The 25 Best Films of 2023

It wasn’t just the behemoth of Barbenheimer that had critics and film nerds alike wearing out every variation of the maxim “Movies are back, baby!” While a glance at any of our past year-end film roundups easily puts the lie to the notion that the movies ever meaningfully “went away,” it’s also true that 2023 had something to offer just about everyone with a generosity that feels like a throwback. The idea of movies as a zeitgeisty, mass-appeal art form didn’t just get a stay of execution in 2023—it flourished with the vibrancy of a brand-new medium, even as most of those heralding cinema’s resurgence to cultural dominance were subconsciously doing so under the regressive guise of returning to “the way things used to be.”

The buy-in came not only from the perpetually undernourished Marvel fanboys, but also from those of us who, thanks to a series of high-profile financial wipeouts, are rubbing our eyes and seeing on the horizon that longed-for, superhero-devoid morning after. Adults who literally couldn’t remember the last time a remotely literate, historical, sober-minded drama with little to no CGI ranked among the top 50 biggest hits of the year (much less top five) were happy to queue with kids of all ages embracing an unabashedly feminist tent pole.

LGBTQ+ and BIPOC audiences felt seen not only by the usual indie suspects like Passages, They Cloned Tyrone, and Past Lives, but also within the collective mutual embrace of meme-spewing diva icons ranging from M3GAN’s killer robot to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. At the same time, right-wing Americans “enjoyed,” in a manner of speaking, touting their own summer blockbuster moment in Sound of Freedom. And if that potboiler’s success came from folks rolling up their sleeves and bulk-buying tickets to give away (often in vain), that only serves to underline the theatrical environment as a still-key battleground in our endless culture war.

We also find ourselves dwelling in “the way things used to be.” In assessing the state of things, the 24 contributors to this list collectively deemed that most of the truly vital cinema out there remains, sadly, way out there. While streaming services continue yanking titles from their libraries, and the David Zazlavs in the industry conspire to further limit what you can and cannot see, finding those uncut gems remains as imperative as ever.

It’s no surprise that the milieus of our favorites—from scraping-by Oregon artistes to tabloid pariahs, from the genocidally indifferent to the forensically teeming—invariably thrive on the fringes. And if the monoculture is shoring up for a big return, our list is our (and your) reminder that it’s worth the effort to venture out beyond Barbieland. Eric Henderson

25. Rotting in the Sun

John Waters muse Jean Hill once said that she was well-known for “shaking hands with the dick,” and in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, influencer Jordan Firstman takes the baton. At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages. As the playfulness of Firstman and Silva undercutting rails of ketamine with layers of metatextuality subdues into something considerably darker—and, yes, more far-fetched—their gamesmanship in playing versions of themselves begins to pay off thematically. Bluntly put, we’re all playing versions of ourselves, a thesis put forth with as much macho crudeness as Silva can muster. Henderson

24. The Boy and the Heron

One of the most vital skills an animator can hone is a sense for how gravity will bear down on their subjects in realistic and legible ways. A character who weighs nothing appears stripped of physicality, and we regard them, consciously or otherwise, as invulnerable. Miyazaki Hayao, over the past half-century, has conquered gravity. His drawings feel like people because they move like people; they’re believable because they’re capable of being hurt. Never is this more apparent than when two of his characters embrace, the total catharsis of human bodies colliding expressed in a tight knot of stumbling feet and clasped arms. This ability to render subjects with such convincing tactility is only one reason why Miyazaki is possibly our greatest living animator, and his latest, The Boy and the Heron—a fable about, among other things, the cost of searching for truth in the unreal—is all the more resonant for it. Cole Kronman

23. Ferrari

Michael Mann’s film follows Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) as he attends to tasks ranging from the mundane to the grief-stricken to the tempestuous. Through it all, Ferrari does his best to maintain the steely look and demeanor that becomes many a Mann protagonist. An impeccably tailored suit is utilized like armor. All words spoken are terse and to the point. Emotion is never on display publicly, and only reluctantly in private. It’s all a pose—but to the dual ends of endurance and survival, as Ferrari’s fortunes are waning. His namesake company is near bankruptcy, and the two lives that he leads, the one with Lina (Shailene Woodley), the woman he loves, and the one with Laura (Penélope Cruz), his wife and co-partner in business, are on a collision course. Cruz’s Laura is a primal force of rage and regret who, in Ferrari’s sensational penultimate scene, battles her standoffish spouse to a smoldering detente. Their confrontation is the harrowingly human analog to the film’s virtuoso vehicular mayhem. Keith Uhlich

22. The Outwaters

Audiences are often driven to zone out during the early portions of found-footage films, which are often composed of ad-libbed banalities that will eventually be paid off with a fleeting glimpse of a forgettable big bad. Early on in Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters, it’s clear that something else is going on, though, and it gets your anxiety coursing. The film’s juxtaposition of images and sounds is insidiously purposeful, steeling the viewer for what may lie ahead. Yes, the camera seesaws all over the place and sounds drift in and out of the mix while characters set up selfies and prattle on arbitrarily, but the film’s images are vivid and beautiful, and the inconsistent sound quality constantly underscores the disconnection between the main characters. Banfitch isn’t an amateur trying to pass himself off as a pro but rather the opposite: a filmmaker with surgical precision, using found-footage aesthetics to lull you into a complacent trance. He’s an alligator with eyes just above the surface of the water, waiting to strike. Chuck Bowen

21. Love Life

In Fukada Kôji’s Love Life, affection is a ghost threatening to tear the social fabric. Taeko’s (Kimura Fumino) ex-husband (Sunada Atom) is literally unable to speak, while her current one, Jiro (Nagayama Kento), seems to only express his emotions when someone isn’t able to hear him. Only in the wake of tragedy do people begin to air their true feelings, and only then in futile ways. At a certain point, it’s as if the Earth itself steps in to say what the character’s won’t. “Watch out for any aftershocks,” Jiro tells Taeko over the phone after a minor earthquake, before the camera shows that he’s with his ex-fiancée (Yamazaki Hirona). In the Japan of this film, domestic misery is covered up with pragmatism and silence, turning the home into a sterile theater of rituals. A kiss is so rare that when it happens a cat runs away. And human bonding is only possible furtively, as when Taeko and her mother-in-law (Kanno Misuzu) share a cigarette in the dead of night. Fukada’s ultimate masterstroke is making us shed the tears that his characters can’t, and haven’t been able to for what feels like millennia. Semerene

20. Walk Up

The high concept of Hong Sang-soo’s Walk Up is that a filmmaker, Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo), goes to visit a friend, Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-Young), at the building where she lives, parts of which she rents out. Each section of the building represents a different element of life, and collectively the building evokes the pull between expression, commerce, and responsibility that any artist, whether struggling, successful, or aspiring, must navigate. Byung-soo arrives at this building on a virtual whim and spends a significant portion of his life there, though Hong, characteristically dividing his film into segments and employing ellipses, boils years down to a few afternoons. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was as prolific as Hong, famously said that he was building a house with his filmography; so is Hong, and in Walk Up he literalizes the metaphor, offering a house as a physical synecdoche of the emotions and challenges involved in the drive to create, whether it’s art, food, or the very domestic realms themselves. Bowen

19. Passages

Ira Sachs’s bracingly mature and sexy Passages renders a love triangle verbally, unleashing the thorniest dialogue of the year, and physically, as the frenzied couplings reveal vulnerabilities, ironies, contradictions, and shifts in power. As filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) becomes torn between his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), and a young school teacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), unleashing catastrophes in his wake, Sachs maintains a measured and deceptively casual tone that’s more reminiscent of European than American films. Tomas, the disruptor, is the least defended of the three lovers, while Martin’s behavior suggests that these romantic confusions might be routine for Tomas in the aftermath of finishing a film. Martin is accustomed to being a sounding board for Tomas and he gets off on this role yet is fed up with it. Passages is suggestive, roaming yet fiercely honed, with images of unforgettably fine-grained intimacy. You feel as if you are seeing but a glimpse of a richly imagined marriage that offers testament to a sentiment aired by the title of a prior Sachs film: love is strange. Bowen

18. Skinamarink

Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink shrouds more than just its characters in darkness. Shooting in his childhood home, Ball often provides the barest of illumination (a plug-in night light, a cathode TV blaring public domain cartoons from the 1930s) while the rest of the frame swirls with grain. We squint into the darkness, trying to make out if something menacing is there or if our eyes are playing tricks on us. Given an overlay of visual noise, Skinamarink is made to look as if it had been shot on Super 16 film stock, but rather than warm nostalgia, Ball insinuates a child’s nightmare deeply into our subconscious and sidesteps the horror filmmaker’s impulse to explain and reveal. As with The Blair Witch Project over 20 years ago, the total lack of resolution is a big part of what gives Skinamarink its power. All we know is that two kids are trapped with a malevolent entity inside a house with disappearing doors and windows. As viewers, our concern quickly moves away from sussing out what’s “real” or imagined and toward figuring out how to slow down our heart rate without looking away. Seth Katz

17. Pacifiction

Albert Serra’s recent historical works have been fixated on power and decadence, so it’s only natural that the filmmaker would have found his way eventually to the modern world and its corrupt geopolitical landscape. Pacifiction trades the 17th-century France of Serra’s last two features for a Polynesian island buckling under rumors of malign influence from Russia, China, and the U.S. The lethargy that pervades the post-colonialist setting is no doubt inspired by Joseph Conrad, perhaps even Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of the writer’s work in Almayer’s Folly, but Serra’s examination of a Polynesian tourist is rooted less in the political specifics of the region than in a broader feeling of contemporary malaise. As doom and gloom mounts around his outpost and none of his usual methods of outreach yield any satisfying solutions, De Roller (Benoît Magimel) becomes an increasingly sympathetic figure, his growing recognition of his own impotence registering as an identifiable symptom of modern life. Carson Lund

16. The Killer

David Fincher’s The Killer is among the funniest and darkest genre films in recent memory. Throughout, Michael Fassbender’s nameless assassin offers advice on how to excel in your chosen field, which becomes sardonic evidence of hollow self-interest in an increasingly digitized global milieu. The lightning-fast opening credits sequence, set to Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s furious electronic synths, offers a Mortal Kombat-style theme foreshadowing the mano-a-mano bouts to come. Nevertheless, Fincher doesn’t feed our bloodlust, as the impact of each bullet, nail, and broken neck is more horrifying than electrifying. Indeed, the film’s glimpse of how various forms of impersonal commerce and capital have been thoroughly integrated into modern life make plain that Fincher doesn’t want us, like the John Wick films, to revel in graphic violence for its own sake. In the end, The Killer primarily disturbs and compels for wryly implying that pulling a trigger and clicking “Buy It Now” are a comparable act. Clayton Dillard

15. Afire

Christian Petzold’s Afire captures complex human interactions in a style of clear-minded sobriety. The blinders through which Leon (Thomas Schuber) sees the world keep him from noticing that he’s living a more interesting story than the one he’s written. For her part, Nadja (Paula Beer) turns out to be an authority on the subject of stories. Her recitation from memory of Heinrich Heine’s poem “Asra” over dinner with Leon and his publisher, Helmut (Matthias Brandt), provides the film with an enrapturing, elliptical centerpiece. Heine’s poem is a Romantic ode to love as suffering, but can the same be said about Afire? As usual, Petzold is more interested in opening than in closing thematic loops. Fire connotes many things: light, creativity, love, inner suffering, a dying planet, malfunctioning cars. Out of these elements, Afire builds a story that begins as a hangout comedy with a sad-sack at its center but gradually becomes a slow-motion conflagration that offers no easy answers. Pat Brown

14. The Plains

Inspired by writer-director-editor David Easteal’s experiences carpooling from his day job at a Melbourne law firm with co-worker Andrew Rakowski, The Plains is almost entirely composed of a single static shot from the backseat of a car. The 180-minute film follows Rakowski over a period of about a year solely through scenes from his commute home, with Easteal frequently in the passenger seat. Both men play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. Their conversations, which have a tendency toward a certain existential bleakness, are key to the film’s conception of both the commute and the car as avatars of the alienating effects of life on the capitalist hamster wheel. There’s something deeply mournful in the film’s restriction of the world to a cramped Hyundai traversing anonymous highways—a rigid James Benning-esque formal framework that compellingly plays off the highly naturalistic performances. And yet, Easteal’s debut feature finds hope in mining inspiration from the most mundane of circumstances, and in the brief flashes of what lies beyond its fixed frame. Brad Hanford

13. Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan indulges his fondness for nonlinear plot structures in Oppenheimer, but the story of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) particularly benefits from this approach. Dispensing with the plodding routines of the average biopic, the filmmaker eschews a slow, steady march toward Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II, opting instead to orbit the two most prominent touchstones of the scientist’s life. For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder. Oppenheimer joins the ranks of The Prestige and Interstellar not for preserving the apparent inexplicability of nuclear physics, but by undermining the idea of science’s objectivity. Jake Cole

12. Our Body

Few films are likely to elicit such a strong physiological response in the viewer as the wonderful, and overwhelming, Our Body. A bodily reaction would only make sense for a film that centers itself around the potential and limitations of the human organism—alongside the technological advances aimed at extending its possibilities. Claire Simon’s film may be seen as a field-redefining intervention—that field being cinema—as its meticulous probing of the power, and ultimate powerlessness, of the human body unfurls alongside a similar exploration of what cinema is still capable of. Simon’s plunge into a gynaecology clinic in Paris where patients go in order to bring life into the world, or to prolong their own lives in the face of an alarming diagnosis, is a tour de force that renders the qualification of cinema as a two-dimensional experience all but nonsensical. It’s difficult to sit through this intimately epic film’s 168 minutes and not feel like one has had one’s every organ and limb overturned by its tentacles. Semerene

11. Asteroid City

In the outer shell of Asteroid City, we’re watching a TV special about a playwright, cut from the tortured, closeted cloth of Tennessee Williams, who wrote a metaphorical drama about tourists out in the desert encountering yes an extraterrestrial, while wrestling with American surveillance and manipulation as well as their own dwarfed desires. From there, we gradually meet the actors who are performing the play, and see how their society informs their own private longings, which in turn inform their characters, as social demons reverberate across vast spectrums of art and memory. Throughout, Wes Anderson burrows so deeply into his aesthetic that his nesting-doll narrative comes to seem haunted by a ghost in the machine, a flaw in the programming that hints at existential terror. In Anderson’s most personal and confrontational film, stories within stories within stories within stories suggest everything, an ongoing, ever-reaching cultural fabric of expression and suppression. But the stories could just as easily suggest nothing, unappreciated thrashings perpetuated by the desperate and desolate. Bowen

10. Anatomy of a Fall

At first, it seems like Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall may turn into a courtroom spin on Basic Instinct. Like Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell, Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a famous novelist whose books seem to contain troubling portents of the crime she’s accused of. Coupled with her outwardly cold demeanor, the film baits us into thinking she could be a criminal mastermind hiding in plain sight. But as the exhaustive courtroom drama at its center proceeds, it’s clear that Triet’s film has more on its mind than the simple question of Sandra’s innocence or guilt, a position that becomes more or less clear far before the final verdict is handed down. At its finest, Anatomy of a Fall is nothing less than a rigorous modern treatise on the knotty interpersonal dynamics of long-term relationships and how conveniently they can be distorted when exposed to public scrutiny. Mark Hanson

9. The Zone of Interest

Rather than put gruesome imagery of death and cruelty front and center on screen throughout The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer uses the film’s grueling sound design to represent the unfathomable scope of Nazi Germany’s crimes. It’s an aural hell punctuated by rhythmic interludes, courtesy of frequent collaborator Mica Levi, that suggests a dance party in Dante’s Inferno. To heighten the disturbing mood, Lukasz Zal’s camera often places a character in the dead center of the frame, and dollies alongside them as they walk to and fro, channeling the lockstep behind Adolf Hitler. Otherwise, though, it plays the stable voyeur with a lens angle just wide enough to feel unreal. This is no simple political message movie, nor is it even a portrait of one of the most horrific moments in history. Instead, The Zone of Interest is the hellish counterpart to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, another film about the soulless march of the careerist’s life. Only in Glazer’s version, the march is a goose step. Zach Lewis

8. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros

In Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman settles into a three-star Michelin eatery in Roanne, France, and unearths another of his temples of contemplation. In a kitchen populated by working-class heroes looking to prove themselves, hysterics might seem inevitable, but here the chefs and other artists and technicians seem to take their brilliance as a given, seeking to coax it to its fullest expression. The sophisticated feng shui of La Maison Troisgros meshes intimately with Wiseman’s beautifully lucid long takes, and the filmmaker is alive to the class tensions that separate the eatery’s kitchen from that of a less rarefied restaurant. Wiseman has made a career documenting class in various social systems, but he allows such differences to remain implicit. An artist himself, Wiseman is less interested in landing classist broadsides than in honoring the internal biorhythms of the realm surrounding him. Bowen

7. About Dry Grasses

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses primarily concerns a complaint about transgressive behavior by Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) toward one of his female students, 14-year-old Sevim (Ece Bagci), with whom he’s nurtured a caring bond within an institution where any expression of affection would be fundamentally at odds with its pedagogy and ethos. But Ceylan’s novelist’s ability to interweave interlocking narrative layers is such that he keeps the film from ever seeming topical. The institutional drama is only one of Samet’s preoccupations, along with the inability to find an audience for his insightful musings, an outlet for his artistic needs, a remedy for desolation and the suspicion of having botched his existence. Hence the accuracy and pointed irony of the film’s English title. About Dry Grasses is just as much about the harshness of a landscape, which mirrors the spirit of its inhabitants, as it is about a barrage of much more elusive things, rendered tangible by an incredible aesthete’s hands. Semerene

6. The Delinquents

The best capers are endowed with a professional gambler’s spirit of self-assured play, and this mischievousness is both taken to logical extremes and given a less flashy treatment in Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents. The film constantly toys with its audience, deploying genre cues only to sidestep their expected payoffs and moral resolutions. Whether one interprets the routes that it takes as relatively frivolous fun or serious arthouse theme-making hardly affects the pleasure of watching it. That distinction is just one of many that are defied in a film that treats the very notion of identity like an easily foiled con man. The Delinquents alternatingly dares the viewer to read it as a caper, a moral parable, a comedy of coincidences, and an existential probe. And the confrontation with the meaninglessness of it all is presented with a spirit of levity, with those doing the confronting coming across more like haps than heroes. Brown

5. Fallen Leaves

Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves is built around crosscutting between two narrative strands. In one, the defeatist Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) tries to hang on to a job sandblasting large metalware while sneaking swigs of vodka. In the other, the headstrong Ansa (Alma Pöysti) contends with bureaucratic nonsense and bad luck at a string of dead-end jobs. The film isn’t particularly complicated, but it’s deeply alert to the sensory pleasures of the world, which is what elevates it above the miserabilism latent in its scenario. And in an amusing tribute from one iconoclastic filmmaker to another, Kaurismäki sets Ansa and Holappa’s first date at a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, a film that depicts a zombie invasion that brings a bored, anesthetized populace to the brink of extinction. That the budding lovers still leave the theater in a rare state of euphoria indicates Kaurismäki’s abiding belief that not all is lost if art and beauty can still surround us in unlikely places. Lund

4. De Humani Corporis Fabrica

An exhausting, terrifying, and at times blackly funny depiction of the French hospital system, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica offers an anthology of brutally invasive medical procedures, from an eyeball being sliced during a lens transplant, to a urethra being jackhammered by a drill that’s positioned, we’re told, to the “Kalashnikov setting.” If that sounds like a stomach-churning proposition, make no mistake, the film is often pretty-tough sledding. However, it never seems to be rubbing our noses in gore just for the hell of it. Rather, suggestive of its namesake, Andreas Vesalius’s groundbreaking 16th-century anatomical study, De Humani Corporis Fabrica evinces a kind of pre-modern wonder in cataloging the remarkable diversity of the human corpus. Using microscopic cameras, the filmmakers plumb the deepest, darkest depths of our interiors, traveling through veins and intestines and into blood-filled surgical incisions with a hypnotic wonder that suggests Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage by way of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Keith Watson

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. As those artists did in those films, Martin Scorsese cultivates a spellbinding air of uncertainty, even though it’s clear from the moment Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) courts Mollie (Lily Gladstone) at his uncle’s (Robert De Niro) insistence that little good will come from their pairing. For a good chunk of Killers of the Flower Moon’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime we’re in a woozy haze of conspiratorial subplots and off-kilter imagery; in several of the murder scenes cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto keeps the faces and identifying features of the Osage killers at the edge of or just out of frame. This upends any feelings of groundedness and primes us to see Mollie as a saintly victim, a beggar to her own demise. In truth, the internal rhythms of the picture—sculpted as always by Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker—mirror her emotional complexity and her increasingly untethered mind-state from the start. Uhlich

2. Showing Up

Through patient observation, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up locates the points of friction that define the oxymoron that is “creative work.” As it explores how someone goes about reconciling their dedication to art with their commitment to everything else in life, the film yields moments of seriousness and silliness alike for the frazzled sculptor at its center, both of which serve as opportunities for Michelle Williams to reveal her character’s long-simmering struggles. This latest collaboration between Williams and Reichardt feels in keeping with the latter’s incisive tales of doomed strivers in the Pacific Northwest, yet it’s also something entirely different for the filmmaker. Showing Up dwells confidently in the ambiguity and uncertainty of its central tension between passion and vocation. Reichardt excavates something more profound than merely the process or result of making art. It’s a revelation of the deep human impulse to create no matter the obstacles in the way. Marshall Shaffer

1. May December

Todd Haynes’s best films refract reality through layers of artifice, inviting converts and skeptics alike to confront truths even as they struggle to recalibrate their own center of gravity. First-time screenwriter Samy Burch’s riff on the Mary Kay Letourneau statutory rape scandal was already fully rigged-up with funhouse mirrors reflecting America’s love-hate relationship with tabloid disgrace. But May December’s all-too-predictable reception in the hothouse of social media only confirms the driving force behind Haynes’s fearless, confrontational idiosyncrasy. “Is Natalie Portman a great actress or a terrible one lucking into the perfect role? Is depicting trauma actually perpetrating it? Is it Sirkian? Is it not Sirkian enough? Is it camp?”

Here’s one more question: Does anyone actually receive movies anymore, or do they only filter them through their own matrix of preconceived polemical positions? Portman’s soap opera actress clumsily embedding herself in others’ notorious lives in order to score an award-worthy part is, along with the couple played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton belatedly wrestling with the original sin at the heart of their marriage, simultaneously tragedy and comedy. Haynes, maybe for the first time since Safe, sustains both flawless control and profound complexity of tone, peeling back the layers of pretense we all increasingly adapt in order to protect ourselves—our best selves, our worst selves, our public selves, our human selves. Henderson

Our Runners-Up

Close (Lukas Dhont), The Holdovers (Alexander Payne), Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos), The Taste of Things (Tran Anh Hung), Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson), Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie), Silent Night (John Woo), Barbie (Greta Gerwig), Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis), Joyland (Saim Sadiq), R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu), Limbo (Soi Cheang), Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster), Dry Ground Burning (Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós), Past Lives (Celine Song), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber), The Roald Dahl Quartet (Wes Anderson), Happer’s Comet (Tyler Taormina), Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Kelly Fremon Craig), Master Gardener (Paul Schrader), Full Time (Eric Gravel), Godland (Hlynur Pálmason), and Fremont (Babak Jalali)

Individual Ballots