If you add the first title on this list to the last one, you get the biggest moviegoing event of the year. It feels fitting to bookend 2023’s ranking with Barbenheimer, a moment of sheer, unadulterated enthusiasm for movies that drove box office numbers through the roof, because when I think back on the year in film, I still feel giddy.

It was a terrific year at the movies. Heavyweights such as Ari Aster, Greta Gerwig, Christopher Nolan, and Martin Scorsese delivered career-defining works, while newcomers Chloe Domont, Molly Manning Walker, and Celine Song surprised us with films we couldn’t stop talking about. Coming up with 10 movies I was eager to endorse was easy. And I haven’t even seen Poor Things yet.

But 2023 wasn’t all rainbows and bright-yellow rollerblades. In May, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, with screenwriters demanding higher wages and job security to keep up with the nebulous streaming landscape. In July, SAG-AFTRA followed suit. The strikes kept Hollywood quiet for several months, pushing projects such as Dune: Part Two into next year. Much more importantly, they underscored the industry’s dire need for change. 

Then a few trying months later, it got some. The WGA reached what they called an “exceptional” deal in September, while SAG-AFTRA approved a new contract with bonuses and protections in November. Hollywood is still recovering from the pause in work, and it’s still an imperfect industry for working writers and actors. But it’s a step in the right direction.

Here are the 10 best movies I saw in 2023. Dune: Part Two, I’ll catch you next year.

10. Barbie

We gave it a viral marketing campaign free of charge, we went to movie theaters in droves to watch it, we debated about whether it was a groundbreaking work of feminism (it’s not) or merely a two-hour advertisement for a toy company (Mattel made it so, yeah). Gerwig’s Barbie became so central to the zeitgeist this year that it’s easy to lose sight of how deeply bizarre the whole thing is. Of course, Barbie is a brand extension exercise, but it’s an audacious, hilarious, and artistically crafted one, raising the bar considerably for big-budget intellectual property ventures to come.

9. Chronicles of a Wandering Saint

What makes a good life? That’s the question at the center of Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, a small, special film by newcomer Tomás Gómez Bustillo that played this year’s Latin American Film Festival. Rita (Mónica Villa) is an elderly custodian obsessed with becoming the most pious resident of her rural Argentine town. With a needle drop you’ll want to write home about, Chronicles takes a magical realist turn that forces Rita to realize that getting what you prayed for isn’t all it’s made out to be.

8. Beau Is Afraid

Ostensibly Aster’s departure from horror, Beau Is Afraid might be the director’s scariest film yet. A sprawling, uncanny, three-hour fever dream, the movie is an odyssey through the psyche of Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged Jewish guy with a pocket full of mommy and daddy issues. Beau Is Afraid takes a lot of big swings and comes up with more than a few misses, but it also hits a few home runs, offering brilliant, farcical depictions of a mind tortured by anxiety.

7. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Judy Blume had declined numerous offers to option her beloved book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret over the years, knowing that her 1970 novel, which follows an insightful 11-year-old through her puberty growing pains, had become a sacred text to girls everywhere. She finally handed the rights over to Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), and the resulting adaptation is a tender window into girlhood and family that slightly expands the scope of its source text without sacrificing any of its wisdom.

6. Killers of the Flower Moon

Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have once again teamed up to make a movie about greedy, evil men, but this is no Wolf of Wall Street. Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of the systematic murdering of Osage Nation members in 1920s Oklahoma, carried out by White men who were after Osage oil money. DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are superbly monstrous, while Lily Gladstone is remarkably enigmatic as Mollie Kyle. Well over three hours long, Killers doesn’t exactly go down easy, but rises to the brutal occasion at hand, resulting in one of the greatest cinematic feats of the year.

5. May December

At the center of May December is the terrible tabloid affair between Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), whose relationship began when Joe was in the seventh grade and Gracie was 24 years his senior. Usually, most of us wouldn’t spend more than one People magazine article with such a story, but director Todd Haynes brings us intimately close to the controversial couple through the eyes of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who is shadowing the lispy Gracie for an upcoming movie. May December is a disturbing portrait of abuse, and a campy parody of performance.

4. Anatomy of a Fall

When Samuel falls to his death from the balcony of his Alpine chalet, all eyes are on his wife, a successful, unapologetic writer named Sandra (an excellent Sandra Hüller). Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall begins as a gripping courtroom drama about whether Sandra murdered her husband then transforms into a forensic analysis of a marriage between two flawed people, raising rich questions about gender, partnership, and love.

3. BlackBerry

Brands had quite the spring at the movies. March saw the release of Flamin’ Hot and Tetris, two films depicting the inception of their title products. Air, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s ode to the minds behind Nike’s Air Jordan shoe, arrived in April. By the time Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry rolled around in May, the world seemed ready to move on from the corporate origin story, and with good reason. But it’s a shame that BlackBerry emerged in the shadow of those movies, because it couldn’t be further from the Airs and Flamin’ Hots of the world. Instead of worshiping at the altar of its title brand, BlackBerry scrutinizes the people and the system that created it, making it more akin to David Fincher’s The Social Network. Jay Baruchel is wonderful as BlackBerry creator Mike Lazaridis, but it’s Glenn Howerton who steals the show as co-CEO Jim Balsillie, giving a hysterical, hot-tempered performance that could slot right into an episode of Succession.

2. Past Lives

Movies do a lot of things. They entertain, they educate, they make audiences laugh and cry and jump out of their upholstered reclining seats. And on special occasions, they linger, imparting an image, feeling, or idea that leaves their viewer a bit different than they were before. Past Lives is a special occasion. Celine Song’s stirring debut feature revolves around a few key moments in the lives of a New York-based writer (Greta Lee), the childhood sweetheart she left in Korea (Teo Yoo), and her loving present-day husband (John Magaro). The film’s beating heart is the Korean concept of in-yun, which suggests that people gravitate to each other because they overlapped in a previous lifetime. Though small in scope, Past Lives is emotionally enormous, unearthing a bittersweet truth about the lives we lead with the people we love—and lives, and people, we never get to.

1. Oppenheimer

The morning of Barbenheimer, a holiday I had anticipated like it was Christmas, a series of logistical misfortunes fit for a sitcom caused my friend and me to arrive late to the theater. By the time we tiptoed our way into our seats for Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project was already underway. Despite our 27-minute fumble, Oppenheimer delivered one of the most exhilarating and harrowing movie theater experiences I’ve ever had, painting a larger-than-life portrait of power—both nuclear and political—petulance, and penitence. 

Days later, I returned to the theater to see it in its entirety, and that riveting first watch shriveled in comparison. Though I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, accidentally watching Oppenheimer like it was Nolan’s 2000 time-bending thriller Memento made the director’s gift for storytelling plain as day. Nolan’s career-long interest in timeline manipulation has been the subject of praise and the punchline of jokes; here, it’s the making of a masterpiece, elevating what in lesser hands could have been a conventional historical drama into an urgent, unforgettable work. With great artistry and relentless precision, Oppenheimer tells the story of the man who created the nuclear bomb, and was haunted by the fallout for the rest of his life. Pay attention, and you’ll be haunted too.