The 22 best films of 2023 — and how to watch them this Christmas (2025)

This was the year of bombshells — Oppenheimer, Barbie — with plans for global domination. They came, they saw, they saved cinemas.

Indiana Jones hung up his hat. Scorsese went west. Napoleon invaded (again). Greta Gerwig became the first sole female director to join the billion-dollar club with Barbie. Other female directors — Celine Song (Past Lives), Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall) — conquered the arthouse.

Hollywood veered between breaking records and fearing for its own health, like a hypochondriacal Olympic athlete. Superhero fatigue set in for real: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, Blue Beetle and The Marvels all struggled at the box office. And as the threat of AI loomed, the actors and writers went on strike. On the plus side, the British rom-com showed signs of life (Rye Lane, Polite Society) and love triangles (Passages) enjoyed something of a comeback.

Here are our picks of the year’s best films that you can enjoy at home.

Barbie

Buy/rent from Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema and other platforms
Greta Gerwig’s attempt to square the hot-pink Barbie myths with the doll’s feminist detractors sometimes feels like a brilliantly executed exercise in bad faith — too knowing by far — but Ryan Gosling is joyous as Barbie’s bit of himbo elbow-decoration, Ken. He’s as good as Grease-era Travolta; his two musical numbers propel the film to flights of genuine comic delirium. Maybe it should have been a musical. Tom Shone

Past Lives

Buy/rent from Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema and others
This semi-autobiographical tale of impossible love from writer-director Celine Song is a Brief Encounter-style heartbreaker about a Korean-born, New York-based playwright called Nora (Greta Lee), her New Yorker husband, Arthur (John Magaro), and Nora’s former childhood soulmate, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who comes crashing back into her life. It’s perfectly shot, perfectly written and perfectly played. Just perfect. Kevin Maher

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Buy/rent from Prime Video, Apple TV+ and others
One of the most adored and best reviewed films of the year (still with a 99 per cent “fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes) is this unassuming coming-of-age drama, adapted from the seminal 1970 coming-of-age novel by Judy Blume. Bras, menstruation and comparative religion are all on the menu in an exquisite tear-jerker that pivots round a knockout turn from Ant-Man’s Abby Ryder Fortson. KM

The Deepest Breath

Netflix
Like Free Solo for grown-ups, this unflinching documentary about world champion free divers is a film that explores not the thrill of survival but the reality, for so many competitors, of inevitable death. The director Laura McGann balances gorgeous subaquatic footage and a plethora of quirky characters with the ever-present shadow of the Grim Reaper. Brilliantly unsettling. KM

Rye Lane

Disney+
Just when we thought the rom-com was dead, along comes this motormouthed delight. Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) make bright, witty, warm sweet talk through a variety of locations, swapping the wisteria-draped gardens of Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill for the curry joints and burger vans of Brixton and Peckham. The funniest thing to come out of sarf London since Del Boy Trotter. TS

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Disney+
The Indy role is really being played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, while Harrison Ford eases his aching bones. But the sense of adventure is still there in the fifth and final Indiana Jones adventure, particularly in the dazzling opening sequence and an equally rousing, if slightly bonkers, finale. As Indy once said, it’s not the years it’s the mileage. TS

Passages

Mubi
Ira Sachs’s wonderfully seductive, sharp love triangle, about a narcissistic film director (Franz Rogowski) who strays from the embrace of his husband (Ben Whishaw) to seduce a young French woman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Because the betrayal is above board — Sachs’s trio are all too young and hip to want to be seen to make a fuss — it cuts all the deeper. Jules et Jim for the age of toxic masculinity. TS

Tár

Sky/Now
Tár burst into early 2023 amid a maelstrom of online hysteria. This fictional biopic of a controversial female conductor called Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) was woke, it was anti-woke, it was not fictional enough (complained the real-life conductor Marin Alsop) and, worse, it was boring. What everyone agreed on, however, was that it was the performance of Blanchett’s career. KM

Babylon

Sky/Now
It flopped at the box office. Movies that run to 189 minutes and showcase elephant excrement and Hollywood orgies will tend to do that. But Damien Chazelle’s gorgeous and wildly adrenalised portrait of Tinseltown’s chaotic pre-history was a worthy successor to his La La Land and is destined for classic status. KM

Maestro

Netflix from Dec 20, and in cinemas
Bradley Cooper, we are not worthy! The former hunky Hangover star produces, directs, co-writes and stars in this astonishing Leonard Bernstein biopic. He delivers the most committed performance as the self-tortured, sometimes self-loathing Bernstein. Plus Cooper spent six years preparing for a single scene, where he conducts Mahler’s Second Symphony at Ely Cathedral. We bow down. KM

Oppenheimer

Buy/rent from Prime Video, Apple TV+ and others
Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus about the father of the nuclear bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, detonates the conventions of the biopic. Chain-smoking, gaunt, speaking in a self-hypnotising baritone burr, Cillian Murphy delivers a charcoal-etches portrait of guilt. A Mephistophelean Robert Downey Jr gives the best performance of his career. TS

The true impact of Christopher Nolan’s science movie on Hollywood economics will not be understood for some years. But for now it’s enough to know that a three-hour movie about theoretical physics, political hearings and committees was enthusiastically embraced by global audiences and made nearly a billion dollars at the box office. And it didn’t feature a single superhero. KM

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Now, from Dec 22
The artists at Sony take their hyperactive, glitchy, hip-hop-infused style for another spin in this sequel, which doesn’t so much follow on from the events of the previous film as remix them. Now we have four Spider-Men, including one based in Mumbai and a London punk, but the star of the show is Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) breaking it to her parents that she’s a webslinger too. TS

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Netflix
The director Wes Anderson’s quartet of Roald Dahl shorts — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Poison, The Swan and The Rat Catcher — are about as perfect an encapsulation of Dahl’s dark wit as you could wish for, studded with gemlike performances from Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes. Watch them back to back or one at a time. TS

Reality

Buy/rent from Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema and others
The writer-director Tina Satter tells the true story of the whistleblower Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) entirely through transcripts of her interview by the FBI at Winner’s home in the suburbs of Augusta, Georgia. No backstory, no character arcs. Just the entire US security apparatus bearing down on a young woman in yellow Converse trainers. The result is riveting — like Harold Pinter for the Trump era. TS

Killers of the Flower Moon

Buy/rent from Sky Store
Martin Scorsese’s engrossing three-and-a-half-hour film about the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma. Leonardo DiCaprio inveigles his way into the heart of a local Indian girl (Lily Gladstone) on behalf of his wicked uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) to fleece her family of their oil money. Their warped, topsy-turvy marriage could be a symbol of the rape of the west, but the achievement of the film is that you believe they’re also in love. TS

The Killer

Netflix
Michael Fassbender plays a cool assassin who goes about his job like an unblinking automaton — until events spiral into chaos. David Fincher makes hay with his worst fears and the result is one of those droll, bullet-fast pieces of film-making, like John Boorman’s Point Blank or Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, that hijacks your nervous system for two hours, then ejects you on to the street. It’s a hard, nasty, diamond-drilled delight. TS

The Great Escaper

Buy/rent from Prime Video, Apple TV+ and others
The screen legends Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson (in her final film role) show the kids how it’s done in a real-life tale about war guilt and the quiet compensations of lifelong companionship. He plays Bernard Jordan, who famously fled his care home in 2014 to attend the 70th anniversary D-Day commemorations. She plays his wife. An exemplary pairing. KM

Sisu

Buy/rent from Prime Video, Apple TV+ and others
Jalmari Helander’s indecently entertaining film about a Finnish prospector (Jorma Tommila) laying waste to Nazis in the waning days of the Second World War is a pulpy, maximalist take on a Tarantino film. Bones snap, bodies fly apart, blood gouts leap — but the storytelling is as tight as a whip. Caked in mud and blood, Tommila seems, by the end of it, as close to myth as Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. TS

Flora and Son

Apple TV+
In John Carney’s five-star heartwarmer, Eve Hewson acts her socks off as the working-class Dublin mum trying to find a hobby for her son (Orén Kinlan), who ends up learning the guitar herself from a Californian instructor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Hewson is hilarious, touching, profane, entirely free from false notes, blather or blah, all the way from first frame to last. Just a knockout. TS

Cairo Conspiracy

Buy/rent from Prime Video, BFI Player and others
A fisherman’s son (Tawfeek Barhom) is granted a place at a prestigious university in Cairo but, once there, finds himself used as a pawn by a government security agent (Fares Fares) to help to select the new Grand Imam. Directed by Tarik Saleh, this is a first-rate conspiracy thriller that builds beautifully and offers a tantalising glimpse of a rarely seen world. All the President’s Men set to the mournful call of the muezzin. TS

How to Have Sex

Mubi from Dec 29
Chasing Rye Lane’s Raine Allen-Miller for the debut British director of the year award is Molly Manning Walker, a former cinematographer who delivered this incendiary drama about teenagers gone wild in the Med. Booze-fuelled and clubbed-up euphoria gradually slides into something much darker, as Manning Walker targets issues of consent, abuse and adolescent misogyny. A tough tale, deftly told. KM

And the best of the year still in cinemas...

Anatomy of a Fall

Available for streaming in February
The clichés of the courtroom thriller were given a prestige makeover by the French director Justine Triet, who was rightfully awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or for her work. The core ingredients, about a wife charged with a husband’s murder, are familiar. But the case, as it unfolds, is relentlessly gripping. KM

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What’s your film of the year? Let us know in the comments below