The Best Films of 2023-Robert Butler

Just as the movie theater experience started to look gloom again, 2023 was a year where was once again rescued and the moviegoing experience ended up feeling like parties and events. The release of Barbenheimer proved that people had superhero fatigue and that they were ready to get back to the movies again as long as the films felt fresh and innovative.  Especially if it felt like an event or a party. Movie theaters even had Barbie Beach Parties at advance screenings that helped generate the buzz prior to its release. On top of that, we also had the ERA’s tour, where Taylor Swift and Beyonce brought their fans to the seat without the backing of a major studio, and while the strike pushed many movies back to next year as Marvel and Disney continued to plummet, we saw a promising spike in specialty box-office performances with comeback films by Alexander Payne, Sofia Coppola, and Yorgos Lanthimos. Even Barry Keogan’s TikTok trending videos ended up getting some audiences to the seats for Saltburn. It was a year where we saw such international studios as Toho Studios usher in Americans audiences to the theater with Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron as it was remarkable seeing these films perform well at the local theaters across the nation.

If anything, 2023 proved that there is a whole realm of endless possibilities in how studios and film distributors will have to get creative if they want to continue to get more moviegoers back to the seats.  Even most streaming services started to embrace the old models as Apple Films saw some box-office success with Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon. As always, there are always cynics who claim cinema is in its demise. As it turns out, 2023 proved that claim is grossly overstated. It was a year where so many passion projects from many great filmmakers who spent years in development hell finally got their visions released to the world. Some held greater results than others, but the ones that did disappoint still showed that their ambitions were on display. As the medium will always remain in a state of uncertainty in how we watch them, there is hope that audiences still enjoy seeing their images blown up on a screen that is quadrupled in size of their TV or home theater system.

As for quality, the year is perhaps the strongest I have witnessed since 2011. Across the genre spectrum, from independent movies to studio films, there was an undeniable variety of really good films for just about anyone.  After instant rewatches, talking with fellow critics and readers, and brainstorming, this year was very challenging in selecting my favorite of the year. Any of the top four on my list could have been my number one choice any other year. Perhaps I should have flipped a coin or just drawn numbers from a hat? Regardless, it’s rewarding that we have had such remarkable offerings this year. I anticipate many of these films will gain even stronger legs in holding remembrance in the years to come. Here are my choices for the very best films of 2023:

 Courtesy Apple Original Films

1. Killers of the Flower Moon (d. Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese’s highly engrossing epic chronicles the true story of the Osage murders, which was a nation that was also ripped apart by greed, opportunists, and white supremacy. Scorsese perceives the Osage nation with delicate attention and never shies away from the brutal injustices that occurred—marriages are pre-determined, murders are plotted, Natives are slowly poisoned, and so much deceit is carried out by the town’s sheriff and the ring leader, “King” Will Hale (Robert De Niro), who is the mastermind of such crimes who persuaded his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) to be accomplice to the murders for his own monetary gain.

Scorsese has always been drawn to gangster films with morally bankrupt characters, and this time he makes no compromises in revealing their treachery. But the saving grace here is the character of Mollie, played so incredibly well by Lily Gladstone. She is deceived by Ernest’s intentions, but their love becomes genuine, and while she has a long-term battle with diabetes on top of grief and her family slowly dying off, Mollie stays strong instead of being broken. Ever since his 2016 film Silence, Scorsese appears to be in his 11th hour searching for answers and making atonements for his past artistry. His films are longer, deeper, and just continue to become more contemplative. It’s as if he is leaving one swan song after another; watching an artist who still continues to grow like this at age 80 is transcendental. It was very difficult selecting my favorite film of the year. After a second viewing, I realized how dense and extraordinary this film really is. There is so much going on and every frame is filled with nuances on every level. It’s truly the work of a master.

Courtesy A24 Films

2. Priscilla (dir. Sofia Coppola)

With her poetic eye and delicate internalization, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla absorbs us into the perspective of Priscilla Presley and her relationship with the King of Rock n’ Roll, Elvis Presley. A masterpiece of aesthetics and human empathy, it confirms Sofia Coppola is one of the finest filmmakers working today, and Caille Spaeny’s understated performance as Priscilla brings a quiet vulnerability that doesn’t rely on the endless verbalization that is so common in American cinema today. Along with Lily Gladstone in Killers of a Flower Moon and Emma Stone in Poor Things, 2023 appears to be a banner year for female characters who, in some way, liberate themselves from their domineering husbands. Spaeny’s lead performance is very different from the other two. As we follow Priscilla’s journey from being groomed by Elvis to developing a romance with him at age 14.

The first half feels like a woozy fairy tale as we see Priscilla fall in love at a young age, which recalls the innocent joys found in The Virgin Suicides, but like Coppola’s debut film, the film takes a more unsettling turn once the daydream vanishes away when she moves into Elvis’s Graceland estate. She is left abandoned, isolated, abused, deceived, and confined as the relationship progresses. There is a gentle perception and an eye for nuances that make Priscilla’s journey so absorbing. The film can be categorized as a biopic, but that’s too narrow. There is a singular vision at work here where every detail is carefully observed and surveyed, and the effect is sublime. Coppola’s eye transcends her character’s world; the camera speaks louder than words with Spaney’s emotions and reaction shots. The movie doesn’t sugarcoat Elvis’s (Jacob Elordi) womanizing, drug usage, and other flawed behaviors. Yet Coppola doesn’t make him one-dimensional either; she presents him as an alienated soul who, in fact, loved Priscilla. There are passages of beauty and grace throughout, including some sublime montages of Elvis and Priscilla together that reveal joys and sorrows. How the Elvis estate wasn’t on board with this film proves just how effective Sofia Coppola was with her eighth film.

Courtesy Focus Features

3. The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne)

Amusing and melancholic, lighthearted and despairing, sorrow and joy—these are all contradictory feelings that are unified in Alexander Payne’s wonderful Christmas comedy-drama, which plays out like a reinvention of a Hal Ashby movie with its setting, spirit, and tone. A film about a boarding school history teacher (Paul Giamatti) who gets pressured into staying on campus during Christmas break to watch a half-dozen of students who have nowhere to go on Christmas after their wealthy parents have prior plans. He ends up forming a bond with a troubled student (Dominic Hessa in an impressive breakthrough role) and with the school’s cafeteria head chef, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph in an outstanding supporting role), who is grieving the loss of her son.

The interactions of each of these characters are greatly characterized. Writer David Hemingson brings his own experiences of boarding school and captures Payne’s reoccurring sensibilities. Payne has always been one of America’s finest filmmakers working today. With Sideways, About Schmidt, and The Descendants, he has always tapped deeply into the human condition and has delivered amusing and equally sad films about flawed characters enduring painful human truths and joys along the way. Best of all, Payne reunites with Giamatti for the first time since Sideways, which was released nearly 20 years ago. Does it measure up to their 2004 masterpiece? Yes, it sure does. I laughed and I cried, but in many different spots throughout. I will certainly be revisiting this each year for Christmas now.

Courtesy A24 Films

4. Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)

There have been many great films about missed connections that made a profound impact on the heart and soul, enveloping deep themes of unspoken longing, loneliness, and the power of human connection. I will never forget David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, or Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, and now Celine Song has encased a masterclass in filmmaking with Past Lives that earns it right to be compared to those treasures.

The debut feature by Song feels like one of a wise master as it goes a step further than just rehashing familiar themes. While it philosophizes its themes of in-Yun and reincarnation, Song turns her film into a deeply moving evocation of missed opportunities. The image of Greta Lee walking with Teo Yoo outside of her apartment near the end of the film will be another lasting cinematic memory. We often ponder what life would be like with ifs and what could have been. How do we choose between two people we deeply love? Song contemplates these questions with a gentle sensibility.

Courtesy Searchlight Pictures

5. Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

Yorgos Lanthimos’s most satisfying film since The Lobster, Poor Things, is his most delirious. A fantastical odyssey about female empowerment and the nature of a woman self-attempting to navigate herself into societal structures. The film is an audacious tale of many things—reanimation, desire, marital abuse, mistaken identities, and a subversive feminist treatise in how to combat the patriarchy. Lanthimos latest is bolstered by a fearless and versatile nearly triple performance by Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe), who runs off with his lawyer (Matt Ruffalo) on a cross-continent journey as she discovers her desires and learns the brutal truths how the outside world operates.

Lanthimos masterfully functions Tony McNamara’s screenplay, which is adapted from the 1991 novel of the same title by Alasdair Gray. He transfixes the source material with a ravishing ballet of colors, images, and decor. But the greatest joys are seeing Stone embody her role with various temperaments as she outmatches the men in the film that are out to control her. The result is remarkable, and Stone’s commanding performance is one of astounding versatility.

Courtesy Netflix

6. May December (dir. Todd Haynes)

A trashy story told artfully, May December utilizes its tabloid story as a meditation on the exploitative nature of artistic creation and performance. Todd Haynes fascinating film achieves an intricate framework through its ruminations and impressive character depth. Alongside the always stunning Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, as Joe, gives one of the most impressive supporting performances of the year. He plays a repressed, much younger husband who begins to reflect his marriage to Gracie (Moore) once a Hollywood actress named Elizebeth (Portman) arrives in town to do research for the role.

This is a film with many levels. On one level, the story is about method acting and how exploitative artists can be in finding the truth for their art. Elizabeth pries others to get information on the relationship and how it impacted them. She even flirts with Joe, just to find the desires Gracie once felt. On another level, the film is about repression as Joe begins to hold possible regrets as he feels his youth was stripped away from him. On the deepest level, the film is about the power dynamics and identity shifts that occur between Elizabeth and Gracie. You feel the tension grow between them, almost like a rivalry. The standout scene is when Elizabeth and Gracie observe each other in the mirror as Gracie discusses Elizabeth’s past for once as she puts her own foundations and cosmetics on. It’s there, along with many other moments throughout the film, where Todd Haynes reassures himself as a filmmaker who is still in top form.

Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

7. Return to Seoul (dir. Davy Chou)

Cambodian French filmmaker Davy Chou (Diamond Island) manages to pull off a deeply spirited character study and existential journey with Return to Seoul, a moody and convulsively lyrical yarn about a young woman who returns to South Korea the first time since being adopted after she was born and raised in France all in pursuit of meeting her biological parents for the first time. Melding an elliptical narrative with genuine melancholy, Chou’s style offers a sensory tone merged with striking visual elements of Lost in Translation, Chou, who is only 39 years old at the moment, has delivered a superbly composed sophomore feature that feels like it was crafted by a seasoned filmmaker.

The film is a deeply personal and wise meditation on alienation, geographical dislocation, and self-discovery. Return to Seoul is a journey about the human condition, and like the human condition, it remains intricate. The beauty of Chou’s films is that Seoul may be the birthplace of Freddie, but it’s also just as parodic and strange. We never see Freddie’s French roots outside of a phone call to her adopted mother. We never cut back to France, we aren’t given anymore exposition or insights. The film moves from moments of quiet isolation to moments of great joy. On many levels, Freddie is like a drifter in search of answers and an understanding of who she really is. The film allows us to experience her journey, one of curiosity and discontent. All around, this is a thoughtful, vulnerable character portrait.

Courtesy Janus Films

8. Godland (dir. Hlynur Pálmason)

Austere and magnificently bold, Godland marks a continuation of Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s study of troubled masculinity within severely harsh environments. Heretofore his first feature Winter’s Brother had a setting in Copenhagen, Denmark while his sophomore features A White, White Day took place in Iceland. Both films took place in a contemporary setting, this time writer-director Pálmason shoots in both Denmark and Iceland and branches off with a deeply psychological, increasingly intense study on the depths of the human soul of a 19th Century Danish Priest.  Also serving as screenwriter once again in his third feature, Pálmason is certainly inspired by the films and style of Herzog, most notably Aguirre the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, as Godland draws the greatest comparison to the latter on both a visceral and thematic level.

Courtesy Neon

9. Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet)

2023 continued to be an impressive year for female filmmakers, as Justine Triet now joins the ranks of Celine Song, Sofia Coppola, Emerald Fennell, A V. Rockwell, Kelly Reichardt, Kitty Green, Greta Gerwig, Kelly Fremont Craig, and Savannah Leaf, all of whom turned out high-quality films this year. Like most of those films, Anatomy of a Fall is not a simple film with simple answers and resolutions in its writing. It holds a lot of emotional complexities and an equal number of ambiguities in the motivations and narrative outcomes. Perhaps what transcends the material so well is how this whodunit becomes more of a portrait of a collapsed marriage. Thanks in part to Triet’s superb writing along with her fellow co-writer Arthur Harari, whose tightened screenplay has the shades of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, for which he also co-wrote Triet’s previous feature, Sibyl. The drama is potent, and the exchanges in this film are masterfully acted, scripted, and staged. The result is a film that is spellbinding and haunting, one that burns through the protagonist’s psyche, played so wrenchingly by Sandra Huller.

Courtesy Toho Films

10. The Boy and the Heron (dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

In The Boy and the Heron, Japanese auteur Hayao Miyazaki carries on his Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole theme’s about Mahito, a 12-year-old boy who must adapt to a new town upon his mother’s death. Like Miyazaki’s other films, Mahito is transported into another world after a nagging heron that can talk persuades Mahito to enter an abandoned tower that takes him to a different realm. With the world dominated mostly by giant parakeets that serve as guardians, Mahito’s life becomes in danger. Mahito learns that he can’t trust the gray heron (voiced by Robert Pattinson in the US version). This is certainly familiar terrain for Miyazaki, and it’s every bit as imaginative as you would expect. Yet there is something very personal in the narrative and reflections through Mahito that is given more tutelage with its vision than ever before. Every moment is greatly textured and sweeping, with many great sequences, including a very powerful moment with a Noble Pelican (voiced by Wilem Dafoe in English and Kaoru Kobayashi in Japanese). With contemplative themes of grief and existential themes of our chaotic world. This ends up being Miyazaki at his most pure and personalized.

Runners-Up (In Alphabetical Order)

Courtesy Ketchup Entertainment

Memory (dir. Michel Franco) 

A biting but finally tender love story about animosity, reconciliation, trauma, and mental health between two estranged classmates from high school offers a deeply engaging and liberating film experience. Memory now marks the seventh feature by Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco (Sundown, New Order), who, at only 44, continues to make these small art-house character-driven movies. He ends up taking a step back from his austere provocations and delivers his most affecting film yet. The films wrenching performances from its lead performers, Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, who are in top form here just as Tim Roth was in his lead role in Sundown.

Courtesy Universal Pictures

Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan) 

While a deeply flawed film, there is no denying just how passionately filmed and undeniably visionary Christopher Nolan’s 12th feature really is. Nolan deserves high marks for raising a lot of ethical and moral conundrums. Not only does the film serve as a compelling chronicle of being persecuted for holding different views or having relationships with people who held non-conformist ideas of the time, but the film’s real philosophy comes from the unintended consequences of what the atomic bomb has created since. Nearly 80 years after being built, practiced, and utilized, the threat of nuclear war has hovered over our planet ever since. It’s something that has always generated conflict, with little resolution, as the world’s superpowers—China, Russia, the United States, and even North Korea—use Oppenheimer’s research and design of the atomic bomb. Ideas aside, it is the exceptional cast of mostly British and American actors, along with Nolan’s unique stylistic choices and many strong sequences, along with Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.’s extraordinary performances, that make this historical biopic a mesmerizing experience.

Courtesy IFC Films

R.M.N. (dir. Christian Mungiu) 

After exploring the horrors of the final days of the Nicolae Ceaușescu era where women’s reproductive rights were stripped away in his 2007 masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu allocates more social commentary on Romania’s social milieu with R.M.N, an emotionally charged and combative blast at Romania’s current xenophobia that is obvious in its attempt to draw parallels with other parts of the world where fear of immigrants appears to be on the rise. Mungiu’s latest film is one of his most thoughtful films—about community, compassion, mob rule, and ethnocentrism. The way Mungiu explores this film, as always, is unsettling and unnerving. The film feels like a condemnation of our current times.

Courtesy A24 Films

Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt) 

Starring frequent Kelly Reichardt collaborator Michelle Williams, in this emotionally restrained drama about a middle-aged woman sculptor named Lizzie, who’s attempting to complete a collection of clay figures for an upcoming gallery show in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. In her first film since the highly acclaimed First Cow, co-writer-director Reichardt pivots away from her small-scale period filmmaking and returns to a more personal project about artistry and rooted anxieties with firsthand observations about the isolations of being a talented artist. Reichardt has always had a gift for minimal insights, once again providing moments of sincerity and authenticity in a narrative that would appear to have such low stakes on the outside. However, at its core, there is a quiet devastation that lingers in the film about loneliness, human disconnect, and small tensions that build up from the everyday humdrum.

Courtesy Focus Features

A Thousand and One (dir. A.V. Rockwell) 

In her remarkable feature directorial debut, A.V. Rockwell’s poignantly rendered A Thousand and One goes head-on with some very potent issues such as race in America, our flawed institutions, the duplicity of gentrification, and just how cruel and oppressive these institutional forces can be when, on the surface, they are supposed to level the playing field. The film brilliantly explores race in New York City and America, and it does so without feeling didactic. With an artfully vibrant directing style, Rockwell should be praised for her engaging storytelling and directing skills. Her visual style flourishes with impressive camerawork, the narrative unfolds with a ferocious vibrancy, and her greatly scripted exchanges are sustained with raw emotion. This is all thanks to the film’s superb performances, especially the lead performance by Teyana Taylor, who turns in a very powerful performance.

Courtesy A24 Films

The Zone of Interest (d. Jonathan Glazer)

A quietly distressing tour de force, Jonathan Glazer’s screen version of Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same title, The Zone of Interest, takes a much different approach in its examination of the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi death camps. Both observational and austere, Glazer uses Kubrick’s style aesthetics, an ominous tone, and showcases perfectly cast actors to create an unsettling study on complicity. By exploring just how normalizing the demoralizing can get in its chilling investigation, by never showing the Holocaust victims, Glazer instead shows a Nazi commandant and his family carrying out their daily lives as genocide occurs in the concentration camps just next to them. This is an unnerving and unwavering film that will leave you haunted.

Honorable Mention (In Alphabetical Order)

All of Us Strangers (d. Andrew Haigh)
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (d. Kelly Fremon Craig)
Asteroid City (d. Wes Anderson)
Beau is Afraid (d. Ari Aster)
Fallen Leaves (d. Aki Kaurismäki)
Godzilla Minus One (d. Takashi Yamazaki)
The Iron Claw (d. Sean Durkin)
Joyland (d. Saim Sadiq)
Mission Imposible-Dead Reckoning Part One (d. Christopher McQuarrie)
Monica (d. Andrea Pallaoro)
Monster (d. Hirokazu Koreeda)
Of An Age (d. Goran Stolevski)
Passages (d. Ira Sachs)
Spider-Man: Across the Spidey Verse (d. Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers, and Joaquim Dos Santos)
The Taste of Things (d. Tran Anh Hung)
Tori and Lokita (d. Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

**Note** Even though I saw both About Dry Grasses and Evil Does Not Exist at the NYFF, I will be counting these as 2024 films due to their North American theatrical release dates.

Top 5 Documentaries

1. Four Daughters (d. Kaouther Ben Hania)
2. Kokomo City (d. D. Smith)
3. The Disappearance of Shere Hite (d. Nicole Newnham)
4. Our Body (d. Claire Simon)
5. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (d. Frederick Wiseman)

Here is to a great 2024!!