So that’s a wrap for 2023… And it has been a banger. The 30 motion pictures you see in the list below are the result of intense internal deliberations deep in the LWLies secret lair in Shoreditch, and there was some democracy involved, but also a fair bit of common sense and personal lobbying. The list runs from 1 February 2023 to 31 January 2024 (to account a little bit for some early US releases, such as Poor Things and All of Us Strangers), but we were fairly stringent on the cut-off. For our number one film, there’s something unassuming about it on first watch but, like all great art, it doesn’t just lodge itself in the mind, but demands repeated reappraisal and discussion.
For better and for worse, we say to Carol Morley: never change. She is someone who, throughout her career, has ploughed her idiosyncratic furrow with passion and intensity. Sometimes, the final products don’t land, but with her new one, a comic dissection of English manners as told through the life of artist Audrey Amiss, she has produced one of her best and most heartfelt movies, lifted no end by a wonderful central performance from the great Monica Dolan.
Justine Triet’s 2023 Palme d’Or winner is powered by a stratospheric performance by the German actor Sandra Huller, who plays a novelist who is accused of killing her husband by pushing him out of the window of their pine chalet. The film takes us through the legal minutiae of the ensuing investigation, but is more interested in having us consider the slippery and abstract nature of truth.
One of 2023’s finest debuts, How to Have Sex is a film that filters vital questions regarding sexual consent through the chronicle of a classic rite-of-passage sun holiday. Three young female friends see this moment as a chance for some gloves-off thrill seeking, but the lads they hook up with have other ideas. Manning Walker picks apart a difficult moment in the path to maturity, and does so against the neon-lit landscape of Malia.
Ya gotta laugh though, haven’t you? No really, you do… Ridley Scott rolls out a grandiose historical biography of the 18th century French military tactician, and has Joaquin Phoenix play him like an up-tight incel whose omnipresent tricorne hat covers up a head full of deep Freudian neuroses. It’s a film that split viewers over its fidelity to the recorded reality and the extreme focus on Napoleon’s obsessive love for his wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), but the battle scenes are some of Scott’s finest, and the whole thing, however you take it, is an unabashed hoot.
Anyone who thinks the rom-com is dead should have a word with debutant director Raine Allen Miller, whose Rye Lane is a film which fondly borrows from the genre’s hallowed past while offering something completely fresh and invigorating. Blessed with the chemistry-heavy paring of David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah, this one was a big, charming win and hopefully the start of something big for its maker.
This was a good year for malevolent cheese graters (see also David Fincher’s The Killer), and the one that crops up in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise makes for one of the year’s most ingeniously nauseating scenes. This clever reshaping of the 1981 Sam Raimi original sees the action transplanted to a mouldering apartment block, and the film is all the better for its mixture of earnestness and humour, and of course the torrents of red stuff that fill the hallways.
As financially successful as they’ve always been, movies about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have always been awkward brand cash-ins aimed at an indiscriminate demographic of Prime-guzzling teens. Jeff Rowe, with the help of his pal Seth Rogen, takes a leaf out of the Spider-Verse playbook and delivers something new, genuine, heartfelt and very funny with this property. The animation is innovative, the script is very funny, and the voicework – especially from the four young newcomers playing the eponymous heroes in a half-shell – is absolutely top-notch.
Park Ji-min delivered one of the breakthrough performances of 2023 in Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, in which she plays a tenacious Korean orphan who was fostered by parents in France, and who decides to return to the home she feels resentful towards to find the parents who abandoned her. It sounds like a traumatising weepie, but it’s very much not, as the protagonist’s practical, emotionally detached methods help to present this intriguing situation with humour and pathos in rich abundance.
One of the measures by which we select the films that eventually make it on this list is to ask whether they’re showing us something we have never seen before. Samsara, from Spanish experimental filmmaker Lois Patiño, ticks that box and then some with this hush, ambient tale of transcendence and transport to a higher plane of being. At the 2023 BFI London Film Festival, this one played at the BFI IMAX, and we hope that it gets a few more showings there when it’s released in the new year.
Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra rocked the 2022 Cannes competition with this insidious and subtle exploration of French colonial influence in the South Seas. Benoît Magimel, who’s fast making a name for himself as one of the world’s great actors, stars as a diplomatic emissary who wants to have his finger in every pie going, but whose attention is diverted when a possible end to his all-encompassing reign rolls into town in the form of a nuclear sub. Contains one of the year’s great shots of boats being tossed around by giant waves.
A big discovery was made in Christian Petzold’s latest film, Afire. And that discovery is that the words “Club Sandwich” as enunciated with a German lilt are in fact the funniest spoken words in all languages. For a director whose films tend to be on the more serious, melodramatic end of the spectrum, this was something a little different for him: a deceptively light comedy about a young novelist unable to overcome his pretensions and preconceptions of the world.
The tightest film of 2023 was Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a thoughtful dramatic adaptation of Andreas Malm’s 2020 non-fiction book which explores the morality of direct-action activism. Calibrated as a classic-era heist movie, in which a disparate crew comes together to – you guessed it! – blow up a pipeline, the film also to make sure that their message rings out across the landscape and leaves a chillingly ambiguous mark on the audience as well.
The return of the king. Finnish maestro Aki Kaurismäki returns to the scene in 2023 doing what he does best: producing immaculate hangdog romances in which the poor, desolate and downtrodden find love on the chilly streets of Helsinki. There’s also surreal karaoke, tragic missed connections, evil capitalists, and one of the greatest cinema date scenes ever committed to film.
A small but remarkable debut feature from Savanah Leaf which offers a visually and atmospherically unique take on Black parenthood in the modern age. Leaf is gifted with a taciturn but open-hearted lead performance from Tia Nomore as Gia, an expectant mother who has already had two of her kids taken from her custody by authorities and must now navigate a malevolent bureaucracy. It’s social realism with an ambient, more lushy visual twist.
One of the year’s finest British offerings came from the maker of one of the millennium’s best TV sitcoms: We Are Lady Parts. Nida Manzoor rises to the challenge of the feature film debut by whisking together a traditional tale of generational malaise among the bickering members of a Pakistani family in London, and a high-kicking action spectacular in which one teenager must save her sister from a conspiracy that could unravel the very fabric of the community. Very funny, completely charming – we can’t wait to see what Manzoor and star Priya Kansara do next.
The title of this intimate opus refers to a province in the west of Argentina, and it’s being used in the same way as David Lynch used the name Twin Peaks – to denote a locus for mystery and intrigue. Laura Citarella spins a tale of one woman’s journey through the rabbit hole of history and her obsession to uncover the details of a romance literally found between pages of books at the local library. But then it jackknifes suddenly into more surreal and profound territory, celebrating female autonomy and the allure of small, independent collectives.
The time-honoured courtroom drama took on a new form in 2023, and at the vanguard of this change was Alice Diop’s extraordinary and harrowing Saint Omer. Its story, which is based on the writer-director’s own research, tells of a woman who’s in the dock on charges of murdering her young child, and her testimony takes us to some dark, morally and philosophically ambiguous places. We love Diop’s short films and documentaries, but this fiction feature debut is arguably her first masterpiece.
That rare bird: a film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival that really delivers the goods. Playwright Celine Song transitions seamlessly to film with the lilting, long-distance romance of Past Lives, in which telecoms technology and social media help a Korean couple rekindle a formative romance with her having emigrated before things could really blossom. Tender, wistful and never judgmental, we’re just hoping and praying that Song isn’t chewed up and spat out by the Studio machine.
We’re not entirely sure who deserves top billing here. Could it be the three extraordinary leads in Ira Sachs’ Parisian partner-swapping ménage à trois? Or could it be Sachs himself, who culled the story from his own formative experiences of Cupid’s poorly-aimed arrow? But maybe we’ll just give it to the costume department, especially the person who found the three-quarter length top that Franz Rogowski wears to a “meet-the-parents” luncheon.
2023’s model blockbuster, in more ways than one. More than just a movie, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a form of cinematic alchemy that achieves what so many aspire towards and so often fail spectacularly: pleasing everyone all the time. Meeting in the middle between corporate-mandated franchise extension and weirdo art movie, Barbie deserves every penny of its extraordinary success, not least for gifting Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling with two of their most perfect roles to date.
The film about a bomb that did the exact opposite at the box office. Christopher Nolan cements his movie-Midas status by giving us a glitchy, three-hour biopic of morally-scarred atomic bomb inventor Robert Oppenheimer, and making the sort of money usually reserved for films with spandex-clad movie stars and lots of awful CGI. Next to becoming Official God of Movies Throughout the Galaxy and Beyond, the sky’s the limit for what Nolan does next. And, of course, this could be his golden ticket come Oscar time…
In 2020, David Fincher made the film Mank, which served as an ode to his departed father in that it was based on a film script he wrote. With The Killer, the famously-fastidious filmmaker has come up with a film which may serve as autobiography, the comic chronicle of a zen perfectionist assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) whose attempts to precision-calculate the requirements of his job always seem to come up short. Dismiss as slight at your peril.
This state-of-the-nation epic based on a ripping page-turned by New Yorker scribe David Gran saw its maker, Martin Scorsese, in a reflective mood. Killers of the Flower Moon is a film about the mechanics of genocide, carried out by wealthy white settlers against unknowing natives, but also one which ponders the tragically ephemeral nature of storytelling and, by extension, history itself. Leo’s great. Bobby’s brilliant. Garlands go to Lily Gladstone.
There’s been a murder, and the victim is the UK theatrical prospects of Kelly Reichardt’s scintillating new film, Showing Up. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 and there hasn’t been a whiff of it on these shores… until a Blu-ray release cropped up in online listings for the end of January 2024 (right before our cut-off for this poll). Michelle Williams stars as a cantankerous sculptor who has to deal with all manner of trifling nonsense to enable her to get the hard work of creativity done. It’s a beautiful film, and we hope that some people over here get to see it big.
While Baz Lurhman gave us a predictably OTT hot-foot through the life of Elvis Presley in 2022, Sofia Coppola delivers a better film is just about every respect with her supremely thoughtful, elegant and unshowy take on the early life of the King’s first wife, Priscilla Presley. It stars newcomer Cailee Spaeny who delivers a career-making turn as the porcelain doll who eventually cracks, with man-of-the-moment Jacob Elordi as her mamma-loving weirdo spouse. It’s biography with the Wiki bullshit pulled out and deep psychological analysis placed in its stead.
Following a brief sojourn into the world of television, Andrew Haigh knocks it out of the stratosphere with his return to the big screen with this emotionally overwhelming adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel, ‘Strangers’. Andrew Scott has seldom been better as a lonely writer whose memories of past loves (Paul Mescal) and family dramas (Jamie Bell, Claire Foy) coalesce into a time-switching tale of romance and regret. Plus, lots of eighties electro pop bangers on the soundtrack.
So is this Hayao Miyazaki’s third or fourth retirement movie? He definitely mentioned he was packing things in after Spirited Away, and that was five films ago now… Anyway, let’s not bother picking over all that, and be thankful for the fact that the Studio Ghibli grand fromage has delivered one of the Japanese animation house’s finest works, a melancholy compendium of pet themes and far-reaching philosophical inquiry. It’s ambitious and occasionally obscure, yet the seriousness of intent is always enveloped within the filmmaker’s patented brand of eccentric creativity.
It’s the film Yorgos Lanthimos was born to make! Okay, hyperbole aside, Poor Things feels like the sweet, sweet product of filmmaker who’s set out his intellectual stall (Dogtooth), done his industry dues (The Favourite), and has now been handed a carte blanche by the head of accounts to make whatever he god-damn wants. And this free adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray casts Emma Stone in the role of globetrotting nymph Bella Baxter – a young woman with the brain of a child who’s learning human behaviour from scratch. It’s a stellar piece of cinematic craft, which acts as a gilded pedestal for a one-for-the-ages performance from Stone.
The jury is still deliberating, but we can’t help but wonder if Wes Anderson’s latest mad missive is also his greatest to date. His interest in the telling of the tale as much as the tale itself manifests in the nesting stories of a theatre troupe putting on a play about an extraterrestrial sighting in the desert-town of the title. There’s more stars than Heaven in the movie, but special mention should go to long-time Anderson totem, Jason Schwartzman, who is gifted his first lead role in an Anderson film since Rushmore. In short, twisty, immaculately-directed mainstream metafiction has seldom been so fun. And so moving!
If you take a peek in Todd Haynes’s trophy cabinet, you’ll notice he already has some LWLies silverware from when he secured the number one spot in with Carol for our 2015 films of the year. So consider this one the double. When we caught his scintillating, disorienting new one, May December, at the Cannes Film Festival, we walked from the screening unsure of what we’d just seen. Perhaps it was an acerbic comedy which handled the darkest of subject matters with dainty abandon? Or a big, brassy actor stand-off, with Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore both on superlative form? Perhaps it was a stealthy critique of biographical cinema, screen acting and the impossibility of emulating another person on film? Maybe it was all of those things? Or none of them? To be frank, we still haven’t quite decided. But what we do know was that this was the film that still has us chortling, gasping and wincing just thinking about it, a discussion-point movie par excellence and another crowning achievement in the career of its director. Our only prayer now is that the award season set take notice. And if you wanna hear from the man himself, take a listen to this episode of Truth & Movies in which the august Hannah Strong interviewed him about the making of this brilliant film.
Published 19 Dec 2023
The LWLies team count down their favourite cinematic experiences from an embarrassment of movie riches.
Our annual countdown of the year’s finest silver screen offerings. How many have you seen?
Our favourite new releases from this year, featuring Spike Lee, Chloé Zhao, Josephine Decker and more.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
