10: Red Island (Dir: Robin Campillo)

If you’re looking for pure visual splendour, I don’t think any other film I saw in 2023 could match the ridiculously beautiful nature and costuming of Red Island, every frame bursting with gorgeous, rich colour, transporting you to the heat and tranquility of ’70s Madagascar through a French child’s eyes. Undeniably a slow burn, Campillo uses the time to create a fully inhabited tale of growing up, disappointments, love, and colonialism, all culminating in a gentle but stirring triumph.

9: May December (Dir; Todd Haynes)

Riotously entertaining without ever losing its pitch-dark evil streak, May December takes an unsparing look at scandal and how sadistically and voyeuristically we consume it, whilst also managing to get plenty of swipes in at the absurdity of acting itself. Portman and Moore are obviously brilliant, especially as their performances get more disturbingly intertwined as the story goes on, but it’s Charles Melton who really steals the spotlight here, graduating from trashy teen TV fare like Riverdale and easily going toe to toe with two of Hollywood’s finest actors.

8: The Holdovers (Dir; Alexander Payne)

A new classic Christmas tradition in the making, The Holdovers sticks faithfully to the tried-and-true festive dramedy recipe, Alexander Payne knowing that there’s no reason to subvert such a winning formula. Instead, he just makes the formula as good as it can possibly be, with tons of heart and laughs and a cosy ’70s vibe that gives The Holdovers an instantly timeless feeling. Led by three wonderful performances, all of which I’d be happy to see take home Oscar gold, it not only brings out career highlight work for Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, but introduces us to the best newcomer actor of the year in Dominic Sessa.

7: John Wick 4 (Dir; Chad Stahelski)

How do you take a super-solid action franchise and elevate it to entirely new heights for its fourth instalment? The magnificent John Wick 4 had many answers to this difficult question, but perhaps the simplest and most effective was; ‘put Donnie Yen in it’. As blind assassin Caine, Yen brought entirely new avenues of combat, comedy, and emotional depth to the Wick series, a perfect complement to Keanu Reeves’s never-more-stoic performance. Hopping between continents and packed to bursting with ideas so brilliant that a lesser film would have been happy just coming up with one of them, it’s hard to imagine the Hollywood mainstream equalling this action achievement for a long time to come.

6: Pearl (Dir; Ti West)

As a prequel to a slasher film that I hadn’t actually seen in the first place, my expectations for Pearl weren’t sky-high, but Ti West’s horror/comedy/tragedy absolutely blew me away, thanks in part to its fantastic technicolour sets and costumes but mostly due to a simply astonishing performance from Mia Goth in the title role. Arguably Hollywood’s greatest current Scream Queen, Goth hits a whole new level here, delivering shattering, terrifying monologues that take the breath right out of you. West and Goth will complete their erotic-slasher trilogy next year with the ’80s-set MaXXXine, and I cannot wait to see how they attempt to top this one.

5: Killers of the Flower Moon (Dir; Martin Scorsese)

What more can really be said about Killers of the Flower Moon? It’s another late-period masterwork from Scorsese, its place on this list all but guaranteed before it even premiered at Cannes back in May. A haunting and furious historical epic that uses its mammoth runtime to immerse you in a meticulously designed world that takes the whodunit instincts of its source book and turns it into a slow-burn horror movie in which an exciting mystery is replaced by the terror of the inevitable. At 80 years old, Scorsese still has a hell of a lot to say about morality, America, and himself, these three obsessions clashing in one of the boldest and most self-critical endings in his entire filmography, a truly unforgettable coda.

4: All Of Us Strangers (Dir; Andrew Haigh)

A beautifully unabashed weepie, All Of Us Strangers immediately entered the Andrew Haigh pantheon as his finest film to date. A tale of wish-fulfilment and fears both everyday and existential, it takes a ghost story and turns it into a much more affecting ode to all kinds of love – romantic or familial, conditional or unconditional – in one of the most effective uses of magical realism that I’ve ever seen on the big screen. A quartet of really lovely performances ground the fantasy and, even though you know it’s all building up to the inevitable ‘now it’s time to make you cry’ scene, that moment is still entirely irresistible and uncynical when it does arrive – my screening at the London Film Festival was a mess of tears and sniffles.

3: The Iron Claw (Dir; Sean Durkin)

The third-to-last film I saw in 2023 also just so happened to be the third best I saw all year, and kicks off a top 3 that is largely defined by all the films’ ability to conjure, in the words of Super Hans, ‘a powerful sense of dread’. That dread is everywhere in The Iron Claw as tragedy after tragedy befalls its central family, but what Durkin does that makes this his true masterpiece is temper that stomach-lurching doom with a truly empathetic and loving look at the bonds between brothers, all of whom are brilliantly acted, but none more so than a career-defining performance from Zac Efron. It’s in this balance that The Iron Claw becomes possibly the most earnestly emotive and affecting film of 2023, one with the sincere confidence to, amidst its miseries, show you a cinematic version of heaven that will stick with me forever.

2: The Beast (Dir; Bertrand Bonello)

Without a doubt the film I’ve spent the most time just *dwelling* on in 2023, Bonello’s The Beast is a masterpiece in the way in which it can balance its fearsome intellectualism with much more visceral pleasures. Horrifying, thrilling, romantic, and erotic, it delights in provocation, asking questions about fear, human extinction, and, most urgently, the eternal danger that men pose to women. Constantly eerie and unnerving in a manner both cinematic and literary, there are many, many layers to unpick here, but Bonello and his sublime lead duo of Lea Seydoux and George Mackay stop it from ever becoming a dry or academic exercise. This is a film to really pore over, confrontationally artsy and mysterious and fuelled by weapons-grade ambition on the part of its creator.

1: Oppenheimer (Dir; Christopher Nolan)

Speaking of weapons grade ambition… Oppenheimer is not just my film of the year because it’s brilliant, though it most certainly is that, but because, more so than the two billion-dollar grossing movies this year, it represents a true spark of hope for mainstream movies going forward. A 3 hour, 15-rated World War 2 biopic with a huge ensemble cast that gets most of its dramatic mileage simply out of scenes of people talking managed to rake in $900 million pretty much on the name of its director alone. It’s a triumph that no-one could have really dreamed of, let alone seriously predicted, before July of this year, Nolan genuinely changing the game. Of course, there’s still plenty of opportunities for studios to learn entirely the wrong lessons here but if a film this good can also make this much damn money, then there’s no reason to not hold on to at least a little faith that Nolan can help usher in a new golden age.