From the record-shattering “Barbenheimer” phenomenon to the longest dual strike in Hollywood history, 2023 has been a year of ups and downs for the film industry. New concerns about artificial intelligence and the disposable nature of streaming emerged at the heart of the writers’ and screen actors’ strikes, while major studios struggled to turn profits on previously bankable franchises like DC Comics and Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, many independent studios have thrived, with companies like A24 and Neon releasing smaller-budgeted films that continue to find audiences and awards.
Here in Iowa, the local film community has continued to rebound following pandemic-era lows. In Des Moines, both the Varsity Cinema and the Fleur Cinema and Café, two beloved arthouse theaters, have reopened in the past year. FilmScene in Iowa City held their second annual Refocus Film Festival, which welcomed legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog as a special guest. And most recently, Iowa natives and Hollywood filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods unveiled The Last Picture House, an independently-run boutique cinema in the Quad Cities.
Oh, and as far as the movies themselves, they’ve been great as usual — that is, if you know where to look. As a helpful guide, here's a list of what this humble writer considers to be the ten best films of 2023.
*Note: As of press time, several major award contenders had not been released in Iowa, including American Fiction, The Color Purple, Ferrari and The Iron Claw.
10. Past Lives
“You dream in a language I can’t understand.”
A semi-autobiographical tale of chance encounters and lost loves, Past Lives is an achingly beautiful, decades-spanning romance from writer-director Celine Song. The film tells the story of Nora (Greta Lee), a Korean woman who reconnects with a childhood sweetheart more than 20 years after she and her family immigrated to Canada. Nora, now married and living in New York City, discovers she still has feelings for Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and the two reminisce and reflect on the different paths their lives took.
Lee, who was previously best known for her comedic roles, solidifies herself as a gifted dramatic actress, often relying on nothing more than subtle facial expressions to convey Nora’s deeply conflicted emotions. Mysterious, tender and heartbreaking, Past Lives is a stunning directorial debut for Song, steeped in the small, intimate moments that can shape a life.
9. The Holdovers
“I find the world a bitter and complicated place.”
Film critic Roger Ebert famously referred to movies as “empathy machines,” and The Holdovers may be the year’s most well-oiled. Set on the campus of a New England boarding school in December of 1970, the film traces the unlikely bond that forms between three aimless souls during Christmas.
Paul Giamatti reunites with his Sideways director Alexander Payne to play Paul Hunham, a crotchety history teacher who is forced to look after a group of abandoned students, including damaged troublemaker Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa). Paul and Angus are joined by the school’s head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a mother grieving the loss of her son in the Vietnam War. Bolstered by an expertly paced script and bathed in the warm glow of New Hollywood nostalgia, The Holdovers is both one of the year’s most hilarious and heartwarming films. Don’t be surprised if this empathy machine goes on to become a new Christmas classic.
8. Asteroid City
“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
From splintered families and UFOs to the nature of performance and the creative process, it’s clear Wes Anderson had a lot on his mind when he made Asteroid City. The film, which is set inside a retro-futuristic vision of the 1950s, centers on a group of Junior Stargazers whose lives are disrupted by an interplanetary encounter in the desert.
Fashioned like a Russian nesting doll, the main plot line takes place as a fictional play within a fictional documentary about a fictional playwright. Anderson freely jumps in and out of these narrative layers, breaking the fourth wall to reveal emotional undercurrents for the play’s characters and the “actors” portraying them. Buoyed by Anderson’s boldly artificial set design and a star-filled ensemble led by Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City is a funny, poignant and often thought-provoking tribute to the explorers (and performers) in all of us.
7. Anatomy of a Fall
“I’m not a monster.”
Under the shadow of a suspicious death, a woman — and her marriage — is put on trial in Anatomy of a Fall, director Justine Triet’s white-knuckled courtroom drama. The film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, follows Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a novelist who becomes the prime suspect for her husband’s death.
As the murder trial unfolds, Sandra is forced to testify to some of the most damning moments in her marriage — moments that Triet captures in the intimate, claustrophobic style of an Ingmar Bergman chamber play. Hüller, all the while, delivers a pitch-perfect performance as the inscrutable Sandra, whose innocence becomes the central question at the heart of the film. At times a thrilling courtroom procedural and a searing domestic drama, Anatomy of a Fall is a riveting cross-examination of the private and public forces that can end a marriage — and a life.
6. The Boy and the Heron
“You see this world? There’s more work to be done.”
Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature film since his self-imposed retirement in 2013 is a beautiful swan song (heron song?) that looks just as much to the future as to the past. Inspired in part by Miyazaki’s own childhood, The Boy and the Heron tells the story of Mahito, a young boy grappling with his mother’s death during World War II. Lured to a magical tower by a talking grey heron, Mahito ventures into an alternate world filled with strange creatures, familiar faces and dangers around every corner.
The Boy and the Heron reportedly took roughly five years to animate, and that level of care can be felt in every hand-drawn frame. The film is flush with painterly landscapes and dreamlike imagery, which, filtered through Miyazaki’s childlike worldview, form a tapestry of connections to life, death and rebirth. It all adds up to one of the most awe-inspiring and life-affirming moviegoing experiences of the year — a fitting late-career coda for one of our greatest living filmmakers.
5. Godzilla Minus One
“My war isn’t over yet.”
Nearly 70 years after the first Godzilla film blazed a path of destruction on the big screen, the long-running kaiju franchise has been given new life in Godzilla Minus One. The film, written and directed by Takashi Yamakazi, returns the titular monster to his roots as an allegory for nuclear war, while at the same time centering its story on small-scale human drama.
Set in postwar Japan, the film unfolds from the perspective of Kōichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a former kamikaze pilot suffering from survivor’s guilt. Kōichi discovers his parents have died in the bombing of Tokyo but finds a new reason to live when he meets a woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who was also orphaned in the bombings. Rooted in the ravages of war and elevated by jaw-dropping action, Godzilla Minus One is a blockbuster with heart — a larger-than-life spectacle anchored in the dark waters of grief.
4. Barbie
“Do you guys ever think about dying?”
In 2023, Barbie was more than just a movie; it was a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, the film seamlessly weaves serious themes of mortality, female autonomy and patriarchal oppression into a colorful, uplifting and uproarious comedy-drama.
The story opens on a day in the life of “Stereotypical Barbie,” played with effervescent aplomb by Margot Robbie (who also served as one of the film’s producers). Her day, like every day, is pretty much perfect — that is, until a moment of existential dread launches her on a journey into the “real world,” back to Barbie Land and inside the deepest corners of the human soul. All of this unfolds under Gerwig’s deliriously free-wheeling direction, which brings the pink, plastic paradise of Barbie Land to kaleidoscopic life. It’s a rare achievement of commercial filmmaking that manages to entertain and inspire, daring audiences to live fuller, dream bigger and — like Barbie — think outside the box.
3. Poor Things
“I am finding being alive fascinating.”
Poor Things is so outrageously funny, sexy and off-the-wall bonkers that it’s a wonder it was even made in the first place. Reteaming with Yorgos Lanthimos, the offbeat director of The Favourite, Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a young woman in Victorian London who has died and been brought back to life by a deformed (and rather demented) doctor. Longing to experience all that life has to offer, Bella sets out on a globetrotting journey towards sexual, intellectual and emotional enlightenment.
Lanthimos, ever the visionary, brings his signature style to the Frankenstein-inspired story, transplanting the Victorian-era setting into a steampunk fantasy dripping with vivid colors and warped perspectives. Stone, meanwhile, is at the top of her game, delivering a physically and emotionally committed performance as the awkward, wide-eyed and headstrong Bella. Threaded with hilariously off-kilter performances by the likes of Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, Poor Things is a bizarre, bold and brazenly original vision of self-discovery.
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
“Can you find the wolves in this picture?”
According to Martin Scorsese, the first film he remembers watching as a child was Duel in the Sun, a 1946 Western that deals with themes of prejudice. Now, roughly three-quarters of a century later, the legendary director’s lifelong love of cinema has come full circle with the first Western in his career. Based on the nonfiction book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon tells the harrowing true story of the Osage murders in Oklahoma during the 1920s.
Long-time Scorsese collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro play Ernest Burkhart and William Hale, two of the central figures behind the killings. DiCaprio and De Niro are eerily captivating as the sinister killers, but the heart of the movie belongs to Lily Gladstone, who delivers a quietly devastating performance as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman confronted with unspeakable tragedy and betrayal. Set to a haunting final score by the late Robbie Robertson and filled with breathtaking cinematography, Killers of the Flower Moon is yet another late-career masterpiece from Scorsese that offers a sobering look at America’s oldest and most virulent disease: greed.
1. Oppenheimer
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Oppenheimer isn’t just the year’s greatest cinematic achievement; it’s also the greatest film of Christopher Nolan’s career. Drawing its name from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the infamous “father of the atomic bomb,” the film traces the theoretical physicist’s involvement in the Manhattan Project, as well as the personal and public struggles that engulfed him following the war.
Of course, this being a Nolan film, these events unfold in a nonlinear timeline. Nolan alternates between Oppenheimer’s role in developing the atomic bomb and two Cold War-era hearings some years later. Cillian Murphy, a long-time supporting actor in Nolan’s films, provides the emotional anchor for the sprawling story, embodying the titular physicist with a quiet unease that radiates a tortured inner life. What emerges is not just one of Nolan’s most visually stunning films to date but also his most emotionally shattering. Yes, Oppenheimer is an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but it’s also angry, empathetic and mournful — a cautionary chronicle of one man’s brilliance being reshaped into darkness.
