2022 was a memorable year for film, Tom Cruise flew back on to our screens as Maverick and Colin Farrell partnered with a donkey — while Emma Thompson went in the buff. We got two water worlds, several love letters to cinema, Baz Luhrmann’s ode to the King, award-winning comebacks and the beginnings of a recovery from the pandemic as audiences braved cinemas again.
But what about this year’s releases? Well, it promises to be even bigger. There’s the return of Indiana Jones, a masterly autobiographical drama from Steven Spielberg, and director Greta Gerwig’s take on Barbie. Plus Cocaine Bear, The Little Mermaid, Christopher Nolan’s epic Oppenheimer and so much more.
Our critics pick the best films of 2023 so far for this list, which we’ll be adding to regularly. Has your favourite been missed? Let us know in the comments below.
The Flash
Andy Muschietti, 12A, 144min
The great thing about The Flash is that his superpowers are actually interesting. And the makers of The Flash have really thought through what it means to go superfast and the result is a superhero movie that doesn’t feel like another kick in the portals.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, PG, 140min
The loveable teenage Spidey Miles Morales returns in the sequel to the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. This time his friend Gwen Stacy — the excellent Spider-Gwen — is a big player too. There are fewer jokes and a solemn devotion to Spider-Man lore here but that won’t bother serious fans, who will have a great time.
Reality
Tina Satter, 12A, 82min
The Euphoria star Sidney Sweeney is a real-life revelation in this audacious and gripping docudrama about a US whistle-blower. The film’s mixture of threat, absurdism and staccato ambience is like vintage Pinter.
Sisu
Jalmari Helander, 15, 88min
The Nazis can’t kill the Clint Eastwood-style hero in this tight, ingenious film about one man’s great escape. It is violent in the pulpy, maximalist manner of a Tarantino film — bones snap, bodies fly apart, blood leaps across the screen — but there is nothing messy about the storytelling, which is as tight as a Sergio Leone flick.
Under the Fig Trees
Erige Sehiri, 12A, 92min
Set in a fig orchard on a sunny day, this Tunisian drama simply hangs out with some of the fruit pickers, chiefly a few young women (played with conviction by non-professional actresses). Despite the drudgery and a boss who turns out to be a serious creep, the work has its upsides: the women can chat among themselves and spend time with men they know. As a warm-hearted movie, it’s beguiling.
Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
Amanda Kim, 12A, 107min
This documentary on Nam June Paik is a thorough portrait of the man known as the father of video art. The film records a significant life, and thankfully Kim doesn’t bring needless Paik-style avant-gardism to her own storytelling. The film’s lucid account has visual energy without gimmicks.
Still
Davis Guggenheim, 15, 95min
It’s impossible not to be moved by Still, the inside story of Michael J Fox’s heroic fight against Parkinson’s disease. In both arenas, he seems battle-hardened — weary and wise in a way that slick kid actor from the Eighties never was.
The Blue Caftan
Maryam Touzani, 12A, 122min
Love pervades this Moroccan drama, the story of a closeted gay tailor, Halim (Saleh Bakri), who treasures his wife, Mina (Lubna Azabal), but can’t help falling for his new male apprentice (Ayoub Missioui). The movie finds sensuousness in tailoring.
Pamfir
Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, 15, 100min
Its picture of Ukraine as rife with petty corruption may not be something the country’s ambassadors want at the moment, but at least this film (made before Putin launched his invasion last year) is a good advertisement for its homeland’s artistic energies. It delivers a tough crime drama in fine style.
Harka
Lotfy Nathan, 15, 87min
A memorable finale crowns this drama’s flair. As the story of a penniless man (Adam Bessa) trying to provide for his relatives, this film isn’t cheerful, and some of the plot’s elements are standard issue. The setting is Tunisia, but much of what goes into social-realist dramas is the same all over the world. Still, Nathan keeps the film intense. You can practically smell the black-market petrol the hero sells.
Polite Society
Nida Manzoor, 12A, 104min
This movie, filmed in the posher parts of Shepherds Bush, suggests that what Jane Austen adaptations really need is more kick-boxing. It was inspired of Manzoor to realise that the Pakistani arranged marriage market offers as close as you will get to the formal codes and customs of Austen’s world. It was even smarter to use that world as a springboard into the hyper-kinetic face-offs of The Matrix.
Little Richard: I Am Everything
Lisa Cortés, 15, 101min
Richard’s contribution to pop culture has often been undervalued (even in modern times, when you might think the media would love the idea of a gay, black artist being one of rock music’s originators). I Am Everything has a wide array of clips and is an affecting account of Richard’s personal struggles — the tempests that caused him to veer between hedonism and Christian anti-gay piety.
Love According to Dalva
Emmanuelle Nicot, 15, 88min
This film has a powerful subject and simply follows through on it with no big surprises. To succeed, the film needs to be highly realistic. Samson’s riveting performance helps it to meet that standard.
My Everest
Carl Woods, 12A, 86min
Max Stainton-Parfitt is a young British man with cerebral palsy who in 2018 trekked on horseback to Everest’s base camp. This documentary about this journey is basic in style and mainly gives us a conventional tale of someone setting himself a challenge. Yet its occasional Himalayan vistas are a bonus, and there’s a piquant, unusual ending.
Evil Dead Rise
Lee Cronin, 18, 97min
The latest revival of the horror series about invisible demons keeps things in the family. A woman (Alyssa Sutherland) becomes a possessed berserker and attacks her children in their home. This adds a nice touch of subversiveness, and the core of this film is pretty good too. As the kids’ aunt (Lily Sullivan) tries to rescue them, we’re treated to absurd, gruesome action in the series’ best tradition.
Pray for Our Sinners
Sinéad O’Shea, Dogwoof on Demand, no cert, 81min
In a general spirit of “never forget”, the documentary-maker has gathered a few accounts of the cruelty inflicted by Ireland’s theocratic authorities within living memory. The themes may not be revelatory, but the interviews are very compelling.
One Fine Morning
Mia Hansen-Love, 15, 113min
Unlike the femmes fatales and grand passionistas of yore, Seydoux specialises in what you might call soft power — mixing millennial diffidence with transparent shows of emotion. There’s not much to Hansen-Love’s film, dramatically: Seydoux has her affair while looking after her father, and that is pretty much it. The entirety of the film hangs on Seydoux’s reactions.
Cairo Conspiracy
Tarik Saleh, 12A, 121min
This director has been banned from Egypt since making the unflattering thriller The Nile Hilton Incident. His latest film was therefore shot in Turkey, but it’s set in the city of its title and tells another story of shady dealings. A well-intentioned student (Tawfeek Barhom) is coerced into spying on clerics at Al-Azhar University as part of a covert government scheme to fix the selection of a new grand imam of Al-Azhar, a powerful role. Thrillers about anxious informants aren’t new, but this film’s particular clash of religion and politics adds strong details to its slow-burning tale.
Lola
Andrew Legge, 15, 79min
The future arrives early in this British sci-fi movie. In 1938 two sisters (Stefanie Martini and Emma Appleton) create a machine that receives radio and television broadcasts from future decades. The women soon become fans of Bob Dylan and David Bowie, and then change the course of the Second World War by foreseeing Hitler’s plans. But their meddling with the timestream is bound to cause trouble eventually. This film has a strong sense of style and its wealth of ideas give us lots to enjoy.
The Beasts
Rodrigo Sorogoyen, 15, 137min
This Spanish movie might tell you something about your film-watching instincts. It’s the story of a French couple (Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs) who have moved to a small farm in Galicia and angered their hard-up neighbours by voting against a wind turbine deal that would bring money to the area. Perhaps their decision is selfish, but that’s no excuse for the way they are persecuted by brutish locals. At this point, you might want Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s film to become a violent revenge thriller. The hulking Ménochet would be a good man for that job, but the plot turns out to be more surprising.
Rye Lane
Raine Allen Miller, PG, 82min
Just when we thought the rom-com was dead, here comes a cracker. Zippily directed by the first-time director Raine Allen Miller from a motor-mouthed script by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, Rye Lane is an out-and-out delight: the best British rom-com since Bridget Jones’s Diary. The film swaps out the wisteria-draped gardens and pastel-painted terraces of Richard Curtis’s west London for the curry joints and burger vans of Brixton and Peckham.
Winners
Hassan Nazer, PG, 85min
An Academy Award goes missing in rural Iran in this comic drama. It’s found by a nine-year-old boy (Parsa Maghami), and his meandering story becomes an ode to cinema. The film will be best appreciated by those who recognise its tributes to particular Iranian movies. But there is plenty for all viewers to enjoy in its quiet humour and restrained pathos.
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
Pawo Choyning Dorji, PG, 109min
Few settings are more remote than Lunana, a tiny village in northern Bhutan. The young schoolteacher (Sherab Dorji) sent there in this drama would surely be within his rights to feel bored to death. That he instead falls in love with the place might seem a pretty corny development. Yet Lunana does have charms, including beautiful mountainous scenery, and the film uses them to create a loveable tale.
Charcoal
Carolina Markowicz, 15, 107min
The stranger who comes to stay with a hard-up couple in this Brazilian film is no ordinary lodger. The pair (Maeve Jinkings and Romulo Braga) have knowingly agreed to shelter a drug lord who needs to lie low. For much of the time, this film isn’t an outright crime story. It finds rich drama in the shaky state of the couple’s marriage and the bad influence their guest has on their young son. Yet there is always the underlying potential for things to turn seriously nasty.
Joyland
Saim Sadiq, 15, 126min
The naive married man (Ali Junejo) who falls in love with a trans woman (Alina Khan) in this Pakistani drama is not the film’s most interesting character, so the script’s focus on his identity crisis is unfortunate. But this movie certainly doesn’t ignore the man’s wife (Rasti Farooq) or Khan’s tough, salty character, a nightclub performer. They are part of its intelligent, compassionate story of people struggling against repressive social codes. That theme’s relevance in Pakistan was underlined last year when the government briefly banned the film, but most of the characters’ problems are universally recognisable.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Dean Fleischer-Camp, PG, 90min
Marcel is an inch-high walking, talking shell with one eye and a sweet nature. First seen in short internet films, he now stars in this feature-length blend of animation and live-action (with Jenny Slate voicing Marcel). Rather than explain its hero’s origins, it simply shows his day-to-day life: Marcel is lonely, but gets by with the help of optimistic thinking and low-tech ingenuity. The film sometimes comes close to excessive cutesiness, but quiet wit and visual brilliance more than save it.
Women Talking
Sarah Polley, 15, 104min
You’re hard pushed to say whether Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley or Rooney Mara gives the best performance in the exceptional Women Talking, about the women of an isolated Mennonite colony deliberating their response to the abuse they have suffered at the hands of their menfolk. Adapted from a 2018 novel by Miriam Toews by the director Sarah Polley, the film boasts one of the best scripts of the year: raw, terse, tense with moral muscle and sinew
Blue Jean
Georgia Oakley, 15, 97min
A great performance by a relative newcomer, Rosy McEwen, anchors this British drama about a lesbian ground down by homophobia in the 1980s. Jean is a PE teacher at a school in the northeast, and her fear of being outed wells up when a pupil (Lucy Halliday) discovers her secret. One or two scenes don’t work smoothly, but in general its writer-director, captures Jean’s state of mind, and McEwen’s air of fragility is riveting.
Nothing Lasts Forever
Jason Kohn, 12A, 87min
Challenging the idea that diamonds are for ever, this documentary wonders how the trade in expensive sparklers will be affected by the rise of synthetic diamonds that are pretty much indistinguishable from the ones mined from the ground. The film has a colourful array of talking heads, including several who attack the cultural propaganda that gave gemstones value in the first place.
Myanmar Diaries
70min
The crimes of the junta that has ruled Myanmar since February 2021 have been eclipsed by the war in Ukraine. This collection of short artistic films and first-hand footage of life under tyranny will probably not do much to change that. Assembled by a collective of film-makers working anonymously, it’s a fragmentary work with no narration or captions to give context. In their different ways, however, its poetic meditations and its footage of terrible events are hard to forget.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Laura Poitras, 18, 122min
This superb art documentary on the photographer-artist Nan Goldin is both a survey of her career and a look at her recent activism. She has been a leader in the protests against art galleries accepting money from the Sackler family, pharmaceutical tycoons linked to the opioid addiction crisis. The film makes fluent use of Goldin’s images to illuminate her life story.
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg, 12A, 151min
On the surface this film looks like another of those “The Year I Discovered Movies” stories every director now seems intent on making, but it’s humbler than that, also deeper and more resonant. It is a gem — twinkling with innocence but inset with the hard rock of experience. The director was right to wait to make this film with the hindsight and wisdom of his 76 years — the boy who never grew up now a wrinkly old soul. All his films are in here somewhere.
Tár
Todd Field, 15, 158min
As Lydia Tár, the disgraced composer and conductor at the centre of Todd Field’s monumental art film Tár, Cate Blanchett delivers an immaculately controlled performance. Lydia, it becomes clear, is a monster, one of those “art monsters” whose legacy we have had to grapple with over the past few years — Roman Polanski, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein — and whose sexual peccadillos threaten to destroy our enjoyment of their work. The twist — and it’s a good one — is that the monster here is a woman.
Piggy
Carlota Pereda, 18, 99min
In this Spanish horror thriller a bullied teenager, Sara (Laura Galán), suddenly gains a protector. Admittedly he’s a psycho (Richard Holmes) who takes it upon himself to kidnap Sara’s tormentors, but at least she has someone on her side for once. Although she could help the police to find him, she keeps quiet. In this way s film uses outright pulp horror to emphasise the everyday horrors of teenage cruelty. The Grand Guignol stuff is perfunctory, but the surrounding drama is full of life.
Alcarràs
Carla Simón, 15, 120min
This drama about a Spanish family of peach farmers is a work of patient cultivation. Its story, in which the family (played by non-professional actors) is threatened with eviction, is gently paced and sticks to low-key, ordinary events. But Simón (whose previous film was the well-received Summer 1993) carefully nurtures the characters, letting us get to know them and their relationships. This bears fruit in a movie that becomes steadily more engrossing. We gain a strong sense of what will be lost if the family is uprooted.