Best Movies of 2023

Oscar Deadline Edition

My wife likes to make sure that we see all the major Oscar nominees, and I like to make my wife happy, so that's what we try to do every year. Not that that's particularly out of character for me: we watch a lot of movies anyway. Not as much as professional critics or people who work in the movie industry do, but a lot for an amateur. In 2023 I watched 123 movies--a lower number of them in the theater than I'd like, but of course I am lying low to avoid covid. Still, it's a lot.

And many of the Oscar nominees turn out to be good, of course. Some of them are also terrible. That's the Oscars. So while I have some pretty solid amateur opinions as to what movies will win most of the Oscars, we all know the Oscars aren't everything, and also that movie watching is an idiosyncratic and personal thing and so the only thing that truly matters is what we liked the most in any particular year rather than what will take home a trophy.

Here are my choices for the best movies of the calendar year of 2023¹.

As a note, this is in kind of a loosey goosey order, and so you can picture pretty much anything could be a couple slots higher or a couple of slots lower.

10 - Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Pt. 1

Mission Impossible 7 had the misfortune of being only a really good movie that just so happened to be a sequel of one of the greatest action movies ever made so far. Dead Reckoning is certainly no Fallout, that’s for sure. It’s longer than it should be, and a little slow in the middle. It kills off a significant character in a fashion that is almost certainly going to wind up being a fake-out to resolve in the sequel, but does so in a way to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

But the core of the series is there—the stunts are ridiculous and wonderful, the action scenes that are beautifully shot, coherently edited, and insanely exciting. It is possible this series will get bad one day, but I’m on board until then.

9 - John Wick 4

I have been fairly evangelical about my love of the John Wick movies since seeing the original in the theaters. It was such a wonderful surprise—a revenge story with more twists and world-building surprises that had enough from the start to build three increasingly expansive sequels on it. Fans could argue ad nauseam which is the best movie of the tetralogy, but it’s remarkable that there’s a case for any of the four.

John Wick Chapter 4 isn’t my favorite of the bunch, but it is great: it continues the tradition of over-the-top action shot beautifully and coherently, with the best stunt performers in the business. Long takes, beautiful lighting, inventive action, and ridiculous car stunts and stair falls. It’s possible that this is the last of the bunch for awhile but I look forward to Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves continuing to do great things.

8 - The Killer

There’s a poker term “on tilt,” for when a player makes a mistake that knocks them off balance and causes them to continue to make even more mistakes, usually from frustrating and aggression. The Killer is a movie about a contract killer who goes on tilt after screwing up an assassination for the first time, and then continues to scramble, think he has his bearings, and then screw up again.

It’s also secretly a comedy. It doesn’t have a single traditional joke, but it’s very funny.

It’s also secretly not the action movie you might expect—though it does have one of the best fight scenes in a movie this year—the Killer doesn’t want to fight, he wants to plan and outsmart and surprise his quarry. The Killer is ultimately another David Fincher movie about deeply weird singular people who are obsessed with their process.

Also, if not for another film a little further down the way, I would say that The Killer had the best sound design of the year. But we’ll get there.

7 - Across the Spider-Verse

I enjoy the MCU Spider-Man movies; their Peter Parker is a good version of the the character. But they’re not great Spider-Man stories. They’ve got the webs, and they’ve got the quips, but they don’t really fully get the indefatigable nobility of the character. Spider-Man is a character who is always the underdog—a poor kid struggling just to get by—who pushes through when everything is hopeless and everyone is telling him to give up, and he continues trying.

That’s a core of Peter Parker, and that’s the core of Miles Morales. Across the Spider-Verse understands that and communicates that better than any of the MCU movies have gotten across.

Also it’s fucking gorgeous. One of the best animated animated movies out there.

6 - The Holdovers

I have less to say about The Holdovers than most other movies on this list. It took me a long long time to get over how BAD it looked from the trailers. But it’s a really solid and wonderful throwback to the movies of the 70s and 80s, with great performances from all three of the leads, and enough warmth and misanthropy for me to recommend it.

5 - Past Lives

Past Lives is a small movie with only four real characters: Korean childhood friends and budding sweethearts Na Young and Hae Sung, Arthur, who marries Na Young a decade later when she moves to New York and starts going by Nora, and finally us, the audience as we watch this story of what-ifs and might-have-beens with all the baggage of our own lives—all the people we could have been and who we are now.

Past Lives is a wonderful small scale story about real relationships—all four of us trying to deal with the fact that life is made up of choices—and not even always the choices that we made ourselves—all guiding us to where we are now. We are all dealing with the fact that the choices we make is not for what makes the best story, but what makes the best life. Past Lives is very romantic in a way that doesn’t initially seem romantic: in a lived in sort of way, in a way that feels familiar and comfortable and suspicious of big romantic comedy gestures.

4 - The Killers of the Flower Moon

That Scorsese guy is pretty good at this by now.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a striking highwire act for him: this is a movie that is both subtle and straightforward. It wears its metaphors on its sleeve while also featuring some of the most subtle and complicated characterization of Scorsese’s career. From early in the film where we see a picture book asks “Who are the wolves in this picture?”, the film unspools a story encapsulating American greed and white supremacy, culminating in a dynamite closing scene that implicates both the movie and the viewer as a cog in the machine that turns American greed and white supremacy into entertainment.

But it gets away with it because it’s also an incredible character piece with a great performance from Leonardo DiCaprio playing one of those wolves, Ernest, his dumbest character ever², and the genuine and complicated and affecting love his character forges with Lily Gladstone’s astounding performance as Mollie. Their complicated and genuine love at the heart of the film takes the metaphor running through the film and grounds it into the real people at the core of it all. It’s twisty and great, and I’m so glad we’ve had a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese working at the top of his game for all these decades.

3 - Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is basically a conventionally good movie in an old school sense. It’s beautifully shot with impressive practical effects, starring every male actor over 30 you’ve ever seen (along with two female actors), all giving some of the better performances of their career. The score is great and just propels you through the entire movie. The script is solid, ending in a gut punch of a final line. Oppenheimer doesn’t rise to being one of my favorite movies ever, but I like it a lot. You probably saw it—if not, you should—and so I probably don’t need to say much more about it.

2 - The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest is not a fun movie. It is very hard to call it “enjoyable.” It is unsettling and awful and fraught in all the best ways, though. It is a monumental achievement in craft and almost certainly one of the few movies from this year destined to be endure as a result. It never shows its horrors, but you feel them, and you hear them. My god, the sound design of this movie alone is an astonishing tour de force. The Zone of Interest is the best at what it does, even if what it does isn’t very nice, with a gut punch of an ending where the past looks across the years straight into the audience.

1 - Asteroid City

“Wes Anderson” is often used as a shorthand for whimsy and twee storytelling—and his movies certainly have the trappings of that—but what countless “X-Men as Wes Anderson characters” gets wrong is fucking dark his movies truly can get, dealing with death and loss in ways that few genuinely funny movies successfully do.

Asteroid City is one of Wes Anderson’s best, and despite all the charming stop motion alien, the artificial sets, the kids and cowboys singing hokey songs, it’s filled with such authentic and moving sadness, with lost and broken people trying to make their way through life and find some sort of meaning and happiness, or at least acceptance.

YouTuber Thomas Flight has talked about “Metamodernism,” a kind of post-postmodernism movement also popularized by David Foster Wallace as “The New Sincerity,” which is where artists start using the techniques of postmodernism, but not for empty irony and play, but to tell sincere and emotional stories. Asteroid City is a story in the vein of Infinite Jest and Everything Everywhere All At Once in using metafiction, fourth wall breaks, playful irony, and pop culture references to tell an at time painfully emotional story: one that reduced me to tears a couple of times.

After much consideration it was my favorite movie of 2023.

”Do I just keep doing it? Without knowing anything?”

Below Ground

Quickfire Oscars Predictions.

Best Picture

• Want to Win: Oppenheimer

• Will Win: Oppenheimer

• Fine If It Wins: Killers of the Flower Moon, Past Lives, The Holdovers, Zone of Interest

• Will Be Angry If Wins: Maestro

Best Actor

• Want to Win: Cillian Murphy

• Will Win: Cillian Murphy

• Fine If It Wins: Paul Giamatti

• Will Be Angry If Wins: Bradley Cooper

Best Actress

• Want to Win: Lily Gladstone

• Will Win: Lily Gladstone

• Fine If It Wins: Emma Stone,

• Will Be Angry If Wins: Carey Mulligan

Best Supporting Actor

• Want to Win: Robert Downey Jr.

• Will Win: Robert Downey Jr.

• Fine If It Wins: Robert De Niro, Ryan Gosling

Best supporting actress

• Want to Win: Da'Vine Joy Randolph

• Will Win: Da'Vine Joy Randolph

Best director

• Want to Win: Christopher Nolan

• Will Win: Christopher Nolan

• Fine If It Wins: Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Glazer

International feature film

• Want to Win: The Zone of Interest

• Will Win: The Zone of Interest

Animated feature film

• Will Win: The Boy and the Heron

• Fine If It Wins: Across the Spider-Verse

Adapted screenplay

• Want to Win: Oppenheimer

• Will Win: Oppenheimer

• Fine If It Wins: The Zone of Interest, Barbie

Original screenplay

• Want to Win: The Holdovers

• Will Win: The Holdovers

• Fine If It Wins: Past Lives

• Will Be Angry If Wins: Maestro

Visual effects

• Want to Win: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

• Will Win: Napoleon

• Fine If It Wins: Any of them, except..

• Will Be Angry If Wins: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Original score

• Want to Win: Oppenheimer

• Will Win: Oppenheimer

• Fine If It Wins: Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things

Original song

• Want to Win: I'm Just Ken

• Will Win: I'm Just Ken

Cinematography

• Want to Win: Oppenheimer

• Will Win: Oppenheimer

• Fine If It Wins: Killers of the Flower Moon

• Will Be Angry If Wins: Maestro

Film editing

• Want to Win: Killers of the Flower Moon

• Will Win: Oppenheimer

• Fine If It Wins: Oppenheimer, The Holdovers

Sound

• Want to Win: The Zone of Interest

• Will Win: The Zone of Interest

• Will Be Angry If Wins: Anything but The Zone of Interest.

That’s all for now. If you take away anything from this, it’s that I predict that more than most years, I think the Oscar voters and me are pretty close to each other in our choices. I look forward to discovering Sunday night if I’m right about that.

1. No rereleases. So Stop Making Sense doesn’t top the list, as tempting as that would be.

2. And I’m counting What’s Eating Gilbert Grape here.