The best movies of 2023 (so far)

Call it 'A Portrait of the Artist In the Midst of Being Canceled’. In Todd Field's psychological character study, Cate Blanchett is Lydia Tár, a genius-level composer, EGOT winner and insufferable narcissist whose icy demeanor hardly fractures as accusations of sexual impropriety threaten to shatter her career. Blanchett's Oscar-nominated performance has rightly earned the lion's share of plaudits, but the superb acting is buoyed by Field's subtly off-kilter visual style, lending the ‘ripped from the headlines’ narrative a hint of Kubrickian uncanniness.

Thanks to Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness and this disarmingly powerful four-legged odyssey from veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the humble donkey has become a cinematic colossus of late – a kind of doleful-eyed, carrot-chewing Brando. The genius of EO, which follows one little donkey across Europe, is in using its furry hero as a mirror to reflect back at us the state of the world in all its beauty, pain and ineffable sadness. It shouldn’t be half as bewitching and emotional, but honestly, it ruined us. 

There’s so much going on in Laura Poitras’s doc, it speaks volumes for the quality of the filmmaking that it all hangs together so dexterously. Iconic photographer Nan Goldin is its subject, protagonist and guide, as the film takes in a tour of New York’s ’70s counterculture, ex-addict Goldin’s quest for justice against the odious Sacklers, the family behind America’s OxyContin epidemic, and the nuts and bolts of social activism. It’s moving, enthralling and artful – in every sense of the word.

It’s been an era of filmmakers recreating their childhoods on screen (and let’s face it, it’s mostly boyhoods we’re talking about), with Alfonso Cuarón, Paolo Sorrentino and Lee Isaac Chung all parlaying their own younger lives into Oscar-worthy dramas in recent years. But of all of these cine-reminiscences, Steven Spielberg’s feels the most alive to the possibility that it might even be misremembering or misinterpreting events – and thus it feels like the most guileless and honest of the lot. With Spielberg’s on-screen surrogate, Gabriel LaBelle’s Sammy Fabelman, to the fore, its many moments of hurt and wonderment are dazzlingly realised.

What unexpected joy and wisdom this stop-motion animation delivers. Expanding a 2010 short and perhaps taking a cue from Aardman’s classic Creature Comforts, it introduces us to a sparkly little mollusc called Marcel (voiced by co-creator Jenny Slate) and her gentle Nanna Connie (Isabella Rossellini), left behind when their community of shells disappears overnight. Enter documentary maker Dean (Slate’s co-creator Dean Fleischer Camp) to join the quest for this missing shell utopia. Cute by never cutesy, and with a surprisingly sharp wit, it’s cinematic soul food that’ll have you going back for a second helping.

The directness of French filmmaker Alice Diop‘s courtroom drama – a film of long, unblinking takes and zero showy camerawork – shouldn’t be confused with simplicity. Knotty and morally challenging, Saint Omer traverses some of the biggest cultural fault lines of modern Europe – race, migration, religion – in its story of a young woman (Guslagie Malanda) accused of leaving her child to drown on a Normandy beach. It’s based on a real-life court case that Diop herself attended and her recreation engages both the brain and the heart. Just try shaking it. 

While not exactly an escapist night at the pictures, Sarah Polley’s tough, talky, ‘The Crucible’-esque feminist allegory all but dares you to reach for your popcorn. Sit up and pay attention, it demands – and anyone prepared to lean into its dialectics is rewarded with an elite group of actors (Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand and Ben Whishaw) debate a still-scarily-resonant case of sexual abuse in a religious commune. Faith, female rage and the meaning of forgiveness have been rarely chewed over with quite this simmering power.

There’s something haunting and ancient in the soil of Britain and it’s captured mesmerically in a trippy tale of isolation and disturbing plant life that plays like a druid’s cheese dream. It could only be the work of Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, whose debut drama, Bait, was a handmade treasure back in 2019. Here, he uses the same vintage aesthetic and 16mm cameras to craft a worthy companion piece to any of the great ’70s folk horrors, as Mary Woodvine’s botanist goes full The Lighthouse on a remote island. 

This gripping, intelligent doc interviews the subjects of some of the most famous docs of recent years about their lives through a lens. The stars of The Staircase, Hoop Dreams and Capturing the Friedmans reveal what it’s like to be at the eye of a non-fiction narrative story, testimonies that are delivered with compassion and insight. Equally interesting on the issues of telling someone else’s story (duty of care, whether participants should be paid), Subject captures the documentary form at a crossroads, hopefully finding its way to a more caring, culturally sensitive future. Filmmakers could do a lot worse than watch Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera’s engrossing film as a cautionary tale.

A juicy organic tomato of a movie that deservedly won Berlin’s Golden Bear, Carla Simón’s channels the Spanish filmmaker’s own experiences growing up on a Catalan farm to give life to one hard-working farming family. A new landowner's attempt to install solar panels threatens the farmers' livelihood in a movie that succeeds as a family drama and a deconstruction of capitalism. With incredible performances from the non-professional actors playing stressed-out peach farmers, Simon crafts a worthy follow-up to her sparkling childhood memoir Summer 1993. 

It’s complicated enough when stay-at-home dad Haider (Ali Junejo) finds fulfilment as a backing dancer to trans performer Bibi (trans actress Alina Khan) in Lahore. When he also finds love with her, the fabric of his life – and his family’s – begins to unravel. Faced with Pakistan’s draconian censorship laws, Joyland had to struggle to the screen, but you’d never know it from its effortless humour, compassion and craft. A bold snapshot of Pakistani society, masculinity and gender in flux, it would feel progressive if it’d been set in Paris or Palm Springs. 

A nerve-shredding modern Spanish parable that offers a gradually suffocating fog of xenophobia, resentment and envy, this year’s Goya Award winner is set among scrubby, hardscrabble farmsteads of Galicia. Inglourious Basterds’ Denis Ménochet essays a brooding kind of restraint as teacher-turned-farmer Antoine in the face of increasing intimidation. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s carefully constructed slowburn thriller is full of great performances, too, especially from Marina Foïs as Antoine’s dogged wife and Luis Zahera as the sinewy, menacing neighbour who hates everything the couple stand for. 

It would have been so easy for Darren Aronofsky’s adapted-from-the-stage chamber piece to get swamped by its prosthetic, fat-suited artifice and one-location staginess. That it doesn’t is down to a career-best performance from international treasure Brendan Fraser. He makes you take grieving, apartment-bound college tutor Charlie, a man facing up to his own mortality, to your heart in just a few scenes, supercharging this fable of human frailty and reconciliation with endless empathy and emotion. We’re not crying, you’re crying. 

A toy inventor (Get Out’s Allison Williams) creates a sentient A.I. doll with creepy eyes and the grip of an industrial vice as a companion for her bereaved niece. What could go wrong? Just about everything, as this giddily mean-spirited Blumhouse horror charts. Despite having Saw’s James Wan’s boody fingerprints all over it as co-creator, it reins in the nastiness in favour of big laughs, including some instantly meme-worthy doll dances. Roll on M4GAN. 

Cinematically, the fantasy genre has tended take itself very seriously, but Dungeons & Dragons comes at its swords and sorcery with a refreshing and exuberant irreverence. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein respect their role-playing tabletop game source material, but also mirror the sense of levity and improvised invention you get while playing it. With the help of an amiable ensemble, the jokes come as thick and fast as the FX-driven action. Game for a laugh, indeed.

Hirokazu Kore-eda has a knack for taking gritty slices of social realism and sprinkling them with a kind of escapist stardust. Who else could turn the story of actual baby traffickers into a bubbly feel-nice yarn in much the same way Shoplifters parlayed hard-scrabble lives into a quiet heartwarmer full of wit and heart? Here he heads to Busan, South Korea, and borrows Bong Joon-ho’s old mucker Song Kang-ho to headline another touching, wryly funny tale of surrogate families. Charles Dickens would be proud to have written a character like Song’s larger-than-life adoption broker Sang-hyun.