Some people like to complain about the state of modern cinema, and to their credit, some years in recent memory have been impacted by various events of a worldwide nature… namely, the pandemic (and its lockdowns) as well as the 2023 Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes. 2020 and 2021 were impacted by the former, and some film releases near the end of 2023, and throughout a good chunk of 2024, were impacted by the former.
But there was a brief period between, mostly in 2022 and most of 2023, when things were pretty healthy and lots of great movies came out. 2023 was especially fruitful, as there were some great ones that are only going to get honorable mentions here, like: Poor Things, The Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall, and John Wick: Chapter 4. What’s focused on below, instead, are the genuinely masterful releases that are difficult to fault; the ones that will likely stand the test of time and be considered classics in the years to come.
10
‘Robot Dreams’
There are a couple of other animated movies from 2023 that are arguably even better (more on those in a bit), but Robot Dreams, if it had been released in most other years, would probably be the year’s best. It’s a movie about a dog and a robot who are only known as Dog and Robot, with the film having no dialogue, and it all being about what happens when the pair bond, but then find themselves separated.
While Robot Dreams is endearing and sometimes funny, it’s also surprisingly emotional, and it’s hard not to feel moved at some point while watching it (the ending is especially brutal… not literally, but emotionally brutal). It’s very simple, in terms of its animation and story, but it does a lot with a little, and it ends up sticking with you more than you might initially expect such a film to do.
9
‘Perfect Days’
Perfect Days is about a man who lives on his own in Tokyo, and he cleans toilets for a living. It is not boring, even though summarizing the film in such a way might well have people running. It’s a movie about the simple things in life, and trying to find a level of peace and contentment with a little, rather than a lot, and it highlights a kind of lifestyle that’s increasingly rarer in these modern times.
But it’s also a bit more than that, with Perfect Days being willing to shift a bit throughout, and maybe even mildly subvert expectations, or at least suggest what might happen if the routine depicted starts to encounter some obstacles, all while also exploring why the central character might have isolated himself in such a way. But at the end of it all, Perfect Days is still a very calming and moving film, and so long as you’re patient and open-minded, it’s pretty easy to get swept up in it all.
8
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
For much of Martin Scorsese’s filmmaking career, Robert De Niro was his go-to leading man, but that changed throughout the 2000s and most of the 2010s, since Leonardo DiCaprio kind of took that spot (though De Niro was the star of 2019’s The Irishman). So, Killers of the Flower Moon was kind of a big deal, since it was the first feature film Scorsese directed that starred both his favorite lead actors at the same time.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a difficult film about a horrible event in American history, but it needed to be uncompromising and harrowing to hit home and feel sincere.
Also, Killers of the Flower Moon was kind of big in general, perhaps notoriously running for about three and a half hours while also being exceptionally heavy. It’s a difficult film about a horrible event in American history, but it needed to be uncompromising and harrowing to hit home and feel sincere. It’s a movie about great evil, and evildoers either justifying or shrugging off the things they do, and what the film is trying to say does indeed have implications beyond the specific historical story being told.
7
‘Godzilla Minus One’
What a series Godzilla is, having started more than 70 years ago while still finding new ways to be surprising, exciting, and entertaining. Godzilla Minus One did indeed breathe new life into the long-running series, going back further in the past to tell what might initially seem like a familiar story for the Godzilla series, but everything is more intense, emotional, and riveting here than you might expect.
Godzilla Minus One does what Shin Godzilla also did: it makes Godzilla genuinely scary, but in a different way to that 2016 film. Godzilla Minus One is a perfect gateway film into the series if you’ve not seen any before, or are more familiar with the American releases. And yeah, those ones can sometimes be fun, but they’re not as good as the best of the Japanese releases, because Godzilla is handled best in his country of origin, most of the time.
6
‘Oppenheimer’
With Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan moved away from science fiction and/or action for the first time in quite a while, since even Dunkirk was pretty explosive and focused on combat quite a bit. Instead, this is a historical drama about a real-life person, J. Robert Oppenheimer, mostly focused on how he contributed to the construction of the atomic bomb, which was used at the end of World War II to devastating effect.
Oppenheimer is about genius and passion funneled into something deeply troubling, as well as an exploration of the consequences that the whole ordeal entailed. Further, the film is a bit of a legal drama, it’s existentially horrifying, and it is paced in a way that makes it often feel like a thriller (despite also being a lengthy film, at 181 minutes). It bites off a lot, but manages to digest it all, and it understandably won Best Picture at the Oscars, which some might say was overdue for a filmmaker of Nolan’s abilities. Still, better late than never, if that is the case.
5
‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’
Just as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the best superhero movie of 2018, so too was its sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the best superhero movie of 2023. The first film introduced a multiverse of Spider-People, and then Across the Spider-Verse introduces a whole lot more, and sets up a pretty massive amount of conflict and drama that, as of 2025, is still not concluded.
The third Spider-Verse movie, if as strong as the first two, might well complete one of the most impressive trilogies ever made, but time will tell. For the moment, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is still easy to appreciate and enjoy, even if you do have to contend with that rather agonizing cliffhanger. It handles the idea of a multiverse right, it excels as a work of animation, and it finds new, funny, and exciting things to do with the largely unstoppable (at least for now) superhero genre.
4
‘The Zone of Interest’
Alongside Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest is another 2023 historical film that looks at a horrific event in history, all in a way to make you think about other events that might’ve happened since. It’s about Rudolf Höss and his family living outside the Auschwitz concentration camp, since Höss is the camp’s commandant, with him and much of his family living their lives in an alarmingly normal way while atrocities continually happen out of sight, but agonizingly close to them.
So, it’s all about the banality of evil, and it’s also one of the most disturbing films in recent memory, even though it’s shot in a way that shows very little graphic content. It’s what’s implied, and what’s heard, that makes The Zone of Interest feel so hard to shake, and the approach here is unlike any other film set during World War II out there.
3
‘Past Lives’
Past Lives wants to break your heart, and it ends up being pretty damn good at doing just that. It’s one of those ultimate “exploring what could’ve been” sort of films, being about two childhood friends who came close to becoming something more than just friends, but then they were separated because one of their families had to move. But they reconnect as adults, and some of those intense feelings are still there, even though one of them is now with another partner.
So, Past Lives very simply explores an emotionally difficult situation, and it makes the audience sit with the tension and sadness inherent to it all. Past Lives is very realistic and not exactly Hollywood in its approach to the romance genre, but that might be part of what makes it so good. It’s not an easy film to watch, and it is very patiently paced, but it’s ultimately as rewarding as it is intensely bittersweet, sort of like Robot Dreams but without as much humor and not nearly as much remembering the 21st night of September.
2
‘The Boy and the Heron’
An absolutely exhausting and overwhelming film the first time you see it, and then something even more affecting upon rewatches, The Boy and the Heron is immense and truly thought-provoking, and sees Hayao Miyazaki making the most personal film of his career to date. It’s a movie about legacy, growing up, and accepting certain hard truths about life, and the ultimate end to it all.
Death hangs heavy over much of The Boy and the Heron, even if the stakes might not be life-or-death in the traditional sense. It’s got a compelling story, and something of a fantasy adventure (expected from most Miyazaki films) to keep you engaged the first time around, but it’s what The Boy and the Heron has to say subtextually that makes it a genuinely masterful animated film, and one of Miyazaki’s very best… and that’s saying a lot, but it’s true.
1
‘All of Us Strangers’
It’s hard to talk about All of Us Strangers without running the risk of sounding hyperbolic. As for what it’s about, it’s also a difficult one to talk about in terms of its narrative, since there’s a good deal that proves surprising here, and it’s the kind of thing that works more the less you know about how it plays out (and eventually ends).
It’s about death, grief, memory, and various other heavy/broad things, all done in a way that works as a fantasy film, a kind of supernatural one, and also a romance movie. All of Us Strangers finds genuinely unexpected ways to be moving and ultimately devastating, and so you might think you’ve seen it all when it comes to emotional movies, but this is next-level stuff. Again, sorry about the hyperbole, but this is already a film that feels like an all-timer.
