The best films of 2023—and where to watch them

Ostracized after she transitioned, former music producer D. Smith reinvented herself as a documentarian with this stylish, explicit and fearlessly candid portrait of transgender sex workers in New York. With honesty and humor, her four subjects welcome the audience into their lives and livelihoods, shattering stereotypes about their clientele while refusing to sugarcoat the danger of their line of work. No film that offered interviews with these women could be less than engaging, but Kokomo City rejects the polite functionality of talking-heads nonfiction in both look and rhythm; its gorgeous black-and-white cinematography evokes the history of “direct cinema,” while its editing lends the project a rollicking music-video soul. It’s classic and jaggedly modern, putting to shame the slick infotainment and celebrity profiles littering the American documentary landscape.

David Fincher’s new Netflix thriller is an exercise in ruthless minimalism, meticulously tracking a heartless assassin played by Michael Fassbender across the globe as he hunts down various targets and demonstrates what another middle-aged agent of death once referred to as his “particular set of skills.” But look beyond the gleaming surfaces and procedural video-game pleasures of the movie and The Killer reveals hidden depths of subversive meaning; it’s really an allegory of late-stage-capitalism, in which a freelancer accepts his position as another disposable cog of the gig economy, as available for the right price as any item on an Amazon wishlist. The comedy, meanwhile, is brilliantly self-deprecating: Fincher may have dedicated his last movie, Mank, to his late father, but it didn’t look half as “personal” as this ode to the futile pursuit of perfectionism.

No one observes hostile workplaces with more insight than writer-director Kitty Green and her regular star, Julia Garner. In The Assistant, the two captured with disturbing clarity the turn-a-blind-eye politics of an office that was Harvey Weinstein’s in all but name. And now they’ve reunited for the similarly fictionalized true story of a couple of twenty-something American women (Garner and Jessica Hanwick) bartending at an Outback saloon where just about every man in sight is some shade of sketchy, suspicious or unsafe. Some seem disappointed that The Royal Hotel never entirely pays off its suffocating, simmering suspense, but that’s crucial to a thriller that exists on the purgatorial edge of violence, where constant vigilance is the only thing keeping a situation from going very south. It’s a horror movie about the horror of being a woman in the world, keeping one eye open as predators circle like hungry dingos. 

In which Houston’s distinguished dollhouse visionary returns to the Southwest, spiritually if not physically. The eponymous setting of Wes Anderson’s bittersweet wonder is a small desert town of the 1950s—a mirage of mid-century Americana constructed in Europe and every bit as proudly artificial as the extravagant Wes Worlds of his other elaborate comedy contraptions. This time, though, the inherent ersatz quality of the setting is built right into the structure of the movie, which positions Anderson’s usual powerhouse ensemble of movie stars as both fictional characters in a play and the (also fictional) actors playing them. Beneath all the meta distancing devices is a moving family drama and an even more moving defense of artificiality as a way to show the audience who you are. Asteroid City may not technically be a homecoming, but it does feel like a window into Wes Anderson.

Even more excitingly anomalous than Oppenheimer was Kyle Edward Ball’s shoestring midnight curiosity, which just might be the most radically uncommercial movie ever to open in hundreds of theaters across America. Though there’s a nominal plot—two very young children awaken in the middle of the night to find their father gone, the architecture of their home in flux, and a strange force groaning orders from the dark—this ultra-low-budget Canadian chiller is borderline abstract in execution, with almost no dialogue and low-light imagery that often makes it hard to even discern what you’re looking at. Bellows of boredom greeted its unlikely release, but for those who could get on the proper wavelength, Skinamarink was a one-of-a-kind experience: a kind of home movie from Hell, evoking the primal helplessness of childhood more powerfully than any more conventional film ever really has.

A Danish priest (Elliott Crosset Hove) sets out to build a church in remote, rural Iceland. The long trek tests his fortitude, his patience, his commitment to God. To the canon of movies about arduous wilderness pilgrimages, one can now add this underseen drama, which brings a primeval world to life through the stark beauty of director Hlynur Pálmason’s 35mm imagery and an acute attention to details of 19th-century routine and ritual. For all the focus on the unforgiving terrain, it’s landscapes of the mind and heart that Godland truly navigates; the film locates both tension and the driest of dry humor in the crucible of a holy man awakening to his own failings, including an increasingly un-Christian resentment for the rugged guide (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) who becomes his foil and rival. The film is Herzogian in the best way: strange, mysterious, unsparing.

Another epic of crime and sin from Martin Scorsese, this one stretching back to a string of savage, unconscionable indigenous murders in 1920s Oklahoma—but also, in larger spirit, to the crime and the sin on which all of America rests. Scorsese boldly restructures David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, sidelining the FBI white-knight angle and laying out the disturbing events instead through the lens of the toxic love story between a greedy dolt (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the wealthy Osage woman (Lily Gladstone, piercing the film with her anguish and outrage) he betrays. A pointedly fanciful epilogue self-consciously acknowledges the matter of who gets to tell this story and for what audience. But Marty’s mammoth portrait of American evil gains a timeless and disturbingly timely resonance by centering a creature as pathetically craven as DiCaprio’s Ernest—an instrument of genocide pathologically divorced from his complicity.

Some of the most astonishing footage ever captured by a movie camera, and also some of the hardest to watch… which might explain why so few caught the newest eye-opening, eye-slicing documentary from adventurous Harvard ethnographers Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Named for a seminal anatomy text, the film goes inside a French hospital and then inside the patients themselves, using tiny cameras to offer a closer view of surgical science—of entrails, of ventricles, of a working brain—than any operating theater could provide. The fascinating contradiction of this nonfiction Fantastic Voyage is how it both demystifies the body and makes it look as strange and wondrous in endoscopic detail as an alien landscape. No movie this year had a more illuminating perspective on what it means to be human, laying bare the universal condition, literal guts and all.

Director Todd Haynes has spent his whole career finding wellsprings of emotion below the artificial surfaces of American life and Hollywood melodrama alike. Part of the genius of his latest and maybe greatest shadow soap opera is how it interrogates that very mission, following as it does a hack TV actress (Natalie Portman, winking at her own forays into biopic sensationalism) who goes looking for the unknowable truth behind a tabloid story clearly modeled on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal. Dripping with ironies, draped in the trappings of the Movies-of-the-Week it satirizes, May December is often screamingly funny. But the laughs blanket the deeper tragedy of the material, conveyed most clearly in Charles Melton’s heartbreaking performance as someone frozen between boyhood and manhood, his illusion of self just one more layer Haynes peels back.

How often is the best movie of the year also a bona fide box-office phenomenon? It’s tempting to celebrate Christopher Nolan’s dazzling, engrossing historical blockbuster as a reversion to the pre-Star Wars halcyon days when Hollywood made movies for grown-ups and people saw them in droves. But truthfully, a monster hit about quantum physics would be an outlier in any era. And there’s never been a biopic quite like Oppenheimer, which splinters the life and dark work of the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb into a densely procedural cautionary tale. The liquid momentum of Nolan’s montage takes on a damning philosophical import, suggesting the race of a brilliant mind—and the unstoppable clockwork mechanics of his Manhattan Project—unimpeded by any moral consideration. By the end, the logic of the film’s byzantine construction seems ethical in nature, a first-person reckoning. Only this particular maestro of the multiplex could turn a three-hour tour of one man’s tortured conscience into a line-around-the-block event.