2023 Year in Review

What a year! Is a way I could theoretically introduce any year-end recap, but feels particularly apt for 2023. It was a pretty exceptional year for movies (more on my top favorites under all those pesky links below), and also for me professionally. After several months of freelancing, Entertainment Weekly hired me with full-time hours, first as a summer intern and then as a news writer. I’ve written a number of pieces that I’m pretty proud of — here are some highlights:

The best movies of 2023

As mentioned above, it was a year full of excellent movies, big and small, and I wanted to highlight a few of my favorites here. More than a few, actually. I watched around 130 new release movies this year, and about one quarter of them were recommendable without any hesitation whatsoever (there were others that were also good but more overtly flawed that didn’t crack my top tier, listed at the very bottom). 

Due to the abundance of great movies of all shapes and sizes, this year’s list is longer than in years past — in previous years, I’ve done 20 movies for 2020, 21 for 2021, and so forth, but this year I expanded out to 32 movies for 2023, because the numbers are close enough, and I make the rules and nobody can stop me. As usual, I’ve arranged them in thematic pairs with my preferred pick first and the one I liked slightly less second. Hopefully these duos might lead some of you to find something new to watch based on its similarity to something else you like (for example, I think all Barbie fans with an open mind should try Poor Things). Here are my top 32 movies of 2023.

The Boy and the Heron / Asteroid City

Two of the year’s most staggering works of dense cinematic artistry see veteran filmmakers with unmistakable visual styles grapple with grief.

Hayao Miyazaki’s so-called final film (until his inevitable next final film) is the movie of the year in my estimation. It follows a young boy who journeys into a mystical kingdom looking for his dead mother. Its world is ridiculously vast and its concepts are admirably audacious, and it’s easily the most visually beautiful movie of the last few years. It also fuses the boundless creativity and world-building of fantasies like Spirited Away with the emotional groundedness and complex thematic aims of more down-to-earth dramas like The Wind Rises, perhaps in better balance than any other Miyazaki project, yielding a cinematic experience that feels like a childhood dream.

Wes Anderson’s latest dramedy is funny, dense, and, as usual, immaculately crafted. It sees a family headed by a photographer (Jason Schwartzman) reel from the death of a matriarch in an isolated southwestern town. Every performance is excellent, and the visuals are expectedly beautiful, often shifting between tons of different compositions in a single fluid take. It’s also one of the more creative pieces of pandemic cinema — characters grapple with loss, make friends and go nuts in quarantine, and communicate through small windows of intimacy. Anderson seems to have gotten introspective during lockdown, as he has some unusual neuroses on full display and undergoes an insecure self-investigation into the creative process. (Also amazing: Anderson’s short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on Netflix).

Magic Mike’s Last Dance / The Iron Claw

These two gems see massive, beefy boys channeling their intense emotions (mourning and romance, respectively) into breathtaking feats of athleticism. Both see hypermasculine protagonists with hearts of gold struggle as they try to please everyone exerting enormous pressure on them — providing graceful, endlessly expressive physical performances in the process.

The final chapter in Steven Soderbergh’s stripper trilogy is a triumphant celebration of the human body in motion, demonstrating how enthusiastically expressive it can be via an overwhelming love story and extraordinarily athletic dance sequences. Salma Hayek finally gives Channing Tatum’s Mike a romantic partner that’s as charismatic as he is — she’s a gifted physical performer with an endlessly emotive face, and their relationship blossoms and evolves almost entirely through gestures, glances, movement, and body language (though their verbal sparring is also charming). The real draw here, though, is the exuberance of the dancing — easily the strongest the trilogy has offered because the performers here are professional dancers instead of actors who can dance. The ensemble’s energetic precision makes for exhilarating sequence after exhilarating sequence, as the dancers repeatedly leap, bend, and spin in elegant moves that seem impossible to execute so gracefully. I gasped more watching this than any other movie I can remember due to the unfathomable skill on display — it feels like there’s a show-stopping moment every thirty seconds. Soderbergh shoots it all with dynamic movement and cuts it to maximize the impact of every beat, resulting in immense clarity that surpasses the style of the first two movies. 

Sean Durkin’s wrestling drama is as good as a biopic can be. It’s tender, emotionally raw, visually gorgeous, and full of complex relationships between complicated people that builds to an absolutely devastating finale. Durkin makes effective use of slow zooms and long takes without drawing attention to either, allowing the performances to breathe and acclimating the audience with the atmosphere of each location. He’s also proving to be a near-master of fade transitions. And it all hinges on a transcendent Zac Efron performance that taps into everything he’s great at. The film capitalizes on the inherent innocence and sadness in his gaze, and he communicates a staggering multitude of emotions without needing to open his mouth. He’s so physically expressive that every one of his scenes suggests a war within his psyche, and his movements and gestures always reflect the quiet turmoil inside. His unshakable boyishness and good nature ensures that we’re always in his corner, and his graceful athleticism gives each wrestling match a dancerly elegance. 

John Wick Chapter 4 / Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1

Hollywood’s two strongest action movies of 2023 strip away the narrative fat that often weighs franchise films down, instead opting to focus their attention on crafting exquisite set pieces in beautiful locations around the world and allowing their vigilant stars to do what they do best: elaborate choreography and stunt work that all looks and feels completely real.

The John Wick series has consistently delivered some of the most elaborate, brutal, and visually stunning action sequences of the 21st century, and the fourth entry ends the franchise on an unprecedented high. Yes, it’s too long, and not every sequence is narratively “necessary” — but all these movies have ever been is a series of escalating combat sequences filmed with immaculate precision, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another movie with as many exemplary action scenes as this one. Every set piece is memorable, distinct, and beautifully choreographed, exceeding the ridiculously high standards set only by the other installments in the series. It feels as though every last idea Chad Stahleski and co. had for a John Wick action sequence ended up in this installment. It’s all on the table. It’s also the first Wick sequel to match the heavy emotional core of the original movie that makes the central hero’s journey feel downright mythic. His struggle is simple but so vast and overwhelming, and there’s something sublime about witnessing him wordlessly battle toward his ultimate fate. And it has the best supporting cast of the series, too, including Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Rina Sawayama, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, and Scott Adkins.

I suppose Dead Reckoning’s narrative doesn’t make much sense, but it never has in the Mission: Impossible series, as Tom Cruise and co. have become increasingly satisfied with delivering a cinema of attractions that harkens back to the earliest era of the medium as popular entertainment. Long sequences of this movie play out almost entirely in silence, allowing the dynamism of the imagery and the expressiveness of the performers say more than any dialogue could. The breathtaking train finale combines the clever physical precision of Buster Keaton with the disorienting disaster physics of Titanic to deliver as tense a setpiece as we’ve ever seen in the series — which is to say, the very best Hollywood can offer. Meanwhile, the lower-key sequences like the airport inject a renewed commitment to the espionage thrills that defined the first entry in the series. It’s also the funniest Mission thus far without feeling notably lighter or less intense. The Rome chase is the best example, embracing something like Laurel and Hardy or Keaton-esque physical comedy that’s always lying dormant in modern car chases, just waiting to be unlocked. It’s broken up into a barrage of little beats of humor and chaos that continually build on top of one another, so it never feels repetitive or familiar. 

Talk to Me / Beau is Afraid

These two stylish, intermittently surreal movies capture the feeling of having a nightmare better than any other entertainment in recent memory. Not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.

Australian horror hit Talk to Me, which sees teenagers attempt to commune with the dead, is the scariest movie I’ve seen in years. I was intermittently reminded of some of the best aspects of The Sixth Sense, Near Dark, The Haunting of Hill House, and Hereditary. It’s brisk, mean, nasty, and shockingly bleak. The excellent performances ground it in raw emotion and occasional bursts of comedy, and the sound design made me literally shiver on multiple occasions (a first for me!). It grapples with addiction, grief, and pain without veering into heavy-handed messaging. It achieves the perfect balance of specificity and ambiguity, where the rules of the world make total sense but leave you with tons of questions, and your inability to answer them multiplies the terror of the proceedings.

Ari Aster’s surrealist genre-bending comedy is essentially Murphy’s Law: the Movie — a journey through anxiety where the worst thing imaginable happens at every possible juncture, to hilarious and intense results, leaving the protagonist a helpless, undiscerning baby. Joaquin Phoenix shows off his under-utilized penchant for comedy as the central character, while Nathan Lane and Parker Posey are even funnier as bizarre side characters that Beau meets on his journey. Every scene is dazzlingly creative from a visual standpoint, packed with extraordinary detail and gorgeous craftsmanship. It feels much more like Charlie Kaufman with dashes of David Lynch than any of Aster’s other movies.

Poor Things / Barbie

Yorgos Lanthimos and Greta Gerwig both crafted hyper-stylized comedies about women journeying into the unknown as they speed-run the entire experience of being human in a matter of days. They both have zany supporting performances, wildly creative production design, and eye-popping costumes that make most other movies look dull in comparison.

Lanthimos’ Poor Things puts a visually immaculate spin on Frankenstein and definitively closes the book on the “born sexy yesterday” trope (prevalent in numerous genre movies like Splash and The Fifth Element. It follows its intriguing premise — what if a person was born a fully-grown adult and marathoned the entire spectrum of human life, learning about language and sex simultaneously — to every possible conclusion. Emma Stone gives the most energetic, physically demanding performance of her career, playing a horny ingénue without an ounce of shame. It also has the most creative, colorful designs of any live-action movie this year, fusing analog and digital effects to create a uniquely surreal world. And it has one of the strongest musical scores of the year, too.

The candy-colored half of the movie event of the year is one of the most fun studio movies in recent memory, bursting with visual creativity, ridiculous performances, and genuinely strange humor. The greatest strength here is the film’s warm embrace of artifice and tactility, with some of the most eye-poppingly stylized sets since Tim Burton’s golden era. It’s a perfect visual embodiment of the overall movie’s gonzo spirit, which surprisingly carries into the “real world.” Rather than taking the Enchanted/Elf approach to the fish-out-of-water narrative that juxtaposes wacky fantasy with a more grounded depiction of reality, Barbie remains incredibly heightened and silly even as the characters explore Los Angeles. Mattel’s HQ looks almost as wild as anything in BarbieLand, and all the performers adopt a cartoonish cadence regardless of location. Somehow, despite the movie’s success, the movie’s star feels a little under-discussed:  Margot Robbie miraculously holds together all of the disparate elements that Greta Gerwig is supplying, moving from caricaturish juvenile simplicity to a more mature, measured, and confused adult, all while bringing exceptional humor and pathos.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem / Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

American studio animation has experienced an aesthetic renaissance since the original Spider-Verse in 2018, and these two movies capture that film’s wildly creative spirit better than any others in the last five years. I guarantee you have never seen an animated movie that looks like either of these ones.

I wrote about TMNT for EW’s Awardist — the full blurb can be found below the interview with Greta Lee. Here’s an excerpt: “The reimagining of the beloved reptilian warriors, from writer/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, emphasizes the youthfulness of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello, who are all voiced by teenage actors with impeccable chemistry. The core cast often improvised dialogue in the recording booth together, organically capturing Gen-Z affect, slang, and spirit… it combines disparate textures to create a computer-animated movie that looks like it’s made of clay, sloppy paint strokes, and notebook scribbles.”

Part two of Sony’s sprawling super-spider saga features even stronger animation and emotional character work than the first movie. Gwen’s melting watercolor world alone makes this one of the most visually stunning pieces of filmmaking in the last several years, and then it brings in such an overwhelming barrage of exciting visual ideas that it’s difficult to even remember them all: Da Vinci Vulture, the Spot, Mumbattan, Spider-Punk, and so many more. The familial tension of hiding super-personas and struggling to be honest with your parents makes this the most queer-coded superhero movie since X2 (and maybe ever?). There’s so much space for the characters to breathe and talk in the first hour that the emotional dynamic is more impactful than in the first movie. 

Oppenheimer / The Zone of Interest

Two of the year’s most harrowing projects approach the atrocities of World War II from the perspective of their perpetrators, intentionally ignoring the viewpoint of the victims to probe how human beings can justify and compartmentalize acts of unspeakable evil.

In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan crafts some of the best sequences of his entire career: Oppenheimer’s dazed victory address, the countdown to Trinity, the final Einstein encounter, and almost every scene involving Florence Pugh are all knockouts. Like Dunkirk, it’s essentially a feature-length, overwhelmingly scored montage that rarely modulates its tone or momentum (though the few moments where it does, like David Krumholtz offering Cillian Murphy an orange, are among the most emotionally resonant in the movie), yielding a handsome, exhausting marathon of nonstop tension and forward movement. It also has the most impressive ensemble of the year, with everyone from Matt Damon to Alden Ehrenreich to Benny Safdie putting in some of the best work of their careers. It’s a troubling, razor-sharp examination of guilt, innovation, and legacy.

Jonathan Glazer’s distressing drama is a purposefully difficult movie in both its subject matter and its accessibility. Schindler’s List skeptics who say the Holocaust ought not to be used the backdrop for populist entertainment, fear not: this is as unentertaining as major movies can be, focusing exclusively on the everyday minutia that keeps the genocide machine operational. It’s stylistically bold in that the vast majority of its visual aesthetic is pointedly flat, ugly, and sterile, aside from flashes of wild stylization that function purely on an atmospheric and tonal level rather than a narrative or even thematic one. It keeps the actual victims of the Shoah at a great distance, never peeking inside the walls of the death camp and instead exclusively highlighting the perpetrators of cruelty in a genocidal society. And although it’s only making a few points over and over again, the film is still full of haunting details that you won’t be able to shake, and the last sequence is an absolute gut punch.

Monster / Past Lives

These two slow-burn dramas take a long time to get going, but their second halves are so emotionally charged and thematically complex that they retroactively enhance all that came before. They also exclusively consist of kind characters doing what they believe to be the right thing at all possible moments, which feels remarkably rare.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film is a tender, emotionally raw spin on Rashomon in which nobody really does anything wrong (or if they do, you understand why). The first two sections are solid but somewhat unremarkable, and then the third and final piece is one of the best stretches of film I’ve seen in recent years. It captures the purity of childhood with impeccable accuracy and honesty while still showing the overwhelming conflicting feelings that come along with being a kid, as well as the horrible burdens that weigh down these two kids in particular. The central child performances by Soya Kurokawa and Hinata Hiiragi are two of the best I’ve ever seen — so natural and playful that it feels like there can’t possibly be a camera, let alone a crew, interrupting their everyday existence. 

Celine Song’s lovely semi-autobiographical debut  sees three smart, kindhearted people fighting against time and fate to be as good as they can to one another and find some semblance of closure. It’s so intimate with its characters’ feelings and psychology that it naturally becomes casually existential. The screenplay is packed with wise, thoughtful dialogue that enthusiastically approaches its thematic concerns head-on — love, destiny, longing, home, and lamenting what could have been. It’s quiet, poetic, and empathetic, bolstered by three excellent, natural performances by Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro. 

May December / Killers of the Flower Moon

These projects from two of our most reliable living filmmakers explore acts of nauseating evil through the lens of an uncomfortable marriage. Both films also consider the immorality of converting real-life trauma into art and entertainment, implicating themselves in the process.

Todd Haynes’ grooming saga is as nauseating as it should be. It’s simultaneously an empathetic examination of the psychological and emotional toll of being a long-term victim of abuse and a horrifying exploration of the onlookers, bystanders, and audiences who allow traumatic, cruel dynamics play out due to numbness, carelessness, or refusal to acknowledge immorality. Natalie Portman gives a career-best performance as the obsessive actor investigating the situation, brilliantly balancing performative kindness and an intense actorly obsession with selfishly absorbing the drama of someone else’s pain. Julianne Moore is as terrifying as she’s ever been, playing a soft-spoken monster who cunningly weaponizes her own supposed pain and put-on naivety and helplessness. And Charles Melton brings incredible depth to a complex character who slowly unravels the awful absurdity of his life to find emotional turmoil and sobering clarity without any resolution. 

In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese examines a few individuals whose lives and relationships speak to the broadest, most troubling dynamics at the heart of the American project. Stupid, amoral, hollow men are manipulated by friendly, conniving monsters to commit genocide to maximize profits, all while the pleas of the victims are intentionally ignored. The first twenty-odd minutes have all the slick style of Scorsese’s prior crime epics, with impeccable music, complex camera maneuvers, and tons of fun flourishes we’ve come to expect from his depictions of wealth. He drops all this almost immediately for some of the unflashiest filmmaking he’s ever delivered — a steady, brutal death knell devoid of all glamor and joy. The film’s grotesque strength comes from how casually its characters discuss slaughtering innocent people for their own gain and how distressingly matter-of-fact the violence is from the outset. Lily Gladstone is phenomenal at subtly conveying a constant sense of dread that becomes so persistent that she, and we, become numb to it. And the last scene is one of the greatest conclusions to a based-on-true-events movie ever conceived, emphasizing the almost complete lack of justice (and satisfaction) that permeates throughout American history while simultaneously calling into question the entire practice of fact-based entertainment, particularly as its funding stems from such unfeeling sources.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 / Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

2023’s two best adventure blockbusters both find an impressive balance of wacky humor and genuine heart, bringing together ensembles of bizarre fantasy characters into oddball found families. They also both have some of the most colorful, elaborate makeup and costuming I’ve seen in a long time.

James Gunn ends his time at Marvel with a bang, creating an insane $250 million Disney movie about hating corporations and God himself that reckons with existence, purpose, and redemption. It’s the most thematically, emotionally, and visually ambitious project Marvel Studios has ever put its name on, with the strongest style and substance of the trilogy. It’s wild that Gunn was fired from this movie, then watched his characters get yanked around in two of the biggest movies ever made by a notoriously stringent studio, then made this: a battle where imperfect, emotional weirdos fight against the exacting control of a perfectionist corporate maniac god who wants to flatten all life into homogenous slop but also needs an oddball to spruce up his awful creations. The last thirty minutes or so is such a lovely succession of simple words of wisdom and radical acts of kindness, and across three movies, Gunn has successfully built a convincing world where we understand each of these characters’ inner pain and their genuine, unrelenting care for one another that has never been paralleled in other comic book movies (or, really, in modern blockbusters in general). It’s an audacious, poetic ending for all of these excellent characters, who have each transformed so substantially over the course of the trilogy.

John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein — the team behind the wonderful Game Night — quietly crafted one of the most purely fun blockbusters in ages with Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It has a charismatic cast (including Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, and Justice Smith), a nicely structured script, charming practical effects, and an abundance of solid visual ideas (many of them comedic). It also features one of the most playful, exciting cinematic heists in a long time and a vision of magic so creative and energetic that it makes the previous twenty years of fantasy filmmaking look embarrassing. And the emotional core is surprisingly affecting for a movie with a character named Jarnathan.

The Holdovers / Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret

The connections between these two blew my mind, especially because I watched them on the same day: Both of these coming-of-age dramedies are set in the year 1970, heavily revolve around holiday melancholy, and feature a sequence set to “The Wind” by Yusuf/Cat Stevens. Both are also emotionally touching, well-performed, and intermittently hilarious.

Alexander Payne’s boarding school dramedy is most likely your parents’ favorite movie of 2023. There’s nothing particularly flashy or unfamiliar here — just a pretty, straight-down-the-middle crowd-pleasing Christmas movie with just enough darkness and complexity to offset the surface-level sweetness. It’s fairly formulaic, but it’s a formula that works time and time again — a grouchy, down-on-his-luck authority figure begrudgingly bonds with a troubled youngster. Paul Giammatti is one of the funniest, most unique actors of his generation, and he’s rarely given the opportunity to shine as brightly as he does here — the role is perfectly tailored to each of his strengths. And Da’Vine Joy Randolph adds an extra layer of tenderness that elevates every scene.

Kelly Fremon Craig already captured the beauty and pain of high school with The Edge of Seventeen, so she pivots to the chaos of middle school for her second directorial project — an adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved novel. It’s equally heartwarming, funny, and somber, which makes it a brilliant encapsulation of early adolescence. Abby Ryder Forston, whose only major film roles came as a youngster in the first two Ant-Man movies, makes a sizable impression as the young narrator, quietly embodying all the heightened emotions of junior high, while Rachel McAdams excels as her conflicted but endlessly loving mother.

Landscape with Invisible Hand / Showing Up

These two underseen projects both focus on visual artists who struggle to balance their creative endeavors with the conflicts and distractions that dominate their personal lives.

Cory Finlay’s bizarre sci-fi film is a little clunky and rough around the edges, but so full of fascinating ideas about contemporary life in our mundane dystopia. The movie imagines life after an alien invasion where the aliens aren’t particularly threatening, but instead absurdly boring and puzzling. In under two hours, it touches on economic imperialism, late capitalism, social media grinding, class dynamics, technological progress leading to career obsoletion, race relations, and how the mess of all these ideas combined can impact a person’s artistry and sense of self. Yet it never feels like it’s rushing through any of its concepts; instead, it probes each one for just enough time to really engage with each idea before moving to the next episode. A bit heavy-handed, yes, but endlessly thoughtful and creative.

Kelly Reichardt simultaneously celebrates and gently pokes fun at the 21st century artistic spirit, with Showing Up, all while lamenting how impossible it is to really feel like you’re getting anything done. It’s a simple slice-of-life drama set in Portland’s artistic community that feels Incredibly well-observed and natural, thanks especially to subtle, multifaceted performances by Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, and Judd Hirsch. André Benjamin steals the show as the only person in the entire city who seems at peace with his creative endeavors.

Sanctuary / What Happens Later

These two couldn’t be more tonally different — one is a fairly intense erotic thriller, the other a cheery romantic comedy — but they’re both one-location romance movies that consist entirely of tense, snappy dialogue between two (and only two!) actors.

Set entirely in a lavish hotel suite, Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary is a thrilling, hilarious, and occasionally beautiful piece of cinematic theater. Margaret Qualley is one of the most unique performers of her generation, shifting between tones, emotions, and motivations in the blink of an eye to make the film’s central power play completely unpredictable. It ends in a silly place, but everything preceding it is also silly, so it doesn’t feel entirely off-base. It’s fun, hot, and bizarrely romantic.

Meg Ryan successfully channels the spirit of Nora Ephron for old-fashioned rom-com What Happens Later that never feels stale or throwbackish, but consistently warm, thoughtful, and empathetic (and full of wonderful dialogue!). As an actress, she’s maintained her magnificent type-A goofball energy and her singsongy cadence (and finds solid chemistry with her sole costar, David Duchovny); as a filmmaker, she’s found a simple, straightforward style that maximizes your focus on the performances and the space that the actors take up. It’s so good to have her back, and it’s infuriating to think of all the great work of which we’ve been potentially robbed for the last twenty-odd years.

Joy Ride / Bottoms

Women dominated American cinematic comedy this year, both in front of and behind the camera. These two movies feature ridiculously funny ensembles of female performers thriving in absurd, unpredictable scenarios.

Four Asian American friends (Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, and Sabrina Wu) travel to China in one of the funniest road comedies in recent memory. All four electrifying lead performers make even the iffier material sound hilarious with off-the-wall line deliveries. The characters undergo complex, unpredictable arcs that transform and escalate the emotional stakes as the movie progresses. Though it doesn’t necessarily transition from its comedic highlights to the ultra-dramatic moments with total grace, each element of the movie connects on some level.

Shiva Baby filmmaker Emma Seligman co-wrote the insane high school movie Bottoms alongside star Rachel Sennott, and it embraces all the absurd conventions of its setting and subgenre for maximal comedic value. It’s one of the weirdest comedies in a long time. There is not a single person resembling a normal human being here — everyone is a bizarro cartoon with wacky motivations and wackier mannerisms. Every performance is funny, and there are so many sight gags in each scene.

The Caine Mutiny Court Martial / Anatomy of a Fall

The legal thriller is back! In addition to the genre’s presence in stretches of Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, these two movies examine the complexity of human behavior and relationships through intense courtroom proceedings.

The final film from legendary filmmaker William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A.) updates Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer-winning novel for the 21st century. Almost the entire film takes place in a courtroom, so it gives the impression of a theatre piece, which allows the actors to make their rapid-fire, highly technical dialogue sing as if they’re on stage. It’s a thrilling, excellent showcase for all of its actors, especially Jason Clarke, Kiefer Sutherland, and the late, great Lance Reddick. Friedkin uses the tense case to highlight the tension between rigid, black-and-white systems and the moral ambiguity of the people who maintain them.

Justine Triet’s film sees a woman (Sandra Huller) on trial after the sudden death of her husband. The fight scene a little past the midpoint is one of the best sequences of the year, and a dog gives one of the most harrowingly convincing performances I’ve ever seen. The rest is a steady, well-executed courtroom thriller fused with a solid domestic drama. All of the performances are nuanced and natural, especially Milo Machado Graner, who plays the main couple’s young son. It also looks pretty and has a few strong ideas that give it a consistent sense of depth, particularly in the final third.

The Equalizer 3 / A Haunting in Venice

Okay, these might not be objectively better than some of the movies I left off of this list, but these two threequels made for two of my most pleasant moviegoing experiences this year. Both of them feature tremendous actors playing charismatic characters who kick it back in Italy while trying to distance themselves from violent conflict.

I wrote a bit about Denzel Washington’s incredible performance in the third Equalizer movie for EW’s Awardist. The full blurb can be found here below the Priscilla conversation and the awards speculation. Here’s an excerpt: “The film gives Washington ample opportunity to make the most of quiet, reserved scenes, demonstrating his unrivaled ability to make the simplest behaviors into riveting cinema: the way he fiddles with a napkin at a cafe or taps his cane on cobblestone streets feels both profoundly intentional and entirely natural. And he unsurprisingly delivers the hell out of numerous monologues, making fairly standard genre fare sound downright Shakespearean.”

Kenneth Branagh’s third Agatha Christie adaptation is the best-crafted and least fun of his Poirot movies. The camera moves with unexpected maneuvers to create unusual compositions that amplify the sense of unease. Meanwhile, every member of the cast delivers exactly what they should, though Jude Hill and Jamie Dornan excel with such melancholy and depth of feeling that they outdo their performances in the much more conventionally respectable Belfast. It’s a glum, remorseful affair focused more on the pain of mourning than on procuring a satisfying whodunnit, though the mystery procedure is also as effective as it needs to be. 

Honorable mentions that didn’t quite make the list: Blackberry, Eileen, Afire, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Ferrari, Carmen, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Priscilla, Jawan, 65, Leave the World Behind, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, A Thousand and One, The Marvels, American Fiction, Gran Turismo, No Hard Feelings, Scrapper, 80 for Brady, Dream Scenario, Theatre Camp, Reality, The Pope’s Exorcist, Knock at the Cabin, Air, Thanksgiving, and Wonka.

Movies I haven’t seen yet: All of Us Strangers, The Taste of Things, Origin, Evil Does Not Exist, Hit Man, You Hurt My Feelings, Rebel Moon Part 1, Passages, Perfect Days, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.