The best of 2023: Our films of the year

by CineVue

What does it mean to love cinema? For the better part of a decade this writer has written for this website, first as a DVD reviewer, later as editor, and now as chief critic. As with all things, hobbies and passions wax and wane, but cinema has always in some way been a constant.

Existing on the margins of the margins of the critical milieu, it’s easy to forget that there are many ways to keep loving films. Indeed, the exhausting requirement to endlessly construct and defend opinions, and the chase to keep up with every release can sometimes dull the appetite for this wonderful object. Yet our love for cinema, once again attested to in this year’s feature, endures.

2023 has been a year of two halves: quite literally: Among others, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and Trenque Lauquen all released as two parters (the latter of which, a terrific noirish mystery just missing out on our top twenty, released both halves simultaneously). The phenomenon that became Barbenheimer transformed two diametrically opposed films into a duology. Audiences’ stratospheric embracing of Gerwig and Nolan’s films was deeply affirming for a mainstream that has been so long gripped in the banal stranglehold of the MCU and its imitators. At long last, it seems, that stranglehold may finally be lifting.

Elsewhere, the idiotic-looking Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire gears up for next year’s April 12, 2024 release date, while Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One has become an international sensation and outclasses its American counterpart in emotion, intelligence and spectacle, and at less than a tenth of the cost, too.

This writer’s favourite film of 2023 was and always has been Past Lives, a profoundly romantic and heartbreaking story of friendship and love. The year’s most surprising (if far from its best), may well have been James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a warm and melancholic last hurrah for the great adventurer; the most gleefully delightful was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, the rare film that delivers on every single word in its title. The most bittersweet was no doubt Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a gripping tale of racism and systemised murder.

But it is perhaps the aforementioned Godzilla Minus One that has defined this year’s cinema for me: as a cultural phenomenon spread by word of mouth, as a grand spectacle, and as a disarmingly affecting human drama that sensitively reflects on national identity and postwar trauma: no mean feat in this especially horrifying moment of global disorder.

10. Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV

The documentary’s final segment, after Paik suffered a stroke late in his life, is perhaps the film’s most moving, not because of his illness but because of a sense of a life and body of work that has found its completion. For most of his career, Paik was dismissed by critics and struggled financially, but as director Kim amply demonstrates, his work has had tremendous influence on both fine art and popular culture. Moon Is the Oldest TV is at once a celebration of that work and testament to its incalculable value. Read our review here. CM

9. May December

Haynes’ strategy is to maintain an aloof irony, helped by an over-the-top score borrowed from Joseph Losey’s The Go Between, which underlines such pronouncements as “We might not have enough hot dogs”. May December isn’t on the acerbic level of Todd Solondz’s Happiness, which it thematically resembles. But the strategy only goes so far. Irony has a wearying effect after a while, ultimately leading to a flattening of the ethical landscape so that by the end of it we can’t help but feel they’re all as bad as each other. Read our review here. John Bleasdale

8. Infinity Pool

Infinity Pool is a lysergic hymn to ritual bloodletting and spoilt Westerners who enjoy languorous holidays in other people’s misery. The visual language of Infinity Pool is disorientation by any means necessary. An early sequence rotates the camera aggressively on its axis across the concrete pour resort. Foster’s interrogation scene sees the camera lens distort the detective at the back of the shot into a Giacometti statue as he tonelessly details the perfunctory legal arrangements. The scales, pores and contours of flesh are seen in extreme close-up at every opportunity. It achieves an effect of revulsion as thorough as the very frequent and graphic spilling of blood. Read our review here. Tom Duggins

7. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Just as Raimi did with his much-vaunted Spider-Man 2, Across the Spider-Verse builds on its predecessor by going deeper as well as broader, exploring the familial pressures on both Gwen and Miles without going over the same ground we’ve seen in the past. Across the Spider-Verse’s hymn to emotional storytelling is a much-needed salve to the dreary primacy of cycles and lore: more importantly, full of colour, life and drama, it is a near-unassailable good time. Read our review here. CM

6. Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One is a monster movie of singular power, using horror-infused kaiju spectacle to deliver an emotionally compelling story of grief, wartime trauma, and hope. Most importantly, its genre-leading visual effects scenes are complemented by richly soulful performances and humane themes of reconciliation and redemption. Read our review here. Alex Adams

5. Bottoms

For those looking forward to some subversive feminist comedy, forget Barbie and get you to Emma Seligman’s raucous follow-up to Shiva Baby. Co-written and starring Rachel Sennett, it shreds high school comedy with a wit that never gets in the way of its broader punchy rhythm as two lesbians – Sennett and Ayo Edebri (The Bear) – create a fight club/ self-defense class in a vain effort to attract cheer leaders. With a banging score by Charli XCX and Leo Birenberg and a style that veers towards a Heathers-style surrealism, this is Porky’s via Andrea Dworkin and leaves its competitors looking, well, plastic by comparison. JB

4. Fallen Leaves

Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s latest is by turns a gorgeous, moving and often very funny romantic dramatic. Fallen Leaves boasts two of the year’s best lead performances in Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen, playing two lonely, awkward souls in unknowing search for each other. Kaurismäki’s deadpan humour is on top form here, while each missed opportunity and not-quite encounter between the pair defers a catharsis that grows ever more intense with each deferral. Cinematographer Timo Salminen invests his night-time scenes with a delicious richness of colour and shadow, while references to Bresson and Godard and a score that quotes Brief Encounter is a cinephile’s dream. CM

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

There is so much to love and enjoy with Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese pulls off several coups, not least an inventive coda recounting the epilogue as a cigarette-sponsored radio drama. This is a timely film with contemporary accounts in Canada of deaths and disappearance of First Nations peoples and the American Right banning college courses teaching what they characterise as “Critical Race Theory” but is just, in fact, facts. It’s a pity that on this occasion Scorsese makes an admirable and fine film, but alas not a great one. Read our review here. JB

2. Past Lives

Part of what makes Past Lives such a special film is its refusal, at every opportunity, to take the shallower, more immediately satisfying choice: to offer cheap sentiment in favour of romantic catharsis. Suffice to say Song’s humane writing serves all her characters in ways that lesser films might have offered them up as two-dimensional sops. The film’s final moments confirm that Past Lives is an exquisite piece of work and the most romantic film of the year. Read our review here. CM

1. Oppenheimer

Ever the craftsperson, rarely the artist, Nolan has constructed a grand and terrible machine, a fascinating object of cinema and a deeply frustrating work of imagination. Oppenheimer represents much of what is great about Nolan as a filmmaker and is devoid, mercifully, of many of the indulgences of his previous pictures. Nevertheless, it is perhaps the purest example yet of the director’s vision of history: as one bent by great men, who are in turn moulded by its arc; never was it clearer just how much Nolan aspires to that arc himself. Read our review here. CM