Best Movies of the Year
Hollywood may have been on strike for most of 2023, but there was chaos, anger and a litany all around. Thanks to unforced PR missteps, we've had a tumultuous year for cinema—and especially for popular cinema, which has shown exciting glimpses of renewal after more than a decade of franchise-driven stagnation.
No, I know there's no pink film here, and that should give you some idea of how difficult it was to condense 12 months of releases into the 20 gorgeous pieces below. It's at least made things a little easier by the fact that some of the best festival films of the year – The Leftovers, Zone of Interest, Poor People, Priscilla, Robot Dreams – have yet to be released in the UK; all of them will arrive in early 2024 and have thus been removed from the list for December next year.
20. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
The creators of 2018's fun Game Night (and damn, couldn't you tell) created this romp of a fantasy game that wore the Hasbro brand effortlessly and aimed to entertain and amuse with a steely commitment. Hugh Grant's Boris-esque mayor was just one of many well-crafted comic characters.
19. Maestro
Bradley Cooper follows—and in some places leads—his thunderous reworking of A Star Is Born with a beautifully mounted and choreographed Broken Glass biopic of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Its fragments come together into a shimmering whole that defies almost every prestige movie convention in the book.
18. Blue Gin
In a year of strong British debuts, this year was one of the best: a deeply felt, awe-inspiringly gorgeous drama set in the 1980s, in which a young teacher embraces her sexuality in the looming shadow of Section 28.
>17. Chicken Run: Dawn of the NuggetThe long-awaited return of Aardman's plucky claymation brood sent Ginger, Rocky and friends on a classic infiltration, while old foes employed devious new Bond villain tactics (and decor).
16. Past Lives
Celine Song's mesmerizingly confident debut film took a simple love triangle and drew it across countries and decades so that it's simple the act of stretching your heart around made it painful.
15. Saltburn
Forgive armchair Freud, but at a time when film discourse has never been more shrill, superego-driven, Emerald Fennell strikes back with a psychosexual country house thriller—think '00s Brideshead goes to hell—fueled by pure sex and status-obsessed ID. .
14. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Watching the second installment in a stunning comic book trilogy, you've seen feature-length animation catapult into the future with a satisfying click. An amazing feat and the best superhero movie of the year. However, nothing else could even remotely compare to it.
13. One Fine Morning
Fading parent, blossoming romance: life comes at Léa Seydoux from all sides in Mia Hansen – Löwe's tender, light and generous drama that finds warmth and value in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
12. Theater Camp
I could barely breathe from laughing after this mockumentary in the Spinal Tap tradition, filmed over the course of one chaotic summer at a children's performing arts club. Only a comedy with deep love for its plot can be so merciless.
Jimmy Tatro and Ayo Edebiri at theater camp 11 .Wonka
The joyful “Rain on the Roof” sequence in Paddington 2 brings to mind the idea that Paul King has a great studio musical: six years later, here it is. Sweeter and sillier than Dahl, it belongs to the British surrealist lineage of Boosh and the Goons, with songs so witty and infectious that they secure it future classic status on first listen.
10. The Fabelman Family
Steven Spielberg turns the camera on himself in this richly textured and revealing film memoir that uses the lightly fictional coming-of-age experiences of a modern American master to lay bare the fears and desires that run through his art.
9. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Part 1 
Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie also went back to the basics of the silent film era to take their spy series to new heights of wonder. The motorcycle cliff jump gets the lion's share of the praise, but every detail here was superbly thought out and fanatical.
8. Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet's Palme d'Or-winning film is driven by Sandra Hüller's masterful performance. A Complicated Woman™ will stand trial to destroy our programmed perceptions of innocence and guilt.
7. John Wick: Chapter 4
Who in their wildest dreams would have imagined nine years ago that Keanu Reeves' revenge thriller would climax with a three-way mash-up of Buster Keaton, Nicolas Winding Refn and 1990s SNK? In an era of creeping disembodiment, it was an object lesson in how it should be done.
Keanu Reeves in John Wick : Chapter 4 Authors: Murray Close 6. Babylon
Damien Chazelle's outrageous epic of early Hollywood mayhem was the cinematic equivalent of a piano falling on your head (in a good way).
Babylon Photo: Scott Garfield 5. Rye Lane
Raine Allen-Miller's endlessly funny and charming debut revives the British rom-com for a new generation of lovers and dreamers.
4. Boy and Heron
Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki may have concluded his tale with a stunningly beautiful coming-of-age fable in which a war-scarred teenager navigates a strange and melancholic otherworld.
3. Killers of the Flower Moon 
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon
The Pensive Martin Scorsese, The prickly hybrid of Western and noir marked a milestone for the first DiCaprio-De Niro team under arguably the greatest living director.
2. Tar
After a 17-year absence, Todd Field returns with this unclassifiable riot of a film in which a star conductor (the incomparable Cate Blanchett) watches her life and career spectacularly unravel.
1. Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan's gripping thriller about the dawn of the atomic age isn't just the best film of the year. This is the roadmap to a better Hollywood, where blockbusters fire the brains and souls and adrenal glands of mass audiences around the world.
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