Our critics share their 10 favorite films of 2023

click to enlarge

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

For cinephiles, creating a list of one's favorite films of the year can often be an invigorating treat. It can also be incredibly hard to narrow things down (an even harder process considering how many movies that may be vying for Oscars — American Fiction, Zone of Interest, etc. — haven't even opened in Spokane yet). But by sampling the various voices you see on the Screen section page, hopefully you can find some of your 2023 favs featured here while discovering a few missed gems for your personal watchlist. (SETH SOMMERFELD)

JOSH BELL

9. Birth/Rebirth

8. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

7. You Hurt My Feelings

6. How to Blow Up a Pipeline

5. Past Lives

4. Eileen

3. Priscilla

2. Sanctuary

1. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Life often feels like a coming-of-age story that never ends. Maybe that's why I was drawn to so many movies this year about people trying to figure out their lives, whether they're 11-year-old girls like the protagonist of Kelly Fremon Craig's wonderfully warm Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret or codependent adult kinksters like the main characters in the twisted BDSM drama Sanctuary. The uncertainty of the world is reflected in the uncertainty of these characters, even if their journeys ultimately lead them to greater understandings of themselves.

Craig does justice to a beloved novel that's been a staple of adolescence for decades, mixing sweet nostalgia with a clear-eyed view of the past and of the difficulties of growing up. Abby Ryder Fortson's Margaret is only a few years younger than Cailee Spaeny's title character is when she first meets Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, another tender but darker look at the perils of impending womanhood. Growing up is no guarantee of a resolution, as the main characters in Eileen, Past Lives, and Sanctuary all have to confront.

There's joy in these films, too, especially in Alexander Payne's sweet Christmastime story The Holdovers, although even that movie is marked by the specter of the Vietnam War. Modern viewers don't have to face that particular threat, but with everything else bombarding us on a daily basis, the best movies of 2023 acknowledge that uneasiness and provide a way to face it, with solidarity or vindictiveness, for a brief moment.

click to enlarge

Origin

MARYANN JOHANSON

9. The Holdovers

8. The End We Start From

7. Barbie

6. Asteroid City

5. Maestro

4. Poor Things

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

2. May December

1. Origin

It's been an amazing year at the movies for reconsidering ideas that are so big that they're usually the unseen cultural water we swim in — from colonialism to patriarchy to homophobia to how pop culture irons oppression and abuse into something so flat and unobtrusive that it stops registering.

And no film does that with more gentleness, more compassion, than Ava DuVernay's Origin, the based-on-fact story about journalist Isabel Wilkerson's research into our collective impulses for subjugation and hierarchy. This is no dry academic treatise but an achingly beautiful tapestry of societal grief overlain with personal loss, with a subtle yet deeply moving central performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. In the midst of digesting pain big and small and letting it fuel her search for a more profound understanding of humanity, she utters a line of a dialogue that could sum up the underlying vibe of this year at the movies: "I just want to scream." I'm struck by the fact that several of the best movies this year do indeed feature characters screaming incoherently at the state of their world, often secretly, as if they were breaking a taboo with their rage.

But Origin also highlights a human necessity that is missing from even some of those very best films: joy. There's a determined optimism that, even if we're screaming now, we can be better and do better in the future.

click to enlarge

Past Lives

CHASE HUTCHINSON

9. Asteroid City

8. How to Blow Up a Pipeline

7. Showing Up

6. Killers of the Flower Moon

5. The Boy and the Heron

4. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

3. The Zone of Interest

2. Skinamarink

1. Past Lives

Andrew Haigh crafted a great ghost story about seeing and being seen in All of Us Strangers. Wes Anderson silenced the silly TikTok imitators with the distinct and profound Asteroid City. Daniel Goldhaber and Ariela Barer made a radical adaptation in How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Kelly Reichardt proved once more she is one of the greatest American artists with Showing Up. Martin Scorsese returned and Lily Gladstone closed a great year in Killers of the Flower Moon. Hayao Miyazaki delivered one of his most truly vibrant visions yet with The Boy and the Heron. Raven Jackson burst onto the scene with the absolutely astounding All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Jonathan Glazer utterly shattered the mind and soul via the monumental The Zone of Interest. Kyle Edward Ball made a modern horror masterpiece in the minimalist nightmare Skinamarink.

However, in a year of great films from both veteran filmmakers and exciting new voices, it was writer-director Celine Song who made the most stunning of them all with her debut Past Lives. Ever since it made a splash at Sundance and opened the Seattle International Film Festival, it has remained imprinted in my mind as one of the greatest love stories ever made. Much like Aftersun did last year, it is a film that takes us through time and space to breathtaking effect. At the same time, each watch has brought into focus just how uniquely layered it is. In a year of magnificent movies that could have easily gotten this spot, it still always came back to this one.

click to enlarge

Killers of the Flower Moon

NATHAN WEINBENDER

9. Priscilla

8. The Beasts

7. Poor Things

6. Full Time

5. Barbie

4. Return to Seoul

3. May December

2. Beau Is Afraid

1. Killers of the Flower Moon

Ambition alone doesn't make a movie great. Think about how often you see a piece of art whose reach exceeds its grasp, that bites off more than it can chew, that writes a check its ass can't cash. But a movie also can't achieve greatness without taking big swings, and more and more filmmaking is simply averse to risk.

So in culling the year's releases down to my 10 favorites, I looked for films that did amazing things within their respective ambitions — whether it was a rustic study of warring farmers in Spain (The Beasts), a satiric melodrama about two women and the man they manipulate (May December) or a pop juggernaut that considered the complicated legacy of a famous doll (Barbie, obviously).

Ambition doesn't necessarily correspond with scope, either. A few of these films created vast universes: the porous nightmare world of Beau Is Afraid, the Victorian whirligigs of Poor Things, the kill-or-be-killed ecosystem of John Wick: Chapter 4. But there can be ambition in modest, human stories, too: Look at the working class tensions of the French drama Full Time, at the maddeningly chameleonic protagonist of Return to Seoul, at the vivid reconstruction and bold recontextualization of American iconography in Priscilla.

But in terms of ambition, no movie could match Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese's film about the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma. It's a stunning, infuriating, self-reflective epic of a distinctly American evil, and it shows in stark detail how white supremacy and complicity not only helped fund our great frontier but warped the ways in which the ugliest chapters of our history are remembered. At 81, our greatest living film director is still finding new ways to challenge himself and his audience. In a long career punctuated with violence, this is his most brutal and unforgiving film.

click to enlarge

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

SETH SOMMERFELD

9. Bottoms

8. Godzilla Minus One

7. Oppenheimer

6. Suzume

5. Poor Things

4. Maestro

3. Barbie

2. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part 1)

1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Staring at my list of the best movies of 2023, I am forced to ask myself an uncomfortable question: Am I a basic b—h?

To say I wasn't moved by this year's crop of smaller films is a massive understatement, as this collection of flicks for the popcorn-munching masses makes starkly clear. There were spots for some very strange gems — Suzame's supernatural journey with a chair boyfriend, Bottoms' wonderfully over-the-top and absurdist feminist send-up of high school movies, Poor Thing's monsterously (and delightfully) twisted fairy tale — but for the most part the smaller critical darlings were... fine... at best.

But as I can practically feel my film cred evaporating into thin air, let me attempt to spin this to the positive... Pretty great year for crowd-pleasing blockbusters!

Barbie is one of the weirdest blockbusters of all time, somehow balancing being unabashedly feminist and ultra-consumerist thanks to glowing performances and relentlessly funny script. Oppenheimer isn't a typical Christopher Nolan spectacle, but offers up a compelling ensemble acting clinic. Dead Reckoning is maybe the best Mission: Impossible film since the original, offering all the over-the-top thrills you want from a summer action movie. Godzilla Minus One somehow made me cry multiple times watching a kaiju film thanks to its thoughtful examination of the nature of sacrifice. Mutant Mayhem scratched my Ninja Turtles fan itch with a much needed infusion of a more rough-edged Spider-Verse-esque art style.

Speaking of which, Across the Spider-Verse had the inevitable task of following up a paradigm shifting masterwork, but still stands up as an elite marvel.The animation team went even further into gorgeous and mind-bendingly experimental territory while expanding Spider-Gwen's reality and throwing just an astounding number of Spideys on the screen. If I had to live in a cinematic universe, this would be the one. If the third Spider-Verse installment in the trilogy can match the first two entries, we might be looking at the greatest trilogy in cinematic history.