Variety's Best Movies of 2023

Looking back, 2023 was a year of wild swings. And two big strikes (if you’ll forgive the pun) — first the Writers Guild and then the Screen Actors Guild took the studios and streamers to task, forcing production to a halt. Yet whatever was going on behind the scenes, Hollywood had a grand-slam year, asserting its audacious cultural relevance with the historic double-header that was “Barbenheimer.”

Variety’s two chief film critics agree that Christopher Nolan’s portrait of the man behind the Manhattan Project is one for the ages — a “Lawrence of Arabia”-level feat about a turning point in human history, as seen through the haunted blue eyes of one of our finest actors. At the same time, some of the year’s best movies flew under the radar. Consider this a guide to the top cinematic achievements, large and small, whether shot on Imax cameras or hand-drawn by an artisanal French couple.

Owen Gleiberman’s Top 10

1. Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan’s mesmerizing drama became a testament to the promise that serious movies for adults can, and will, have a future in movie theaters. In the wake of its success, however, many have asked: How is it that a densely packed three-hour movie about the father of the atomic bomb became a big-ticket blockbuster on the level of films featuring superheroes, avatars, and Tom Cruise? The answer lies in Nolan’s wizardry as a storyteller. He stages “Oppenheimer” as a coruscating light show of history, dazzling in every detail. It’s a film that draws you in with centrifugal force, even at it both celebrates and interrogates the fabled figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy as a charismatic mandarin whose scientific genius is matched by his self-justifying insolence. If you think the movie falls off in its last third, you haven’t watched it closely enough. Long after the bomb has been dropped, Nolan uses both the extended 1954 security hearing and the amazing performance of Robert Downey Jr. to place Oppenheimer in the crosshairs of judgment, revealing that his delusions were nearly as large as his heroism.

2. Anatomy of a Fall: For a while, Justine Triet’s brilliant drama is built around a mystery of tantalizing darkness. Samuel (Samuel Theis), a teacher and writer, has fallen to his death from the upper level of his sprawling chalet home in the French Alps. Was he killed by his wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a more successful author than he is, and a woman who’s been given ample motivation to resent and even hate him? Or did he commit suicide? Triet hard-wires the tension, gripping us in every moment, and some viewers have come away feeling that the film’s central question — did she or didn’t she? — is never answered. In fact, it’s answered midway through (just look closely at the moment when the police drop a dummy from the top of the house). Yet the tension remains, as Triet stages an explosive courtroom drama that turns into “Scenes from a Marriage” as staged by a 21st-century Hitchcock. “Anatomy of a Fall” tells the story of this marriage — but more to the point it tells a story of women and men in our time, when the shifting power dynamics have increased women’s equality, leaving certain men feeling as if that assertion of justice were somehow a fatal assault.

3. Ferrari: Michael Mann brings off a masterful piece of supple ’70s storytelling in this thrilling, humane, high-stakes biographical drama about three months in the life of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), the legendary Italian automaker. It’s 1957, and Ferrari’s company is on the brink of bankruptcy. To attract enough business to save it, his cars and drivers must win the Mille Miglia, the thousand-mile motorsport endurance race through the open roads of Italy. Driver gives Ferrari a coiled authority, and Penélope Cruz is Lady Macbeth fierce as his wife and business partner, who must subsume her rage when she learns that her husband not only has a mistress (Shailene Woodley, good despite a thin accent) but a secret second family. Money and risk, love and hate, all fused by speed — “Ferrari” is a hypnotic ride, one rooted in the specter of death that’s hovering over every hairpin turn.

4. Maestro: It’s no exaggeration to say that every scene of Bradley Cooper’s drama about the life of Leonard Bernstein is a lush and vibrant surprise. Cooper stages each moment with great emotional and historical precision (he wants you to feel like you’re right there, eavesdropping). At the same time, the film leaps around with impressionistic freedom, omitting most of Bernstein’s formative conducting career as well as such minor details as his composing of “West Side Story.” Yet Cooper plays Lenny — now aged, now a giddy young man, now courting the woman he will marry, now pursuing the men he also loves, now conducting Mahler with a sweaty transcendent passion —in a performance of such vivid soul-sharing that it scarcely matters what the film leaves out; you’re so caught up in what’s there. As Felicia Montealegre, who married Lenny with open eyes and stood by him, Carey Mulligan creates an indelible portrait of a love rooted in intimacy and play, empathy and heartbreak.

5. Past Lives: Celine Song’s drama has a lyrical deceptive quality — and not just because it’s tranquil on the surface and tumultuous underneath. It begins in Seoul, where a 12-year-old boy and girl develop an innocent attraction, then lose touch after her family emigrates to North America. Years later, Nora Moon (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (John Magaro) reconnect through video calls, a bond that’s maintained after she attends a writer’s retreat and meets the prickly New York doofus she goes on to marry. We could swear there are still romantic vibes between the childhood friends, and we wait for them to bloom. The movie, however, has played a trick on us; for that’s not what happens. Yet we weren’t quite wrong. “Past Lives” is a neorealist multiverse film — not a fantasy but a moving drama of the universes of love and possibility, from the past and into the future, we carry around inside us.

6. Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre: In 25 years, I’ve rarely liked a Guy Ritchie film; I have never loved one. But this was the year he upped his game, relaxing his dynamo craftsmanship into something less bombastic and more startlingly accomplished. “The Covenant,” the Afghanistan War rescue drama Ritchie directed, is one of the finest movies ever made about the post-9/11 world. That said, my choice for Ritchie movie of the year — and one of the most riotously enjoyable movies of the year, period — is this delirious screwball espionage caper, staged with a quick-talk nonchalance worthy of Howard Hawks, starring Jason Statham as the iciest of superspies, who leads his team, including a divine Aubrey Plaza and a star-worthy Josh Hartnett, on a mission that makes the latest “M:I” adventure look stodgy, all to foil an arms dealer played by Hugh Grant with irresistible sociopathic glee.

7. Little Richard: I Am Everything: Lisa Cortes’ transfixing documentary about the wildest king of rock ‘n’ roll is a movie that thrills you in two ways. It uses stunning archival footage to channel the electricity of Little Richard, and the eruptive glory of his volcanic gospel-on-amphetamines music still hits you like a revolution. Yet the movie also takes a deep dive into how Little Richard, a Black queer man who was not about to conceal who he was, entwined the very DNA of rock ‘n’ roll with the perverse power of his identity. His story becomes the stirring and in some ways tragic tale of an artist so ahead of his time that even his own life couldn’t catch up with how he’d changed the world.

8. May December: Two words have stood in the way of a full appreciation of Todd Haynes’s daring psychodrama. The first word is “camp” — as if the extravagant elements of this lurid tale of seduction were somehow meant to add up to a postmodern wink. The second word is “tabloid” — as if the fact that it’s a gloss on the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau somehow meant that we’re supposed to place the experience of it in a box marked “trash Americana.” But Haynes, in telling the story of a famous actress (Natalie Portman), who spends a few weeks with the Letorneau-like Gracie (Julianne Moore), who married the former 13-year-old (Charles Melton) she slept with, is actually posing a serious and even dangerous question. He’s looking at a relationship our culture condemns as criminal and abusive and asking: Is it defensible? Could it be love? (Nabokov asked the same question.) Elizabeth, who wants to “become” Gracie (so that she can portray her), becomes our representative as she acts out the answer.

9. Fair Play: You could say that this delectably heated-up drama about two hedge-fund analysts, Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor), who are carrying on a serious romantic relationship they have to keep secret (because it breaks the rules of their firm), is like something Adrian Lyne would have made in the ’90s. Except that it may also be the most telling, plugged-in portrait of the killer go-go finance world since Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.” The writer-director, Chloe Domont, creates money-fueled dialogue (part jargon, all greed) that sizzles and convinces, and once Emily gets the promotion that Luke was angling for, the dissolution of their engagement is fueled by enough psychology and emotional playacting to make the movie a genuine heightened projection of the post-#MeToo world.

10. The Zone of Interest: A movie that channels the horror of the Holocaust should hit you with the force of revelation. Yet too many movies with this subject matter do not; Jonathan Glazer’s quietly shocking drama assuredly does. It’s set in and around the stately German bourgeois home where Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), an SS officer, carries on a comfortable domestic existence with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and children. The catch is: He’s the commandant of Auschwitz — and the concentration camp is literally right over the wall next to their garden. Glazer creates an unnerving true-life fairy-tale nightmare of evil, using the distant sounds of Auschwitz (the fire from the ovens, the screams) to evoke a monstrousness we can’t see, and that the Höss family lives in denial of. The film is transcendental in style until, in its second half, it becomes a tale of corporate intrigue. Christian Friedel makes Höss an architect of death with the devil’s haircut, and Hüller’s performance as the Carmela Soprano of the Third Reich is chilling.