From Christopher Nolan’s summer smash Oppenheimer to the winter hit The Holdovers, 2023 was a great year for film, and these 10 are the best movies of the year.
From atomic bombs (Oppenheimer, Asteroid City) to atomic blondes (Barbie, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour), 2023 was a year when cinema looked ahead by going back to the past. With reliable franchises like Marvel, DC, Indiana Jones, and Transformers failing and streaming still a question mark, the movie landscape expanded, allowing for a Hayao Miyazaki film about death to be the number one movie in America and for a three-hour movie filmed partly in black and white about nuclear physics to become a summertime critical and commercial smash.
It’s a weird time for movies, but it was also a great year for films of all kinds: American ones, international ones, comedies, horror, sci-fi, dramas…heck, even a Godzilla movie (Godzilla Minus One) was excellent. I saw hundreds of movies this year, and to make a 10-best list this year was incredibly hard but always enjoyable. These are the 10 best movies of 2023.10. The Killer
What a nasty, deceptive little thing The Killer is! An exercise in weightless style, the movie is perhaps the best distillation of what constitutes a David Fincher movie: a blank slate hero who narrates via a sardonic voiceover; a shot setup that borders on the painterly; a thumping, urgent score by frequent collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; and a limited color scheme of deep yellows and light blues that evoke the decayed urban landscapes of Fincher’s earlier works like Zodiac and Fight Club. The Killer is a great example of pure cinema, a movie tailor-made to be in the Letterboxd accounts of teenaged boys or middle-aged film critics.
It’s also a great workplace comedy, and the big joke of The Killer is that being an assassin can be just as boring as any other 9 to 5 gig. Michael Fassbender is one of our gifted comedians, and his nameless assassin, a soulless killer with great taste in music, is a great guide into this world of meaningless subterfuge. The Killer can seem empty and a bit hollow, but it works as a Fincher compilation album, an entertaining and streamlined package of the director’s greatest hits that remind you why he’s still one of the best in the business.9. Asteroid City
No movie surprised me more this year than Asteroid City. For close to 20 years, I haven’t been the biggest Wes Anderson fan. The boy genius who crafted those mischievous comedies Bottle Rocket and Rushmore in the ’90s had been gradually replaced by an auteur terrible who made big, lifeless dioramas and stuck exaggerated, lifeless cardboard characters in them. The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, that 2004 AmEx commercial — they were all the same, all motion pictures without any true motion or life, all showcases for a now-parodied style that’s instantly recognizable and almost always suffocatingly precious.
A human cartoon of a movie, Asteroid City doubles down on Anderson’s love of artifice, and for the first 40 minutes, it seems like just another exercise in stylistic emptiness. But what makes this movie great, and certainly the best thing the director has done since Rushmore, is that the artifice is part of the point. This is a movie about masks, the metaphorical ones that characters wear to hide their hurt and the one Anderson has worn almost his entire career to hide his reluctance to tackle anything deeper than superficial pleasures.
It’s also the rare film where the director openly asks himself what the point of the stuff he creates is and if any of it matters. “Just keeping telling the story,” a character says at one point, and Anderson does, in his own way, on his own terms, but a bit different now, wiser, less precious, and more vulnerable. With a great lead performance by Jason Schwartzman and memorable supporting turns by Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City is Wes Anderson’s late-period masterpiece.8. Oppenheimer
It feels like Christopher Nolan’s entire career has led to Oppenheimer, an epic movie about smart men in dusty rooms talking about nuclear physics. Yes, the movie is much more than that, but the great thing about Nolan’s cinematic achievement is how exciting he made a field of science that isn’t known for its populist appeal. That he did so on his own terms, with as much time as he needed, filming roughly half of it in black and white and using a 47-year-old lead actor who has never anchored a multimillion-dollar studio movie before, only emphasizes the rarity of his success, artistically, financially, and culturally.
Oppenheimer is in many ways a good old-fashioned Hollywood movie, a big movie about big ideas, big actors (an excellent Cillian Murphy led a cast that included Robert Downey Jr.
