The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2023
We're talking '70s whodunnits and heartrending ghost stories, magical cacti and one hell of an English mansion*.
It’s a shame to limit year-end lists to things that were released in that year, so this draws from all the movies I saw in 2023, irrespective of when they came out. The movies I saw ranged from 1940s noir to 2023 blockbusters to 1993’s Face/Off, a film so confoundingly terrible at every turn that I truly cannot get it out of my head. Luckily, the following top 10 (and five honorable mentions) more than made up for it.
10. Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus (2013)
Look, sometimes I too am surprised by which movies turn out to be absolute gems. This one was made on an itsy-bitsy $400,000 budget in 11 days by Chilean director Sebastian Silva. It’s a drifting, slow burn of a film about a certified asshole played by Michael Cera who hitches a ride with a group of brothers (Silva and his real-life siblings) to find a magical cactus in the Chilean desert that will, he’s sure, give him the high of his life. On the way, they meet a young American named Crystal Fairy, played fearlessly by Gaby Hoffmann, whose unrelenting kindness infuriates Cera.
In a tidy 99 minutes, this movie works its magic on you, steering deftly away from conflict just when you expect it to arise, subverting familiar Hollywood tropes in favor of something deeper. Cera is at turns punchable and huggable, while Hoffman’s character appears to be an earth goddess iteration of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. When you finally get to know her on her own terms, however, the results are moving and deeply human. The same can be said of the film.
9. Barbie (2023)
Greta Gerwig was saddled with an impossible task: make an artistically liberated movie about one of the most contentious pieces of plastic on the planet that neither alienates Barbie apologists nor Barbie haters, and above all, does not alienate Mattel. Inevitably, the result is one big compromise, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Some people have said the movie is a few years out of date. Feminism is edgier now, more complicated, and certainly more jaded. But having a two-hour film in which female characters can vocalize their pent-up rage about all that is wrong in the world is cathartic, even if their glitzy determination is all a bit too sanitized and palatable.
Margot Robbie is luminous and soulful, Ryan Gosling is more than Kenough, and I came away from the whole thing feeling like I was floating on a pink cloud of optimism, an emotion I wish more films provided.
8. The Handmaiden (2016)
Lesbian romances directed by men automatically set the alarm bells jangling, and while I’m not sure The Handmaiden is entirely free from the leering male gaze, it makes up for it with a kind of warped weirdness that one would expect from the man who brought us the brutally depraved 2003 cult classic, Oldboy. Based on Sarah Waters’s Victorian-set novel Fingersmith, The Handmaiden changes the setting to 1930s Korea during the Japanese occupation and follows a pickpocket whose plot to con a wealthy heiress out of her fortune is thrown into chaos when the two develop a bond.
While that description might lead you to some assumptions, this movie is not what you think it is, and these women are not who you think they are. If it weren’t for the performances of Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee, which are equal parts steely and winsome, the eroticism of the film would probably feel fetishistic, but these characters are holding the cards and they are nobody’s fools. The plot takes several stomach-lurching twists, but unlike the novel, its darkness is strange, twisted, and almost hallucinatory. No matter how far it careens into uncharted territory, you can rest assured that you’re in safe hands. Director Park Chan-wook is at the top of his game.
7. Saltburn (2023)
This movie crosses lines, let me tell you. Emerald Fennell, known for taking over Season 2 of Killing Eve and making the pitch-black rape-and-murder revenge comedy Promising Young Woman, is given free rein like never before, and boy does she run with it. Saltburn follows an awkward, lower class Oxford freshman (Barry Keoghan) who befriends a dazzling classmate (Jacob Elordi) and wins an invitation to his sprawling family estate for the summer. Where Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley let the homoeroticism simmer below the surface, Saltburn opens the floodgates, which is not intentionally a sex pun but which is basically accurate. Fennell goes for shock value in her graphic portrayal of the antics of horned-up 19-year-olds, but she never leers at them. Meanwhile, her satirizing of the British class system is utterly savage.
I was swept away in the first half of the film, completely bewitched by the story and its characters. When the train goes off the rails, however, I found myself wishing it could have stayed on the tracks a little longer, even though the chaos is completely intentional and fun as hell. But Fennell’s visual style is what I can’t stop thinking about. She opens with snappy close-ups of a cigarette lighter on a blood-red background and continues to make vivid color shifts from scene to scene. Few millennial filmmakers have her visual panache or gleeful provocativeness, and I will watch any movie she makes. In the meantime, I’ll be replaying Rosamund Pike’s performance on repeat in my brain.
6. Tár (2022)
Cate Blanchett needs hefty roles to stretch her muscles, and thank God Todd Field and his brilliant creation Lydia Tár were up to the task. Playing the eponymous maestro, Blanchett is magnetic—commanding respect but not affection. The film gazes straight into the jaws of the #MeToo movement and cancel culture from a controversial vantage point: Lydia Tár is a trailblazing conductor whose gender and sexuality put her far outside the usual profile of an abuser, and the movie has received plenty of flack for this, including from Marin Alsop, whose career and personal life align, shall we say, precisely, with that of Lydia Tár’s.
For my part, I found the thorniness of the subject matter more captivating than offensive. You don’t need movies to regurgitate what you already believe–you need them to show you something new. Tár is ultimately less about cancel culture than it is about a character who is so vivid that I never once questioned whether she was real. Blanchett gives a tour de force of a performance, and the script gives her all the range she needs to create one of the most compelling and complete on-screen characters of last few years.
5. The Last of Sheila (1973)
Before Glass Onion there was The Last of Sheila, an overlooked caper with a Fantasy Football-level pedigree. Scripted by Steven Sondheim (yes, that one) and Anthony Perkins (the one who played Psycho’s Norman Bates), it’s an ensemble piece made with a who’s-who of 1970s show business. James Mason. Raquel Welch. James Coburn. Dyan Cannon. Richard Benjamin. Even an unnervingly youthful Ian McShane makes an appearance as the least menacing character of his career.
The movie is a deliciously clever whodunnit about a wealthy movie producer (Coburn) who invites a group of shameless acolytes to his yacht in Greece to play an intricate murder mystery game. The plot unfolds in a series of twists, some subtle, some head-spinning, all successful. But at its heart, it’s a brutal takedown of Hollywood, written by two bitter members of its inner circle. There is a casual child molester, a backstabbing ingénue, a screenwriter with a victim complex, and a larger-than-life talent agent. The top notch performances are underpinned by an excoriating script with a bone-dry sense of humor and one liners so devastating they seem destined for viral meme-ification. It would’ve been nice if Sondheim and Perkins had written more movies together, but this one provides plenty of delicious material to watch and rewatch.
4. Official Competition (2021)
This year, I discovered the joy of Spanish cinema. I know, I know, I’m decades late, but I really had no idea what I was missing. It’s been overshadowed for me by French cinema and then Scandi cinema (Ruben Östlund is my guy), and I may even have fallen into the embarrassing trap of assuming that all European countries have similar sensibilities. How wrong I was. Spanish cinema is wickedly funny, playfully sexy, and full of quirky, formidable women.
The highlight for me this year was Official Competition, a comedy that gives Penelope Cruz all the room she needs to show off her dynamism as a performer. Playing a mercurial, avant-garde film director tasked with bringing two warring actors from different sides of the fame spectrum into a single movie (one is a middle-aged matinee idol played by Antonio Banderas and the other is an award-winning method actor who takes himself far too seriously), she is erratic, monumental, and utterly mesmerizing. This film is a cutting satire of the arthouse film industry, but it’s also goofy and stylish and bursting with character.
3. The Rescue (2021)
There have been no fewer than seven onscreen adaptations about the 2018 rescue of the boys trapped in a cave in Thailand, but this documentary from Free Solo filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is not only the definitive one, but also one of the best documentaries of 2021. Chin and Vasarhelyi gained access to bodycam footage, interviewed the British divers who facilitated the rescue, and, instead of sensationalizing the big, dramatic moments, unearthed the minuscule details that turn a gripping story into one that is so astounding you will be gasping throughout.
This is one of those stories with so many moving parts and perspectives that it requires filmmakers as dogged and sensitive as Chin and Vasarhelyi to be told in full. They highlight the spirituality that guided many of the Thai families who were praying for their children’s return, as well as the agonizing and deeply personal decision of the anesthetist to medicate the boys in order to rescue them. This documentary is edge-of-your-seat thrilling, but never loses sight of the humanity at the heart of the story.
2. Oppenheimer (2023)
Somewhere near the middle of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the wife of the eponymous Father of the Atomic Bomb kneels beside her husband in a ravine at midnight where he lies in the fetal position. “You do not get to commit to sin and expect people to forgive you for the consequences,” she tells him. She isn’t talking about the horrific murder of approximately 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that his creation will soon perpetrate, but she may as well be. As the director of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was a key figure in ushering in the nuclear age and inflicting a global trauma from which we will never truly heal. Focusing on the man rather than the consequences of his actions, the movie is a mystery disguised as a biopic, treading back and forth over the same question: what did he really believe?
There are no easy answers. Cillian Murphy’s inscrutable, ice-blue gaze hints at immeasurable depth without reflection, and whether he is tortured by the global fallout of his work or tortured by the personal fallout is left for the viewer to ponder. Character studies that complicate the person rather than simplify them can be infuriating when executed poorly, but infinitely more satisfying when executed well. Although there are few answers here, Nolan frames the movie (as he so often does) with a cyclical timeline, ending with a coda featuring Albert Einstein that sticks the landing so flawlessly that it feels like the reveal at the end of an Agatha Christie novel.
1. All of Us Strangers (2023)
There is a long-held understanding that we all grieve in different ways, and in the case of the main character in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, this is particularly true. Adam (Andrew Scott) lives a solitary life in a near-empty high rise overlooking London. Unable to get beyond the first few lines of a screenplay, he begins visiting his childhood home in a suburban village. There, he meets his parents, who are the same age they were when he became an orphan at the age of 12. At the same time, he begins a relationship with the only other tenant in his building, a nurturing 20-something played by Paul Mescal.
The premise of this film is unusual. It is both a ghost story and a love story. It’s about loneliness and intimacy. It is full of grief and full of reconciliation. What makes it astonishing, however, is the way it examines familiar themes–coming out to your parents, processing death, falling in love–from a perspective that is both surreal and so intimate that it feels almost too personal to watch. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the love story between Adam and his neighbor. Where other movies use sex as a form of emotionless spectacle, this movie uses it to show tenderness, an emotion so rare in movies that it feels transgressive.
If you have experienced the type of grief that follows in the footsteps of tragedy, this movie will either destroy you or bring you the kind of catharsis akin to a cold plunge. A shock to the system. A cleansing that hollows you out. During the last 15 minutes, all you can do is hold yourself and say “Ow,” and while that may sound off-putting, it is worth the emotional workout. This film has haunted me ever since I saw it nearly three months ago, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Honorable mentions…
(Just because)
WarGames (1983)
A prophetic thriller about the dangers of AI from 40 years ago. Matthew Broderick plays a Ferris Bueller-type character, but this movie gets what Ferris Bueller’s Day Off did not (though WarGames came before): the kid is a brat. In this case, he’s a computer genius who accidentally sets off a nuclear disaster through his penchant for hacking. Clever, fast-paced, and thought-provoking, this film needs to be a more ubiquitous classic.
Women Talking (2022)
A dialogue-heavy, performance-driven movie based on a true story of women in a remote Mennonite community who must decide how to handle a series of brutal sexual assaults. It is less upsetting than it sounds, since it deals with the aftermath rather than attacks. Sarah Polley is an extraordinary director in the way she finds visual beauty in a contained space. The performances are top-notch, and the soundtrack from Hildur Guðnadóttir is haunting and evocative.
Polite Society (2023)
A sweet and spiky coming-of-age martial arts movie from writer/director Nida Manzoor about a girl trying to sabotage her sister’s wedding. There are hints of Get Out and way too much Tarantino-ing for it to feel truly original, but the film is joyous and stylish and the sisters make an irresistible sparky duo.
Das Boot (1981)
A classic that needs no introduction, but if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in a while, it is a must-watch. Grueling, claustrophobic, and well-paced, it’s riveting and sobering from start to finish.
Suspiria (1977)
If you’ve never seen a Dario Argento movie, I’d vote for Profundo Rosso as the best place to start, but Suspiria is probably his most famous, and it is every inch the cult classic you want it to be. Lurid, grotesque, and surreal, it’s the kind of campy, in-your-face horror flick that they just don’t make anymore.
Whither Scorsese?
If you’ve made it this far, you’ll have noticed that Killers of the Flower Moon is nowhere to be found. It seems like every critic is raving about it, which put a spring in my step when I finally sat down to watch it. But alas, it left me cold. It is impeccable and I enjoyed almost every one of its approximately 9,000 minutes, but, aside from its galvanizing opening, it felt like reading a phD thesis. Flawless on every level? Yes. Missing that extra depth that would turn your admiration into infatuation? Yeah. At least for me.