The Best Films of 2023
THE STRANGE HARBORS PICKS FOR THE BEST FILMS OF 2023
2023: a tumultuous, but also exciting year for cinema that saw the bottoms fall out of once unstoppable franchises and the rise of new and old masters. Characterized by surprise blockbusters, stinging excavations of the human condition, and a few bold oddities, this year was a cornucopia of great film. So much so that for the first time ever, I’m expanding the usual top 10 to a top 20. Here are my favorite movies of 2023:
20. Sick
Not even its sack-of-rocks COVID satire can stop John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning) and Kevin Williamson’s (Scream) lean, mean, butchering machine. Chases, guts, and slasher camerawork for the ages, Sick is a taut exercise in brutality revolving around self-isolating roommates (Gideon Adlon and Bethlehem Million) besieged by a masked killer. Many might find the film’s pandemic roots stale or even in bad taste, but Sick’s nasty slasher nuts-and-bolts are so strong that it hardly matters. Clocking in under 90 minutes, it makes the most of its runtime to deliver a gauntlet of suspense, teaming with sleek tension and breathlessly entertaining splatter.
19. The Breaking Ice
Anthony Chen made his triumphant return to Cannes this year with The Breaking Ice, a moving, humanist snapshot of China’s lost youths told through a ships-in-the-night friendship. The story of three young souls adrift on a short-lived - yet unforgettable - journey, Chen’s latest favors the intensity of the red-hot bonds of ephemeral friendships over trite, heightened theater. Filmed with barely a working script, The Breaking Ice is a daring experiment that pays off handsomely: an exploration of the entire spectrum of a generation’s hopes, dreams, and anxieties through a laser-focused milieu. Its interweaving of powerful performances and spiritual complexity, eventually melded with local folklore, is nothing short of beautiful. Read the full review here.
18. The Five Devils
Léa Mysius’ puzzling, peculiar The Five Devils is one that stealthily sinks its hooks into you. An opaque - and very French - fantasy that gradually opens up its queer romance, Mysius’ concoction of fascinatingly disparate ideas plumbs the depths of scent as memory, the closeness of the past, and a fiery coming-of-age. Full of clever, but never kitschy, tricks of structure, The Five Devils is a feat of sublime, elemental filmmaking that never takes the obvious approach: an ambitious trove of sensory cinema. As usual, Adèle Exarchopoulos is tremendous, but it’s Sally Dramé that really shines as the film’s precocious, witchy child.
17. Priscilla
Sofia Coppola aims her dreamlike sights at Elvis Presley with Priscilla, a not-quite biopic of its titular Queen of Rock and Roll. The perfect convergence of subject matter and a filmmaker’s particular wheelhouse, Coppola’s spotlight on the wife of Elvis Presley twists the director’s potent examinations of girlhood adolescence with the nightmare of being groomed by an American legend. Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi bring a wrenching emotional texture to their portrayals of real-life figures.
16. The Boy and the Heron
It’s easy to forgive the world’s most disingenuous retiree when he rips it out of the park every time. The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s purportedly final film - a designation that’s already been walked back - opens portals of vivid imagination between a young boy’s hopes and an old man’s regrets. The story of a 12-year-old venturing into a fantasy world to reunite with his late mother, The Boy and the Heron finds Miyazaki at the height of his prowess: a thematic and visual bingo card that never feels derivative of an animation master’s magnificent oeuvre. Its manic exploration and parade of self-reverie might be more unwieldy than your typical Miyazaki fare, but its touching finality - an immortal, old legend facing his own end - is shattering, even if it isn’t exactly true yet in the real world.
15. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
With Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise’s crusade for analog supremacy finally becomes text and the results are unbelievable - the last movie star, fighting God and gravity in one of the best action movies ever made. Barreling through sequence after exhilarating sequence of some of the most nerve-jangling stuntwork you’ve ever seen, Ethan Hunt and his IMF team return to face their most dangerous foe yet to reach an immutable truth: there is nothing like walking into, and out of, a Mission: Impossible movie. Read the full review here.
14. Skinamarink
Kyle Edward Ball delivers one of the scariest movies of the decade with a lo-fi stunner that reaches into the crevices of vestigial instinct. Uncanny in its ability to bottle the ineffable childhood dread of past-your-bedtime nightmares, Skinamarink mines a whole new mode of horror from its swirling grain, sinister corners, and dark spaces. Where modern horror excels at tickling fears within our developed brains, Skinamarink reaches into the most terrifying, awful recesses of your childhood memories to pull out knots of dread. It’s an uncanny replication of a time long past, and a frighteningly accurate simulation of a bad dream you just can’t shake. Read the full review here.
13. Knock at the Cabin
Crackling with confident, formal prowess and visual electricity, M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin is the director’s best film since 2004’s The Village. A family’s impossible choice framed by ratcheting tension and blistering performances, Shyamalan’s latest nerve-jangler is a chamber piece artfully designed to quicken pulses and break hearts. There isn’t a single wasted shot in Knock at the Cabin’s firecracker, 100-minute runtime: it’s astonishing to watch. Many who find value in the cruel gut-punch of The Cabin at the End of the World - the film’s source novel - will likely bristle heavily against Shyamalan’s hopeful, sentimental insistence, but I found myself taken by its reconfiguration of the novel’s themes. Read the full review here.
12. Past Lives
Turning life’s big “what ifs” into wrenching poetry, Past Lives excavates bittersweet branches in the timeline to articulate the very concept of being. More elegiac than the love story many are touting it to be, its examination of missed connection and missed opportunity is anchored in tender melancholy by the tremendous trio of Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro. Past Lives is another entry into my favorite canon: movies that shatter you into a million pieces, only to put you back together, different. An understated gem and an astonishing debut from Celine Song.
11. John Wick: Chapter 4
John Wick has always been the action franchise of the decade, but Chad Stahelski’s Chapter 4 is next level: the type of exhilarating, metal-as-hell ballet of bullets that blows the doors off action filmmaking. There hasn’t been a take-your-breath-away feast for genre fans like this since Mad Max: Fury Road or The Raid. “Whoever it is, whoever comes, I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them all.” Reeves spews these caustic words like venom at the end of Chapter 2 not as vengeful platitude, but as a promise. And by renouncing every shred of diplomacy left in John Wick, Chapter 4 fulfills that promise with a feat of jaw-dropping filmmaking: it’s action movie nirvana.
10. Huesera: The Bone Woman
The story of a first-time mother (Natalia Solián) whose joy is quickly robbed by the curse from a sinister, otherworldly entity, Michelle Garza Cervera Huesera: The Bone Woman sidesteps all the pitfalls of metaphor horror with chilling deftness. From its crackling haunts to its vague, creeping dread, Huesera finds as much terror in the shackles of domesticity as its titular, bone-shattering demon. Supremely scary with some of the most bracing sound design you’ll ever hear, Huesera: The Bone Woman is the best horror movie of the year.
9. Hidden Blade
Another entry in the “Tony Leung looks incredible while smoking” canon. Formally audacious and perhaps one of the most gorgeous films of the year, Cheng Er’s Hidden Blade is the height of espionage porn: allegiances shifting, secrets kept, and lies repeated, all reflected through its Byzantine - but utterly captivating - structure. Following the inner-workings of an underground espionage network right under the nose of the newly established puppet regime in Japanese-occupied China, Hidden Blade is a cloudy puzzle box that clears at the most opportune moments: a shifty inspection of spycraft as a gauntlet of brutal, hollowing performance.
8. De Humani Coroporis Fabrica
Upending the genre conventions of forensics and pop biography, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica is more experimental art film than documentary. Shot over several years, this stunning series of abstract voyages and gruesome destinations goes inside a number of French hospitals, and then the human patients within. Using cutting-edge imaging and microscopic cameras, it effectively transforms sanguine displeasures of the flesh into an exploration of the alien landscapes within us all. De Humani Corporis Fabrica is the most fascinating documentary of the year, if you can even call it that.
7. Godzilla Minus One
Godzilla as metaphor has never been more elegantly handled than Takashi Yamazaki’s Minus One, a wrenching collision between epic kaiju destruction and the human element. Discarding the biting political farce of 2016’s Shin Godzilla, this new iteration of the thunderous lizard strips its monster mash back to basics with its post-war milieu. Godzilla as atomic force of nature is always the main attraction, but Minus One’s story of a disgraced kamikaze pilot’s (Ryunosuke Kamiki) fight not just to survive, but to live, is one of the most affecting humanist stories of 2023. Francois Truffaut once said that there is no such thing as an anti-war film, but Godzilla Minus One comes pretty close.
6. May
December
A thorny balancing act of different tones that drills straight into sordid psychodrama and the elusive nature of performance, Todd Haynes’ May December is a masterpiece of high wire cinema. As expected, Natalie Portman and Juliane Moore are tremendous, but it’s Charles Melton — as a boy stuck in time and a discomfiting stasis — who runs away with the entire thing. An impenetrable chameleon of a movie about abuse, celebrity, and damaged people fixed in place, it’s shocking how often May December topples its foundations every time you think you’ve found your footing. Simultaneously exploring decayed domestic spaces and their exploitation by feckless entertainers, Todd Haynes drills so deep into the layers of truth and artifice it will make your head spin. Read the full review here.
5. Oppenheimer
Theory vs. practice. Creation vs. destruction. Christopher Nolan’s paradoxically sprawling, intimate Oppenheimer is a stunning deconstruction of the “great man” biopic. Navigating the vast gulf between science and empathy, Nolan’s latest - and perhaps best - delivers a harrowing drama about the moral cost of unleashing upon the world the most horrible weapon it has ever known. Shooting on IMAX cameras and employing his signature, byzantine structurings, Nolan once again applies his touchstones to the pages of history, this time on the flip side of Dunkirk’s theater of war: the nail-biting buildup to the world-stopping Trinity test, its horrific application in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the complicated, genius scientist at the center of it all. Read the full review here.
4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon is a late style masterwork. A funereal procession of malignant conspiracy and opportunistic genocide disguised as epic western, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour tragedy finds consistently surprising modes to unearth capitalist sin. Shining a megawatt spotlight on the rot underneath American exceptionalism, Killers of the Flower Moon mines the expected powerhouse performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, but it’s Lily Gladstone that burns holes in your consciousness: it’s a malevolent, baroque lamentation of American greed and cruelty, fashioned into a piercing requiem for our country. Read the full review here.
3. Ferrari
Michael Mann’s Ferrari disguises the fissures of masculinity in the typical rhythms of biographical fare, but the sheer amount of texture and feeling hidden between the lines — and within Adam Driver’s craggy, steely performance — is staggering. Intimate, somber failings juxtaposed with screeching banshee metal and spitfire ambition, their non-reconciliation a feature and not a bug: a full-blooded film years in the making. Like much of Mann’s late oeuvre, Ferrari is sure to be divisive. Those that bristled against the perceived unevenness of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and Blackhat will likely have no love for his “biopic,” but true appreciators of the filmmaker’s post-2000s work know that no one is pushing texture, form, and pure human feeling quite like Michael Mann. Read the full review here.
2. The Zone of Interest
A picturesque idyll conjured by history’s most monstrous as hell seeps around all its corners, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a haymaker display of a filmmaker’s restraint and precision - a masterwork in a career full of them. Reconfigured from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, Glazer’s vision transplants real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) in the place of Amis’ fictional stand-ins. A lush domesticity juxtaposed with the greatest atrocities ever committed by mankind, The Zone of Interest maximizes a gaze at mundane evil through uncanny restraint. More a searing work of anthropology than a traditional narrative, to call it a Holocaust “drama” would be a misnomer. Read the full review here.
1. The Killer
With a minimalist veneer that belies its toothy takedown of capitalism, hustle culture, and our deteriorating gig economy, David Fincher’s latest mines new tensions from the disciplined loner trope. The Killer’s disguise as a trash genre exercise has elicited plenty of shrugs, but make no mistake, it’s every bit as potent and layered as Fincher’s masterworks of The Social Network and Fight Club. Is it filmmaker auto-fiction? Or is it a dark mirror for a world that has crossed the capitalist Rubicon? Can you still be Jef Costello while quoting Malcolm Gladwell and reciting Airbnb superhost stats? The Killer unearths the tension between taciturn men of action and a money-focused society that has stripped them of their agency and cool, turning a cold-blooded killer into yet another cog in the consumerist machine. Read the full review here.
