Of all the feature filmmaking debuts this year, the most triumphant is Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure,” about an African American writer’s attempt to game the racist parameters of the White liberal publishing world, while simultaneously dealing with some gnarly family issues. Jeffrey Wright finally gets the starring role he’s so long deserved in a movie that somehow manages to be a sharply pointed satire while also being incredibly warm and appealing. This is the kind of movie that succeeds gloriously in checking all the boxes, even as it makes fun of checking all the boxes — and that’s a fact.
Where to watch: Dec. 15 in theaters
That’s the best of the best. Here are more of our favorite movies of 2023 — films that got 3 stars or more from The Post’s critics.
Four people (Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Paula Beer and Enno Trebs) gather at a vacation cottage on the Baltic Seas in a film Ann Hornaday calls a “quietly atmospheric study of artistic isolation and ego.”
Joanna Scanlan gives a BAFTA-winning performance as a woman who discovers that her recently deceased husband had a second wife and family. Thomas Floyd praises Scanlan’s “steely performance as a widow pulling at the threads of her late husband’s carefully woven double life.”
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Ann Hornaday says the rhythms and gestures of writer-director Raven Jackson’s feature debut — an impressionistic portrait of a girl coming of age in rural Mississippi — suggest “looking to the likes of Terrence Malick, William Faulkner and Maya Angelou for their elliptical meanings.”
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
In Kelly Fremon Craig’s film adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved 1970 coming-of-age novel, Kristen Page-Kirby says, “The film’s laughs come from empathy, not derision.”
Noémie Merlant and Kit Harington play new parents in the assured in a film that Ann Hornaday says “morphs from a social critique of how American society fails women along the entire spectrum of reproduction to a nuanced — and often uncomfortably candid — portrait of a new mother navigating profound anxiety, alienation, self-doubt and barely containable rage.”
The journey of a family fleeing North Korea to Thailand provides the spine of this engrossing documentary. Mark Jenkins calls the film “sort of a found-footage horror flick, except that both the footage and the horror are real.”
Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson star as Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, best friends who invented the once-ubiquitous BlackBerry smartphone in a comedy Ann Hornaday calls a “funny, insightful corporate biopic.”
Bobi Wine: The People’s President
This documentary follows the titular Ugandan singer turned presidential candidate in his losing 2021 campaign. Mark Jenkins says the “mix of intimate portrait and raw street warfare proves visceral, dynamic and sometimes upsetting.”
Writer-director Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature chronicles the misadventures of two unpopular high school lesbians (Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri). Olivia McCormack calls the film “an eccentric little satire: simultaneously relevant and irreverent.”
Set during Augusto Pinochet’s violently repressive regime, the story follows a homemaker (Aline Küppenheim) whose sense of political disengagement is upended when she agrees to nurse a wounded young man (Nicolás Sepúlveda), in hiding from the authorities. Ann Hornaday says the film “isn’t interested in shock value as much as how the personal and political mesh together, with increasingly tense results.”
Actor Michael B. Jordan makes a strong directorial debut, reprising his role as boxer Adonis “Donny” Creed in this third installment of the “Rocky” spinoff series. Ann Hornaday says that Jonathan Majors plays Donny’s nemesis “with a fascinating combination of menace and sensitivity.”
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy
Documentarian Nancy Buirski’s kaleidoscopic film examines the cultural legacy of the Oscar-winning 1969 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. It’s an analysis of the “generational shift from tough-guy actors like John Wayne to vulnerable performers such as Hoffman and Voight,” Mark Jenkins says the film presents “Midnight Cowboy” as “both an indicator and an instigator of social change.”
The Disappearance of Shere Hite
The documentary presents a portrait of the sex researcher and author of “The Hite Report.” Ann Hornaday says the film is “fascinating on myriad levels, most obviously in the way it illuminates how Hite transformed herself from a lonely little girl in a repressed household to a dashingly romantic figure on New York’s Upper West Side, where her Pre-Raphaelite beauty allowed her to model while she pursued her academic studies.”
Nicolas Cage plays a nondescript Everyman who starts turning up in other people’s dreams in a film Ann Hornaday calls a “smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy.”
The feature debut of writer-director Savanah Leaf focuses on a mother in crisis (Tia Nomore) who is crushed under the weight of her responsibilities. Omari Daniels says the film presents “an unflinching and quiet view of the complications of motherhood.”
Emma Mackey plays the title character, author Emily Brontë, in what Ann Hornaday calls a “provocative revisionist biography.”
Ann Hornaday calls Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi’s film an “alternately tender and tough documentary portrait” of a couple grappling with the slow disintegration of Alzheimer’s disease.
Michael O’Sullivan calls Sally Dramé, the young star of this French film about a strange young girl with a heightened sense of smell that not only allows her to replicate any aroma, but perform a kind of time travel, a “remarkably self-possessed newcomer.”
This Irish dramedy follows the relationship between a single mother in Dublin (Eve Hewson), her unmanageable teenage son (Orén Kinlan) and a guitar teacher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whom the mother meets online. Ann Hornaday says, “As a profane, slightly blowzy modern-day Holly Golightly, Hewson develops a seductively credible chemistry with Gordon-Levitt.”
Lucas Trevor says that this Japanese reboot of the venerable monster movie showed us “there’s still an audience for movies that combine concise and creative action with emotionally resonant characters.”
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
Michael O’Sullivan says this tale of a wounded soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal) who returns to Afghanistan to bring the interpreter who saved his life (Dar Salim) back to the United States may be manipulative — skillfully, entertainingly and at times almost overbearingly so. “But oh, boy, does it work.”
Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting
This documentary explores a subject that has been much in the news: high school, college and professional sports teams called the Indians, Redskins, Braves, Chiefs and the like, and the movement to remove the offensive portrayals of Native Americans. Mark Jenkins says that the “lively if somewhat lumpy” film packs lots of information and even more emotion.
Thomas Floyd says that Sean Mullin’s documentary portrait of Yogi Berra, the baseball player known for his malapropisms, “zips through Berra’s life without ever feeling rushed. When it comes to Mullin’s well-paced depiction of a misunderstood legend, Berra’s words put it best: ‘You can observe a lot by watching.’”
A common trope of horror — the demonic entity — becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience in this tale of an Indian American teen (Megan Suri) whose classmate (Mohana Krishnan) begins carrying around an ominous-looking Mason jar. Lucas Trevor calls the film a “great addition to an unfolding new canon” of elevated horror.
Keanu Reeves returns to the title role of a supremely lethal fugitive assassin in this fourth installment of the vibrantly violent action franchise. Michael O’Sullivan says that, at nearly three hours long, “there is more time to lavish on the films’ fans exactly what they want, in spectacular fashion.”
Ali Junejo plays a shy and quiet man who falls for an exuberant trans woman (Alina Khan) in what Mark Jenkins calls a well-acted, novelistic drama about “the “repression of human individuality by a regimented traditional society.”
Four Asian American friends (Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu) set out on an international adventure in a raunchy comedy that Olivia McCormack calls “a heartwarming film about identity and friendship wrapped in a package of penis jokes.”
Killers of the Flower Moon
Ann Hornaday says that Martin Scorsese’s thriller based on David Grann’s nonfiction book about the murders of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma “dramatizes a grievous truth — about the depravity, destruction and self-deception that undergird the American idea — that has been buried for too long, especially in movies.”
D. Smith’s debut documentary about Black trans sex workers follows four subjects in Atlanta and New York. Ann Hornaday says the film “bursts not just with the indomitable energy of the smart, mesmerizingly beautiful women Smith has cast, but with the contradictions of their lives.”
Dawn Porter’s mesmerizing documentary portrait of former first lady Lady Bird Johnson is based on Johnson’s own recorded audio journal. Ann Hornaday says one of the most delightful surprises in the film is “Lady Bird’s keen power of observation.”
Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la star in a dystopian thriller about the possible end of the world. Michael O’Sullivan says it’s “the human dynamic that is the most chilling and, in the end, almost hopeful.”
This satisfying comedy-drama centers on Palestinian guests who become stranded at a wedding in an Arab village deep within Israel’s borders. Mark Jenkins says the film is “grounded in geographic and emotional reality.”
Penélope Cruz plays an unhappily married mother of three children — the eldest of whom (Luana Giuliani) is undergoing a gender transition — in this drama based on writer-director Emanuele Crialese’s own experiences coming of age as a trans teenager in 1970s Rome. Ann Hornaday calls it “a small but all-encompassing portrait of how life feels in a certain time and place — when the broken pieces of one’s true self are invisibly coming together, even when getting them to fit feels too overwhelming to contemplate.”
Ann Hornaday says that Halle Bailey, the star of this live-action remake of Disney’s beloved 1989 animated classic, delivers “a lovely performance that’s all the more accomplished for being delivered amid crashing waves, sweeping vistas and the crushing expectations of generations of fans.”
Sally Hawkins stars in the true story of Philippa Langley, an English amateur historian who in 2012 discovered the lost gravesite of King Richard III. Ann Hornaday calls Hawkins’s performance “alternately elfin and flinty.”
Bradley Cooper directs and stars in this biopic about conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan). Ann Hornadays says, “It isn’t a Great Man tale — if anything, it’s an ode to a Great Woman. Instead, it’s something deeper, messier and more unresolved. It’s a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center.”
Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros
Tim Carman says Frederick Wiseman’s quietly observant documentary about a family of acclaimed French restaurateurs shows us “the inner workings of a very particular, very rarefied food chain, one in which human consumption and profit are not the sole motivations.”
Mark Jenkins calls this documentary about John Chau, who was murdered after traveling to a remote island off the coast of India to spread the Gospel to the island’s people, a tale of “extreme Christianity.”
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One
Ann Hornaday says that this action sequel may be formulaic, but “It’s fast, it’s furious and it’s a lot of fun.”
Michael Fassbender plays a washed-up soccer coach assigned to rehabilitate the American Samoan national soccer team after a humiliating loss in this silly-sweet underdog sports comedy, based on a true story. Michael O’Sullivan says the film “isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — ‘Be happy’ and ‘There’s more to life than soccer’ — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it.”
In this biopic about open-water swimmer Diana Nyad, Ann Hornaday says star Annette Bening delivers a “salty, vanity-free performance.”
Other People’s Children
Virginie Efira plays a woman who develops a deep connection with her lover’s adorable 4-year-old daughter (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves) in what Ann Hornaday calls a “quintessentially French” drama.
Palm Trees and Power Lines
Ann Hornaday calls this story of sexual grooming a “film of disarming candor and power.”
In Ira Sachs’s story of a lovers’ triangle, star Franz Rogowski brings what Ann Hornaday calls a “feral, provocative energy to a character who can be irresistible even when he’s at his most irritatingly demanding and mercurial.”
A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings
Filmmaker Aviva Kempner tells the story of how her mother and uncle — both Polish-born Jews — survived the Holocaust, in a documentary that Mark Jenkins calls “frequently compelling.”
Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
For those who missed the opportunity to see Beyoncé in concert, Sofia Andrade says that this behind-the-scenes documentary about the singer’s Renaissance tour, “directed and written by the queen herself, is a strong Plan B. (Or should we say Plan Bey?)”
Romanian New Wave auteur Cristian Mungiu’s drama follows Matthias (Marin Grigore), a man who returns to his small village after walking off his slaughterhouse job in Germany, only to find the townspeople roiled by the presence of foreign workers. Ann Hornaday writes: “So much fear and misplaced anger are at play in Matthias’s increasingly hysterical behavior that ‘R.M.N.’ might as well be an X-ray of contemporary America.”
Mark Jenkins calls this French drama about the subculture of ATV riders in the suburbs of Paris “kinetic, intimate and immersive.”
Lola Campbell plays a motherless 12-year-old girl who reunites with her father (Harris Dickinson) after a long absence in this British drama, which Ann Hornaday says gives viewers “uplift without moralizing.”
Justice Smith, Briana Middleton, Sebastian Stan, Julianne Moore and John Lithgow star in this twisty if formulaic tale of con men and women. Michael O’Sullivan calls the film’s cast the “ace up its sleeve.”
Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a ceramic artist stressed out by the impending opening of her solo exhibition, and Hong Chau is her blithely oblivious neighbor, fellow artist and landlord in a film by slow-cinema virtuosa Kelly Reichardt that Michael O’Sullivan says traffics in a “strange and strangely visual poetry.”
Ray Romano’s directorial debut, the tale of a boisterous Italian American family whose love language is shouting, delivers what Michael O’Sullivan calls “something honest, something recognizable, something real.”
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
This animated sequel reunites teenage webslinger Miles Morales (voice of Shameik Moore) with Gwen Stacy, a.k.a. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) — is a lot of movie, says Ann Hornaday, “You’ll want to stay in this world forever.”
Eliza Scanlen plays a 17-year-old girl living in a fundamentalist Christian community who shares a mutual attraction with her pastor’s 28-year-old son (Lewis Pullman). Ann Hornaday writes, “As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, ‘The Starling Girl’ plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s ‘Women Talking.’”
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
Davis Guggenheim’s documentary portrait of the star of the “Back to the Future” trilogy is told via a mix of interviews, scripted reenactments and archival footage. Michael O’Sullivan says Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1990, “still has an immensely likable and funny on-camera persona, and now he is using that gift — along with a different one, this nakedly honest film memoir — to share hope, joy and perhaps a sense of acceptance with others.”
This Gen-Z horror film centers on a group of adolescents who try their hand at the supernatural by summoning spirits through what is said to be the embalmed hand of a medium. Olivia McCormack writes, “It’s the ingenious combination of horror and human connection that makes ‘Talk to Me,’ well, something to talk about.”
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
To fully appreciate “The Eras Tour,” a simultaneously intimate and spectacular documentary of Swift’s record-breaking, earth-quaking, career-spanning victory lap of the past year, Ann Hornaday says it’s best “to simply surrender to the whole thing: the sparkly cowboy hats, the boots, the friendship bracelets and the screaming. (There will be a lot of screaming.)”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Kristen Page-Kirby says the animated film talking-turtle superheroes is “not just as visually innovative and just as funny, but it has a similar mission: to examine and celebrate the complexity of an experience — in this case, what it’s like to be a 15-year-old boy — through the lens of a pop culture phenomenon. To a lesser extent, it’s also about what it’s like to parent one.”
This wryly knowing mockumentary centers on the lovably kooky adult counselors and child campers at a struggling summer drama program in the Adirondacks. Michael O’Sullivan says the film’s eccentric world of show tunes and show people is “big enough (and funny enough) for everyone.”
Ann Hornaday calls first-time feature filmmaker A.V. Rockwell’s gritty urban drama about a mother struggling to raise her son in 1990s Harlem a “triumphant debut.”
This Canadian documentary follows a child-rape case in India, a country where — according to a broadcast reporter glimpsed in the film — a woman is raped every 20 minutes. What’s extraordinary about the film is the victim’s and her father’s determination, Mark Jenkins writes, “and the possible changes for good that may result from it.”
We Are Fugazi From Washington, D.C.
This immersive concert film celebrating the beloved D.C. post-punk band Fugazi was curated from footage shot by the group’s fans and aspiring filmmakers. Michael O’Sullivan says the movie captures not only Fugazi’s “chugging, muscular music,” but also “the democratic spirit epitomized by the band, known for its low ticket prices and all-ages-welcome policy.”
Part rom-com, part father-of-the-bride farce, this comedy from writer-director Kenya Barris and producer/co-writer/star Jonah Hill follows the romance and wedding plans of Hill’s Ezra, a hip-hop-loving Jewish podcast host, and Lauren London’s Amira, a Black stylist in L.A. Michael O’Sullivan calls the film a “master class on wedge issues and our shared humanity, delivered by comedians who know that laughter can be at once a bitter pill and the best medicine.”
