2023: a tumultuous, but also exciting year for cinema that saw the bottoms fall out of once unstoppable franchises and the rise of new and old masters. Characterized by surprise blockbusters, stinging excavations of the human condition, and a few bold oddities, this year was a cornucopia of great film. So much so that for the first time ever, I’m expanding the usual top 10 to a top 20.

Michael Mann Ferrari disguises the fissures of masculinity in the typical rhythms of biographical fare, but the sheer amount of texture and feeling hidden between the lines — and within Adam Driver’s craggy, steely performance — is staggering. Intimate, somber failings juxtaposed with screeching banshee metal and spitfire ambition, their non-reconciliation a feature and not a bug: a full-blooded film years in the making. Minor spoilers ahead…

David Fincher’s The Killer — a deceptively layered hitman yarn — closes out this year’s New York Film Festival. With a minimalist veneer that belies its toothy takedown of capitalism, hustle culture, and our deteriorating gig economy, Fincher’s latest mines new tensions from the disciplined loner trope. Many will mistake The Killer’s stripped-down trappings for a minor work, but it’s every bit as incisive and wrinkled as Fight Club or The Social Network.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a late style masterwork. A funereal procession of malignant conspiracy and opportunistic genocide disguised as epic western, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour tragedy finds consistently surprising modes to unearth capitalist sin. Shining a megawatt spotlight on the rot underneath American exceptionalism, Killers of the Flower Moon mines the expected powerhouse performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, but it’s Lily Gladstone that burns holes in your consciousness. Minor spoiler ahead…

A thorny balancing act of different tones that drills straight into sordid psychodrama and the elusive nature of performance, Todd Haynes’ May December is a masterpiece of high wire cinema. As expected, Natalie Portman and Juliane Moore are tremendous, but it’s Charles Melton — as a boy stuck in time and a discomfiting stasis — who runs away with the entire thing. May December will make your head spin. Minor spoilers ahead…

Director Kevin Greutert returns to the franchise that birthed his feature-length career with Saw X, a precise and brutal high watermark that knows exactly what its audience wants. Top-tier Tobin Bell, top-tier Shawnee Smith, top-tier traps: it’s the best Saw in years and perhaps since the original. Minor spoilers ahead…

Welcome to my dispatch from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Like always, I won’t be writing full reviews of everything I see at the festival, but this stacked year has outpaced my pen more than ever: the latest — and perhaps final — Miyazaki, a new Bertrand Bonello, a brutal Indian actioner, and Demián Regna’s nasty followup to 2018’s Terrified are just some of films screening at 2023’s TIFF. Here are the capsule reviews The Boy and the Heron, The Royal Hotel, Knox Goes Away, Kill, and Boy Kills World.

Richard Linklater’s confectionary romcom tears the house down at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. Paradoxically breezy yet unpredictable, Hit Man is a full-blooded rejuvenation of its genre, buoyed by volcanic chemistry and capital “M” movie star performances from Glen Powell and Adria Arjona. A movie about self-actualization and the moral chasms we pave over, it’s sexy, funny, and just a little twisted. Minor spoilers ahead…

My coverage of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival begins with possibly the most horrifying — and masterful — film of 2023. A picturesque idyll conjured by history’s most monstrous as hell seeps around all its corners, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a haymaker display of a filmmaker’s restraint and precision — a masterwork in a career full of them. Minor spoilers ahead…

Greta Gerwig, through the lens of a massive IP tentpole, goes on a non-stop, pointed charm offensive. Strange, earnest, and quite delightful, Barbie takes a playful sledgehammer to gender, coming-of-age, and the very concept of a brand-driven movie. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling put forth superstar performances. Minor spoilers ahead…

Theory vs. practice. Creation vs. destruction. Christopher Nolan’s paradoxically sprawling, intimate Oppenheimer is a stunning deconstruction of the “great man” biopic. Navigating the vast gulf between science and empathy, Nolan’s latest - and perhaps best - delivers a harrowing drama about the moral cost of unleashing upon the world the most horrible weapon it has ever known. Minor spoilers ahead…

With Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise’s crusade for analog supremacy finally becomes text and the results are unbelievable - the last movie star, fighting God and gravity in one of the best action movies ever made. Barreling through sequence after exhilarating sequence of some of the most nerve-jangling stuntwork you’ve ever seen, Ethan Hunt and his IMF team return to face their most dangerous foe yet to reach an immutable truth: there is nothing like walking into, and out of, a Mission: Impossible movie. Minor spoilers ahead…

My favorite horror movie, 2008’s Australian cult sleeper - Lake Mungo - is celebrating its 15th anniversary this week. Within the walls of a mockumentary, dread and sorrow percolate into a devastating crescendo as the Palmer family grapples with the specter of death, and there’s nothing quite like it. A terrifying haunted house yarn that belies its tragic, shattering underbelly, Lake Mungo is a masterwork of grainy apparitions, mounting unease, and quiet restraint. Minor spoilers ahead…

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is astounding. Delivering a multiverse story in service of its characters rather than the other way around, directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson elevate this Spider-sequel with jaw-dropping craft and a keen deconstruction of the wall crawler’s metafiction. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the closest a movie has ever come to the joy of reading a great comic book, splash pages and all.

Almost two decades after Zhang Yimou’s masterwork To Live, Chinese author Yu Hua’s prose returns to Cannes in a different mode through Wei Shujun’s Only The River Flows, the filmmaker’s third consecutive feature to premiere at Cannes since 2020. Eschewing the sweeping canvas of To Live for a mesmerizing, intractable noir, Only The River Flows centers on a mysterious murder in a riverside town, the lackadaisical bureaucracy surrounding the case, and the detective obsessed with solving the killing.

In 2013, filmmaker Anthony Chen’s first feature, Ilo Ilo, won the coveted Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Centered around the inseparable bond between a 10-year-old Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny, Chen’s full-length debut deployed a specific lens — a family weathering the 1997 Asian financial crisis — to tell a universal story exploring the nooks and crannies of our shared humanity. Flash forward to exactly a decade later, Chen makes his triumphant return to Cannes (in the Un Certain Regard section) with The Breaking Ice, a moving, humanist snapshot of China’s lost youths told through a ships-in-the-night friendship.

Colors! Personality! Stakes! James Gunn closes out the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy with the wildly vivid Vol. 3. Crafting an intimate farewell against the fabric of Marvel cosmic, Gunn brings something that rarely finds its way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe: finality. It’s one last hurrah as the Guardians race against the clock to save a grievously injured teammate, touring through James Gunn’s warped imagination in a surprisingly personal goodbye. Like many superhero movies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is overlong and stuffed to the brim with talented-but-shortchanged actors, but it helps that this is the best looking Marvel movie of the last ten years. Minor spoilers ahead…

John Wick has always been the action franchise of the decade, but Chad Stahelski’s Chapter 4 is next level: the type of exhilarating, metal-as-hell ballet of bullets that blows the doors off action filmmaking. There hasn’t been a take-your-breath-away feast for genre fans like this since Mad Max: Fury Road or The Raid. Minor spoilers ahead…