I have kept a “to watch” list for a decade now and I finished it in 2023. My goal for next year is to do less list making, which is a big challenge for me with the way my brain works. I watched 56 movies for the first time this year, which includes a few I had seen at a young age but didn’t really remember clearly. Maybe that’s cheating. I make the rules, here.

This year’s list includes a deep dive into the Sight and Sound list from 2022 of the greatest films ever made. Previously I’ve used lists like this as checklists, but I am really going to try to not do that next year. I want to watch what I want to watch. Some of that will be the acclaimed stuff and some won’t. We’ll see how that goes one year from today.

I am surprised at how few of these are new. Only five of these came out this year, but I liked all five of those. I am going to watch everything nominated for an Oscar as I typically do once they’re announced at the end of January, but otherwise I want to let the Criterion homepage guide me a little more than usual this year. I also aim to write more here, but we’ll see if that happens or not.

I hope you loved what you saw this year. Drop suggestions in the comments or just disagree with my takes. All are welcome.

As is tradition, let’s rank the new watches (also available as a list on Letterboxd, if you do such things or want to follow me there):

1	The Long Goodbye This is a crazy choice for my top spot, I know, but I would be lying if I picked anything else. An acclaimed director who has made masterpieces and bombs once said he sometimes makes movies and sometimes makes films. The Long Goodbye is a movie, not a film, and it is one of the best ones ever made. It’s a quintessential 70s film with Elliott Gould doing Elliott Gould stuff as an updated take on Philip Marlowe and it drips with style. This is among my favorite genres and I just cannot believe how hard this one hit me when I saw it. It’s not the accomplishment a lot of movies on this list are, but I truly did not enjoy any experience more than this in 2023.
2	News from Home Director Chantal Akerman is a legend but is more famous for another movie we’ll talk about a lot more later in this list. After seeing her masterpiece, I wanted to watch the other film she’d made that interested me and I think it is a tremendous amount more interesting. The premise of News from Home may not grab you, but resist that. It’s a series of shots of New York City paired with letters the director received from her mother in the early 70s, before she directed a movie a lot of people would contend is the greatest film ever made. The delivery method here is as incredible as the content itself, as you slowly get a picture of how these two relate and never see the other side of the conversation. This would seem pretentious or inessential in other hands, but I really was consumed by it as it ended. This won’t work for everyone, but if you think it might, you owe it to yourself to try this one.
3	A Man Escaped A masterpiece by one of the greatest directors of all time. A story of a jailbreak, but also of the power of pacing and how to show that locked-in feeling alongside the stolen moments it takes to do something methodically and not get caught.
4	Come and See I’d put this one off for more than ten years. It’s been called the most devastating and upsetting movie ever made. It’s been called the ultimate war movie to end all war movies. It is all that and more. I was horrified and upset and mesmerized. Pick a quiet moment and really engage with this one. It’s so violent and so dark but so worthy of your attention and your consideration.
5	The Banshees of Inisherin I don’t know if this will sparkle like this years later. The extreme display is very extreme and could seem silly if you didn’t truly care about the interpersonal conflict at the heart of this one. An obvious sister film with In Bruges given the cast, this is a totally different story with a lot of the same emotions. Male friendship gets a lot of play in discourse these days, both ironically and not, and I think this is a genuine way to talk about it even with a hyper-ridiculous consequence in the middle of it all.
6	Barbie I have very little to add to what has already been said. I couldn’t believe Barbie was what it was when I saw it. It deserves to be where it is on all the lists and it is a truly unique, surreal thing. I’ll be really interested to see what the Oscars do with it.
7	Asteroid City I think too much has been made of the style of Wes Anderson. It’s obviously the immediate takeaway, but that style is in service of something. Asteroid City is his best movie in years and I don’t really trust anyone’s opinion who writes it off as pretty meaninglessness. I saw few things that made me feel the way this made me feel this year.
8	Grand Illusion Jean Renoir is one of the most revered directors of all time, and I really did not get out of his other masterpiece what everyone else gets out of it. I was pleasantly surprised that La grande illusion had the opposite reaction. This is a war film about duty, station, and country, that’s also more complicated than a lot of the sweeping epics we still get nearly a century later. This is a great watch and doesn’t feel as weighty and plodding as some of the more complex class parables of the day.
9	Children of Men I put this off because people said it was heavy, but it’s on too many modern classics lists for me to avoid it. People are right, this is very upsetting and the ending is overwhelming. It’s great, but you know that, don’t you?
10	Black Girl There are terms like “world music” that inherently reinforce the centrality of our own, American experience in the way we view the world. Director Ousmane Sembène was asked if his films were understood in Europe and told the interviewer “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts of Africa.” He said this in French and pointed out that he spoke their language, but they did not speak his. You can watch La noire de… in about an hour. I don’t know that there’s a better hour you could spend, if you truly are interested in broadening your horizons. I don’t pretend to have an awareness of African film, but this is a great place to start.
11	La notte I watched Antonioi’s trilogy for the first time this year and I liked La notte the best. This is the story of one day and night and the journey of all the years that lead people through one short experience that reflects so much more. I encourage any serious film fan to watch all three in order, but I got the most out of the middle one.
12	The Battle of Algiers A truly effective protest film and an impressive accomplishment in both scope and message.
13	Chungking Express After seeing other Wong Kar-wai films, I should not have been surprised at the twist of this one. Still, I was charmed and enthralled. This is a great one and one I’ll revisit.
14	L’avventura The first of the Antonioni trilogy is the most straightforward. A woman goes missing during an adventure. Two of the searchers have to determine what is too far to go to find her and is it okay to move on without her. Even beyond that, what does it mean to have moved on?
15	Eraserhead My slow march through David Lynch’s filmography continues. I was surprised to find that Eraserhead is even more inscrutable than I expected, even given the reputation. I love Twin Peaks a lot and always get something out of the director’s films, but there’s just so much in here that feels designed to not even really evoke an emotion. I loved the experience as a whole but the more I reflect on it the more pieces of it feel just disjointed and inexplicable. But the whole cannot be denied and is worth considering.
16	Daisies Daisies was not even on my radar before this year but I watched it on recommendation from the aforementioned list. It’s an insane, expressionistic journey where two women muck up the world around them and ponder their place in it. The ending here may strike some as heavy-handed, but I loved it and I felt like it drove home the point. Worth your time and quite a visual marvel.
17	Throne of Blood Even if you’ve seen a lot of versions of Macbeth, this one is a fantastic one. What a performance from a master, too.
18	Glass Onion I loved this a lot but I understand why some people didn’t. I was charmed by most of the performances and I really loved the mystery. I don’t really think you can ask for more than that here. I’d watch ten more of these.
19	La strada Deeply sad in the best way. An absolute gut-punch and a knockout set of central performances. An all-timer for a reason.
20	The Passion of Joan of Arc This is a lot of people’s pick for the greatest performance on film ever. Godard even had one of his characters go watch it and be moved by it as a centerpiece to one of his films. It holds up remarkably almost one hundred years later and it really is moving.
21	Cléo from 5 to 7 There are so many movies on the lists of great movies that detail the life of one woman in Paris in the 60s and 70s, but this may be the best of them. The story of one day’s wait for a vital test result is so much more.
22	The Boy and the Heron To be honest, this may be more style than substance. For a director who has given more to animation than almost anyone to ever live, that’s hardly a bad thing. Miyazaki’s latest (and last? maybe?) film is beautiful and shocking and surprising and, honestly, messy. It crams a lot of the story into the last 20 minutes and seems to have left a lot of people cold. There is deep emotion here and a lot to explore about grief, but I don’t think this will end up being one of the master’s best films. It is absolutely stunning to watch and is still a fabulous thing, it just doesn’t have the magic trick a lot of the best Studio Ghibli films do.
23	Contempt I liked a lot about this one from Godard, but I always find myself taking a second to remember which one this is. It’s similar to a lot of the other films about film from the time, but the central interpersonal problem here feels real and Brigitte Bardot is great in it.
24	Wanda There are a few movies that Criterion suggests all the time. This is one of them. I watched it totally cold and I recommend you do that, too. Barbara Loden made this largely as a one-woman army, directing, writing, and staring in it, and her character is so baffling but so relatable at the same time. There are a ton of movies like this, but few that embody this quality of a person forgotten by the world but still forced to engage with it.
25	Ikiru Ikiru is a classic and a top-ten movie on a lot of lists. I enjoyed it and I recommend it. Roger Ebert recommended rewatching it at different eras of your life and I can see the appeal. I have to say that this year was a strong one and I loved most of what I watched, so forgive a few masterpieces being down here in the 20s.
26	La dolce vita Similarly, forgive me, but it’s no insult to list it here. I obviously recommend you watch this if you haven’t, as it does a great job of going back and forth between agreeing with and mocking the protagonist. That’s a great trick that more movies about ennui could stand to steal.
27	A Woman is a Woman There’s a lot to love about this growing argument between Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, two staples of the time that are great in everything, and I think parts of this jump off the screen and demand your attention. It wanders towards an ending that I don’t personally feel pays off the journey, but I did love the journey.
28	To Leslie I’m a huge Marc Maron fan and I think his performance here is great. The legacy of this movie is going to be the weird Oscar campaign, but it’s a really solid story about redemption and a small piece of the way we all take back our lives. I liked it a lot.
29	Hiroshima mon amour It’s too common to call movies “a vibe” but whew, this one is certainly that. Worth experiencing cold.
30	All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) I loved this when I saw it, but with a year to reflect it’s mostly in that first bit and some of the more shocking new scenes, like when an officer tears the names out of old uniforms to hand them to new recruits. We’re left to confront what we already know but is new to these people marching into a war often remembered in scale and scope beyond imagination at the time.
31	Shin Godzilla I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s just a really good watch.
32	Oppenheimer Probably the favorite for the Oscars this year, though time will tell. I think it has the same problem almost every Christopher Nolan movie has: pacing. It’s great, obviously, and the main performance is a standout, but I found it hard to love the back half as much as the front half. I think a lot of reductive criticisms are frustrated with the choice to hold the camera after the bomb itself, but rather than that I was just more frustrated with the drag you feel as the narrative dips and peaks over and over after that. I can’t imagine rewatching this, even though I think it’s a great film.
33	Nightmare Alley (1947) I loved the remake so much I figured I’d watch the original. It’s remarkably close, though I think the remake improves enough to make it a better film. This one’s great, though, and it’s a lot tighter.
34	Women Talking The message is important and the performances are strong, but there’s a real trend in the last few years of more great movies opting for this play-like design and it makes a film feel very structured and storyboarded to me. I appreciated this movie a lot more than I enjoyed the experience of watching it.
35	Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles This was Sight and Sound‘s new number one greatest movie ever made, so I finally blocked the time off and watched it. It is very divisive as a number one choice, but anything would be. It’s more interesting that it is divisive even as a classic. It inspires a lot of one-star reviews from viewers who want to see the greatest movie ever and are not ready to engage with an extremely long, extremely slow look at the daily life of a woman with just one slight difference from the average homemaker. The complaints about lengthy, wordless shots of a woman making meatloaf miss the point. That said, even as a movie designed to make you sit in the reality of those slow moments, it’s unbelievably slow and you need to be ready for what it means to engage with it. There’s a visible boom mic in the middle of an outdoor shot at one point, so standing this up as a perfect, unassailable film is a ridiculous endeavor. It all comes down to if you are moved by the climax (which you should be) and if you have the patience for the journey (which you might not). I think it’s hard to argue that making this the number one is a pretentious choice, but I’m glad I experienced it even if I didn’t always love it.
36	McCabe & Mrs. Miller I liked some elements of this but it was a little bit of a tough hang for me. I need to revisit this.
37	Amarcord Fellini at his most over-the-top. Fantastical and ridiculous on purpose. Parts of this are great, but whew boy, some of it is just too much for me.
38	Top Gun: Maverick I liked it fine. It’s exciting and a little forgettable.
39	Top Gun I hadn’t seen Top Gun since I was a kid and I did not remember it being like this. Parts of this are really wild to watch in 2023, but it really does still hit a few high notes.
40	The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart I loved The Venture Bros the show and the culminating movie does a good job tying up a lot of the story. Would be completely meaningless to anyone who hadn’t seen all of the show, so down a few rungs just because of the esoteric nature of something like this.
41	L’eclisse The third part of the Antonioni trilogy just didn’t work for me. The ending is supposed to be a masterstroke of arthouse cinema and I didn’t like it at all. I watched the last 20 minutes twice. Eventually I’ll revisit all three and maybe it’ll click then, but I think the first two are works of genius and the third one is a flicker at the end.
42	Andrei Rublev This three-hour, multi-chapter epic about faith and dedication really tried my patience. I loved Stalker and Solaris, but I had some trouble getting there with Andrei Tarkovsky’s more personal works (more on that later in the list). Some chapters of this really blew me away, especially the last one, but some parts of it felt difficult to sit through. I recommend it if you’re really interested in a faith journey but it really did feel very long to me at times.
43	Tokyo Story Every year there’s at least one undisputed masterpiece that doesn’t really click for me. I liked this movie a lot, but if I didn’t know the reputation I would never have guessed this is heralded as one of the absolute best movies ever. I wonder if I hadn’t known that if this would be higher or lower on my list? Probably higher, which makes me think I definitely should revisit it.
44	Imitation of Life Every old-timey story about race has some fascination to it for a modern audience and this is absolutely no exception. Some of this is remarkable, some of it is not.
45	Bug Watched as part of a series at my local arthouse theater where they’re showing every movie to ever get an F rating as part of CinemaScore’s audience rating card system. People were shocked and frustrated by the ending when they saw this and they were absolutely, real-deal right. The ending is a mess, though the overall feel and the strange devolution of this one is worth the runtime.
46	The Fabelmans The twinkly, not-at-all-realistic performances here are part of the point in how we remember our own past, but they’re super distracting and weird. Bonus points for David Lynch in a memorable cameo, but I could not get over how absolutely bizarre everyone is in this movie, even if that’s on purpose.
47	Elvis Austin Butler does a great job and Tom Hanks does a bad job. Way too long, but surprisingly better than expected, overall.
48	Gloria More weird than bad, but the child acting in this is, and I mean this, the worst I have ever seen in any movie.
49	TÁR The performance is strong, but the message here feels thudding and overwrought. I didn’t love it, but I have come around a little bit on it since my initial frustration.
50	Triangle of Sadness I love the first thirty minutes of this one and I think the last twenty or so is really strong, but the class consciousness message in the middle is so direct that it at times stops even being a narrative. There’s a lot here that’s funny and interesting but the connective tissue made me groan too often for me to not put this towards the bottom.
51	Avatar: The Way of Water Fine. Probably better than the first one, but also very much like the first one. Way, way too long.
52	Meshes of the Afternoon I don’t know what the right spot for this is. This is an all-time piece of short film but it didn’t have the desired impact on me. I try to watch a few short films every year and I did not really love this one. I know that’s probably on me, but it didn’t move me the way it moves other people.
53	Mirror Views on Mirror vary wildly, with people saying it’s either Tarkovsky’s greatest work or nonsense. I fall in that second camp. I will definitely revisit this because of my love for some of his work, but I found this to be impenetrable. I didn’t even hate it so much as resisted it. It happened, in front of me, and I continuously tried to consume it and was unable. It is easy to see a movie like that and say there is nothing to get (as I feel sometimes about true arthouse stuff like Last Year at Marienbad) but I know that can’t be true here, right? It demands another attempt.
54	The Whale I don’t really have anything to add to the discourse. It’s just overwrought, by a lot, and it just builds and builds until a truly insane, unearned ending that is shockingly weird. There are some interesting elements, but no, no dice.
55	Rudy I saw this as a kid and watched it one night this year when my wife wanted to watch it. It’s really bad. The message is a bad one and the delivery is even more twinkly than I remembered.
56	Blonde An easy choice for the last spot. Blonde is a deep insult to viewers and the reviews reflect that with near-universal disdain. That this earned an Oscar nomination is an indictment of the process and anyone’s appreciation of this film is an undeniable strike against them. Whenever I hate something this much I try to think about why that is, but here there are so many reasons it is difficult to engage with the contrary opinion seriously. It’s fully abusive, edging up to the point of torture porn as a piece of art, and is polemical in a shocking, distracting, unnecessary way. I have not seen many movies in my life as disposable and repugnant as this.