Our film critic’s top 10 films of 2023
Do Barbie and Oppenheimer make my list of the best films of 2023? They sure do. They are great films that made lots of money. Win-win as far as I’m concerned. Here are the rest you won’t want to miss | WATCH
It was billed as Barbenheimer, a nuclear stand-off between Greta Gerwig’s doll of a movie Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s mushroom cloud-on-the-horizon biopic Oppenheimer.
Some predicted it would be mutually assured destruction, which made a nice headline but ignored the imminent reality. Both movies, released within days of each other in July, blew up the box office.
They drew people back to the cinema, post-Covid and in the face of the inexorable rise of streaming services such as Netflix.
At the time of writing, Barbie had her perfect nose in front, grossing close to $US1.5bn, compared with Oppenheimer taking near $US1bn.
Do Barbie and Oppenheimer make my list of the best films of 2023. They sure do. They are great films that made lots of money. Win-win as far as I’m concerned.
It’s interesting, as the year draws to a close, to think about what to include and omit on a “films of the year” list.
There are caveats, starting with the fact I can only consider the films I have seen. So, if I don’t mention a film you loved, that’s either because I haven’t seen it (Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance) or I have, and it didn’t make my top 10 (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning).
Another factor is that some films, like fine wine, mature with age. You see them and have an immediate reaction; then you think about them, and they develop. For me, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is a vintage example of this lingering-in-the-mind effect.
There’s also the important question of would-I-see-it-again? Some films demand to be seen more than once and improve on each viewing.
With all of that in mind, here’s my strictly personal top 10 films of 2023.
10. Cat Person
I don’t think I’ve seen a better bit of casting than Nicholas Braun, aka cousin Greg from the television series Succession, in Susanna Fogel’s adaptation of The New Yorker short story about a man and a woman who should not meet but do, to deleterious effect.
9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
A smart, spectacular web adventure that is the best superhero film and the best animated movie of 2023. Though on the latter I have yet to see The Boy and the Heron, the latest offering from the masters of animation, Japan’s Studio Ghibli.
8. Beau Is Afraid
Joaquin Phoenix having a darkly hilarious three-hour anxiety attack? Who would have seen that coming? Perhaps he was rehearsing for the Waterloo moment in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (which I’m yet to see). The funniest film of 2023, though I suspect Nic Cage’s Dream Scenario, which comes out on January 1, will match it.
7. I’m going to cheat here ...
Yet another deciding factor is that certain films speak to you at particular ages. With six decades under my belt, I am drawn to explorations of love – had, lost, missed and possible. The deeply moving “what-if” South Korean film Past Lives goes deep into that exploration, as does the British drama Living, drawn from a story by Leo Tolstoy, written by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and starring Bill Nighy.
6. Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Leo DiCaprio, a love affair, a murder mystery, a no-holds-barred account of one of the countless bad ways by which the American west was won. What more do you need? Sometimes life is simple.
5. Maestro
I walked out of this unconventional biopic of the Jewish American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein thinking, “What on earth was that about?” Then I talked to my viewing companion, who loved it. Then I thought about it, day after day. I think I have come to understand what it’s about. If I keep thinking about it, which I will, it might be No.1 by next week. And Carey Mulligan is outstanding.
6. Another cheat ...
Two films about the class divide by directors who like to defy the norm. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, in which Brideshead Revisited meets The Talented Mr Ripley, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, which is all about the liberating impact of debauched sex. I didn’t write this in my review of Saltburn, for spoiler reasons, but now time has passed, the final, wordless moments, in which Barry Keoghan dances naked through a Brideshead-like manor is one of the greatest single-scene performances I have seen.
7. The New Boy
The best Australian film of the year, and of many years. Warwick Thornton’s drama set in an outback monastery that takes in Indigenous children, starring Cate Blanchett as a renegade nun, is a masterpiece. It would have been my No.1 except …
2. Barbie
So intelligent, so satirical, so dazzling, so much fun, such knock-out performances by Australia’s Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken. Who thought a film about a doll would riff on Stanley Kubrick and Marcel Proust? Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, her partner in life and art, did and I thank them for it. And Robbie finally should win her already-should-have-won (for the 2017 movie I, Tonya) Oscar.
1. Oppenheimer
I almost cheated here and put Barbie and Oppenheimer at joint No.1. At the time of their release, I gave each film four-and-a-half stars. But, today, the would-I-see-it-again? factor tilts the scales in Oppenheimer’s favour. It’s about how the world we live in came to be, which is no small story. After watching it, I spent a night on Google to learn more about all the characters, especially Atomic Energy Commission boss and would-be US commerce secretary Lewis Strauss (an unrecognisable and remarkable Robert Downey Jr). The more I learned the more I needed to see the film again, and I did so a few days later. It was even better than the first time, just as Nolan’s brilliant Dunkirk (2017) was. This is Christopher Nolan’s magic, from the Guy Pearce-led Memento (2000) onwards: watching his films once is only, as Humphrey Bogart puts it at the end of Casablanca (1942), the beginning of a beautiful friendship.