Matthew Triponey

(For once I had the list sorted out before the Oscars, but then I suffered a bad case of “accidentally became important at work and it’s ruining my life” and here I am even later than usual; I now believe the universe itself is conspiring to prevent me from publishing a remotely timely retrospective. Anyhoo.)

I want to call 2025 a bad year for movies.

I feel like I have to because of how underwhelmed I was for most of the year. Things picked up a bit as awards season got underway — at least it wasn’t a repeat of 2024 where I’d seen my top four by April and the rest of the year tested my soul; 2025 had the decency to spread its good stuff out a little more — but I found even a lot of the really well-liked movies didn’t completely land for me. This year, I have a pretty long list of also-rans, but most of them only felt barely good enough to contend.

But then I think I can’t call it bad, because that list of also-rans? Yeah, it’s easily the longest it’s been since I first started doing this. I made dozens of cuts out of the movies I deemed good enough to be eligible. 2024 had no bench at all; I had to ease some of my qualification rules just so I’d have twenty films I was excited enough to write about. If anything, I tightened those rules this year. And 2025’s top tier was, if not any more numerous than 2024’s, quite a bit stronger; it’s tough to call a year that ended with the most neck-and-neck Oscar showdown since There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men bad.

So yeah, despite my complaints, I feel like I have to concede 2025 as having been at least mediocre. Better than 2024. Not by much, but still. This list was a struggle in 2024. This year, it wasn’t as much. These are twenty very good movies — and I don’t even have to argue with myself over whether a few of them technically count as movies! Can’t complain, really.

As a reminder, my rules are — with occasional exceptions — that I won’t consider short films because they’re such a different medium, or documentaries because putting them in rankings like this feels crass to me. This year, there was one film that kind of challenged that latter rule, which was The Voice of Hind Rajab. It’s not a documentary, no one would try to argue that it is (though it does turn a touch documentarian in its final reel as it begins carving into the fourth wall), but it invokes real-world elements to an extent that it feels…weird to stack it up against contemporaries that are one hundred percent actors playing pretend in front of cameras and microphones. I decided not to qualify it for the Top 20. Do I have any underlying logic why it doesn’t count where something like Flee did? Not really. But they’re my own rules, so I guess I can break and rewrite them at my leisure. Regardless, The Voice of Hind Rajab is too singular a thing not to be mentioned anywhere in a review of 2025 as a year in cinema, so here’s the part where I urge you to make time for it at some point.

And now for the list.

20. The Secret Agent
Look, I’m not saying I disqualified The Voice of Hind Rajab solely because I felt weird not having The Secret Agent somewhere on here, but I won’t pretend to be upset about it either. This feels like one of those placeholder positions I reliably have one or two of every year: a movie I’ve only seen once that has seemingly infinite room to grow with repeat viewings, whenever I should happen to get around to them. The Secret Agent is a whole lot of movie to digest on one viewing — a stew of styles and influences, bracing but with a jet-black and sometimes trippy sense of humor, possessed of a laser-focused sense of time and place but also heightened and surreal. Its bold story choices catch you so off-guard it’s hard to feel like you’ve had time to properly respond to all of them by the time it ends. That it came out at all coherent marks director Kleber Mendonça Filho as one of the MVPs of 2025; that it registers as an achievement perhaps marks him as one of the greats.

19. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
One of those movies that by choosing specificity — honing in on the dynamic of a single family that has, for reasons equal parts personal, social, and political, chosen to hide a dark secret — taps into something universal in its depiction of a world where an elder generation has tolerated an evil in its midst and passed it down to their children, whom it now badgers and chastises for failing to handle it with the grace deemed appropriate. The grim, surreal, and even horrifying dawn of realization that the people you’ve loved your whole life might not be good human beings. It’s cutting stuff. A stronger ending would’ve pushed it into the Top 10.

18. Sisu: Road to Revenge
OK, that’s the artsy crap, time for a movie where a crusty old prospector uses explosives to make a tank do a backflip. Sisu: Road to Revenge is the movie I wanted its predecessor to be, and then some. Proudly stupid, proudly about absolutely nothing, and much, much better structured — a freight train that builds and builds and builds until it crashes at exactly the right moment for a breather, and then gets right back on the horse for a finale that’s one hundred percent pure action movie hilarity. Contains no fewer than six kills that made me scream-laugh. I hope they make a hundred more of these. Some movies are good, and some movies are bangers, and we surely must cherish the ones that are both.

17. The Long Walk
If you’d shown me this list at the beginning of the year, this is the entry that I would’ve found the most surprising. I’ve liked most of Francis Lawrence’s work, but I’d never seen anything to indicate he might have a great film in him. And of course, Stephen King adaptations are pretty infamously hit and miss. But I actually really liked The Long Walk — even more so in retrospect. It could easily have settled for being a Hunger Games-alike, but it’s got more on its mind than that. You can feel King’s idiosyncrasies at work in it, for one thing, but there’s something unique in its approach to the material as well. Instead of being a twisty thriller that keeps you guessing about who lives and who dies, and whether there’s a chance of the characters finding their way out of their circumstances, it accepts the inevitability of its own scenario and becomes this oddly meditative thing. It searches for the spark of light in the darkness, and I think it finds one: that faced with our own imminent mortality, love is the last thing that dies. Two super strong lead performances from a pair of very exciting young actors round out 2025’s most pleasant surprise.

16. The Phoenician Scheme
It finally happened, you guys! At long last, a Wes Anderson movie has made my year-end Top 20! Am I a real cinephile now? Speaking as someone who’s spent at least the last decade on a quest to get Wes Anderson, this ought to feel like a personal victory…but it doesn’t, really? I don’t feel like I’ve accessed a newfound understanding of why he makes movies the way he does. It’s more that he finally made the movie I think his talents are most suited for: a dry, morbid comedy thriller that aims for your brain and your funnybone more than your heart, and on the comparatively rare occasions that it reaches for the latter never tries to grasp the stars. Basically, the things that make Wes Anderson fans consider The Phoenician Scheme a somewhat minor entry in his body of work are the same things that make me feel completely on its wavelength. I expect I will return to finding him confusing within the year. But for now, I’ll enjoy this opportunity to look like a Fancy Movie Critic Man. I am almost certain to lose the war, but at least I’ve won this single, solitary battle.

15. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
It’s always tough to figure out where those quintessential “that was a fantastic movie, which I will never watch again” movies belong on lists like these. I usually just reserve the twentieth slot, which was my original plan for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but as the year neared its end, I found that I respected it too much for that. This, I suppose, is the compromise. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a great movie, one of the best of the year, and it is often a tough sit. There’s plenty to get you through it, of course — a lot of on-point cinematic choices, such as shooting it like a reverse E.T. where the camera is at an adult’s-eye view and never lets you clearly see the anxiety-inducing child; and with all respect to the great Jessie Buckley, my Oscar vote this year would’ve gone to Rose Byrne, and I don’t even have to think particularly hard about it. But I think the thing that most impresses me here — even as it makes the film a real challenge — is how well it doesn’t so much depict as simulate a panic attack for people who don’t experience those. It’s a movie of perpetual, swirling anxiety, adding new fears to the teetering Jenga tower with every scene, until finally it all comes crashing down in a cascade of chaos and terror and even threatened violence. And then it subsides, and you look at the movie like “Did you get it out of your system?” And the movie just looks back like: “…yeah.” For my money, that’s the funniest ending of the year, and that’s in large part due to the fact that it’s articulating a fundamental truth. Anyway, if you want to know what it feels like to be me, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about as close as the movies can get you.

14. Sentimental Value
There’s a part of me that still isn’t connecting with Joachim Trier’s work the way everyone else seems to be, but I do feel like I got another step closer with Sentimental Value. It’s another difficult movie to talk about, in much the same way as The Secret Agent — it, too, is a lot of movie. But it’s a lot of movie in a different way, not because of the breadth of its influences or a hazy, surreal atmosphere — if anything, Sentimental Value is an extremely normal movie with its sights set down a very narrow lane — but because it discovers so many insights into its characters that some of them start to feel like happy accidents, byproducts of the things it really wants to focus on. Holding any thought about this movie in your mind is challenging simply because you have so many of them, and they’re all in perpetual communication with each other. I think you could watch this movie a hundred times and never fail to come away having drawn a brand-new connection between its characters and themes. Does art influence life, or life influence art? Sentimental Value is about a man for whom there is no longer any separation between the two concepts, and about a family trying to figure out how to relate to him when he can only see them through that very literal lens. Layers upon layers, until this normal, grounded drama starts screwing with your head the way actual surrealism does. A deceptively unprecedented experience.

13. Eddington
I always love winding up on the “love it” side of the year’s big “love it or hate it” movie. Makes me feel like an iconoclast or something. Not that I don’t completely understand why people don’t like Eddington. This is just about as thorny as subject matter gets, and some viewers simply won’t settle for anything less than the utmost clarity in the approach; believe me, I’ve been there plenty of times myself, and I’m sympathetic to the argument that the targets of the satire very likely won’t recognize they — not the people they hate — are the punchline of the joke they just heard, even as I’m not sure storytellers can always do much about that problem. I’ve really got no judgment whatsoever for anyone who hates this. I just think it has greater clarity of purpose than it’s been given credit for, the satirical element is creatively built into its structure, its big meta-joke is pretty funny, and it all plays well into Ari Aster’s whole deal even as, if only on paper, Eddington stands out as his most grounded work to date. I don’t think Eddington is a “both-sides” movie so much as pretending to be one — taking all its characters at their word, assuming their worldviews to be broadly true, and then contrasting the extremely recognizable, real-world-headlines consequences of one with the utterly ridiculous nonsense consequences of the other. It’s sharp, it’s witty, it’s deadpan, it doesn’t go down easy, but it’s looking at the world through a really unique lens and I can’t help but be compelled by it. It’s probably my most thought-about movie of 2025.

12. Left-Handed Girl
This should have been a bigger deal than it was — not that it was ever going to be a giant smash hit in the U.S., but you’d think the cinephiles, at least, would be talking about it, if only for that Sean Baker credit on the script. It’s easily the hidden gem of the year in cinema. Most obviously, there’s the miracle of it being the first iPhone-shot movie that I actually thought looked really good. But it’s also that rare sort of non-narrative film that feels like the exact opposite through sheer virtuosity — the way the editing stitches all these interconnected characters together in this ceaseless flow of life, makes every scene a punctuation mark, uses cross-cuts as parentheses to clarify the moments they’re interrupting. The performances are all extremely intuitive, as is the direction, making for a movie where you can pretty easily sketch backstory and personality for everyone even where the script never directly confirms everything. Another story of children shouldering the burdens of their elders while making a grab for whatever future remains that plays with grace and bite and somehow equal parts despair and hope. Doesn’t announce itself as great, but it is.

11. Twinless
I said this back when I first watched it, and it remains true now: This movie’s most impressive accomplishment, and the reason why it’s so high on this list, is that it took my least favorite story framework in existence — dramedy where someone tells a significant lie that snowballs into borderline psychopathy — and found a context where I’d love it. The key, it turns out, is actually grasping that the lie is bad, and that the consequences could very easily — and justifiably! — forestall his eventual happiness no matter how sorry he is. The early fakeout about which character this movie is actually about goes a long way toward that end; it ensures that no one feels like a supporting player in someone else’s story. It’s otherwise very well made, in that un-showy way that makes for a great film even if it doesn’t win you any Oscars. It’s surprisingly propulsive for a little dramedy, both in its no-BS editing that always seems to know exactly what moments to let breathe and for how long, and in the airtight script that exists in a constant state of graceful setup and funny, cutting, and/or moving payoff. It’s actually very entertaining to watch, which feels rare for this kind of thing. But it’s the emotionally insightful storytelling — that willingness to confront itself and its characters — that really puts it a cut above. Dylan O’Brien had a great year, and James Sweeney could have a real future in the director’s chair.

10. No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook is the reigning master of knowing exactly how far over the line you’ll allow him to go…and then pressing onward anyway, while looking you in the eye with a knowing smirk. No Other Choice is far and away his funniest movie, almost a piece of R-rated slapstick from time to time, and ninety-five percent of the humor is just how smug he is about the whole thing. If you get offended, he wins (though No Other Choice, despite its premise, is probably in the bottom half of his work in terms of boundaries violated). It’s missing the probing psychology of some of his other recent work, but makes up for it with its energy and jet-black comedy. Almost every scene has at least one visual choice that I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen in a motion picture before. Nobody doing it like South Korea right now, man. On another level.

OK, time to make people mad.

9. Superman
HAW HAW HAW it’s my list and you can’t stop me! Feels like it’s been a while since I had one of these, some corporate product that a proper cinephile is is Not Allowed to list ahead of No Other Choice and Sentimental Value, so I feel like it’s finally time to take a wrecking ball to all this credibility I’ve been building up. Look, man, I try, I want to be respectable, I gave this one another whirl before I put this list together with the specific intention of knocking it down a few pegs, and the exact opposite happened, this was originally like three places lower and I bumped it up after it made my heart soar again. Yes, it’s yet another big studio blockbuster about superheroes that looks like garbage, but this is easily one of my favorite scripts of the year, so perfectly tuned in to where it’s going and what it needs to do to get there. Great cast, great characters, great mini-arcs built into nearly all of them, and finally, at long last, we have a theatrical film that gets Superman, gets what the character’s about, why we like him, why he’s persisted this long in the cultural consciousness. Simultaneously the silliest and most sincere movie of the year and that’s exactly what it needs to be. I’m so glad James Gunn got to make it before the White House orders Warner Bros to take him off these movies (probably/maybe). I can’t believe Hollywood managed to get me interested in yet another cinematic universe.

8. 28 Years Later
I believe that engaging with art — especially storytelling — makes us better people. As Ebert once said, a story is an empathy generator; it puts us in the shoes of its characters and makes us feel what they feel, and in so doing articulates something about how its creator sees the world. Generally, I think that’s a cumulative effect. It’s rare that I can point to a movie and say, “That, specifically, made me a better person.” It’s only happened a handful of times in my life. Meet the latest and by far the strangest entry on that list: 28 Years Later, a sweaty, brutal, franchise zombie movie. I don’t know what I expected here; my thoughts on the series have been mixed (I think 28 Days Later is good but maybe a smidge overrated, and I don’t care for 28 Weeks Later at all), and at the end of the day it’s mainly been a showcase for blood, gore, and human depravity. And now here we are, with a bold, daring reboot so unique in its approach that it’s borderline experimental, a hyper-violent zombie tone poem that leaps from high philosophy to mega-zombies tearing guys’ heads off bare-handed and back again, somehow never losing focus in the surreal haze of its hellish aura. It ventures into horrors and somehow, through sheer force of will, claws out a life worth living, and in doing so, it really unlocked something in me, altered my perspective, helped me release a lot of what had been ailing me in the difficult months prior to its release. It is…kind of a miracle. Sort of unprecedented. Managed to make it to the big screen without taking a single studio note. It’s also unique in being the first movie I’ve ever put on this list having already seen its sequel and found it a likely contender for next year’s retrospective. Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and company are doing something genuinely interesting here, and I desperately hope the thin box office receipts do not stop them from seeing it through to completion.

7. Sinners
Yeah, yeah, I know, depending on who you talk to, this is either five or six entries too low. I just haven’t been able to shake my disappointment with its somewhat cliched resolution; please don’t hurt me! I otherwise agree with you that it is great, really great, just an absolute drum solo of an effort from Ryan Coogler, proof positive that everything we’ve ever disliked about his work to date ought to be blamed on corporations. Sinners is his best film, and it’s not close. Looks great, sounds great, carries the air of the iconic from the first frame. It has a ton on its mind and articulates it with nuance; it’s popcorn filmmaking that also stands as a challenge to its audience, something worth giving consideration that doesn’t resolve itself easily or comfortably. Extraordinary heroes and an extraordinary villain. Feels like nothing else out there. I have watched the “Rocky Road to Dublin” scene approximately three thousand times. Whatever its flaws, this is a major work — significantly greater than the sum of its parts, and the sum of its parts is already pretty darn high.

6. Sorry, Baby
Every year, it feels like there’s one movie I put really high on the list even though I don’t have much to say about it, either because words fail or I have no idea how I’d contain it in a single paragraph (with Sorry, Baby, it’s a little bit of both), so I end up making a pithy joke about how wild it is that all our most exiting new artists began their careers as social media funnypersons and hoping my speechlessness isn’t mistaken for indifference. Sorry, Baby is easily the most deceptively simple film of the year; very little happens, and most of what does is contained to just a handful of prolonged sequences in a sparse few locations. But it observes and relates so much in those limited spaces, really captures a life frozen in the moment it was traumatized, and the strange and unexpected things that sometimes pierce the malaise of those afflicted with such things. It chooses such unusual moments to choose you — the stretches between the dramatic moments that drive your average film —and yet it paints full portraits in those margins. It tells the story by telling everything but the story, somehow. It isn’t something that reads as unique or daring, but there really aren’t a lot of movies that have tried this sort of thing. Fewer still that have done it well.

5. The Testament of Ann Lee
I think a film about the Shaker movement could only ever exist as a thing of contradiction and contrast. And what a fascinating piece this is. A grim, anxious…musical? Beautiful and awesome and terrifying, worshipful and cynical, grandiose and intimate. Rarely do I see a movie that feels as exacting as this, a musical where the players’ every movement evokes entire texts of meaning. It feels as cultish and dangerous as it does good and pure — a depiction of a religion that is both a singular figure dragging others into a faith built of her own personal neuroses, but that also resists the great evils of its age. All The Testament of Ann Lee can really do is bring you into its characters’ world and let you decide for yourself what you think of them; it’s as much a character study as larger-than-life spectacle. Truly a full and rich emotional experience, and probably the Oscars’ biggest oopsie this year. The kind of movie for which they coined the phrase: “What a picture!”

4. Marty Supreme
The vast majority of Marty Supreme’s reviews describe it as essentially an anxiety attack in movie form. Those critics generally like it as much as I do, and yet I had a completely different experience with it. I thought Marty Supreme was a blast. A genuine guilty pleasure. It accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of making you love its protagonist as much as you hate him, which means everything that happens to him is either cathartic or hilarious — often both, simultaneously! It likely establishes Josh as the creative force behind the Safdie filmmaking duo, because even though he’s the only one on hand, this feels like the Safdiest movie of all time, the project their entire career has been building up to. A breakneck epic about ping pong, breathless and feverish and somehow entirely gripping — a zone only the Safdies’ balance of straight-faced ridiculousness and searing intensity could possibly capture. A Wolf of Wall Street-style takedown of a narcissist that places said narcissist in the absolute stupidest environment where one could exist. It’s always moving, you’re always waiting for it to crash, and it never does; as wild and unruly as it is, it even finds a strangely effective grace note by the end. Ambitious, original — nothing’s ever felt like this, been this compelling despite being essentially a feature-length meta-joke. If not the best movie of 2025, it’s certainly the most singular.

3. Wake Up Dead Man
Look, man, when these stop being good, I’ll stop putting them on this list. It is not this day, and at this point, I can only assume it won’t be tomorrow either. Or the next day. Or the next day. I think Rian Johnson is the filmmaker who’s closest to my heart — a guy I strongly suspect goes to the theater wanting the same thing I do: smart, fun genre cinema for adults, with strong characterization and something on its mind. If not outright the best movie in the series (it’s better than Glass Onion but a hair inferior to Knives Out), I think this has the strongest mystery to date, as well as the most satisfying resolution. Josh O’Connor is at least a contender for the trilogy’s best stealth protagonist, while Daniel Craig somehow finds new layers in Benoit Blanc that keep him from being too static as a character. Johnson refuses to repeat the formula from either of the previous two films, and once again turns over plenty of interesting stones as he puts a lens on another subsection of the United States in 2025. It’s just a movie, man, a real, honest-to-God movie that sucks you in and takes you on a journey and holds you under its spell until the credits roll. My brain was on fire for days after it ended.

2. It Was Just an Accident
As well-made, well-written, and well-acted as anything else that qualifies for this, and of course it’s hard not to allow the bravery of its own existence not to increase your esteem for it. On top of that, it’s another film that flirts with the boundaries between genres and manages to play simultaneously as comedy of errors, hard-hitting drama, and searing political commentary without missing a step. But for me, where It Was Just an Accident truly establishes itself as one of the best films of the year is in the uniqueness of its approach to what could have been very straightforward subject matter. It could easily have been a politically charged revenge movie, one that aimed either for guilty catharsis or an examination of what the cycle of violence makes us capable of. You expect the central conflict will be the protagonist desperately trying to resist the temptation of vengeance. Instead, you get a mournful film whose heart is not the question of whether a good man can exact bloody vengeance while remaining good, but the acceptance that the choice isn’t even his in the first place — by nature of who he is, he simply can’t do it. The protagonists of It Was Just an Accident are trying to talk themselves into vengeance, not out of it. They exist in an open-ended film that both accepts this as right but grieves its implications for any notion of perfect justice. You can’t stare into the abyss without the abyss staring back. All you can do is let go and move on. It’s no wonder that people turn to religion.

1. One Battle After Another
   Sometimes it’s tough to weigh the film you think is the technical best of the year against the film you feel closer to because of its relevance to its cultural and historical moment. In 2025, I am pleased to say that for once, those films are one and the same. One Battle After Another feels as major as anything to have graced the silver screen in recent memory. Every year sees lots of good movies and a handful of great ones. Not every year gets a One Battle After Another — a movie that feels like an instant all-timer. Nobody seems ready to talk about this just yet, but it’s clear to me we’re ginning up to debate whether this is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film — and I don’t need to tell anyone what a big deal it is that One Battle After Another can even make an argument for itself on that front. I’m already prepared to declare it the best film of the ‘20s so far — and it’s going to take one barnburner of a film to topple it in the next four years. This is as close to perfect as movies get. Every performance precisely cued in to its weirdo characters, the pacing gliding forward with a slick crackle, the story smart and compelling, the strange, surreal gonzo tone — the real world, but ever so slightly off — holding through every twist and turn. One Battle After Another would have felt radical in just about any era in human history, but in this one — the one where the federal government is on the verge of functional ownership of most of the film industry, and Disney+ has buried everything with a gay person in it — feels like a miracle. And it’s challenging, nuanced; it’s asking hard questions about how we fight and why we fight and exploring the near-unresolvable quagmire of our own motivations and individual capacities for courage and endurance. It feels like everything, somehow, despite its off-kilter specificity. An actual, no-bones-about-it masterpiece. I realize it is not interesting for a cinephile to slot this at the top of 2025. But that sort of consensus rarely arrives without good reason, and One Battle After Another is a very, very good reason.

Now the only question is the likelihood that I will debase myself by putting Pizza Movie on this list next year (it’s not zero!).

(With the understanding that someone might be interested in reading my annual roundup on movies and not the equivalent music piece — or vice versa — and lacking the desire to reiterate what I said last time: If you want to know my thoughts on the state of the world and the state of myself and the state of this website, you can read the essay that opened my musical retrospective here. It still covers just about everything I’m capable of saying right now. Otherwise, please enjoy this year’s Top 20 Movies!)

I’m not wild about 2024 as a year in movies. Yeah, I ultimately filled this list with a handful of contenders to spare, but…I don’t know. I got there in part by cheating, at least by my standards; there are two entries with runtimes so short I’m not sure I’d have qualified them as feature length in a year when I was less desperate for films I’d actually be excited to write about. And even with that rule broken, you have to get a couple entries deep before you start finding movies I’m confident would have made the cut last year.

Part of the problem is that 2024 played as something of a reverse 2023 — it got off to an extremely strong start, then just flatlined for the rest of the year. The top four entries on this list had all been released by April, and that’s quite a high to come down from.

Still, the top tier of this year’s list is pretty, well, top tier. And considering how recently I was sincerely concerned 2024 would not have enough great movies to comfortably fill twenty slots, the fact that I ended up with as much overflow as I did — even if I don’t feel compelled to include any of it as an honorable mention — comes as some relief. There will never be a year with no great movies — and if 2024 could pull it off, there will probably never be a year where this list is a challenge. This isn’t my favorite column since I started doing this — though, for what it’s worth, it also isn’t my least favorite — but in the end I’m content with it.

Let us begin!

20. Evil Does Not Exist

Evil Does Not Exist is the kind of Top 20 entry that’s really only one fatal flaw away from being a Top 10 entry. There’s part of me that even thinks it might be better than the much more culturally impactful Drive My Car — or that most of it is, anyway. It’s typically beautiful work from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: I make my living as a small-town journalist, I love me a good public meeting, inject your movie about municipal water systems directly into my veins. But what really stands out to me is how skillfully paced it is — slow and deliberate, to be sure, but in this way that allows it to complete every thought before moving on. Hamaguchi establishes a sort of chilly remove that accentuates its depiction of mundane worldly cruelties and provide and stages its surprising sense of humor with appropriate awkwardness. Like I said, it’s the sort of movie that normally would comfortably slot itself in the Top 10 or Top 5 — but for my feeling that it nowhere near sticks the landing, and in fact fails to earn it by such a significant distance that it can cast the faintest pallor over the film preceding it. Not much of one, though — Evil Does Not Exist is extraordinary until it isn’t, and it isn’t only for a short time. I continue to watch Hamaguchi’s career with interest.

19. Look Back

The year’s best cry-like-an-idiot movie. This is one of two entries I feel like I might have disqualified in a year where I found my also-rans more compelling — at only fifty minutes, it’s shorter than a lot of TV shows these days. But the Academy counts that as feature length, so whatever — this year, it’s good enough for me. Look Back is absolute emotional dynamite for weird artsy types who have a difficult, anxious relationship with their work — which is to say me, it’s emotional dynamite for me specifically. It’s also emotional dynamite for people with a tendency to fixate on what-ifs and might-have-beens and who struggle with the transience and impermanence of things, which is to say that, really, this kind of became overkill for me past a certain point. Charming, low-key, and delightful until it’s crushing, then swings from hope to despair and back again until it’s put you the whole way through the wringer. Beautiful, sad, affirming, great.

18. Conclave

Conclave is the kind of movie that reminds me why I frame these lists as “favorites,” not “bests.” Obviously, who am I to decide my own subjective emotional responses ought to be representative of some larger object standard? But it’s more than that, it’s the fact that even my own personal sense of what’s good or bad or better or worse get tangled up in the complexity of telling a story. I can easily think of ways Conclave could have been technically better cinema. And all of those things would have made me like it less. I worry in my discussions over the last several months I’ve overemphasized Conclave as an ironic pleasure; let me be clear now that it truly isn’t. This is a well-made film, it looks great, the cast is phenomenal, it somehow makes behind-the-scenes Vatican politicking the most fascinating thing in the world. It’s super melodramatic and intense, but I have a weakness for that kind of thing. It’s just that when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong — but also swings for the fences so hard that you have to admire it. This would be a “better” movie if it ended twenty minutes earlier, on that final moment of ambiguity — instead of suddenly ratcheting everything up to eleven and piling on twist after twist after twist. But I had a big, stupid smile on my face through the whole ending the first time I watched it, relishing each earth-shattering revelation, doing a spit-take the moment I realized what the final turn was going to be. For me, it’s The Dark Knight Rises of pope movies: great when it’s good and a masterpiece when it isn’t. Loved it.

17. Rap World

The other entry I thought about disqualifying, and it’s even more tempting in this case, not only because it runs a mere fifty minutes but because it’s literally a really long YouTube video and even I have trouble muscling past the stigma associated with that. But Rap World is just too…undeniable. It occupied my thoughts far too long after I watched it to be discarded solely on account of its medium. There really is a level of stupidity that a movie cannot achieve without the people making it secretly being actual geniuses, and I’m struggling to think of anything that better demonstrates what I mean by that than Rap World. It doesn’t just deliver on the jokes — though let me be clear that it is hilarious, and somehow only gets funnier as it goes — it perfectly replicates the experience of hanging out with the stupidest guys you knew in the year 2009. Every inch of every frame reflects an unwavering commitment to the bit — the camera as much the medium as it is an actor portraying a character in the story, every dialogue exchange feeling loose and improvisational despite the fact that it would have to be extremely purposeful in order to convey the necessary information and set up the jokes for the editing room, the cultural references and overall mood having to line up with a historical period that happened too recently to be easily signaled visually. It can only exist as a function of an extraordinary amount of thought going into it. It truly is Moron Citizen Kane. Funny when it’s funny and hilarious when it’s kind of sad.

16. Nickel Boys

You know, I always complain about how late I am with these because of how long it can take certain films to screen near me (if they do at all). And yet, I sometimes feel like the extra three or four months I get to do these still isn’t enough. I don’t know how I’d handle throwing a list together at the tail end of December having only seen everything one time and some films only a handful of days prior. Nickel Boys feels like it’s occupying a placeholder slot here. I had no idea where to put it. Because it’s clearly extraordinary, but I’ve also never seen anything like it and I know I didn’t completely get my head around it on the first viewing. I could see repeat viewings moving it to pretty much any position here. The craftsmanship is incomprehensible, how its cinematography can be so beautiful while also being one hundred percent subjective, anchored in the direct point of view of its characters. And it maintains that delicate state without ever breaking kayfabe — it actually feels like you’re looking through a human being’s eyes, it has that fidgety distraction that comes with reacting to changes in your environment, and yet it’s all so deliberately stitched together and graceful. And that’s just the surface, not the rich core of theme and feeling I still don’t completely have in hand. Just an impossible thing, a miracle of a movie.

15. Anora

Another year, another Sean Baker movie that I feel like you guys like way more than I do, and honestly, I’m not even sure Anora is my favorite of his; it lacks that Sean Baker-y texture of everyday oddity that drives the rest of his work. But for the purposes of a list like this, that says a lot more about where you guys are than I am, because Anora is still one of the best — for lack of a better descriptor — “four-quadrant” movies of the year. You know, the sort of movie that’s accessible on a hundred different levels, whether you’re in it for the jokes or the feelings. I like the smallness of its scope, and the inherent hilariousness of its concept. And the performances are across-the-board stellar; I’m actually completely fine with that upset Mikey Madison Best Actress win (and probably would’ve voted for Yura Borisov too, were I a member of the Academy). Weird, layered, doesn’t always take things where you think it’s going to. Good fun.

14. Rebel Ridge

I would like for Netflix to die in the hottest fire it can find for completely burying this. There is absolutely no reason why Rebel Ridge shouldn’t be a monster hit, much less nearly forgotten only a handful of months after its release. Well, if there’s only one person left beating the drum, let it be me — Rebel Ridge is one hell of a bone-crunching thriller (that’s also weirdly humane at the end of the day?). It’s the modern world’s answer to First Blood. It slides gracefully from slow-burn indie intensity to detective procedural and finally to pulse-pounding actioner, never misses a beat. The civil asset forfeiture revenge thriller: just what the doctor ordered.

13. Hit Man

While we’re on the subject of “burn in hell, Netflix,” here’s the other great movie they casually dropped halfway through the year and then pretended never existed. Hit Man is the first Richard Linklater movie I’ve loved since 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!! and possibly his best “fun one” since as far back as School of Rock (depending on how you define “fun one,” anyway). It has a lot of his staples, chiefly its low-key tone and its talky but not overly self-serious philosophical dimensions. But it’s also kind of a departure for him in that it replaces his aching sincerity with biting, red-hot irony. What if you therapy speak’d yourself into becoming a sociopath? What if the best version of yourself is actually kind of terrible? Cheeky, kind of slimy, deliberately leans into its guilty pleasure elements. Super watchable, and also kind of quietly unprecedented.

12. Nosferatu

I’m picking up a vibe like people are starting to get a little sick of Robert Eggers. Not me, though. It’s weird, because I have a long history of being a “story over aesthetics” guy when a movie forces me to make that choice, but Eggers is just such a generational talent behind the camera. He’s one of the best technical craftsmen working, and at this point probably a candidate for the all-time list. He’s going to have to turn in a script that’s actively bad even to get me to drop below my customary four stars, much less to turn me against him. And Nosferatu does not have a bad script! It isn’t flawless, but it’s doing some interesting things, particularly with the strange psychosexual aspects of the story; I strongly disagree with the strain of criticism accusing it of having nothing on its mind. Nosferatu has more than enough beneath the surface to support its staggering visuals. It looks and sounds phenomenal, and it’s interesting to see Eggers attack something a little more visceral — less the slow burn of The Witch and more a proper horror thriller. It’s unsettling as all hell, a horror movie that feels deeply, pervasively evil and buries itself in your gut. A filmmaker at the absolute height of his powers.

11. Hard Truths

Mike Leigh is one of those otherworldly talents to me — I simply cannot comprehend how he manages to do what he does with such consistency. I don’t understand the functions of his work, and never in a million years could I replicate them — constantly creating things that feel like new, unprecedented experiences despite being naturalistic, improvisational dramas about the lives of everyday, average people. How he can wrangle such beauty out of sets that consist largely of living rooms, how he can mine so many layers of complexity out of premises so simple they’re barely even loglines, how he can get those performances out of so many different people over so many years — seriously, I think there’s an argument to be made that no director in the history of the medium has been better with actors. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, just, my god. It’s all so familiar, the characters so much like people you know in real life, their situations so relatable, and yet it’s so complicated, so evocative, a house of cards that would collapse instantly with one wrong move and yet somehow no one ever makes one. And it’s all done with such humility; there isn’t a single moment where the film starts to feel impressed with itself. Just another day at the office. It confounds me in the best possible way.

10. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

There’s no doubt it can be hard to separate a movie like The Seed of the Sacred Fig from its circumstances — the fact that its mere existence is an act of extraordinary courage, that multiple members of the cast and crew have been arrested and/or exiled for making it. But the older I get, the more I believe that’s part and parcel of the whole thing — that movies, or any works of art, for that matter, are functions of their real-world foundations as much as what’s actually contained within them. Sometimes the medium really is the message. It’s that bravery that makes The Seed of the Sacred Fig so cutting and urgent, that gives it its vitality. Specificity, once again, is key — what ultimately exposes the universality of the human condition and what ails it. You don’t have to have lived a second of its story for its characters and their increasingly fraught relationship with one another to ring achingly familiar. Edward Albee once said, “Fiction is fact distilled into truth.” The Seed of the Sacred Fig is truth.

9. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Easily the year’s most pleasant surprise. I gave up on Aardman at some point; the studio hasn’t delivered anything better than OK in a while, and its recent turn toward sequels felt like a desperate last grasp at keeping its doors open. The mediocrity of the new Chicken Run more or less sealed the deal for me. Then lo and behold! They delivered Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, their best feature in twenty years, since its own predecessor — and there’s a small part of me that wonders if I like it even more than that one! It’s exactly what I want out of a Wallace & Gromit movie — simple but inventive, dryly funny, sometimes a riot but not so often it becomes exhausting, replete with the requisite Aardman charm, and it’s also got stronger storytelling than I’m used to even in the studio’s best features. Nothing fancy, of course, but there’s a sense of purpose and drive to it that I don’t think Aardman has tapped into since Chicken Run. It’s just a good time, the perfect family film.

8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

It grew on me! It’s no Fury Road, but I don’t think it matters. This is the Aliens to Fury Road’s Alien — inferior, but different enough as a movie that you stop comparing them. Alien is the best version of itself, Aliens is the best version of itself, and so it goes with Furiosa. It’s less of a slam-bang action flick, more of a sweeping epic — albeit one that’s more honed in on character, more interested in telling a story. Fury Road is fun; Furiosa is bleak. It feels the loss of the old world more profoundly than any other entry in the Mad Max franchise; there’s a weight to it, a sense of grief. Chris Hemsworth has absolutely never been better, and Anya Taylor Joy’s Charlize Theron impression is downright creepy. And through it all, you still get the great set pieces and utterly deranged characters you see these movies for. And it’s an excellent companion piece to its predecessor, the latter of which is something of a tonic for the former’s bleakness. If nothing you do matters, might as well do something right. What else are you going to do?

7. Flow

One thing I’ve found over the years is that I really, really like the idea of movies about animals — actual animals, I mean, not Disney animals with essentially human intelligence — but I struggle to get into them in practice. Even all-timers like Au Hasard Balthazar I respect more than enjoy. They’re animals! There isn’t a whole lot of texture to dig into there. It’s hard to feel anything deep and interesting. That’s why it’s significant that I loved Flow right out of the gate and it never lost me. I don’t know how fair it is to say it’s about actual animals — the concept requires it to take at least a few liberties, like that they figure out how to steer the boat. But in the ways that matter, it feels authentic. I think Flow low-key has some of the best storytelling of any movie this year, or at least the most novel — that it somehow manages to wring character arcs out of its furry cast while still having them feel like animals. It pulls off this cause-and-effect, punishment/reward angle — if I do this, I get food; if I do this, I get hurt, that sort of thing — that feels true to the way animals learn, makes its characters dynamic, and sends them on a journey that’s as much emotional as physical. I think what most stands out to me is how broadly appealing it feels, despite being a little indie movie with a lot of vision — simply because of how skillfully it executes on a ton of different levels. You’ve got cute animals, you’ve got enough concrete storytelling to engage the average audience, and there’s mystery and ambiguity to it — especially its haunted world-building — that leave it feeling like it’s hit upon something important. Truly something special.

6. Sing Sing

Another one that’s grown on me with distance and a second viewing. Sing Sing is good in all the ways you want a movie to be good, the ones that maybe aren’t as fun to write about, but where it goes the extra mile, I think, is how unified it feels in its purpose. How seemingly everyone involved knew what was unique to the story they were telling, what made it special, what made it interesting, and worked to bring that out — not only in writing and filmmaking and performance but in the reality of the production itself. It’s only kind of the real-life John Whitfield’s story, and it’s only kind of a true story in the first place. Really, by drawing the film from his account, then threading in the details of other men he knew over the course of his incarceration, then casting actual former inmates in those roles and letting them incorporate some of their own autobiographies into the story, they created something that’s a perfect approximation of its own subject. It’s theater — the ultimate collaborative art form. And Sing Sing is a very collaborative-feeling movie, a lot of different people bringing their own truth to the experience. So you get this balanced, nuanced movie, as much a hangout flick as a propulsive narrative, and it walks the line gracefully. Never feels thin, never feels overstuffed, there’s always some new layer being peeled back, and sometimes it’s surprising what you find underneath. Despite its heavy subject matter, it’s warm, uplifting, and full of love, and it earns every second.

5. The Brutalist

I’ve said before that if The Brutalist is not quite the best movie of 2024, it’s easily the most American. An immigrant population crawling out of the ashes of generational trauma, while the world continues spinning apathetically around them, funneled into the blood and sweat of the capitalist grind, expected to pick up and carry on somehow. A big world run by even bigger whims, a people with little recourse against them but to live and die by their whims. Even after obtaining prestige and a certain indispensability, it only affords the opportunity to stand silently and watch as self-made wealthy megalomaniacs pass the torch to their failsons who are no less evil than them but lack even the mad vision to build something that lasts; they know and care nothing of the world beyond spreadsheets and the numbers that go up and down on them. And in the end, what you leave behind is bigger than you; what it inspires is out of your hands. Art, commerce, ego. A staggering, ambitious epic that’s all the more impressive for how it stands perpetually on the razor’s edge of collapse without ever tipping in.

4. Hundreds of Beavers

I swear I am just hemorrhaging brain cells, man. Every year I’m alive on this Earth I become measurably stupider. I go through different artistic phases from time to time, where a specific type of thing fascinates me and I get way too into it. Right now, that thing is what I can only describe as “the artfully stupid.” Get me artists at the absolute height of their powers who are devoting all of that talent and perfectionism to the most moronic ideas that ever slithered across their diseased brains. Go to film school, then pool all of your resources into bringing that big Drunk Idea to life. Anyway, if there was a Wikipedia page for “the artfully stupid,” I’d have to insist on the poster for Hundreds of Beavers being at the very top. It has codified the entire concept. Sincerely well designed, possibly the best edited movie of the entire year, lovingly hand-crafted, and you will feel entire sections of your brain sloughing off while you watch it. This isn’t a movie you experience; it’s a movie you lose a fight with. I can identify the exact moment where my dumbfounded silence lapsed into complete hysteria and then never stopped. We’ve done it, ladies and gentlemen. The pinnacle of human achievement. The stupidest movie ever made. I laughed until I was sick. I loved every second of it. I made it my entire personality last year and I do not regret it.

3. I Saw the TV Glow

I have never seen anything like I Saw the TV Glow. That’s pretty much the long and short of it. It’s a rare thing, a movie that feels like it’s discovered some whole new way of communicating, like it’s expanded the known boundaries of what cinema can do. And somehow, it does that despite wearing its influences very explicitly on its sleeve — part of me thinks Jane Schoenbrun has been a little too forthcoming about their influences on the interview circuit, and yet it hasn’t made a dent in the overall novelty of the experience. I Saw the TV Glow keeps its literal and metaphorical elements in perfect balance, sliding from the more traditionally narrative to the downright Lynchian without ever losing you, cheating your emotional investment, or shedding the core of what it is. It always feels of a piece with itself. It achieves thematic clarity on the level of the preachiest morality play you’ve seen, without ever putting its actual subject into the literal text of the story. It’s evocative, it defies genre, it borrows chintzy ‘90s YA visuals and somehow transforms them striking and gorgeous. Blank check for Schoenbrun; I’m there for whatever comes next.

2. Dune: Part 2

I am as God made me, folks. It’s like I said when I put Part 1 in that year’s Top 20: I love science fiction nonsense, I love big worms and laser guns and spaceships, and when you hand those things to a director who knows how to shoot them so that they are not gray, warmed-over filth, I’m a cat chasing a laser pointer. You’ve got me; I’m putty in your hands. Anyway, I still have a handful of minor reservations about Part 1, but those do not recur in Part 2 — it’s the better movie in every conceivable way; it even brought me around on some of the things I didn’t care for the first time around (chiefly that loud loud LOUD score, which now feels like the purest reflection of the duology’s “sinners in the hand of an angry god” ethos). Being alive in a time of prophecy would be as invigorating as it would be terrifying, and that’s the key to how Dune: Part 2 manages to be a rousing epic and a feel-bad indictment of religion and power at the same time. It’s some truly extraordinary big-screen spectacle. Bring on Dune: Messiah, bring on the other sequels, let’s get to the weird stuff, let’s upset some people, let’s set Warner Bros’ money on fire, we’re doing this.

And drumroll…

1. Challengers

Alternative title: The Most Damning Indictment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences This Side of Crash! I’m definitely not sore about this, not even a little bit. The kind of movie that makes me want to put on a bad Humphrey Bogart voice and declare “What a picture!” Challengers has reliably gotten better every single time I’ve watched it. With full respect to Call Me By Your Name’s following — it’s a great film, and I have no quarrel with it — this is the best work of Luca Guadagnino’s career, and to be completely honest, I don’t consider it close. Challengers is just plain a movie, man, a good, old-fashioned movie, with electric direction and razor-sharp writing and real, actual movie-star performances from real, actual movie stars. It’s smart and trusts its audience; it’s entertainment made by and for adults. There’s already a part of me that thinks it might be the best sports movie of all time, one that actually manages to synchronize what’s happening on the court with what’s happening off of it. There’s no moment here where a character just Digs Deep; it’s all fully motivated. And somehow it pulls off that feat while navigating as many as three or four simultaneous timelines without confusing its audience or losing its freight-train momentum; every new piece of information is deployed at the exact perfect time. There was a moment in the climax that almost made me leap out of my seat when I realized what was going on. This, right here, is how it’s done, kids. A master class.

2023 was a pretty good year for movies.

Yeah, for all of my complaint — and I was full of it this year — that’s the inescapable conclusion looking over this list. This wasn’t a great year, but it more than justified its existence by the time the lights went down.

It just didn’t feel that way. Mostly I think that’s because 2023 was a very back-loaded year. We had to hold out until November and December for a lot of these; a handful of them have only been in wide release — for a certain value of “wide release” — for a month or two even now. And for me, living in a rural area means even a lot of the earlier releases were impossible to see until streaming services picked them up in the fall. Basically, Barbenheimer was all I had sustaining me for the first three-fourths of the year. Hard not to feel kind of glum about the state of things when that’s your situation! I went to a dark place when they postponed Dune.

But hey, it did result in December and January being one of the best two months of movies I’ve ever lived through. And even though I didn’t see a sizable number of these in time to save 2023 from itself, there’s still a lot of really special stuff on here. Once again, they represent a fairly diverse selection, and I’m pretty happy with them on the whole.

(And I’m glad for that because 2024’s slate is looking like a real bummer right now!)

Anyway, I don’t normally do honorable mentions for these, but this year, there is a very definitive Number 21. So I’ll just take a moment to recognize it: May December. I think it’s a lot of tension with very little release, which is ultimately why it was my last cut from the list. However, it’s genuinely insightful, one of the rare movies that I think helped me understand its subject in a new way — and of course, Charles Melton was robbed.

Now for the Top 20!

20. John Wick: Chapter 4
I’m not sure whether the John Wick movies are getting better or if I’m just getting more amenable to them. I kind of think it’s the latter, because it seems impossible to me that each of them has been better than the last, which has been my experience with them. I’ve been meaning to revisit the first one to see if I like it now, but have thus far refused to do so for the very good reason that I cannot watch that puppy die again. That said, I do think Chapter 4, at least, is better than the others — at least, better than my memory of them — which is why the series is now making its first-ever appearance on my year-end list. These movies all have a certain magic about them; even when they’re bad, they’re good. There’s a moment on the cusp of what feels like the final showdown where Chapter 4 goes, “But first, another thirty-minute action sequence!” And I sighed, but then the movie was like, “OK, OK, I hear you, but what if this scene involves Keanu Reeves killing dudes with cars and then falling down a cartoonish amount of stairs for like fifteen minutes?” And I was like, “Fine, I’ll allow it.” It kicks as much hindquarter as you need these movies to; moreover, it gives John Wick probably his best enemy yet, the first one who is not obviously more evil than him, and I think it advances the series’ central theme — can a leopard change its spots? — to an appropriately complicated place. The cool thing about this list is that no one can stop me from cutting a Todd Haynes movie to make room for Keanu Reeves shooting guys in the face.

19. Fallen Leaves
I think the best thing I can say about Fallen Leaves is that it would probably be even higher if I spoke the language. Comedy can be tough to translate across language barriers, and that can keep this one at arm’s length once in a while. It’s hard to hear the nuance in context and delivery that’ll really make the joke go the extra mile. So the fact that I loved this movie as much as I did is a real testament to how good it actually is. For me, it comes down to one thing: this romantic comedy centers on one of the most unusual fictional couples I can think of, and the fact that it makes them work is genuine magic. These two are awkward, have terrible social skills, can barely look each other in the eye, have an anti-chemistry so intense that someone it winds all the way back around into being chemistry again. Only these two people would have this kind of patience for each other. They’re destined to spend the rest of their lives sitting two feet apart on a couch, and both of them will be completely happy with that arrangement. And there’s just something kinda sweet about that. Maybe eventually they’ll exchange enough words to learn each other’s names.

18. Barbie
Shrug. This is the world we live in now. Interesting, unique, well-made art can still exist on a mainstream level, you just have to smuggle it through the system in Barbie packaging. I think enough proverbial ink has been spilled over Barbie at this point; on most levels, you can assume I’m more or less in agreement with the general consensus. For my part, I think I was always going to sign off on it so long as it delivered quality jokes and a distinctive, well-realized aesthetic. That it ended up delivering much more than that — including another peak performance by Comedy Ryan Gosling, the best Ryan Gosling — is really just icing on the cake. Like I said. It’s a Barbie world.

17. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
I will actually lose my mind if you people put Kelly Fremon Craig in director jail again. When I first saw it, I thought word-of-mouth would rescue its box office; when that didn’t happen, I thought Oscar season would breathe some life into its cultural presence; when that didn’t happen, I began to feel as though I was going mad. I have no idea why Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was allowed to pass in the night like this. Craig has now proven twice over that she may be THE voice for coming-of-age stories about girls. Just like The Edge of Seventeen, Are You There God is funny, sweet, observant, tells its story well, and gets tremendous performances out of its whole cast (we as a culture are failing Rachel McAdams). Somebody please rescue this from obscurity; I don’t want to have to wait another seven years for Craig’s next one.

16. Robot Dreams
The Oscars do serve at least one purpose — without them, I don’t think I’d ever have bothered to watch this. It’s such an unassuming thing, and yet it’s also unprecedented in its way — how it is simultaneously perfect for both adults and children, to the extent that I couldn’t even tell you which of those audiences it’s primarily for. It shows you a sort of cynical, adult world, and then views it through an innocent, childlike lens. And in doing so, it achieves a certain clarity about things. Oh, and what’s that? It’s about endings and beginnings and the transience of things, the subject most likely to reduce me to a simpering puddle of tears? Yeah, I liked this one.

15. Monster
Hirokazu Koreeda stands apart with Asghar Farhadi as a social observer of passionate moral conviction and the ability to tell stories that somehow feel as though they’ve never been told before despite never invoking anything stronger than the everyday problems of everyday people. Monster is one of the best Rashomon-style narratives I can recall seeing. It has an expert, instinctive sense of when the moment comes to most powerfully expand your understanding of its story. It might not be as airtight as some of its director’s best work, but it more than makes up for that with its resolve. I love a movie that strikes a perfect balance between concrete, clearly conveyed information and more ambiguous developments that allow you to speculate about the characters and themes. And I love movies about the interconnectedness of humanity, how everything we do ripples outward to the people around us and then to the people around them. Simultaneously crushing and beautiful — which is to say, exactly what you expect from a Koreeda film, and exactly what you want most.

14. The Boy and the Heron
A Hayao Miyazaki film that attends more to its metaphorical dimensions than its literal ones, thus positioning it somewhat farther from my comfort zone than a lot of his work. And yet, it’s a Miyazaki film — gorgeous, on all levels, without fail, and to the extent that it’s something a little off the beaten path, at least getting your head around it is an arresting challenge. It’s the sort of movie you could watch a dozen times without failing to find something new. I’ve heard it called a Miyazaki highlights reel, but if it is, well, of course! It’s transparently a reflection on everything he’s made, whether it did any good and whether he’s left it in secure hands. It’s a phenomenal coda on an iconic career — assuming it is, in fact, his last film, which knowing him and how many times he’s tried to quit this business already, I recognize it almost certainly isn’t.

13. Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos exists at a confluence of “obviously extraordinarily gifted” and “not really my thing” that makes his movies difficult to position on lists like this. That’s probably never been truer than it is with Poor Things, a movie I have no problem calling an all-time masterpiece even though it weirded me all the way out. Honestly, I’m prepared to argue it’s Lanthimos’s best work — the most fully inhabited, the prettiest, the most purposeful, the best constructed. Certainly Emma Stone’s is the best performance to have happened under his supervision, which is saying a lot. Also his funniest movie, by a pretty significant margin: I’d have been fine with Poor Things if it had been nothing but Bella slowly driving Mark Ruffalo insane. And it is certainly more than that. Fifty-fifty chance I never watch this again, zero chance I’m not still thinking about it on my deathbed.

12. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Even as a tiny microbudget indie, the existence of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is outright shocking to me. I kept waiting for it to pull a punch, hedge its bets, dial it back toward something a little more comfortable for the political mainstream. It never did. It’s certainly the boldest thing to happen on the big screen this year. I think what makes it feel so radical is that it avoids the politics altogether. It isn’t trying to have a dialogue about the problem and how best to respond to it. It simply throws you into the mix with these characters, brings you into their world, and then trusts you to follow them through the paces of what is otherwise a normal heist movie/slow burn thriller — a very good one, but still, normal. Treating the subject like it’s no big deal somehow makes it the biggest deal of all. How to Blow Up a Pipeline was one of the year’s earliest releases, and it has loomed large in my mind ever since.

11. The Iron Claw
One of the best screenplays of the year, with one of the strongest senses of character. There’s nothing outwardly unusual about it, but I can’t recall seeing its subject — the world of professional wrestling — brought to life in quite this way before. The balance between what’s real and what’s fake in this thing that’s half sport, half theater is very tricky to navigate, and probably uniquely toxic for someone with a competitive spirit. Sean Durkin’s prior experience capturing cult dynamics in film fits the material uniquely well. Strong performances, strong filmmaking, genuinely insightful in its approach to its real-life characters, one of those all-around good movies for adults that we don’t get enough of anymore.

10. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
The most I can remember liking a Mission: Impossible movie right out of the gate — and I don’t think that’s just a matter of circumstance. Dead Reckoning, of course, delivers everything we’re starting to take for granted from this franchise — the tactile, hard-hitting action, and the mind-blowing stunt work. But I also think it’s a major step forward on a story level. For starters, it’s the first time these movies have ever felt like they’re putting their central ethos — never leave a man behind — to a serious test; Dead Reckoning is intense in a way I don’t remember the majority of its predecessors being. Additionally, the new villain, despite being a literal algorithm, is genuinely threatening and even kind of scary in the brief moment where it brings its full power to bear. It’s super fun to watch, but also strangely compelling. With Dead Reckoning, I can say something I’ve never said about a Mission: Impossible movie before: I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Honestly, what do I even say? This movie doesn’t need anyone else to lavish praise upon it. It’s all true, everything you’ve heard. The animation is now operating on levels that feel physically impossible. The writing is razor-sharp. There are no other superhero movies on the market working with characters this deeply felt. Somehow, all of this is happening despite the plot being a twenty-car pileup of characters and storylines. Yeah, it is, for the moment, only half a movie, but if Beyond the Spider-Verse even comes close to matching it, it’s half one of the greatest movies ever made.

8. The Zone of Interest
Impossible to talk about. Harrowing. A knife in your gut, twisted slowly. Sandra Hüller is terrifying. It could only have happened like this. It always happens like this. It’s happening like this right now. When it happens again, it will happen like this — not because we’re good at ignoring the cruelty, but because some part of us wants it. Can’t envision paradise without it. To a lot of us, Heaven is not Heaven if Hell is not below it.

7. The Starling Girl
Every year, I adopt and make a cause out of at least one movie barely anyone saw and that missed most critics’ year-end retrospectives. The Starling Girl is 2023’s. As usual, it’s my own experiences informing that — there’s so much about this movie, its circumstances, its characters, the little things they say and do and why and how, that rang instantly true for me. There’s a scene where its main character breaks down because she’s so happy she’s certain that means the thing she’s happy about is something God wants her to give up, and it made me wonder: would anyone who hasn’t experienced that even recognize what was going on in that scene? I don’t know, but believe me, it’s worth trying. Even as much as it’s personal for me, The Starling Girl is a just-plain-great movie on every relevant level. Check it out; it’s a real good cry.

6. The Holdovers
Alexander Payne’s best in a while — and ever is on the table. His talents as a filmmaker are plenty, but I think what I love most about him is that he’s one of the last directors making really good movies about normal, average people who have normal, average problems. People who don’t look like Sears fall collection models, who have weird hangups, who have lazy eyes and smell like fish and sometimes are awful for no reason. I’ve never understood the criticisms of Payne’s work as misanthropic — he’s clear-eyed about his characters and their flaws, but his movies always having them realizing that solace is in one another. I don’t think he’s ever told that story as beautifully as he does here. The Holdovers is sweet and sad and funny and anchored on a trio of the year’s best performances.

5. Anatomy of a Fall
I think it’s likely the best courtroom dramas aren’t really about the proceedings themselves, and so it goes with Anatomy of a Fall, a movie where the plot itself feels like an act of misdirection — the possible murder, the trial, that’s just a framing device used to probe the shadows of a failing marriage and a mother and son struggling to put themselves back together. It’s in the execution thereof that I think Anatomy of a Fall sets itself apart from its contemporaries in the genre — how it reverse engineers a sort of flashback structure despite, ultimately, containing only one actual flashback (which is so loaded with meaning it almost serves as an entire film unto itself). It’s tough to make a movie where the protagonist keeps secrets from the audience, and that’s how Anatomy of a Fall gets away with it. Guilt or innocence matter less than what brought us to this point. The fall is simply the final consequence. I think I’ve detected the faintest hint of a backlash to this one, so let this stand as a firm declaration that I am not a part of it. Fully deserving of all its accolades.

4. Godzilla Minus One
ha ha ha you can’t stop me — but also, why would you want to? Yeah, I think these last few years have fully ruined me on American blockbusters. My message to the public, at this point, is that if you won’t even read the sparse, simple subtitles of a foreign genre flick, you have no idea what you’re missing. Godzilla Minus One is, at the very least, the best Godzilla movie of my lifetime, and the only reason I won’t go farther back than that is that I haven’t actually seen any of those. I would also contend it’s one of the best movies of its kind more generally. A disaster movie where you actually care about the characters? What a concept! Minus One is also possibly the best Godzilla has ever been as social commentary — it’s deeply weird to say that a movie whose primary appeal is a digital monster knocking over digital buildings is ultimately sort of life-affirming, but Godzilla Minus One contains multitudes. It delivered everything I want from a kaiju movie, and also unexpectedly made me feel better about this beautiful, catastrophic thing we call humanity. I’ve wanted to love a Godzilla movie my whole life, and I can’t tell you how it feels to finally get to. If I do not get a U.S. Blu Ray of this, I will become dangerous.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon
I don’t really have favorite filmmakers. I’m not sure whether that’s unusual for a movie nerd. It’s more like a long list of directors who consistently do really good work that I’ll always check out on the big screen if at all possible. But if you asked me to step outside myself and decide who I think is the best filmmaker of all time, I’m pretty sure my answer would be Martin Scorsese. And I can’t think of stronger evidence in my favor than the run he’s been on since The Wolf of Wall Street — to Silence to The Irishman to, well, this. Those four films would be the envy of any artist, so I can’t think of any better testament to Scorsese than that I think a lot of his fans, maybe even most of them, would not consider this his golden era. This is all just par for the course at this point. I think that makes it easy to take him for granted, so consider Killers of the Flower Moon’s positioning on this list my way of ensuring that I don’t. It’s lesser Scorsese, which makes it just about any other director’s crowning achievement. Absolutely stunning.

2. Oppenheimer
At this point, I think what I like most about Christopher Nolan is that I get the impression with him, more than any other filmmaker, that he’s doggedly determined to grow with each new project he takes on. The sense I get from him is that if he’s not taking a step forward, if he’s not innovating something, he thinks the whole thing is a waste of time. Each new movie has to be his pinnacle as a director. Anyway, I hope failing that test isn’t too frustrating for him, because it is very difficult to imagine him spending the rest of his career outdoing Oppenheimer. It’s so masterful on a craft level that it’s sometimes astonishing to remember it’s from the same guy we chewed out for putting the camera too close to the action during a couple of Batman movies over a decade ago. It really feels like his whole career has been building to this grim opera of a biopic — breathless and insistent, convinced sound and fury can signify something, and damn you for thinking otherwise. After a particularly successful second viewing, I’m actually starting to wonder if maybe it’s my actual favorite movie this year and I’m just holding out because I don’t want to admit the Oscars got it right twice consecutively. Stay tuned on that, I guess.

1. Past Lives
   I saw this in September, and it has held onto the top slot ever since. I’ve already alluded to it in an earlier entry on this list, but there’s little that impresses me more than the ability to tell a real story about real people and still have it feel as though it has never been told before. That’s especially true of a movie like Past Lives, which on paper fits pretty snugly into a whole subgenre of semi-love stories about regret and what might have been. Another thing I’ve already alluded to: movies about that have my number in a big way, and Past Lives basically broke me in half — you know, in a good way. Its cultural specifics are so beautifully woven into the structure of it. The central theme feels potentially iconic, the way it instantly and permanently resonates throughout the whole story. I’m consistently struck by how flawlessly directed it is — the gentle sort of flow of it, the way Celine Song meters things out and lets them bleed together. I was stunned to learn that her work in the industry before this was as sparse as it is — for any artist to arrive this fully formed feels like a miracle. The subtleties of it, its hypnotic rhythm, the absolutely gutting performances, its composure and grace, the way every viewing peels back a new layer — Past Lives is exquisite, and I think more than worthy to wear 2023’s crown.