Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a successful writer married to Samuel (Samuel Theis), a failed writer. Packed with highly accomplished debuts from younger directors, and full of brilliant ideas, the best movies of 2023 were compelled by art’s old chestnut: humans struggling to understand their place in the world. This year’s best releases were full of so much ambition and emotional intelligence it’s hard to argue that the value of human input in filmmaking is heading toward obsolescence. Even as Hollywood fretted over the possibility of artificial intelligence upending filmmaking and giving writing and acting gigs to bots, it’s impossible to watch the movies on this list and not feel such a possibility is faintly ridiculous. Still, amidst all the noise, 2023 provided a wealth of quietly beautiful films. Even now, with the strikes over, the industry is scratching its head at what happened and what’s to come. The double-whammy of Barbie and Oppenheimer gave the box office a long-overdue, post-Covid-19 jolt, only to be followed by a pair of months-long strikes in Hollywood that shut down production on nearly all the films in the works for 2024 and beyond. Put bluntly, picking the best movies of 2023 was tough.
