The Top 10 Films of 2023
2023 in Review
You’re not crazy—the line between news and satire has blurred substantially. “COVID is done, we’ll all get back to our normal lives in 2023” you (naïvely) said 12 months ago, but how’d that go over? Like a lead Chinese spy balloon. 2023 overflowed with baffling headlines: Thousands of syringes containing “vaginal tightening gel” seized at MSP Airport.1 Kid Rock has beef with Bud Light. Puffer coat Pope is fake. For a week, we all searched for a submarine piloted via Xbox controller. We just… what a year. Pour one out for all of 2023’s dubs, snubs, and submersibles (and by “one,” we mean your last remaining Grimace shake).
Cinema, too, seems troubled by the general fuckening happening all around us.2 We’ve seen films downtrodden by post-pandemic ennui, movies still frozen in the Groundhog Day-esque never-ending 2016, actors lapping up bathwater or donning prosthetics just to inch closer to Oscar glory. We’ve seen studios wring out franchises until the last drop of box office cash hits the ground (or in the case of Magic Mike 3, until the last drop of some other fluid hits the AMC carpet). Movies about dreams, about nightmares; we saw the cash cow of rising young stars in Joy Ride and The Little Mermaid, as well as 80 for Brady where that udder ran dry years ago.
But ultimately, the biggest trend in 2023 cinema was the rise of the business movie. Movies about business successes (Ferrari, The Beanie Bubble, Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game) as well as business failures (Pain Hustlers, Mafia Mamma, Dumb Money), and profiles of familiar enterprises (Blackberry, Air, Tetris, even Barbie and Wonka). Within this subgenre, it’s not difficult to see the collective burnout through the trees—how tired is everyone? Many of our favorite festival films this year address just how much hustle culture is failing young people globally, leaving an entire generation trapped between crumbling institutions and stagflation, between the Metaverse and iPad baby brain. Cinema, to its credit, still asked us the big questions in 2023: can humanity serve as its own steward in these unprecedented times3? Can we save ourselves from the path ahead? Can Jacob Elordi even act? Just kidding on the last one—if we wanted friction that dry, we’d just see Beetlejuice with Lauren Boebert.
Shaun’s Honorable Mention
15. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Country: Vietnam 🇻🇳 (original title: Bên trong vỏ kén vàng) •
Director: Phạm Thiên Ân • Shaun’s Score: 3.7/5★
A poetic fantasia on death and its effects on the living, well deserving of the Caméra d’Or for best debut feature. Its narrative unraveling mirrors social upheavals and lasting trauma in the Vietnamese countryside—at times, too well.
14. The Burdened
Country: Yemen 🇾🇪 (original title: المرهقون) •
Director: Amr Gamal • Shaun’s Score: 3.8/5★
Though perhaps borrowing from elsewhere in the genre, Gamal is scathing in his discussion of bodily autonomy and social expectations. Samuel Alito could learn to shoulder some of this burden.
13. Evil Does Not Exist
Country: Japan 🇯🇵 (original title: 悪は存在しない) • Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi •
Shaun’s Score: 3.8/5★
I won’t bore you with repeating reviews I’ve already published, so you can follow the title links for my long-form thoughts.
12. Barbie
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Greta Gerwig • Shaun’s Score: 3.9/5★
11. The Killer
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: David Fincher • Shaun’s Score: 3.9/5★
Aidan’s Honorable Mention
13. Monster
Country: Japan 🇯🇵 • Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda • Aidan’s Score: 3.8/5★
Saving face as a preamble to monstrous outcomes, plus some sunny queer themes that probably hit harder in Japan.
12. Barbie
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Greta Gerwig • Aidan’s Score: 3.8/5★
Wonderful. Gerwig essentially invents a new mode of visual storytelling out of a franchise concept, and the performances execute perfectly on it. Hits all the notes you expect it will and delightfully goes further.
11. Janet Planet
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Annie Baker • Aidan’s Score: 3.9/5★
Sneaks up on you, much more than the idea of a constellation of interlopers. A vision of daughters protecting mothers. An ode to resisting the music.
Shaun’s 5 Through 10
10. Oppenheimer
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Christopher Nolan • Shaun’s Score: 4.0/5★
9. Passages
Country: France 🇫🇷 • Director: Ira Sachs • Shaun’s Score: 4.0/5★
Franz Rogowski (a cousin of mine, at least lexicographically) is always a treat, especially when showing up late to meet the in-laws in a flamboyant mesh crop top. Sorry Hannah, it seems one can’t have the Best of Both Worlds.
8 (Tie). The Holdovers + Stonewalling
Countries: United States 🇺🇸 / Japan 🇯🇵 + China 🇨🇳 (original title: 石门)
Directors: Alexander Payne / Huang Ji, Ryuji Otsuka • Shaun’s Score: 4.1/5★
7. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Raven Jackson • Shaun’s Score: 4.1/5★
Tree of Life for the Black American South. Perhaps the best American debut feature of 2023, but not for a viewer unaccustomed to slow, nonlinear cinema.
6 (Tie). About Dry Grasses + Killers of the Flower Moon
Countries: Türkiye 🇹🇷 (original title: Kuru Otlar Üstüne) / United States 🇺🇸
Directors: Nuri Bilge Ceylan / Martin Scorsese • Shaun’s Score: 4.2/5★
About Dry Grasses features the single best fourth wall break in the history of cinema. I won’t elaborate, but read this after viewing.
5. Monster
Country: Japan 🇯🇵 (original title: 怪物)
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda • Shaun’s Score: 4.3/5★
Aidan’s 5 Through 10
10. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Christopher McQuarrie • Aidan’s Score: 3.9/5★
Don’t @ me. When I watched the latest Mission Impossible in IMAX last summer, I wrote that “this movie will have a larger impact on Congress’ attitudes toward artificial intelligence than a thousand tech CEO testimonies.” And I was right!
Criticism tends to undervalue the importance of movies that influence political opinions. While the Mission Impossible franchise has dotted summer blockbuster lineups for over a decade, none of its installments have managed to transcend the cinema. Now, with an AI villain to defeat, Tom Cruise & Co. have found their match.
Artificial Intelligence is the perfect foil for Ethan Hunt. The impossible mission in Mission Impossible is that Hunt alone can ignore the choice between self-preservation and saving others in danger, managing to get everyone out safe time after time. The mission—an ability to shatter the Bayesian priors of a supercomputer—is a perfect metonym for the human spirit.
If Eliezer is right and AI aims to wipe out humanity while maximizing paperclip production, at least we’ll have Ethan Hunt/Hollywood megaproductions/Joe Biden(?) to save us from that terrible fate.
9. The Teachers’ Lounge
Country: Germany 🇩🇪 • Director: Ilker Çatak • Aidan’s Score: 4.0/5★
Social trust is a fragile necessity in the classroom, and on display here are the manifold forces slowly rending it in schools, institutions circularly built upon that trust.
Try as a teacher might to heal this rot with the force of her principles, the algorithm of distrust still runs its course back to 0.
8. Killers of the Flower Moon
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Martin Scorsese • Aidan’s Score: 4.1/5★
Gladstone deserves every accolade. As does the first 2/3 of this film. The final act—a straw man to let us believe Ernest is redeemable—is a letdown. Evil is nothing but evil. And Scorsese breathtakingly acknowledges the impossibility of his trying to extinguish it.
7. Passages
Country: France 🇫🇷 • Director: Ira Sachs • Aidan’s Score: 4.2/5★
Of those experiences that unmoor you, and of those people who—when unmoored—jump headlong into the sea, and finally of those who are left behind to pick up the pieces.
6. The Killer
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: David Fincher • Aidan’s Score: 4.3/5★
Seamless until it shouldn’t be, The Killer is ideal meta-commentary on Fincher’s work and cinema itself. Working with (and, um, taking out) human beings is not a craft. It can’t be. Others have their own wills, their own motivations. Control for all your variables and you’ll still be confounded.
There may be no good or evil in the world—that’s what Fincher’s protagonist posits here—but the absence doesn’t mean there’s a “select few” who can rise above. Ultimately we are subject to others’ intentions. Best to ride that out and create our art under the circumstances.
5. The Holdovers
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Alexander Payne • Aidan’s Score: 4.4/5★
No matter how hard you paint over a film with nostalgia, social dynamics will shine through. We’re all the better for Payne’s near-perfect fiction here. Ink spilled by detractors over its lack of politicking warrants—much like the obnoxious sons-of-Senators within—an F.
Sin & Cinephilia’s Top 4
4. Rotting in the Sun
Countries: United States 🇺🇸 + Mexico 🇲🇽 • Director: Sebastián Silva
Shaun’s Score: 4.4/5★ • Aidan’s Score: 4.5/5★
Nobody cares, Andrew Haigh. All of us are no longer strangers. That HuffPost gay loneliness essay came out seven years ago. U.S. gay marriage is nearly a decade old. And in Mexico, which legalized marriage equality long before the land of the free, Sebastián Silva has seen the future. Let’s just say Claire Foy won’t be aiming for last billing on this one.
Rotting in the Sun is a perverse, ribald, riotous, and ultimately astounding work. It’s also a mirror, reflecting gay culture’s fatal relationship with drugs, depression, meaningless sex, and—most pointedly—wretched disrespect for every individual and moral in its way.
Silva directs like his auto-fictional protagonist, a nihilist living in Mexico City. He loves to get up in his actors’ faces, holding them inches from the camera and always in impossible situations.
On an excursion to a queer beach resort, he meets Jordan Firstman, a sort of gay Julia Fox who also plays a version of himself. Firstman is, in his own words, “a happy clown,” the kind of gay that folks like Sebastián love to hate. We start to agree until the plot takes a shocking turn, forcing each character to evaluate their place in Silva’s orbit. He proceeds to wring them (and us) out like a pile of wet laundry, forging a simultaneously exhilarating and excruciating two hours in the theater.
*** Sin & Cinephilia’s
Bronze Ram Award 🥉 ***
3. The Zone of Interest
Country: United Kingdom 🇬🇧 • Director: Jonathan Glazer
Shaun’s Score: 4.5/5★ • Aidan’s Score: 4.5/5★
Why study history? Why subject audiences to a rigorous analysis of bygone horrors through a formalist shotlist and sound design both imposing and sanitized beyond comprehension? For starters, one in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth. And with each shot, we’re provided an opportunity to reflect.
Glazer feeds us this over-abundance of shots, of angles to view the action, of moments to gawk. And as we gawk, as we anticipate—foolishly—that his subjects will take a moment to reflect, we are reminded over and over and over that they don’t, and won’t. Maybe the Hösses did actually consider the profound horror they left in their wake. Maybe Rudolf did wonder about the shoes: Where would they all go?
Do androids dream of electric sheep? Of course they fucking do.
*** Sin & Cinephilia’s
Silver Ram Award 🥈 ***
2. May December
Country: United States 🇺🇸 • Director: Todd Haynes
Shaun’s Score: 4.6/5★ • Aidan’s Score: 4.6/5★
Decades after imprisonment, scandal, and shame, Gracie (Julianne Moore) invites actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) into her life as an observer. Elizabeth is portraying Gracie in a film adaptation of her life, and both purport to want the most accurate portrayal possible. As Gracie prepares for their first face-to-face meeting at a family barbecue, she pauses, gazing into an open refrigerator—has she finally reached an epiphany on the sordid sins of her past? A dramatic, telenovela-esque music cue accompanies a quick zoom to tee up: “I don’t think we have enough hotdogs.”
The film’s three leads (including a spellbinding Charles Melton) are tangled in a web of motivations, misconceptions, and revelations. Elizabeth is not just a destabilizing force, but a rare catalyst for reflection. No (Port)man is an island, and Charles Melton delivers as Joe (cheekbones and all) more than Netflix can usually churn out.
Genre-bending and camp to the point of dizzying delight, May December is the most under-appreciated film of this year’s commercial awards cycle. The film’s genre changes are tracked via admissions, questions, and realizations—started from the “hotdogs” now we here. By the time that Joe asks Gracie a teary, sharp question in the final act, we realize we’ve been in a terrifying psychological thriller all along.
*** Sin & Cinephilia’s
Golden Ram Award 🥇 ***
1. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Country: Romania 🇷🇴 (original title: Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii)
Director: Radu Jude • Shaun’s Score: 4.7/5★ • Aidan’s Score: 4.8/5★
Radu Jude is a fearless filmmaker of ideas. He’s not afraid of contradicting himself. He’s not afraid of provoking audiences. And he’s certainly not afraid of, erm, forceful endings.
We could describe the thousands of ideas and inspirations that surface during Jude’s nearly-three-hour road masterpiece Do Not Expect… Instead, we’ll focus on its final 30 minutes, a single rolling camera shooting an industrial safety video for a German multinational. The subject is paralyzed from his legs down from a workplace accident; the point of the video is that it was his fault.
As the camera rolls and the production team strains to capture the “perfect take,” we realize nothing was his fault. The director asks him to lie to make the story fit, noting that all great cinema starts with a grain of fiction. It starts to rain. Title cards are substituted for monologue. And the entire histories of communist and capitalist Romania—and of cinema itself—seem to bear down on this one unfortunate subject who just needs a paycheck to replace the workers’ compensation he won’t be receiving.
Do Not Expect… encapsulates (perhaps better than any other 2023 release) the corporate anxiety of a post-pandemic world, from economic desperation to the failure of institutions meant to protect us. It’s the kind of filmic miracle you don’t think is possible. Yet after two hours of city streets, comparative literature, and Andrew Tate TikTok filters, it arrives.
Where were they coming from? Hong Kong, of course.
Just to be clear, for this list we are only including full-length narrative feature films. There were plenty of exceptional documentaries and short films last year, but they’ll be covered elsewhere.
Or in previously unprecedented times, as Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest chronicle.