eyes of two hospital chaplains during COVID, is a bruising yet beautiful watch. There’s value in art that refracts the existential crises many of us experienced during the pandemic, of course, but something is searing and sublime about a documentary that stares death directly in the face like Lorentzen does. This is the only movie that made me cry in 2023, but less because I was sad — and more because I felt that a camera captured something proximate to the divine.

Available in select theaters.

#5 — Showing Up (trailer)

If a single film could represent my year off-screen, it would be Kelly Reichardt’s meditative Showing Up. Her film celebrating artists just trying to tune out the noise and create simply to scratch their creative urge, not necessarily for competition or celebration, provided a beautiful balm. Reichardt’s gentle touch in everything from the light needling of artists and academics to the passage of time creates a prime space for self-reflection. If I could, I would live inside this movie.

Available on Paramount+ and to rent from various digital platforms.

#4 — Anatomy of a Fall (trailer)

Truth, reality, and fiction collide spectacularly in Justine Triet’s courtroom thriller-cum-marital drama Anatomy of a Fall. The film leaves a simple innocent or guilty binary in the dust. Instead, it cuts deeper to the bone in its quest to uncover whose perspectives get privileged when reconstructing the past. This is live-wire entertainment at its finest as Triet’s filmmaking keeps pace with Sandra Hüller’s chimerical and commanding lead performance as the defendant.

Available in select theaters and to rent from various digital platforms.

#3 — May December (trailer)

Nothing brought the full cinematic package to the screen quite like Todd Haynes’ May December. Whether you want a scalpel-sharp analysis of extractive acting practices, our tabloid obsession with scandal, power imbalances in a groomed relationship, the vagaries of Southern niceties … a dark comedy, a tawdry melodrama, a quasi-true crime tale, a meta-dissertation on acting and performance, a thriller of psychological convergence … this film has it all. I cannot wait to see what new faces will open up with time as I rewatch this film with the frantic urgency of someone convinced they’ll run out of hot dogs.

Available on Netflix.

#2 — Oppenheimer (trailer)

I feel like I left it all on the field in my sprawling review of Oppenheimer from this summer, so reference that if you want something a little more eloquent. To it, I will add that my appreciation of Christopher Nolan’s magisterial accomplishment has only grown on subsequent viewings. This ambitious epic that turns conventions on their head by prioritizing ideas and themes over people and plot is what we should want out of big-budget studio cinema. Nothing at the movies said “we are so back” quite like Nolan did here.

Available to rent from various digital platforms.

#1 — De Humani Corporis Fabrica (trailer)

I saw 169 films released in 2023. It takes a lot to break through the noise and wow me with something new. Movies don’t have to reinvent the mold to be great (see: several movies on this list!) but anything that feels as revelatory as De Humani Corporis Fabrica does deserves feting. I can imagine at this point, you might be tempted to write off the entire list because I just named an avant-garde documentary with a Latin title my favorite movie of the year. But I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t stick to my guns and say that directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel (who helped shed more light on the film in our conversation) did more to expand my idea of what cinema can be than anything in years. Employing laparoscopic cameras in surgical use, the documentarian duo abstracts the familiar terrain of our bodies and turns each nook and cranny into a stomach-churning world of thrilling possibility. This movie will convince you a world of impressionistic wonder (and, occasionally, terror) exists inside your organs. To watch this film is to reorient your understanding of humanity.

Available on MUBI and to rent from various digital platforms.