Best Movies of 2023 Streaming: The Holdovers, Barbie, Maestro and More - Variety

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“Oppenheimer” may not be streaming on Peacock until the new year, but “Barbie” is ready to watch from home right this second courtesy of Max. And it’s far from the only great movie in 2023 to find itself available on streaming as the year comes to a close. From Netflix’s Oscar contenders to Hollywood tentpoles such as “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “The Little Mermaid” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” there’s no shortage of great 2023 titles streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Peacock, Max and more platforms.

Arriving to streaming just in time for the final days of 2023 is Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers,” which is now on Peacock after grossing nearly $20 million at the domestic box office this fall. Set in 1970, “The Holdovers” stars Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham, a curmudgeonly history teacher at an elite boarding school who is tasked with looking after the teens who can’t go home for the holidays. He forms an unexpected bond with a contentious student, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), and the school’s kitchen manager Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who is grieving the loss of her son.

“The Holdovers” is one of the several major Oscar contenders now available to stream. Other buzzy awards players now streaming include Netflix’s “Maestro,” “Rustin” and “May December,” Max’s “Barbie” and Prime Video’s “Saltburn,” among others. For family audiences, 2023 favorites such as “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” are both available on Netflix.

Catch up on the best movies of 2023 now available on streaming platforms with the list below.

• Barbie (Max)

  

  Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett C

  After grossing $1.4 billion to become the highest-grossing movie of 2023 and the biggest earner in Warner Bros.’ history, Greta Gerwig’s comedy blockbuster “Barbie” is now streaming on Max. The film is heading to a likely huge Oscar nomination haul after picking up 9 Golden Globe nominations and a record-breaking 18 Critics Choice Award nominations. From Variety’s review: “You know who else sets unrealistic beauty standards? Movie stars. Like Barbie, they serve as role models, which is what makes Gerwig’s take on the ultra-popular toy line so darn smart. Margot Robbie might be a dead-ringer for Barbie, but her moxie powers the performance. Gerwig has made the kind of family film she surely wishes had been available to her when she was a girl, sneaking a message (several of them, really) inside Barbie’s hollow hourglass figure.”

• The Holdovers (Peacock)

  

  Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers” is now streaming on Peacock after emerging as a box office hit this fall with nearly $20 million at the domestic box office. The film is eyeing several Oscar nominations, including best picture, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph is considered by many to be the frontrunner at this time for best supporting actress. Paul Giamatti leads the period drama as an ornery school teacher who is forced to chaperon students staying over at his prep school during the holiday break. From Variety’s review: “Peer beyond the perfectly satisfying Christmas-movie surface, and ‘The Holdovers’ is a film about class and race, grief and resentment, opportunity and entitlement. It’s that rare exception to the oft-heard complaint that ‘they don’t make ’em like they used to.'”

• May December (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Variety film critics Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman both named Todd Haynes’ “May December” the eighth best movie of 2023. Debruge writes: “At a moment when audiences can’t seem to get enough of true-crime movies on Netflix (where this meta-melodrama is now streaming), Todd Haynes takes a sly look at the imperfect prism through which such stories are presented to the public. Natalie Portman plays a professional actor who swoops into the life of an ex-con (Julianne Moore, channeling tabloid subject Mary Kay Letourneau) years after she went to prison for initiating a sexual relationship with her underage baby daddy (Charles Melton). Determined to absorb all she can from the ‘real’ woman, Portman’s vampire-like star winds up crossing the lines in highly inappropriate ways. Zoom out, and it’s all performance — since Moore’s acting, too — in a mirror room where empathy and exploitation tend to blur.”

• Maestro (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of Netflix

  Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” premiered to critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival and is widely excepted to be a major player at the upcoming Academy Awards. Cooper’s directorial follow-up to “A Star Is Born,” “Maestro” is a biographical drama about famed composer Leonard Bernstein that mainly focuses on his marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). From Variety’s review: “In his second film as a director, Cooper places himself on a high wire, working with a pointillistic intimacy that invests every moment with fascination and surprise…it’s a stunning portrait of the artist as a charismatic narcissist in thrall to a marriage he believes in yet can’t completely live up to.”

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: Sony Pictures

  “Across the Spider-Verse” earned critical acclaim and $690 million at the worldwide box office. It was also named one of the best films of 2023 by Variety during the first half the year: “Given the pop-art bedazzlement — and the thrilling retro comic-book classicism — of 2018’s ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,’ what could the makers of the sequel do for an encore? How about go bigger, go trippier, go even more Jack-Kirby-meets-punk-meets-Warhol-coloring-outside-the-lines crazy, all in the service of the rare story that makes good on the promise of the multiverse: that it’s a space as ominous as it is brain-bending. The adventure of Miles Morales deepens, multiplies, and acquires newly urgent stakes. And seriously, when was the last time you could say a comic-book movie did that?”

• Fair Play (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

  Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman named “Fair Play” the ninth best movie of 2023, writing: “You could say that this delectably heated-up drama about two hedge-fund analysts, Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor), who are carrying on a serious romantic relationship they have to keep secret (because it breaks the rules of their firm), is like something Adrian Lyne would have made in the ’90s. Except that it may also be the most telling, plugged-in portrait of the killer go-go finance world since Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street.’ The writer-director, Chloe Domont, creates money-fueled dialogue (part jargon, all greed) that sizzles and convinces, and once Emily gets the promotion that Luke was angling for, the dissolution of their engagement is fueled by enough psychology and emotional playacting to make the movie a genuine heightened projection of the post-#MeToo world.”

• Rustin (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Emmy winner Colman Domingo is a leading candidate for the best actor Oscar thanks to his riveting performance in Netflix’s “Rustin,” which centers on civil rights leader Bayard Rustin’s attempts to plan and execute the historic March on Washington. Variety film critic Peter Debruge called the film a “career-defining” moment for Domingo, adding: “Most Americans don’t know the name of the man standing over MLK’s shoulder during the March on Washington, but a galvanizing performance and equally compelling script are sure to change that…Directed by George C. Wolfe with the same passion and conviction that defined its subject, ‘Rustin’ reminds that the pursuit for equality has never been and should never be satisfied with the advancement of a single group.”

• The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Netflix and Peacock)

  

  Image Credit: ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Col

  Universal and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” was the first box office sensation of 2023, grossing $1.3 billion worldwide. The film features the voices of Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Jack Black and Anya-Taylor Joy and follows Mario as he ventures into the Mushroom Kingdom and other worlds on a mission to save his brother, Luigi. Variety critic Owen Gleiberman named the film a Critic’s Pick, writing, “It’s the rare video game movie that gives you a prankish video-game buzz…The film takes full advantage of the sculptural liquid zap of the computer-animation medium. Yet it also has a fairy-tale story that’s good enough to get you onto its wavelength.”

• The Killer (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: "The Killer" (Courtesy of Netflix)

  David Fincher’s “The Killer” is based on the French graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and adapted by the director’s “Fight Club” screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. It stars Michael Fassbender as an assassin who finds himself unraveling after a job gone wrong. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Arliss Howard and Sophie Charlotte. The film, backed by Netflix, world premiered at the Venice Film Festival to strong buzz.

  From Variety’s review: “Just watching Fassbender do push-ups in his black rubber gloves wires up the atmosphere. When the killer puts music on his earbuds (the Smiths’ “Well I Wonder”) to get into his groove, it becomes the needle drop as homicidal pop-opera soundtrack. The target arrives, and as we watch him move about the apartment, the film generates the hypnotic tension one remembers from ‘The Day of the Jackal’ or certain moments in Brian De Palma films. We realize that the chemistry of cinema hasn’t just put us in the killer’s shoes — it has put us on his side. We want to see him do the deed.”

• Saltburn (Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: MGM

  “Saltburn” has turned into one of the year’s most love-it-or-hate-it offerings. “Promising Young Woman” Oscar winner Emerald Fennell polarizes with this story of an ostracized student (Barry Keoghan) who weasels his way into the life of a rich British family. From Variety’s review: “A tall drink of Evelyn Waugh spiked with Patricia Highsmith bitters, Fennell’s sophomore feature boasts a distinctive, splashy look for its demented critique of pomp and privilege among England’s elitist upper class. Picture Brideshead reduced to ashes by Tom Ripley. Presented in a nearly square Academy ratio that makes DP Linus Sandgren’s garishly saturated colors and bold, Kubrickian visual sense all the more striking, the pitch-black satire announces its defiant slant via a homoerotic opening montage of one Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), stupid rich and patrician sexy (as in, all the debutantes want to do him).”

• Air (Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: ©Amazon/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Directed by Ben Affleck from a script by Alex Convery, “Air” tells the true story of how Nike’s basketball division signed then-NBA rookie Michael Jordan into a historic partnership that revolutionized the world of endorsement deals with the creation of the Air Jordan brand. “Air” grossed $74.7 million worldwide, with praise from audiences (with an “A” Cinemascore) and critics, alike. In his review, Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge compared the underdog tale to “this generation’s ‘Jerry Maguire.’”

• Cassandro (Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: Prime Video

  Gael Garcia Bernal earned rave reviews out of the Sundance Film Festival for his performance in “Cassandro,” which tells the true story of the openly gay Mexican wrestler who found fame and glory in a notoriously homophobic sport. From Variety’s review: “Thanks to the dream casting of Mexican star Bernal as ‘the Liberace of Lucha Libre,’ ‘Cassandro’ arrives with a kind of instant credibility, which director Roger Ross Williams protects by eschewing any sign of camp, opting instead for stately, respectful cinematography and a wistful horn score from composer Marcelo Zarvos.”

• Flora and Son (Apple TV+)

  

  Image Credit: ©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection

  “Once” and “Sing Street” director John Carney had one of the biggest breakout hits of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival thanks to “Flora and Son,” starring Eve Hewson as a struggling single mother who takes up the guitar as a way to bond with her rowdy teenage son. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a washed-up L.A. musician who helps Hewson’s mother learn the power of music. Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman called the film “irresistible” in his Sundance review, adding: “It’s small of scale, unabashed in its pop sincerity, and has a quality that has always brought life to musicals, but that has now gone out of style. You might call it innocence.”

• The Little Mermaid (Disney+)

  

  Image Credit: ©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection

  Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid” made its Disney+ streaming debut after earning $568 million at the worldwide box office over the summer. Halle Bailey takes on the iconic role of Ariel opposite Melissa McCarthy as Ursula, Javier Bardem as King Triton and Jonah Hauer-King as Prince Eric. From Variety’s review: “Bailey is all the reason that any audience should need to justify Disney revisiting this classic. Just wait till you hear her sing ‘Part of Your World,’ delivered with all the conviction of Jennifer Hudson’s career-making rendition of ‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.’ A star is born.”

• Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

  The long-awaited sequel to the 2000 stop-motion animated comedy “Chicken Run” follows Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) as she sets up a peaceful sanctuary far from the human world after escaping from the evil Tweedy farm. With the hatching of Molly (Bella Ramsey), Ginger and her mate Rocky (Zachary Levi) seem to have their happily ever after, but outside their peaceful world a new and terrible threat emerges that threatens chicken-kind. Aardman Animations’ first feature, the original “Chicken Run” grossed over $225 million at the box office to become the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time. Variety’s Peter Debruge called the sequel “a delightful, decades-later return to the English toon studio’s stop-motion roots.”

• Asteroid City (Peacock and Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: Focus Features

  After making it streaming debut on Peacock in August, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” arrived on Prime Video this month at no extra cost to subscribers. The Focus Features release world premiered to mixed reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but Anderson’s passionate fanbase turned up in droves to theaters to see the ensemble comedy-drama. The movie earned a respectable $27.7 million at the box office. “Asteroid City” is set in a desert town forced into quarantine after an alien makes contact with the townspeople. Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzmann, Tom Hanks, Maya Rudolph, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Hope Davis, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum and Margot Robbie make up the ensemble cast, among many others.

• Showing Up (Paramount+ With Showtime)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of Allyson Riggs

  “In her fourth film with director Kelly Reichardt (and their best since ‘Wendy and Lucy’), Michelle Williams gives a deceptively quiet performance as a sculptor trying to let life — and the real world — in,” reads Variety’s review of “Showing Up.” “Lizzy Carr (Williams), the central character, is a sculptor who is finishing up a series of ceramic figures she’ll be presenting in a gallery show…what’s the meaning of her life if she doesn’t succeed at becoming an artist, and for all her talent her sculptures turn out to be…a hobby? Part of the gentle enchantment of ‘Showing Up’ is that the film never articulates that question — at least, not in the way I just did. On the contrary, it’s a movie of feints, digressions, sidelong humor, and the randomness of life intruding on the purpose of life.”

• Creed III (Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: MGM

  Michael B. Jordan’s acclaimed “Creed III” arrived on Amazon Prime Video this year following a strong box office run that included $156 million domestic and $274 million worldwide. Those numbers make “Creed III” the top-grossing film of the franchise, a feat that’s even more special considering the sequel marks Jordan’s feature directorial debut. Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman hailed “Creed III” as a “rock-solid sequel that’s closer to ‘Cape Fear’ than ‘Rocky.’” 

• Golda (Paramount+)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection

  From Variety’s review: “In ‘Golda,’ Helen Mirren, acting with deft skill and control beneath one of those startling transformative prosthetic makeup jobs, portrays Golda Meir during the three-week cataclysm of the Yom Kippur War, which shook Israel to its bones in the fall of 1973. As the actor stands (or, more often, stoops) before us, we can believe our eyes that this is the Iron Lady of Israel. For here is that frown, those beetle brows, that coarse wavy hair tied into a bun like challah bread, that pugnacious nose, that stare of implacability designed to bore a hole in its beholder. Here, as well, is the woman who lit a thousand cigarettes, chain-smoking her way through the war-room anxiety and through the secret medical treatments she was undergoing at the time for lymphoma…Mirren makes her terse, decisive, and ferociously alive, always a step ahead of the Israeli military officers in the room.”

• Beau Is Afraid (Paramount With Showtime+)

  

  Image Credit: Takashi Seida / © A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection

  A24 spent $35 million to bring “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” director Ari Aster‘s third feature, “Beau Is Afraid,” to life on the big screen. The film flopped at the box office with a global gross just over $10 million and became one of the most divisive releases of the year. The film can be a delirious and exhaustive ride at nearly three hours (Variety’s Peter Debruge wrote in his review that the film is “what happens when a technically gifted artist is given too much creative freedom”), but it’s got enough surprises and technical prowess that it’s at least worth a shot, especially as it’s now streaming on Paramount+ With Showtime.

• American Symphony (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: Netflix

  Matthew Heineman’s moving “American Symphony” is a bonafide Oscar contender for best documentary feature. The film centers on Grammy-winning music star and Oscar winner Jon Batiste in early 2022 as he finds himself composing an original symphony for a performance at the storied Carnegie Hall in New York City. His career milestone is upended by personal struggle when his life partner, Suleika Jaouad, learns that her long-dormant cancer has returned. From Variety’s review: “It’s essentially a living-with-cancer drama first and portrait of an artist at work almost secondarily — or at least it’s the only film you’ll see that spends equal amounts of time at Carnegie Hall and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Jaouad is undergoing bone marrow transplant treatment.”

• Evil Dead Rise (Max and Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett C

  Halloween may be over, but demons last all year. The latest blood-soaked entry in the “Evil Dead” franchise is set in a single apartment complex as evil spirits possess a single mother and put her three children in harm’s way. From Variety’s review: “When the lights go out, the body count mounts in Lee Cronin’s effective urban nightmare… A kinda-sorta sequel, it offers incontrovertible evidence that predatory and possessive bogeymen are just as frightful when their hunting ground shifts from a cabin in a dark corner of the woods to a gone-to-seed apartment building in downtown Los Angeles.”

• Master Gardener (Hulu)

  

  Image Credit: ©Magnolia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Paul Schrader’s “Master Gardener” was named one of Variety’s most overlooked movies of 2023: “Joel Edgerton is Narvel Roth, a buttoned-up horticulturist in Paul Schrader’s latest. The culmination of a new trilogy about men grappling with troubled pasts — that started with ‘First Reformed’ and ‘The Card Counter’ — the film is a lushly photographed story of a man who can’t keep his secrets as hidden as he would wish. When his boss, a wealthy woman who employs him to manage her garden (Sigourney Weaver), brings her delinquent niece to work with his carefully-tended plants, he realizes that it might not be possible to hide from the world forever.”

• The Burial (Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: ©Amazon/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Jamie Foxx earned rave reviews out of the Toronto Film Festival for Maggie Betts’ “The Burial,” in which he plays a smooth-talking attorney who is hired by a funeral home owner (Tommy Lee Jones) to help save his family business. From Variety’s review: “Demonstrating talents far beyond her 2017 indie debut, ‘The Novitiate,’ director Maggie Betts has a rousing old-school crowd-pleaser on her hands with this truth-based (albeit strategically embellished) drama featuring the most entertaining performance yet from Jamie Foxx, who makes a day in court feel like going to church.”

• They Cloned Tyrone (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Jamie Foxx, John Boyega and Teyonah Parris are front and center in “They Cloned Tyrone.” The science-fiction thriller centers on a series of eerie events that thrust an unlikely trio onto the trail of a nefarious government conspiracy. Boyega is a dope dealer named Fontaine, while Parris is a sex worker called Yo-Yo and Foxx is her pimp Slick Charles. “They Cloned Tyrone” is the directorial debut of Juel Taylor, who co-wrote the film with Tony Rettenmaier. Prior to serving as co-screenwriter on this film, Taylor also penned “Creed II,” “Shooting Stars” and “Young. Wild. Free.” The film puts a modern and mysterious spin on the Blaxploitation genre and its tropes, and Boyega previously told Variety that he liked that it might leave viewers puzzled. “You stayed confused for Jordan Peele. I think we should keep this going,” he quipped. “Trust me, you will figure everything out.”

• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of Netflix

  “Asteroid City” wasn’t the only new Wes Anderson movie in 2023. He also delivered “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” adapted from the short story collection by Roald Dahl. It’s on the Oscar shortlist for best live action short film. From Variety’s review: “It’s hard to say whether Wes Anderson’s sensibility is perfectly suited to that of Roald Dahl or the other way around. Whichever it may be, the ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ author’s ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’ seems to have found its ideal screen incarnation in the ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ director’s hands: a fanciful 40-minute short featuring a slew of new collaborators (Ben Kingsley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade) in the helmer’s traditional head-on diorama style. At that tight running time, it’s dauntingly dense, but also ready to compete in the Oscar short category, where it would be better than every winner since Martin McDonagh’s ‘Six Shooter’ way back in 2006.”

• El Conde (Netflix)

  

  Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

  “Jackie” and “Spencer” director Pablo Larraín returns to satire in “El Conde,” which world premiered in competition at the 2023 Venice Film Festival before streaming on Netflix. The black-and-white film reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire who, tired of being remembered as a thief, decides to die. The cast includes Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro and Paula Luchsinger. Larraín has often tackled Pinochet’s dictatorship in his work (his 2012 Oscar nominee “No” centered on the successful campaign to remove him from office), but “El Conde” is one of his most ambitious and unusual efforts yet.

• A Thousand and One (Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features, Sundance Institute

  A.V. Rockwell’s feature debut “A Thousand and One” won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival at the start of the year. Teyana Taylor gives an electrifying performance as a young mother reconnecting with her son. The film was named a Variety critic’s pick out of Sundance. The review reads: “Rockwell uses the full range of cinematic expressivity to turn a small, often tragic story of raw deals and rash decisions into an admiring portrait of survivorship, determination and resourcefulness.”

• Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman named “The Covenant” one of the best films of the year midway through 2023, writing, “Jake Gyllenhaal, in his finest performance in years, plays a U.S. platoon leader who is wounded in an ambush, and Dar Salim is the wily, tough-as-nails Afghan translator who rescues him, in a journey of harrowing suspense, only to have Gyllenhaal return the favor by plunging back into the war. It’s an anguished, moving tale that redefines Ritchie as a deadly serious Hollywood artist.”

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Disney+)

  

  Image Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

  Although Marvel stumbled in 2023 with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels” flopping at the box office, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” was a hit with $845 million worldwide. The film follows the Guardians as they set out to save Rocket Raccoon from his evil maker, the villainous High Evolutionary. From Variety’s review: “James Gunn brings the underdog superhero trilogy to a satisfying close…At a jam-packed, planet-hopping 150 minutes, it also feels less like a conventional moviegoing experience than the endorphin rush that comes from waiting years for the next season of your favorite TV series, then binge-watching all the new episodes in a single sitting.

• Skinamarink (Hulu)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of BayView Entertainment

  Variety named “Skinamarink” the best horror movie of 2023: “Easily the most divisive film of the year — and one that seems unlikely to get knocked from this top spot — Kyle Edward Ball’s debut feature walks the tightrope of narrative and art piece; anxiety and tedium; fantasy and reality. Shot at his childhood home for $15,000, Ball recreates the specific fears of growing up better than scores of auteurs could imagine. For those willing to suspend attention spans to dive into something completely new, ‘Skinamarink’ will alter perceptions of how things go bump in the night.”

• Infinity Pool (Hulu)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection

  Variety named “Infinity Pool” the fifth best horror movie of 2023: “Between his disruptive role on the last season of ‘Succession’ and his performance in ‘Infinity Pool,’ Alexander Skarsgård spent 2023 brutally skewering the wealthy. Directed by ‘Possessor’ helmer Brandon Cronenberg, James (Skarsgård) is a novelist who marries rich and starts to enjoy the violent, sexual bacchanalia engaged in by those staying on vacation destination Li Tolqa. But if the 1% have too much fun, they’re cloned and killed for a price, something which seems obscene to Foster at first but then gives him a thrill. The film is a blend of psychedelic images and distressing brutality, watching James as he sheds his humanity like a second skin. Mia Goth does excellent supporting work as a seemingly normal tourist who soon swings into batshit mode and walks away with the movie.”

• How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Hulu)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection

  Daniel Goldhaber’s buzzy climate change action thriller “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” centers on eight individuals who come together to perform the eponymous act at two locations in the name of climate activism. The indie features an ensemble cast that includes Ariela Barer, Kristine Froseth, Lukas Gage, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner, Jake Weary and Irene Bedard. From Variety’s review: “Whether their actions constitute ‘eco-terrorism’ and whether violence of any kind is ever justifiable in the service of progress are questions Daniel Goldhaber’s sophomore feature duly grapples with…It’s a strong, straightforward drama-cum-thriller about a divisive topic.”

• Cocaine Bear (Peacock and Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: Universal

  “Cocaine Bear” cooked up $85 million at the worldwide box office earlier this year, making it a spring hit for Universal Pictures following the studio’s early 2023 horror blockbuster “M3gan.” Inspired by a true story, “Cocaine Bear” follows several characters as they come face to face with a grizzly bear who consumed pounds of cocaine during a drug deal gone wrong. From Variety’s review: “Elizabeth Banks’ coked-up-bear-as-slasher comedy is better than ‘Snakes on a Plane.’ And we’re already cued to watch it as a wilderness thriller crossed with ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’….The line on ‘Cocaine Bear’ is that it’s so nutty, so luridly preposterous, so WTF-are-we-watching? that it’s all but irresistible.”

• Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Theives (Paramount+ and Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

  The box office returns on Paramount’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” were so-so, but the reviews were surprisingly strong for the Chris Pine-starring fantasy. Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, “Honor Among Thieves” stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis as a group of bandits and con artists who team up to steal a fantastical relic from one of their former members. From Variety’s review: “The film turns pop-fantasy derivativeness into its own form of fun…There’s an intricacy to the staging of ‘Honor Among Thieves’ that helps balance out the roller-coaster derivativeness of the plot.”

• Inside (Peacock and Prime Video)

  

  Image Credit: ©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

  Willem Dafoe is the only actor on screen for the majority of “Inside,” in which he plays an art thief who loses his sanity after getting trapped inside a penthouse apartment. Variety praised Dafoe’s “riveting” performance in its review, writing: “Whether he’s playing Christ, Antichrist or somewhere in between, there’s always something slightly off that makes him watchable. In ‘Inside,’ director Vasilis Katsoupis provides him with a showcase part in what is essentially a one-man show that Dafoe carries with aplomb.”

• Bottoms (Paramount+ With Showtime)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of ORION Pictures Inc.

  From Variety’s review: “‘Bottoms,’ at moments, evokes the barb-wire camp of ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ crossed with the scandalous misanthropy of ‘Heathers.’ Yet unlike those movies, this one has a teasing humanity that sneaks up on you. The fight club, the faking of identity, the vengeance — PJ and Josie have launched all this because their lives don’t feel real to them. They need to pummel their way into being seen. This is the second feature directed by Emma Seligman, whose first film, ‘Shiva Baby’ (2021), was a critical darling, though I found it at once overdone and unconvincing. ‘Bottoms’ is a more confident and audacious piece of work, in part because Seligman has left realism behind. She has made a comedy of vicious gamesmanship, at once confessional and surreal. It feels like a quintessential SXSW movie, and in its premiere last night went over big.”

• The Eternal Memory (Paramount+ With Showtime)

  

  Image Credit: MTV Documentary Films

  Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi follows up the Oscar-nominated “The Mole Agent” with this affecting, low-key study of political journalist Augusto Góngora’s struggle with neurodegenerative disease. From Variety’s review: “Through films as varied as ‘The Father,’ ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ and ‘Relic,’ dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed on screen in recent years — a subgenre that carries a trigger warning for anyone with off-screen experience of the subject. For those who think they cannot stomach one more, Maite Alberdi‘s ‘The Eternal Memory’ treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most — focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself, as formed, held and lost both in the individual mind and a wider collective consciousness.”

• Elemental (Disney+)

  

  Image Credit: Courtesy of Pixar

  Set in a world where beings made of the four elements — water, fire, earth and air — coexist, Pixar’s box office sleeper hit and Disney+ hit follows Ember (Leah Lewis) and Wade (Mamoudou Athie) who, despite their fundamental differences, discover that they have a lot of similarities. The animated feature is directed by Peter Sohn, who helmed Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur.”

• Passages (Mubi)

  

  Image Credit: Mubi

  “Passages” centers on a love triangle in Paris between a movie director (Franz Rogowski), his artist husband (Ben Whishaw) and a grade-school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos) he meets out one night. From Variety’s review: “With ‘Passages,’ American indie darling Ira Sachs makes his first film in France, a brutally honest portrait of a train-wreck relationship in which an openly gay director sabotages his marriage — and maybe his life — by falling for a woman. Affairs happen; that’s nothing new. But this one proves unusually destructive, giving three stellar international actors a chance to tear one another’s hearts to shreds.”

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