Best Movies of 2023 

It's always overly simplistic to try to sum up a movie year, but I think it feels fair to say that 2023 was ... fine. That probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement as the lead-in to a list of my favorite movies of the year, and that's not an unfair perception. Some years, it feels excruciating taking that 11th film off of the top 10 list; for this year, there were a few movies I loved, and some more that might not have made the list in any other year.

Still, a year-end list is a chance to draw attention to excellence, and there's plenty to be found in these movies. Here's my personal, always-idiosyncratic list, with my annual caveat: The answer to the question "why isn't [fill-in-the-blank movie] on your list" is quite simply "because I didn't love it enough to put it there."

• National Geographic Documentary Films
• The Mission

10. The Mission. The year's best non-fiction film demonstrated unusual subtlety in approaching its central character: John Chau, an American Christian missionary who died in 2018 while attempting to bring the Word of God to an isolated island tribe in the Bay of Bengal. Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss employ interviews and animated re-creations of journal entries to paint a vivid portrait of Chau's unwavering commitment to spreading the Gospel. But was his devotion deserving of respect, or evidence of a problematic colonialist mindset? It's part of the film's success that the answer is, "Two things can both be true."

• Apple

9. Killers of the Flower Moon. Martin Scorsese's adaptation of an infamous true story—about the systematic murder of Osage people in Oklahoma in the 1920s to steal away their claims to oil wealth—doesn't center the Osage themselves, though Lily Gladstone's performance as one of the victims is a stunner. That's not inherently a problem, as this story uses Leonardo DiCaprio's role as a thick-headed fortune-hunter to show the way that racism decays into entitlement, and that the best way to understand America's original sins is to stare into a face that looks like your own.

• Searchlight Pictures

8. Poor Things. What would a world built around the desires and expectations of men look like to a woman trying to understand it as a blank slate? That's the satirical conceit at the center of the story of Bella (Emma Stone), reanimated by a mad scienteist in Victorian London with the brain of a fetus. Stone's hilarious physical performance and an exaggerated production design that evokes vintage Terry Gilliam contribute to a delightfully naughty challenge to whether the way things have always been makes any sense at all.

• Lionsgate Films

7. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Kelly Fremon Craig's adaptation of Judy Blume's seminal tween coming-of-age novel works beautifully because it captures how "coming-of-age" is both biological and emotional. Abby Ryder Fortson is wonderful as the 11-year-old protagonist dealing with adolescent anxieties, but Craig amplifies the story's themes through the confusion faced by Margaret's mom (Rachel McAdams, in a phenomenal performance) over her own next phase in life. There's just a deft touch to every potentially challenging topic, adding up to a lovely character study full of warmth and understanding about how hard it is not just becoming a woman, but being one.

• Neon Films

6. Robot Dreams. Pablo Berger's dialogue-free adaptation of Sara Varon's graphic novel applies a touching sophistication to the concept of a "love story" in a vaguely Zootopia-like version of mid-1980s New York City populated by anthropomorphic animals, where a lonely Dog mail-orders a Robot companion. Berger gets wonderfully playful with the details of his setting, but there's a depth of emotion here both in the idea of how we come to be connected with someone, and how we can choose to move on when those connections are broken.

• Focus Features

5. Asteroid City. Wes Anderson's meticulously-constructed movies have always been about how people who have built meticulously-constructed lives for themselves deal with chaotic change, and his latest—about a group of people facing an alien invasion circa 1955, or perhaps about the creation of a work based on such an event—is no different. The sly humor keeps reminding us that the things we want to be neat and tidy are always messy, and that life—and the art that wants to show us something about that life—is about making peace with that mess.

• SBS Productions

4. Passages. Tomas (Franz Rogowski), the filmmaker anti-hero of co-writer/director Ira Sachs' feature, offers a fantastic portrait of a kind of solipsism whereby you just assume everything must be all about your needs. The romantic triangle involves Thomas, his husband of 15 years (Ben Whishaw) and the woman with whom he begins an affair (Adèle Exarchopoulos), brilliantly evoking a certain kind of narcissistic artist so convinced that they feel things more deeply than the rest of the world that the feelings of the other people in their lives almost don't exist.

• Netflix

3. May December. Todd Haynes' loose re-interpretation of the infamous 1990s Mary Kay Letourneau case—here focusing on an actress (Natalie Portman) researching the woman (Julianne Moore) who eventually married the teen (Charles Melton) with whom she had a tabloid-fodder affair— pokes at both the mundanity and the unknowability behind tales that seem impossibly strange. Through the terrific trio of central performances, it proves absolutely savage at examining the way we so often tell these stories in popular culture, while pretending at caring about their complexity.

• A24 Films

2. The Zone of Interest. "The banality of evil" is almost too banal a term for what Jonathan Glazer is up to in his super-loose adaptation of Martin Amis's novel, focusing on the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz (Christian Friedel), his wife (Sandra Hüller) and children living their lives just steps away from atrocities. The remarkable sound design turns the hum of destruction and gunshots into background noise for people living happily, while the audacious coda re-frames the idea for how easy it can be to become numb to the concept of inhumanity on a massive scale.

• A24 Films

1. Past Lives. Don't accept the way that some descriptions of Celine Song's feature debut reduce it to a story about "regret;" she teaches you from the very first scene that it's about more than that. Weaving through decades in which childhood not-quite-sweethearts Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae-sung (Tee Yoo) enter and exit one another's lives, it becomes a tale not simply of lost love, but about how much of the way we think about love is shaped by love stories as a creative form. Sometimes, our need to imagine something as "meant to be" makes it hard to see what actually is.