The best international movies of 2023, as always, were difficult to condense into a number as small as 25. Let’s just say I don’t envy those narrowing down the Best International Feature Film shortlist for the Oscars. Our collection of films from outside the United States traverses the globe, encompassing everything from Chilean action movies to tiny Korean dramas to Nigerian fantasias. We bind ourselves to the experience of a blind Finnish cinephile, and that of a Tunisian family’s long-suffering daughters. We fell in love with food, and fell in love in Rye Lane Market. As we traditionally do with our list of the best international movies, let us paraphrase Bong Joon-ho: If you can brave the one-inch barrier of subtitles for these incredible films, you’ll be vastly rewarded with a range of genres, styles and experiences that will enrich your life beyond your national borders.
Here are the 25 best international movies of 2023:
25. Mami Wata
As characters debate spirituality in West African Pidgin, and lights pop to enhance a dreamy mid-forest sequence’s bold black-and-white, you find yourself fully immersed in the mystic fable of Mami Wata. Stray English words and images that almost feel like they’ve been taken from a postcard, or seen flipping through the channels late at night, contribute to a film ready to wash you away into its uncanny world. Filmmaker C.J. “Fiery” Obasi brings us to the shoreline of Iyi, where technology stops with the tide and a religious leader is under threat. Shot with a striking, Expressionist style by the Nollywood staple, Obasi’s story of a village, its water goddess, the women channeling her and the men trying to wrest control is a beautiful, stark fantasy. Mami Wata’s fairy tale of tested, lost, then rediscovered faith and the dangers of inflexibility comes in the most visually stunning package possible. A well-spun myth with gilded illustrations so lovely that each is worth framing, it’s full of complex moralizing and art departments working overtime to make the most of their resources. A few key performances and a filmmaker with a clear vision unite for a film that truly feels fantastical, like someone somehow snuck a camera as they were falling into a holy reverie.–Jacob Oller
24. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic
Teemu Nikki met Petri Poikolainen during their Finnish national service in the 1990s; they became friends, but lost touch soon after. Nikki went on to be a respected movie director; Poikolainen had just begun to make a name for himself as a stage actor when he was struck with a devastating MS diagnosis, which eventually took his sight and ability to walk. When he reconnected with Nikki more than 20 years after their first meeting, the director suggested making a film together. In that film, The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic, Poikolainen plays Jaako, who is also blind, uses a wheelchair and has MS. His days are lonely and long, punctuated by the robotic voice of his phone reminding him to take his medication; awkward calls from his dad, simultaneously distant and over-protective; and very welcome calls from Sirpa (Marjana Maijaala). Sirpa—who Jaako met online and has never encountered in real life—is gravely ill with cancer, and the two spend as much of their days as they can manage on the phone, talking about everything from the severity of their illnesses to which Friends character they’d be (both: Chandler). When Sirpa’s cancer takes a sudden turn for the worse, Jaako decides to embark upon a three-hour solo trip to visit her, despite the many daunting obstacles he will face along the way. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic is shot in extreme shallow focus: The sole consistently clear portion of the screen being Poikolainen’s face, with the world around it cloudy and obscure. While this unconventional method doesn’t exactly replicate sightlessness for the viewer, it does encourage an unusually intense empathy with our protagonist. Spending the duration as the only character in focus puts unenviable pressure on Poikolainen’s performance, and he proves himself well worthy of the challenge. He’s such a warm, compelling presence, it doesn’t take long to forget just how unusual the film’s stylistic conceit is. It helps that Jaako isn’t depicted as either a martyr or self-pitying; he’s not defined by his illness. He can be thorny, but he has a whipsmart humor and an all-abiding love for the pre-’90s work of John Carpenter. It’s a pleasure to spend time in his company. Nikki has said on the interview circuit that he didn’t make The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic to espouse the importance of disability representation, but to find a way of working with his old friend, and the specificity of this approach prevents the film from veering into broadness or sentimentality. Still, it would be disingenuous to deny that Poikolainen’s condition gives Nikki’s movie an extra resonance, not least because—due to the degenerative nature of his MS—this might well be the only starring role he ever gets. To labor over the sadness of the situation would be contrary to the spirit of the movie, so let us instead just be grateful that in the face of imposing physical restrictions, The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic gives Poikolainen’s fiercely charismatic lead performance such a thrilling, empathetic home.—Chloe Walker
23. Alcarràs
The Solé family is often sprawled across their home, fleeing the stress of the never-ending harvest. Simón crucially never offers us a clear layout of the family’s land, capturing it in a series of close-ups, disjointed and intimate. Every moment is fractured, conveying how disparate the family has become, desperate to avoid the perpetual stress that lingers over every conversation at this pivotal moment. In a particularly tense scene, Dolors (Anna Otín) massages the knots out of gruff patriarch Quimet’s (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) back, while her children do their own tasks, milling around them. Simón chooses to hold them in individual shots, never pulling back to frame them in relation to one another, only catching sight of them as they linger in the background of another’s close-up. It is a careful setup, one that balances the family’s desire for connection—piled into a contained space—against the inability to connect in a meaningful way. –Anna McKibbin
22. Four Daughters
Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, and Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters takes place at the confluence of two rivers: Fiction and documentary. The subjects of this hybrid film are Olfa, a Tunisian mother of four girls, and the teenage Eya and Tayssir, the youngest two of her daughters. Ben Hania fills the gaping silhouette of the mysteriously absent other pair—Ghofrane and Rahma—with two actors (Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar), as well as a stand-in for Olfa herself (Tunisian megastar Hend Sabri). Together, the actors (including one man, Majd Mastoura, who plays a variety of male figures in Olfa’s life) re-enact significant moments in the women’s lives in an attempt to therapeutically exorcize their grief and anger. The film is a rehearsal with no end performance in sight, the process being the point. The result is astonishing emotional rigor, particularly from Eya and Tayssir. Forced to endure hardships both new and familiar to their mother—who unquestioningly believes one of her motherly duties is to inflict the same pain on her children that marred her own life—the girls are remarkably unafraid to hold Olfa to account. The conceit at the heart of the film is a brilliant one, because it dissolves all of the interpersonal barriers that might have prevented its subjects from total honesty. Four Daughters is a fascinating, gripping watch for the depth and candor with which it explores these women’s fraught bonds. Rather than dilute the truth, then, the use of mirrored performances has an intensifying, clarifying effect on their original subjects—one so acute that it even unnerves some of the actors.–Farah Cheded
21. Attachment
To love someone is to graft together two lives, whether you’re joined at the hip or connected by a long digital umbilical cord spanning thousands of miles. It’s a joining of two independent beings, and with that joining comes a certain acknowledgement that you’re not only giving a part of yourself away, but allowing that part of you to move freely around the world without you. It’s a moving, beautiful thought, but in the right context it can also be a terrifying one. It’s a universal dilemma, which makes it perfect fodder for horror storytelling. In Attachment, writer/director Gabriel Bier Gislason examines that dilemma with keen, incisive eyes. Attachment begins with attraction, the sudden collision of two women who simply seem to fit together. Leah (Ellie Kendrick), a visiting academic from London, meets Maja (Josephine Park), a Danish woman with a past as an actress, in a cute and endearing encounter in a library. They strike up a conversation, which turns into a weekend affair, which turns into a more complicated relationship when an accident leaves Leah with an injured leg and a harder road back to London. Rather than leaving her new flame to recover by herself, Maja makes the decision to follow Leah to London, where she meets her girlfriend’s overbearing mother Chana (Sofie Gråbøl), a devout Jewish woman who values her daughter’s health and safety above everything else, to an often unhealthy degree. As the trio settles into an awkward new dynamic, Maja and Leah try their best to forge a real, lasting relationship from the strange circumstances of their togetherness, while Maja does her best to get along with the suspicious and often standoffish Chana. But within that sincere desire to forge a connection, new wrinkles emerge. If you’re willing to settle into Attachment’s pace and follow down all its dark and complex corners, you’ll be rewarded with a quietly upsetting, deeply affecting horror film that nails its romance and family dynamics with clarity.—Matthew Jackson
20. Walk Up
The social influences of one’s surroundings—namely the various dwellings we inhabit—act as a clever framing mechanism in South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Walk Up. Specifically, the film visits each floor-spanning apartment of one particular building, characters neatly shuffling between each residence as they navigate personal employment woes and fluctuating relationship tensions. As Hong makes his way through the building from the ground up, the interpersonal connections between characters shift—romances blossom and fizzle, familial ties strengthen and disintegrate, rental power dynamics sweeten before souring—until they ultimately reset, ready to unfold anew. Filmmaker Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) and his daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so) arrive at a building owned by Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young), an old friend of the director. Ms. Kim gives the two a tour of the three story edifice, which houses her own work studio on the basement level, her own residence on the first floor, an intimate restaurant owned by a woman named Sunhee (Song Seon-mi) and an apartment rented by a reclusive artist on the top level. After briefly entering each unit (and probably violating a couple lease agreements in the process), the three retire to Ms. Kim’s apartment for an evening of copious wine drinking. As the young woman departs to fetch more wine from a convenience store, the next segment begins with Byung-soo, Ms. Kim and Sunhee eating a meal at the latter’s restaurant, wherein we find the film’s thesis of art, financing and the general impossibility of the two—creativity and capital—coexisting. “For them, a film is purely a means of making money,” Byung-soo drunkenly laments when he reveals that the plug was pulled on his most recent film just weeks before it was set to enter production. “Money is the only standard to judge anything.” Clearly, Hong is working through some personal disappointments as it pertains to his own metric of “success” here. By the time Walk Up comes to a conclusion, all of the characters appear in front of the building. They are either on their way elsewhere, appearing for an overdue visit or returning to perform job duties inside. This set-up mirrors the very beginning of the film, and relationships that have been fortified or abandoned since have miraculously seemed to regress into their original dynamics. Has Hong simply gone full-circle, setting these individuals up to relive the previous events and perhaps make different choices? Or does the suffocation of our small quarters cause us to become callous and self-centered? Does leaving our most intimate spaces allow us to embrace possibilities that we’ve since considered closed-off or impossible? Without the looming pressures of rent, work-from-home set-ups and casual business meetings, Hong suggests that we might just finally be free.—Natalia Keogan
19. Close to Vermeer
While Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch baroque master who painted some 30-odd works during his career, is generally considered an enigmatic figure in the art world, curators and experts have nonetheless dedicated their entire careers to evaluating his comparatively limited oeuvre. Thus, Gregor Weber, a highly-regarded expert on the artist, considers the “crown jewel” of his career to be overseeing the largest and most encompassing Vermeer exhibit ever at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The planning and execution of this Vermeer retrospective is the focus of Suzanne Raes’s documentary Close to Vermeer, which unfurls into an engrossing 79-minute exploration of the experts, museums and debates that continue to engage with the artist and his legacy. Just a year away from retirement, Weber embarks on a quest to acquire as many Vermeer paintings as possible for the swiftly-approaching exhibit. Despite being a Dutch artistic icon, many of Vermeer’s works – including recognizable artworks The Milkmaid and The Art of Painting – are currently (and perhaps forever destined to be) part of permanent collections at foreign museums. As such, he and several Rijksmuseum colleagues, including fellow Vermeer historian Pieter Roelofs, attempt to secure loans of those paintings. They travel to The Frick and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Germany’s Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum and even the neighboring Dutch Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. When able to secure pieces for the exhibit, researcher and conservator Anna Krekeler puts them under her microscope and relishes in the details of Vermeer’s brushwork up-close. Though much of the doc’s beauty clearly stems from the gorgeous details inherent to the 17th century artist’s motifs, the overall momentum of the film is driven by art-world politics that typically don’t filter down into public consciousness. For example, a standoff of sorts develops when American researchers decide to disavow a work long considered to be an authentic Vermeer due to the predominance of a green hue in a subject’s flesh tone. Weber contests this finding – but is it due to genuine scholarly disagreement, or because he’s down to the wire in terms of making decisions for the Rijksmuseum exhibit? Pleasant and contemplative, Close to Vermeer chronicles an exhibit of a master that both civilians and historians know startlingly little about, considering the profound impact he’s had on the craft of painting.–Natalia Keogan
18. All of Us Strangers
In All of Us Strangers, Haigh makes clear that loneliness need not confine itself to physically desolate landscapes. The solitary, melancholy Adam (Andrew Scott) seems reasonably well-off, though he insists to his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) that he’s not a particularly rich or famous type of writer. Still, he can afford a nice apartment in a London high-rise where, still, he feels removed from the world. For the moment, he and Harry appear to be the only tenants in the new building, and Adam’s job does afford him the ability to spend his days at home, alone. He only meets Harry when the younger man knocks on his door in a flirtatious, drunken stupor, assuming (correctly) that Adam is also gay. Adam is working on a screenplay inspired by his childhood years, which has him thinking about one likely reason contributing to his loneliness: His parents both died in a car crash when he was only 12. Seeking to reconnect with his roots, Adam is drawn back to his old neighborhood, a train ride away from London, and is surprised yet somehow not exactly shocked at what he eventually finds: His father (Jamie Bell) and mother (Claire Foy), living in their old house, just as he remembers it. He is aware of the strangeness, and so are his parents; they understand that they have not been with Adam all these years, and that their renewed time with him may be limited, subject to disappear at any moment. The reunited family tries not to focus on this, instead having tea and catching up with Adam’s adult life. Are his parents ghosts? Transposed memories? Hallucinations generated with unusual calm and rationality? Haigh, adapting a 1987 novel just called Strangers, does not commit to one particular explanation – even when it seems like maybe he has. Yet All of Us Strangers doesn’t have the watery, wishy-washy quality of the more precious strains of magical realism. In its way, it is as clear-eyed and upfront as it needs to be. The performances are note perfect, as they must be with such a small cast. For all its open-heartedness, All of Us Strangers doesn’t peddle easy uplift. The movie suggests that loneliness, isolation or ostracization – whether created by circumstance or intolerance – don’t heal like normal physical wounds, and that all the time in the world given over to that process wouldn’t necessarily feel like enough. A lot of movies attempt to replicate the experience of a dream; this one situates itself right on the edge, whether ecstatic or delirious or stricken, of waking up.–Jesse Hassenger
17. Pacifiction
Catalan classicist and arthouse hellion, Albert Serra is a rare breed of auteur that — 20 years into a singular career — has only recently drawn attention from the U.S., whose cinematic head his previous five features have soared over with the jet stream ferocity of a confident, evolutionary artist. But his newest, Pacifiction, offers more mood, visual aesthetic and momentum for the average moviegoer to grab onto. The narrative is as nebulous as ever. In the radiant pastel glow of slow, droning Tahitian island life, a French foreign dignitary wrestles with his dawning insignificance in the phantom political machine he’s always served. But the mystery creates an enveloping tone — one heightened by the immersive experience of dodging beautiful, life-ending waves on a jet ski or discussing flippant nuclear tactics with a military general in the club. The music is languorous, the conversations intriguingly veiled, the gauzy light intoxicating, the pace meditation-inducing, and the source of tension almost always invisible. Writer-director Serra splits his time between Barcelona and Paris like he splits his directorial efforts between strict formal classicism and unnerving new wave subversion. Where the misguided filmmaking renegade wrecks tradition to create something so uncinematic it could be an ad, Serra’s punk outlook lends him a fresh cinematic language imbued with the wisdom of film history and the daring of modern art. He is uncompromising in his several-minute shots, unpopular subjects, interest in sexual perversion and unapologetic approach to new, more challenging, often less likable kinds of films. And Pacifiction is his most breathtaking yet.—Luke Hicks
16. Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Frederick Wiseman is, and has been for more than half a century now, fascinated by how the sausage gets made. Since the 1960s, he’s spent time documenting hospitals, schools, local government, cultural institutions, zoos and parks, submerging himself and us in their often arcane processes. His films are famously lengthy—his recent work has averaged around the three-and-a-half-hour mark, though he has gone as long as six—because of his granular devotion to detail. The lesser movies of his oeuvre can prove to be something of an endurance test; the better films (and that’s a far more populous category) leave you with the feeling of having properly experienced a whole new world. In Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Wiseman shows us how the sausage gets made in an unusually literal sense, along with a whole host of other culinary delights. His latest odyssey takes us to France, and the restaurants of celebrated chef Michel Troisgros, which he runs with his two sons, César and Leo. For most of the four-hour runtime, we are situated in the main establishment, La Colline du Colombier, nestled in the postcard-perfect French countryside. We spend time both in front and back of house, as well as in the immediate surrounds; a particularly charming scene sees a group of young Troisgros workers heading out into the local forest on a foraging trip in their chef’s whites, the sole woman of the group being hoisted on the tallest man’s shoulders so she can reach higher up in the tree for the fruit. It’s an idyllic sequence; one of the most notable features of Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is how surprisingly calm the whole business is. For decades, but especially recently, with productions like The Bear and Boiling Point, audiences have seen high-end kitchens depicted as frantic, hellishly stressful places (if you can’t stand the heat, etc…). Here though, Wiseman shows us a workplace that could—in some scenes, at least—be fairly described as tranquil. As we watch these masters at work, Wiseman invites us to revel in the poetry of their expertise—and it’s mesmerizing. And speaking of poetry, there’s a lovely lyricism to the culinary language we pick up along the way (and of course, it helps that everyone’s speaking French): Quenelle, battuta, bigarade, arlettes, duxelles, zabaione, mignardise, gremolata, faisselle, rau răm. We may not be able to taste the food, but between the sights and the sounds of the kitchen, Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is still a feast for the senses.—Chloe Walker
15. Chile ’76
Decades after his death, Alfred Hitchcock’s name is still instinctively used to describe taut political thrillers like Manuela Martelli’s feature debut, Chile ’76. Set 3 years after Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, the film steeps in unease for 90 minutes; it’s the product of a nation contemporarily inclined toward fractured partisan politics, as if Martelli intends for her audience to face the historical rearview as a reminder of what happens to democracies when they catch a case of hyper-polarization. The first appropriate qualifier for Chile ’76 that anyone should reach for is “urgent.” But rather than “Hitchcockian,” the second qualifier should be “Pakulan.” Chile ’76 shares in common the same pliable atmospheric sensibility as the movies of Alan J. Pakula; Martelli roots her plot in realism one moment, then surrealism the next, oscillating between a sharp-lined authenticity and dreamlike paranoia. Martelli is an optimist, her belief being that when faced with incontrovertible proof of genuine government tyranny, the average citizen will do their part to buck the system even if it might mean getting disappeared by the bully president’s goon squad. The sensation of the film, on the other hand, is suspicion, the relentless and sickening notion that nobody can be trusted. Whether the thrumming electronic soundtrack or Soledad Rodríguez’s photography, composed to the point of feeling suffocating, Chile ’76 drives that anxiety like a knife in the heart.—Andy Crump
14. Other People’s Children
French director Rebecca Zlotowski tackles the subject of a “biological clock” and the social pressures surrounding it with grace and levity, undoubtedly impacted by her own experience as a child-free woman in her 40s. Her film Other People’s Children doesn’t merely focus on a woman weighing her options when it comes to the prospect of motherhood; it also exemplifies the myriad ways that we can foster genuine, compassionate bonds with kids—particularly those acting outside the “parent” label. Fortysomething Rachel (a dazzling Virginie Efira) is a high school teacher in Paris who, by all accounts, is living her best life. She maintains a friendly-enough relationship with her ex-husband (Henri-Noël Tabary), is devoted to her dad (Michel Zlotowski, the filmmaker’s father who’s appeared in a few of her earlier films) and sister Louana (Yamée Couture) and has recently begun to learn to play guitar. It’s during one of her weekly lessons that she finally goes out for a drink with Ali (Roschdy Zem), a fellow student whose presence has encouraged Rebecca’s own perfect attendance. He makes her laugh, they hit it off and eventually become lovers. As their relationship escalates, Ali tells Rachel about his 4-year-old daughter, Leila (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves), who he maintains full custody of. Interestingly, Zlotowski herself became unexpectedly pregnant during the making of this film, a fact that makes the central struggle of Other People’s Children all the more fascinating and poignant. Funny, frank and never adopting a fatalist viewpoint, Other People’s Children entrenches itself in a full spectrum of human (though largely feminine) emotions that concern prospective parenthood. Its thoroughly French sensibility (humorous nudity, gratuitous shots of the Eiffel Tower and several café/bistro scenes) is only bolstered by the Jewish identity of Rachel and her family, yet the relationship between her and proudly Arab Ali never serves as fodder for milquetoast observations of religious difference (lord knows Europeans typically can’t resist these oft-tepid surveys). Coupled with Audrey Diwan’s vital film Happening from last year, French women directors are creating a necessary canon of child-free womanhood, past and present, assured and uncertain.—Natalia Keogan
13. When Evil Lurks
When Evil Lurks starts with a bang. Well, two bangs, to be precise. The film opens with brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon) awoken by a pair of gunshots that pierce through an otherwise quiet night in their sleepy rural town. The two then set off to investigate the noise, only to come across a rotting subhuman bathing in his own fetid fluids and excrement. Directed by Demián Rugna, When Evil Lurks follows Pedro and Jimmy’s desperate attempts to contain the infectious evil at hand. It quickly leaps out from under a boldly original and bone-chilling premise and wastes no time hooking its viewers and setting the scene for a film that is impressively committed to defying horror conventions and being its own beast. Indeed, When Evil Lurks takes place in a uniquely-crafted and novel world where characters are all-too familiar with the disease that has taken root in their village. But When Evil Lurks isn’t just a grim and nightmarish cautionary tale – it’s also insanely fun. The film is filled with a profusion of I-can’t-believe-they-went-there moments, one of which involves the creepiest goat you’ve seen since The Witch, another of which sees a kid getting bitten by a zombie dog, and the rest of which are so delightfully gruesome that you’ll simply have to see them to believe them. These shocking moments shine even brighter when juxtaposed with the understated stylization of the film. Mariano Suárez’s cinematography is refreshingly restrained, and through limited, stagnant camera setups, he positions his characters in a stark and eerily real world. Similarly, When Evil Lurks manages to escape the trap of punctuating every jump scare with a deafening musical cue. Instead, the score simply accompanies the viewer through the film’s emotional beats without being manipulative. When a filmmaker finds a way to talk about fears that have existed for literal centuries, that’s something to celebrate–and that is exactly what Rugna has done.—Aurora Amidon
12. Unicorn Wars
Who knew an animated movie made up of sunshine, rainbows, cuddles, and teddy bear dicks could be as bleak as Unicorn Wars? Maybe that last list item is a warning sign. For a bigger indicator, look at the director: Alberto Vázquez, the mind behind 2015’s Birdboy: The Forgotten Children. Together, these films make a fine double feature of grotesqueries, though compared to Unicorn Wars, Birdboy is an episode of Sesame Street. A story about drug addiction, corrupt authorities, and environmental collapse sounds grim on paper and plays grim on screen, but Unicorn Wars is more than “grim.” It’s deranged. Scorched earth and religious prejudice tie these two movies together. In Unicorn Wars, the former comes well after the latter, a deep-rooted belief in God being one impelling factor of many driving conflict between warring factions: Peaceful, forest-dwelling unicorns, and warmongering teddy bears. This isn’t a metaphor. There are literal teddy bears. The bears are governed by fascist tough-bears who derive their status from perpetuating war. That doesn’t mean the movie is too serious to enjoy its toilet humor. But Unicorn Wars carefully packs big, meaningful themes into a candycoated parcel, using delirium as bubble wrap to keep its contents secure. The fluidity in craftsmanship is as impressive as Vázquez’s talent for Trojan Horsing metaphors about the human condition into a movie about teddy bears knifing unicorns and unicorns goring teddy bears. If that was the whole picture, then Unicorn Wars would still be worth watching as an exercise in bad taste filmmaking and gonzo animation, like an extended episode of Happy Tree Friends constructed with actual skill. Ridiculous as it sounds, though, there’s more to Vázquez’s neon and gore-soaked vision than its grody particulars give away at first glance. Openly raunchy as his film may be, under that surface, it’s downright biblical.—Andy Crump
11. Godland
A brutal battle between brittle doctrine and flexible conviction, Godland sees Hlynur Pálmason transplant a religious conflict of Scorsesian proportions to the majestic vistas of Iceland. Elliott Crosset Hove plays Lucas, a Danish priest traversing the island without any skills (including the language skills needed to speak to his prospective flock), who weathers all the conditions naturally occurring because of his spiritual-colonial hubris, running himself ragged on the long road to apostasy. Hove’s foil, gruff and capable guide Ragnar brilliantly played by Ingvar E. Sigurðsson, embodies the natural equilibrium of an undisturbed society (his physical feats matched beat-for-beat by montages of waterfalls, ice floes, and the changing of the seasons — all stunningly lensed by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff). As the friction mounts between this arrogant doofus (whose frailty and unwieldiness is symbolized by his photography hobby) and the world he’s stumbled into, Pálmason mostly avoids obvious conflict in favor of a lavish, lush, luxurious unraveling. Life moves forward, regardless of how we live it. We can hold fast to the strictness of scripture, or relax for once in our lives, embracing a warmer sense of community. Along the way, we can capture the beauty we see, care for the dogs we find, and show compassion to those around us. We can curse the ice we tread, or respect it. But our end, Godland assures us, is already written.—Jacob Oller
10. Fist of the Condor
A silent, hairless man made of muscle. A mysterious text, filled with ancient ancestral ass-kicking knowledge. An animal-based fighting style. A possible identical twin. A revenge-tinged showdown. These are the throwback components making up the neo-classical Chilean martial arts movie Fist of the Condor. Marko Zaror, who’s come stateside before as a villain squaring off against Keanu Reeves and Scott Adkins, reunites with filmmaker Ernesto Díaz Espinoza for a transcendently simple standalone feature. If you’re not familiar with Zaror (I was not), Fist of the Condor is the perfect introduction to the secret weapon best known by direct-to-video action enthusiasts and Robert Rodriguez completionists. He’s jacked, he’s stoic, he can pull off all sorts of silly stuff with a straight face and, most importantly, he’s a great fighter. If you’re looking for 85 minutes of old-school action and the best pure martial arts movie of the year, look no further. This naturally sets expectations high, possibly for a film with the same charming disdain for reality as Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. But Fist of the Condor, though not without its moments of wry humor and gory excess, is a much quieter experience. Think ‘70s kung fu, with its casual lore, minimal characters and mythic tone. Fist of the Condor isn’t non-stop brawls, but something that could inspire the next Wu-Tang Clan. Incorporating both Zaror’s intended introspections and the magical abilities martial arts movies love to unlock through those limit-pushing actions, the training montages do what they’re meant to do: They train us. We learn to love this disciplined dork, and anticipate him putting his education to use in actual fights. Espinoza (who wrote, directed and edited the film) builds this tension perfectly, then reminds us in the moment, quickly cutting between Zaror’s rapid pummeling of a wooden Wing Chun dummy and him putting those same flying fists to work on some poor biker’s face in a barroom confrontation. It’s amazing to watch the human body move so fast, and more amazing to watch it exactingly execute the same sequence of moves again and again. Zaror is a phenomenal talent, displaying the kind of precision and awareness that lets Espinoza shoot wide and long. There’s not much cheating here. Espinoza can experiment with camera placement without worrying about ruining a particular strike or dodge, simply because his stars are such beef machines. He makes it all simple, which gives the indie film room to breathe. Other action movies from 2023 may have bigger setpieces, crazier stunts, more scenes of Tom Cruise trying to kill himself. But none are as ambitious and successful in their pure dedication to good ol’ fashioned hand-to-hand fighting as Fist of the Condor.—Jacob Oller
9. Rye Lane
Part of the joy of making a romantic comedy is reimagining the stakes of a story, relitigating what is deemed cinematic. Rather than the traditional blockbuster terrain, you are charting the more familiar fallout from relational misunderstanding. Romantic comedies are bound by relatability, and truly great romantic comedies understand this relatability grows from specificity. Where many recent examples of this genre fall short is in dodging this degree of specificity, scared to ground an audience in the monotony of the everyday. Rye Lane leans into this perceived monotony, animating everything with the promise of new love. Rye Lane takes place over the course of a day, following Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) as they wander across South London, concocting new, increasingly ridiculous ways of spending time together. They use local landmarks as a set of interpersonal stepping stones, guiding one another through the physical ruins of their own romantic histories. Everything is captured in sharp, bright colors, reflecting the joy buried in every corner of this city. But the color scheme is only one way director Raine Allen-Miller navigates the playfulness of Dom and Yas’ dynamic. She stages elaborate setups to heighten their budding relationship: A cinema full of multiple Doms, passionately cheering Yas on as she recreates her recent breakup, is both a funny joke and a constructive character beat, showing two people who bond over a shared way of coping. Allen-Miller experiments with the focus and angle of the camera, switching between the extremes of the fish-eye lens and wide shots to capture the blurred and busy texture of the city. Their love story is one dedicated to recontextualizing their surroundings, to overhearing an embarrassing conversation and seeking out the other’s amused gaze, to buying burritos from the stall in Brixton and letting the other one order for you. Each new location is a gateway into understanding the other person, a prompt for a new story. In this way Rye Lane builds a lovingly transportive setting. Thanks to Rye Lane’s specificity and care for its central relationship, Allen-Miller has made one of the best British comedies–certainly one of the best London-based films—of the last decade.—Anna McKibbin
8. Anselm
It’s rare to find 3D present in a quiet documentary about German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. It’s even rarer, though, to find the technology used in a manner that feels intentional and vital to its film’s storytelling, successfully eluding 3D’s propensity to come across as gimmicky or cheap. Both of these rarities are found in the mesmeric gold mine that is Wim Wenders’ Anselm. Anselm combines the filmmaker’s technical mastery with a deep curiosity for his subject to create an experience that is as thought-provoking as it is immersive. Shot in 6K-resolution by cinematographer Franz Lustig, Anselm presents a cinematic experience of Anselm Kiefer’s oeuvre, which probes complex themes of human existence, German nationalism, Nazism, poetry, science, mythology, religion, literature and the cyclical nature of history. Filmed over the course of two years, Anselm traces the artist’s path from his native Germany to his current home in France, connecting the stages of his life to the essential places of his career that spans more than five decades. Within the first few seconds, we are immediately transported into Kiefer’s world. This is achieved through a combination of strategic 3D placement and crisp, high-resolution imaging. The depth created through three-dimensional processing creates an overwhelming sense of realism. The images possess such details that they create the illusion that you are viewing them with the naked eye. It’s the first time I have ever truly felt as if I could reach out and touch the objects on a screen. It’s an incredibly immersive experience—and it’s incredibly beautiful. A standout moment happens just two minutes into the film: We’re outside on a still fall morning. The camera floats from a gorgeous wide shot of one of Kiefer’s wedding dress sculptures across to an hilly landscape. As the camera glides away, the sun begins to peek through from the mountains in the distance. The bright orange light, brought to the foreground through the use of 3D processing, feels so real, you almost expect to feel warmth on your skin. It’s subtle, yet divine. Wenders fills the sonic landscape with readings of poems, like “Todesfuge” by Paul Celan—the inspiration behind Kiefer works such as Margarethe (1981) and Your Golden Hair, Margarethe (1981)—haunting whispers from unknown female speakers, and voiceover by Kiefer. The result of this is something much more truthful than what could be uncovered by listening to any talking head. You’ve been allowed a glimpse of what it’s like to be inside Kiefer’s mind and soul for 93 minutes. The seamless flow of spoken thoughts and ideas, mirrored by the smooth, crane-shot visuals, gives the illusion of floating through memories, space and time. We feel Kiefer’s need to create. The work feels organic and, though incredibly intimate, never invasive. For its historical relevance, its personal connections to both filmmaker and subject, and its immersive nature, Anselm is well worth experiencing—yes, in 3D.—Kathy Michelle Chacón
7. Saint Omer
In the largely white seaside commune of Berck-sur-Mer, nestled in France’s northernmost reaches, literature professor Rama (Kayije Kagame) stands out. This is primarily a matter of her skin color, a rich, flawless pecan in striking contrast to the town’s oatmeal-hued locals. But there’s also the fact of her dimension, her statuesque frame. When she first arrives in Berck, people turn their heads. In the best case scenario, Rama’s steely beauty leaves them stunned. In the worst, they simply see her for her Blackness. Rama’s outsider status is central to her role in Saint Omer, Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop’s latest film and departure from her traditional mode as a documentarian. Like Frederick Wiseman’s A Couple, Saint Omer welds fiction with fact; it’s based on the awful case of Fabienne Kabou, who in 2016 was tried for leaving her 15-month-old child to her death on the beach at high tide. Diop attended the trial, and the experience clearly made an impression on her. Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other. Like Diop, Rama travels to Berck to witness the trial of a woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old; here, that figure is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a student and Senegalese immigrant. And like Diop, Rama intends to fashion Laurence’s transgression into narrative fiction, as a retelling of the tale of Medea. Not that Saint Omer treats Laurence as a monster, of course. Diop peels back layer after layer of humanity in the film, confronting Laurence’s awful deed head-on and clear-eyed all while sparing her judgments made through blinders. There is a version of Saint Omer where the horror of the subject gives way to horror as a genre; Diop has instead gone for a straight ahead interpretation of a nauseating tragedy, where the only thing harder to swallow than infanticide is the realization that there’s very little anyone burdened by Rama’s doubts can do but learn to live with them.–Andy Crump
6. Anatomy of a Fall
Anatomy of a Fall is the tale of a stone-cold female author who steals her husband’s book idea, then mercilessly murders him. It’s also the sorry story of a widow who must defend herself in court after her depressed husband commits suicide by jumping from the attic window of their remote home in the French Alps. The truth remains ambiguous; we may learn the ending of the trial, but we will never know what really happened. The facts of the case: Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is a writer whose books often borrow from her life—the death of her mother, the emotional rift from her father, and the accident that left her 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) partially blind. Her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer, was unable to pick Daniel up from school on time, leading to the accident, and thus blamed himself. One morning, Daniel goes on a walk with his dog Snoop and returns to find his father dead in the snow. Sandra, the only other person present in the house at the time, is the prime suspect, although she claims she was asleep. Although filmmaker Justine Triet leaves the ending ambiguous, it’s fairly easy to parse which of these two films she set out to make. Sandra might be an icy protagonist, but Triet’s view of her is largely sympathetic. If your romantic life were put under the scrutiny of the law, without time for preparation, would you come out as the victim or the perpetrator? While it may be fun to debate whether or not Sandra is guilty, Anatomy of a Fall is most compelling as a picture of a grieving child working his way through his father’s death. Its interrogation of a marriage is a touch too clinical to deliver any real dramatic gut punches, due both to the nature of the procedural genre and Sandra’s chilly personality. But Machado-Graner’s tear-jerking performance as a heartbroken kid searching for impossible answers after discovering his father’s lifeless corpse is another story. Anatomy of a Fall may not reinvent the wheel, but it’s still one of the most sharply made courtroom dramas in recent memory. —Katarina Docalovich
5. The Beasts
Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen draws on two pieces of history for The Beasts’ structure. First, Napoleon’s Spanish campaign in the 1800s, a seed sown centuries ago and yielding fruit in the film’s present. Second, and more importantly, the awful story of Martin Verfondern, German-born, Dutch-naturalized, expatriated in the Galician village of Santoalla, and murdered by his neighbors, Juan Carlos and Julio Rodríguez, in January of 2010. For the spoiler allergic, this constitutes a spoiler, but The Beasts is made with assurance and no small amount of tension, both of which blunt its headline problem: You may know of Verfondern, but you will forget about his fate under the film’s dramatic spell. Such is Sorogoyen’s talent as a writer and director. His carefully assembled and wholeheartedly dedicated cast helps, too. The Beasts swaps Verfondern for Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs) Denis, progressive, learned, well-traveled, happily married and ready to start a new chapter in their lives by working the land in the Galician countryside. Their methods hew toward farming’s crunchier side. Pepiño (José Manuel Fernández y Blanco), the Denis’ warm-hearted and quick-witted neighbor, raises an eyebrow at stretches of land left bare. The welcome party doesn’t comprise the entire village, of course. Brothers Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido) don’t like Antoine. Xan pours all of his contempt into his interactions with Antoine, save for the latter’s attempt at a drinks summit that humanizes them both and glimmers with the chance for amends. The scene takes place an hour and change into The Beasts’ beefy 130-minute duration, and supplies the most suspense out of even the film’s objectively dangerous moments; a nighttime encounter on a backroad—where a rifle-toting Lorenzo and devilishly plastered Xan block Antoine and Olga’s way to their home—strikes terror, but terror is fleeting. Hope given and snatched away cuts considerably deeper. The blunt, clear-eyed perspective Sorogoyen and his longtime comrade-at-writing, Isabel Peña, take on the war waged between Antoine and Xan, between outsider and native, between France and Spain, is apneic. Xan’s mounting animus, and Antoine’s churning indignation, clang against one another even when they aren’t sharing the same physical space, which has a way of sucking the oxygen out of the room even in the film’s quietest moments, or perhaps especially in those moments. The sensation of observing these details fold into one another and unfold as a narrative isn’t that far off from turning the pages of a novel, or even a newspaper; that’s the journalistic effect of Sorogoyen’s filmmaking. The Beasts comes years after Andrew Becker’s Santoalla, a documentary feature about Verfondern’s murder, but for all of Sorogoyen’s edits to the truth, his fiction strikes just as hard. —Andy Crump
4. Godzilla Minus One
Big G returns in utterly triumphant fashion in 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, which immediately feels like the most direct corollary to Gojira that the series has ever produced, while thoughtfully modernizing so many of its elements. Wisely, despite the transition to full-on CGI effects to bring Godzilla to life, the creators still capture his stiff, upright movement as it’s always been, the physical remnant of having been played by a man in a suit. Rarely, however, has the sheer mass of the monster been captured so vividly and terrifyingly as it is here, as we watch whole sections of roadway buckle and leap into the air after each of his thunderous footfalls–not to mention the incredible destructive spectacle of his atomic breath. This Godzilla is genuinely terrifying, a rampaging beast without an ounce of mercy or nobility to him. This likewise results in the odd situation where we actually find ourselves genuinely rooting for the human characters to vanquish and defeat Godzilla for once, a rare state of mind for the Godzilla series that is empowered by Minus One‘s sympathetic protagonist Kōichi Shikishima, a man trying desperately to find either a reason to live or the courage to die following the horrors of the second world war. He’s surrounded by salt-of-the-earth Japanese citizens who band together to overcome a truly impossible-seeming obstacle, with an unexpectedly hopeful depiction of human ingenuity and selflessness. An absolutely outstanding kaiju film in general, and one of the few to ever successfully make the human characters an effective center of the action.–Jim Vorel
3. The Taste of Things
While ASMR is most heavily associated with the pleasures of sound, it would be nothing without the aesthetics. The way a cake spatula smooths a dollop of buttery frosting; the way egg noodles gleam under a coating of soy sauce. It might sound reductive to compare Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng’s lyrical work with a social media fad, but there is now an entire micro-industry dedicated to the way human beings have always lusted after the sensual impressions of food, an idea which is as much in conversation within The Taste of Things as that of the romance between its two leads. If there were no plot at all, The Taste of Things could still very easily coast on the visual and auditory pleasures of its subject: The culinary arts, to which Trần’s camera and microphone dedicate sumptuous displays of rich textures and decadent sizzles of in-process cookery, much of it spearheaded by veteran kitchen cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Taking place in late 19th century France at the estate of the so-called “Napoleon of Culinary Arts” Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), The Taste of Things focuses on its residents. For Dodin and Eugénie, cooking is an erotic, romantic, intimate act. After the first meal of the film is enjoyed by Dodin and some colleagues, they all bemoan Eugénie’s welcome yet absent company at their dinner. Eugénie assures them she is speaking to them through her food. While Eugénie prepares a lavish spread for Dodin and his friends, she momentarily loses herself, seemingly to the understandable exhaustion that comes with dancing and careening through a hot kitchen. DP Jonathan Ricquebourg glides the camera around Eugénie and co., giving the banquet preparation a sense of precise choreography akin to ballet, all the way to the angle at which a wooden spoon slips through a pan of rich, creamy sauce. Throughout the narrative’s drama, the chemistry between Binoche and Magimel is as palpable as the food that their characters prepare together. And while the film remains free of explicit sex or nudity (though, one scene cheekily parallels Binoche’s nude silhouette with the curvature of a poached pear), the insinuations and implications carried by the appearance, sound and intent behind the cooking are far more sensuous. The Taste of Things is abundantly, if maybe overwhelmingly, accessible; it’s not particularly challenging to watch a film that’s quite literally as gratifying as a home-cooked meal.–Brianna Zigler
2. Passages
With Passages, Ira Sachs brings beautiful devastation. The thorny relationships he usually explores push on boundaries of monogamy, of commitment, of what it means to be with someone and stay with them through the complexity of years. The pressure he exerts on these limits—necessarily drawn (but not always happily accepted) with more give for queer people, particularly gay men—the love that ebbs and flows throughout this adversity, and the limits themselves stagger us with their realism. Passages is this close, painful, sexy twisting of the screws at its best, as Sachs and his frequent co-writer Mauricio Zacharias observe the havoc wreaked by a bisexual brat’s latest dalliance. Sachs so deftly avoids the stereotype of the greedy have-it-all bisexual that he comes back around on it, creating a perfectly punchable narcissist (who’s sexy enough to back up the bad behavior) in Tomas (Franz Rogowski). Given to whims and his own ego, Tomas leaves his bookish, quiet husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) behind at his film shoot’s wrap party in order to hook up with a rebounding extra, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Passages brilliantly and brusquely blows through the low-key, embarrassing, engrossing questions permeating non-monogamous queerness, encapsulated by the singularly focused story of a taker running rampant over the other people in his life. We’re allowed the dignity of applying the themes ourselves, Sachs subtly nudging us with the details of his brash three-way blow-up. It’s a dark thrill, real enough to open our own old wounds. A bittersweet reckoning deftly illustrated by a duo on opposite ends of a relationship’s chaotic twists and turns, Passages revels in the fallout of fucking around and finding out.—Jacob Oller
1. The Boy and the Heron
Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live? is a time capsule, preserving the virtues of the society it was made and circulated in. It’s about how to live as a good person in this world, about the childhood experience of discovering difference, disparity, and loss—and, thus, turning to philosophy. The influence of the text is apparent in Miyazaki’s work at Ghibli. While the protagonist of his latest film, Mahito (Soma Santoki), is styled around Miyazaki’s childhood, Miyazaki himself appears as he is today more directly in the figure of Mahito’s granduncle (Shōhei Hino), a man who built a mysterious library on the family estate decades ago before disappearing into his stories forever. The Boy and the Heron, released in Japan with the same name as Yoshino’s novel, becomes a firm reminder of the need to grow up, but one that recognizes the importance of the ephemeral experiences of childhood. Unlike Miyazaki’s semi-biographical 2013 swan song The Wind Rises, the quasi-autobiographical The Boy and the Heron is styled as the fantasy Bildungsroman that he became famous for—with a mature, edgier bent. The opening sequence depicts a 1943 firebombing, rendered with striking animation that entirely breaks with the art style of the rest of the film, veering into the abstract. Mahito’s ill mother dies in the flames. Afterwards, the 12-year-old moves to the countryside as his father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura), an industrialist contributing to the war effort, remarries his late mother’s younger sister, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura). Unlike the bucolic farmland of My Neighbor Totoro that imagines a space closer to nature or the remnants of a nostalgic past in Spirited Away that facilitates its fantastical traversal, the impetus for Mahito’s journey is an act of self-harm. The spirits find Mahito, feverish and delirious, on the family’s rural estate. A particularly nettlesome gray heron (Masaki Suda) harasses the boy, drawing him towards the site of his coming-of-age journey. His guide hereafter is apprehensive, the fantasies tainted with death and decay. From here, the script (trans. Don Brown) is perhaps Miyazaki’s best. Sharing its outline with all these past films, The Boy and the Heron utilizes a different narrative mode: The mythic. This is a fantasy world that deals in archetypes instead of history orientated by the polemics of fascists and philosophers. Everything is handled with delicate ambivalence, all implicit, the intentions left ambiguous. It is an open text begging to be read. Some may get the impression the film says nothing at all, but The Boy and the Heron is ultimately something more enduring than an edification. Synthesizing the virtues Yoshino wrote of a pre-war Japan with the terror of growing up in its collapsing empire, Miyazaki draws the world in its entirety. Through decades of refining his craft and iterating on this familiar story, Miyazaki has honed The Boy and the Heron into a platonic form—the kind held by Mahito’s philosopher-storyteller granduncle, who creates whole worlds with his small stone building blocks. To see The Boy and the Heron is to see Miyazaki. The film is as complicated as the man it is about, and this is what makes The Boy and the Heron a masterwork. I can see him still writing his stories, still drawing his airplanes.–Autumn Wright