The best movies of 2023 (so far)

Call it 'A Portrait of the Artist In the Midst of Being Canceled’. In Todd Field's psychological character study, Cate Blanchett is Lydia Tár, a genius-level composer, EGOT winner and insufferable narcissist whose icy demeanor hardly fractures as accusations of sexual impropriety threaten to shatter her career. Blanchett's Oscar-nominated performance has rightly earned the lion's share of plaudits, but the superb acting is buoyed by Field's subtly off-kilter visual style, lending the ‘ripped from the headlines’ narrative a hint of Kubrickian uncanniness.

Building on the mash-up of animation styles that made Into the Spider-Verse so ridiculously vibrant and throwing in a multitude of new ones – stop-motion LEGO-mation, anyone? – this dizzying, dazzling sequel is the persuasive case for superhero movies than the played-out genre desperately needed. The Miles Morales version of Spidey, voiced again with a sense of wonderment and real soul by Shameik Moore, zooms across multiverses and meets several hundred parallel Spider-people in a personal quest with universal stakes. The gags and pop-culture references – delivered with trademark Lord and Miller irreverence – come so thick and fast, you’ll need several viewings to unpack them all. Which will not be a major burden with a movie this entertaining.

Even on IMAX, the seismic themes and ideas spill over the sides of Christopher Nolan's most spectacular, cerebral and haunting blockbuster yet. Cillian Murphy is brooding and briliiant as the titular physicist, J Robert Oppenheimer, charting his quest to build America the A-bomb in a science-fact thriller that’s paced like a chain reaction. The film’s jaw-dropping centrepiece – the first atomic bomb test – gives you a sense of what the first audiences to see 2001: A Space Odyssey must have felt 50-odd years ago. In a world of CGI, Nolan opts to recreate it using practical effects (a don’t-try-it-at-home mix of gasoline, aluminium powder, magnesium and propane). Like the movie itself, it leaves you shaken to the core.

Thanks to Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness and this disarmingly powerful four-legged odyssey from veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the humble donkey has become a cinematic colossus of late – a kind of doleful-eyed, carrot-chewing Brando. The genius of EO, which follows one little donkey across Europe, is in using its furry hero as a mirror to reflect back at us the state of the world in all its beauty, pain and ineffable sadness. It shouldn’t be half as bewitching and emotional, but honestly, it ruined us. 

Already a hot favourite for Oscars across most (all?) categories, Martin Scorsese’s 1920s true-crime epic is meticulously crafted, beautifully played and entirely gripping – even over a potentially bum-numbing three hours and 26 minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are on top form as two very different kinds of amoral scumbag, both up to their necks in the blood of Osage Native Americans, but it’s newcomer Lily Gladstone who centres the film with a soulful, delicate performance as a taciturn Osage heiress with the moxie to survive this orgy of greed and violence.

A diaspora tale of real psychological acuity and emotional eloquence, this captivating drama perfectly articulates the hurt of a young adopted Frenchwoman as she returns to the country of her birth and struggles to reconcile with the past. French-Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou follows his brilliantly-drawn protagonist, the spiky, chaotic Freddie (Park Ji-Min), as she shrugs off Korean customs, her drunk-texting birth father and a continued sense of rejection from the mum who won’t acknowledge her in the hope of wrestling back control of her inner life. Like Freddie, it’s a film that will only grow in stature with the passing of time. 

Finding flaw in Justine Triet’s (In Bed with Victoria) brainy, provocative and elusive Palme d’Or winner is no easy task. It’s hard even to define it. Murder-mystery? Courtroom drama about an innocent woman (Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller) suffering from institutionalised sexism? That question sits at its murky heart. A man falls from the balcony of his Alpine chalet and suspicion falls on his writer wife. Cue a forensic examination of a rocky marriage, as well as a knotty character study of a refreshingly complicated woman. Triet teases us with morsels of information that may (or may not) be important, like an arthouse version of Cluedo. Keep your wits about you and it’s one of the most satisfying cinema outings of the year.  

Tom Cruise’s willingness to do literally any bastard-mad thing to entertain us finds its purest expression in the seventh instalment of the consistently excellent Mission: Impossible movies. He sprints, freefalls, races and horse-rides through a series of gawp-worthy action set pieces, occasionally while handcuffed to Hayley Atwell’s terrified franchise newbie, all expertly executed by writer-director Christopher McQuarrie. And the plot? Hard to say, this being the first part of a Dead Reckoning twofer and with multiple strands yet to be tied together, but it’s smart-baffling in the best M:I tradition. Kudos, too, to charisma machine Esai Morales, who somehow makes dialogue about A.I. sexy as the superbad, Gabriel. Roll on Part Two.

A sunkissed hangout movie that sours and spins out of control like the worst kind of night out, Molly Manning Walker’s debut is where bubblegum fun strays into a minefield of sexual assault, trauma and heartbreak. Terrific newcomer Mia McKenna-Bruce is Tara, a high-schooler celebrating finishing her exams with a mates’ holiday to Crete. On the menu? Booze, partying and saying farewell to her virginity. Enter the seemingly charming Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and exit all the good vibes. A coming-of-age drama they should teach in schools, How to Have Sex is not a bit less cinematic for its educational message.

There’s so much going on in Laura Poitras’s doc, it speaks volumes for the quality of the filmmaking that it all hangs together so dexterously. Iconic photographer Nan Goldin is its subject, protagonist and guide, as the film takes in a tour of New York’s ’70s counterculture, ex-addict Goldin’s quest for justice against the odious Sacklers, the family behind America’s OxyContin epidemic, and the nuts and bolts of social activism. It’s moving, enthralling and artful – in every sense of the word.

Who said the romcom was dead? Putting an authentically South London spin to the Before Sunset formula of two strangers meeting, chatting and slowly falling for each other – ie with loads more chicken shops and Supermalts – Rye Lane is sparky, romantic and pisstakey in all the ways that London is. David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah provide charm, jokes and very relatable insecurities as two young Black Londoners, Dom and Yas – who slowly size each other up and – eventually – like what they see. Their Salt-N-Pepa karaoke scene is a mic drop moment in every sense. 

Getting compared with Wong Kar-wai’s classic romance In the Mood for Love loads seriously unreasonable expectations on a first-time filmmaker. But Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song’s tender-hearted romance holds up to them purely for its emotional intelligence and wisdom and its sheer empathy for its characters. The central relationship plays out over several decades between Korean New Yorker (Greta Lee) and the childhood sweetheart (Teo Yoo) who never left Seoul, and the husband who struggles to give her space to explore her feelings. A love letter to two people and two cities – Seoul and New York – in all their messy glory, it’s one we’ll be revisiting in years to come.

Played by real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada, Donya is an interpreter forced to flee the Taliban and start afresh in America in this soulful, black-and-white study of loneliness and connection. With British-Iranian director Babak Jalali’s meticulous compositions and a faint, slackerish energy best embodied by Gregg Turkington’s drowsy, Jack London-loving psychologist who helps Donya tackle her undiagnosed PTSD, Fremont is not flattered by the Jim Jarmusch comparisons. It’s the kind of lo-fi gem that would have built a steady rep in the old days of video stores. It deserves to be discovered on streaming.

It got lost amid July’s Barbenheimer noise but this raucously entertaining, needle-sharp Blaxsploitation riff is ripe for discovery on Netflix. An almost uncategorisable mix of crime thriller, satirical comedy and near-future sci-fi, it’s the handiwork of a first-time filmmaker of real promise in Juel Taylor. He rescues the term ‘woke’ from the right-wing commentariat with a They Live-adjacent storyline in which John Boyega, Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx team up to uncover a conspiracy to control Black consciousness via… well, that would be spoiling one of the year’s best in-jokes. 

It’s been an era of filmmakers recreating their childhoods on screen (and let’s face it, it’s mostly boyhoods we’re talking about), with Alfonso Cuarón, Paolo Sorrentino and Lee Isaac Chung all parlaying their own younger lives into Oscar-worthy dramas in recent years. But of all of these cine-reminiscences, Steven Spielberg’s feels the most alive to the possibility that it might even be misremembering or misinterpreting events – and thus it feels like the most guileless and honest of the lot. With Spielberg’s on-screen surrogate, Gabriel LaBelle’s Sammy Fabelman, to the fore, its many moments of hurt and wonderment are dazzlingly realised.

Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney is electrifying as 25-year-old NSA translator Reality Winner, who was questioned by the FBI in 2017 over leaked documents relating to Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. Tina Satter’s anxiety-inducing thriller expertly transfers her ‘verbatim theatre’ stage production ‘Is This a Room?’ into a kind of verbatim cinema, drip-feeding dread in a real-time recreation of Winner’s first interrogation. It’s signals the arrival of a singular talent in Satter, and offers further evidence of Sweeney’s brilliance. Oh, and that double meaning title? Chef’s kiss.

This achingly funny mockumentary takes a cue or two from Christopher Guest and Waiting for Guffman in its spoofy homage to two great American institutions: summer camp and musical theatre. The fly-on-the-wall aesthetic captures the chaotic creativity of a group of young tyros prepping a new musical dedicated to the camp’s ailing founder, Joan (Amy Sedaris). The belly laughs come thick and fast as the youngsters and their high-drama directors (co-writers Molly Gordon and Ben Platt) try to turn ‘cardboard into gold’. It’s as big-hearted and affectionate as comedies come.

British cinema’s own old oak, Ken Loach delivers a (possibly final) film as inflamed and vital as ever. Some would argue to its detriment, with the line crossed from social realism and into straight polemic in its depiction of a struggling northeast English community reacting to the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees. But Loach and his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty aren’t here to spin subtle, elliptical yarns. The Old Oak is another clarion call inspired by real-life crises that are impacting working class people and that directness is its greatest strength. And throughout, the cast of first-time actors bring unvarnished warmth to its moving moments of human connection. Who else is making films like this – and who will make them when Loach finally hangs up his clapperboard?

What unexpected joy and wisdom this stop-motion animation delivers. Expanding a 2010 short and perhaps taking a cue from Aardman’s classic Creature Comforts, it introduces us to a sparkly little mollusc called Marcel (voiced by co-creator Jenny Slate) and her gentle Nanna Connie (Isabella Rossellini), left behind when their community of shells disappears overnight. Enter documentary maker Dean (Slate’s co-creator Dean Fleischer Camp) to join the quest for this missing shell utopia. Cute by never cutesy, and with a surprisingly sharp wit, it’s cinematic soul food that’ll have you going back for a second helping.

The directness of French filmmaker Alice Diop‘s courtroom drama – a film of long, unblinking takes and zero showy camerawork – shouldn’t be confused with simplicity. Knotty and morally challenging, Saint Omer traverses some of the biggest cultural fault lines of modern Europe – race, migration, religion – in its story of a young woman (Guslagie Malanda) accused of leaving her child to drown on a Normandy beach. It’s based on a real-life court case that Diop herself attended and her recreation engages both the brain and the heart. Just try shaking it. 

Could it live up to the hype? Would we end up just remembering the memes and how, for a short time in the summer of 2023, everything suddenly turned pink? The answers, it turned out, were ‘yes’ and ‘no’. When Greta Gerwig’s fuchsia-hued fantasia finally arrived in cinemas, it delivered all the promised silliness, mockery and straight-up Kenergy, sending Margot Robbie’s living doll on a journey of empowerment with Ryan Gosling’s insecure Ken in hot pursuit. What we hadn’t expected was how all-in Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay goes on Jordan Peterson-style meninism and even the movie’s own paymasters at Mattel (represented by a roomful of men in suits and Will Ferrell’s windbag CEO). She and Robbie promised we’d love it regardless of how we felt about Barbie – and she was right.

While not exactly an escapist night at the pictures, Sarah Polley’s tough, talky, ‘The Crucible’-esque feminist allegory all but dares you to reach for your popcorn. Sit up and pay attention, it demands – and anyone prepared to lean into its dialectics is rewarded with an elite group of actors (Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand and Ben Whishaw) debate a still-scarily-resonant case of sexual abuse in a religious commune. Faith, female rage and the meaning of forgiveness have been rarely chewed over with quite this simmering power.

Characters don’t have to be likeable or good to be great. Love is Strange director Ira Sachs gets it, delivering a so bad he’s grand antagonist for the ages in self-centred Tomas. Portrayed by mercurially intriguing German actor Franz Rogow​ski (Great Freedom), he’s a Paris-based filmmaker and hot mess who’ll crack it at an actor for not walking down the stairs artfully enough. Thinking nothing of taking a lover – Blue is the Warmest Colour star Adèle Exarchopoulos – while leaving hubby at home (Ben Whishaw), he ping-pongs between them, causing maximum damage to all three. But you can still see why they would. Beautifully written, framed and performed, it’s a thoroughly French, knotty affair.  

‘It’s a mining area so you’ll have to be okay with a little male attention.’ As understatements go, the parting words of the recruiter who sets up American backpackers Hanna (Ozark’s Julia Garner) and Liv (Glass Onion’s Jessica Henwick) with a job pulling pints in a remote Aussie pub is a doozy. Director Kitty Green made the excellent post-Weinstein thriller The Assistant, also with Garner facing down some despicable bastards, and here she puts a feminist lens on a beery, blue-collar kind of male toxicity. Like the Outback tinnie-sploitation classic Wake in Fright, The Royal Hotel is a brilliantly nightmarish night at the boozer.

There’s something haunting and ancient in the soil of Britain and it’s captured mesmerically in a trippy tale of isolation and disturbing plant life that plays like a druid’s cheese dream. It could only be the work of Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, whose debut drama, Bait, was a handmade treasure back in 2019. Here, he uses the same vintage aesthetic and 16mm cameras to craft a worthy companion piece to any of the great ’70s folk horrors, as Mary Woodvine’s botanist goes full The Lighthouse on a remote island. 

This gripping, intelligent doc interviews the subjects of some of the most famous docs of recent years about their lives through a lens. The stars of The Staircase, Hoop Dreams and Capturing the Friedmans reveal what it’s like to be at the eye of a non-fiction narrative story, testimonies that are delivered with compassion and insight. Equally interesting on the issues of telling someone else’s story (duty of care, whether participants should be paid), Subject captures the documentary form at a crossroads, hopefully finding its way to a more caring, culturally sensitive future. Filmmakers could do a lot worse than watch Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera’s engrossing film as a cautionary tale.

This social drama set on the Native American reservations of South Dakota reflects the outside status of America’s indigenous people in stark, emotionally searing terms. It follows two mostly-unconnected Lakota boys – 12-year-old Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) – as they eek out a life for themselves, living hand-to-mouth in grinding poverty but boyishly hustling like the heroes of an old Italian neorealist masterpiece. Co-directors Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, and their Native American screenwriters Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, sweeten the tough stuff with hope and cautious optimism. Blunt yet lyrical, it’s a deeply rewarding watch.

A juicy organic tomato of a movie that deservedly won Berlin’s Golden Bear, Carla Simón’s channels the Spanish filmmaker’s own experiences growing up on a Catalan farm to give life to one hard-working farming family. A new landowner's attempt to install solar panels threatens the farmers' livelihood in a movie that succeeds as a family drama and a deconstruction of capitalism. With incredible performances from the non-professional actors playing stressed-out peach farmers, Simon crafts a worthy follow-up to her sparkling childhood memoir Summer 1993. 

It’s complicated enough when stay-at-home dad Haider (Ali Junejo) finds fulfilment as a backing dancer to trans performer Bibi (trans actress Alina Khan) in Lahore. When he also finds love with her, the fabric of his life – and his family’s – begins to unravel. Faced with Pakistan’s draconian censorship laws, Joyland had to struggle to the screen, but you’d never know it from its effortless humour, compassion and craft. A bold snapshot of Pakistani society, masculinity and gender in flux, it would feel progressive if it’d been set in Paris or Palm Springs. 

Does it sound like an unquestioning hymn to capitalism? Yep. Does it get close to deifying Michael Jordan? That too. But there’s something in Ben Affleck’s pacy, loose-limbed retelling of Nike’s efforts to sign a young Jordan from under the noses of more powerful rivals Adidas and Converse that blasts past any reservations. That secret sauce is a simple but infectious joy in sharp dialogue and characterisation that feels like a throwback to Hollywood’s ’70s golden age. It doesn’t hurt to have Matt Damon schlebbing-up winningly as Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike NBA savant willing to risk everything for Jordan’s signature, and Affleck himself in as a wonderfully droopy version of Nike founder Phil Knight. Championship rings for all involved.

Not so much ‘magical realism’ as magical and realistic, Charlotte Regan’s debut paints in much brightest colours than you’d perhaps expect from a film about a young girl swerving social services in an east London estate. Full of big laughs, it’s a loose-limbed depiction of that girl, 12-year-old Georgie (the brilliant Lola Campbell), as she reluctantly reconnects with the dad she’s never met (Triangle of Sadness’s Harris Dickinson). The offbeat bond that develops between them is a reminder of Taika Waititi’s Boy, with Regan’s affection for her characters making for a movie with a generous heart and an irrepressible spirit.

The best Alexandre Dumas adaptations in decades – sorry, Dogtanian and Paul WS Anderson fans – this swaggering French adventure flick has everything you could want from a swashbuckling caper. The improbably sexy cast has Eva Green as the pipe-puffing Milady, executing Cardinal Richelieu’s devilish scheme against a gauche monarch, the English, the Protestants and our heroes themselves, the Musketeers – here featuring a moody Vincent Cassel and a flamboyant Romain Duris. We came for the all-star line-up and stayed for the blur of sword fights, horse chases and smart storytelling choices. Roll on part deux later this year.

A nerve-shredding modern Spanish parable that offers a gradually suffocating fog of xenophobia, resentment and envy, this year’s Goya Award winner is set among scrubby, hardscrabble farmsteads of Galicia. Inglourious Basterds’ Denis Ménochet essays a brooding kind of restraint as teacher-turned-farmer Antoine in the face of increasing intimidation. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s carefully constructed slowburn thriller is full of great performances, too, especially from Marina Foïs as Antoine’s dogged wife and Luis Zahera as the sinewy, menacing neighbour who hates everything the couple stand for. 

Fresh from Paul Verhoeven’s sexy nun psychodrama Benedetta, Virginie Efira takes things down a notch or two as the survivor of a Bataclan-style massacre at a Parisian bistro. Full of sensitivity in its depiction of the lonely path walked by a PTSD sufferer, French director Alice Winocour’s enthralling drama is alive with empathy. And it’s the Caesar-winning Efira who centres it all as a woman emotionally imprisoned by her trauma, with Benoît Magimel providing soulful support as a fellow survivor who helps her through. 

Inspired by Swedish author Andreas Malm’s eco-manifesto, which suggested that non-violent protest was doomed to fall short in the face of the climate change catastrophe, co-writer/director Daniel Goldhaber and his diverse young cast (American Honey star Sasha Lane is a standout) craft an urgent thriller exploring the personal toll of committing to an existential cause. The source text was dynamite, while this is more of a slow burn. But when it catches fire, it’s both a compelling thriller and a clarion call to action. 

It would have been so easy for Darren Aronofsky’s adapted-from-the-stage chamber piece to get swamped by its prosthetic, fat-suited artifice and one-location staginess. That it doesn’t is down to a career-best performance from international treasure Brendan Fraser. He makes you take grieving, apartment-bound college tutor Charlie, a man facing up to his own mortality, to your heart in just a few scenes, supercharging this fable of human frailty and reconciliation with endless empathy and emotion. We’re not crying, you’re crying. 

A toy inventor (Get Out’s Allison Williams) creates a sentient A.I. doll with creepy eyes and the grip of an industrial vice as a companion for her bereaved niece. What could go wrong? Just about everything, as this giddily mean-spirited Blumhouse horror charts. Despite having Saw’s James Wan’s boody fingerprints all over it as co-creator, it reins in the nastiness in favour of big laughs, including some instantly meme-worthy doll dances. Roll on M4GAN. 

Cinematically, the fantasy genre has tended take itself very seriously, but Dungeons & Dragons comes at its swords and sorcery with a refreshing and exuberant irreverence. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein respect their role-playing tabletop game source material, but also mirror the sense of levity and improvised invention you get while playing it. With the help of an amiable ensemble, the jokes come as thick and fast as the FX-driven action. Game for a laugh, indeed.

Hirokazu Kore-eda has a knack for taking gritty slices of social realism and sprinkling them with a kind of escapist stardust. Who else could turn the story of actual baby traffickers into a bubbly feel-nice yarn in much the same way Shoplifters parlayed hard-scrabble lives into a quiet heartwarmer full of wit and heart? Here he heads to Busan, South Korea, and borrows Bong Joon-ho’s old mucker Song Kang-ho to headline another touching, wryly funny tale of surrogate families. Charles Dickens would be proud to have written a character like Song’s larger-than-life adoption broker Sang-hyun.