2023 will be remembered as one of the most significant recent years in film — certainly of the 2020s, and likely of the 21st century. It marks a year of returning master auteurs and unexpected blockbusters, in turn heralding a true return to theaters after the tumult of the pandemic. It marks a recognition of women and our influence at the box office. It also marks a new reckoning in the film industry with a historic double-strike from the writers’ and actors’ guilds, demanding rightful change to pay, working conditions, and creative ownership.

Steeped within the best films of the year is the theme of power — who has it, who reclaims it, and how we channel it within ourselves. The films on my list explore this idea in ways both subtle and inherent within their respective subject matter. Beyond that, though, they’ve also moved me, challenged me, and deepened my definition of storytelling, which I will take with me into my own writing. 

Here are my Top 10 films of 2023:

Honorable Mentions: Asteroid City, Killers of the Flower Moon, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., Saltburn, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse

10. All of Us Strangers

I haven’t cried this hard at a film in theaters in a long time. Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers shares a few things in common with my favorite film of 2022, Aftersun — grief, the unpredictability of loss, love as a salve, and a tear-jerking story co-starring Paul Mescal.

Here, Mescal is in a supporting role beside Andrew Scott, who plays Adam, a lonely screenwriter living in an eerily empty London high-rise, where he meets Mescal’s Harry. After a fraught initial meeting, the pair become romantically involved. At the same time, Adam begins a new screenplay about his childhood. This process leads him back to his childhood home, where he is greeted by his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell), who both died in a car accident when Adam was twelve. This mysterious gateway into Adam’s past becomes a precious connection to his parents who never got to see him grow up, but the longer Adam stays there, the more strain it puts on his life in the present.

All of Us Strangers is an ethereal mind palace, our protagonist walking through memories and fragments of his past, all brought to life through some of the most stunning cinematography of the year. At one point, Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” to which she replies, “Does it feel real?” We aren’t left with a further explanation; we are only left with what we believe to be true, and we cannot change what’s already been done.

Anyone who has endured loss understands this. We instead must look within ourselves and within others to carve out a purposeful path forward. It is no coincidence that Adam is a storyteller; writing is perhaps the ultimate way to string something coherent out of such painful, confusing life experiences. Scott plays Adam with his heart on his sleeve, his wounded vulnerability eliciting instant empathy. The film contains one final gut punch that will test the viewer’s emotional endurance, but Adam’s story poignantly showcases how only love can act as a kind of fourth dimension, a force that binds all of these characters together.

9. The Holdovers

No one does anything alone; we always stand on the shoulders of those who made us who we are. This may come in the form of a parent, a coach, a mentor. In the case of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, this guiding figure comes from an unlikely source: Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), the reviled history teacher at Barton Academy, an all boys’ prep school in New England. 

Set in the 1970s, Hunham finds himself stuck over the holidays with Angus (Dominic Sessa), a bright but rebellious student whom Hunham is tasked with watching over, and Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) the school’s cook and a grieving mother. Separately, these characters are lost souls, occupying the halls of Barton Academy like ghosts over a lonely holiday season. Together, however, they infuse life and joy into one another for a Christmas that will stick with them long after everyone has returned from break.

As a curmudgeon with a heart of gold, Hunham’s greatest strength is the wisdom he has to offer Angus. Though his history lessons in the classroom fall on disinterested ears, Hunham’s personal history with the academy and the missteps that prevented him from greater opportunities strike a chord in Angus, who himself is pulled between what his family expects of him and the path he desires for himself. Their dynamic shifts over time from begrudging teacher and reluctant student to a relationship of mutual respect and understanding, the presence of the other like a mirror, reflecting the harder edges as well as the potential for change. 

The Holdovers is the best comfort-watch of the year. It harkens back to an era of filmmaking that is classical and mannered in its execution with a heartfelt story and wonderful performances, particularly from newcomer Sessa. The warmth radiates off the screen.

8. The Boy and the Heron

“How do you live?”

This is the Japanese title (as well as the originally proposed title) for The Boy and the Heron, the latest (and perhaps last?) film from master animator Hayao Miyazaki. It’s also a fitting thesis for how the film and Miyazaki himself reckons with mortality and passing on a legacy. 

Mahito (Luca Padovan) is a young boy forced to leave Tokyo after his mother dies in a hospital fire during the Pacific War. His father Shoichi (Christian Bale) has remarried Natsuko (Gemma Chan), Mahito’s aunt, who welcomes them into her estate. Alone, wayward, and grieving his mother’s death, Mahito’s path becomes entangled with the grey heron (Robert Pattinson) that lives in an abandoned tower in the forest. When Natsuko goes missing, Mahito’s journey to find her leads him to a fantastical world that transports him through space and time itself. 

At the heart of this fable, our filmmaker reckons with the power of created worlds, and whether that creativity will persist when its progenitor is no longer here to oversee it. Miyazaki has infamously flirted several times with retirement, only to present us with another richly realized story. Much like Mahito pulls and pushes with the forces outside his control, Miyazaki explores what it means to be powerless to time. Whether he chooses to make another film or to leave the next story for the next generation to tell, one thing is certain: No one will ever do it like him again.

To see a Miyazaki film in theaters for the first time was such a special, emotional experience; that would be true no matter what story Miyazaki chose to show us. The plot of The Boy and the Heron is more scattered than other top-tier Studio Ghibli films, and the titular relationship between Mahito and the heron is at best tangential to the central meditation on parents, children, and successors. But it is no less emotional, no less gorgeously rendered. What truly matters is that for two hours, I, like Mahito, was transported into a world of possibility. A world where our hero can decide what his fate is, and who he lets into his life. A world that helps us answer the question of how we live.

7. Oppenheimer

One half of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon (more on its counterpart later), Oppenheimer speaks to the power of original storytelling on a grand scale — told by one of our major modern filmmakers — and offers a convincing rebuke to the notion that theatricality only applies to tentpole, CGI-filled franchise films.

A biopic filmed with the majesty equal to the stakes of the true events it depicts, Christopher Nolan utilizes sweeping cinematography, daring editing, a wondrous score, and the central performance of trusted collaborator Cillian Murphy to propel us through the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead theoretical physicist behind the Manhattan Project tasked with the development of the atomic bomb in World War II. Nolan’s signature fingerprint ripples throughout the film — time, great but flawed men, and the moral quandaries that place his characters into pressure-cookers, exploding outward into consequences for all. Oppenheimer is uniquely suited to these proclivities, forcing the audience to feel what Oppenheimer feels, to experience the world through his ever-churning mind. 

The ultimate trick of the film, though, is the ethical dilemma layered amid this technical achievement; about halfway into the story, Oppenheimer has a conversation with General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) about the minute possibility that the detonation of their weapon could set off a chain-reaction that ignites the atmosphere, destroying the world. Is Oppenheimer the right person to decide that? Is anyone? What do they risk if they stop this pursuit? The reality is there will always be someone that bears the weight of the decisions of powerful men in closed-door meetings. These men will feel the effects on the fringes, but the real-world tragedy is far from theoretical.

In the lead-up to the release of Oppenheimer, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time: genuine excitement for a big, new blockbuster film. And moreover, one that refracts its core story and themes through the subjective lens of its protagonist.

6. Priscilla

There isn’t a cooler filmmaker in existence than Sofia Coppola. Quiet confidence oozes from all of her films, providing an ornate frame for the beautifully complex women she renders on screen. Priscilla locks us inside the golden cage of Priscila Presley’s (Cailee Spaeny) life with rock icon Elvis (Jacob Elordi).

Adapted from Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me” (and executive produced by her as well), Priscilla tracks Priscilla’s whirlwind, tumultuous relationship with Elvis, beginning with him courting her when she was a 14-year-old in high school, up until their divorce years later. 

Coppola isn’t interested in sensationalizing these events or passing her own judgment on this lopsided power dynamic and the grooming involved; she instead limits our perspective to the titular protagonist’s point of view. Spaeny’s Priscilla is often small and isolated within the frame, surrounded by the lavish furnishings of Graceland, Elordi’s Elvis towering over her, impossible to dismiss. Coppola’s grounded, scaled-down approach — combined with Spaeny’s wide-eyed portrayal of Priscilla and Elordi’s sobering take on Elvis — injects reality into a larger-than-life figure, presenting him as Priscilla sees him: suave, imposing, and human. 

Not unlike Pablo Larrain’s 2021 film Spencer, this focused lens gives the film a greater level of intimacy and tenderness than biopics generally possess. It also provides an unfettered glimpse into Priscilla’s journey from naive child to independent adult. It is only when she breaks free from this beautiful cage that she finds her own voice — and her own life.

Due to the proximity of their respective release dates, perhaps the comparisons between Priscilla and 2022’s Elvis are inevitable, but to me, Coppola provides a more methodical, nuanced approach than the bombast of Baz Luhrmann’s broad biopic, which allows her to dive into the less-discussed, often ignored woman behind the mythological King of Rock and Roll. 

5. The Zone of Interest

I’ve heard the phrase “the banality of evil” attributed to many films this year (honorable mention Killers of the Flower Moon is another prime example). Evil is slow and unassuming, creeping in at the edges of the frame, blackening our vision, darker and darker until it eclipses everything. Perhaps no film this year embodies this effect more viscerally than The Zone of Interest, one of the most upsetting films I’ve ever seen.

Set in 1943 at the height of World War II, director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest centers on Nazi Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who live in a lavish estate with their family directly outside the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp. We never see what occurs inside those walls; Glazer instead hijacks the rest of our senses, employing carefully calibrated sound design to let us hear the atrocities instead, our minds filling in the rest. With this soundscape as the backdrop, the camera is positioned at a remove from the Höss family as they squabble about commonplace domestic problems, a passive voyeur to the events that unfold.

The juxtaposition of family life in the foreground with true horror in the background represents the staggering lack of empathy that comes with exacting power over marginalized groups for the sake of one’s own self-interest. The documentary-like feel of the film makes these actions all the more damning, the effects of their decisions landing more starkly. The final moments of the film hammer home this theme of complicity, indicting the way we package history into something palatable, into a one-off moment committed by uniquely evil monsters. Evil is not unique, nor is it exclusive to this time-period. It pervades now, and insidiously so.

4. May December

Director Todd Haynes knows how to get under our skin. He steers into the curve of psychologically challenging subject matter, his characters morphing their shape the longer we observe them. With May December, Haynes explores the taboo, salacious nature of tabloid scandal.

Loosely inspired by the real-life story of Mary Kay Letourneau, May December follows TV actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) as she interviews the infamous couple Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) as research for her upcoming film. We learn that the now-married couple made headlines twenty-three years prior when Gracie, then 36, was caught having sex with Joe, then 13, and that Elizabeth is set to portray the role of Gracie in her film. Set against the backdrop of the idyllic greenery of Savannah, Georgia, the thin layer of domestic bliss that Gracie and Joe project to the world comes under newfound scrutiny as Elizabeth digs deeper and deeper into their lives.

May December is a venus flytrap — beckoning us in with its sensational story, then ensnaring us for falling prey to it in the first place. Once we are in its clutches, it becomes clear that the inner-workings of the film are far more complicated. Elizabeth is initially presented as a wannabe forensic scientist, walking through the crime scene seemingly to unearth some essential truth from Gracie’s behavior, before becoming part of the scene herself. Meanwhile, Gracie’s rosie exterior grows more prickly by the minute. And so begins their unnerving dance.

Haynes sprinkles obvious breadcrumbs that hint at the motivations for all of these parties but offers no easy answers. He shows more interest in the vicious tug of war between these two women vying for control over the narrative, over their very identities. But it’s not them who suffer; it’s Joe, caught in the middle in a state of arrested development for the past two decades of his life. Amid Portman and Moore’s sparring, Melton grounds the film with vulnerability that demonstrates what gets lost when those with power act at the expense of everyone else. In this story, sensationalism supersedes humanity, making Joe’s circumstances all the more tragic.

Beyond the storytelling and performances, the film has my favorite shot compositions of the year. One scene in particular involving a tri-fold mirror as Elizabeth and Gracie are dress-shopping with Gracie’s daughter broke my brain — not unlike the nature of the film itself.

3. Barbie

The prospect of a Barbie film helmed by Greta Gerwig felt too good to be true. Surely a film about the world’s most famous doll with the blessing of its parent company couldn’t possess both sharp social commentary and emotional resonance, could it? In the theater, I held my breath, hoping I would be wrong. My greatest joy in film-going this year was the realization that I was.

Making waves this summer for igniting the box office as the other half of the “Barbenheimer” event, Barbie tells the story of — you guessed it — Barbie the Mattel toy, living in Barbie Land in pink-infused ignorant bliss with her fellow Barbies and Kens. Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie, who also executive produces the film), amid one of her daily dance parties, suddenly ponders her own mortality, to the discomfort of the rest of Barbie Land. Her journey to self-actualization takes her to the Real World, where she and Ken (Ryan Gosling) learn some shocking truths about what it means to be a woman in the world today.

Amid the bright, poppy, high-energy feeling permeating throughout Barbie (the Ken Dream Ballet sequence is an instant classic), Gerwig and Robbie nestle a poignant message of empowerment that both women and men can learn from. Societal expectations, particularly of women, are asymptotic. America Ferreira, as the character Gloria, accomplishes the difficult task of giving a monologue that hammers this thesis statement home. In the wrong hands, such a moment could come off as trite or pandering, but Gerwig’s authentic writing combined with Ferreira’s raw charisma make this speech one of the best scenes of the year.

Barbie may live in our zeitgeist for its box office achievements, or the way it galvanized movie-goers across the nation alongside Oppenheimer, but what sticks with me still is the takeaway that true power comes from embracing all of ourselves — the beauty, the strengths, the flaws, and the curiosity for life. Or, perhaps more simply and honestly, it’s the euphoric feeling of kicking open the theater doors, the words “WOMEN CAN DO ANYTHING!” bursting enthusiastically from my lips.

2. Anatomy of a Fall

Between Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, Sandra Hüller wins my award for Most Valuable Performer this year. She takes center-stage here as Sandra Voyter, an acclaimed novelist who becomes a homicide suspect when her husband Sam mysteriously dies after falling from the attic window of their remote chalet in the French Alps. Placed under the hot microscope of the French legal system and forced to defend herself without using her German native tongue, the circumstances surrounding Sandra’s husband and their family life grow grayer by the second.

Directed by Justine Triet and co-written with her husband (!!) Arthur Hararri, Anatomy of a Fall is a courtroom thriller where the very nature of a relationship is put on trial. Is Sandra’s testimony too cold? Is she intentionally vague? Might she harbor resentment towards her husband? Every terse comment, every argument, every creative endeavor becomes evidence against Sandra. Simultaneously, our own allegiances shift throughout the film as we look for certainty amid the ambiguity of the case. The fact that the only potential witness to these events is Sandra’s son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is blind, further adds to the complexity of the situation and offers a blatant metaphor for subjective perspective in the face of scrutiny.

Anatomy of a Fall shares common ground with May December when it comes to who has control over a narrative. We fall for the stories and opinions of others so easily. This in turn can obscure our projected image, where prosecutors and bystanders warp us into something unrecognizable and untruthful — regardless of what actually happened. To that end, the actual outcome of the case is irrelevant, because Sandra’s agency is already lost, the specter of her husband looming over her and Daniel indefinitely.

A final special mention for the best dog performance I’ve ever seen — long live Snoop the dog!

1. Past Lives

A friend once told me that encountering people from our past is proof that we existed, that we have a history that led us to our present. Acquaintances, friends, lovers from certain places and times have more intimate access to versions of ourselves than perhaps even we do, their image of us frozen in amber, flawed and pristine at the same time. 

This is how it feels to experience Past Lives, a quietly earth-shifting film about connection over time. In her directorial debut, Celine Song presents a semi-autobiographical story that tracks the relationship of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Song (Teo Yoo), childhood sweethearts who orbit one another over the course of twenty-four years. When they meet in person again in New York, this deeply forged bond becomes juxtaposed to Nora’s relationship with her husband, Arthur (John Magaro).

Song attempts to solve this three-body problem with the concept of In-Yun; when Nora and Arthur first meet halfway through the film, she defines it for him (and us) as the Korean term for providence as it relates to the connections between people. When we’ve created a meaningful connection to someone, it means that we encountered them in a past life. This divine coming-together is an endearing notion, but it’s also daunting to face the question this concept implies: Is this the life we’re meant to pursue? 

Nora reckons fully with In-Yun as her past with Hae Song and her present with Arthur collide. Song dives deeper than the surface level prospect of a love triangle, instead allowing space for each character to ponder the growth that led them to this point, and the people they were to one another along the way. Every shot is intentional in support of this feeling, that palpable, powerful sense of possibility hanging in the space between Nora and Hae Song, down to the final, breathless frames of the film. 

I knew Past Lives would be in contention for the best film of the year as soon as I left the theater, feeling both lighter and heavier with the weight of these characters settling into my soul. This film offers us the opportunity to reflect on the decisions we’ve made. On the paths we did or didn’t take. On the people that leave. On the people that stay. Not every connection we make will last, but every connection does matter, no matter how brief or how sweeping.