The 11 Best Movies of 2023

And some of the worst.

It’s 2024! And maybe you’re looking for a film to watch on New Year’s Day. So here’s my top ten list of 2023. Links to my reviews/essays are provided in case you want to read about what I think of them more in depth.

11. Showing Up (Splice Today)

10 Cocaine Bear (EIH)

9. Kill Boksoon (Splice Today)

8. Fingernails (Chicago Reader)

7. Anatomy of a Fall (EIH)

6. American Fiction (EIH)

5. The Boy and the Heron (CNN)

4. Eileen (EIH)

3. El Conde (Chicago Reader)

2. Zone of Interest (American Purpose)

1. Past Lives (EIH)

Obviously the list doesn’t include things I haven’t seen; just for starters, I haven’t caught up with May December, Five Devils, the Holdovers, Iron Claw…and I’m sure a lot of others. Still, I think the ones I’ve got on there are solid. Some things that almost made it on: Talk to Me, M3GHAN, Polite Society…and maybe The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which I never got around to reviewing.

Kind of notable that there’s no superhero films on here this year, and none of the big studio blockbusters; I liked Barbie pretty well, but didn’t love it. There were a lot of excellent smaller and foreign films this year, though, so I’m happy to highlight those.

I also saw a lot of terrible movies this year. For a while I thought the worst movie of the year was the towering, derivative, sententious self-indulgent mess which is The Creator. But then I saw the Christian prosletyzing SF piece of trash that is The Shift. Which is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

And yet, somehow, I think Oppenheimer was even worse. A fundamentally dishonest Great Man apology for imperial violence with standard-issue Hollywood ham and brow furrowing. There’s nothing I hate quite as much as I hate Hollywood atrocity porn, and at 3 hours this is an endless example of why.