The Best Movies of 2023 (and Where to Watch Them)

Critic Siddhant Adlakha watched 194 films this year—his favorites reckon with an enormous, eventful year both on and off screen

Words by Siddhant Adlakha

This year in movies was marked by enrapturing images on screen, changing tastes at the cinema, shifting tides on the studio lot, and inescapable tragedy out in the real world, far away from all the razzle dazzle. Reckoning with it all seems impossible—but we have to start somewhere.

Behind the scenes, Hollywood’s writers and actors banded together in a massive dual labor strike against predatory studios, resulting in historic protections. At the box office, a string of superhero failures sounded the death knell for the homogenized, mass-produced comic book movie industrial complex. It may seem distasteful to revel in certain kinds of blockbusters missing the mark, but the less oxygen Hollywood cape movies take up, the more attention and screens become available for different kinds of works and cultural points of view. For instance, 2023 ended with the breakout success of not one, but two big Japanese productions: kaiju melodrama Godzilla Minus One and Hayao Miyazaki’s moving career-capper The Boy and the Heron, both released in December alongside festival favorites like Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gentle puzzle box thriller, and Wim Wenders’ slice-of-life drama (and eventual Japanese Oscar entry) Perfect Days. It turned out to be a banner year for Japanese cinema in the west; the limited releases of tokusatsu throwback Shin Kamen Rider, coming of age fantasy Suzume, and sports drama The First Slam Dunk were also well-received.

Things looked different for American productions too. After the explosive Oscar success of Everything Everywhere All At Once, more Asian American stories entered the mainstream spotlight, proving it not to be a passing fad. Whether or not they were wholly successful, they contributed to an ever-evolving cultural tapestry. Disney’s fantasy series American Born Chinese and Randall Park’s debut satire Shortcomings—two markedly different tales of identity—proved that indie comics from Asian American authors are a fertile wellspring. Raunchy road-trip comedy Joy Ride received a rapturous response from many viewers, while comedy-drama The Persian Version brought Iranian American struggles to the fore with delightful flair. These productions ran the genre gamut, but the biggest AA+PI successes in TV and movies were arguably Netflix’s livewire series Beef, in which Ali Wong and Steven Yeun dive deep into the zany psychology of lonely Angelenos, and Celine Song’s debut romance Past Lives which—it may not surprise you to learn—has its own dedicated entry further down.

It was an exceptionally strong year for cinema across the board, from surprise hidden gems to surprise blockbusters, though it’s hard not to wonder how much they truly mattered, given the state of the world at large. It’s certainly worth noting that some of the year’s best films resonated because their themes reflected (and in some cases, preceded) agonizing current events. Nandita Das’s Hindi drama Zwigato approached a tale of food delivery drivers through the lens of India’s authoritarian surveillance state; months later, the country effectively withdrew all digital freedoms. Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N., a stark portrait of rural Romania, captured the banality of Islamophobic fear mongering; Romania’s far-right parties have since formed a dangerous coalition. Even Ridley Scott’s Napoleon traded historical accuracy for a tongue-in-cheek critique of modern strongmen—bumbling, but dangerous—in the vein of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Javier Milei, and Xi Jinping. Then again, none of these works could ever hope to stop the inevitable march of history, whose long arc these days seems to bend further away from justice.

It can be hard not to feel helpless, despite the year’s many rousing and transformative cinematic offerings. But perhaps the problem lies in this corrective mode of thinking: our preoccupation with the idea that media, through representation and political optics, can somehow save us by saying the right thing. Perhaps the movies are only here to remind us of what we already know, or what we’ve forgotten. Several films on this list reflect real and imagined history, or lucidly recall both past and present atrocities—the rise of global right-wing populism; the ongoing ethnic cleansings in Gaza, Armenia, and Sudan—so it would be foolhardy not to reference these contemporary connections during our countdown. Otherwise, what are these dazzling, moving cinematic mirrors even for?

Honorable mentions:

Passages, a rigorous, unfairly censored queer drama (France)

Amerikatsi, a tragicomic tale of diasporic yearning (Armenia)

Against the Tide, an intimate, indigenous fishing documentary (India)

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a grief-stricken meditation (Vietnam)

Asteroid City, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison, five works of sorrowful whimsy by Wes Anderson (USA)

Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars”, a furious deconstruction of the power and limits of revolutionary cinema, a parting gift from late maestro Jean-Luc Godard (Switzerland, France)

15. Occupied City
Netherlands, U.K.

Composed mostly of exterior establishing shots, the four-hour-and-22-minute documentary by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) is a demanding act of observance. Written by McQueen’s wife, filmmaker Bianca Stigter, and based on her book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, Occupied City was shot during COVID lockdown in Amsterdam, the director’s adopted home. It narrates tales of Nazi occupation, and of the oft-ignored Jewish and communist resistance in its wake—courtesy of thoughtful voiceover from actress Melanie Hyams—as it creates meaning and memory through the juxtaposition of words and physical spaces, powerfully recalling the past, and depicting the myriad ways it’s both remembered and forgotten. Fittingly, one of the movie’s many outdoor scenes, which seek to lure the ghosts of history into the present, is foregrounded by a protest for Palestinian freedom.

Now in U.S. theaters

14. Godzilla Minus One
Japan

Evoking both terror and wistful optimism, Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One, set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, is a pure blockbuster experience. From its humanist core to its awe-inspiring kaiju spectacle, it creates images that feel familiar, despite being brand new. With a distinctly anti-militaristic bent, it provides a nostalgic, old-world cinematic experience, while turning traditional notions of masculine strength and heroism on their head. It makes well-worn ideas about the world—about destruction and rebuilding; about loss, and living through it—not just new, but renewed. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters

13. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic
Finland

A sweet romantic drama that gives rise to a nail-biting thriller, Teemu Nikki’s The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic centers on snobbish disabled protagonist Jaakko (played by blind and partially paralyzed actor Petri Poikolainen), and his long-distance relationship with a terminally ill woman he speaks to over the phone. Nikki’s stylistic approach tethers us to Jaakko’s limited mobility and point of view—it’s told mostly through soft-focus close ups of his face, and of his hands as they interpret textures—but in the process, it reveals a limitless artistic perspective through its detailed use of sound, and though Poikolainen’s powerful performance. The film creates, in the process, a new cinematic language that forces us to see the world in a new way. (Full Review)

Now streaming on Fandor, Tubi and Amazon Prime

12. May December
United States

With the powerhouse trio of Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton at his command, melodrama virtuoso Todd Haynes remixes the real story of 34-year-old teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and the 12-year-old student she groomed and eventually married, Vili Fualaau. Adapted by screenwriter Samy Burch, May December doesn’t merely recount this sordid saga, but changes numerous specifics while keeping one eye firmly on the ludicrous (and equally predatory) culture of true crime. Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a TV star stepping into the role of an older woman, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore) and her much younger, emotionally stunted husband Joe (Melton). However, Berry shadowing the Yoo family and their high school-aged children results in long-buried feelings brimming to the surface, told through fine-tuned performances in one of this year’s most daring tonal high-wire acts. By oscillating between disturbing and darkly funny, it makes the silver screen a mirror to our basest impulses as viewers and keepers of stories. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters and streaming on Netflix.

11. Anatomy of a Fall
France

A German woman, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), on trial in France for the death of her husband, and for her gender and sexuality. Her 12-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), the only “witness” to his father’s demise, despite being nearly blind. A language barrier. A hot, silver-fox defense attorney. A dog that veers in and out of the case in unusual ways—and recorded evidence in which a steel-pan cover of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. plays on an infinite loop. These are just some of the strange and seemingly immiscible ingredients that make Justin Triet’s Palme d’Or winner such a riveting watch. But Anatomy of a Fall is also far more than the sum of its parts, as a film that brings the legal and moral definitions of “truth” into vicious conflict, until the only form of closure left is that which you snatch from the ether and determine for yourself. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters. Buy or Rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV or YouTube

10. Origin
United States

Isabel Wilkerson’s dense, nonfiction essay-novel Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents ought to be impossible to adapt. And yet, Selma director Ava DuVernay takes the book’s academic inquiry into global caste hierarchies and transforms it into a living document on love, tragedy, and touch, with Wilkerson herself—played by a heart-rending Aunjanue Ellis—as the lead character. Part journalistic docu-drama, part vivid re-telling of history’s gloomiest chapters (Nazism, modern anti-Blackness, Indian untouchability), DuVernay pulls off the impossible by making Origin not only work, but thrive, as it veers between the darkest and most euphoric corners of the human soul. It’s about fully understanding interconnectedness—not just of evil and oppression, but of everything, both inside and around us. (Full Review)

Limited U.S. release December 2023. Wide U.S. release January 2024

9. The Old Oak
United Kingdom, Belgium, France

After a nearly 60-year career, The Old Oak may be the last film we ever get from Ken Loach, the kitchen-sink-realism virtuoso who has made many an ode to the working class. His latest is no different in that regard, but it allows him to shift his cultural focus to the ongoing Middle Eastern migrant crisis. Young photographer Yara (Ebla Mari) and her family are the latest Syrian refugees to arrive in a dilapidated English mining town, whose old residents gather at the struggling local pub, the Old Oak, to discuss politics and their fears of displacement. However, the pub’s kindly, middle-aged owner, Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), takes Yara under his wing, leading to an uptick in local resentment and setting off a stunning domino effect that brings the very idea of solidarity into sharp, unyielding focus. Loach frames it not merely as ideological alignment, but an act of resistance, coexistence, and cultural exchange in the face of gut-churning loss and hardship. Building a better world is a difficult task, but in the words of a plaque on the Oak’s dusty backroom wall: “When you eat together, you stick together.” (Full Review)

United Kingdom release September 2023. Wide U.S. release spring 2024

8. Fallen Leaves
Finland, Germany

News stories of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine form the background hum to Aki Kaurismäki’s Kuolleet lehdet, or Fallen Leaves, a wry Finnish rom-com about characters surrounded on all sides by the confines of capital and class. A droll reflection of modern life against the white noise of global atrocity, the film centers on the missed connections of a shy supermarket clerk and an alcoholic metal worker. Through its withheld and sardonic scenes, it captures fleeting moments of romantic exuberance amidst the despondency, lacing its deadpan delivery with hints and reminders of life at its warmest, most welcoming, and most forgiving. (Full Review)

 Now in U.S. theaters

7. The Pot-Au-Feu (The Taste of Things)
France

The stylistic and thematic antonym to Fallen Leaves, The Pot-Au-Feu (or The Taste of Things) from French-Vietnamese filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng is a luminous period romance, in which a late 19th Century French kitchen becomes the playground for an evolving personal and professional relationship. A rewriting of traditional notions of marriage, it fittingly stars once-married but now-divorced actors Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche. They play a respected gastronome and his renowned cook, a pair whose mutual respect and admiration have long since cemented into a comfortable but vibrant form of middle-aged romance. With detailed scenes of delectable food prep, and a camera that seems to float on air, this new culinary masterpiece taps into every sense and creates a living, glowing vision of inspiration and nostalgia amidst its tale of love and loss. (Full Review)

Limited U.S. release December 2023. Wide U.S. release February 2024 

6. Anselm
Germany

In a banner year for 3-D cinematography (thanks to experimental works like A Woman Escapes and Laberint Sequences), Wim Wenders pushes the technology even further by crafting physical and emotional pathways to the works of Anselm Kiefer, a German sculptor and painter whose unsettling works—composed of rough textures and organic materials—seek to keep memories of the Holocaust alive. The 90-minute documentary is scored by whispers from off-screen, like voices of the dead crying out for recognition, as it weaves a fabric of overlapping images whose layers come to embody the artistic process. It takes the numerous poems and political writings that inspired Kiefer’s work and makes them part of each piece through old recordings and double exposure, funneling the past into the present, as though Kiefer’s headless statues and charred wheat fields were vessels for angry spirits, warning us to keep a closer eye on fascist machines as they’re reborn in new forms. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters 

5. The Zone of Interest
Poland, United Kingdom

Another film that recalls the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest captures the mundanity of evil through aesthetic disconnects. A domestic saga about a family and their garden, straightforward in every way except one—they’re Nazis living just outside the Auschwitz walls—the film unfurls in the vast chasm between its characters’ perspectives and what the camera actually sees. The era’s sickening atrocities, though never explicitly shown, form the terrifying soundscape to Glazer’s story of workaday bureaucracy, resulting in a nauseating depiction of the way people and societies so effectively compartmentalize their actions, sanding down their own moral dimensions until they become a complete non-factor. If you’ve ever wondered how people ever gave permission to or partook in such horrors, The Zone of Interest helps crystalize the answer at the same time as it unfolds in the real world. Most hauntingly, it features a banal scene of a Nazi officer’s wife (Sandra Hüller) inspecting the belongings of a dead Jewish woman, an image whose contemporary equivalent can be seen daily in the Gaza strip, such as this video of an IDF soldier claiming a dead Palestinian girl’s jewelry for his girlfriend. The film is a warning not just of what could happen, but what has been allowed to happen once again. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters

4. Past Lives
United States

A gentle tale of South Korean childhood sweethearts reconnecting as adults in New York, Celine Song’s magnificent, semi-autobiographical debut Past Lives uses the traditions of cinematic romance to investigate nostalgia and the emotional fallout of emigration. Opening with a context-less shot of Nora (Greta Lee), her husband Arthur (John Magaro) and her old flame Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) seated at a bar, it fills in these blanks in radiant fashion, spanning decades in a tale of the past giving way to an unexpected present, and scabbing over into painful, dreamlike memory. As connections are lost and re-forged, Song deploys her ever-moving camera in service of exploring the ways people and places can come to represent who we once were—and who we thought we were—as we reckon with who we’ve become. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters. Buy or Rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV or YouTube

3. Rimdogittanga (Rapture)
India, China

Another work that reaches deep into its filmmaker’s memory, Dominic Sangma’s Garo-language drama Rimdogittanga (or Rapture) captures the politics of fear through the eyes of a vulnerable child afflicted by night blindness—a stand-in for young Sangma himself. It’s a richly rendered story about a strange disappearance, and an Indian village whose ire and superstitions turn both towards interloping outsiders, and inwards, toward its own moral fabric. Few films have been so simultaneously ethereal in their spirituality, yet so lucid in their political aims, with a camera that remains transfixed on moral dilemmas that seek to reflect the climate of violence gripping modern India. A film about how the fear of monsters can mutate, and make us monstrous as well. (Full Review)

Festival debut 2023. Release details forthcoming.

2. (Tie) Killers of the Flower Moon
United States

Now in his eighties, Martin Scorsese continues to create meaningful images, and few films this year felt more important than Killers of the Flower Moon. An adaptation of David Grann’s book that turns a journalistic whodunnit into a vicious exposé of bald-faced lies, Scorsese’s harrowing period epic zeroes in on the Oklahoma criminal conspiracy that saw dozens of wealthy Osage Native Americans murdered, and dozens more denied justice, in a film whose impeccable ensemble weave a vicious, sickly entertaining tapestry of casual murder and white supremacy. With Robert DeNiro as a scheming, deeply wicked lead conspirator, Leonardo DiCaprio as his brash, imprudent nephew, and Lily Gladstone’s devastating turn as a grieving Osage woman caught in the middle of it all, Scorsese digs deep into the kind of knowing, unapologetic savagery upon which the West was constructed, as he builds to a stunning crescendo that confronts his own role in writing this version of American history. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters. Buy or Rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV or YouTube

2. (Tie) Oppenheimer
United States

Physical and psychological paradoxes take rapturous form in Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic in constant climax, whose terrors stem not only from the spectacle of mass destruction, but from the moral equivocations that help justify it. With an enchanting ensemble at his disposal, Nolan condenses a lifetime’s worth of detailed backstory (courtesy of the book American Prometheus and various government transcripts), distilling entire chapters and journalistic detours into single lines. In the process, he’s able to use his nesting-doll structure to depict his complex character portraits—of A-bomb inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and rival politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.)—with immense dramatic clarity. He mines each and every one of their humdrum exchanges, until the political and the personal—the egotistical—become entirely inseparable. History is written by its smallest, pettiest, and most conflicted victors, and Nolan’s film zeroes in on the way they hold the pen, revealing the horrors unleashed by the hearts of men afforded too much power. (Full Review)

Now in U.S. theaters. Buy or Rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV or YouTube

1. Green Border
Poland, Czech Republic, Belgium, France

Plenty of films this year have felt vital in their depictions of past atrocities, but none have felt as deeply, profoundly urgent as Agnieszka Holland’s Zielona granica, or Green Border. Heavily protested upon its release in Poland, Holland’s home country, the film draws on the style and unflinching brutality of her Holocaust films, but applies them to a propulsive contemporary tale of Middle Eastern refugees trapped in a man-made purgatory between the borders of Poland and Belarus, victimized by vicious border guards on either side as they’re detained and deported back and forth. Holland’s black and white aesthetic—and evocative details, like phone numbers of human rights lawyers scribbled on forearms, like death camp tattoos—evoke past atrocities wrought upon Poland under Nazi rule, as that very same fascist violence is turned against vulnerable Muslims and Arabs, a sobering reflection of the situation currently unfolding in Palestine. With its patchwork of colorful characters (from desperate migrants, to young border guards, to residents along the Polish border), the film isn’t just moving, but maddening, functioning both as effective drama and crucial call to political action, as the horrors of the past are repurposed, and “never again” becomes now.

Polish release September 2023. Wide U.S. release 2024

Published on December 29, 2023

Words by Siddhant Adlakha

Siddhant Adlakha is a critic and filmmaker from Mumbai, though he now lives in New York City. They're more similar than you'd think. Find him at @SiddhantAdlakha on Twitter