AVClub's The Best Films of 2023

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[By Sam Barsanti, Mary Kate Carr, Murtada Elfadl, Saloni Gajjar, Drew Gillis, Courtney Howard, Jen Lennon, Tim Lowery, and Cindy White]

Was 2023 the year that the movie theater finally made a comeback? Maybe, but it was definitely the year that brought film to the forefront of the cultural conversation again. The Barbenheimer phenomenon is largely to thank for that; it’s been years since we’ve had such a big cinema-going event. It helped, too, that both Barbie and Oppenheimer were uncommonly good, especially for blockbusters. But there were other cinematic successes: A24 continued to dominate the indie space with films like Past Lives and Anatomy Of A Fall, animation came to play with a new entry in the Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse franchise and a surprisingly good Ninja Turtles movie and, of course, Martin Scorsese brought us another mega-sized American epic in Killers Of The Flower Moon. It was a triumphant year for film, and we’ve done our best to sort through everything that was on offer. Here are our picks for the best films of 2023.