Top 10 Movies of 2023

10. When Evil Lurks

Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks is a brutal, relentless nightmare, a bleakly hateful view of a near-future Argentina in which the Church has collapsed and demons roam the countryside, driving people to deranged acts of cannibalism and murder. Rugna’s antagonists transmit themselves through acts of violence against their hosts, and the film plays as a sort of time lapse of spiritual nuclear fallout, horrors blossoming from horrors blossoming from horrors until there’s nothing left but cascading losses and atrocities. Its flatly vicious depictions of violence toward children walk the line between tasteless and terrifying, and its final sequence is one of the bleakest and most desolate in recent memory.

9. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein

An unlooked-for gem in the vein of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride and Matthew Vaughan’s Stardust, Honor Among Thieves is clever, corny, funny, and possessed of a swashbuckling ease you don’t often see in major releases anymore. Its action sequences are fun and imaginative, its characters charming, and its best gags so funny I had a coughing fit in the middle of the theater. Chris Pine proves once again that he’s got a dash of that sort of oddball, comedic leading man energy, the sort of charisma that let actors like Cary Elwes and Charles Grodin blaze trails through genre and offbeat films in the 80s and 90s.

8. Bottoms, Emma Seligman

A left-field sex comedy from the director of the agonizingly brilliant debut feature Shiva Baby, Bottoms is hilariously broad and bald-faced, a sort of hyperviolent Wet, Hot American Summer anchored by the always-incredible Rachel Sennot and Ayo Edibiri and brought to real laugh-out-loud hysterics by Nicholas Galitzine in the role of Jeff, a macho sissy crybaby Queen Bee football diva. It’s a simple piece of gender comedy, swapping the head bitch cheerleader for an emotionally identical jock, but Galitzine steals the movie as a result, picking the scenery out of his teeth as he dances to ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ and gleefully fakes injuries and breaks hearts. A rallying cry for, as the film puts it, “ugly, untalented gays” everywhere.

7. Talk to Me, Danny Philippou

What a pleasure to see something genuinely terrifying in theaters. Talk to Me is blood-curdling, dealing subtly with the social alienation of grief, Blackness, and mental illness as it eats its way through bereaved outsider Mia’s (Sophie Wilde) broken family and the family of her former closest friends, a white family quick to suspect, abandon, and dismiss her as a disturbing artifact begins to send shockwaves of bizarre behavior through the teenagers’ social circles. Directors the Philippou twins conjure desolate images of the afterlife evoking everything from Under the Skin to Society, and along the way they keep their audience constantly off-balance and unsettled, no mean feat.

6. Infinity Pool, Brandon Cronenberg

A disaffected failed writer (Alexander Skarsgård) vacations with his rich wife (Cleopatra Coleman) on the fictional island of Li Tolqa, a ruthless third-world country where rich tourists are permitted to pay their way out of criminal infractions through an arcane process in which the Li Tolqan authorities grow a double of the culprit, memories intact, and then execute it in front of the original. Director Brandon Cronenberg creates an atmosphere of suffocating entitlement, cruelty, and reckless tourist boredom, deconstructing identity in hallucinogenic flashes of deeply disturbing imagery. What is an action? What does “responsibility” mean? When anything is permissible for a price, what are ethics, what is meaning? It’s a film even more ambitious and intriguing than his brutally masterful Possessor.

5. Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster

I liked Hereditary, but after Midsommar left me cold and deepened some of his debut film’s thematic weaknesses I was feeling increasingly bearish on Aster as a director. Then I saw Beau Is Afraid. Any movie in which a naked lunatic called “the birthday boy stab man” erupts into the main narrative after a brief feature on the news and spends like six horrific seconds cackling and stabbing the protagonist’s hand with a pair of scissors is a winner in my book, and that’s the least Aster’s third and most ambitious feature has to offer. It’s a neurotic mama’s boy epic, a goofball picaresque traipsing through something equal parts anxious thriller and bone-dry Wes Anderson comedy.

4. Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese

From its haunting opening montage of anti-native violence carried out by their white loved ones to its sledgehammer of a closing sequence in which Scorsese himself appears onscreen to remind us of the limits of art, the enduring humanity of the film’s subjects, and his own limitations as the teller of their story, Killers of the Flower Moon is a heartbreaking masterpiece. Scorsese has never been so careful or so confident, and Leonardo DiCaprio is skin-crawlingly effective as the stupid, loathsome Ernest Burkhart. Lily Gladstone’s complex portrayal of his Osage wife, Mollie, a woman surrounded by increasingly obvious horrors too intimately devastating to acknowledge, is one for the books, a truly star-making turn.

3. The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki

How do you cope with the knowledge that nothing will ever be the same after the loss of a loved one? How do you begin to map the emptiness that opens up inside you, to impose order on your own devastation, to begin to understand the world around you in a new and painful context? The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki’s final film, dwells on these questions more than it answers them, contemplating obsession, mortality, and the cost of the world’s fixation on permanence and conquest. Inflected with the visual language of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin’s famous series of islands in the land of the dead, Miyazaki conjures one last wonder to behold, graciously giving us a chance to reckon with the end of his career and his encroaching old age as he does the same.

2. Godzilla Minus One, Takashi Yamazaki

I’m as surprised as you are that my number two watch of the year is a fucking Godzilla movie, but Takashi Yamazaki’s reinvigoration of the iconic monster is a genuine capital-A work of Art. His Godzilla is war made flesh, a towering insensate brute, a living scab shrugging off hideous injuries in seconds, flesh bubbling with regenerative power. Godzilla Minus One also digs into the psychology of postwar Japan and the Japanese people’s reckoning with their emperor’s total disregard for their lives, culminating in a courageous stand against war, against militarism, and against government tyranny, wedded to a near-perfect extended action sequence in which navy veterans confront their own failures, complicities, and relationship to mandated suicide tactics. The scenes of Godzilla wreaking havoc are equally riveting.

1. May December, Todd Haynes

Holy mother of god. What a nuclear bomb of a movie. What an unrelenting nightmare. Natalie Portman has never been better than she is here as a hack actor who mistakes herself for the protagonist of a long and twisted story between Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and her much younger husband and grooming victim, Joe (Charles Melton). Moore is a tearful, clutching ghoul, Melton a terrified child trapped in a man’s muscular, sculpted body almost like the predator he married has shaped him like clay over the course of his life. It’s tawdry, demented spectacle, an endlessly unfolding series of miserable little half-truths presented with almost operatic ghastliness. Without question a masterpiece of human squalor.

Best TV of the year

10. The Fall of the House of Usher

9. The Curse

8. Silo

7. Foundation

6. Fargo

5. The Idol

4. Perry Mason

3. Scavengers Reign

2. Copenhagen Cowboy

1. Dead Ringers