Top Movies of 2023

What a difference a year makes! About this time last year I was bemoaning my lack of enthusiasm for the movies of 2022, including most of the likely Oscar contenders. While there were a number of very good films that year, there just weren’t many that truly thrilled or delighted me. In 2023, by contrast, I felt like a kid in a candy store. It’s true that “Barbenheimer” aside, the year was back-loaded with nearly all of the best movies dropping in the last quarter. However, it felt front-loaded for me in that four of the films I saw at the Middleburg Film Festival in October ended up in my top five of the year. Even more tellingly, I would recommend the vast majority of the films I saw in 2023. There were a few disappointments (Killers of the Flower Moon among the most notable), but many more that met or exceeded my expectations. The result is a lot of “honorable mentions” that in another year would have made my top ten.

The usual caveats: I didn’t see any documentaries in 2023 – though I want to see Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgrois, Occupied City, American Symphony, and Anselm – or nearly enough foreign language films, which don’t usually stay long in theaters around here but tend to take longer to hit streaming. Still, I’ll stand by my choices any day. These films enthralled me, moved me, rocked me with laughter – sometimes all three. I share them in the hope that they did or do the same for you.

1. Tie:

AMERICAN FICTION

Writer-director Cord Jefferson delivers a gangbuster of a debut feature with this highly entertaining satire of the literary establishment and the politics of racial representation. Based on a novel written over 20 years ago by Percival Everett, it’s if anything even more current today; think less angry, more wry mash-up of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Radha Blank’s The 40 Year Old Version. Jeffrey Wright is outstanding as protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a highbrow middle-aged black American writer who writes a ghetto porn novel as a bitter joke...only to see it meet with an effusive reception beyond his wildest imagination. This may be the funniest movie I saw all year; while the satire starts out quite broad, it develops more shading and nuance as it goes on and is deftly interlaced with the more realistic dramedy of Monk’s strained relationship with his family.

THE HOLDOVERS

In what may be Alexander Payne’s softest and sweetest film (in a good way!), Paul Giamatti delivers a career-best performance as a curmudgeonly terror of a history teacher at a boys’ prep school in the early 1970s. Stuck with looking after the few boys who are left behind to spend their Christmas holidays at the school, he builds a slow, mutually begrudging bond with the brightest and most troubled of them (Dominic Sessa), as well as the school cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who’s mourning the death of her son in Vietnam. Both Sessa and Randolph are excellent, but it’s Giamatti who elevates the film to the next level. He somehow manages to be at once the antithesis of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and his natural heir – no mean feat.

3. ALL OF US STRANGERS

Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years, HBO’s Looking) once again confirms why he’s one of my favorite writer-directors working today. In his latest film, a London-based writer (Andrew Scott) finds himself visiting his long-dead parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) – or incarnations of them at the point when he tragically lost them – around the same time he begins a relationship with his younger neighbor (Paul Mescal). The parent storyline is loosely based on a Japanese novel; the romance is all Haigh, layering on the perspective of a Gen X gay man whose personal and generational trauma have made it hard to open up to love. Both narratives eventually meld into a haunting, deeply poignant meditation on grief and missed connections. I’m making the movie sound like a downer, but it isn’t really; it works a strange magic that holds you in its grip right up to the end.

4. OPPENHEIMER

Amazingly for a film clocking in at 3 hours of (mostly) men talking, testifying, and writing on chalkboards, Chris Nolan’s take on the “American Prometheus” never once flags or drags; if anything, it’s almost too frenetic, especially initially, in its cross-cutting between different stages of Oppenheimer’s life. It does eventually settle down into a compelling portrait and Nolan’s best film in years. His depiction of the race to build the first A-bomb is particularly riveting, though he somehow manages to generate almost equally high drama and tension from congressional and security clearance board hearings. Boosted by a large and excellent cast, the film ultimately derives much of its power from Cillian Murphy’s spare yet magnetic performance as a man who for all the renown and intense scrutiny he drew remained a profound – and profoundly conflicted – enigma.

5. ANATOMY OF A FALL

Ostensibly a murder mystery and courtroom drama about a man who fell to his death (or was he pushed?), Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner is at its core an almost clinical dissection of a troubled marriage and the difficulty of reconstructing the truth from inevitably subjective and incomplete accounts. By turns chilling, harrowing, and unexpectedly funny, the film sharply underscores how impossible it is to truly understand a relationship from the outside – and sometimes from the inside, too. Sandra Hüller is terrific as the prime suspect, as is Milo Machado-Graner, the young actor who plays her son.

6. THE BOY AND THE HERON

As far as I’m concerned, Miyazaki can keep un-retiring if he continues to create films like this. A gorgeous, moving fantasy about a boy whose grief over his mother’s death leads him to a series of otherworldly adventures, it held me rapt from start to finish and also made me laugh out loud without ever breaking the spell. True, the ending felt a little rushed, and I never entirely untangled how the different worlds in the story were linked. But for me, at least, the film’s best experienced as a dream vision, which means figuring out its internal logic matters less than submitting to its surreal beauty.

7. POOR THINGS

In this retelling of Frankenstein through the fisheye lens of Yorgos Lanthimos, the “monster” is a female beauty (Emma Stone), appropriately named Bella, who provokes not terror but a desire to control her even as she stubbornly seeks freedom and self-actualization. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, the film’s a colorful funhouse romp, tricked out with characteristic Lanthimos deadpan humor, lots of sex, and a visually inspired reimagining of an alternate-universe, vaguely steampunk-ish version of Victorian-era Europe. It’s a fascinating watch, and Stone is fierce, fearless, and wonderful as the insatiable Bella, though the performance that affected me most was that of Willem Dafoe as her damaged and damaging, yet surprisingly sympathetic, creator.

8. ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT'S ME, MARGARET

Despite never having read the Judy Blume classic, I fell in love with this adaptation, which captures all the joys and anxieties of being a pre-adolescent girl with both humor and empathy and not one whiff of preciousness or condescension. I expected no less from director Kelly Fremon-Craig, who previously wrote and directed the delightful The Edge of Seventeen and, as with that film, gets wonderful performances from her young stars – especially Abby Ryder Fortson as the titular protagonist. Rachel McAdams delivers fine supporting work as Margaret’s equally displaced and disoriented mother, and the film does a nice job evoking the cultural era (NY/NJ circa 1970) without letting it distract from the timelessness of the narrative.

9. MAESTRO

Say what you like about Bradley Cooper’s latest passion project (and it seems many have nothing good to say about it), I found it an impressive directorial and acting follow-up to A Star is Born. Less a biopic than a kaleidoscopic look at the life of Leonard Bernstein, its emotional fulcrum is his loving but complicated marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Both Cooper and Mulligan are top-notch and really sell their characters at each point of their lives; the cinematography, too, is seriously virtuosic and rangey work that doesn’t feel like showing off so much as channeling Bernstein’s exuberance. It helps if you don’t treat Maestro as a movie “about” either Lenny or Felicia but about their relationship. On that level, I think it works beautifully.

10. SHOWING UP

With Kelly Reichardt, it’s always about the little things. Here she provides a glimpse of a few days in the life of an artist (Michelle Williams) who’s struggling to put together a show while dealing with the distractions of no hot water, tensions with her family and with her more successful frenemy (Hong Chau), and a wounded pigeon (yes, a pigeon). Like Reichardt’s other films, this one isn’t driven by plot – there isn’t really one – but by her unsentimental yet empathetic observations of a character, her community, and the dynamics therein. It’s the kind of quiet little film that sneaks up on you long after you’ve seen it and other, flashier movies have faded. It’s also a thought-provoking reminder of how much of making art is about...well, showing up.

Next 10 / Honorable mentions: Barbie; The Zone of Interest; Past Lives; Perfect Days; The Teachers’ Lounge; Fallen Leaves; Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; Suzume; Joy Ride; Asteroid City

Also a passing word in defense of two blockbusters that weren’t: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and The Marvels. Were they great films? No. Did they need to be made? No. Still, both were both rollicking fun and didn’t take themselves too seriously, and both deserved to perform better than they did – especially the much-maligned Marvels.

And finally, a shout-out to two 2022 films that I did not see until 2023 but that would surely have made my top 10 for 2022 if I had seen them in time:

Return to Seoul

Cambodian-French director Davy Chou’s gorgeous air kiss of a film charts the fitful odyssey of a restless young Korean-French woman (Ji Min-Park), adopted by a French couple as a baby, who finds herself in Seoul and ends up looking for her birth parents. After that first visit, the narrative flashes forward, a few years at a time, to her subsequent return trips. Each time she brings a radically different outward persona but the same big question mark about what she really wants – an elusiveness that would be frustrating were it not for Park’s startlingly assured performance. The film’s vibes are part Lost in Translation, part Wong Kar-Wai, part Korean comedy of manners – but what Chou delivers is his own uniquely rich evocation of the disorienting experience of visiting one’s country of origin for the first time.

The Quiet Girl

In this tiny gem of a film, a young Irish girl is sent by her sprawling, largely uncaring family to live for a while with distant relatives; they treat her with simple kindness and attention, and she thrives under their care. And that’s it: the kind of small, quiet, precisely observed film that carefully avoids easy sensibility only to hit you with ALL THE FEELINGS by the end. I still tear up at the memory of the last line.