There are decent years in film, and then there are years like 2023: remarkable. Perhaps it’s that we are only now seeing the fruits of post-pandemic labour, as filmmakers have been able, finally, to ignite their wilder visions. In these past 12 months, there was the cultural phenomenon that was Barbenheimer (Barbie and Oppenheimer double-bills, for those of you living under a rock), and two long, unique, and historically rich epics made by auteur directors – Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon – whose box office success bodes well for cinema.
Meanwhile, the failing fortunes of the MCU – a rather optimistic sign of “superhero fatigue” – may leave more space for strange, personal, and artistic ideas to hit the screen again. And it was a strong year for films to get weird, with indies like Ira Sachs’ story of a sexy Parisian love triangle Passages, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s return with gorgeous, droll love story Fallen Leaves, and Amanda Kramer, art-film provocateur, and her two glimmeringly peculiar performance-based movies. The brilliant films have kept coming right down to the wire, too: Todd Haynes has kept up his stellar run of films with May-December, a story of sexual predation and female manipulation wrapped up in a campy comedy-of-sorts with the blackest of black humour.
In the number one spot this year is a film that I originally only gave four stars – a mistake that became increasingly apparent with every repeat viewing. I’m sorry, Scorsese.
Here are the 10 best films of 2023.
10. Passages
A searing bisexual love triangle and a wise examination of human nature, Passages could also have been a fairly pedestrian European-inflected arthouse flick by an American director in Paris: sexy, dark, unflinching, whatever. But Passages has an intelligence of design that elevates it: with Franz Rogowski as the wolfish f*ckboy film director, dashing the hearts around of both his long-term partner (Ben Whishaw) and his new squeeze (Adele Exarchopolous), it has both messily intimate sex scenes and infuriating intrapersonal dynamics that will keep you contemplating it long after the sizzle has faded.
9. Infinity Pool
Brandon Cronenberg – son of David and refreshingly unbothered by having a similar predilection for body horror and technology – makes a squirm-inducing thriller in the form of Infinity Pool. The film stars Alexander Skarsgard as a past-his-prime writer and Mia Goth as an unnervingly intense but sexy fellow guest at the luxury resort in an imaginary and vaguely dictatorial European nation. When the privileged bunch stumble upon a government programme to create doppelgangers/clones in the case of wrongdoing, they realise there’s a chance to take advantage of the situation. A gross, dystopian sci-fi with wide-reaching implications about wealth and greed, this slice of weirdo fun pushes the boundaries of mainstream cinema.
8. Please Baby Please
Okay, this is not for everyone. Kramer’s theatrically staged art film about sex, power, and gender identity, all wrapped in a West Side Story-meets-The Warriors setting, is unlike anything else you’ll see this year, and its attempt at cinematic provocation of the audience is done with thought and care. Focused on a married couple (Andrea Riseborough and Harry Melling) in mid-century NYC, who are increasingly both fascinated, turned on, and terrified of a local gang of leather-jacketed delinquents, Please Baby Please is part-musical, part-off-kilter-stage-show, part sexual odyssey with beehives attached. Raise your eyebrows if you will, but it’s potent stuff.
7. Anatomy of a Fall
This French-language Cannes Palme D’Or winner seems like a simple courtroom drama at first glance. It follows all the conventions, up to a point, although in incredibly rendered specificity: a woman (Sandra Huller, an absolute powerhouse of microexpressions and ironic distance) finds her husband dead from an apparent fall out of a window onto the ice; she becomes the main suspect; even her adolescent son is unsure of her innocence as evidence begins to mount against her. But Justine Triet’s film is an elegant, thoughtful allegory: this is not just a murder trial, but a metaphorical trip through marriage, gender roles, and maybe even the entire circus of blame and guilt that our wider culture engages in these days. See it once for the intrigue; come back again for its delicious ambiguity.
6. May-December
Todd Haynes has long excelled at examining female interiority from the framing of a period, often domestic setting, and he happily wears his inspiration from old Hollywood melodrama on his sleeve. In his latest film, he flips the switch and looks at female sexual predation of men, while never losing sight of the way these women tick. The tongue-in-cheek psychodrama stars Julianne Moore as Gracie, a middle-aged wife and mother who abused and was impregnated by a 15-year-old boy, played beautifully by Charles Melton (now grown-up and married to Gracie). When actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) comes to visit to interview them, the toxic dynamics become painfully – and often hilariously – clear. This film is intense enough to singe your eyebrows, but you’ll be having so much fun you won’t even notice.
5. The Killer
If David Fincher has long been respected as the slickly commercial and famously perfectionist movie director of American cinema, he must have a funny bone somewhere: his homage to minimalist crime films of the past is also one that pokes fun at a man who thinks he can control everything. Starring Michael Fassbender as a contract killer whose self-important voiceover reveals an arrogant emptiness – and a bit of incompetence – The Killer is gorgeously constructed and scalpel-sharp, poking at the mechanisms of late capitalism all while featuring Fassbender trying to inventively murder a series of people. What more could you want?
4. Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan’s staggeringly ambitious story of the curious figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer (a top-of-his-game Cillian Murphy) is undoubtedly one of the best films of the year, even if it sometimes reveals flaws. Nolan doesn’t write the film’s women especially well, but it’s hard not to appreciate his overall vision of Oppenheimer’s complex political life before, during, and after he was made director of the Los Alamos site for the development of the first atomic bomb. Filmed in astonishing 70mm black and white and offering one of the most absorbing and white-knuckle sequences in film this year – the lead-up to the successful Trinity test – Oppenheimer is both bombastic and thoughtful, saved from some of its pitfalls by the brilliance of its lead performance and its willingness to ask nuanced questions about ethics, politics, and American history.
3. Napoleon
Sir Ridley Scott (the director of Gladiator) knows how to mount a huge-scale historical epic, but his tongue-in-cheek humour and borderline satirical take on the life and times of the world’s great conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte (played by an ever-great Joaquin Phoenix), is what really makes it shine. Combining elegantly choreographed violence on snowy battlefields with the toxic, sensuous, and tumultuous marriage to his wife Josephine (a brilliantly sly and self-possessed Vanessa Kirby), the film is no a history lesson, but a depiction of the combined majesty and pitiful egotism it requires to fulfil this role. It has often-hilarious line readings: “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” Napoleon shouts at a British diplomat at one point. The film’s subversion of the “great man” biopic – it closes not with a list of Napoleon’s achievements but with a list of the dead left in the wake of his empire-building – makes it a cut above the usual historical epic.
2. Barbie
A cultural phenomenon, an excuse for the girlies to dress up, a vindication of the colour pink, a rare cinema event that grossed a billion at the box office, and a staggeringly enjoyable, tongue-in-cheek exploration of femininity? Hi, Barbie, indeed! Margot Robbie, a woman who I’ve long felt was a Genuine Movie Star™, could not be more charming as the world’s favourite doll, who ventures into the real world when things start going a bit weird in Barbieland. But Greta Gerwig’s clever direction, Ryan Gosling’s scene-stealing hilarity as Ken, and the production design of a sugary pastel world of plastic, all tip this film into a pure serotonin machine. Every time I’ve seen it, I’ve loved it more.
1. Killers of the Flower Moon
So I have to admit something outright here: I made a mistake when I first reviewed this film. Something held me back from giving this towering, heart-shattering epic – about the discovery of oil under Native American land in 1920s Oklahoma, and the subsequent murder of the Osage people by those who want access to it – the full five-star treatment. That first viewing, I was cowed by the enormity of the tapestry Scorsese weaved, and wrong-footed by the ways he had shifted the structure of the story from the source material that was David Grann’s book. But I recognised that its thesis on the evils that white Americans inflicted on indigenous people – and the poisonous casualness with which racism infects a society – was brilliant, never mind its stunning performances from Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro. I’ve since seen the film twice more, and it has only grown in my estimation: it’s a masterpiece.