10. Barbie
Greta Gerwig ducked beneath a hornet’s nest, tiptoed among landmines, threaded a miniscule needle, and opened 10 cans of worms with this musical comedy consideration of the massive cultural artifact known as Barbie. She not only came away unscathed, but managed to deliver one of the sharpest, funniest, most generous films of the year. Kudos also to Margot Robbie—both producer and star—and Ryan Gosling, whose brewski beer-swilling Ken was the comic highlight of 2023.
9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Was there a more thrillingly gorgeous and emotionally stirring shot in a film this year than Miles Morales and Gwen Stacey sitting, in their spider suits, upside down on the overhang of a skyscraper—the image then flipping so that they appear “right side up,” her ponytail seemingly defying gravity? OK, maybe the shot in which Gwen and her father are arguing and the walls of their apartment begin to drip like watercolor tears. Ingenious animation wasn’t the only hallmark of this first part to the Into the Spider-Verse sequel (part two is due in 2024). This was also one of the most nuanced and inventive explorations of superhero identity crises that I’ve seen.
8. Priscilla
I’ll take all the caged-bird heroines Sofia Coppola wants to give us: Priscilla Presley, Marie Antoinette, Scarlett Johansson stuck in Japan. Heck, I’m pretty sure I would have preferred her Josephine to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. But Coppola only does this one thing, you say? Get back to me when her movies on the subject reach the number of macho military biopics cinema has given us.
7. Skinamarink
Largely comprised of grainy, static shots offering oddly angled views of various rooms in a house—a flickering television screen or night-light offer the only illumination—Kyle Edward Ball’s feature debut follows two young siblings who wake up to find their father missing. Imagine The Blair Witch Project if it had been stewed, alongside Poltergeist, in a pot of slow cinema. It’s not just a childhood fear of the dark—that desperate, midnight dash from your bedroom to the bathroom down the hall—that Skinamarink explores, however. It’s the deeper fear of abandonment—due to divorce, death, or some other circumstance. This is lofi horror with high emotional intelligence.
Protect your heart if you’re going to watch this one. A screenwriter (Andrew Scott) at an impasse on his latest project—a semi-autobiographical tale based on his 1980s upbringing in suburban London—gets a creative boost when he travels to his childhood home, only to be greeted by his late parents, who are still at the age they were when they died. What follows is every conversation with them that the writer has wished he could have had. Instead of sputtering out on this high concept, director Andrew Haigh uses it as a launching pad for a retroactive coming-out tale that’s laced with a ghostly tenderness.
5. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
The feature debut of writer-director Raven Jackson, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt lets us simmer in the memories of an adult woman named Mack who grew up in rural Mississippi. It doesn’t move chronologically, but rather slides in and out and among time, in the same manner that our memories come to us: unbidden, unexpected, peppered with details but often little context. The filmmaking has such a strong tactility, that if you allow yourself to slip into the movie’s stream, it begins to feel as if these memories, somehow, are yours.
I’m not sure what it will take for me to stop lobbying on behalf of writer-director Nicole Holofcener, especially when she teams up with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as she does here. On Oscar for one of them? No, both. Holofcener’s script brings deep relational wisdom to a sitcom premise, in which Louis-Dreyfus’ writer falls apart after overhearing her husband disparage her work. The Seinfeld legend, meanwhile, juggles both genuine hurt and punchlines with aplomb. Her 11 Emmys aren’t nearly enough.
3. Asteroid City (plus The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison)
I like Oppenheimer well enough, but for me, in 2023, it was Wes Anderson’s mid-century depiction of a doomsday scenario that most achingly captured the year’s anxieties—global, national, and personal. As a group of teen brainiacs and their fractured parents gather in the desert—alongside yodeling locals and government scientists—that whisper in their heads that the universe is out of their control grows louder and louder. And then an alien comes to visit. The result is one of Anderson’s most opaque, yet still beguilingly consoling, efforts. (And this in a year when he also delivered a series of short films adapted from Roald Dahl stories that delightfully interrogated the very idea of narrative, including cinematic ones.)
A puzzle movie about the fact that life is a puzzle to which we each bring different, mismatched pieces, Anatomy of a Fall boasts the best script of the year, by director Justine Triet and Arthur Harari. A son (Milo Machado Graner) returns from a walk with his dog Snoop—give Snoop an Oscar!—to find his father (Samuel Theis) dead in the front yard of their chalet in the French Alps. Did he slip from the second story? Did he jump? Was he pushed by his wife (Sandra Huller, giving the performance of the year)? An ensuing trial reveals their relationship was indeed contentious, but exactly to what extent depends, in the movie’s words, on choosing what to believe when nothing can be proven.
If this one actually proves to be Hayao Miyazaki’s swan song, what a perfect way to go out: combining the the pensive playfulness of My Neighbor Totoro with the visionary world-building of Princess Mononoke, while also lightly touching on every other film in the legendary animator’s career. And yet, The Boy and the Heron is its own wondrous thing, a blossoming of imagination that leaves us with a personal challenge, one stated in the film’s original title: How Do You Live?
