Films of 2023
It’s the 2026 Oscars! While Hollywood is busy awarding the films of 2025, I’m busy awarding the films of…not 2025, nor 2024, but 2023 – because that’s how long it takes me to catch up on cinema and then get around to thinking about my list. As of this writing, I have watched 115 movies with their release date on Letterboxd listed in 2023. I’ll post the whole list at the end of this blog, but as always, it is bound to change when I inevitably watch some other movie released that year. So this is just my list for now.
Worst Picture
I don’t actually watch very many movies I hate. Generally, I have a bias toward liking films, and I tend to gravitate towards ones I like; and I have very broad taste. I’ll give five stars to Piotr Szulkin’s 1980 masterpiece Golem and another five stars to Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2. And I mention the latter to make the point that I have been along for the ride of the MCU since the beginning, and have had a grand old time like everyone, and I got up and cheered at the credits of Endgame, so I’m no Marvel hater. But having said that, the franchise has finally outworn its welcome, and there is no contest for the worst movie of 2023 – it’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This movie isn’t offensively misbegotten, nor is it calamitously broken: far worse than that, it is lazy and completely juiceless. It is without juice. It would be all right to make a movie in which there were no original ideas – originality is overrated – but to make a movie in which everything is not only an echo of the Star Wars galaxy, but also an immeasurably weaker version, is just a waste of everyone’s time. I could not bring myself to remotely care about any of it. And even if the actor had not been sucked into his own quantum realm of scandal, the villain is, much to my surprise, completely flat and boring. Also, the entire thing looks like nothing so much as brownish-purplish sludge. Thankfully I watched this in the way it deserves, on the screen on the back of an economy-class seat, struggling to hear the audio through cheap headphones because I was seated right behind the wing and adjacent to the engines.
Best Documentary
Like so many great documentaries, In the Rearview is a film that should not have needed to be made, but unfortunately it had to be. The film is as powerful as it is simple. In the early weeks of Russia’s ongoing attack on Ukraine, a driver takes a van and drives back and forth between the Polish border and villages just behind the front line in Ukraine, carrying refugees out of harm’s way with each trip, and each time dropping them off safe in Poland only to turn around and drive straight back into the line of fire. As these trips unfold, cameras inside the van capture the passengers making their weary, sorrowful escape from known danger into unfamiliar exile.
Best Special Effects
I’m giving this to Godzilla Minus One for doing by far the most with the smallest budget. They made this thing for under $15 million, which bonkers when you see how well-realized the visuals are – and I don’t even primarily mean Godzilla, who will never look quite real in any movie because there is no real thing like Godzilla, I mean the imagery of post-war Ginza being smashed by Godzilla. This is also a good old-fashioned crowd-pleasing heartwarming movie with all the old tropes Spielberg used to be the king of, and well worth seeing.
Best Production & Costume Design
I think it’s important to recognize that an authentic period piece is really hard to assemble when you need to recreate a whole moment in history that is long gone by, and no film in 2023 did that quite as lushly and gorgeously as Killers of the Flower Moon, which so perfectly recreates 1920s Osage country that you wonder why this part of American history hasn’t been a bigger presence on our screens, and makes you forget how much work it took to recreate it.
Best Locations
I had to think about this one, as there were a lot of great locations filmed in 2023. Sing Sing is a great location; The Settlers takes place across the wilds of Tierra Del Fuego; The Delinquents revolves around the gorgeous rocky hills of Argentina; The Monk and the Gun is filmed in Bhutan, which is almost cheating. While I may be biased by familiarity, my favorite use of a place in filming was in the undersung Sometimes I Think About Dying, a movie not only set in Astoria, Oregon, but very obviously actually filmed there, and which feels completely immersed in the dense Columbia estuary fog. This is another entry in a subgenre of films from Oregon which feel much more anchored to their locale and authentic to it than many other films – films like Pig or the bulk of Kelly Reichardt’s oeuvre (really this may mostly just be down to Kelly Reichardt).
Score
2023 was a very strong year for original scores. Bobby Krlic’s unsettling score for Beau is Afraid builds to a very strong climax that is integral to the film, just as his Midsommar score did in 2019. Poor Things features the film debut of Jerskin Fendrix, and it’s as bizarre as the rest of his discography. Kohta Yamamoto and Hiroyuki Sawano collaborated on the final score for Attack on Titan, which appears on this list because it released the end of the show as two movies, and it is as apocalyptic as you might expect. While on the subject of gigantic beasts trampling the earth, Naoki Sato’s score for Godzilla Minus One is a beautiful return to the kind of film scores one used to get, in the kind of movies that that one harkens back to. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s posthumously-released score for Monster is absolutely essential to Kore-eda’s emotional triumph.
Those are all honorable mentions, ultimately. There were in the end four scores I had to seriously think about when trying to decide which I liked best, all of which I had listened to repeatedly many times at work. The first is Ludwig Goransson’s Oscar-winning score for Oppenheimer, which musicalizes the fraught and quivering tension that binds the atomic nucleus together in a way similarly metaphorical to how Nolan visualizes this abstraction through eerie arcs and sparks of light. The next is Gary Gunn’s incredible score for A Thousand and One, which flows under the movie like a warm river, and provides its heartbeat. Then there is Łukasz “L.U.C.” Rostkowski’s entrancing and melancholy folk score for The Peasants. But my favorite score of 2023 has to be Joe Hisaishi’s restrained and moody score for The Boy and the Heron. The benefit of the restraint of most of the score is that in the few moments where it shrugs off that restraint, the score breaks like a ray of light cutting suddenly through the clouds. In particular, the repeated motifs originating in Ask Me Why and Granduncle strike me like a wave crashing against the rocks.
Animated
As great as Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron is, the best animated picture of the year is The Peasants, a film which looks as though an impressionistic painting had come to life and was dancing, which uses its animation to unwind the story across the seasons with incredible transitions, and which achieved all of this by actually hand-painting the entire movie frame by frame.
Cinematography
There were so many great-looking movies in 2023 that it’s genuinely hard to say what the best cinematography was. There’s a repeated sequence from Priscilla that is so beautiful I kind of want to give it to that; but then there is also the incredible photography of the whole process of cooking in The Taste of Things; and there is the comforting manner in which The Holdovers is shot, which extends beyond the warm film grain to encompass everything about how the camera enacts its own nostalgia. Faced with this, I am giving it to what in some ways has the simplest cinematography: Perfect Days, which follows Ozu in simply letting the camera be a passive frame into which life and beauty enters.
Director & Editing
I’m giving both Best Director and Best Editing to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a film which feels so much shorter than its long runtime because of the way in which it spins the different temporalities of its story together, and the way in which the dynamic union of photography, score, and performance make every moment thrill with tension.
Supporting actor
Best Supporting actor is a ludicrously full category where I cannot really afford to run down everyone who deserves mentioning. You could nominate half the cast of Oppenheimer alone and have a great list just from that call sheet. Robert Downey Jr. obviously deserves mention for that film, but so does the undersung Alden Ehrenreich, the warm and fuzzy David Krumholtz, the deranged Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the man who conceptualized Project Sundial, a bomb powerful enough to light all of France afire and blast a hole in the earth’s atmosphere. And then there is Casey Affleck’s two-scene performance in which he does very little and yet seems to be channeling Satan himself. Beyond Oppenheimer, great performances abound: William Catlett is an excellent step-dad in A Thousand and One; Mark Ruffalo eats a big ol’ ham sandwich in Poor Things; Paul Mescal extracts his usual share of tears in All of Us Strangers; Jacob Elordi looms unsettlingly over Priscilla; Sam Spruell plays a horribly villainous Colonel in The Settlers; and of course, Charles Melton’s subsumed trauma is the whole juice of May December. We also have to recognize Simon Bennebjerg’s nihilistic villain in The Promised Land, and De Niro’s role in Killers of the Flower Moon is one of his best performances – and while we’re on that, Brendan Fraser comes in an steals all of his two minutes of screentime in a hilarious way.
There’s one other shoutout I want to give, and that’s to Clarence Maclin in Sing Sing, who plays a somewhat fictionalized, younger version of himself. Maclin is not a professional actor; rather, he used his time incarcerated at Sing Sing to engage with drama as part of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, and he genuinely is extremely compelling.
My best supporting Actor I’m giving to George MacKay, old shovelface himself, who keeps popping up in straight-to-Mubi indie pictures and is always a delight. I’m sort of cheating with this one, because I’m giving it to him for both his role in Femme and The Beast, and the latter could be considered a lead performance. Across these two movies, he gives an extremely varied and intensely chimeric performance, essentially playing several characters who bury different parts of themselves at different times.
Supporting actress
I genuinely feel somewhat embarrassed when I look at how short the list of names on my spreadsheet for Best Supporting Actress is, especially compared to the extremely long list for Best Supporting Actor. I genuinely struggled to recall a lot of standout supporting actress roles, though I’m sure I saw many I just couldn’t recall – but this was in stark contrast with Lead Actress, which makes me suspect that the way in which I tend to categorize performances as supporting or lead perhaps bumps a lot of women into lead who might actually campaign for the Oscars as supporting. It may also be a function of a lot of the biggest or best movies I saw either having a heavily-male ensemble (like Oppenheimer) or revolving around a very small cast where there really is just a female lead.
So, having said all that, first some well-deserved shoutouts. Paula Luchsinger gives a very strong performance in El Conde; Sakura Ando is intrinsic to the success of Monster; Melina Hagberg deserves to be mentioned for The Promised Land because it’s notable whenever a child carries the emotional core and also the sense of fun for whole sections of a very bleak movie, playing against the wonderfully dour Mads Mikkelsen. Julianne Moore is unsurprisingly creepy and upsetting simply in her apparent normalcy in May December, a movie loosely based on an extremely salacious and troubling real story from my home state. And Parker Posey is quite fun in Beau is Afraid – one of the only fun things in the movie. But the winner has to be Patti LuPone, also for Beau is Afraid, for delivering the mother of all terrifying mother monologues.
Lead actor
There are some candidates for Lead Actor which are obvious and must be acknowledged, people like Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, Bradley Cooper in Maestro, Colman Domingo in Sing Sing, and Joaquin Phoenix in Beau is Afraid. I also want to recognize Dominic Sessa’s strong debut in The Holdovers as well as Hinata Hiiragi’s in Monster. Andrew Scott gives an incredibly moving performance as the loneliest man alive in All of Us Strangers, and Seydou Sarr is truly distressing in Io Capitano. My best actor goes to the great Koji Yakusho for his intensely humane turn in Perfect Days, a movie which rests almost wholly on his very unshowy performance.
Lead actress
There were a great many Lead Actress contenders who were all excellent. Emma Stone is a delightfully odd revenant in Poor Things, while Sara Montpetit is an adorably squeamish vampire in the fun and romantic Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. Also notably tiny, and deploying that as a tool in service of the film, is Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla. Daisy Ridley, an actor I love in Star Wars but who seems saddled with many movies-that-do-not-exist since then, gives her best performance yet in Sometimes I Think About Dying. Natalie Portman in May December, Sandra Huller in Anatomy of a Fall, Margot Robbie in Barbie, Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things, and Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One, are all superb. But I have to give my award to a performance that struggles to suppress its own terror for the entire runtime, often existing just outside the verge of tears, while remaining inexplicable, and that belongs to Léa Seydoux in The Beast.
Other
Before getting to my top ten, I wanted to glance over the list as a whole and point out anything I felt could not be left out. This of course includes miscellaneous awards, both sily and serious. For example, I have no strong view on which film actually had the best makeup, and am a poor judge of that; but I definitely enjoyed trying to decide which Glenn had the more fun makeup, Powell in Hit Man or Howerton in Blackberry. On a serious note, 2023 saw the release of debut features from two brand new auteurs. Celine Song’s Past Lives seems to have garnered more attention, and it is an incredible debut – but not the best of the year. That goes to A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, a movie which lands like a thunderbolt from the blue. I was astonished when I looked up the movie after watching it and discovered it was her first feature, this is a masterpiece right out of the starting gate.
If you look down my list past the top ten, you’ll see a lot of films I could and probably should list as honorable mentions. What can I say; I give out a lot of perfect scores. I’m not going to list them, as the sun is sinking and that’s what the list is for. I want to commend to you Sometimes I Think About Dying, and Ridley’s relatable, stifled smallness in it; The Iron Claw, a film purportedly about professional wrestling that is in fact one of the weepiest films of the year; You Hurt My Feelings, a frank look at a normal marriage featuring not just Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but my beloved Tobias Menzies, who is always fun to see in anything; A Tiger in Paradise, a movie that I found immensely thoughtful, vulnerable, and important, all while fundamentally rejecting its outlook on life; and Fremont, a still small movie.
Best pictures
Below are my top ten, and then my list in total for 2023. However, as a reminder that this is just the list in this moment, and things change, since last year’s 2022 list I discovered another film from 2022 that now has displaced something on that list and made it in my top 10 of 2022, the absolutely fantastic Hundreds of Beavers.
10. The Boy and the Heron:
Hayao Miyazaki is continually retiring and coming back, so the fact that this movie even exists is a special blessing. This is easily his strangest and most abstractly symbolic work. There are so many images with stick in my mind: the fiery beginning; the sacred paper in the blast of the wind; the girl in flame; and most of all, the final, grand collapse. Through all the strange symbolism pierces a honest encounter with death, life, and artistic subcreation which feels portentous beyond what I can articulate, like reading the one of the major prophets.
9. The Taste of Things:
This is such a simple film that there’s actually very little to explain about it. It is essentially a love story about French cooking. But director Trần Anh Hùng shoots the kitchen in the way that Terence Malick shoots nature, or IMAX documentarians shoot the Himalayas. It’s simply too gorgeous to believe, yet so appetizing that, overcoming incredulity, it insists on its reality as the platonic idea of the kitchen. I’m hungry just remembering it. And I think that simplicity is essential to the picture: there is a kind of holy virtue in taking full enjoyment and satisfaction in the blessings of life. I believe God delights in His creatures finding such unspeakable satisfaction in their food that it brings them to the point of tears.
8. The Holdovers:
This is a movie which takes a deeply relatable melancholy and anxiety about the lost academic life, the disappointing and yet still tenuous career, the profound loneliness of New England in the winter, and out of it pulls a golden thread of encouragement, hope, and how to use one’s life well when that no longer appears plausible.
7. Oppenheimer:
Certainly the most talked-about movie of its year, I have little meaningful to add to the discourse around Oppenheimer, not least because I continue to find the question of how exactly to feel about the whole enterprise it depicts intractably complicated, becoming so grey it is impossible to see a way up or down. But that is all to the benefit of the film and its decision to center the particular, deeply-flawed human who sits at the center of it all.
I think Oppenheimer makes a good double feature with Sunshine, a kind of diptych in which Cillian Murphy enters purgatory the moment the Trinity test goes off, only escaping at the end of Sunshine.
6. A Thousand and One:
This is a film about the epic scope of every life and every relationship between the infinite wells that are human beings. It is full of sorrow and beauty, and more than anything else it forces me to face the fact that in this present, broken world, the desire for all things to be well for all people practically amounts to asking for things which are now impossibly contradictory to be resolved, in ways that are just beyond us. But we live in pain in the hope of a world where there will be no such contradiction between my good and yours, and we shall all be together.
5. Perfect Days:
This movie asks very little of you; rather, it invites you to sit quietly with a contented janitor, and it shows you a glimpse of a way to live.
4. Monster:
This is a difficult film, emotionally. It captures a child in a kind of pain he can’t even fully articulate to himself, much less find a way through. The adults are no less confused and swamped by troubles in their own way, and everyone is foundering. But there is a way in which hope is depicted at the end which echoes the words of Christ, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them…”
3. The Beast
This is a very, very loose adaptation of Henry James’s The Beast In the Jungle; interestingly, it is not the only French film adaptation of that in 2023. But the story has been vivisected and splayed into something so calculated to hit all my particular anxieties, and so viscerally horrifying, that it is easily one of the most upsetting films I have ever seen. Beyond that, I cannot begin to describe it.
2. The Peasants
An animated film that astonishes with every frame as the living brush strokes dance, imprecisely painted by the unseen hands of its makers, this is nevertheless much more than a visual feast. It is in fact a sliver of life, the kind of life lived out again and again and again through time immemorial, and as such it is too brutal to bear.
1. The Zone of interest
I have nothing to add to what’s been said about The Zone of Interest. All I can say is that I found the execution of its central conceit so affecting that it went straight to the top of my list and remained there. There are shots in this which live in the dark parts of my brain – and that, from a movie where the whole point is not showing anything.
The List, in Full (with images of it today given the list is a living document): https://boxd.it/mCVai
