The movie landscape shifted momentously in 2023, thanks to the gradual toppling of a giant—namely, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Following 15 years of box-office (and cultural) dominance, the MCU began to wobble in February with the scattered Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It regained its footing somewhat with the assured Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, until it came crashing to the ground in November with the dreadful The Marvels, the sprawling franchise’s all-time worst-performing entry. Factor in Disney+’s roundly panned Secret Invasion and underwhelming Loki Season 2, and the once-mighty titan finally appeared to be on its last legs, thereby ending an era of seemingly unshakable supremacy.
With audiences seemingly tiring of superhero fare, they turned their attention elsewhere, including to modern and historical dramas—be it Celine Song’s thwarted-romance debut Past Lives, Martin Scorsese’s crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon, Todd Haynes’ art-imitating-life May December, Cord Jefferson’s satiric American Fiction, Justine Triet’s courtroom whodunit Anatomy of a Fall, or Jonathan Glazer’s unique Holocaust nightmare The Zone of Interest. To be sure, there was at least one men-in-tights affair that wowed critics and audiences alike: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson’s spectacular Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Nonetheless, moviegoers largely craved something new, and nowhere was that more evident than with the cinematic event of the past twelve months: Barbenheimer, the two-for-one weekend extravaganza that made both Barbie and Oppenheimer the summer’s hot topics.
Wildly different and yet marked by a similar auteurist spirit, Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan’s blockbusters are unquestionably what we’ll remember most from this year. Thus, it’s no surprise that at least one of them makes a standout showing in this, our rundown of the best films of 2023.
Now streaming on Paramount+
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at January’s Sundance Film Festival, The Eternal Memory is the year’s most heartbreaking film—a tragedy about Alzheimer’s disease that doubles as a testament to true love. Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s documentary is an up-close-and-personal look at the lives of Paulina Urrutia and her husband Augusto Góngora. Urrutia is an actress who served as state culture minister, while Góngora is an acclaimed journalist known for his sociopolitical coverage during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. As Góngora’s mind begins to slip and his sense of self wavers, Urrutia tenderly cares for her spouse, and the proceedings transform from simply a wrenching study of loss and devotion into an inquiry into the numerous ways in which memories define and bind us.
9. The Killer
Now streaming on Netflix
David Fincher taps a vigorous noir vein with the pulse-pounding and subtly satiric The Killer, in which Michael Fassbender’s gun-for-hire is forced to go on the lam—and exact revenge against his two-timing employers and ruthless enemies—after an assassination gig goes sideways. Poking fun at the emptiness of modern culture at the same time that it delivers the sleek, sharp, kill-or-be-killed goods, Fincher’s genre effort is both a story about, and example of, rigorous meticulousness as a path to success. The director’s stewardship is scintillating, matched by a stellar (and slyly amusing) turn from Fassbender as a hollow man compelled to grapple with the limits of his guiding code. Defying expectations to the end, it’s lean, mean, and caustically bleak.
8. Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros
Now in theaters
Frederick Wiseman may be 93 years old, but with Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, the legendary documentarian shows no signs of slowing down. A four-hour portrait of La Maison Troisgros, a three-starred Michelin restaurant in central France’s Roanne, Wiseman’s latest assumes his preferred form: The film provides protracted views of the myriad components of a well-oiled machine, from the farms where produce is procured, to the offices where business and menu strategies are devised, to the kitchens where artisans craft astonishing culinary delights. Over the course of its extended runtime, Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros demands and elicits attentive engagement with the people and procedures at the heart of this acclaimed establishment, all of them equally vital ingredients in a process of artistic invention.
7. Afire
Now streaming on the Criterion Channel
A weekend getaway to a beachside house turns intensely uncomfortable for a questionably talented writer (Thomas Schubert) when he discovers that his vacation will be spent in the company of an intriguing stranger (Paula Beer) in Afire, German director Christian Petzold’s incendiary tale of arrogance, insecurity, and disconnection. Personal and romantic tensions are the order of the day within this quiet enclave, whose dynamics grow more fraught as its inhabitants become intertwined and a wildfire slowly encroaches. Tracing the line separating transition and stasis, Petzold imagines his story as a powder keg on the verge of detonating. Even when that explosion occurs, however, it does so in a beguiling manner that keeps everything—including the nature of Schubert’s tangled-up protagonist—open for debate.
Now in theaters
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is everything a holiday film should be: scathingly silly, earnestly sweet, and attuned to both the intimate warmth and chilly melancholy of the Yuletide season. Cast as a movie from 1970 (the year it’s set), it concerns a curmudgeonly teacher (Paul Giamatti) tasked with staying at his prep school to supervise a wayward student (Dominic Sessa) who’s not going home for the Christmas break. Joined by the institution’s grief-stricken cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), it’s a fable about weathering personal storms—of loss, abandonment, disappointment, and loneliness—via unlikely surrogate-family relationships. Its evocation of its era is as confident as its empathetic depiction of its charming characters, embodied by Giamatti, Sessa, and Randolph with endearingly prickly depth.
Now streaming on demand
Ari Aster has never played it safe, and he goes completely off the deep end with Beau Is Afraid. To a far greater extent than his previous Hereditary and Midsommar, the writer/director’s latest is a hallucinatory trip of unhinged surrealistic madness, following a loner named Beau (a manically uninhibited Joaquin Phoenix), as he journeys through a hellscape of his own neuroses, all of them rooted in his messy feelings for (and relationship with) his mother. Hilarious, unsettling, and wildly original, Beau is a tumble down a dark, demented rabbit hole of scrambled social and psychosexual fears and hang-ups. It’s complete with animated interludes, theatrical productions, and a battle between its protagonist and a giant phallic monster. Movies are rarely this headily idiosyncratic.
4. Perfect Days
Coming soon to theaters
The story of a Japanese public toilet cleaner (a phenomenal Kōji Yakusho) whose days and nights are governed by orderly rituals, Perfect Days is a quietly affecting gem from German director Wim Wenders. The director, who co-wrote the film with Takuma Takasaki, locates lyrical grace and sorrow in the unassuming plight of his lonely middle-aged main character. Charting this solitary individual as he visits Tokyo’s varied restrooms and scrubs their surfaces, avoids their customers, and deals with a talkative colleague, the film is an immersive snapshot of a life defined by routine, from which Yakusho’s protagonist derives purpose and contentment. Far from one-note, however, Wenders’ drama ultimately disrupts its placid action via unexpected arrivals and interactions, thereby allowing it to become a multifaceted rumination on the joys and heartaches of being alone.
3. Poor Things
Now in theaters
A bizarre and boisterous riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poor Things provides director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) with an ideal outlet for his unconventional artistry. The coming-of-age saga follows a resurrected young woman (Emma Stone) who leaves the confines of her mad-doctor maker (Willem Dafoe) with a debauched lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) in order to experience the globe’s many delights and depravities. Through her journey, the film discovers, and indulges in, distortion at every turn, presenting an eccentric vision of a world defined by attitudes, dynamics and paradigms warped beyond repair. A beautifully strange marriage of style and substance, it also boasts the finest performance of the year courtesy of Stone, whose reborn babe in the woods proves a clumsy, funny, and fiercely independent feminist heroine.
Now streaming on Prime Video
Wes Anderson reconfirmed his peerless dexterousness in 2023 with a series of Netflix shorts (based on stories by Roald Dahl) that imagined the act of adaptation in breathtakingly novel ways. But his tour de force was this summer’s Asteroid City, a serio-comic cross-section of grief, love and hope set at a 1955 desert star-gazing competition that’s interrupted by the arrival of an extraterrestrial visitor. Awash in grown-up longing, remorse, and despair as well as youthful astonishment, curiosity and angst, it’s a star-studded retro-futuristic wonder—led by Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Steve Carell, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Rupert Friend, Hong Chau, Maya Hawke, Stephen Park, Willem Dafoe, and Margot Robbie (!)—that boasts the director’s immaculately painstaking aesthetics along with his trademark wry humor and bittersweet heart.
1. Oppenheimer
Now streaming on demand
There were terrific movies in 2023, but only one genuine masterpiece: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a towering work of formal and moral complexity that stood head and shoulders above the cinematic pack. A conversation-driven three-hour biopic that moves like a thriller and hums with the dreadful ominousness of a horror story, Nolan’s subjective character study of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a layered treatise on ambition, ingenuity, regret, honor, and treachery, featuring career-highlight performances from Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey, Jr., as well as superb turns from Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, and Benny Safdie. From the classrooms of the University of California, Berkeley, to the desert outposts of Los Alamos (home to the Trinity test), to a private interrogation room where Oppenheimer’s record and allegiances are called into question, Nolan’s historical drama is an awe-inspiring and exhilarating portrait of the father of the modern age—and without question the year’s best.
Honorable mentions
American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Eileen, Infinity Pool, Personality Crisis: One Night Only, The Promised Land, Sanctuary, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Zone of Interest.
