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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.