The Top 10 Movies Of 2023 [That I Saw]

January 2, 2024 by TeeCoZee

The narrative has been the same since Covid started: there just isn’t anything good playing. I’ve been hearing that line far too often. The streets are saying that Hollywood is in a slump. And frankly, I just don’t share that sentiment. I think Hollywood is just fine. Maybe I’m an optimist, maybe I have poor taste or maybe, just maybe, I’m trying to justify spending $24 a month on Regal Unlimited. I swear, it’s a good deal. Because of the price of movies, it pays itself in 2 visits. I just had to, you know, find 2 movies to see every month. Frankly, it was hard in the winter months. I found myself settling more and more on just movies that looked somewhat interesting. And on a cold, gray February afternoon, that’s all you need. Trust me. It’s still a good time.

So here’s the 10 movies that I had the most goodest time seeing. I realize that sentence was atrocious, but I’m running with it. But as always, there’s a caveat: I’m missing 4 movies. In particular, I did not see Past Lives, American Fiction, Anatomy Of A Fall or The Zone Of Interest. I do plan on seeing those films, but I didn’t feel like waiting before making this list. I have every right to revise the list, but I probably won’t because I’m lazy. And if your favorite movie isn’t on this list, I’m going to also lump categories for the movies that didn’t make the list. And if your favorite movie was Oppenheimer, then I have no love for you. Onward!

10) Barbie – Dir. Greta Gerwig

I originally had this slot open for Killers Of The Flower Moon, but then I realized that I had nothing to say about it. After some deep reflection, I realize that the movie just isn’t that special. Sometimes, a movie comes out that just achieves everything that was meant to be achieved. And that should be celebrated. While both Killers Of The Flower Moon and Barbie achieved this purpose, it was for different reasons. Martin Scorsese wanted people to realize that he can only empathize with despicable people. Greta Gerwig wanted to make a fucking movie about Barbie. Greta Gerwig wins. To be more specific, this is the movie that every little girl wanted to make and Gerwig had the budget, the talent and the creative team to make that actually happen. That alone is a triumph. The plastic universe she created made my face hurt. I’m just not used to smiling that much. The casting was absolutely perfect, the story moved at a brisk pace and there was a whole lot of heart. Every little detail was made meticulously with love, which is a theme you’re going to see often on this list. I’m just a sucker for seeing auteurs succeed in bringing their unique vision to screen. We all should be.

9) The Boy And The Heron – Dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Miyazaki hadn’t made a feature-length film in 10 years. That’s totally understandable. He’s pushing 83 years old and the animation scene just isn’t what it used to be. Even the studio that he helped found, Studio Ghibli, has resorted to making 3D animated schlock (at the hands of his own son, no less). There just doesn’t seem to be room anymore for a delicate artist in the animation world. So he decided to make one last film to cap off his prolific career. This one is a much more personal tale, dealing with his own experiences as a young boy living in post-war Japan. The similarities stop there, because it delves into a fantastical world that only Miyazaki could create. In the end, you have something that’s indescribably beautiful, creative, full of meaning and won’t leave your head for days. In other words, it’s a Hayao Miyazaki film.

8) Asteroid City – Dir. Wes Anderson

At some point, Wes Anderson became a meme of himself. I was convinced for a long time that I had seen The French Dispatch because I could envision the entire thing in my head. I never saw that movie. I don’t know which version is better. His curiosities became so predictable that what was once seen as brilliant became mundane, because it came from his head. Very few directors ever get held to those standards. We expect him to renivent the wheel over and over again but he just wants to be a goofy guy with childhood grief issues. Asteroid City is more of him being that goofy guy with childhood grief issues, but the change of scenery did him wonders. He traded in quaint nostalgic European locales for the barren desert and created a whole new world from scratch. And everything about that world works. It’s chock full of intricacies, sarcasm and hidden jokes. It’s a film you can either laugh at relentlessly or watch in silent repose. It was the hard reset he needed creatively, to show that he’s willing to step outside of the fenced in area he built outside of the box.

7) The Iron Claw – Dir. Sean Durkin

Alright, you can roll your eyes. Of course the movie about wrestling made it to my list. But this is also a grotesque and heart shattering true story that was told with a lot of class. And it’s also the best movie ever made about wrestling (I reserve the right to switch back to saying that The Wrestler holds that title, but for now I’ll stick to my statement). The Von Erich brothers were played by actual Hollywood actors, not wrestlers. You would never know it on-screen, because these guys most likely put themselves through hell preparing for the roles. The action was authentic 80’s southern wrestling to a tee. And you can laugh at their haircuts all you want, but Zac Effron and Jeremy Allen White gave career-defining performances. I also can’t stress enough how much I appreciate how tastefully the story was told. This could have easily devolved into misery porn, filled with disfigurement, drug addiction and unspeakable tragedy. They were able to present the weight of the story without showing everything, which was not an easy task. This makes the film much more stomachable for general audiences. This is a crazy story that more people should know about and this film did a great service presenting it.

[SIDE NOTE: They did an awful job casting Ric Flair. Just awful. Terrible. The worst. Ugh. And he was also an intregal part of the climax, which made matters worse. I don’t know why they didn’t listen to test audiences and reshot the scenes. It would’ve helped so goddamn much.]

6) Godzilla Minus One – Dir. Takashi Yamazaki

Why does Hollywood make it seem so difficult to make a Godzilla movie? They have the best resources in the world, but Toho is still running laps around them. I wouldn’t at all consider myself a Godzilla aficionado, but I do know that Shin Godzilla ruled, everything made in America was trash and Godzilla Minus One was the best action movie I saw all year. This is because the action actually made sense. What a concept! We have become so numb to the Michael Bayfication of action movies, but in most cases it goes like this: you see a subject, the subject makes an action movement, there are 50 quick cuts of some sort of “movement” done by CGI and then you see the subject in a different place. Because it’s action, they’ve been getting away with showing us pixelated sludge and calling it cinema. Every movement that Godzilla makes is followed by the camera. There were absolutely no points in the movie where I had to ask myself what was going on. That fact alone is worthy to be on this list. But then, out of nowhere, you get an actual legit story. One that’ll actually move you, with characters that you care about. Relentlessly sobbing during a Godzilla movie was not on my 2023 Bingo Card, but I went there. And it was a hell of a ride.

5) Beau Is Afraid – Dir. Ari Aster

A24 can seemingly do no wrong in my eyes. They took a huge gamble by giving Ari Aster the green light to make a 3+ hour surrealist saga that would surely turn off half of the audience, complete with a giant penis monster at the 2:45 mark to weed out the very last set of theatrical walkouts. For those reasons, this movie got a lot of flack. And for those reasons, I love it dearly. It’s a film in 4 evenly cut slices, each completely unique from the other. We follow Beau as he travels from waking nightmare to waking nightmare, all carefully designed by a puppetmaster that he’s made to believe is dead. It’s hard to speak about it without giving anything away, but this is a film I will be revisiting on a yearly basis and gaining new insight from. It’s a horror movie for indecisive introverts. It’s The Lord Of The Rings for Jewish men with maternal complexes. It is, frame by frame, a true vision. It’s a breath of fresh air. It’s something that I can’t recommend to everyone. It makes me reflect on mortality and what I want out of my life. It’s also gut bustingly hilarious.

4) The Holdovers – Dir. Alexander Payne

Sometimes, you just need a holiday movie that warms your heart and restores your faith in the human race. Sometimes, you just need it to be dark and sarcastic. Sometimes, you just need it to portray a time and place perfectly. Sometimes, you just need it to have Paul Giamatti playing the part he was born to play. The Holdovers does all of these things and so much more. It’s a coming-of-age tale for all ages. The characters are complex, yet relatable. It doesn’t pull any punches. It’s a straightforward story that perfectly emulates the early 70s, while having more heart than I’ve seen in ages. It’s going to be a comfort movie for years to come.

3) Skinamarink – Dir. Kyle Edward Ball

It’s been almost a full calendar year since I saw Skinamarink and it still hasn’t left me. It’s an extremely specific nightmare, one that I frequently had as a child. Two kids wake up in the middle of the night to find their parents gone. Everything about the house is normal, except there are no doors or windows. They sit in the living room for eternity and watch cartoons, waiting for something to change. But nothing changes for the better. The story paints a picture that is only relatable to those who grew up in the 90s. When communications were unreliable, the TV was the only comfort and anything can be in the shadows. This film focuses solely on the shadows. You never see the kids faces, nothing is ever clearly in focus. Instead, you’re fixated on the dark spots and the minutiae, forming nightmarish visions of your own. But the film is also extremely subjective. It relies heavily on the audience watching it in the proper environment with the proper mindset. If you’re watching it on a bright afternoon with other noises in the background, you’re not going to get much out of it. If you have the option to look at your phone, it won’t have any effect on you. But if you lend yourself an hour and a half to give it your undivided attention, Kyle Edward Ball will take you to hell. Seeing it in the theater, I can assure you that I had never been more terrified in my entire life. So many times I wanted to look away and plug my ears or just rip my brain out, but I was paralyzed in fear. The friend I saw it with admitted that he was looking at the floor half of the time. And you know what? That’s okay. Because there really isn’t anything to see. Skinamarink is a blank canvas to paint your greatest fears on. And I don’t think any film has ever done that before.

[SIDE NOTE: If you look up the reviews, you’ll notice that it’s generally hated. That’s because there was an extremely limited theatrical run and I can guarantee that all those people watched it on a laptop with the lights on while scrolling through Twitter. They occasionally looked up, saw a shot of a ceiling and went back to their phones.]

2) Poor Things – Dir. Yorgos Lathimos

There has never been a movie like Poor Things. There will never be another movie like Poor Things. This is fine, because we have Poor Things. I’m failing to even find the words to describe it. In the most complementary way possible: It’s Overboard meets The Lawnmower Man, shot inside of a living painting and directed by a rich man’s Baz Luhrmann. Does that not hook you enough? Emma Stone is fucking brilliant. Throughout the runtime, her brain evolves from that of an infant to a genius. Watching her character evolve and adapt to the world around her feels unreal. She does it with infinite poise and humility. The film taps deeply into what it means to actually be human, why we feel things like ecstasy or empathy and creates a universe unlike anything I’ve ever seen. This is the one movie I’m going all-in on this year. The one that I’ll complain endlessly about when it doesn’t sweep the Oscars. This is, without any doubt in my mind, the best movie of 2023.

But it wasn’t my favorite…

1) Perfect Days – Dir. Wim Wenders

I have never seen a film that felt so personal to me. I have never felt more related to a character so unlike me in a place so foreign. When I first moved to New York, I had an idea of what I wanted out of life: I wanted to live a normal anonymous existence and work a menial job in an extraordinary place. Perfect Days is a meditation on this idea. The story follows Harayama, a single elderly public toilet janitor in Tokyo. We watch carefully as he repeats every routine of his day. He gets dressed, brushes his teeth, gets a coffee from the vending machine, meticulously selects a cassette tape, starts up his van, drives to work, pops in the cassette tape as soon as Tokyo Tower is in his view, vibes, cleans toilets, listens to his coworkers complain, eats a sandwich, takes a picture at the park, goes home, visits the same noodle shop, watches the baseball game, goes home, reads, goes to bed, repeat. And he’s perfectly content doing this day in and day out, much to the confusion of everyone around him. The story does nothing but showcase his contentment and appreciation for the life he gave himself. There’s no grand catharsis, no character change, nothing. He is happy with his simple life. Even though his misses his family, there’s nothing that’s worth changing. In the chaotic hellscape we call life, this is the equivalent of reaching nirvana. And Wim Wenders, in his beautiful and tender love letter to Ozu, helps us get there. It is a perfect vision of how I want my life to be when I’m old and alone. A film has never meant so much to me.

And then, there’s the other movies.

Movies That I Saw That I Really Fucking Enjoyed
Dream Scenario
Killers Of The Flower Moon
Bottoms
Leave The World Behind
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One
May December
Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse
Talk To Me
The Killer
Priscilla

Movies That I Saw That I Enjoyed
Gran Turismo
Super Mario Bros
Thanksgiving
Knock At The Cabin
Scream VI
Missing
Infinity Pool
Evil Dead Rise

Movies That I Saw That Were Kind Of Ass
Anyone But You
M3gan
Silent Night
Tetris
Haunted Mansion
Cocaine Bear

Movies That I Saw That I Fucking Hated
Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey
Oppenheimer

Go ahead. Fight me on Oppenheimer. But I’ll tell you this: I can come up with more criticisms for Oppenheimer than you can come up with praises. But I’m gonna save that writing for the day after the Oscars, when I’m in a ballistic rage that Oppenheimer won all of the awards. Can’t wait.

– TeeCoZee