The 10 Best Films of 2023
Another year has come and gone, and with it closes one of the best years for film in recent memory. While I truly believe there isn’t a “bad” year for cinema, 2023 has proven particularly difficult to widdle down my list to just ten films. There are many, many great films on the outside looking in (and even more films I never had a chance to see, including Poor Things, The Boy and the Heron, All of Us Are Strangers, and more). That said, all of these films are excellent and many will stand as the best of the decade come 2030.
This list is comprised of films wrestling with the concept of destiny. Our place in this world, how we forge our paths, the paths not taken and the destinations withheld. Are we preordained to live a certain way, and if we can’t accomplish that what else can we be? Another theme that emerged as I formed this list is the art of ending, as more than most years these films end with such a powerful moment or revelation that they can make or break the film as a whole. In a year, of wonderful films, here are the top ten films of 2023.
10. Barbie
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was a cultural icon of the year. Setting aside the film itself, the movement around it was an accomplishment of its own, a testament to the communal power of film. People were desperate for a film like Barbie to come along to reinvigorate their love for cinema. And no other film captured the zeitgeist quite like Barbie, a film that is not only entertaining for people of any age, but one that allows for careful and considered dialogue after. While not a particularly deep film (and not every film has to be) Barbie recognizes that this is a film that can start a conversation, not finish it.
The design of the film, the performances, the music, everything here is working towards a common goal of sheer entertainment. It is not pretentious in its attempts at social satire, being broad enough with its points that it never isolates an audience that is just looking for a great time, while not dumbing itself down to the point of uselessness. It balances its pop entertainment and its feminist ideals wonderfully, all while being the funniest film of the year by a mile. No film has more jokes, no film is so packed with gags, and no film from 2023 will make you smile quite like Barbie.
But it's Barbie and Ken. There's no just Ken. That's why I was created. I only exist within the warmth of your gaze. Without it, I'm just a little blond guy who can't do flips.
The thing that puts Barbie into my top ten is the truly incredible performance by Ryan Gosling. It’s hard to be funny, it’s hard not to care at all what people will think. He is truly pitch-perfect in this film, an absolute beaming example of heedless wonder. Not only does he manage to create Ken whole-cloth, but he carries the film when it becomes weary, he bridges the narrative gaps that don’t completely work, and when he’s not on screen you get excited to see him again. Because of the joy he brought to the theatre, Ryan Gosling and Barbie are the tenth best film of 2023.
9. Godzilla Minus One
As I stated in my initial review of this film, I love Godzilla as a franchise and as a symbol. Throughout the decades since his initial screen debut, The King of Monsters has been used by filmmakers to represent different aspects of our world, from our reluctance to protect our environment to our depravity during wartime, to simply the role of family in our lives. In Godzilla Minus One, writer-director Takashi Yamazaki takes the monster and makes him a symbol of our greatest fears, and our struggles with facing our inadequancies. Setting the film in post-war Japan, the film explores jingoism, cowardice, and the role of the individual on a world scale.
As with any Godzilla film, the balance between grounded human emotions and spellbinding, jaw-dropping fight scenes is a delicate one, and Godzilla Minus One walks this line beautifully. The attack scenes are terrifying in their spectacle, the destruction at times both immense and deeply personal due to our connection with the characters. When your giant-monster-attacks-city movie includes a shot as devastating as when Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) falls to his knees, screaming as black rain pours over a decimated city, you have created something masterful.
Come to think of it this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That's why this time I'd take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.
This kind of overt, raw emotion is implemented wonderfully throughout the entire film. Our protagonist, Shikishima, is wrought with the pain of abandoning his post during the war. This leads both to a cold, unwillingness from him, and beautiful, deeply broken moments from him once he’s finally able to face what he’s done. But the film isn’t interested in the bravado that comes with dying for a cause, as living for a cause is much more important not just for our characters, but for the country of Japan and the world at large. The film evokes Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”, dismissing the idea of a good and righteous death in favor of a world in which we survive, we thrive, and we build a life. This film is not just about survival, it’s about why surviving is a worthy thing.
8. Killers of the Flower Moon
With Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese paints a portrait of rot, dirt, maggots, and worms, and places this directly in context with the American Dream. The true story of the Osage Nation murders, seen through the eyes of both the men who committed these atrocities and those who chose to trust them with both heart and soul, is a condemnation of everything colonialism has wrought. Much like his previous epics Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese targets greed and capitalism as the root of all evil, and demands that we the audience not look away, not be tempted by the sweet smell of corruption, for the horrors that blossom from that rot will never wash away with time.
Following the life of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro) as they worm their way into the lives of the Osage people only to start killing them to claim their lands and titles, the film is as damning as it is painful. Ernest marries Molly (Lily Gladstone), a strong-willed Osage woman who loves him wholeheartedly, and whose life is torn apart by Ernest and his greed. Gladstone is impeccable in the film, quiet and watching, always aware of what is happening yet still blinded by the love she holds for Ernest. The dichotomy of holding this love while knowing, deep down, that he is the origin of all her pain, is the most fascinating aspect of the film, and while DiCaprio and De Niro are both great in their roles as soulless murderers, it’s Gladstone that we cling to as the audience.
Evil surrounds my heart. Many times, I cry, and this evil around my heart comes out of my eyes. I close my heart and keep what is good there, but hate comes.
The film truly astounds in its final two scenes. In the second to last scene, we jump elsewhere in time, further removing ourselves from the Osage people and seeing how their story and pain have been transformed into light entertainment for a country uninterested in facing the brutality of its Dreams. This is followed by a scene of dance, of the Osage people in celebration of their being. This mirrors a similar scene earlier in the film, of a woman passing away only to be greeted by her ancestors in the afterlife. In these celebrations of the people, both in their lives and the great beyond, Scorsese is able to contrast with the emptiness of the radio show. We end on a bittersweet note, one that looks hopeful to the future without neglecting the horrors of the past, and of a people determined to reassert their destiny.
7. Evil Does Not Exist
The best film I was able to see at VIFF last year, Evil Does Not Exist is a beautiful, carefully paced film that first draws the viewer in with its stunning cinematography before entrapping you with the slow reveal of the story. Contrasting the life of a quiet mountain town and the corporate city folk who wish to bring their business to the community, the film uses its alluring rural setting to ease us in while still holding an edge of suspense throughout. The community is almost too perfect, an idealization of a quiet life, and we (like the two company workers) begin to imagine a life in this newly discovered world.
The community is not a paradise, not a utopia, but that’s what makes it so appealing. Takahashi (Ryuji Nishikawa) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) both lead dreary, listless lives, working for a company that doesn’t care for them or the world around them. After just a day in the town of Harasawa completely revitalizes them, reconnecting them with themselves emotionally and with the nature that Tokyo lacks. It’s the work they do in the town, the chores, the splitting of wood, and the fetching of water, that the two company workers (and the audience) come to admire.
It’s all about balance. If you go overboard, you upset that balance.
But the film isn’t about reconnecting with nature, but the fear of that nature. Our guide in the community, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), is a reserved, stoic man of work. He works for the town, the townsfolk, and his daughter. His job, first and foremost, is to maintain the balance of the town. He’s the one who hunts when the deer population grows. He’s the one who cuts the trees, fetches the water, and is the first to speak up against the proposed glamping site Takahashi and Mayuzumi are there to propose. He is the natural order of things, and we see him watching the two interlopers as they come to his town and see themselves as belonging. It’s this tension of balance that holds the film together wonderfully until its sudden and unexpected (but completely necessary) ending—a quiet but firm response to the ever-growing arms of modernity.
6. Blackberry
Sometimes, execution is everything. When The Social Network debuted in 2010 nobody could’ve guessed that it was birthing a whole new genre of film onto the world: the Broken American Dream. While we’ve always had films about the broken promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, this particular subgenre of the unfurling of corporate America was new. And as this genre has progressed it’s changed, mutated, offered offshoots of itself including the corporate failure (Gold, The Dropout) and the personal failure (The Social Network, The Founder). With Blackberry we see the perfect intersection of these offshoots, with the crumbling business titan dragging down the morals of the man who built it.
The dramatic rise and fall of the company Blackberry is so perfectly captured by director Matt Johnson and the script he co-wrote with Matthew Miller. The ultimate thrill of dominating a market and the inevitable collapse of that empire by taking more risks and giving up on what made the company to begin with. The film is as much about the soullessness of corporate culture as it is about hubris, as success for the company came not from strenuous and serious work but from heart and people. As the film progresses we see the wearing away of Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), the molding of him into a CEO at the cost of his humanity. And while it is not a dramatic turn, he is not becoming an “evil” person, his willingness to do away with his morals is still damning, and in the end he’s left alone, friendless, and fixing what he broke.
Let me tell you the best advice I ever got at Harvard. You want to be great, you need to sacrifice. The more painful the sacrifice, the greater you'll be.
But the real star of the film is Glenn Howerton’s dynamite portrayal of Jim Balsillie, a corporate shark and complete scumbag. The devil in a poorly tailored suit, Howerton commands every frame that he’s in. A powerful, rage-filled performance of a man desperate to prove everyone wrong, only to have that desperation bleed into macho despair. The final scene between him and Baruchel is wonderful, the culmination of every tirade he’s gone on and insult he’s thrown, only to have all that rage swept away in a moment of begrudging respect. His performance alone could have secured this film as one of the best of the year.
5. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse
When the film Spider-Man: Enter the Spiderverse came out in 2018, I was mesmerized. It truly felt like we were watching the birth of a brand new evolution of animation, an intensely dynamic style that made every frame exciting. With Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse we see the further evolution of that style, pushing the new technology to its limits, while also engrossing us in a story about family, forgiveness, and breaking the chains of destiny. All this while still containing the humor and wit we need from a Spider-Man feature.
While this film, much like the first, is full of wonderful, hilarious side characters, our two leads are such deep wells of empathy that they completely hold the film together themselves. With Miles Morales we find a teenager on the cusp of discovering who he is. Balancing the life of a son, a student, and Spider-man has pushed him to isolation, and his journey through the film is about discovering the world already laid out before him. With the powers bestowed upon him he has taken the weight of the world onto his shoulders, blinding him to the love and support that is at his fingertips, and only when that world is threatened is he able to accept that he is not enough. This isn’t giving up, it’s growing up and realizing you can not do everything in this world.
Miles, being Spider-man is a sacrifice. You have a choice between saving one person and saving every world.
While Miles's arc is going to be bridged between this film and its sequel, Gwen Stacey emerges as the true main character of this film. We open with her father discovering her secret superhero life, fracturing the world she has grown to know. Abandoning him and her life out of fear, she joins the Spider-Society, the group of interdimensional Spider-Men whose ultimate goal is to have all the Spider-Men throughout all universes experience the same tragedies and gaining the same life experiences. Through her relationship with Miles she’s able to break free from the teachings of this group, learning that just because something has been before doesn’t mean it’s preordained forevermore. It’s Gwen’s arc that we see completed in this film, going from fear of the future to embracing the unknown, and it’s this lesson on top of the heart-pounding action of this film that made it onto this list.
4. The Iron Claw
One of the most tragic stories in sports history, The Iron Claw is about the greed that comes with deciding your fate. Following the four von Erich brothers throughout the 1980s, we see each of them as broken men held together only by each other. As they rise to fame in the world of wrestling only to crash and burn in the most shocking of ways, we see the decimating effect of forcing ourselves to play our roles. In life, in the von Erich family, you are a wrestler, and you’re only ever as good as your last match, as dictated by the overbearing and forever present figure of Fritz von Erich (played with an underlying menace by Holt McCallany). Fritz is the Iron Claw of the title, an unbendable, unbreakable force, pressing upon his sons until they break.
The power in this film lies in the brilliant building of the family dynamic within the first act of the film. The love these brothers hold for each other is intense, and the cast is able to convince us not only that they love each other but that they live for each other. Zac Efron puts in a career-best performance as Kevin, the eldest brother, a classic Texas boy who loves his family and is slowly torn apart by the tragedies that befall them. His final scene of the film is one of the most heartwrenching line deliveries of the year, and one I will be thinking about far into the future. His performance along with Harris Dickerson, Stanley Simons, and Jeremy Allen White makes this one of the strongest ensembles of the year, four boys barely men being dragged into a life of danger by their overbearing and inept failure of a father.
Ever since I was a child, people said my family was cursed. Mom tried to protect us with God. Dad tried to protect us with wrestling. He said if we were the toughest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt us. I believed him. We all did.
Director Sean Durkin’s camera is raw and unyielding, forcing us to see the pain this family goes through unflinchingly. The focus on the bodies of these men, pushed beyond their physical limits, almost bursting, creates tension in their capabilities. The constant pressure for perfection, the pitting of brother against brother in pursuit of a father’s love that will never be attainable, is seen through a haze of blood and sweat, the lens capturing every detail of their lives. There is no privacy, for their lives are not their own, they are but pawns to be used and sacrificed by Fritz von Erich to attain what he was never able to. A stark tale of the sacrificial lambs for the American Dream.
3. The Holdovers
Alexander Payne is not a feel-good director. His films, from Election to Sideways, are bitter and sardonic, biting and critical of the characters we follow, hateful at times even. With The Holdovers we still see this criticism of the characters he’s created, three misfits left over the Christmas break at a 1970s New England boarding school. We see him judging their brash decisions and their indecisiveness in equal measure, see him calling out their hypocrisies and self-doubt. But, for maybe the first time in his filmmaking career, we also see him holding out for hope.
Our three characters, a preposterous and pretentious history teacher (Paul Giamatti), a rebellious teenage flunky (Dominic Sessa), and the lonely, recently bereaved lunch lady (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) find themselves slowly drifting closer together as the film goes along. Never are the relationships truly contentious, never is there a grand, overwrought scene where secrets are revealed. Instead the film just naturally unfolds, as being forced to spend time together wears down each of their carefully crafted walls. As those walls crumble and bridges are built, the bitterness that Payne still holds makes for darkly funny and deeply profound moments between these people. Each character has their moments of grace and failure, each a redemption and a fall, but never is this dramatized. These are people, real, genuine people, and the love they build for each other is undeniable by the end of the film.
I find the world a bitter and complicated place. And it seems to feel the same way about me. You and I have that in common, I think
While both Sessa and Randolph put in star-making performances, it’s Giamatti who truly drives this film. His performance as Paul Hunham is broad and delightful in its crassness, a lonely, pompous man whose bitterness towards the world has curdled his perspective. Preaching from a pedestal of intellect, it’s his revelation that rational is not always what is needed that transforms this film into something special. Laughter isn’t rational, confessions are not rational, sacrifice isn’t rational, not to a pure academic as Paul Hunham, but by the end of the film all of these elements have not only become a fundamental part of him, they change his world completely. The things we’re willing to sacrifice out of love, not fear, are what truly design our humanity.
2. Oppenheimer
Every moment of Christopher Nolan’s opus Oppenheimer is drenched with an overwhelming sense of dread and foreboding. The film is an unstoppable mechanism, a perpetual motion machine of horrific implications. The three-hour epic takes us through the steps of the creation of the atomic bomb, each step a gathering cloud for the world-ending storm that approaches. With it the audience is swept away just as our scientists are, the journey and discoveries exciting us and blinding us from what will come until it is far too late. A condemnation of the systems that exploit us, for our intelligence, for our brilliance, only to use us for the most despicable of capabilities and discard us when we seek our redemption.
Cillian Murphy has been an all-star for decades now, from 28 Days Later to The Wind That Shakes the Barley, but here we see him more broken and poignant than ever before. Cillian plays Oppenheimer as a scientist over a humanist, a man who believes that science's power must prevail over man's inherent failures. By building this tremendous horror, he believes that all the basic tortures of the soul will be laid to rest, a cure for the common man. But Nolan shows us this scientist who himself is this failure he rages against, a man who fails his lovers and betrays his friends. The pursuit of pure science was a distraction from the world crumbling around him, and in the scene after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, we see this. Shellshocked, haunted, already beginning to decay, Oppenheimer gives a speech that is rousing yet pathetic, a hollow man yelling hollow slogans. With the dropping of the bomb he has not only been proven wrong in his moral beliefs in the power of science, he has been proven that everything he’s worked towards has been used against him.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.
The supporting cast of this film is the best of the year, and one of the best assembled, a magnificent group of people deadset on getting the job done. Each person is a microcosm of Oppenheimer’s vision while not holding the weight of the world on their shoulders, allowing them vision the man himself is unable to have. Josh Hartnett acts as Oppenheimer’s vision, a man of pure drive. David Krumholtz is his conscience, desperately trying and failing to warn him of the future. Florence Pugh is his scars, the wounds every man carries that affect him every day without him realizing it. Emily Blunt is his humanity, his last tether to the world of the living. All together they can see the inevitable, the true weight of what is about to transpire, but only Oppenheimer can feel that weight, and in the last third of the film we see how such a weight can crush a man.
The last third of this film is something different altogether, but still perfect in its thematic resonance. Following the eventual dissolution and disregarding of Oppenheimer within the American government, it’s yet again a force of pure nature being thrown against a man who thoroughly believed in it. First, it was science that betrayed Oppenheimer, and then his government, and with the two things he’s dedicated his life to proving to be cold and unforgiving, he has no choice but to wilt and suffocate. All of the responsibility, all the deaths that crash upon his soul, are carried on Cillian Murphy’s face, and it is a lake of tremendous depth and despair. In the end the film is a giant, exhilarating display of the unforgivable sins we commit in the pursuit of something unreachable.
…
Before I name my number one, some quick honourable mentions:
Anatomy of a Fall - a bitter examination of the relationships we all assume we have and the truths we’re unwilling to admit.
Asteroid City - a deeply affecting, highly enjoyable, highly complex puzzle that’s all the more rewarding once you get the pieces to fit
Showing Up - a love letter to the frustrations and ultimate satisfaction in creating beauty.
The Promised Land - a gorgeous period drama that pits the working man against the entitled, with an explosive final act.
May December - a bitter, poignant takedown of the exploitation inherent in storytelling, and the victims we leave behind in our pursuit of entertainment.
1. Past Lives
The best film of the year is not a grand epic, nor a haunting tale of woe, or an invention of the unimaginable imagined. It’s a simple tale of mourning, for lives not lived, for lives lived but not to our expectations, mourning for the people we once were but forgot. Following Nora Moon (Greta Lee) as she emigrates as a young girl from Korea to Canada, we meet her in three different parts of her life. As a young girl, still learning the world, opening up to the kindness of a boy. As a college girl, rediscovering this forgotten love, and is faced with the ultimate decision of what she wants in life. As a thirty-something, settled and happy, meeting this man who was a boy she loved for the first time in twenty years. Each section is an exploration of what it means to not only love someone but to not love someone anymore, and how the hardest thing we can do is to live for ourselves and not another.
Greta Lee is exceptional here, a subtle, deeply moving performance in both her sections of the film. In the second act we see her exploring, discovering who she still is, and as she reconnects with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) through Facebook, we see her torn between the lives she could leave. We see her reminded of the girl she was, the one who she left in Korea when she came to a new foreign world. There’s a longing in this rediscovery, the longing anyone can have for a simpler time when answers are clear. In the final act, when Hae Sung takes the faithful trip to New York to see her after more than twenty years, we see her changed once more. More determined, more settled into the life that she has fallen into, there is still longing in her, a sense of things left undone. Speaking with Hae Sung, simply looking into the eyes she may have fallen in love with in another time, shakes her. She is not looking to abandon her life, not looking to leave everything she’s grown to love behind, but she is finally able to mourn the life she wasn’t ever able to properly say goodbye to. Hae Sung is a door shutting on the past, a life still led, a childhood well-loved, but one that needs to be left on the banks of the rivers of memory.
You dream in a language I can't understand. It's like there's this whole place inside you I can't go.
With Hae Sung we see the consequences of living in the past, of never letting go of our old ways. His love for Nora has grown, and with it a yearning to return to how things were. But we can never go back, never choose a different path. And even though this was not a decision Hae Sung had made as it was Nora’s family that left him behind, we can not rage against the fates of others. We are only in control of a sliver of this world, and if we allow ourselves to grasp beyond our reach we will be left in the cold. Hae Sung’s visit to New York is a door closing for him as well, a definitive, an answer to a question that has been leading his life for far too long. We see this all in Teo Yoo’s eyes, a weight of undying love, but a knowledge that it’ll never be. He is not hopeless, which makes his journey all the more tragic in its ultimate ending.
The film speaks about the Korean belief “inyeon”, the idea that if two strangers even walk past each other and their clothes accidentally brush that there was a connection between them in a past life. Inyeon is paramount to Past Lives, the indelible and at times unbearable marks we leave on everyone we come across. The way a smile can change a person’s day, a look can strike someone cold, how a stray thought can hold a person alive long after they’ve left you forever. We are powerful in the sliver of reality we have control over, and our lives hold so much in the small grains of time we pass with each other. With Past Lives, we see that we can mourn the people we once were while celebrating the beauty they held, and the beauty they shared with those they touched. We can change the world, and the next world, and the next.
…
2023 was a year of wonder, tragedy, growth, and hope at the theaters and in the movies. Films warned us of the world we’re capable of creating and crafted dreams of better lives we could be leading. I hope you, too, can carry on the dreams of tomorrow. And I hope that the films of 2024 inspire a better tomorrow for all of us.