2023 was a tumultuous year for the film industry, with lengthy writers and actors strikes bringing Hollywood productions to a grinding halt and forcing fall festivals to proceed without their typical red carpet star power. But amid all the chaos, it slowly emerged as one of the best years for cinema in recent memory. Just take a look at the 50 best movies of 2023, as determined by IndieWire’s annual critics survey.
Every year begins with a slate of highly anticipated films that cinephiles buzz about for months before they hit theaters. But it’s not often that so many of the year’s most exciting projects actually live up to the hype. The box office showdown between Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was the biggest narrative of the summer movie season, but the heavyweight battle turned into a draw when both films earned rave reviews and propelled each other to massive box office receipts — providing the industry with a much-needed shot of adrenaline in the process.
Martin Scorsese’s $200 million epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” enjoyed similar success when it walked into Cannes as the most anticipated premiere in years and left as a bona fide Oscar contender. Eagerly awaited auteur films like Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” Todd Haynes’ “May December,” Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” and Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” enjoyed similar success. And of course, no year would be complete without unexpected breakouts from new filmmakers such as Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” which marked the arrival of a major cinematic voice to watch.
Ranking the best films of the year is a Herculean task that will always be inherently subjective, so IndieWire enlisted the help of film writers from around the world. 158 critics voted in our annual end-of-year survey, and the resulting top 50 films of the year is the closest thing you’ll find to a truly global critical consensus about the year’s best films. From blockbusters that dazzled audiences to hidden gems that charmed the festival and arthouse crowds, our comprehensive ranking celebrates all of the year’s best cinematic artistry.
Keep reading for the 50 films that critics selected as the best of 2023, ranked in ascending order. Each voter had to fill out a ranked top 10 list, where 10 points were assigned for a first-place choice, nine points for a second-place choice, and so on to generate a numeric score for each film that determined the order of the Top 50. Use the resulting list below to catch up on the best in cinema from 2023, and read more about what placed in other categories such as Best Director, Pest Performance, and Best Cinematography here.
This list features editorial contributions from Wilson Chapman, Alison Foreman, and Samantha Bergeson.
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50. “Eileen”
Image Credit: Neon Director: William Oldroyd
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham
Read IndieWire’s Review: Director Oldroyd has toned down the deliberate repulsiveness of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” author Otessa Moshfegh’s second novel, but you still get the sense here of a young woman fascinated by the disgustingness of life and as a means of expiation for underachieving — and for staving off boredom. But she also gets off on degrading herself, which is part of the film’s sick pleasure. Enter Rebecca Saint John (Hathaway), the new psychologist at the prison, who has an almost Jackie Kennedy-esque aura about her, a platinum-blonde flipped bob, and cigarette-wielding charisma that just oozes out of her. Eileen (McKenzie) is almost immediately intoxicated, and the feeling is mutual, because Rebecca, unlike her father, doesn’t flinch at Eileen’s depraved underside. When she catches Eileen poring over bloody crime scene photos in the prison’s archives, Rebecca entreats Eileen for an invitation to drinks. Eileen and Rebecca have a heady, woozy chemistry reminiscent of Todd Haynes’ lesbian romance “Carol,” and yes, those comparisons are going to stick because, like Rooney Mara’s Therese Belivet, Eileen is a young woman pulled out of her self-made shell by an older, more confident one. It’s impossible to talk about the gasp-eliciting twist “Eileen” takes — when Rebecca invites Eileen over to her house for Christmas — without spoiling the whole thing. But let’s just say that a criminal subplot is introduced, and it brings Eileen and Rebecca more intimately together, turning “Eileen” into a kind of cracked queer Christmas noir.
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49. “Close Your Eyes”
Image Credit: Avalon Director: Victor Erice
Cast: José Coronado, Manolo Solo
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Close Your Eyes” is neither an autobiographical cine-memoir à la “The Fabelmans” nor a teary-eyed tribute to the magic of the movies in the vein of “Cinema Paradiso.” Yet, as if by accident and divine purpose all at once, it also becomes both of those things by the end. Set at the dawn of the streaming age and shot with the funereal sterility that came with it, “Close Your Eyes” openly laments the loss of a more tactile film experience (the kind that included actual film), but only so that it can honor the way certain images take root inside us when seen under the right circumstances, as inextricable from our being as a soul from its body.
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48. “The Settlers”
Image Credit: Mubi Director: Felipe Galvez
Cast: Mark Stanley, Alfredo Castro, Camilo Arancibia, Benjamin Westfall
Read IndieWire’s Review: Felipe Galvez’s Chilean Western “The Settlers” may remind some viewers of a Boetticher film when they’re watching it: following three men on horseback on a cross-country journey, it dramatizes questions of identity and belonging, and how these things can be written in violence. Most Boetticher-like, in a tight 98 minutes “The Settlers” says more than a lot of films double its length. It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time, as provocative for its ideas, dialogue, and characterizations, as for the beauty of its empty landscapes. “The Settlers,” for all its artistry, is also a deeply felt work of activism with a message that needs to be heard in Chile. – Christian Blauvelt
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47. “La Chimera”
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Cast: Josh O’Connor
Read IndieWire’s Review: It begins with a man played by Josh O’Connor — famously not Italian — dreaming of the woman he loved and lost. His name is Arthur, her name was Beniamina, and this idyllic vision of their reunion is rudely interrupted by a ticket-taker aboard a gorgeous country train as it rumbles across the Florentine countryside during the mid 1980s. Legend tells of a buried door that connects this world to the next, and this surly archaeologist is so hellbent on finding it that he’s become the leader of a ragtag gang of tombarolis — lovable grave-robbers, essentially — in the small village where his Beniamina once lived. He offers the group his sorcerer-like ability to dowse the location of ancient treasures, and in return they do the digging for him. Stealing 2,000-year-old pots and statues out of the earth isn’t exactly legal work (Arthur is returning from the latest of his many stints in jail when the film begins), but the group makes a decent profit by selling whatever they find to a mysterious local fence named Spartaco, who operates like a Bond villain from their secret lair atop the local animal hospital.
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46. “The Eternal Memory”
Director: Maite Alberdi
Cast: Paulina Urrutia, Augusto Góngora
<a href=”https://www.indiewire.com/video/the-eternal-memory-paulina-urrutia-forgot-filming-doc-1234927706/” target=”_blank”>Watch IndieWire Art of the Doc’s Interview with Subject Paulina Urrutia</a>: The film centers on a Chilean couple, Augusto Góngora and Urrutia, who grapple with Góngora’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The duo have been together for 25 years, but Urrutia, an actress-turned-Minister of Culture and the Arts in Chile, is awaiting the day her love does not recognize her anymore.
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45. “Saltburn”
Image Credit: Prime Video Director: Emerald Fennell
Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Carey Mulligan, Alison Oliver
Read IndieWire’s Review: Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” is a movie sustained by the friction between identity and reinvention, and therefore a fitting second feature by a filmmaker whose Oscar-winning debut made it hard to tell if she was an underachieving dramatist or an overachieving provocateur. Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” is a movie sustained by the friction between identity and reinvention, and therefore a fitting second feature by a filmmaker whose Oscar-winning debut made it hard to tell if she was an underachieving dramatist or an overachieving provocateur.
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44. “The Eight Mountains”
Image Credit: Janus Films Director: Felix Van Groeningen
Cast: Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi
Read IndieWire’s Review: “The Eight Mountains” lovingly adapts Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, a valentine to brotherhood and a shape-shifting tale of self-discovery, resilience, nature and love — platonic but more steely than any rock you could climb – that somehow rarely feels like it treads a single step of the endless stream of movies and literature capturing the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of all of those just mentioned things since time immemorial.
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43. “Beau Is Afraid”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Ari Aster
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Beau Is Afraid” is quick to reveal itself as a fundamentally different beast than “Hereditary” and/or “Midsommar” (and not just because the movie is so unrepentantly Jewish that every one of its cuts feels like it was performed by a mohel). That change of pace starts with Aster’s decision to forego a straightforward genre narrative in favor of an unclassifiable Odyssean mindfuck. While the film’s plot couldn’t be simpler — a 49-year-old virgin named Beau Wassermann (Phoenix) journeys to his mother’s house across a country gone mad — its frazzled and strictly episodic telling owes more to Charlie Kaufman and Albert Brooks than it does to any of the ancient Greeks.
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42. “Four Daughters”
Image Credit: Kino Lorber Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Cast: N/A
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Four Daughters” orbits the trauma of a Tunisian woman named Olfa and her youngest daughters, Tayssir and Eya. Some years ago Olfa’s two eldest daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, left to join ISIS — or, as this documentary posits, were “devoured by the wolf.” Filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, never seen but often heard from her safe space behind the camera, decides to re-tell the story of how this came to be.
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41. “A Still Small Voice”
Image Credit: Luke Lorentzen Director: Luke Lorentzen
Cast: Margaret “Mati” Engel
Read IndieWire’s Review: “A Still Small Voice” is ultimately such a life-affirming film can only be explained by the climactic scene in which it finds its title. It’s a moment of profound acceptance that follows what might seem to be a moment of unsalvageable rejection; a moment delivered in a trembling whisper, meek in its way but still loud enough for us to hear its message that failures aren’t necessarily endings, and endings aren’t necessarily failures.
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40. “Ferrari”
Image Credit: NEON Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Patrick Dempsey
Read IndieWire’s Review: Ultimately, while “Ferrari” indeed centers on the man of its title, that title also extends to the same-named dynasty that made Enzo’s empire possible, the people he touched, the women left strewn by his death drive. Driver’s performance is a fine one, flanked ever by emotional guardrails even in stressed-out moments like when Enzo eyes his stopwatch for his racing Ferraris’ latest speed times. But Cruz hijacks the wheel from her co-star in a grief-dazed but always alert and forceful turn, her face a stony wall that tells of great pain. (A wonderful closeup of her staring at Dino’s mausoleum brings on a wave of conflicting emotions that tell her whole story.) The cast benefits greatly from Mann’s bottlenecking approach to one slice of Enzo’s life, as domestic and professional stresses merge in what was eventually a triumph for his company, putting Ferrari back at the front of the auto arms race against the likes of Maserati, but a tragedy for his restless, never-satisfied being.
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39. “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros”
Image Credit: Zipporah Films Director: Frederick Wiseman
Cast: N/A
Read IndieWire’s Review: Billed as a “farm-to-table” documentary on account of its loose, semi-linear trajectory from the markets and vineyards of Roanne to the restaurant dining room in which they’re ultimately transformed into something much greater than the sum of their parts, Wiseman’s slow-cooked but satisfying “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros” occupies a generous space between his sober portraits of American institutions (e.g. “At Berkeley,” “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library”) and his more epicurean films about the French arts (e.g. “Crazy Horse,” “Ballet,” “La Comédie-Française ou l’Amour joué”). Its characteristic focus on the tension between tactile labor and abstract crises — between day-to-day upkeep and spiritual survival — is present from the opening moments, but so is its characteristic refusal to artificially define the contours of that tension.
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38. “20 Days in Mariupol”
Image Credit: PBS Director: Mystylav Chernov
Cast: Mystyav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, and Vasilisa Stepaneko
Read IndieWire’s Review: Chernov frequently blurs the most severe injuries, but it’s the puddles of blood, dead animals and lifeless limbs half-buried by rubble that indicate the sheer scale of suffering in Mariupol. His jarringly stoic narration and haunting original music by Jordan Dykstra add to the sense that, in Mariupol, nothing is left. This is not a film about President Zelensky’s Churchillian leadership or the heroism of first responders (though if you look, there is some of that).
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37. “About Dry Grasses”
Image Credit: Sideshow Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Deniz Celiloğlu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici, and Ece Bağcı
Read IndieWire’s Review: At nearly 200 minutes in length, “About Dry Grasses” (or “Kuru Otlar Üstüne”) is par for the course for Turkish virtuoso Nuri Bilge Ceylan. He returns, once again, to the icy frost of his Anatolia-set Palme d’Or winner “Winter Sleep,” for a story that beats with similar frustrations towards power in the grand social scheme. However, he weaves this theme into his background tapestry, favoring instead a talkative and often discomforting tale of a small-town art teacher, his 12-year-old female student, and an accusation of impropriety that might be false on its surface, but is rooted in truths the camera sees.
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36. “Bottoms”
Image Credit: ©United Artists/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Emma Seligman
Cast: Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Nicholas Galitzine, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Jordan Gerber, and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: At the bottom of the film’s knotted plot and raunchy jokes, however, lies a rather poignant story about female friendship and empowerment. Though it starts as a genuine desire to protect themselves from a rival school that is literally kidnapping and beating up students (free of consequence, one might add), the girls get more out of the club than just good fighting skills.
Though the focus is always on PJ and Josie — Sennott and Edebiri are phenomenal, with the film serving as an “Ayo and Rachel Are Single” reunion — the supporting cast really makes the movie shine. From the rest of the fight club members, each one with their own unique personality that manages to become more than archetypes even when they don’t have that much screentime, to the football players baffled and enraged by the girl’s fight club taking attention away from their games, “Bottoms” has a terrific ensemble.
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35. “A Thousand and One”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: A. V. Rockwell
Cast: Teyana Taylor, Will Catlett, Josiah Cross, Aven Courtney, and Aaron Kingsley Adetola
Read IndieWire’s Review: Terry and Inez’s story is only one of many, but it serves as a microcosm for the specific economic struggles of any Black lower-middle-class Americans trying to keep up with gentrification’s engine and NYPD indifference to Black people. “A Thousand and One” culminates in a gutting conclusion that turns the entire movie on its head — it’s one best left entirely unspoiled — and serves as a sobering reminder of how fucked-up beginnings can hopefully bring about better endings. Cross is effective in a key scene surrounding this revelation, but it’s Taylor who anchors Rockwell’s direction and screenplay with her powerhouse performance. Taylor has worked with the likes of Tyler Perry in comedies, but it’s her seeming kinship with Rockwell (and Taylor’s own story as a New Yorker) and a performance as fiercely committed to the project as Inez is to Terry that signal a major acting talent.
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34. “Trenque Lauquen”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Laura Citarella
Cast: Laura Paredes
Read Cahiers du Cinema’s Best Films of 2023: “Trenque Lauquen,” Citarella’s four-hour mystery about the search for a missing botanist in Argentina, landed in the top spot after premiering at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.
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33. “De Humani Corporis Fabrica”
Image Credit: Grasshopper Films Director: Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Cast: N/A
Read IndieWire’s Review: Perhaps the most striking footage of all parallels one of the most famous moments in art cinema — in Salvador Dali’s 1929 “Un Chien Andalou,” where a woman’s eye is sliced open in a dreamlike sequence. But in “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” the moment isn’t fleeting or simulated. The eye is taped wide open with wide dilated pupils, the lens slowly cut open and painstakingly repaired. Where Dali’s slice was a momentary flinch, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s scene is a hypnotic experience, and watching the images is more intense than grotesque. But even with the technological marvels and precise surgical skill, there is still a sense of meat being butchered. The camera doesn’t flinch at gelatinous substances tethered to flesh, which slowly decays around it, all tentatively kept alive by little vessels pumped by a muscular mass that could stop at any moment. The film’s existential fascination with anatomy has classic roots. Leonardo Da Vinci to Michaelangelo employed grave robbers so they could similarly cut open the human body and discover its secrets.
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32. “Priscilla”
Image Credit: Sabrina Lantos/A24 Director: Sofia Coppola
Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, and Dagmara Domińczyk
Read IndieWire’s Review: Comparisons to the more opulent and electrifying “Marie Antoinette” are inevitable, as both movies are about teenage girls who are trying to appease their kings, and both movies look at their hermetically sealed historical figures through a (somewhat) modern lens that sees through decades or centuries of mythmaking in order to render the emotional reality of their respective situations. But from a certain perspective, “Priscilla” is also the polar opposite of Coppola’s 2006 masterpiece. While Marie Antoinette was forced to Versailles against her will, Priscilla Presley’s ultimate dream was — like many girls her age in 1963 — to live in Graceland as Elvis’ wife. And while Marie Antoinette spent the brunt of her short life struggling to reconcile a sense of personal identity with the one conferred upon her by the royal palace, Priscilla Presley, who’s still alive today (and an executive producer on this film), spent the brunt of her short marriage realizing that she didn’t have to.
“Priscilla” may not be one of the better movies that Coppola has ever made — it’s vague where her previous coming-of-age stories have been knowingly precise, scattered where its predecessors revealed new insight with each scene, and gloomy where those other films were galvanized with pockets of light — but it stands apart from the rest of her work as the uniquely sensitive and self-honest portrait of a girl who starts to realize that she may have outgrown her greatest fantasy.
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31. “Kokomo City”
Image Credit: ©Magnolia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: D. Smith
Cast: N/A
Read IndieWire’s Review: D. Smith knows how to make a person stand up and pay attention. From the rollicking opening scene of “Kokomo City” — her luminous documentary portrait of four Black trans sex workers which she shot, edited, and directed — it’s clear the terms are being set by a visionary artist who just happened to funnel her interdisciplinary talents into filmmaking for this particular project. How lucky we are that she found this medium.
“Kokomo City” may be her filmmaking debut, but this songwriter innately understands the rhythms and beats that make compelling cinematic storytelling. You can see it in the staccato contrast of light and dark in her elegant black-and-white photography. You can hear it in the unexpected needle drops and deep-cut tracks, and you can feel it in her lyrical cuts that find small moments of beauty in everyday compositions. Make no mistake, Smith announces wordlessly from behind the camera: I have arrived to change the game.
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30. “Godzilla Minus One”
Image Credit: Toho Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sasaki, and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: Every entry in the sprawling, oft-rebooted franchise has wrestled with the question of scale as it finds its place on a spectrum between “human story plagued by giant lizard” or “giant lizard story nagged by humans,” a balance easily miscalculated. The twenty-story-tall poster boy’s recent exploits in Hollywood have managed to have it neither way instead of both, overdosing on lore while dawdling with characters who cannot hope to be as interesting as their reptilian upstager…
Of course the big guy’s home studio of Toho understands this better than anybody, as evident in 2016’s reinvigorating “Shin Godzilla,” in which bureaucratic red tape held up the defensive countermeasures as a comment on the mismanaged Fukushima meltdown of 2011. With estimable brawn and brain, its follow-up “Godzilla Minus One” returns to the primal scene of nuclear devastation to ponder the value of an individual life in the face of mass death, and finds a handful worth fighting for.
In judging the nobility of self-sacrifice against the ambiguous morality of kamikaze warfare — posed as an injustice not to its targets, but rather to the Japanese soldiers spent like bullet casings by an indifferent state — writer/director Takashi Yamazaki does more than find a renewed purpose for an IP asset impervious to irrelevance. He’s reconciled the series’ pop thrills with the heaviness of its political subtext more skillfully than anyone since the rubber-suit days by melding the two into an ideological spectacle to rival Sergei Eisenstein’s, both in its foregrounded populist leanings as well its rousing, cathartic montage in action.
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29. “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”
Image Credit: Courtesy Locarno Director: Radu Jude
Cast: Ilinca Manolache, Nina Hoss, and Uwe Boll
Read IndieWire’s Review: It takes flair to concoct visual-gag-after-visual-gag within episodic riffs on the raw deals suffered by the gig-economy-classes in modern day Bucharest. Radu Jude blends absurdist humor with keen social integrity, like a sharper Romanian riposte to Ruben Östlund, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange (Ilinca Manolache, sensational) builds to a 40-minute final shot in which tragicomedy is heaped upon tragicomedy to unbearably brilliant effect.
Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope.
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28. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”
Image Credit: Jaclyn Martinez/A24 Director: Raven Jackson)
Cast: Charleen McClure, Moses Ingram, Reginald Helms Jr., Zainab Jah, Sheila Atim, and Chris Chalk
Read IndieWire’s Review: A whispered symphony of sense memories that cycles through the decades like rain water — heavy with images and ambient sounds that trickle down from the generations above before they’re absorbed into the earth and suffused back into the air — the vague but vividly rendered “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” runs a little drier every time writer-director Raven Jackson loops back to squeeze another drop of meaning from the textures and traditions that connect a Black Mississippi woman to the place where she was born (and vice-versa).
Her name is Mackenzie, she’s played by a small troupe of different actresses over the course of Jackson’s freeform debut, and the body they share between them serves as a kind of living conduit between then, now, and whatever comes next. Her story is filtered through a too-studied slipstream of a movie that makes its vignettes feel as neatly arranged as the verses of a poem, its scenes spanning from the ’60s to the ’80s but all located in an eternal now that quickly does away with the linearity of flashbacks or forwards.
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27. “You Hurt My Feelings”
Image Credit: Courtesy of A24 Director: Nicole Holofcener
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Owen Teague, and Jeannie Berlin
Read IndieWire’s Review: Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has long been one of our foremost chroniclers of the minutiae of everyday life, someone uniquely equipped to marry the very funny with the very honest, the sort of creator who makes things that hurt, in both good and bad ways. For her first original feature in a decade — she’s been making plenty of TV in recent years, and in 2018, directed and scripted the Ted Thompson adaptation “The Land of Steady Habits” — Holofcener returns to classic territory: a New York City story about neuroses and good intentions and the slights that keep us at night. It’s, of course, about love.
And while “You Hurt My Feelings” is not without all the things Holofencer does so very well — all that honesty, all that understanding of the texture of everyday life, plus Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the spotlight, where she belongs — it also feels decidedly low-key for such a insightful filmmaker. The shagginess of it, the missteps, the rambling bits are pleasurable enough, and there are plenty of laughs and insights here, but there’s also nothing new. If you like Nicole Holofcener films, you will like this one, and there’s comfort in that, if not an edge of disappointment, too.
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26. “John Wick: Chapter 4”
Image Credit: ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Chad Stahelski
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, and more
Read IndieWire’s Review: The “John Wick” franchise has evolved from a small-scale tale of revenge for the death of a wife and the killing of a do to a globe-trotting epic that spans continents, dozens of characters, and an intricate mythology. In its fourth chapter, director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves bring this franchise back to its roots while expanding the world and the story to bigger and bolder places. The result is not only the best movie in the franchise, but the best American action blockbuster since George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
After going to war with essentially the entire world, and causing the deaths of hundreds of people, “Chapter 4” finally starts pondering the question of just how far John Wick is willing to go for revenge, how many people close to him he’s willing to endanger, and whether it was all worth it. At this point, this is no longer about the killing of his wife and dog, it’s about burning down a system that always resented Wick for abandoning it.
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25. “Godland”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Hlynur Pálmason
Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Vic Carmen Sonne
Read IndieWire’s Review: The life and work of writer-director Hlynur Pálmason seems suspended in a liminal space between his homeland of Iceland and the neighboring Scandinavian nation of Denmark, where he studied filmmaking and has now raised a family. And nowhere is that interstitial status more evidently reflected than in his third and finest feature yet, “Godland,” an arrestingly beautiful and philosophically imposing bilingual historical drama about the arrogance of mankind in the face of nature’s unforgiving prowess, the inherent failures of colonial enterprises, and how these factors configure the cultural identities of individuals.
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24. “The Taste of Things”
Image Credit: IFC Films Director: Tran Anh Hung
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel
Read IndieWire’s Review: There is something to be said for a simple dish made with the best ingredients by a trusted hand. Just as a perfect omelet made by a lover is more satisfying than an eight-hour feast laid on by a Prince, so it follows that a film like “The Pot-au-Feu” works, not in spite of, but because it focuses on executing its basic premise with enrapturing attention to detail. This is a story about love and food, which it presents as the same thing.
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23. “Maestro”
Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Bradley Cooper
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Vincenzo Amato
Read IndieWire’s Review: Bradley Cooper exerts and exhausts his soul to not only direct and co-write “Maestro,” about the great composer and New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, but also to star as the complicated musical legend widely known for writing the score for “West Side Story.” Much ado has already been made about the prosthetic nose the gentile second-time feature filmmaker dons to inhabit the specific skin of the Jewish maestro, who died of a heart attack in 1990 at 72. This feat of sculptural makeup effects by artist Kazu Hiro is an unnecessary distraction that never stops reminding you that the person underneath is actually Bradley Cooper, not Bernstein.
Nose aside, “Maestro” is a technical triumph in terms of checking all the boxes of multihyphenate-ism — Cooper funnels himself into the project at every creative level — but this handsomely made Oscar-tailored package actually belongs to another person entirely, and that would be Carey Mulligan, playing Bernstein’s wife of nearly four decades, Felicia Montealegre.
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22. “Perfect Days” (Wim Wenders)
Image Credit: @MASTER MIND Ltd Director: Wim Wenders
Cast: Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano
Read IndieWire’s Review: Wim Wenders‘ latest, “Perfect Days” plays like the culmination of filmmaker’s long tryst with Japanese virtuoso Ozu Yasujirō, which includes Wenders’ 1985 Ozu documentary “Tokyo-Ga,” and manifests here as a distinctly Ozu-esque observance of life and rhythm. First commissioned as a short film project celebrating Tokyo’s state-of-the-art public toilets — the great social equalizer — Wenders snatches the concept and doesn’t so much run with it as much as he strolls with it in the park while contemplating dreams, the dignity of labor, and the fleeting joys of waking moments.
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21. “The Killer”
Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: David Fincher
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard
Read IndieWire’s Review: Like the “Jeanne Dielman” of assassin movies, “The Killer” centers on how the self-started glitches in one character’s routine cause their carefully ordered world to fall slowly off its axis. David Fincher’s sleek if small genre exercise plants us into the orbital sockets of an unnamed killer-for-hire, played by Michael Fassbender, whose self-deceptions catch up to him amid a contract job gone just about an inch wrong in Paris.
There are few surprises in this straight-line thriller, well-executed within a millimeter of its life as ever by the “Gone Girl” and “Social Network” director. Here, the perfectionist, you-might-say-control-freak director punches up a nimbly sketched screenplay by “Seven” scribe Andrew Kevin Walker that evokes no sympathy for its protagonist, played with Zen-cool by a no-pulse Fassbender.
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20. “Afire”
Image Credit: Courtesy Sideshow/Janus Films Director: Christian Petzold
Cast: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel
Read IndieWire’s Review: Gently dunking on a writer of near-apocalyptic pomposity over the course of a languid seaside vacation, Petzold’s latest film plays a bit like “Barton Fink” by way of Eric Rohmer, though the slight dramedy never quite equals either of those highs. Still, this smoldering tour through the life of the mind marks an endearing change of pace for the talented filmmaker, who trades the capital-H history of “Phoenix” and romantic fantasy of “Undine” for a more subdued — and sometimes surprisingly funny — character study.
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19. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate Director: Kelly Fremon Craig
Cast: Rachel McAdams, Abby Ryder Fortson, Kathy Bates, Benny Safdie
Read IndieWire’s Review: Judy Blume never talked down to kids or adults, and such is the spirit that drives Kelly Fremon Craig‘s film adaptation of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” It’s an adaptation that Blume long resisted, at least before “The Edge of Seventeen” filmmaker and her mentor and producer James L. Brooks pitched their idea to her, but Blume’s book translates beautifully to the big screen with same zip, pep, and good humor of Blume’s books.
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18. “Pacifiction”
Image Credit: Grasshopper Film Director: Albert Serra
Cast: Benoît Magimel, Pahoa Mahagafanau, Marc Susini
Read IndieWire’s Review: What do you want when you already have paradise? That question looms over Albert Serra’s singularly mysterious cinematic immersion into Tahiti, “Pacifiction.” The indigenous Polynesians living there would likely argue that this paradise hasn’t been theirs in a long time. Serra, the Catalan filmmaker behind such boundary-pushing works of experiential filmmaking as “Honor of the Knights” and “Story of My Death,” is yet another outsider coming to their shores, but he avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most movies set in some tropical locale. “Pacifiction” is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.
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17. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”
Image Credit: Sony Pictures Animation Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Oscar Isaac, Issa Rae
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is awash in stories — its first five or so minutes, an ostensible prologue, is a dynamic tragedy in miniature, and that’s just the first five minutes — all built around an idea one of its characters tosses out during a similarly information-packed voiceover: They’re going to “do things differently.” It’s precisely what the film‘s predecessor, the rightly Oscar-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” did four years ago, taking a well-worn concept (a Spider-Man origin story? again?) and turning it into an actual masterpiece built on a wealth of stories, new and old, told with legitimate energy and innovation. And it’s what Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson attempt to replicate in their sequel, an aim that pays off mightily.
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16. “American Fiction”
Image Credit: Orion Pictures Director: Cord Jefferson
Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross,
Read IndieWire’s Review: In “American Fiction,” the comic and tragic go hand in hand. Each moment is layered with meaning, socially, politically, and emotionally. The film, based on the novel “Erasure” by writer and professor Percival Everett, is part satire, part romantic comedy, all combined with thoughtful family drama. With an all-star cast and talented writer at the helm, “American Fiction” is poised to become an audience favorite.
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15. “Passages”
Image Credit: Courtesy MUBI Director: Ira Sachs
Cast: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, Adèle Exarchopoulos
Read IndieWire’s Review: A signature new drama from a director whose best work (“Keep the Lights On,” “Love Is Strange”) is at once both generously tender in its brutality and unsparingly brutal in its tenderness, the raw and resonant “Passages” is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones.
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14. “The Boy and the Heron”
Image Credit: Studio Ghibli Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Ko Shibasaki
Read IndieWire’s Review: It’s true that “How Do You Live?” — which tells an original story that borrows its title from Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel of the same name, and has been inexplicably rechristened “The Boy and the Heron” for its international release at Studio Ghibli’s behest… despite the fact that Yoshino’s book acts as a crucial plot point in a film whose climax hinges upon an obvious stand-in for its writer-director literally asking the audience “How do you live?” — isn’t Miyazaki’s best film. It lacks the full kineticism of “The Castle of Cagliostro,” the fury of “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” the adventure of “Castle in the Sky,” the Totoro of “My Neighbor Totoro,” the effervescence of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” the romance of “Porco Rosso,” the grandeur of “Princess Mononoke,” the beguilement of “Spirited Away,” the floridness of “Howl’s Moving Castle,” the hamminess of “Ponyo,” or the emotional mega-wattage of “The Wind Rises.”
Crucially, however, “The Boy and the Heron” contains aspects of all of those things (in addition to more overt references to the anime godhead’s previous work). And while this dream-like warble of a swan song may be too pitchy and scattered to hit with the gale-force power that made “The Wind Rises” feel like such a definitive farewell, “The Boy and the Heron” finds Miyazaki so nakedly bidding adieu — to us, and to the crumbling kingdom of dreams and madness that he’ll soon leave behind — that it somehow resolves into an even more fitting goodbye, one graced with the divine awe and heart-stopping wistfulness of watching a true immortal make peace with their own death.
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13. “All of Us Strangers”
Image Credit: Searchlight Pictures Director: Andrew Haigh
Cast: Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott, Carter John Grout
Read IndieWire’s Review: God bless British Andrew Haigh, whose best films — “Weekend,” “45 Years,” and now the quietly shattering “All of Us Strangers” — are the rare work of a modern director who knows how to get out of their own way. Haigh’s simple but penetrating dramas couldn’t be more specific in how they depict the strangeness of intimacy and the intimacy of strangeness, and yet they’re also palpably unfilled in a way, like a half-empty room that someone you were looking for just left. In that light, it should come as little surprise that Haigh is so well-suited to an ineffably personal ghost story about the absences that can shape our entire lives if we let them.
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12. “Showing Up”
Image Credit: Courtesy of A24 Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Andre 3000
Read IndieWire’s Review: “First Cow” may not have been anywhere near as soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film about desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul. Or, a fowl, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up,” a slight knowing smile of a movie starring Michelle Williams as a stressed-out Portland ceramist with a pageboy haircut who reluctantly finds herself nursing an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite career.
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11. “Fallen Leaves”
Image Credit: Courtesy MUBI Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Cast: Alma Pöysti, Martti Suosalo, Jussi Vatanen
Read IndieWire’s Review: Indeed, she gets fired from the supermarket for stealing expired food, and he struggles to stay sober long enough to get through an entire shift at the construction site where he works with his friend, Houtari (Kaurismäki veteran Janne Hyytiäinen, wonderful here as a wannabe lothario who possesses a divine confidence in his karaoke skills). But hope, much like “Fallen Leaves” itself, is only ever believed to be lost, and happiness is never far at hand.
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10. “Asteroid City”
Image Credit: Focus Features Director: Wes Anderson
Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Brian Cranston, Steve Carrell, Margot Robbie
Read IndieWire’s Review: Like any movie by Wes Anderson, “Asteroid City” is the epitome of a Wes Anderson movie. A film about a television program about a play within a play “about infinity and I don’t know what else” (as one character describes it), this delightfully profound desert charmer — by far the director’s best effort since “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and in some respects the most poignant thing he’s ever made — boasts all of his usual hallmarks and then some.
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9. “The Holdovers”
Image Credit: Focus Features Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa
Read IndieWire’s Review: Set in the winter of 1970 and shot to look as if it had actually been made back then, Alexander Payne’s nuanced and hyper-literate “The Holdovers” takes great pleasure in defying every impulse of modern cinema from even before the moment it starts (the studio fanfare includes a “throwback” Focus Features logo, which is a cute little in-joke about a company that wasn’t founded until 2002). And yet, it might take even greater pleasure in embracing some of the movies’ most time-honored tropes and traditions.
Chief among them: The inviolable rule that anything a school teacher “casually” tells their students in the first act of a film must speak to a core idea of the film itself. In that light, be sure to take notes during the opening scene in which Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) quotes Cicero to the “vulgar philistines” in his Ancient Civilization class. “Non nobis solum nati sumus.” “Not for ourselves alone are we born.” No spoilers, but that’s definitely going to be on the final exam of “The Holdovers,” which gradually thaws into a slight but sensitive tale about a trio of lonely souls who teach each other to push through their lives’ most isolating disappointments.
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8. “Barbie”
Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell, Kate McKinnon, America Ferrera
Read IndieWire’s Review: Gerwig, as ever, has assembled a stellar supporting cast. All Barbies delight, but the Kens, appropriately enough, launch a real sneak attack, especially Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Michael Cera nearly makes off with the whole thing as the singular sidekick Allan. There’s also a murderer’s row of below-the-line talent: Opuses can and will be written about Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Jacqueline Durran’s costumes. “Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch.
It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic.
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7. “Anatomy of a Fall”
Image Credit: Neon Director: Justine Triet
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner, Antoine Reinartz
Read IndieWire’s Review: Rounding out her own impressive hat trick, “Toni Erdmann” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller dazzles in a role clearly written with the performer in mind. She plays Sandra, a German-born, France-based bisexual novelist accused of killing her male partner in a way eerily foretold by one of her novels. And if that description calls to mind another icy-blond (in a performance, incidentally, that also shook the Cannes Film Festival, back in 1992), the echo is both wholly intentional and entirely irrelevant. Indeed, “Anatomy of a Fall” is filled with such anti-portents — coincidences or clues, depending who you ask, echoes or empty noise, depending on who’s listening.
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6. “The Zone of Interest”
Image Credit: Courtesy of A24 Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam
Read IndieWire’s Review: A narrative Holocaust drama that’s defined by its rigorous compartmentalization and steadfast refusal to show any hint of explicit violence, Jonathan Glazer’s profoundly chilling “The Zone of Interest”stands out for how formally the film splits the difference between the two opposite modes of its solemn genre — a genre that may now be impossible to consider without it. No Holocaust movie has ever been more committed to illustrating the banality of evil, and that’s because no Holocaust movie has ever been more hell-bent upon ignoring evil altogether. There is a literal concrete wall that separates Glazer’s characters from the horrors next door, and not once does his camera dare to peek over it for a better look. It doesn’t even express the faintest hint of that desire.
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5. “May December”
Image Credit: Netflix Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, Charles Melton
Read IndieWire’s Review: A heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp that teases real human drama from the stuff of tabloid sensationalism, Todd Haynes’ delicious “May December” continues the director’s tradition of making films that rely upon the self-awareness that seems to elude their characters — especially the ones played by Julianne Moore.
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4. “Past Lives”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Celine Song
Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magro, Moon Seung-ah
Read IndieWire’s Review: Of all the writers retreats in all the summer towns in all of New York, he had to walk into hers. As the sun fades on a perfect Montauk night — setting the stage for a first kiss that, like so many of the most resonant moments in Celine Song’s transcendent “Past Lives,” will ultimately be left to the imagination — Nora (Greta Lee) tells Arthur (John Magaro) about the Korean concept of In-Yun, which suggests that people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before
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3. “Poor Things”
Image Credit: ©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Poor Things” is the best film of Lanthimos’ career and already feels like an instant classic, mordantly funny, whimsical and wacky, unprecious and unpretentious, filled with so much to adore that to try and parse it all here feels like a pitiful response to the film’s ambitions.
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2. “Oppenheimer”
Image Credit: ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon
Read IndieWire’s Review: At first, I thought that if J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t exist, Christopher Nolan would probably have been compelled to invent him. The exalted British filmmaker has long been fixated upon stories of haunted and potentially self-destructive men who sift through the source code of space-time in a desperate bid to understand the meaning of their own actions, and so the “father of the atomic bomb” — a theoretical physicist whose obsession with a twilight world hidden inside our own led to the birth of the modern age’s most biblical horrors — would seem to represent an uncannily perfect subject for the “Tenet” director’s next epic. And he is. In fact, Oppenheimer is so perversely well-suited to the Nolan treatment that I soon began to realize I had things backwards: Christopher Nolan only exists because men like J. Robert Oppenheimer invented him first.
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1. “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Apple Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons
Read IndieWire’s Review: It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns “Killers of the Flower Moon” into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it.
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December 13, 2023 at 10:00PM
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The 50 Best Movies of 2023, According to 158 Critics from Around the World - IndieWire
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