With the end of the year bringing ambitious new works from octogenarian masters Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and Ridley Scott—plus strong new entries from mid-career auteurs Yorgos Lanthimos, Jonathan Glazer, Wes Anderson, and Alexander Payne—2023, in some ways, felt like a throwback to an era to which many (male, middle-aged) cinephiles have longed to return. But Barbie and Oppenheimer, the films whose mutually beneficial fake rivalry defined the year, were both real movies from real filmmakers with real points of view, and the commercial success of both felt like Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan getting away with something. That, plus the fact that audiences finally rejected a pair of truly forgettable Marvel movies (honestly, the much-reviled The Flash was better than either of them), was another sign that the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel might be something other than an oncoming train.

And speaking of oncoming trains…

10. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part One 

Barbenheimer’s great success came at the expense of the supposedly penultimate entry in the best, most analog action franchise going. Given the chaotic process by which writer-director Christopher McQuarrie says he and stuntman/producer/star Tom Cruise make these movies, they should be train wrecks. Instead, this one gave us the most thrilling train wreck ever captured on digital celluloid. Move over, Buster Keaton! 

9. Beau Is Afraid 

Ari Aster’s inscrutable odyssey about a troubled man’s quest to leave his apartment and visit his mother was the better of the year’s two Joaquin Phoenix-starring epics by a mile. It was lovely to see Parker Posey again, but yikes.

8. Poor Things 

Remember when Tim Burton made films you actually wanted to see? Lanthimos’ reunion with his The Favourite collaborator Emma Stone was weird and kinky and hilarious and unsettling in the way Burton’s films once were—in a previous century.

7. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 

With the Marvel Studios live-action superhero operation in freefall, Sony Animation has picked up the slack. Despite boasting a new trio of directors, this follow-up to 2018’s Oscar-winning Into the Spider-Verse was even more daring, emotionally resonant, and visually rich than the first. Paying homage to the innumerable prior iterations of Spider-Man via a melange of varied palettes and animation techniques, it made me ask yet again why so many contemporary animated films are so ugly…

6. The Boy and the Heron 

…Hayao Miyazaki’s late-career masterpiece excepted, of course.

5. Past Lives 

Playwright Celine Song’s filmmaking debut was a devastating reflection on roads not taken.

4. Asteroid City  

Let me see if I can do this from memory, about a film I saw three times: Anderson’s lockdown-inspired latest depicts a 1950s TV broadcast of a filmed stage production of a play about a one-horse New Mexico town that gets locked down by the U.S. Army following a Close Encounter? Whatever, this movie was bliss. It was great to see Jeffrey Wright, the standout player from The French Dispatch, solidify his standing among the Wes Anderson Players, a group that Tom Hanks slid into like a comfy old sweater. And seeing Jason Schwartzman—who also appeared as the year’s best supervillain in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse—play a middle-aged widower a quarter century after embodying Max Fischer in Anderson’s seminal Rushmore only made the reflections on mortality land harder.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

Sure, we could’ve used even more of the magnificent Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart, one of the survivors of a murderous conspiracy against newly super-rich Osage people during the 1920s. But Scorsese deserves the credit he got for hitting pause on the version of his adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction book that he was about to shoot when a group of Osage leaders contacted him to offer their insight into the project. Rebooting the movie away from the procedural version that would’ve starred Leonardo DiCaprio as straight-arrow lawman Tom White, and choosing instead to make Burkhart the focus and DiCaprio her shit-heel husband Ernest, required Scorsese to go find his $200 million budget elsewhere. The result was a more complex and empathetic film.

2. The Zone of Interest 

Glazer’s follow-up to 2013’s Under the Skin reinvented the Holocaust film by keeping all the horror off-screen, puncturing any scar tissue you might’ve built up from previous treatments of the subject.

1. Oppenheimer 

A fascinating hybrid of suspense thriller, character study, and memory play, Nolan’s three-hour, CGI-free gabfest was his own Grand Budapest Hotel—meaning, the one even his most committed detractors had to acknowledge as significant. That this movie grossed $950 million worldwide suggests that maybe we can have nice things, at least sometimes.