It turned out to be a bit of a weird one, as cinematic years go. The film industry seemed shaky at the halfway point, but by November, both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America had reached a deal with the studios and ended their respective months-long strikes. The threats of corporate greed, AI-mediated theft, and old-fashioned intellectual laziness still loom, but cinema and the workers who make it possible endure, for now. Even the reliably dispiriting box-office receipts are a little misleading – four releases in the Top 20 money-makers of 2023 ended up on our list of the best films of the year. Oppenheimer alone seemed to attest that even the median multiplex moviegoer was hungry for something original and stimulating. ($326 million in domestic receipts for a talky three-hour biopic is downright flabbergasting, in a good way.)
Still, most of our favorites from 2023 required viewers to dig a little deeper, beyond the buzzy events, middlebrow mediocrities, and vast glut of IP-exploiting dreck. We have a reputation as sniffy aesthetes to defend here, after all. Veteran American filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher, Todd Haynes, Kelly Reichardt, Martin Scorsese, and Frederick Wiseman delivered works that rank among their best – some financed via deals with the streaming giants, no less. International arthouse luminaries like Jonathan Glazer, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Yorgos Lanthimos, Christian Petzold, Hong Sang-soo, and Albert Serra returned with exciting new features. (Okay, Hong never really left.) The year gave us powerhouse sophomore efforts from rising talents, as well as stunning debut features from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and China. Somehow, 2023 blessed us with a new Godzilla movie, a Taylor Swift concert film, and a final, incomplete salvo from one of the late masters of the Nouvelle Vague – and, somehow, they all rule.
So: We are pleased to present The Take-Up’s picks for the best films of 2023. We don’t do rankings here. Instead, we have developed a curated list of 30 films that we loved, arranged alphabetically. We also provide links to contributor reviews and advice on where you can watch these cinematic gems.
Honorable Mentions: Air, BlackBerry, Earth Mama, Godland, Godzilla Minus One, The Iron Claw, Infinity Pool, Kokomo City, La chimera, The Plains, Rotting in the Sun, Rye Lane, Shin Kamen Rider, Stonewalling, Suzume, They Cloned Tyrone, Tori and Lokita.
Afire
Christian Petzold isn’t afraid of metaphors. There are some fires encroaching on his anxious thirtysomething author (a sublimely schlubby Thomas Schubert). Not only is his manuscript for his new book likely to be shelved by his editor, he’s smitten with the mysterious stranger (Paula Beer, the true combustible presence here) who coincidentally finds herself double-booked for the same beach weekend. And there’s the literal forest fire that seems like it will never reach their shores. Afire is another slow-burn (apologies) meditation from the nascent German master, but his turn to both romantic comedy and deeply felt melodrama is the director’s work at its most universally identifiable – and not just for schlubby, anxious thirtysomething writers. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on Criterion Channel and to rent on major online platforms.]
Asteroid City
In a filmography packed with features whose fussed-over visual density is practically a running joke among cinephiles, Asteroid City stands out as Wes Anderson’s most hyper-intricate creation to date. From its predictably glorious retro production design to its dizzying layers of fiction-within-fiction to its cast of cartoonish yet soulful characters – that Jeffrey Wright monologue! – Anderson’s latest work arrived ready for years of study and revisitation. What makes Asteroid City a modern masterpiece, however, is its frank yet sophisticated confrontation with existential terror, as well as its firm reassurance that we don’t have to understand something to keep at it. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Amazon Prime and to rent on major online platforms.]
Bottoms
With Shiva Baby (2020) and now Bottoms, director Emma Seligman has not only cemented her status as a luminary among late Millennial / elder Zoomer filmmakers – she’s emerging as one of the best comedy filmmakers of the 2020s. Channeling predecessors ranging from Better Off Dead (1985) to Heathers (1988) to Not Another Teen Movie (2001), Seligman crafts an unabashedly queer and unreservedly R-rated fairy tale about two high-school misfits, an underground fight club, and a deeply misguided plan to get laid. Come for the awkward lesbian clownery, stay for the public bloodletting and domestic terrorism. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on MGM+ and to rent on major online platforms.]
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
Is De Humani Corporis Fabrica the first punk film from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab? One could say their whole bit is punk, flying in the face of every holy tradition resting atop a tripod. Filmmakers (they prefer to be known as artists and anthropologists) Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel have already induced nausea by mounting Go-Pros on fishing boats and shoving viewers’ eyeballs into the mouths of cannibals, but their exploration of our slimy greasy gopher guts here feels almost winkingly self-aware. “It’s getting a bit abstract,” a surgeon states as he pokes his camera and the film’s audience around the inside of a man’s nether regions. It’s also getting a bit life-affirming, taking the centuries-old guide to the human body referenced in the title into a digital age that too often feels life-adverse. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on MUBI and to rent on major online platforms.]
The Delinquents
Selling Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents as a heist comedy probably isn’t fair to Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents. Granted, it’s an apt description for the set-up. Banker Moran hatches a scheme to boost just enough dough for he and his co-worker/potential co-conspirator Roman to live on, rather than punching a clock for the rest of their lives. They succeed, but that’s just the first 20 minutes. For the next three hours of this meditative dual portrait, there are more pressing matters than money to steal: beauty, purpose, and as felt in its luxurious pacing, your own time. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on MUBI and to rent on major online platforms.]
Gods of Mexico
Gods of Mexico is the more elegant flipside to De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the other great anthropological “documentary” of 2023. Helmut Dosantos’ trifurcated study of the Mexican people within is the stately classical aria to the latter’s burst of anarchic experimentalism. By detailing the work, faces, and bodies of three geographic regions of the country, it hews closer to the earlier work of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. By eschewing any staid or traditional nonfiction aesthetic in lieu of their lush panoramic frames, Dosantos and crew create something strikingly their own. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on Peacock and to rent on major online platforms.]
The Holdovers
The Holiday Movie Canon grew by at least one entry last year: Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, a slyly affecting, fittingly melancholic reteaming with Sideways (2004) co-lead Paul Giamatti that perfectly captures the mosaic of feelings of being on Christmas break as an aimless teen. Too cool to care about applying himself but too young to escape the ties that bind him to his New England prep school, jaded Angus (Dominic Sessa) ends up stuck at the stodgy Barton Academy with the equally staid Professor Hunham (Giamatti). Along with cafeteria cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the unlikely trio spends the Yuletide together — each challenging the others’ cynical outlooks on life in their own touching ways. It’s the best movie of its kind since … well, Payne’s Nebraska (2013). (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters, available to stream on Peacock, and available to rent on major online platforms.]
In Water
As longtime Take-Up readers know well enough by now, there are just some filmmakers who would have to go out of their way to have their permanent spot on the year-end list revoked. Hong Sang-soo is one such individual. Upon first learning of In Water, his second film of 2023 — there are three total, with the third, In Our Day, still yet to be seen by this critic — a more reluctant viewer might have dismissed it outright. Shot out of focus and running barely over an hour, the film overcomes its barely-a-film accusations by sneaking up on the audience with a relatable tale of creative struggle and the inner depths one must plumb to triumph over the fear of failure. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters.]
The Killer
Unfolding like a fittingly slick and brutal remix of The Limits of Control (2009) – as well as a crisp stroll through Steven Soderbergh’s arch, late-capitalist wheelhouse – David Fincher’s The Killer is a dark-horse candidate for the funniest film of 2023. In this cold-blooded farce, a control-freak mercenary assassin botches his only on-screen mission and spends most of the film plotting his fumbling revenge. Fincher might be working within his comfort zone here, reuniting with his usual collaborators for a stylish international crime thriller, but The Killer ultimately proves to be a subversive, self-effacing work of low-key genius. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Netflix.]
Killers of the Flower Moon
Despite undergoing numerous changes throughout its production, there is no doubt the final version of Martin Scorsese’s latest is also the strongest one. As formally ambitious and self-reflective as one could hope for a late-period work from a New Hollywood auteur, Killers of the Flower Moon saves its most profound moment for the very end. With the simple act of a director cameo — something that Alfred Hitchcock and others have famously been doing for a century — Scorsese himself delivers a staggering ending to an already harrowing endeavor. In the months since first viewing, not a day has passed where this critic hasn’t reflected on its bold implications. It’s another Marty masterpiece. Was there ever any doubt?. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters and available to stream on AppleTV+ on Jan. 12.]
Maestro
Underrated practically on arrival, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, is reserved for those who can appreciate a good, old-fashioned, capital-lettered Oscar Movie. Chock-full of huge swings across both acting and technical categories, Cooper’s calling his shot way out into the farthest reaches of the stadium. The funny thing is that it doesn’t even matter where it ultimately lands when it’s so enjoyable to watch unfold. Maestro has big feelings and even bigger performances from Cooper and Carey Mulligan with very little subtlety to offer. It’s heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, and if one is into such things, it’s absolutely infectious. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters and available to stream on Netflix.]
May December
As Emerald Fennell’s shallow Saltburn racks up its zillionth explainer TikTok, one has to wonder just how Netflix managed to bungle the marketing for Todd Haynes’ May December. His sewer-scented Yankee Candle of a persona-swap movie radiates the kind of transgression that Fennell’s is vainly grasping for. After all, which is the more insane motivation for a film’s protagonist-slash-antagonist: wanting to possess rich hotboy Jacob Elordi or sadgirl pseudo Mary Kay Latourneau? Glib cinematic horse races aside, it’s not just that the meme-able moments of Saltburn are essentially drinking May December’s bathwater, given that the latter dissects the process of meme-ification itself. Every pet-store jerk-off, meta mirror moment, and missing hot dog also cuts bone-deep, revealing humankind’s deepest needs for approval and control, love and autonomy, and strength and tenderness. (Joshua Ray) [Now playing in select theaters and available to stream on Netflix.]
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgrois
It’s undeniably impressive that nonagenarian filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has spent the past decade delivering some of his best work (e.g., At Berkeley, In Jackson Heights, City Hall). It’s downright miraculous that his latest documentary is such an unequivocal delight, a four-hour plunge into the rarefied world of one French family and their Michelin-starred restaurants. Menus-Plaisirs is no squawking reality show, however: It’s a sumptuous, immersive look at the creation of culinary art at the highest level, as well as the farmers, herders, vintners, and artisans that support it. A truly magnifique experience. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
For all the rapturous response to the previous Mission: Impossible film, subtitled Fallout (2018), it was nevertheless by turns shaggy, dopey, overcooked, and, yes, impossibly thrilling. What wasn’t expected for the next installment, which as its title implies, is “just” the first half of a promised double feature, was for it to be more of the same – except in a controlled and elegant package. Maybe Christopher McQuarrie’s (the now de facto auteur of the franchise) Dead Reckoning Part 1 doesn’t reach the high-highs of its predecessor, swapping a skydive there for a base jump here. However, its sharp and timely critique of the digital over the analog catalogs its generic forefathers so expertly as to tug at the nerdy heartstrings of any cinephile. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Monica
Floating around in production hell for years before finally premiering in 2022 and eventually going wide in May of last year, Monica certainly had a difficult journey from script to screen. Just as remarkably, it weathered the storm of an absolutely stacked release year and remains a 2023 standout. Following the strained relationship between mother Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) and daughter Monica (Trace Lysette) as a sudden but serious bout of illness forces long-held pain to the surface, Andrea Pallaoro’s understated melodrama was well worth the wait. (And well worth seeking out, even in a year packed with must-watches.). (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on AMC+ and to rent on major online platforms.]
Monster
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s last breakout hit, Shoplifters (2018), came incredibly close to giving the Japanese director the American awards recognition he deserves. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but losing to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), it seemed an Oscar just wasn’t in Kore-eda’s cards that year. Despite being the strongest work from the filmmaker since before even Shoplifters, his most recent feature, Monster, has no shot at the award. (Japan is betting it all on Wim Wenders’s inferior Perfect Days instead.) It’s a shame, because this heart-rending triptych is one of the most quietly stirring, finely crafted dramas of the year — from Japan or elsewhere. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Oppenheimer
With six months of hindsight, it has become increasingly apparent that Oppenheimer just might be Christopher Nolan’s opus. The film proves to be a scorching, pessimistic dissection of the Great Man Theory of history, executed via an improbably propulsive biopic that spends much of its running time neck-deep in the minutiae of nuclear physics and Cold War politics. Heading a staggeringly deep ensemble cast, Cillian Murphy delivers a performance that is equal parts stark and cryptic, befitting a figure who embodied the fundamental conflicts at the heart of modern science. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Our Body
Destined to draw comparisons to the illustrious work of the great Frederick Wiseman, Claire Simon’s Our Body offers a fresh perspective on the lengthy, observational, institutional documentary style pioneered by the prolific nonagenarian. The trick? Simon gets so close to her subject — the patients of a gynecological ward at a public hospital in Paris — that she actually becomes one herself. Documentarians who insert themselves into their projects can quickly derail the entire affair if they aren’t careful. (See: the viciously derided Bama Rush from last spring.) Luckily, Claire Simon’s already powerful doc only grows more impactful once her own story starts to unfold on camera. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Pacifiction
There’s a French submarine doing nuclear testing near the Tahitian coast. Or maybe there isn’t. Director Albert Serra gives actor Benoît Magimel the opportunity to show the reach of his versatility alongside his other 2023 star turn as the stoic romantic chef in The Taste of Things. Here he’s French middle-management caught in a riptide, sweaty, smarmy, and without conscience. The immoralist is Ahab catching his white whale in Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943) as remade by Alan J. Pakula, and his obsessive ignorance is perfectly suited for Serra’s widescreen mystification of the colonialist’s vision of the land and its people. Or, as its confounding final chapter questions, maybe it isn’t? (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on MUBI and to rent on major online platforms.]
Past Lives
There are plenty of reasons that so many arthouse viewers responded to Celine Song’s marvelous, melancholic feature debut. There’s the film’s cunning structure, a looping, ellipses-dotted journey through 20-plus years that nonetheless gives us everything we need to know. There’s Greta Lee’s revelatory performance as an immigrant woman caught between the life she has built and her abruptly resurgent past. Most of all, however, there is a universal resonance at the heart of Past Lives, the warm ache that swells when we dwell on the roads not taken, the loves left behind, and the old selves abandoned but not forgotten. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Poor Things
A fantastical Victorian picaresque with dashes of Mary Shelley and Terry Gilliam, Poor Things might seem far afield from the chilly, provocative films that established Yorgos Lanthimos’ international reputation. Yet the filmmaker’s preoccupations – chiefly the absurdity of modern existence and how we learn to navigate it – find a funny and fulsome expression in his adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s unclassifiable novel and in Emma Stone’s riveting, never-better performance. Amid all the frilly costumes, Jeunet-esque sets, and furious jumping (so much jumping) lurks a fiery yet tender-hearted tale of righteous defiance in the face of a cruel, arbitrary social order. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Priscilla
Look to The Take-Up’s Best of 2022, you’ll find this critic spotlighting Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis — a movie best enjoyed in spite of its flaws. Here, we have Priscilla: Sofia Coppola’s masterful B-side to Luhrmann’s take that manages to soar even higher precisely because it embraces Elvis’s faults. Brave and beautiful in its refusal to gloss over the grimier aspects of Mr. and Mrs. Presley’s troubling marriage, Coppola brings her very best to the table and accomplishes an all-time career highlight. It’s rare for something this delicate to hit so hard. Nevertheless, Priscilla pulls it off with grace. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Showing Up
Artistic malaise seemed to plague several filmmakers behind the year’s great works. Wes Anderson worked through his M.O. in his most expressively intricate tinkerbox yet. Christian Petzold made yet another hard left turn because of it. And Sebastían Silva found his … eight-and-a-half through it. Kelly Reichardt, however, was perhaps the only one who found a true solution for this ailment of artistic angst. Unsurprisingly for the filmmaker who’s arguably the most pragmatically spiritual among her peers, hers is a simple solution revealed right there in the title Showing Up. (Joshua Ray) [Now available to stream on Paramount+ and Showtime and to rent on major online platforms.]
Skinamarink
Nearly a year after its release, Kyle Edward Ball’s experimental childhood nightmare remains the most divisive horror feature of 2023. (Check out that Letterboxd rating histogram!) However, even Skinamarink’s critics should grudgingly concede that Ball has crafted an original and provocative work. The filmmaker bracingly synthesizes ’90s-kid nostalgia, domestic anxiety, and liminal uncanniness into the stuff of squirming Lynchian horror, a vision of home sweet home collapsing into a monstrous abyss. In Skinmarink, humanity’s demon-haunted past and creepypasta present are smudged into a single paradoxical compulsion: the urge to peer into the darkness, terrified of what might be peering back. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on AMC+ and Shudder and to rent on major online platforms.]
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
It’s easy to spill superlatives when discussing Sony Pictures Animation’s spectacular follow-up to their 2018 Oscar-winning triumph. Yes, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fantastic: as a sequel, as a Spider-Man movie, as a superhero film, as a work of animation, and as a delirious feat of cinema generally. And, yes, webslinger Miles Morales and his fellow Spider-People appear to be teeing up one of the greatest action trilogies of all time. What truly lingers about Across, however, is not just its spectacle, but its deft storytelling, its intricate screenplay, and its remarkable sensitivity towards its characters. Excelsior, indeed. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Netflix and to rent on major online platforms.]
Streetwise
In his beguiling feature debut, director Na Jiazuo journeys upstream from Zhangke Jia’s Still Life (2006), crafting a purgatorial neo-noir about the gravitational pull of bad people, bad choices, and, above all, bad places. Wandering languidly through the lives of five lost souls in the dying industrial river town of Zhenwu, Na’s vigorous direction exhibits a sincere fascination with (and sorrowful empathy for) his flawed, trapped characters. The alleys might be piled with sodden garbage and the gangsters might all be bumbling losers, but Streetwise is flush with the peculiar, tragic beauty of vain hopes on a rain-slicked night. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
Kicking off last March and continuing through the end of this year (not to mention the possibility of additional dates stretching into 2025), the phenomenon that is The Eras Tour is far from over. That’s why it came as such a surprise that Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour dropped in October, less than halfway through the concert’s globe-spanning run. Despite reservations that the film would somehow impede on the concert-going experience (or vice versa), Sam Wrench’s documentary presents a unique opportunity to see the highly sought-after live show in a new cinematic light. There’s no telling how it might feel watching the doc from home, as The Eras Tour stands out for the way it’s optimized for the theater. (A refreshing notion in this streaming age.) (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in theaters and available to rent on major online platforms.]
Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars
Jean-Luc Godard didn’t shuffle off this mortal coil, he jumped right the fuck off of it. Before throwing his final middle finger in the face of all that is sacred (his own existence this time), he left behind a 20-minute “trailer” for Phony Wars, a “film” that will never exist. In what’s been touted as his final work, he turns his back on traditional film language once more, opting for a compilation of work notes-cum-missive against the very work itself. Of course, the veracity of the claims made here by Patron Saint Joker of Cinema (although he decidedly did not live in a society by his end) can be questioned, but the late master’s work was never really about the punchline. It was about the construction of the joke itself. (Joshua Ray)
Walk Up
Like the universe, the filmography of Hong Sang-soo is ever-expanding at an accelerating rate. Blink, and you may miss the short tenure of a new release before Hong moves on to his next project. That said, Walk Up is not to be skipped. Love for Hong has long been established here at The Take-Up, but this one really does deserve attention, whether you’re a newcomer or devotee. There are plenty of pet themes to be found (as in other Hongs) — as well as recurring stylistic markers like the black-and-white cinematography and tiered story structure — but the subversive, meditative way Walk Up uses them to tell its tale of an estranged father and daughter makes it a truly original experience unlike anything else released in 2023. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent on major online platforms.]
The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer, the hottest music-video director of the ’90s turned the Great Filmmaker of the Great Film of the ’10s, fades into the background of The Zone of Interest. His adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, detailing the lives of an Auschwitz prison-camp commandant, strips its source bare of nary a narrative, leaving behind one of the most excruciatingly mundane portraits of horror ever captured on celluloid. Those expecting the surreal high art of the aforementioned Under the Skin (2013) or the rushes of emotion belying his underseen Birth (2004) will only find those modes twisted into what, for some, feels schematically unauthored. The schema is the point: His experiment brings the viewer so uncomfortably close to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” that they’re left to question their own contented place just outside the atrocities. (Joshua Ray) [Now playing in select theaters.]
