Looking back: the best films of 2023 (UK release dates)
From Greta Gerwig's box-office busting Barbie with Margot Robbie to Damien Chazelle's hedonistic 20s epic Babylon that also stars Margot Robbie, here are the best films of 2023
10. Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig [STAR:4]
Ordinarily, this list would exclude the top box-office earner. But Barbie feels like the obvious exception due to its colourful impact on the culture via Barbenheimer, as well as its infectiously entertaining and politically satisfying story. Instead of a transparent cash-grab, the film succeeds as an anti-patriarchal adventure of a feminine ideal evolving into an independent heroine: from concept to human.
Greta Gerwig rose in low-budget American cinema with her writing and performances alongside partner Noah Baumbach (co-writer on Barbie), eventually making the coming-of-age movie Lady Bird and then wonderfully adapting Little Women. Although audiences might’ve lost an indie treasure, especially as she eyes the new Netflix Narnia reboot, she’s jolted a more colourful, comedic and feministic approach into blockbuster filmmaking – from which (you’d hope) Hollywood will learn and improve.
Photo: Warner Bros.
9. The Old Oak, dir. Ken Loach [STAR:4]
Given the atrocities happening in the world, the issues around immigration (especially this year) have shaken many to their core – inspiring the best and worst of humanity. This is exemplified in Ken Loach’s latest, and probably last, film The Old Oak, set in a Northern mining town that’s reaching economic destitution during the cliff-edge year of 2016. When a coach-load of Syrian refugees arrive to live in local housing, they face fierce opposition via racism and Islamophobia.
But the charitable landlord of The Old Oak pub TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) turns against the prejudice to help the refugee photographer Yara (Ebla Mair) and restore the town’s former union spirit. Like a lot of Loach films, scenes creep into your body and set it alight – but thankfully, The Old Oak offers some hope to cling onto. The octogenarian director even grazes the transcendental, opting for love and kindness rather than division and scorn.
Photo: StudioCanal
8. TÁR, dir. Todd Field [STAR:4]
There have been variations on the name of Todd Field’s patient psychological drama: is it Tár or TÁR? After witnessing the mass of personality and performance infused in the titular character – the EGOT composer/conductor Lydia Tár (a commanding Cate Blanchett) – only the capitalised version makes sense. It shows the power she wields over her Germany-based orchestra, extending to those behind the scenes – the visual and audio recorders, the board members, the young and pretty female subordinates. She’s a supreme dictator, and won't compromise for anything less.
When Lydia's control inevitably slips, a guilty chaos pervades her everyday – submitting to a dream state of violence, visions and paranoia. Although she often isn’t likeable, she’s swarmed in a stubborn, conscientious mystery that encourages persistent deconstruction. With her personal and professional sins, the film asks dark questions about the separation and connection between art and artist.
Photo: Focus Features
7. Beau is Afraid, dir. Ari Aster [STAR:4]
No other film this year has dramatised the anxiety of modern life (and life in general) as stressfully as Beau is Afraid, the latest from Hereditary and Midsommar filmmaker Ari Aster. The world outside is a catastrophising obstacle course, family members are compulsively disappointed, and everyone wishes some kind of harm to each other. Such is the confused fate of Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), who tries his hardest to fulfil a surreal American odyssey to his dominating mother’s house. On that road, he meets grieving families, elaborate theatre groups and tortured soldiers that warp his sense of self.
Despite Aster’s back catalogue, it’s perhaps inaccurate to label this a horror movie; it's more of a twisted comedy blended with a Kafka-esque, Freudian nightmare that immerses you into an extended panic attack. Beau is Afraid is a rarity: a gross, disturbing and brilliant experience supported with such budget and top-tier talent.
Photo: A24
6. Infinity Pool, dir. Brandon Cronenberg [STAR:5]
Brandon Cronenberg is on his way to competing with his father, David Cronenberg, and maybe even becoming the family’s superior filmmaker. Both dabble in surrealism, body horror and dystopian fiction, around which the patriarch created a cult following. But the son is better at sketching his characters, filling them with colours and emotions before pushing them into extreme situations. It was the case with his hitman thriller Possessor, now it is with his demented doppelganger drama Infinity Pool.
Like a horror version of The White Lotus, the film follows failed writer James (Alexander Skarsgard) as he holidays with his rich girlfriend (Cleopatra Coleman) at a resort in a poor country. As he explores beyond the barbed-wire fences with younger admirer Gabi (a frightening Mia Goth), James becomes embroiled in the country’s bizarre politics – involving the creation of a clone version of himself to be executed. Ego, privilege and hedonism slice into each other in this freaky mutilation of masculinity.
Photo: Universal
5. Broker, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda [STAR:5]
Hirokazu Kore-eda loves an ethically dubious surrogate family, as seen in his Palme d’Or-winning grifter drama Shoplifters and his recent black-market adoption film Broker. For the latter, Hirokazu branches out from his native Japan to South Korea – examining the controversial practice of ‘baby boxes’, in which anonymous mothers leave their unwanted newborns. They’re subsequently raised in the attached orphanage, where a sceptical grown-up orphan Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) works. With laundryman Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), he steals abandoned babies to sell to desperate parents.
Although the premise fiddles with moral principles, you soon realise the motivations are almost altruistic. Dong-soo and Sang-hyun are also people who’ve been left behind, and they want to secure the best lives for these babies. When they prep their latest sprog to be sold, the mother Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun) discovers what they’re doing and decides to help them. The four of them grow into a connective family, a comfort blanket for the rejected. And despite these traumas, Hirokazu creates a serene, beautiful road movie bolstered by a poignant piano score by Jung Jae-il.
Photo: Picturehouse Entertainment
4. Saltburn, dir. Emerald Fennell [STAR:5]
The common perception of the upper class is politeness, sophistication and prudence with the kind of refined lifestyle to which all should aspire. But in her second feature Saltburn, writer/director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) penetrates the malevolence within those aristocratic values as well as the class consciousness that elevates them. The residents of the palatial country estate Saltburn feel entitled to tread outside those perceived margins: revealing the kinks and traumas that burrow under their masks of wealth.
The enigmatic antihero Oliver Quick (breathlessly played by Barry Keoghan) enters the house after befriending popular rich kid Felix (Jacob Elordi), to whose family it belongs. This erupts into competitive and sexual manipulations, demonstrative of the strains people will go to climb the spiky social ladder. Saltburn succeeds as an unforgettably weird class drama that tears apart identity and stitches up the gore to reach an affluent way of life.
Photo: Amazon Studios
3. Return to Seoul, dir. Davy Chou [STAR:5]
The most underrated film of the year, Return to Seoul is a mature, fractured meditation on the immigrant experience – pursuing darker inquiries about warped identity. Freddie (Park Ji-min) was born in South Korea but adopted by a couple in France. But in her mid-20s, she rapidly chooses (apparently by accident) to take a plane to South Korea and explore her birth country for the first time.
Freddie is energetically extroverted, forcing everyone she meets to engage with each other. She’s clearly unsure what her objective is; it’s like she finds herself doing things on impulse rather than making conscious decisions. On this passive route, she tries to find her biological parents. But Freddie’s detachment from Korean customs disengages, scares, and alienates her.
Writer/director Davy Chou slices his character further by examining Freddie’s life at successive ages, observing how she fits into different faces and stumbles into different jobs but never relaxes into one persona. She’s eternally lost in this existential crisis, never finding a decent grip despite familial hopes along the way. And yet Chou’s detailed direction and Park’s nuanced performance find a blurred throughline, crafting a bleak but fascinating character-piece.
Photo: MK2 Films
2. Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan [STAR:5]
And the Barbenheimer award goes to… Oppenheimer! Although Christopher Nolan is effectively a Hollywood filmmaker (The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar), he’s one of the few innovators at the top – concurrently experimenting with narrative and technology to create unforgettable cinematic events. Oppenheimer absorbs your current reality and explodes atomic truth bombs that burn to your core. This is a biopic like no other.
Nolan splits and shuffles the narrative into the origins of atom bomb inventor J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and the trials that would plague his later life. A post-Marvel Robert Downey, Jr. outdoes himself as the film’s villain Lewis Strauss, who tries to discredit Oppenheimer after the latter speaks out against the postwar creation of the hydrogen bomb. It’s representative of the complexities in wielding nuclear weapons, which not only alarmed the greatest civilizations in the latter 20th century but cemented a permanent paranoia about global annihilation. Even if the fear is more relaxed in the present, Nolan shakes you awake about the destructive possibilities.
The legacy of Oppenheimer is, therefore, a divisive and difficult one – scaffolded by the victory of the Second World War, but blown apart by the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After watching the film, visuals of death and destruction superimpose themselves on the seemingly peaceful landscapes around you; a mushroom cloud of revelations detonates in your head.
Photo: Universal
1. Babylon, dir. Damien Chazelle [STAR:5]
Babylon is 2023’s supreme Marmite movie, but it's also the best. Damien Chazelle’s orgiastic epic of 1920s Hollywood and the sound-and-vision friction that came after is a stupendously immersive party, like The Artist but after dark: supplied with sex and drugs and jazz music. Its lack of Oscar noms for writing, directing or cinematography is a grave sin against movies.
The film is a vast, three-hour love letter to cinema, but doesn’t ignore the darkness underneath – rising, ironically, with moral censorship in Hollywood. Film stars like Nellie La Roy (a career-best Margot Robbie) and Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) are chucked from the heady, inebriated haze of silent films to the rigid, formulaic tedium of eye-sore sound stages. Liberation is strangled and society regresses, with vices sought elsewhere in the hidden hellscapes of Los Angeles – one belonging to a crazed Tobey Maguire as demonic gangster James McKay.
Through these various transitions, the ambitious Manny (Diego Calva) is always there to sort out problems and works his way up the Hollywood ladder to achieve his dreams. But in his experiences, rough and exciting and traumatising as they are, the spirit of moviemaking is still alive in his soul. As well as hosting a Dionysian celebration of the early days of film with an endlessly creative soundtrack by Justin Hurwitz, Chazelle never shies away from the questionable aspects: the final scene a mesmerising cognitive dissonance between love and hate for the medium.
Photo: Paramount
Honourable mentions:
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, dir. Laura Poitras
Amanda, dir. Carolina Cavalli
Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, dir. Kelly Fremon Craig
The Eight Mountains, dir. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch
The Fabelmans, dir. Steven Spielberg
Godland, dir. Hlynur Pálmason
Holy Spider, dir. Ali Abbasi
How to Have Sex, dir. Molly Manning Walker
Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese
One Fine Morning, dir. Mia Hanson-Løve
Past Lives, dir. Celine Song
Pearl, dir. Ti West
Reality, dir. Tina Satter
The Royal Hotel, dir. Kitty Green
Rye Lane, dir. Raine Allen-Miller
Scrapper, dir. Charlotte Regan
Theater Camp, dir. Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman
Women Talking, dir. Sarah Polley