From Maestro to John Wick 4, 2023 was a bumper year for cinema — but these were the best of the bunch, writes Robbie Collin

Hollywood might have been on strike for much
of 2023, but around the mayhem, rancour and litany of unforced PR errors we had a blistering year for cinema — and popular cinema especially, which showed thrilling flickerings of renewal after a decade-plus of franchise-based stasis.

No, I know that pink film isn’t on here — which should give you some idea of how hard it was to whittle 12 months of releases down to the 20 magnificent specimens below. At least it made things slightly easier that some of the year’s very best festival films — The Holdovers, The Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Priscilla, Robot Dreams — have yet to be released; they’re all arriving in early 2024, and have thus been filed away for next December’s list.

20. Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

From the makers of 2018′s hilarious Game Night (and boy, could you tell) came this uproarious fantasy caper, which wore its Hasbro branding lightly and took its quest to entertain and amuse with steely commitment. Hugh Grant’s Boris-esque town mayor was just one among many perfectly judged comic turns.

19. Maestro

Bradley Cooper follows — and in some places tops — his thunderous reworking of A Star is Born with a beautifully mounted and acted shattered-glass biopic of the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Its fragments combine into a shimmering whole that defies almost every prestige-movie rule in the book.

18. Blue Jean

In a great year for British debuts, here was one of the best: a deeply felt, tremblingly gorgeous 1980s-set drama in which a young teacher reckons with her sexuality in the looming shadow of Section 28.

17. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

The long-awaited return of Aardman’s plucky plasticine brood packed off Ginger, Rocky and friends on a classic infiltration caper, with old adversaries deploying devious new Bond-villain tactics (and decor).

16. Past Lives

Celine Song’s mesmerisingly assured debut feature took a simple love triangle and drew it out over nations and decades, so that the mere act of stretching your heart around it made it ache.

15. Saltburn

Forgive the armchair Freud, but at a time when film discourse has never felt more shrilly superego-driven, Emerald Fennell struck back with a psychosexual country house thriller — think noughties Brideshead goes to hell — fuelled by pure sex-and-status-crazed id.

14. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

To watch this second instalment in the eye-boggling comic-book trilogy was to witness feature animation catapulting itself into the future with a satisfying thwip. A medium-detonating feat, and the year’s best superhero film — not that anything else came remotely close.

13. One Fine Morning

A fading parent, a blossoming affair: life comes at Lea Seydoux from all directions in Mia Hansen-Love’s tender, bright and generous drama, which finds warmth and worth in the mess of everyday life.

12. Theater Camp

I could barely breathe from laughing after this slide-off-your-seat mockumentary in the Spinal Tap tradition, set over one chaotic summer at a kids’ performing arts club. Only a comedy with deep affection for its subject could be so utterly merciless.

11. Wonka

The joyous Rain on the Roof sequence in Paddington 2 suggested Paul King had a great studio musical in him: six years later, here it is. Sweeter and sillier than Dahl, it falls in the British kitchen-sink surrealist lineage of the Boosh and the Goons, with songs so wittily infectious they secure its future classic status on listen one.

10. The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg turned the camera on himself in this richly textured and revealing cine-memoir, which used the modern-day American master’s own lightly fictionalised coming-of-age experiences to lay bare the fears and desires that run through his art.

9. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1

Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie also reached back to cinema’s silent-era essentials to drive their spy series to new heights of amazement. The motorcycle cliff jump got the lion’s share of the kudos, but every set-piece here was dazzlingly conceived and fanatically tuned.

8. Anatomy of a Fall

Built on a masterful performance from Sandra Huller, Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning procedural put a Difficult Woman on trial to needle away at our hard-wired perceptions of innocence and guilt.

7. John Wick: Chapter 4

Who in their wildest dreams would have imagined nine years ago that Keanu Reeves’ revenge thriller series would peak with a three-way mash-up of Buster Keaton, Nicolas Winding Refn and a 1990s SNK beat ‘em up? In an age of creeping incorporeality, here was a ribcage-rattling object lesson in how this stuff should be done.

6. Babylon

Damien Chazelle’s outrageous epic of early Hollywood hellraising was the cinematic equivalent of having a grand piano dropped on your head (in a good way).

5. Rye Lane

Raine Allen-Miller’s endlessly funny and charming debut revived the British rom-com for a new generation of lovers and dreamers.

4. The Boy and the Heron

Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki bowed out — probably — with a breath-stoppingly beautiful coming-of-age fable in which a young teen scarred by war navigates a strange and melancholic otherworld.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese’s brooding, barbed western-noir hybrid was a suitably momentous stage for the first DiCaprio-De Niro team-up on the watch of perhaps the greatest living director we have.

2. Tár

After a 17-year absence, Todd Field returned with this unclassifiable riot of a film, in which a star conductor (a never-better Cate Blanchett) watches her life and career grippingly implode.

1. Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s breath-stopping dawn-of-the-atomic-age thriller isn’t just the year’s best film. It’s a roadmap to a better Hollywood, where blockbusters fire up the brains and souls as well as the adrenal glands of mass audiences worldwide.