Best Movies of 2023

10. SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

212 LISTS | 13 TOP SPOTS
Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson | 140 mins | Superhero
Shameik Moore | Hailee Steinfeld | Brian Tyree Henry | Luna Lauren Velez

“Expanding the vision of Into the Spider-Verse, this ambitious sequel brings Miles Morales face-to-face with Spider-Man 2099 and his “Spider Society,” who want to protect the multiverse from “anomalies” like the Spot, a new baddie who can create interdimensional portals at will. As great as Into the Spider-Verse looked, Across the Spider-Verse looks even better. (Spider-Gwen’s dimension is like a watercolor painting brought to mutating life; Spider-Man India hails from “Mumbattan” that’s a swirl of shades of yellows and greens.) The only knock against Across the Spider-Verse? It’s the first part of a two-part story, and it does feel like it at times.” – Matt Singer, Screen Crush

9. THE ZONE OF INTEREST

235 LISTS | 29 TOP SPOTS
Jonathan Glazer | 105 mins | Drama
Sandra Huller | Christian Friedel | Freya Kreutzkam | Ralph Herforth

“Jonathan Glazer’s take on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel is a portrait of hell from the periphery. An S.S. officer (Christian Friedel) and his family live in the housing area surrounding Auschwitz; they throw pool parties and take afternoon tea with friends while chimneys belch black smoke in the distance. Glazer strips away the imagery we now associate with Holocaust dramas and puts his high-formalism style to perfect use, presenting an absolutely chilling look at how normalization works — at some point, you simply stop hearing the barking dogs, gunshots, and human suffering happening right outside your own backyard. This is what the banality around the banality of evil looks like. And Sandra Hüller, playing the officer’s raging wife, once again convinces you that she’s one of the most fearless international actors working today.” – David Fear, Rolling Stone

8. ANATOMY OF A FALL

277 LISTS | 13 TOP SPOTS
Justine Triet | 151 mins | Drama
Sandra Huller | Swann Arlaud | Milo Machado Graner | Antoine Reinartz

“They say trends come in threes. And so, nipping on the heels of Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” and Cedric Kahn’s Directors’ Fortnight breakout “The Goldman Case,” Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall” make a compelling case that the courthouse has become the most fertile ground in contemporary French cinema, offering incisive auteurs both motive and opportunity to put social structures on trial. As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

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 on who you ask, echoes or empty noise, depending on who’s listening.

“Anatomy of a Fall” is never really about the trial that follows; at its searing best, the film tracks the destruction of a family with cold precision. If an artist relies on memories, why not also share nightmares? Why not build a polar vortex that crushes fact under fiction, that lifts from last night’s argument, today’s viewing of a ’90s classic and tomorrow’s worst fears? It’s a cyclone that sends the mind soaring, and primes the heart for a hefty fall.” – Christian Blauvelt, IndieWire

7. The Holdovers

278 LISTS | 19 TOP SPOTS
Alexander Payne | 133 mins | Comedy/Drama
Paul Giamatti | Da'Vine Rudolph | Dominic Sessa | Carrie Preston

“It’s been a long while since director Alexander Payne last served up a prickly little slice of life. The Holdovers is a welcome return to the forms of Nebraska and Sideways, tart and bleary at once. Paul Giamatti, doing his most appealing work since Private Life, plays a sorry, drunken boarding school teacher tasked with watching one left-behind student over winter break in the early 1970s. Newcomer Dominic Sessa is a gangly, endearing revelation as that problem student, while Da’Vine Joy Randolph provides invaluable support as a cafeteria worker tasked with feeding these messy men while tending to her own profound sorrow. Payne’s worldview has been softened by age; where he might have gone mean 20 or so years ago, he instead turns to ragged empathy. He finds the grace in the shambolic, depicting a tired, downtrodden older man as he allows the springy obnoxiousness of youth to coax him out of stasis. The Holdovers is a very good Christmas movie and a great New Year’s one: a look at resolutions that may really stick this time.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

6. POOR THINGS

288 LISTS | 38 TOP SPOTS
Yorgos Lanthimos | 141 mins | Sci-Fi/Romance
Emma Stone | Mark Ruffalo | Willem Dafoe | Ramy Youssef

“Emma Stone is a woman who gets to start from scratch in Yorgos Lanthimos’ unbound and astonishing new feature, “Poor Things.” For most of us, life is comprised of knowledge and circumstance that take decades to accumulate until we die.  

For Stone’s Bella Baxter, that process happens in very fast motion, thanks to a reanimating procedure that finds her, once a dead woman floating in a river, now alive again with her unborn child’s brain inside her head. Bella, née Victoria, is a living breathing tabula rasa unfettered by societal pressures, propriety, or niceties. And Stone, in her most brazenly weird performance to date, plays her like a toddler taking its first steps and saying its first words — until by the end of “Poor Things” she’s speaking fluent French and studying anatomy, her eyes and ears full of worldliness.  

Boldly realized with taffy-colored production design, brain-bending sets stuffed with enough easter egg unrealities to fill the most difficult 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and wildly over-the-top Victorian costumes that look as if made by a schizoid seamstress on too many tabs of acid, “Poor Things” is also hysterically funny and the raunchiest movie you’re likely to see all year. Lanthimos makes a sexually graphic picaresque that’s part Terry Gilliam, part Ken Russell, about Bella’s pursuit of pleasure but also her selfhood in a patriarchal world. Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, and Ramy Youssef each provide overwhelmingly hilarious turns as the men in Bella’s life — her ridiculous lover, her creator, and her potential husband, respectively.  

“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. It’s proof that whatever weird alchemy Stone and Lanthimos are vibing on after “The Favourite” is the real deal.” – Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

5. BARBIE

317 LISTS | 26 TOP SPOTS
Greta Gerwig | 114 mins | Comedy
Margot Robbie | Ryan Gosling | Issa Rae | Kate McKinnon

“The irrepressible outpouring of giddy but principled inspiration in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster—a vision of the earnest passions embodied in child’s play and the progressive power of girls’ uninhibited imagination—feels like the first display of her comprehensive artistry and like a new dimension in modern cinema.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

4. MAY DECEMBER

354 LISTS | 32 TOP SPOTS
Todd Haynes | 117 mins | Comedy/Drama
Natalie Portman | Chris Tenzis | Charles Melton | Julianne Moore

“From one angle, May December is a dark comedy about sexual mores and tabloid nosiness about the business of others. From another, Todd Haynes’s film is a bitterly sad portrait of a life brutally compromised by childhood abuse. And another: The film is about the lie of moviemaking, its necessary bending of the truth and its tendency to pretend it’s doing otherwise. There are many more ways to approach May December (shrewdly written by Samy Burch), a transfixing and shape-shifting film, sly and sophisticated. Natalie Portman, playing an actor researching a role she hopes will launch her into the prestige echelon, works wonders, making manifest all of our predatory hunger for sordid detail, our eagerness to assign a moral framework that defines our decency against others’ lack of it. Julianne Moore ferociously plays a woman who once did something monstrous but may or may not still be a monster, while Charles Melton gives the film its beating, broken heart. Coy and vaguely sinister—while still also kind, still attuned to the multitude of ambivalences contained within each character—May December could probably be endlessly unpacked, so varied are its tones and textures and piercing insights. What could have been a nasty little bit of camp is instead something wise and heady, a complex film whose mind whirs at breakneck speed.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

3. PAST LIVES

388 LISTS | 62 TOP SPOTS
Celine Song | 105 mins | Drama/Romance
Greta Lee | Teo Yoo | John Magaro | Moon Seung-ah

Once upon a time in Seoul, two kids — Na Young and Hae Sung — were the best of friends. Then her family immigrated to Canada, so whatever mutual childhood crush they harbored for each other is cut short. Years later, the now-grown Na Young (Greta Lee), who goes by Nora, reconnects with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) over social media. She lives in New York. He’s still in South Korea. Eventually, communication stops. Life goes on. Nora gets married to a fellow writer (John Magaro). And then Hae finally makes good on his promise to come visit America. She offers to play tour guide. Every sightseeing excursion and catch-up exchange feels loaded. The feelings haven’t gone away. Neither of them know what’s going to happen next.

A playwright with a genuine feel for nuance and crafting characters so achingly real and recognizable that you feel like you’ve known them forever, writer-director Celine Song has a talent for letting things be left unsaid, and letting this central trio express themselves through unfinished sentences, casual asides, and glances; every hesitation and pause suggest short stories unto themselves. And with her first movie (drawn from her own autobiographical experiences), she already proves she can make the sort of intimate, character-driven romantic drama that never overplays its hand yet will gladly lubricate your tear ducts. It also makes you realize that Lee has been chronically underused as an actor — she’s never been given a chance like this to display her chops before, and takes full advantage of exploring this very complicated woman’s conflicted feelings. Most importantly, Past Lives takes what appears to be a simple story of unrequited love and gives it the depth, the feeling, and the emotional scope of something that feels so much larger than just a film. When we first saw this minor-key masterpiece back in January, we felt like we’d already seen the best movie of the year. All these months later, that feeling still remains.” – David Fear, Rolling Stone

2. OPPENHEIMER

436 LISTS | 101 TOP SPOTS
Christopher Nolan | 180 mins | Drama
Cillian Murphy | Emily Blunt | Matt Damon | Robert Downey Jr.

“So many biopics tried this year not to be biopics, to the point that the films’ publicists politely but firmly requested that we not call them biopics. Christopher Nolan didn’t seem to have any such worries. Oppenheimer is a proud biopic: a dense, big-swing condensation of a 600-page biography about one of the most important men of the 20th century and about (in the movie’s own words) “the most important fucking thing to ever happen in the history of the world.” But Oppenheimer is also the opposite of a standard-issue Great Man movie: The achievement here is monstrous, and the psychic dissolution of the main character before our very eyes is heartbreaking. Nolan wants to enter J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mind, to see the “hidden universe” that quantum physics opened up and thus convey the psychic prison in which the scientist found himself after ushering in the nuclear age. That the director turned this most devastating of stories into a riveting pop culture phenomenon without ceding one inch on its tragic dimensions is surely an achievement for the ages.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

1. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

479 LISTS | 63 TOP SPOTS
Martin Scorsese | 206 mins | Drama
Leonardo DiCaprio | Robert De Niro | Lily Gladstone | Jesse Plemons

““I do love that money,” smirks Leonardo DiCaprio’s thuggish Ernest Burkhart, no less an avatar of base greed than Henry Hill and Jordan Belfort. He’s a clod, and if it seems hard to understand why Lily Gladstone’s regal Mollie Kyle would fall for her white suitor (in both senses of the word), that’s the point: the forcible—yet still, strictly speaking, legal—remanding of valuable Osage resources and property to white caretakers in Oklahoma (and elsewhere) in the early 20th century was such a transparent power grab that it didn’t really fool anybody. The “Reign of Terror” dramatized in Martin Scorsese’s nightmarish period piece is an example of evil operating in plain sight. Certainly, Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t perfect, but it’s deeply felt, and there are sequences of surpassing power and artistry throughout. Scorsese’s ability to honestly reconfigure flaws as strengths—like acknowledging and eventually emphasizing his own inadequacies as the teller of this particular tale—make other filmmakers’ successes look small by comparison.” – Adam Nayman, The Ringer

Full List:

RTITLEL#1ARL%#1%TCLTCL1TCL%TCL1%
1Killers of the Flower Moon479633.8352%9%1011764%13%
2Oppenheimer4361013.5747%15%791950%15%
3Past Lives388623.9242%9%70944%7%
4May December354324.7739%5%67742%5%
5Barbie317265.2635%4%38324%2%
6Poor Things288384.4431%5%53833%6%
7The Holdovers278195.0530%3%52233%2%
8Anatomy of a Fall277135.4630%2%54134%1%
9The Zone of Interest235294.5426%4%58836%6%
10Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse212135.1023%2%22114%1%
11Asteroid City200125.7222%2%42326%2%
12Showing Up168144.9318%2%45728%5%
13The Boy and the Heron13675.3315%1%26116%1%
14Fallen Leaves12975.4514%1%30219%2%
15All of Us Strangers128135.3914%2%33421%3%
16American Fiction12765.8614%1%25316%2%
17Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret11956.7813%1%30219%2%
18Maestro10845.0112%1%26216%2%
19John Wick: Chapter 410745.8412%1%714%1%
20Godzilla Minus One106115.1512%2%714%1%
21Passages10616.9112%0%21113%1%
22The Killer10046.0611%1%18011%0%
23Pacifiction91163.9110%2%1529%2%
24Saltburn8575.399%1%503%0%
25Priscilla8136.059%0%1218%1%
26Afire7865.718%1%17011%0%
27Bottoms7565.638%1%906%0%
28Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One7417.008%0%604%0%
29How to Blow Up a Pipeline7125.918%0%1016%1%
30The Taste of Things7055.628%1%1519%1%
31Air6516.057%0%1208%0%
32Talk to Me6226.307%0%201%0%
33A Thousand and One6025.927%0%17111%1%
34De Humani Corporis Fabrica61124.226%2%1469%5%
35The Iron Claw5816.596%0%503%0%
36Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros5735.886%0%20013%0%
37Beau is Afraid5565.466%1%815%1%
38Godland5216.436%0%1107%0%
39BlackBerry5106.376%0%302%0%
40All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt5055.245%1%1228%2%
41Rye Lane4935.645%0%503%0%
42Perfect Days4825.685%0%1006%0%
43You Hurt My Feelings4406.785%0%1006%0%
44The Quiet Girl4764.815%1%18111%1%
45Monster (2023)4365.235%1%614%1%
46Ferrari4046.304%1%604%0%
47The Color Purple (2023)4015.764%0%704%0%
47Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 34016.144%0%101%0%
49Our Body3924.904%0%614%1%
50Dream Scenario3917.454%0%805%0%
51Trenque Lauquen3935.674%0%503%0%
52Origin3854.844%1%906%0%
53R.M.N.3706.584%0%1308%0%
54The Delinquents3515.824%0%1006%0%
55Unrest3515.684%0%604%0%
56Rotting in the Sun3426.254%0%403%0%
57Eileen3115.203%0%604%0%
57Earth Mama3116.003%0%916%1%
59Kokomo City3017.143%0%1107%0%
60Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves2926.293%0%201%0%
61Skinamarink2915.553%0%413%1%
62Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem2806.073%0%101%0%
63The Plains2825.003%0%704%0%
64La Chimera2735.603%0%614%1%
65Theater Camp2615.953%0%101%0%
66Knock at the Cabin2515.923%0%201%0%
66Wonka2516.183%0%302%0%
68Fair Play2507.183%0%101%0%
68Suzume2506.143%0%503%0%
70The Eight Mountains2525.303%0%604%0%
71Dry Ground Burning2434.003%0%201%0%
72Rewind & Play2406.933%0%503%0%
73Fremont2316.383%0%503%0%
73About Dry Grasses2314.803%0%805%0%
75Walk Up2334.122%0%503%0%
76Four Daughters2225.502%0%302%0%
77They Cloned Tyrone2216.422%0%201%0%
78Tori and Lokita2205.942%0%503%0%
79Totem2125.292%0%906%0%
80Infinity Pool2116.272%0%403%0%
80Orlando: My Political Biography2114.882%0%604%0%
82M3gan2107.202%0%302%0%
83Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World2045.292%1%533%2%
84In Water2025.802%0%413%1%
85The Sweet East2015.822%0%101%0%
86Napoleon (2023)2007.172%0%403%0%
86Reality (2023)2006.732%0%302%0%
88How to Have Sex1908.082%0%201%0%
88The Creator1907.622%0%000%0%
88The Teacher's Lounge1907.202%0%604%0%
88Youth (Spring)1905.572%0%503%0%
9220 Days in Mariupol1825.302%0%714%1%
93Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour1807.672%0%201%0%
93When Evil Lurks1804.852%0%101%0%
93Polite Society1805.862%0%201%0%
96The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar1615.002%0%302%0%
96Evil Dead Rise1617.902%0%201%0%
98The Royal Hotel1607.252%0%403%0%
98Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie1608.002%0%403%0%
100The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes1526.002%0%000%0%

Lists Included 920 | Top Critics Included 159

R Rank
L Total number of lists where the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year
AR Average position on ranked top 10 lists
#1 Total number of lists where the film was selected as the best film of the year
L% Percentage of total lists where the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year
#1% Percentage of mentions where the film was selected as the best film of the year
TCL Number of times that the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year on top critics’ lists
TCL1 Number of times that the film was selected as the best film of the year on top critics’ lists
TCL% Percentage of times that the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year on top critics’ lists
TCL1% Percentage of lists where the film was selected as the best film of the year on top critics’ lists