When it comes to cinema, 2023 has been a year of extremes. Barbenheimer. Industry strike. Canceled projects. Uniting the audience. Political censorship. Spending it writing about the industry and its craft involves moving between hope and despair, between belief that cinema will flourish again, and watching it fight tooth and nail for its survival.
However, there were 15 films that demonstrated empathy, vision, and creative courage. He shows that, whatever the future holds, we can at least be sure that great art will always prevail.
Here are the best films of the past year, ranked by UK release dates.
- Reality
Playwright Tina Satter’s feature film debut is rooted in sheer, minimalist terror, and made necessary by its approximation of the truth. Reality, as in the film version of the play Is This a Room? Sater’s 2019 staging is a verbatim adaptation of the June 3, 2017, FBI interview with U.S. Air Force veteran and NSA-contracted translator reality Leigh Winner. Viner was accused of leaking an intelligence report on attempted Russian hacking of voter rolls. 2016 election, and sentenced under the 1917 Espionage Act. But these were not the actions of a trained spy, but of an ordinary man whose humanity made him a criminal under the law.
We see Winner (Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney) fussing over her pets as her home is invaded by an army of men who talk in slow, casual grunts. She apologizes for the disturbance and tries to find a private place where she can talk to the pair in charge, Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchant Davis). He speaks with mechanical politeness, just as we, the audience, begin to fathom the deeper denial at work here. No one says this in these transcripts torn from reality, but by the end of the day, this woman will be in jail.
- How to have sex
The excitement of Molly Manning Walker’s debut film is a tale of two halves. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) arrives in Malia, Crete with her two friends Skye (Lara Peake) and M (Enva Lewis) and is determined to lose her virginity. She’s 16 years old, fleeing rapidly beginning adulthood, and would rather drown herself in oblivion than read what’s inside the envelope of her GCSE results.
At first, the cycle of drinking, drinking, drinking, vomiting, sleeping, drinking, drinking, drinking is exhausting but tempting. Then Walker unsettles both his audience and Tara herself, as the resort’s ugly, exploitative side emerges from the shadows. It’s as if we’ve reached the end of the night, and someone has finally turned on the lights on the dancefloor. How to Have Sex is a loosely autobiographical opus from a first-time director who’s so smart and so sensitive that he doesn’t see the world of sex and won’t settle for anything other than brutal honesty.
- May December
May December is strongly the work of provocateur Todd Haynes, the artist who once dramatized Karen Carpenter’s struggle with anorexia and bulimia using Barbie dolls in her short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. It is (largely) based on the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, an American teacher who was jailed in 1997 for sexually abusing a 12-year-old child. She gave birth to the boy’s daughter and later married him. But Haynes, at first, presented his story the same way the media did – as pure tabloid sensation.
An actor (Natalie Portman) arrives at the door of Letourneau Gracie (Julianne Moore) in this film. She’s playing her in an upcoming film and is eager to reflect all of Gracie’s influences, from her stutter to the self-conscious way she bows her head like a sweet princess. May December is an opportunity for two of Hollywood’s most divine stars to stage a secret battle, one consisting almost entirely of incomplete sentences and twitching eyebrows. But, then, Joe (Charles Melton), Gracie’s victim and husband, comes into focus. The heartbreak of Melton’s performance – and our complicity in the melodrama that came before it – is almost impossible to bear.
- Priscilla
(Sabrina Lantos)
Sofia Coppola’s take on The Little Mermaid may have been thwarted by the powers that be (read: unimaginative studio executives), yet the director found her own subtle, subversive form of vengeance in Priscilla. It is its own fairy tale, a tragic version of Sleeping Beauty in which the princess awakens from her eternal sleep and realizes that it is her prince who cursed her in the first place. However, the prince here is the icon of modern Americana, Elvis Presley.
But if Butler, brow slicked with sweat, embodied Elvis the showman, then Jacob Elordi, in Coppola’s film, looks behind the curtain to find a nervous, insecure wretch desperate for an accessory to his misery. Working off Priscilla’s own memoirs, published in 1985, Coppola’s quiet but evocative work draws Cailee Spaeny’s Priscilla into a kingdom of whispered promises, gold watches, and white shag carpets. Spaeny plays her as a young girl caught up in a daydream – but, in her few moments away from Elvis, she’s like a whole other woman.
- route
While Celine Song’s Past Lives is likely to end up on some best-of-the-year lists, I couldn’t help but be more drawn to that film’s spiritual contradiction: Ira Sachs’s passages that counterpoint the maturity and clarity of Song. The protagonists are headed towards mutually assured destruction along with a trio of lovers. German director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) – spoiled, irritable, pathetic – is married to English printmaker Martin (Ben Whishaw). One night, Tomas sleeps with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a French school teacher.
He goes home to tell Martin – “I have had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it?” – And so an erotic fire flares up, in which everything around Rogowski’s big, beady eyes and wicked smile begins to catch the light. He is so fragile that you yearn to console him, but completely Capable of brutality. Sachs takes no sides here – instead, his camera thinks carefully about where the true power lies, in life and in sex. It’s an anthropologist’s eye applied to the most spectacular messes.
- Rotting in the sun
Nihilism collides with (possibly?) the biggest gallery of onscreen dicks in this year’s Sebastián Silva’s cutthroat portrait of art, fame and fortune. The Chilean filmmaker plays a version of himself who is driven to suicidal ideation due to the isolation he experiences in his extremely privileged, narcissistic corner of gay culture. He obsessively researches phenobarbital, a drug linked to a sudden increase in fatal overdoses, and attempts to prove that his life is meaningless because he cannot remember the last film directed by Martin Scorsese.
It is performative and honest at the same time, a parody of artistic self-flagellation that turns into unexpected patterns once the film’s other players enter. One of them is the impressive Jordan Firstman, a stalwart writer on TV’s Search Party, who again plays himself without any inhibitions, here desperate to collaborate with Silva on a reality show he’s been working on. Describes Curb Your Enthusiasm as “but, like, positive”. , The second is Vero (Catalina Saavedra), Silva’s cleaner, who wraps up this audacious but oddly sad tale in a single shot that’s truly jaw-dropping.
- Eternal Daughter
Joanna Hogg’s twin films, The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II, made a deep impression among critics and audiences, partly thanks to how their autobiographical concept encompassed some of film’s most complex questions: telling us whose stories. is allowed? And what do we hope to achieve by telling them? Such themes are also at the heart of Hogg’s unexpected, deeply affecting third chapter of the trilogy, The Eternal Daughter.
Hogg’s stand-in Julie was played by Honor Swinton Byrne in those first two films. But here Julie is middle-aged, and she’s played by Swinton Byrne’s real-life mother, Tilda. Julie’s own mother, Rosalind, is also played by Swinton – meaning the chameleon actor really enjoys playing opposite herself. Julie takes Rosalind on a birthday weekend to a manor hotel in Wales, a former private residence where Rosalind spent part of her childhood. The mother begins to remember when the daughter, once a filmmaker, guiltily records on her phone. However, unlike its predecessors, The Eternal Daughter exists in its own haunted realm of fog and shadow. Gothic literature often treats the home as a psychic realm of nostalgia – here Hogg uses it to explore a child’s desperate need to be understood and loved by a parent.
- barbie
Hollywood hasn’t been entirely without good ideas this year – take John Wick: Chapter 4 or Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, for example. But you’ll probably have to dial it back on Mad Max: Fury Road. A stronger example of art triumphing over commerce than Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. It’s a movie about a toy, it’s also a delightful slapstick comedy reminiscent of the Golden Age of Hollywood, it’s also a surprisingly cogent examination of depersonalization under capitalism. Its box office success, combined with the whole Barbenheimer incident, felt like a brief but welcome ray of hope for the industry.
And it’s that simplicity and optimism that propels Gerwig’s film as it dances across film history from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, embracing the hypocrisies of modern life. Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “The Stereotypical Barbie”, travels from her idealized, plastic world to ours, only to discover that the words “Women can be anything” have been replaced by “Women should be everything”. Has been changed to. Oh, and Ryan Gosling’s Kane is there too – and he’s very, very funny.
- Babylon
Damien Chazelle’s debauched, provocative take on Hollywood’s silent era tears through both the director’s La La Land reputation as a head-in-the-clouds dreamer and the common misconception that early film was ever a quaint or saintly place. We enter this world of drugs, sex, and elephant dung through the eyes of two ravenous wannabes, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and film assistant Manny Torres (Diego Calva), both fictional amalgamations of the era’s true pioneers.
Robbie, here, delivers the starlet with a lion’s bite, as she wrestles with snakes, dances like a woman possessed, and leaves a table of hors d’oeuvres looking like a murder scene. She crashes through Chazelle’s vibrant but rarely inauthentic world, through Justin Hurwitz’s feet-stomping jazz score and Mary Zophres, Jaime Leigh McIntosh, and Heba Thorisdottir’s sultry fashion looks. Her performance encompasses both glory and heartbreak, as the film around her begins to confront the cost of immortality – and what it takes to achieve that one perfect moment on screen, like the single tear that rolls down Nellie’s cheek in her first on-camera performance.
- Saint Omer
In 2016, French documentarian Alice Diop shadowed the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese woman charged with killing her infant daughter by leaving her at the beach. Saint Omer, her formidable shift into fiction, allows us to understand what exactly about the experience so rattled and fascinated her. It’s a film about empathy and unknowability, about how France’s colonial history manifests into modern-day isolation. Kabou’s trial is refracted not only through Diop’s own subjectivity as a witness, but through the tragedy of Medea, the matricidal Greek princess scorned as “utterly hateful to the gods… and to the whole human race”.
Saint Omer attempts to strip the crime of its “unthinkability”, drawing its power from the futility of that act. The accused here, Laurence Coly, is played with stunning reserve by Guslagie Malanda, who eschews expression and instead fills the void with unnameable, suppressed passion. We spend the entire film desperate to see her cry, to see her rage, to unravel in a way that would finally provide answers. But that moment doesn’t come. Instead, cinematographer Claire Mathon sees her shrink almost into nothingness, save for the few brief, but potent glances she shares with Diop’s stand-in, Rama (Kayije Kagame).
- Pearl
At first, Pearl was nothing but an afterthought, a prequel to Ti West’s Seventies porno-slasher X, hastily written in two weeks with his star Mia Goth. But art has odd ways of taking on a life of its own. Pearl not only far outmatches its predecessor, but actually serves better as a standalone, tragicomic portrait of a woman whose sensitivity to the world ultimately destroys her. Goth’s Pearl is a monster of very modern makings, of sorrow and violent desires, and corrupted to the point she can no longer differentiate between the pure and the abject.
She’s a young woman, living on a farmstead in 1918 and the daughter of agoraphobic German immigrants, who sees abuse at home and a Technicolor wonderland in her delusions. But she’s betrayed by those she trusts time and time again. When a handsome cinema projectionist (future Superman David Corenswet) sees a glimpse at the real Pearl, and all her ugly emotions, he cowers. Murder and mayhem ensue. Goth embraces all that is scary, ludicrous, and pitiable about Pearl, and allows those feelings to reach their apex in a final reel monologue that becomes a slam-dunk moment for the actor. Long live Pearl, warts and all.
- All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Not only does beauty and bloodshed lie within Laura Poitras’s documentary on artist Nan Goldin, but so does resilience, grief, elation, desire, freedom, fury, chaos – every shade of every emotion signalled as big and bright as a Times Square billboard. Here, as in its subject’s life, there’s little delineation between life, art, and politics. Goldin’s unhappy childhood, in which misery was suppressed behind a suburban facade, was marked by the suicide of her sister. That pain led to her work, including 1985’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which catalogued the fortifying but vulnerable queer enclave of New York’s Lower East Side.
With a shutter click, the community comes under attack during the Aids crisis, as Poitras recounts the friends Goldin lost, like artist David Wojnarowicz. Goldin’s grief becomes coupled with the opioid crisis, and her own addiction to OxyContin. It leads her to the steps of the Met, to protest the funding received by the Sackler pharmaceutical empire. At one point, Goldin explains that she became a photographer because she’s spent her entire life being told her own experiences weren’t real. A camera is one small way to preserve the truth. Poitras’s impassioned, soul-scouring documentary captures what happens when art no longer becomes a desire, but a means of survival.
Here, Scorsese circles around his old obsessions, as he methodically chips away at the rotted core of a man’s heart. It’s no less unflinching in its depiction of violence, and his faithful collaborator, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, lends the film a sickly, apocalyptic propulsion. But it’s also, in part, so clearly the work of a filmmaker in his later years, who is a little more selfless and self-reflective than before.