It was a year of strikes, postponed releases, and one all-time, world-historic box office bonanza. What did it all add up to? In the end, somewhat improbably, an extremely good year for movies. There were sleeper indie hits (Past Lives), absorbing French courtroom dramas (Saint Omer and Anatomy of a Fall), worthy horror diversions (M3GAN and Talk to Me), and big, must-see awards-season event films (Maestro, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things).
In short, the year offered something for everyone. Here are our 36 favorite movies of 2023. Time to catch up on the ones you missed.
January
Infinity Pool
Infinity Pool, a fever dream of a horror film by Brandon Cronenberg, made me think of J.G. Ballard, of Joan Didion, of Denis Johnson—high-minded literary references that won’t quite prepare you for the phantasmagoria that’s coming. We’re on a remote island nation, at a tightly guarded luxury resort, where a rich tourist couple—gorgeous, restless—are on holiday. Alexander Skarsgärd is James, a novelist with a generous wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), who is happy to keep him in expensive shirts while he seeks inspiration for a second book. Another guest, Gabi (Mia Goth), and her slightly louche husband, Alban (Jalil Lespert), invite James and Em to dinner and then to a secluded beach outside the gates of the resort. What happens next will make you cover your eyes. Movies like this have to build trust, and Infinity Pool does so expertly. The visuals are crisp, and the momentum of the story holds you as it takes you down its dark roads. —Taylor Antrim
M3GAN
You’d be well within your rights to think there’s no way a film about a robot doll who busts out TikTok dance moves between murders could be one of the best of the year. But if it’s a rollicking good time at the movies you’re looking for, then M3GAN delivers in spades. (When I went a few weeks after it opened, the cinema’s response to its bonkers blend of horror and comedy was loud enough to rival a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) A special shout-out should go to Allison Williams for her performance as the engineer behind the titular cyborg, delivered with just the right amount of campy bewilderment—and just like Williams, the film knows exactly what it is and what it’s trying to be. Leave your prejudices at the door and let yourself be carried away by the dulcet tones of the robot’s unhinged cover of Sia’s “Titanium.” —Liam Hess
One Fine Morning
It’s always a pleasure spending a couple hours in the intimate, meticulously observed world of Mia Hansen-Løve, and One Fine Morning is the latest, and finest, example. Léa Seydoux has shone in an impressive gamut of roles the past few years (The French Dispatch, France, No Time to Die, Crimes of the Future), and here she’s at her unfettered, barefaced, pixie-cut best. She plays a single working mom in Paris who is patiently juggling caring for her young daughter and her aging father, a former philosophy professor whose health is deteriorating. She’s nearly given up on a love life when she embarks on an affair with an old friend who happens to be married. Each plot thread follows leisurely from there in expected ways but without any high-key drama; indeed, nothing major really happens. Books are packed, assignations are had, many hospitals are visited, tears of both joy and sadness are shed. There are highs and lows, and in between, characters walk or take the bus and Métro. But it’s often the gentle accumulation of moments and details that comprises a life, and here humor, sorrow, disappointment, and affection are tenderly rendered and weighted perfectly in a film that feels completely lived-in. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
Saint Omer
From the opening scene of a woman and baby walking along a beach under ominous moonlight, Saint Omer pulls you into its eerie, elegant universe and keeps you there until the very final shot. You instinctively know it’s the work of a masterful filmmaking talent—and that talent is Alice Diop, the French documentarian who took home the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year for her first narrative feature. Meeting Diop’s sensitive gaze are the two lead actors, Kayije Kagame (as a journalist who becomes obsessed with a grim murder trial and travels to a regional town to watch it unfold) and Guslagie Malanda (as the woman taking the stand to explain murdering her own 15-month-old child by leaving her on a beach), whose delicate performances during the extended, dialogue-heavy courtroom scenes make for some of the most gripping cinema of the year. Saint Omer touches on a handful of weighty themes—loneliness, motherhood, race, and justice—but the gentle way it explores them is just as riveting as the topics themselves. —L.H.
February
Godland
As bleak as it is astonishingly beautiful, Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland feels a worthy successor to films like Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Fred Zinnemann’s A Nun’s Story for its depiction of a young priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), dispatched in the late 19th century to remote Iceland, where he is to help establish a church and photograph its congregants. Between the extraordinary demands of the journey, however, and his relationships with Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), his flinty guide, and Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), the daughter of a local man, Lucas’s body, mind, and faith are all severely—even tragically—tested. —Marley Marius
The Quiet Girl
I was bewitched and then overwhelmed by this quiet, lovely Irish film, which scored a surprise nomination for international feature at the 2023 Oscars. Based on the story “Foster” by Claire Keegan, it is about a nine-year-old named Cait who is sent by her neglectful, overwhelmed parents to nearby childless relatives for a summer in the Irish countryside. It’s a simple tale about loneliness and reticent need, but it swells with feeling and somehow never tips into maudlin sweetness. Young star Catherine Clinch holds an entire world in her mute, expressive face, and the middle-aged couple who looks after her (played by Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett) channel an incredible compassion even as they are hemmed in by circumstance and family obligation. I defy you not to be moved to tears by the end. —T.A.
Return to Seoul
The unusual and unexpectedly powerful Return to Seoul covers familiar subjects—identity and finding your way—through a refracted lens. It’s centered on 25-year-old Freddie, who was born in South Korea but given up for adoption to French parents as an infant, and who is played with confidence and simmering restlessness by first-time actor Park Ji-Min. Freddie winds up in Seoul seemingly by chance and seeks out her biological parents with the same accidental spirit. The character evades all stereotypes: She’s quiet but not especially polite, speaks only French (some halting English), and is unafraid of chaos. She’s not wholly likable, and the film, which was written and directed by young French filmmaker Davy Chou, wisely meets Freddie on her own terms, never judging nor pitying her. Return to Seoul jumps in time and charts Freddie’s course toward adulthood and a connected sense of self. It’s a patient movie that deepens as it goes—and the finale is stunningly humane. —T.A.
March
Palm Trees and Power Lines
A disquieting film about seduction, manipulation, and power that portrays a summertime relationship between 17-year-old Lea, played with natural restlessness by newcomer Lily McInerny, and 34-year-old Tom (Jonathan Tucker), who smoothly preys upon her boredom and longing. Methodically paced but simmering with unease, filmmaker Jamie Dack’s debut is set in the suburban sprawl of the American Southwest and perfectly captures teenage desire and the vulnerability it exposes (especially) young women to. —T.A.
Rye Lane
I fell in love with South London watching Raine Allen-Miller’s gorgeous rom-com Rye Lane; its story is masterfully written, and defies many of the tedious tropes of the genre. We first meet the film’s protagonists, Dom and Yas, in the gender neutral restroom at a gallery opening of their mutual friend. Dom is crying about his ex, who cheated on him with and then left him for his best mate (he definitely needs to find a new best mate), and Yas hears him. She peaks under the stall and clocks his light pink Converse, so when she bumps into him out in the gallery, she recognizes him as the bathroom sad sack. The two of them strike up a conversation, ultimately venturing out through the titular South London market, Rye Lane. For a film that is just about two young people walking through a city and talking, I was transfixed. The color palette alone is enough of a reason to sit through it—from Yas’s electric-bubblegum-pink bag to Dom’s handsome green utility jacket. Their dark skin is also glowing in every shot, thanks to the skillful lighting and rendering done by the film’s DP, Olan Collardy. The eternally gray city of London has never looked less bleak. —Alex Jhamb Burns
A Thousand and One
A Thousand and One is the knockout first feature from filmmaker A.V. Rockwell that took home the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in January. It stars a commanding Teyana Taylor as Inez, a mom who steals her son, Terry, away from foster care and raises him in Harlem through the hardscrabble period of 1990s and early-2000s New York. Taylor brings a natural authenticity to a difficult role—a story of survival, essentially, of a Black woman dedicating her life to a gifted son who is freighted with a terrible history. Atmospheric, gritty, and heartbreaking, with a standout performance from its lead that is sure to generate awards season buzz. —T.A.
April
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
The difficulty of being a tweenage girl hasn’t changed much since Judy Blume first wrote Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in 1970, but at least we have movies like this one—sweet, sad, soulful, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, and ideal fare for adults and kids alike—to pad young women’s crash-landing into adulthood. Rachel McAdams is particularly great in her role as an artistic New York City mom adjusting to the suburbs, and her high-waisted jeans and lightly feathered hair are major style inspo, at least for those of us who didn’t live through the ’70s when they actually happened.—Emma Specter
Other People’s Children
The topic of fertility, though ubiquitous in modern life, is relatively unexplored in cinema—as are women characters who are child-free by choice. In French writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children, the luminescent French actor Virginie Efira stars as a 40-something Paris schoolteacher who, after beginning a relationship with a man who has a daughter from a previous marriage, starts to entertain thoughts of motherhood. It’s a refreshingly warm, nuanced film with charming humor that’s worlds away from the sad childless-old-maid trope; instead it’s a thoughtful and full depiction of a sexy, empowered middle-aged woman as well as a meditation on legacies, the emotional tightrope of being a stepmother, and the ambivalence that can arise near the end of a child-free woman’s fertility. You won’t want to miss a delightful cameo by revered documentarian Frederick Wiseman and Chiara Mastroianni as the ex-wife hovering on the sidelines. —L.W.M.
Showing Up
Marking Michelle Williams’s fourth collaboration with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Showing Up centers on a small creative community in Portland, Oregon, where Lizzy (Williams), a sculptor, is preparing to mount a new show as she deals with minor familial drama (mostly to do with her rudderless brother, played by John Magaro) and a cold war with her friend-slash-rival-slash-landlord, Jo (Hong Chau). By turns gently funny and deeply ruminative—with a powerful attention to the hard work of being creative—the film is a refreshingly low-key delight. —M.M.
May
BlackBerry
In case you missed this hilarious and surprisingly gripping rise-and-fall corporate tale of the Canadian tech startup that broke big with the BlackBerry, now s your chance. Directed by Matt Johnson and starring a perfectly cast Jay Baruchel as Research in Motion s a nerd-turned-titan, BlackBerry has been re-released on AMC+ as a three-part limited series with a bunch of extra footage. You probably think you don t much care about the smalltime engineers who came up with the world s first smartphone, but once you start watching BlackBerry, which has a breakneck pace and a comedic secret weapon in the alpha male CEO (Glenn Howerton, savage) who leads them to riches, you won t look back.—T.A.
Past Lives
Past Lives is the first film from playwright Celine Song, and its superb and romantic—certainly one of the best movies of the year. This is a highly personal story of a young woman named Nora, played as an adult by Greta Lee, who immigrates to the US with her family when she’s 12, leaving a neighborhood boy, Hae Sung, behind in Seoul. She and Hae Sung reconnect online 12 years later and then again in person when Nora is in her 30s and married, living in New York’s East Village. Past Lives is a patient, transporting portrait of romance and thwarted love, with themes of friendship, ambition, and regret. A humane and lovely study of how people change—and how they don’t. —T.A.
You Hurt My Feelings
It’s impossible not to enjoy this funny, gentle, wryly thoughtful movie from veteran filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, about relationships among middle-aged bohemian couples in Brooklyn. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies play a married pair at the center of the action: Beth, a writer who has published one semi-successful memoir and is now finishing a novel, and Don, a therapist in private practice. When Beth overhears Don tell her brother-in-law that he doesn’t actually like her manuscript—though he’s assured her he loves it—a crisis of trust erupts. Holofcener amplifies a drama of small stakes into scenes of marital jousting and tension that are diffused by larger problems of parenting and aging and just…getting on with things. A small movie, but poised and hilarious. —T.A.
June
Blue Jean
Set in the northeast of England during the late 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s proposed Section 28 legislation helped fuel a growing climate of homophobia within schools, Blue Jean follows a gay teacher, Jean (played in a knockout performance by Rosy McEwen), who lives a double life. First, she’s forced to negotiate how to handle the arrival of a queer student who seems to have a sixth sense about Jean’s sexuality, and then, the subsequent tensions with her girlfriend over the hostility of the world surrounding them. A moving, deeply atmospheric character study of its protagonist’s struggle to come to terms with her identity—and cleverly laced with nods to the consequences of Jean’s story within the wider world—the film marks McEwen and director Georgia Oakley as serious talents on the rise. —L.H.
July
Afire
The antidote the summer blockbuster, German director Christian Petzold’s Afire is a consideration of work in a time of leisure. Author Leon joins his friend Felix for the summer on Germany’s Baltic coast—but Leon’s plans to finish a manuscript are derailed when they discover they must share the space with the irresistibly charming Nadja (played by Petzold muse Paula Beer). A self-absorbed grump, Leon confronts and instigates various interpersonal conflicts while a much larger threat simmers in the background. The film unfolds at a somewhat languorous pace, but it’s far from dull, with a dreamlike tenor that casts a powerful spell; the final 20 minutes take your breath away as it builds to its devastating end. As Leon, actor Thomas Schubert plays what could have been an intensely unlikable character with pitch-perfect (not to mention relatable) physicality and expressions, a tangle of repressed fears and desires that surface in his strange new environs. It’s one of the rare films this summer that reminded me of our humanity and left me appreciative of it happening all around me. —L.W.M.
Barbie
Would it be fair to say that nobody quite knew what to expect when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie hit theaters in July? We’d all seen and made note of its Kubrickian first teaser trailer—released all the way back in December 2022—and endured a lengthy press tour that involved a lot of pink, plus Ryan Gosling saying things like, “I’ve had this Kenergy, if you will. And this Kenergy is alive in me now.” As it turned out, Barbie had all of those flavors and more: something for the film nerds (Gerwig has cited The Wizard of Oz and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as other inspirations), for lovers of campy absurdism, for die-hard Barbie apologists, and for the feminists who have always found the doll problematic. Also mixed in are genuinely moving performances from Margot Robbie and America Ferrera, and very funny turns from Gosling, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, and Michael Cera. (More of him in everything, please!) By God, Gerwig pulled it off—and with more than $1 billion in global box-office receipts to show for it. —M.M.
Oppenheimer
Even when factoring in the Barbenheimer effect, the box-office stats for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer are staggering: The film has now made over $600 million worldwide, an extraordinary feat for a three-hour-long biographical drama based on a historical figure. But perhaps the most cheering fact is that audiences have been flocking to see a film that—despite what many expected, given the subject matter and director—focuses less on spectacle and more on the moral ambiguities and psychological torment of its central character. (The fact that Nolan and lead actor Cillian Murphy, who is all but a shoo-in for a nod at next year’s Oscars, manage to make this intimate character study as gripping as any thriller is astonishing in and of itself.) Every element of Oppenheimer—the accomplished performances of its ensemble cast, the puzzle pieces of alternating timelines woven together by editor Jennifer Lame, the chilling soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson, the exhaustive scrutiny of Hoyte van Hoytema’s camera as it charts every inflection of Murphy’s face—is as perfectly calibrated and delicately complex as the nuclear bomb itself. It’s a rare and welcome example of a director at the top of his game meeting deserved box office success, and warrants every accolade it will receive come awards season. —L.H.
Talk to Me
There may not be many new ideas in horror, but the fleet, fun, and unbearably tense Talk to Me reminds you that it hardly matters. This is a demonic possession story with a hook: a group of Australian kids film and post themselves while in the grip (literally, they use an embalmed hand) of spirits, and it becomes a social media craze. The metaphor is both obvious and brilliant—possession as narcotic, as party drug. But Mia (Sophie Wilde), who is mourning her mother, takes it too far and becomes perhaps perma-possessed. The talented directors, siblings Danny and Michael Philippou, know how to deliver shocks and keep a sometimes shaky story moving. Talk to Me is both a blast and 90 thoroughly draining minutes. —T.A.
Theater Camp
This hilarious and winning mockumentary about a theater camp for drama kids in the Adirondacks pays homage to classic Christopher Guest movies like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. Directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, it’s a 90-minute charmer with warmhearted and hilarious jokes about the self-dramatizing theater types who staff Camp AdirondACTS and the young kids who worship them. Gordon and Ben Platt as counselors are standouts in the ensemble cast, and Jimmy Tatro is uproarious as the renegade, hopelessly bro-ish camp director. —T.A.
August
Passages
Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange, Little Men) crafted one of the hottest and most layered romantic dramas of the year with Passages, about a filmmaker, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), who—much to the chagrin of his long-suffering husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw)—takes up with a schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) after a messy night out…only to come miserably slinking back when Martin begins an affair of his own. Reckless intimacy and emotional manipulation come to a head in this seductive three-hander. —M.M.
September
Fair Play
Fair Play crosses the throwback erotic-thriller vibes of classic Adrian Lyne movies like Fatal Attraction with the chilly, high-stakes finance maneuverings of recent shows like Billions and Industry. A young Manhattan couple, Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor), work at the same hedge fund, even as they carry on a secret love affair. They can’t keep their hands off each other; Luke proposes, and wedding plans are set. Then Emily gets the promotion that Luke was expecting at work, and the power balance between them is upended. Fair Play is well-paced and provocative on ideas about gender and ambition and ego. It’s also edgy and angry and a little bit salacious. —T.A.
October
Anatomy of a Fall
Undoubtedly the best courtroom drama I’ve seen since…A Few Good Men? The Verdict? Hollywood comparisons don’t apply to this fascinating, subtle, and extremely French study of culpability and marriage and just possibly murder. In an isolated alpine chalet in France, the husband of a novelist is found dead from a fall. His wife, Sandra, played magnificently by the German actor Sandra Hüller, is immediately under suspicion, claiming to have been asleep when it happened. The two had had vicious fights over emotional issues (their son was left blind after an accident) and jealousy (both are writers, though only she is published). The fissures of their marriage come to light in a trial in which a prosecutor is vicious in his attempt to pin a guilty verdict to Sandra, even as she seeks to give a ruthlessly honest account of a relationship that had spun out of control. The stakes climb inexorably higher to the intensely moving end. —T.A.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon is based on David Grann’s book of the same name. It’s about the murders of members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma—some of the wealthiest individuals in America after oil was discovered on their land. The book described how the initial investigation was badly mishandled by the FBI, prompting a young J. Edgar Hoover to reassign it to a young Texas Ranger. The Martin Scorsese version of the story (backed by Apple) premiered to raves at Cannes—including from British Vogue’s Radhika Seth, who expects big things from it as we roll into awards season—after being delayed from 2022 to allow for more editing time. Many have thrilled at seeing Robert De Niro and DiCaprio share the screen, but our enthusiasm is reserved for the amazing Lily Gladstone, who gives the film its quiet moral weight. —Chloe Schama
Priscilla
Just a year after Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis sent Austin Butler flying into the stratosphere, Sofia Coppola is telling Priscilla Presley’s side of the story, adapting her 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, for the big screen. An early teaser, alive with saturated colors and perfect period details, sets the scene—promising a heady, Marie Antoinette-esque portrait of a dreamy young woman thrust into totally otherworldly circumstances. Cailee Spaeny (The Mare of Easttown) stars as Priscilla in all her girlish, raven-haired, cat-eyed glory, while Jacob Elordi plays a quietly menacing Elvis. —M.M.
November
Fallen Leaves
A tender, melancholy romance infused with the dry comedy that legendary Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki is renowned for, Fallen Leaves centers on two lonely and star-crossed Helsinki souls who manage to connect in an unfeeling world. In fewer than 90 minutes, it gestures at larger themes—the devastation of war, the ruthlessness of capitalism, and the isolation of contemporary life—in between moments of true hilarity, making it a salve in a year packed with bloated, clumsy movies that achieve no more than a fraction of the emotion that Fallen Leaves conjures. —L.W.M.
The Holdovers
Much has been made about The Holdovers becoming an instant holiday classic. After all, director Alexander Payne has baked nostalgia into the very fiber of his latest, which takes place in 1970 over winter break at an elite New England boarding school, with Christmas standards by the Temptations, Andy Williams, and Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass prominent in its soundtrack. But focusing on its vintage vibes overlooks what makes this movie so eminently rewatchable. The fact is we’ll be delighting in The Holdovers for many years to come because its cast, led by Paul Giamatti (reuniting with Payne nearly two decades after Sideways) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, delivers wonderful performances—somehow simultaneously melancholic, acerbic, compassionate, and above all, hilarious. —L.W.M.
Maestro
Five years (!) after the release of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper returns to the director’s chair with Maestro, his long-gestating portrait of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, in which he also stars. Carey Mulligan appears opposite him as the elegant Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein’s wife, while the likes of Matt Bomer, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Josh Hamilton, Gideon Glick, and Miriam Shor play supporting roles. (The film’s screenplay was loosely based on Famous Father Girl, the 2018 memoir by Lenny and Felicia’s eldest daughter, Jamie.) It’s a thrilling, sophisticated and moving examination of a marriage—one riven by creative ambition and Bernstein s untrammeled thirst for life. —M.M.
May December
Todd Haynes, a proven master of the modern melodrama, delivers a captivating triple character study with May December—a movie dense with references both cinematic and pop-cultural (Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Winter Light, and the case of Mary Kay Letourneau are all touchpoints), and yet utterly its own thing. Set near Savannah, Georgia, in 2015, it follows an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman, never better) as she prepares to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore, sublime), a semi-professional baker who, some 20 years earlier, made national headlines for her affair with Joe, a 13-year-old friend of her son’s. When Elizabeth arrives at their home, Gracie and Joe—now an emotionally stunted, 30-something X-ray technician (played by Riverdale’s Charles Melton, a revelation)—are living a relatively quiet life with their nearly grown children. But her increasingly depraved attempts to understand the Atherton-Yoos’ relationship threatens to upend it entirely. —M.M.
Napoleon
At 85 years old, Ridley Scott is in one of the most prolific stages of his career, with The Last Duel and House of Gucci both premiering in 2021 and an upcoming, hotly anticipated Gladiator sequel filming for much of this year (the SAG-AFTRA strike paused its progress in July). His newest film, the grand, galloping Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the French military leader and eventual emperor, is a lavish epic—heavy on the well-orchestrated battle scenes and never lacking in drama and detail. The film s smaller-scale moments focus on Napoleon s tempestuous love story with his first wife, Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), whom he was forced to divorce after she was unable to bear him an heir. —L.H.
December
All of Us Strangers
Andrew Haigh—the celebrated writer-director of Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2015), and the series Looking and The North Water—is back with a searching and emotionally resonant movie about a love affair between two London neighbors. All of Us Strangers is adapted from a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada and stars Andrew Scott as Adam, a London screenwriter who falls into a hothouse affair with Harry (Paul Mescal), while at the same time attempting to reckon with the death of his parents (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) from 30 years before. Supernatural mysteries collide with aching examination of things left unsaid in an acting tour de force. —M.M.
American Fiction
In our charged, fractious moment, few films are riskier propositions than those about race. But Cord Jefferson’s debut feature, American Fiction, succeeds, propelled by impressive performances from Jeffery Wright and Sterling K. Brown, laugh-out-loud humor, and an askance view toward easy moralizing. Wright plays a frustrated novelist who, disgusted by tired and offensive tropes in Black entertainment, writes a book full of them under a pen name—and ends up at the center of the hypocrisy of the publishing world. Confronting the commodification of marginalized voices and society’s insistence on reducing individuals to stereotypes, it’s a provocative, wickedly funny interrogation sure to speak to anyone who sees themselves in more expansive ways than the world sees them. —L.W.M.
The Color Purple
Directed by Blitz Bazawule and (re-)adapted for the screen by Marcus Gardley, this coming-of-age period drama based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel (and its Tony-winning reimagining for Broadway) tells the story of Celie—an African American woman living in the South and doing her best to navigate abuse, poverty, and racism during the early 1900s—for the second time on the big screen. The incredibly starry cast includes Fantasia, Halle Bailey, Danielle Brooks, Colman Domingo, Taraji P. Henson, H.E.R., and Ciara. —E.S.
The End We Start From
Quiet, tense, and beautiful to look at, this dystopian drama, a first feature from the UK director Mahalia Belo, is an adaptation of the excellent 2017 novel by Megan Hunter. It tells the dreamlike story of catastrophic floods hitting London just as our unnamed protagonist gives birth to her son. Jodie Comer plays the new mother in a wonderfully committed, highly physical role that will have people talking. A survival drama ensues, one resonantly focused on women and mothers and their particular forms of determination. Comer is radiant and resilient and keeps the film from turning bleak as she travels through a reeling, rain-soaked England. Katherine Waterston and Benedict Cumberbatch are also excellent in supporting roles. —T.A.
Ferrari
The director Michael Mann—unsurpassed purveyor of stylized action cool—may be 80, but his Ferrari, a mid-century set epic about Enzo Ferrari and his attempt to rescue his namesake motorsport company from bankruptcy, is an excitingly ambitious and delightfully vroom-vroom holiday drama. Filmed in Italy with Adam Driver in the lead role and Penélope Cruz as his sparring wife Laura, it is heavy on style and transporting in its Formula 1 and Mille Miglia set pieces. Mann specializes in escapism for grown ups—serious and satisfying even when they’re built for fun. —T.A.
Leave the World Behind
Sam Esmail is the hyper-talented creator of Mr. Robot and the director of the first season of the undersung paranoid thriller Homecoming for Prime. With Leave the World Behind, he’s adapted a brilliantly disquieting novel by Rumaan Alam, in which a weekend-home domestic drama is shadowed by end times. He has a gonzo cast to help him: Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha la Herrold, and Kevin Bacon. The result is a technically brilliant, jitteringly tense, and haunting tour of impending apocalypse. —T.A.
Poor Things
A young woman with the brain of a baby discovers the world and all it has to offer—including sex, travel, dessert, fashion, and heartbreak—in the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, adapted from the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray. Emma Stone is unlike you’ve ever seen her in a role that requires a full onscreen evolution from barely sentient child to empowered woman, and there’s enough beguiling weirdness in this film (Brain transplants! Bustling bordellos! An extremely narratively important goat!) to make it feel unique and timely all at once. —E.S.
Renaissance: A Movie by Beyoncé
Beyoncé s Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé is pitch-perfect. It was touching, energizing, entertaining, and funny; an ode to the queerness of then and now, and the intersectional communities that have inspired and elevated Beyoncé to where she is now. She also pulls back the curtain on the multiplicity of roles she inhabits—performer, mother, woman, wife, daughter—and makes us see her for all that she is. At one point in the the film, she says: “I’ve transformed into a different animal”—and that she has. She’s in a league of her own, and owns it with an inspiring blend of grace and humor. Plus, the fashion is just fantastic. —José Criales Unzueta
Shayda
This is a powerful first film from Iranian-born Australian director Noora Niasari, coproduced by Cate Blanchett, and it deserves to be seen for its central performance by the immensely talented Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who carried last year’s serial-killer drama Holy Spider. Here she’s the titular Iranian immigrant mother seeking refuge at a women’s shelter in Melbourne amidst a custody battle over her (adorable) six-year-old daughter. Filmed with striking realism, it’s a quietly engrossing drama that never tips into sentimentality or easy moralizing and builds tension as the abusive and menacing father, Hossein, fights to maintain his grip on wife and child. —T.A.
The Zone of Interest
Meticulous and unsettling, Jonathan Glazer’s loose adaptation of a 2014 Martin Amis novel is set at Auschwitz but keeps its rigorous attention on the striving, middle-class German family that runs the place. There is not one scene of violence, but horror shadows every frame as we follow the family’s domestic dramas and the all-too-human professional anxieties of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). The camp looms in the background, its haunting sounds constantly overheard, forcing us to think about accommodation, disassociation, and repression. These are themes with contemporary resonances, to be sure, but the movie is so subtle and carefully composed that it harnesses your empathy and sticks in your head like a provocation. A must-see. —T.A.
Listen to Vogue editors talk more about this year’s must-see films on this episode of The Run-Through here.