These films are among the best 2023 had to offer

A collage featuring images from (left to right) ‘Barbie,’ ‘Past Lives,’ ‘Asteroid City,’ ‘Poor Things,’ ‘All of Us Strangers,’ ‘Priscilla,’ ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and ‘The Holdovers.’ Photo Credit / Warner Bros.-A24-Focus Features-Searchlight Pictures-Apple TV+

After several tumultuous years as the entertainment sphere recovered from the pandemic, the film art form surged back to life with the most robust slate in recent memory and new entries from the great likes of Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Jonathan Glazer, Todd Haynes and David Fincher (just to name a few). The cultural phenomenon of “Barbenheimer” transported audiences to a wondrous world of pastel pink and haunted them with an explosive tale of man’s primordial hubris, and the prestige pictures were consistently sterling. Compiling this list was both gratifying and truly distressing, and though there are always more movies to be seen, narrowing it to a neat set of 10 already came down to splitting cinematic hairs. The following are not only of supreme quality but also possess the x-factor, that ineffable quality which personally resonated.

Before we dive in, and since it was truly such a fantastic year, here is a list of 10 Honorable Mentions (Presented Alphabetically):

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Anatomy of a Fall

John Wick: Chapter Four

The Killer

May December

Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One

Oppenheimer

Perfect Days

Showing Up

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

10. Asteroid City

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” a group of grieving characters chants late in the film; much like loss itself, this rallying mantra almost objectively makes no sense, yet the more you drift into its subliminal depths, the more emotionally nourishing it becomes despite its displacement from reality. Asteroid City, the eleventh feature from Wes Anderson, is composed of varying layers of performance and reality rubbing against each other that miraculously form magical, existential cinema, like clacking stones that somehow ignite a spark. Set against the scintillating backdrop of the postwar period of 1950s America, the metatextual nesting narrative playfully depicts the events of a retro futuristic Stargazer Convention and the curious extraterrestrial discovery that disrupts the attendees’ (including Jason Schwartzman’s bereaved father and Scarlett Johansson’s beguiling starlet) constrictive worldviews, the story’s wondrous staging as a fictitious play deluged with popping pastels and creamy, expansive shot compositions, and the creation of that play through a stiff, black-and-white television documentary.

Anderson has spent his accomplished career hopelessly lost in his whimsical images and melancholic musings, tracking intrinsically messy characters who try to arrange themselves into overly neat, twee narratives, and Asteroid City marks a thoughtful autocritique with him grappling with a need to apply symbolic order to chaos, depicting storytelling as the most vulnerable and crucial human act possible. As he inverts that to present an overtly artificial story, he still finds something profound regardless while the occupants of Asteroid City and their actors struggle with a similarly futile endeavor. Much like the actors playing actors playing characters at the center, we can’t help but glean meaning from the seemingly meaningless, to confront the unknown head-on so we can continue this dreamy consciousness of feeling that binds us all. Through sheer force of artifice, life’s elusive truths aren’t answered but achingly felt. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense: Just keep telling the story.

9. Poor Things

Maybe living audaciously is the only way to live in a world that controls and subjugates you. The giddily depraved companion piece to Barbie, Poor Things is oddball filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ rich intertextual response to Frankenstein that you didn’t know you needed, all with some of the most thrillingly radical feminist iconoclasm to ever grace the screen. As observed in Mary Shelley’s seminal work, men create to assert control over the world, but in this gloriously cheeky yet ultra-perceptive film, women create to understand themselves and their surroundings. Bella Baxter (a career-best Emma Stone), a woman brought back to life by her own cruel creator (Willem Dafoe), embarks upon an odyssey of self-liberation as she dismantles an outdated, male-skewed text and assembles a more progressive one with the imaginative urgency, bracing fervor and triumphant fallibility of an individual on the precipice of being fully-formed. Expertly modulating a tragedy as a farce, Lanthimos presents a mordant, dark adult fairy tale about the horrors and oddities of occupying a female body, and he visually renders a surrealist, baroque landscape of comically empty male embellishments that perfectly complements Bella’s search for feminine truth and autonomy. Throw in Mark Ruffalo’s delightfully debaucherous lawyer as her travel companion, and you have the rare film that only grows more shrewdly aware with the more bawdy and raucously entertaining it becomes.

8. Passages

An intoxicating cinematic cocktail of emotional manipulation and deliciously bad choices, Passages will leave you enraptured and enraged in equal measure, all from the measured humanist gaze of director Ira Sachs. Raging narcissist filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) impulsively begins a sultry love affair with the beguiling Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), but this doesn’t particularly sit well with his mousy husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw). Yet, Tomas still wants to love both of them as much as he loves himself, keeping Agathe and Martin in his orbit. What begins as a steamy, catty love triangle dramedy quickly evolves into a searing yet deeply empathetic portrait of conflicts and burdens of the soul expressed through frivolous desires of the flesh, warping sobering reality into tantalizing melodrama like its megalomaniacal protagonist. Passages reinvigorates the type of mature adult picture that has grown increasingly short in supply, and Sachs and company keenly understand that as much as we want to assert our own voice and image into the world, we are also innately isolated and need to see ourselves reflected in others, with the quickest method through these erotic, precariously physical passages of human bodies. What we witness is the gradual implosion of these interconnected relationships and the seismic emotional reverberations that finally strike when the ecstasy wears off.

7. The Holdovers

It’s not the most wonderful time of the year for a few unfortunate people, and maybe that’s okay. The title of The Holdovers refers to a select group of students, a professor and a cook marooned on a haughty New England boarding school’s campus over Christmas break in the 1970s, but it also indicates a more nuanced state of self-isolation for those disenchanted to the season’s cheer — misplaced souls straining to mask their sadness, portrayed by three of the most lived-in, authentic performances of the year (Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa). The Holdovers is a rapturous holiday crowd-pleaser that nonetheless doesn’t invalidate the anguish and bitterness of its characters with cloying sentimentality, but rather presents those feelings as an instructive force for mutual understanding and, thus, healing. With its affectionately assembled period details but often distinctly cutting style, the film cleverly riffs on the notion of nostalgia and “simpler times.” Unfortunately, these struggles have always existed, but luckily, human connection is just as timeless. Both earnest and arch, the film is a barbed love letter to those the emotionally harrowed make in their turmoil, forging a deeper sense of pathos and dimensionality in recognizable archetypes, from the curmudgeonly teacher (Giamatti) to the bereaved mom and cook (Randolph) to the tortured adolescent troublemaker (Sessa).

6. The Zone of Interest

A cold, calculating and indelible look into the everyday lives of a Nazi commandant and his family stationed on the perimeter of a concentration camp, The Zone of Interest approaches the unfathomable brutality of chillingly normal people with quiet, despondent rage. Directly reckoning with a cinematic canon that sensationalizes evil, especially that found in the holocaust, to the point of being detached from reality, director Jonathan Glazer, at gripping mastery of the form, posits that humanizing it is key not for condonement but to truly understand the sickening depths of its capabilities. Perhaps depicting the Nazis as inflated figures so cartoonishly malicious that they must be from another world was for our own comfort, and in an age where fascists leaders are blatantly proliferating and some remain oblivious, The Zone of Interest serves as a stark reminder that they are very much intact with our reality, all percolating from the film’s completely unvarnished viewpoint. Conjuring an aura of dread around the most seemingly innocuous things, Glazer piercingly utilizes the uncanny — making the alien feel familiar — to illuminate the banality of evil. With precise command of every frame, he captures the cognitive dissonance between people with recognizable domestic and occupational happenings and the insidious actions they forcibly place outside their peripheries, all this mundane beauty insulated from what it discreetly feeds off of.

5. Barbie

In Greta Gerwig’s wondrous and ferociously funny cultural treatise on gender, commercialism and self-worth, life in plastic isn’t so fantastic, but there may be a better way. As the beatific, idealized doll (a luminous yet achingly vulnerable Margot Robbie) ventures into the real world, unearths thornier elements of her humanity, and makes irreversible changes in her coming-of-age, she discovers that it’s better to be perfectly imperfect than imperfectly perfect. Like Greta Gerwig’s other movies Lady Bird and Little Women, Barbie is a stirring ode to the messiness and complications of being an individual, how scary and exhilarating and beautiful and utterly human it is to define yourself and feel everything on your own terms. It’s a sterling announcement of her as a vital studio filmmaker, covering her recognizable themes of self-actualization’s and the emotional process’s transformative nature but through a gorgeously abstract and grand lens. As Gerwig playfully wrestles with the absurdity of prescribed conformity, she wisely reveals it’s impossible to fulfill all these ideals imposed upon you, but you’re just enough for yourself, which is more than okay. The movie sincerely understands how tumultuous being a person is in the currently fraught cultural sphere and serves as a candy-flavored balm to that existential dread, poignantly capturing how to reclaim your humanity from a commercialist culture that inflates your image for appeal and sells it back to you. Bursting with joy and pathos, Barbie is a lovingly crafted tale of jumping into the fray of personhood and that beautifully bittersweet price of identity. Gerwig has the blazing heart of a populist filmmaker and the intellectual insight of an iconic, era-defining auteur.

4. Priscilla

If last year’s brash, ostentatious Elvis from Baz Luhrman was the poison, then the sensitively understated drama of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is the antidote. Like so many other Sofia Coppola movies, Priscilla is an impressionistically stylized, precisely perfumed portrait of feminine melancholy and isolation in a world of masculine decadence. Lensing these portraits through the moody flip sides of specific aesthetics, the pensive counter viewpoint here is of the silky, glamorous mid-century Americana that serves as the basis of the great American myths, nothing more than Elvis Presley (portrayed as more childish and off-kilter by Jacob Elordi) and the woman (a mesmerizing Cailee Spaeney) who became tethered to his garish mythology before she could even have a choice. So many of Coppola’s films are elegiac as they depict women wilting away with these excesses, and Priscilla admittedly is often a haunting tale of a girl swept up and suffocated by her teenage fantasy. However, it’s ultimately an even more touching look into a sobered young woman finding the internal strength to leave it, initially ascribing her agency and self-worth to a man only to find it in herself. Pulsing with a vital undercurrent of life, Priscilla honors the stoked desire of an entire generation of women yearning to be independent while lamenting the patriarchal channels they had to navigate to pursue it, and the movie becomes a declaration of resilient feminine soul that burns bright.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

Legendary director Martin Scorsese’s latest masterpiece is the culmination of the rich and self-reflexive chapter of his accomplished career that began with Silence. Dialing back on the electric propulsion of his more traditional crime pictures like Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon mounts a measured, elegiac sorrow that seeps into your soul, making you stew with evil at its most incomprehensible, banal and systemized. After discovering oil on their land, the down-trodden Osage people reclaim their social capital in 1920s Oklahoma, but the avarice and malice of sinister businessman William Hill (a supremely unsettling Robert De Niro) and his complicit, craven nephew Ernest Burkhart (a homely Leonardo DiCaprio) orchestrate genocide against the tribe to usurp their fortune; moreover, Ernest stifles, deceives and victimizes his compassionate Osage wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone in the year’s best onscreen performance, serving as the film’s shimmering, spiritually fortified beacon of humanity) in the process. A staggeringly essential, incendiary American epic told with a sobering modern gaze, Killers of the Flower Moon evinces the rueful meditations of a seasoned artist grappling with the limitations of his medium, specifically how those in control have manipulated and misappropriated history. 

Scorsese dismantles the traditional Western and unveils the white supremacist ideologies it’s inextricably linked with, hauntingly illustrating the deluded narratives of manifest destiny, colonialism and capitalism that Ernest compartmentalizes his humanity for. Framing the film through the toxic “romance” between him and Mollie, it underscores how greed and self-entitlement spread like a cancer and render any sense of love, if it was ever even there, as completely decayed and moot, evoking on a macrolevel how American ideals are founded upon heinous exploitation. Yet for as brutal, starkly devastating and unflinching as Killers is, Scorsese’s ultimate statement is a tender testament to the Osage’s resilience and power, restoring the cinematic canon to a place where we can properly reckon with the atrocities perpetrated against them. Thus concludes the mammoth saga of the Killers of the Flower Moon, but as seen in the film’s percussively soul-stirring conclusion, the Osage’s story is one that transcends time.

2. Past Lives

Perhaps the greatest love story is the one you have with your own life, that complicated intersection between the path you take and the path that takes you. This is a bittersweet truth Nora (Greta Lee), having emigrated from South Korea in her youth and now settled in New York with her husband Arthur (John Magaro), learns as she encounters swoony childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) for a few fateful days, finding closure with not only “the one who got away” but also a version of herself that has faded into the past. Experiencing Past Lives is like being tenderly caressed by a loved one for a final time at that infinitesimal, exact moment when the touch can be the most deeply felt, and yet they’re starting to pull away. With her extraordinary feature debut, playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song captures these moments that are ephemeral in reality and eternally impactful in memory, and her delicate yet immediate direction navigates lost souls with a melancholic stillness and driving flux. Her exquisitely crafted movie is the profound reconciliation of those two disparate ends. It’s miraculously both romantic and pragmatic, swept up in fanciful notions of destiny and what-if but also poignantly wrestling with choice, with identity as a fluid constant residing in this dynamic. Nora may see Hae Sung again somewhere down the road. Or maybe she won’t. But the only way she’ll know is if she lives in the present, a choice whose reality she now can wholly occupy. One door fully closes so another can open.

1. All of Us Strangers

Like all great cinema, writer-director Andrew Haigh’s soaring, fantastical paean to the power of love and loss vividly captures some of the most elusive human phenomenon, that the act of letting go only pulls you closer to yourself. It’s the purest embodiment of the form, the rarely compassionate and generous film that invites you to heal and hurt with its characters simultaneously. The journey to that tough realization for screenwriter Adam (an incandescent Andrew Scott) materializes one fateful night as the idealized object of desire yearned but always unfulfilled for most lonely gay men: the mysterious, sultry Henry (an astutely cast Paul Mescal at the height of his seductive powers), too gauzy and, well, perfect to be completely real, knocking on Adam’s door to offer all the connection he’s missed for his entire life, but too palpably sensual and thornily relatable to be a specter, empathizing with Adam’s plight so they both can be seen through the gossamer anguish of their existence. While a romance blossoms between Adam and Henry as a radiant emblem of possibility, the temporal holes of Adam’s life lure him back into preexisting regret, visiting the ghosts of his parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) who passed away early in his youth and never knew their real son.

All of Us Strangers doesn’t just sensuously embody intimacy: It’s the film’s sublime cinematic language, each rhapsodic rhythm of touch and closeness filling in the darkest, most neglected parts of the soul. Andrew Haigh is such an acute observer on the profound, transformative nature of human intimacy in all its triumphs and flaws, and he’s elevated that to a metaphysical realm. Words can’t truly encapsulate these intangible feelings of connection and isolation as we seek to understand and be understood, but Haigh’s trenchant visual language does. In collapsing the divide between memory and reality, he creates an expressive liminal space that’s both ethereal and emotionally tactile, one that conjures catharsis in the spaces left unsaid. Being polarized between the past’s mourning and the future’s hope is a universal human struggle, but it’s also a specifically queer one that results in so much repression and displacement of the self throughout this fabric of time. Love is the only force that can actually align the cosmos in the present, and that can only be attained by sharing both tenderness and pain with someone, to absorb and distill every emotion just like this movie so gracefully does. Like life itself, All of Us Strangers will shatter and mend you back together, a truly monumental meditation on the human condition.