10 Best Films of 2023

1. Past Lives

Celine Song’s directorial debut has been met with nothing short of adoration since its debut at Sundance. Following its wide release, the film has received almost unanimously rapturous reviews for the subtle yet richly layered way it explores how love can span continents and decades.

Starring Greta Lee as Nora, the story follows her family’s journey from South Korea to Canada and later to New York City, drawing parallels to Song’s own life experiences. Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung, Nora’s childhood soulmate from Korea, while John Magaro portrays Arthur, her husband in the United States. The movie delves into the relationships between Nora, Arthur, and Hae Sung, exploring themes of love, shared memories, and the Korean idea of inyeon - the red string of fate which connects people across different lifetimes.

The film explores the ideas of liminal spaces, as Nora moves between places, languages and relationships where she feels she belongs; where she feels she doesn’t; and where she feels caught in-between worlds – a feeling known to many immigrants, but also many people in their thirties looking for love, purpose or guidance. Song’s writing is understated and tender, eschewing melodrama for the quiet, wrenching reality that making choices in life and love can inherently shut off other possibilities, and exploring how we can embrace what we have and grieve the other lost loves of our lives.

2. Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse

In a breathtaking leap beyond the already sky-high bar set by Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, the creators of Miles Morales’ animated exploits have somehow elevated their craft to even greater heights in Across The Spider-Verse.

This bold and brilliant blockbuster stands light years ahead of the competition, delivering mind-boggling animated action across a dizzying array of styles, while infusing the frame with whip-smart humour and poignant character moments.

Shameik Moore’s Miles hurtles through the multiverse, navigating Mumbattan, Nueva York, and darker dimensions, forming bonds with new Spider-pals like Daniel Kaluuya’s Spider-Punk and Karan Soni’s Pavitr Prabhakar, all while deepening connections with Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld). The film boasts spine-tingling action spectacles, such as the opening Vulture brawl and Miles’ escape from Spider Society, balanced by emotionally resonant moments, like Miles’ mother’s heartfelt speech about watching her son grow up.

Elsewhere the diverse art styles – particularly the blossoming watercolour splashes of Gwen’s world – are nothing short of breathtaking. Across The Spider-Verse emerges as an audacious work of art and top-tier superhero narrative, defying the trend of diminishing returns in Marvel’s live-action releases.

3. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed

Amidst challenging times for feature documentaries struggling for space in cinemas and on streamers, Laura Poitras’s All The Beauty And The Bloodshed emerges as a beacon of compelling storytelling. This chronicle unfolds as a poignant exploration of artist Nan Goldin’s battle against the art-washing tactics of Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of the notorious painkiller OxyContin.

The film seamlessly weaves raw reportage with intimate interviews, groundbreaking photography and rare footage, providing an interconnected documentary experience that delves into Goldin’s life and activism. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is a celebration of life and a poignant commentary on society’s failure to protect it, skillfully navigating multiple stories without losing focus. Poitras’s documentary stands as a major achievement, evident in its recognition with the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, a first for a documentary.

Poignant, enthralling and artful, the film speaks volumes about the quality of filmmaking that allows its diverse elements to cohesively come together.

4. Killers Of The Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese is back, and determined to keep us in our seats for as long as possible. Adapted from David Gann’s book about a murderous conspiracy to steal resources from the newly oil-wealthy Osage people in the 1920s, you could read Gann’s book faster than completing Scorsese’s 206 minute film. But Scorsese’s impeccable production design, his beloved criminal perspective, and incredible performances ensure that Killers Of The Flower Moon is a feat of filmmaking – even if it could have been a feat of miniseries making.

Leonardo DiCaprio is on fine form as weaselly World War I vet Ermest Burkhart, who moves to Fairfax Oklahoma to live with his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro, never better). King is a self-appointed friend to the Osage people, but also a Machiavellian money-grabber, who immediately enlists his naïve nephew to help him accrue land and power by marrying wealthy Osage woman Mollie King (Lily Gladstone, remarkable but underused), and slowly killing off her entire family. Though Scorsese tells us this story through the perspective of the criminals, he shows the systemic neglect and abuse of the Osage people, whose communities were decimated and deaths ignored.

The violence is brutal and shocking, and the tension taut throughout, with an intriguing coda highlighting our apparently endless desire to turn the deaths of women – usually white, but in this case Indigenous – into forms of ghoulish entertainment. (Netflix True Crime, we’re looking at you). Scorsese is aware of his position as white male filmmaker telling this story, but urges us not to look away from decades of violence.

5. Oppenheimer

With Chat GPT and AI having been unceremoniously launched upon us with little regard for how this technology could impact us, society is yet again facing a quandary that has accompanied many advances in technology: the awareness that just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean we should.

As these discussions of how scientific advancement needs to be accompanied by social, cultural and ethical considerations surge, along comes Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It’s the story of the man who helped research and create the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagosaki during World War II – and considered the ethical implications of his work only after it had been unleashed.

Nolan has always been preoccupied with the personal and the vast, pitting individual desires and ambitions against the world and cosmos, and Oppenheimer is no different. Adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph And Tragedy Of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nolan explores Oppenheimer’s scientific career; his Communist sympathies; the origin and development of the Manhattan Project; a complex relationship with recruiter Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.); and a character assassination disguised as a 1954 security hearing interrogation.

Also in the mix are DC political machinations and Senate hearings, and some of Oppenheimer’s womanising. Nolan is playing with perpetual motion maximalism, and it’s a testament to the sharp writing and stellar performances that it remains vaguely cohesive and utterly engaging for its three-hour runtime.

6. Return To Seoul

Return To Seoul skilfully delves into South Korea’s contentious adoption history, crafting a nuanced character study that is both intelligent and intriguing. Ji-Min Park, a remarkable newcomer, portrays Freddie, a grown-up French national and one of the thousands of South Korean children sent abroad since 1953.

Initially framed as a fish-out-of-water story, the film quickly evolves into a poignant diaspora tale, marked by psychological acuity and emotional eloquence. Directed by French-Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou, the narrative follows the spiky and chaotic Freddie as she confronts Korean customs, attempts to connect with her drunk-texting birth father, and grapples with a sense of rejection from her mother. The film artfully captures the pain of a young adopted woman returning to her birth country to reconcile with a complex past.

Park Ji-min’s portrayal is both captivating and seethingly wilful, resisting societal expectations and stereotypical immigrant narratives. The encounters with her birth father, played by Oh Kwang-rok, are touching and absurd, showcasing droll awkwardness and a dream of reconciliation. Return To Seoul transcends initial expectations, evolving into a poignant exploration of identity and cultural belonging, marking it as a film likely to grow in stature with time.

7. Women Talking

Loosely based on real events that occurred at the Manitoba colony in Bolivia, Miriam Towes’ novel Women Talking tells the story of eight Mennonite women who hold a meeting to discuss what to do in the aftermath of an unimaginable horror. The women learn that the men in their colony have been drugging them at night and sexually assaulting them, then gaslighting the women to make them believe that they were imagining things or being possessed.

The book plays out in an incredible dialogue, as the women navigate philosophical and religious discussions about faith and forgiveness, practical concerns such as their safety and ability to survive, and the complex relationships they have with each other and the men in their lives – their husbands, their sons, their attackers, and the men who exists across categories.

The book is an incredible piece of work, and thus needed an incredible director with vision, emotional intelligence and an understanding of how to tackle complex subject matter responsibly. Enter Sarah Polley, whose direction is as thoughtful, intricate and beautiful as any of her other work. She has also assembled an incredible cast, including Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand and Claire Foy.

8. How To Have Sex

Written and directed by Molly Manning Walker, How To Have Sex starts as a rites-of-passage journey between three friends, Sky (Lara Peake), Em (Enva Lewis) and 16-year old Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), as they go on a post-exams trip to Crete, where they are surrounded by booze, boys and mischief.

Tara is younger than the others and determined to lose her virginity – a common trope cinema lovers have seen before in films like American Pie, Superbad and Revenge Of The Nerds. But they were teenage boys. For teenage girls, danger is ever-present; emotionally, sexually, and physically. As Tara soon realises that her expectation of a fun, tender, sexy summer romance are at odds with the desire of young men to use women and discard them – and the expectation of her friends being supportive is at odds with their own insecurity – a dream holiday soon turns into a navigation of deep pain and loneliness.

Manning Walker’s writing is subtle but wrenching, capturing the gaps in current discourse around consent, and the objectification of young women by men who are told that asking for a ‘yes’ is the only responsibility they hold. Mia McKenna Bruce is sublime, putting in a nuanced and devastating performance against a neon palette highlighting the fun, garishness and isolation that the holiday setting evokes. An incredibly powerful film.

9. Passages

Passages, a film from Ira Sachs, goes against the director’s usually quiet dramas, in favour of some vigorous eroticism and an unreserved forward momentum. Here, the director grants three young European arthouse talents ample room to embody their roles, and fearlessly bring to light the inner complexities of pleasure, pain and confusion.

German actor Franz Rogowski plays film director Tomas, a man driven by pure id. Selfish, mercurial and charismatic, he’s married to soft-spoken Martin, but at the wrap party for his latest film, Tomas sleeps with schoolteacher Agate (Adèle Exarchopoulos), sparking off a series of sexual and romantic encounters that threaten to unravel them all.

The three characters explode in and out of each other’s lives, and the film is beautifully shot, with stunning production design and costuming adding to the sense of drama. The sex scenes are long and sensual, and while it may not be a film to watch with your parents, the scenes are also thoughtful, showing the characters’ evolving relationships and desires. Sexy and intriguing.

10. Barbie

You can’t have a Best Films of 2023 list without mentioning the doll who brought us all so much joy (after decades of bringing us so many body issues). Barbie (Margot Robbie) has to leave her bubblegum world to visit the Real World, and there she discovers the difficulty of being a woman – and how she herself has contributed to that struggle.

So goes the plot of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, co-written with Noah Baumbach – but the plot isn’t what we’re here for, and good thing too, because Splash-meets-The Lego Movie isn’t particularly original. And yet, despite the well-worn plot; the inane Girl Power Feminism; and the surprising heteronormativity undermining the camp, I laughed until I cried. Margot Robbie oozes charm and radiance and pathos every moment of the film.

The production design and costuming are sublimely fun, with pink plastic exclamation points marking every visual gag and nostalgic callback. The soundtrack, featuring Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa contains bops galore. But it’s Ryan Gosling’s Ken who steals the show.

As Ken decides to co-opt an incel/beer commercial/80s-musical masculinity mash-up, Gosling is completely game to play the blond idiot, and perfectly execute a glorious, Drake-meets-Grease dance routine destined to be projected on the walls of gay bars for evermore. Barbie is a pink, frothy, funny, fizzy delight, and maybe accepting her, flaws and all, is what we’re supposed to do.

Honourable mentions go to: TÁR; Asteroid City; Talk To Me;Close; Anatomy Of A Fall; The Creator; Suzume; Saltburn; Bottoms; The Fabelmans; Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning; Flora And Son; Thanksgiving; The Killer; It Is In Us All; Napoleon