Best Movies of 2023

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Photo caption: Cillian Murphy in OPPENHEIMER. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year.  By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my Best Movies of 2022 and Best Movies of 2021 lists. To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.

I’ve seen 130 2023 films so far, but I have yet to see a few promising prestige films like Zone of Interest and American Fiction. Pretty sure some of those will end up high on my list when I finalize it in a couple months. (BTW that 130 total for 2023 doesn’t include the 89 festival submissions that I’ve screened (those will be 2024 films) nor the 121 movies from earlier years that I watched this year.)

I almost always pick an international film like Drive My Car or Incendies or an indie like Winter’s Bone, Hell or High Water or Leave no Trace as my top movie of the year. This year, my top pick is a big summer blockbuster, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. I especially admired Oppenheimer for these reasons:

  • Christopher Nolan’s imagination in threading together two riveting stories. The first is the Manhattan Project, the mastering of all the scientific and technological challenges in developing the first nuclear weapon, in a race with the worst villains in the history of the world – that’s fodder for an epic movie in itself. The second is the psychological study of a man who was brilliant enough to lead the development of the first atomic bomb, but who could not grasp that he would then lose all control on its use.
  • The brilliant performances of Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey, Jr, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon and Benny Safdie.
  • Oppenheimer is visually thrilling, thanks to the collaboration of Nolan, Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and editor Jennifer Lame. Ludwig Göransson’s music is pretty great, too.
  • Together the filmmakers have made a movie that runs for three hours without a single slow or dry moment, despite spending two hours on nuclear physics. I am confident in predicting that Oppenheimer will receive (and deserve) at least ten Oscar nominations and could challenge the record of fourteen.

My number two film, Anatomy of a Fall, is good enough to have been my top in almost any other year.

ANATOMY OF A FALL. Courtesy of NEON.

Here’s the entire list:

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in PAST LIVES. Courtesy of A24.