The best movies of 2023, topped by Emma Stone’s riskiest role ever

After two years of a pandemic that drove moviegoing out of the theaters and further into our homes and streaming services, the best thing in movies in 2023 was rediscovering that going to the movies was fun again.

A trip to the moviehouse became an event — something that used to happen in the days of the double feature in the ‘50s, or when “Jaws” and “Star Wars” ushered in the blockbuster era. But when movie lovers can catch their favorites on Netflix or Disney+, sometimes just weeks after a theatrical run, it takes a lot to get people off the couch and into a theater.

In July, people filled movie theaters because of the counterprogramming of two movies that would seem to have distinctly different audiences: Greta Gerwig’s frilly comedy “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s atomic biopic “Oppenheimer.” The scheduling, meant to cancel each other out, instead raised both films — and made the “Barbenheimer” juxtaposition a reason to see both movies.

Two more events were caused by women for whom movies are a side gig. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé each released movie-length concert documentaries, capturing their recent concert tours for those not fortunate enough to have an NFL stadium nearby. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” and “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé” each attracted fans — not of movies, but of the performers — who literally danced in the aisles.

The other thing that made moviegoing so worthwhile is that there were a lot of really good movies, particularly in the later months of 2023.

What made compiling this year’s list of the best movies so difficult is that there wasn’t one movie that was head-and-shoulders above the rest. I could take this list and shuffle the top 7 — and I could defend the order as reflecting my feelings at that moment. That’s how good this year’s best movies were.

Here’s my list of the 10 best movies of 2023:

1. “Poor Things” • Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein-like tale — in which a crazed scientist (Willem Dafoe) implants a baby’s brain into an adult woman (Emma Stone) — becomes an absurdist satire of Victorian morals. As her character grows smarter and figures out the scam of male dominance, Stone delivers a risk-taking and courageously hilarious performance. (Now playing in theaters.)

2. “Anatomy of a Fall” • Creating a psychological drama disguised as a courtroom thriller, director Justine Triet (who co-wrote with Arthur Harari) follows an academic (Sandra Hüller) on trial in the death of her husband. The question of whether she did it becomes secondary to a bigger concern: How much can anyone outside of a marriage know about what’s going on inside it? (Available on digital-on-demand.)

3. “Oppenheimer” • Writer-director Christopher Nolan takes on the toughest type of narrative, the biographical drama, and delivers a haunting portrait of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). He’s driven to develop the atomic bomb before the Nazis do — while fearing that it may destroy the world, and questioning whether the government he supports has the wisdom to wield it. (Still in some theaters; also available on digital-on-demand, or to buy on BluRay or DVD.)

4. “Past Lives” • Celine Song, writing and directing her first movie, tells a semi-autobiographical story of Nora (Greta Lee), a Korean-born playwright in New York, who reunites with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), her crush back when they were each 12 years old and living in Korea. With John Magaro as Nora’s American husband, Song weaves a quietly moving examination of the moments on which our lives change — and when we consider what might have been. (Available on digital-on-demand.)

5. “The Zone of Interest” • Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s explanation of the Nazis’ extermination of Jews — “the banality of evil” — is made palpable in writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel, which follows the home life of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife (Sandra Hüller, who’s having quite a year). The death camp is just over the fence, the horrors inside never seen but always felt, often in the ways the Höss family act like everything is normal. (Arriving in Salt Lake City theaters on Jan. 26.)

6. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.” • Judy Blume’s landmark young-adult novel gets the movie adaptation it deserves, as writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig introduces us to Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), a 12-year-old girl trying to make sense of her new home in Jersey, her changing body, and her religious identity — made more complicated by her Jewish dad (Benny Safdie) and Christian-raised mom (Rachel McAdams). (Available on digital-on-demand, BluRay and DVD.)

7. “Killers of the Flower Moon” • Director Martin Scorsese, now 81, makes what may be his last masterpiece — a thorough examination of the efforts of white people to rob, cheat and kill the Osage of 1920s Oklahoma out of their oil fortunes. With riveting performances from Leonard DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, Scorsese’s drama digs into how money and racism corrupted a generation. (Available on digital-on-demand; will stream on Apple TV+ starting on a date to be announced.)

8. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” • The continuation of the story of Miles Morales, as he learns more about the workings of the multiple universes — and the Spider-Man that exists in each one — expands the possibilities of animated filmmaking. The painterly settings and layered references to Marvel’s exhaustive canon take this second of three installments to another level. (Available on digital-on-demand; also streaming on Netflix.)

9. “You Hurt My Feelings” • Julia Louis-Dreyfus, our queen of modern anxiety, plays an author who overhears her psychologist husband (Tobias Menzies) disparaging her next book — causing her to question every white lie she’s ever been told. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener crafts a masterful comedy of manners that examines why we say what we do to get along with the people we love. (Available on digital-on-demand; also streaming on Apple TV+.)

10. “A Thousand and One” • Singer Teyana Taylor gives a stirring performance as Inez, who will do anything — except obey the law — to give young Terry (played by three actors at different ages) the life he should get. But not all is as it seems in writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s searing drama, which asks tough questions about maternal love in a quickly changing New York. (Available on digital-on-demand.)

The second 10 • Honorable mentions for these movies that almost made the cut: Greta Gerwig’s bubbly and subversive “Barbie”; Aki Kaurismäki’s dry Finnish romance “Fallen Leaves”; Hayao Miyazaki’s luminous and imaginative “The Boy and the Heron”; Nida Manzoor’s martial-arts sister comedy “Polite Society”; Kelly Reichert’s warmly witty “Showing Up”; Emma Seligman’s bloody high-school comedy “Bottoms”; Michael Mann’s fast-moving biopic “Ferrari”; Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s improvised mock-documentary “Theater Camp”; Todd Haynes’ darkly humorous character study “May December”; and John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s sharp-tongued action comedy “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”

The bottom 10

Why dwell on the worst movies of the year? It’s therapeutic. I write them down here, and I never have to think about them again.

1. “Beau Is Afraid” • Director Ari Aster, so good at making the horror films “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” lets his neuroses out for a three-hour walk in a dystopian drama that’s annoying, cruel and self-indulgent.

2. “Haunted Mansion” • Remember when studios said they would save Hollywood by mining their existing intellectual property? Disney tried it with their famed Disneyland attraction, with tedious results.

3. “About My Father” • Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco takes his one facial expression — pained embarrassment — and tries to build an entire movie around it, dragging the great Robert De Niro into the mess with him.

4. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3″ • Thirty years on, and Nia Vardalos is still telling the same joke about her loud Greek family.

5. “The Oath” • Writer-director-star Darin Scott tries to craft a “Gladiator”-like war epic out of the story of Moroni — the man who transcribed the Golden Plates that Joseph Smith later translated into the Book of Mormon — but has neither the budget nor the craft to make it work.

6. “The Tutor” • I almost forgot about this artificially “twisty” thriller about a cat-and-mouse encounter between an impoverished tutor (Garrett Hedlund) and a troubled rich teen (Noah Schlapp). Thankfully, so did everyone else.

7. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” • Mario, Nintendo’s franchise hero, turns out to work better as a playable avatar or a corporate logo than as a movie character.

8. “80 For Brady” • Gene Siskel used to ask if a movie was more interesting than a documentary of the movie’s stars having lunch would be. That test gets a workout in this NFL infomercial, which casts Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Lily Tomlin as fans of quarterback Tom Brady (playing himself) on a trip to the Super Bowl.

9. “The Little Mermaid” • Except maybe for Halle Bailey’s radiant performance as Ariel, there’s not a single element in this live-action remake that comes close to improving the 1989 animated original. So why fix what isn’t broken?

10. “Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire” • When Netflix throws a ton of money at director Zack Snyder, one expects more than a bloated, humorless mashup of “Star Wars” and “The Seven Samurai.”