My top 21 movies of 2023

I thought that having a baby and quitting cultural criticism as a career would cut back on the number of TV shows and movies I watched. While that was true in the former case, it was absolutely not true in the latter. I didn't see as many movies as most professional critics, but I saw far more in 2023 than I ever could have expected to, which meant I could pull together a respectable top movies list, plus a totally respectable list of runners-up, while still leaving off several films I enjoyed.

It was a good year for movies, I thought. As we prepare for the Oscars on Sunday here are the 21 2023 movies I loved most!

(Want to hear me discuss these movies in an audio format? Here's a podcast episode where I chat about my top 15!)

21. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The smartest thing this movie does is capture the feeling of playing in a freewheeling D&D campaign, full of daring escapes, amazing moments of inexplicable survival, and critical fails at key moments. The second smartest thing it does is managing that while not providing cutaways to the group "playing" the game, preserving a blockbuster purity that eschews the kind of post-modern storytelling that just wouldn't have meshed well with what directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were going for. Gosh, I hope this gets a sequel! It feels like a genuinely new direction for the IP-driven blockbuster.

20. Spider-man: Across the Spiderverse

I won't lie. Learning about the crunch that went into making this movie soured me on it just a bit. Yet I can't deny the thrill that came from seeing this the first time, and I loved both its willingness to engage with the increasingly unsustainable complications of the superhero blockbuster and the terrific, emotional storyline for Spider-Gwen (my fav). Oh, and it's not half a movie. C'mon.

19. The Starling Girl

Evangelical America so rarely makes it into pop culture via a lens that isn't one provided by other evangelicals. Exvangelical art has made inroads in music and literature, but it's often hard to find in film and television. Laurel Parmet's The Starling Girl serves as a one-film correction to that. Following a young woman in an extremely conservative church who strikes up an affair with her youth pastor, the film tackles questions of crumbling belief and patriarchal hierarchies, with terrific performances from Eliza Scanlen and Lewis Pullman in the leads.

18. Beau Is Afraid

I'm still not sure what to make of Ari Aster's third film. The three-hour long comedy-horror exploration of what it would mean to be a son at the mercies of a tyrannical mother alternately thrilled and baffled me. It's uneven and messy, yet there are sections in it that hung with me all year, and it also wins the nonexistent Oscar for Best Use of Licensed Music for an unforgettable scene featuring Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby." Ask me in 10 years how much I liked it. I'll probably say, "Oh, God, a lot!"

17. Fallen Leaves

Aki Kaurismäki makes movies that function like after-dinner mints. They're all about 90 minutes long, they're all thoughtfully wry comedies about modern life, and they're all set in a particularly beige presentation of his native Finland. Fallen Leaves, thus, serves as a tonic for much of the modern movie climate. Kaurismäki gets us invested in the lives of a young man and woman who seem perfect for each other, then keeps bumping them into each other and ripping them apart again. By the last half-hour, the means the fates are using to keep the two separated become truly, ingeniously ridiculous, yet the director is too warm-hearted to give in entirely to the darkness. Also: one of the top movie dogs in a year full of great movie dogs.

16. Barbie

Y'all heard of this one? Greta Gerwig's fizzy confection of a movie needs no further hype at this moment, but if I were to single out what takes it from "a very fun fish-out-of-water comedy" to one of the year's best films, it would be the last 10 minutes of the film. They escape the gender prison the film too often finds itself in to embrace the ways that each and every human on this planet is born, finds life, and dies, all in our own unique ways. Insightful, probing stuff that makes this my favorite of Gerwig's three films. (Read more here.)

Consider becoming a paid subscriber: For as little as $5 a month, you can support this newsletter and help keep it rolling. Paid subscribers get a weekly post on Fridays, access to comments, access to my Andor recaps, and a link to the Episodes Discord server. There will be some other fun treats along the way. Click the button to learn more!

15. Eileen

For everyone who wishes the 2015 film Carol were more explicit about Carol potentially being a sexual predator, here's William Oldroyd's Eileen, a nervy little movie about the title character, a young, desperately horny woman who works at a juvenile detention facility for boys. Her life starts to spiral out of control when she meets an older woman played by a brilliant Anne Hathaway. Most critics think this film falls apart in the third act, but that was when Eileen really got its claws into me. Part crime thriller, part psychosexual cat-and-mouse game, part queer horror – Eileen is one I'm guaranteed to revisit in years to come.

14. Passages

A one-film corrective to endless waves of "why do movies need sex scenes?" discourse, Ira Sachs's Passages is either an erotic thriller masquerading as an indie marriage drama or vice versa. The core setup – a famous film director starts cheating on his husband with a young woman – is a bog-standard setup for these sorts of stories, but Sachs finds the core of longing at the heart of all three of his characters. The sex scenes are among the best in recent memory, too, doing so much work at building plot, character, and theme that you'll be reminded why it's so important for movies to tap into raw human desire. Ultimately, though, this film belongs to one of my favorite subgenres: What if you knew a real piece of shit guy?

13. Showing Up

Basically from 14 on up, I feel like every movie – even my number one – should be higher. I especially feel that way about Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up, which was my number one film for much of the year, before it faded a bit in my memory. Whenever I revisit Showing Up, I feel confident it would have regained its esteem for me. It's a very simple movie, a dramedy about a grouchy artist who just wants to find the time to work on her shit despite all the people in her life who make demands on her time. It boasts beautifully lived-in performances from Michelle Williams and Hong Chau (two of the best!), and it quietly boasts some of the best sound design of the year.

12. Godzilla Minus One

I'm not sure any movie made me cry more this year than Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One, a beautiful melodrama about broken, traumatized people helping each other to heal that occasionally features Godzilla absolutely wrecking shit. Made for peanuts compared to recent Hollywood kaiju offerings, this Toho entry in the storied franchise gets back to basics and remembers one of Steven Spielberg's lessons from Jaws: If you can't show the monster all that much, that can be far more interesting. Everybody trying to make blockbusters in Hollywood right now could learn something from this film.

11. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

Kelly Fremon Craig's 2016 debut feature The Edge of Seventeen is one of those movies I've seen over and over again, so in love am I with Craig's easy facility with building interesting characters in every corner of her film. Thus, I was a touch disappointed by her follow-up, an adaptation of Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, the first time I saw it. Like Seventeen, however, it stuck with me all year long, and a recent revisit made me feel like I'll be rewatching this one a bunch, too. Largely plotless, it's a movie about being nearly a teenager and realizing your parents had whole lives before they became your parents that boasts note-perfect performances from an excellent ensemble cast and some perfect 1970s period details.

10. Asteroid City

It was such a good year for film that my third-favorite Wes Anderson movie ever is all the way down here at 10th. My gosh, this movie is a miracle! Anderson's love of placing endless layers of artifice between the viewer and the emotional cores of his films works to his advantage here, with a fake 1950s sci-fi teleplay that slowly reveals itself to be about the oceans of regret we all carry around within us and, also, the Covid-19 pandemic. (Not only do all of the characters end up quarantined, but they have to talk to each other through rectangular windows that resemble Zoom windows.) There were a ton of movies in 2023 that capitalized on the rueful regrets of aging Millennials, and if you are someone roughly in the same age bracket as Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, who has grown up alongside them, then seeing them play ennui-ridden parents of teenagers packs an extra punch. Good movie!

9. Skinamarink

I found 2023 a bit of a disappointing year for horror – though I haven't seen nearly every title the genre had to offer. Still, it was worth it all for this gripping, often enervating experimental film about two kids who suddenly become trapped in their house with some... malevolent force. Yet what I've just described is something you can only really get from reading the Wikipedia page for Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink. The experience of watching the film left me trembling for almost an hour after seeing it, so evocative is it of growing up queer in a house full of abuse. (I wrote a little about that on Letterboxd.) The people who love this movie are evangelical about it, but so are the people who hate it. There is every chance you will watch this and say, "Emily, wtf, that was just 100 minutes of shots of walls and corners and things," and you would be right. And yet, if you're on its wavelength, there's really nothing like it. I sometimes say this is the scariest movie I've ever seen. Your mileage will almost certainly vary!

8. A Thousand and One

Too often, the film conversation each year only finds room for one debut when there are other films that also deserve praise. So it went with A.V. Rockwell's A Thousand and One, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, only to see its position as the hot debut from a brilliant new filmmaker eclipsed by the also amazing Past Lives (see literal next entry). The story of a Black mother and son living on the fringes of a rapidly gentrifying New York City over nearly 15 years of time, A Thousand and One somehow creates a sense of epic sweep on what must have been a minuscule budget. The last 15 minutes are among the most shattering of any film in 2023, and I need to offer a special shoutout to Gary Gunn's score, my top score of the year. If there's one movie on this list I'm reasonably confident most of my readers will at least like, it's this one. And a lot of you will love it.

7. Past Lives

Rueful Millennial regret, part 2. For as delicately perfect as Celine Song's Past Lives is, for as swooning as its every element is, for as subtly haunting are its performances from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro, the film really only works if you bring your own regrets to it. I do not say this to run down the movie in any way. Some films function as spaces that you enter, allowing your own imagination to run wild as it processes the emotions and ideas in the movie, and Past Lives is one of the best films at allowing for that kind of personal attachment in recent memory. The plot – woman reconnects with the boy she left behind in Korea when she immigrated to Canada (and then the U.S.) – is painstakingly constructed, yes. But what is most striking to me about it is its generosity in allowing you to draw from its vast reservoirs of melancholy and memory and find yourself within them.

6. Killers of the Flower Moon

If Martin Scorsese never makes another film, Killers of the Flower Moon would serve as a fitting capstone on a legendary career. The director has spent much of his life humanizing men who do terrible things, while never minimizing the horrors they were capable of. This might be the most that maxim has ever applied to one of his films. In Killers, Scorsese's relentless focus on a cruel, dimwitted asshole who, nevertheless, might have possibly loved his wife forces you into complicity with the man as he carries out murders of members of the Osage tribe as part of a plot to concentrate wealth in white hands. But it goes a step further, too, forcing an examination of your own complicity in being someone who lives in a country built on literal stolen ground. And then Scorsese ends the movie underscoring why what you just saw is an imperfect attempt to grapple with what really happened! Possibly a masterpiece, definitely a major work.

5. Anatomy of a Fall

I'm not sure a great 2023 movie had a harder uphill climb for me than this one, even though Justine Triet's film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes! A courtroom drama about a woman who may or may not have killed her husband that is also weirdly focused on issues of translation and mistranslation doesn't exactly scream "a fun and sexy time at the movies," yet Triet's patient handling of this story and her actors' evocative work creates a film that builds and builds until it's at a full boil, and you don't quite realize how you got there. Also: The best performance by a dog... ever????? (Read more here.)

4. The Zone of Interest

As with Killers of the Flower Moon, I more or less agree with every criticism I've heard of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest since audiences started seeing it – and I think those criticisms are largely the point of what the movie is trying to do. Here, a largely dull domestic drama about a family dealing with a handful of minor issues is made ultra-horrifying because the characters you are following are Nazis, and the father is one of the big bosses at Auschwitz. The movie is saying, yes, that we are all complicit in any number of great evils because we're just trying to get through our day, but it's also, in the end, critiquing itself for even existing. We can and should depict and study and remember horrifying events like the Holocaust, but we cannot seek to understand them because to understand them is to reduce them to something simple that can be consigned to the past. The Zone of Interest knows how seductive that line of reasoning is – and how ultimately destructive. Also: As a huge sound design nerd, allow me to argue that this has possibly the best sound design in a movie ever? You never see into Auschwitz, but you sure do hear what's happening there. The sound is half the movie! It's astonishing.

3. The Boy and the Heron

Every so often, somebody tries to convince me that this is a minor, muddled effort from Hayao Miyazaki, and then I remember folks said that about Ponyo and The Wind Rises, too. Time will be kind to this film, I think, which follows a young boy into a mystical other world that seems at times like Miyazaki producing a mash-up of his earlier films, like he's decided to create his own riff on the Fargo TV show. In the last half-hour, however, the movie peels back its last handful of layers to reveal a deeply moving rumination from an old man on how the rules we learn to govern our lives cannot be applied to younger generations, who must make their own rules. Also, there are so many fun bird monsters?? A++

2. Oppenheimer

You may have heard of this one, too, I imagine. Christopher Nolan's magnum opus is what amounts to a three-hour montage that's less a biopic and more a meditation on how one man's inability to look at his life's work beyond the immediate next step stopped him from seeing the chain reaction realizing his life's work (inventing the atomic bomb) would touch off. The movie's steadfast refusal to simply be a biopic has, I think, invited a lot of confusion as to its aims and ideas, but it's also a movie that ends with its protagonist imagining that what he has invented will literally end the world. It's hard to get less ambiguous than that. Anyway, this is very funny.

1. May December

The films I responded to in 2023 tended to be interested in people coming to terms with their complicity in oppressive power structures or people figuring out how to exist in traumatic and abusive environments. What made Todd Haynes's May December my top film of 2023 was the way in which it talked about both of these topics. The film follows an actress who goes to a small city in the South to meet with a woman best known for seducing a 12-year-old boy while she was in her 30s. She and the boy had children together, and they remain married 30 years later. The actress, who will play the woman in a movie about the events, wants to make sure she gets everything right. Haynes's gift for melodrama and camp provides just the right amount of Lifetime movie of the week flavor for the film's first half, so you barely see the trap he's laying for you. The deeper you get into the film, the more its portrayal of sexual abuse, adults preying on children, and Hollywood exploiting everybody involved will bruise. Yet Haynes's great gift is in knowing just when to deflate the film via an arch aside or a moment of high camp. Weirdly, the movie I thought about most while watching it was Tar, my top film of 2022 and another movie about an older woman who cannot look clearly at the terrible things she has done.

10 other movies I really liked, why not:

• Blackberry
• Bottoms
• Ferrari
• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3
• The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
• The Killer
• Knock at the Cabin
• Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part 1
• Poor Things
• You Hurt My Feelings

And if your favorite movie isn't on this list, I probably just didn't see it! (Or you can check my Letterboxd to see if I recorded any thoughts about it there.)

Here's to 2024! I've already seen one movie (Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow) that will surely crack my top 10 at the end of the year. Hooray!

This week's reading music: "Reprise Theme from A Thousand and One" by Gary Gunn

The free edition of Episodes is published most Wednesdays, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).