The best movies of 2023 so far

This year at the movies, we’ve had surprise box-office hits, strong genre fare, early awards contenders, and everything else in between. It’s been a fantastic year for cinema.

We launched our list of the best movies of 2023 in February, but we will continue to update it as the year goes along, adding our favorite movies as we catch up with them. At the end of the year, this will then turn into our definitive list, with our staff voting on the best movies of 2023.

For now, consider this a sampling platter — a rolling list that encapsulates the many different kinds of good movies that have been released this year, and the different tastes in movies we have on our staff. There’s plenty in here for any kind of movie-watcher to enjoy.

Because this list is not ranked (yet), we’ll be listing the entries in reverse chronological order. That means the most recent release will be listed first, and then the next most recent, all the way down to the earliest release of the year that we liked. That also means new additions will be surfaced earlier in the list. Because we’re thinking of you, dear reader.

Without further ado, here are the best movies of 2023 so far, and where to watch them. Our latest update added The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. Enjoy!

40 PHOTOS

1. WHEN EVIL LURKS

• Genre: Horror
• Run time: 1h 39m
• Director: Demián Rugna
• Cast: Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón, Luis Ziembrowski
• Where to watch: Shudder

With When Evil Lurks, Terrified writer-director Demián Rugna doesn’t just break the rules of possession movies, he writes his own. Everyone in the film’s rural Spanish farming community and the nearby modern town already knows the seven rules about dealing with possessing demons. But those rules are difficult and inconvenient to follow, and it’s so much easier to just deny the problem exists — no matter how many bodies pile up, and no matter how people die.

Bureaucratic indifference, personal irresponsibility, and denial are major themes in When Evil Lurks, a tremendously tense, shocking story that purposefully ignores the lines most horror doesn’t cross. (People who can’t handle graphic harm to children or animals, this is not your movie.) But Rugna isn’t torturing his characters with the sadistic glee of an Evil Dead Rises. His film is empathetic and personal, and his characters and their conflicts are well drawn. As rural farmer Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) tries to hold his family together and convince them of the danger, his history with them and his failings get in the way. But there’s nothing he can do to change the past; all he can do is try to shift the future. It’s heartbreaking watching him try, but it’s also an edge-of-the-seat thriller with moments designed to shock even jaded horror fans. —Tasha Robinson

2. THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR

• Genre: Comedy
• Run time: 37m
• Director: Wes Anderson
• Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley
• Where to watch: Netflix

It’s been a busy year for Wes Anderson, and Wes Anderson fans.

First, Asteroid City came out this summer, which you can read more about if you scroll down. Then, this fall, we were treated to four shorts adapted by Anderson from Roald Dahl stories for Netflix. Each is a strange and delightful experiment in form and adaptation, and all are well worth your time.

The standout is the first (and longest): The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. In this tale, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Henry Sugar, who seeks to learn a skill he just discovered existed: sight without the use of your eyes. Sugar, being a bit of a rapscallion, wants to use it to cheat at gambling, but this is immaterial. Henry Sugar, and the three other Dahl stories Anderson adapts, are opportunities for the director to continue to push his unique aesthetic and approach forward.

Anderson’s recent movies have seen the director continue to push more and more toward recognizing and making bare the artifice essential to filmmaking. These shorts take that even further. Actors recite Dahl’s words verbatim, speaking directly to the camera for asides like “I said” (Dev Patel in particular excels at this). The sets are treated like those on a theater stage, collapsing or building in real time to aid scene transitions. These shorts, and Sugar in particular, are real “movies can be like that?!” moments. It’s not an unfamiliar experience for those who have watched Anderson’s career, but it never ceases to amaze. —PV

3. NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU

• Genre: Sci-fi horror thriller
• Run time: 1h 33m
• Director: Brian Duffield
• Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Elizabeth Kaluev, Zack Duhame
• Where to watch: Hulu

No One Will Save You is an exceptional experiment in genre filmmaking, one that takes the tropes of a conventional home invasion thriller and turns them on their head with the introduction of extraterrestrial threats and a personal story of redemption, survival, and self-reflection.

Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart) stars as Brynn, the pariah of a small town who awakens one night to find her home invaded by an apparent burglar. Upon further inspection, Brynn quickly realizes the invader is neither a burglar, nor are they of this Earth, and she must think on her feet to survive the encounter and escape to safety. That premise alone offers up a wealth of opportunities for moment-to-moment twists, with the most intriguing being apparent from the opening minutes of the movie: Nearly the entirety of No One Will Save You is devoid of any audible or spoken dialogue.

As far as directing decisions go, it’s a smart and adventurous one on Duffield’s part, relying on Dever’s emotional, wordless performance to convey to the audience what’s going on and what’s most important. She’s exceptional in the role, creating a convincing portrait of an awkward shut-in wracked with guilt over a traumatic past event who nevertheless finds the will to overcome extraordinary circumstances in her stubborn fight to survive. From the creature designs and shrill percussive score to its shocking twist ending, No One Will Save You is one of the best and most surprising horror thrillers to come out in 2023. —Toussaint Egan

4. THE CREATOR

• Genre: Sci-fi
• Run time: 2h 13m
• Director: Gareth Edwards
• Cast: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney
• Where to watch: In theaters

Original sci-fi movies aren’t easy to come by in theaters these days, and great ones are even more rare. But that’s exactly what director Gareth Edwards has brought us in his first movie since his 2016 Star Wars spinoff, Rogue One. The Creator brings classic science fiction questions about what makes us human face-to-face with a modern world of technological warfare and global military dominance.

The Creator takes place in a world where robotics advanced faster than in our own, creating sufficiently advanced AI beings that are human in all but appearance — referred to as Sims. After a Sim detonates a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles, the United States goes to war against the entire concept of AI, vowing to wipe it out of existence, making Sim-friendly countries in Southeast Asia priority target number one. Somewhere along the course of the U.S.-dominated conflict, an AI designer known as Narmata creates an apparent superweapon that could turn the tides of the war. A soldier named Joshua (John David Washington) is sent in to terminate the weapon, which turns out to be the first Sim child.

This premise gives The Creator room to explore all kinds of ideas in its story, like how America responds to threats (both real and perceived) from the rest of the world. But the movie’s greatest strength is simply its filmmaking. The Creator is easily the best-looking blockbuster of the year and one of the most visually impressive since Edwards’ own Rogue One. It’s full of gorgeous shots of smoke rolling across jungles, menacing U.S. Army tanks crawling across remote villages, and gunfights and bombs that feel terrifying due to their sheer scale and firepower.

Despite all of its ruminations on the horror of warfare and destruction and the terrifying completeness of its violence, The Creator isn’t some depressing slog. In the fundamental mold of ’90s blockbusters, The Creator is, at its core, an optimistic movie, with an ending that’s beautiful and keeps its eyes toward the future. The Creator may start with two hours of Apocalypse Now, but it has an ending that would make Amblin-era Spielberg proud. —Austen Goslin

5. BAD CITY

• Genre: Action
• Run time: 1h 58m
• Director: Kensuke Sonomura
• Cast: Hitoshi Ozawa, Tak Sakaguchi, Masanori Mimoto
• Where to watch: Hoopla, or for digital rental/purchase

Japanese V-cinema legend Hitoshi Ozawa stars in this hard-boiled crime thriller boosted by some of the best action choreography of the year. Veteran movie and video game action choreographer Kensuke Sonomura steps back into the director’s chair after 2019’s Hydra and delivers one of the year’s standout crime thrillers and action movies.

Bad City first and foremost delivers breathtaking choreography, evocative sound design, and strong leading performances. A particular standout: watching one of the great screen fighters of our time, the former professional street fighter Tak Sakaguchi, operate with Sonomura’s excellent choreography. Oh, and if you want to know what it’s about: A disgraced police officer is freed from prison to help stop violent gang warfare. But the plot is a secondary concern to the movie’s exemplary action, including breathtaking knife duels, explosive shootouts, and so much more. —Pete Volk

6. SHIN KAMEN RIDER

• Genre: Tokusatsu
• Run time: 2h 1m
• Director: Hideaki Anno
• Cast: Sosuke Ikematsu, Minami Hamabe, Tasuku Emoto
• Where to watch: Prime Video, under the title Shin Masked Rider

Hideaki Anno is back with his latest movie in the Shin series, which has seen him make massive blockbusters from many of Japan’s biggest IPs. After directing the masterful Shin Godzilla, he wrote (but didn’t direct) Shin Ultraman. The latest, Shin Kamen Rider, might not reach the soaring heights of Shin Godzilla, but it’s an incredibly fun time bolstered by terrific costume designs, inventive action sequences, and a delightfully bizarre tone, all while looking gorgeous throughout.

Sosuke Ikematsu is the young motorcyclist Takeshi, who gets transformed by a sinister organization into a human-grasshopper hybrid. Along with his allies, he must hunt down the organization and take out the many different human-animal hybrids they’ve created along the way: There’s a bat hybrid, a wasp hybrid, a chameleon hybrid, and many more.

It’s the best superhero movie of the year and certainly has the best depiction of super-speed powers. —PV

7. THEY CLONED TYRONE

• Genre: Sci-fi comedy
• Run time: 2h 2m
• Director: Juel Taylor
• Cast: John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, Jamie Foxx
• Where to watch: Netflix

Juel Taylor’s They Cloned Tyrone is as hilarious as it is inventive; it’s a Black-centric sci-fi comedy-thriller that channels the pulpy Blaxploitation-inspired humor of Black Dynamite and Undercover Brother with the cerebral identity crises of Jordan Peele’s Us and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You.

John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris deliver a powerhouse trio of performances as Fontaine, Slick Charles, and Yo-Yo, respectively — a drug dealer, a pimp, and a prostitute who find themselves unexpectedly thrust into a nightmarish situation when they accidentally uncover a clandestine government cloning facility deep below their neighborhood. Upon learning that the dilapidated condition of their community is not solely attributable to institutional neglect but to outright malice and surreptitious manipulation, the three band together to expose the conspiracy at the heart of their neighborhood to reclaim their autonomy, identities, and future.

They Cloned Tyrone stands out as one of the most unique and entertaining films to be released on Netflix in recent memory. A wild, weird, and genuinely funny comedy anchored by strong leading performances (especially in the case of Jamie Foxx’s charismatic and foul-mouthed turn as Slick Charles) and surprises that only merit further appreciation upon rewatching, Taylor’s directorial debut signals the arrival of a promising new voice and hopefully even more ambitious stories in the future. —TE

8. BARBIE

• Genre: Comedy
• Run time: 1h 54m
• Director: Greta Gerwig
• Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell
• Where to watch: Available for digital rental or purchase before streaming on Max.

Perky, playful, and deceptively caustic, Barbie falls into a category with a limited number of previous films (1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie and 2007’s Enchanted among them) that gleefully satirize a cultural staple while also treating it with real affection. Margot Robbie stars as Barbie, one of many Barbies in Barbieland, an imaginary alternate universe where the popular toys hang out together in an endless idyll of pink plastic palaces, frequent wardrobe changes, and happy pastel parties. But whoever’s playing with this Barbie in the real world is sad, and it starts to affect Barbie — which leads her and Ken (played to perfection by Ryan Gosling) to take an Enchanted-style trip to the real world, where they’re both surprised at what they learn about real-world gender stereotyping.

Any description of Barbie’s big themes (toxic masculinity, how Barbie branding affects young girls, women as playthings, the commodification of girl power) makes it sound preachy and stilted. But writer-director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach bypass any feeling of sitting through a Gender Studies 101 class. They package up all these ideas within a giddy satire full of meta-humor musical numbers, bright and winning performances, pointed jokes aimed at Mattel and the corporate world, some terrific casting (Issa Rae as President Barbie, Simu Liu as a rival Ken, and Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie are standouts) and endless cultural gags about everything from the worst Barbie marketing decisions to the terminally online. It’s a high-speed joke-fest that doesn’t take Barbie any more seriously than she deserves — but does pay solemn homage to all the ways, positive and negative, that Barbie fandom makes people feel. —Tasha Robinson

9. OPPENHEIMER

• Genre: Biopic
• Run time: 3h 0m
• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Cast: Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh
• Where to watch: In theaters before streaming on Peacock

Is there much left to say about the United States criminal, moral compromise in dropping the atomic bomb or the tortured psychology of the bomb’s creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer? Maybe not, but as Christopher Nolan proves in his biopic on the life of the theoretical physicist, there’s plenty left to feel. Cross-cutting through time at lightning speed, and smashing together facts in ways its source material, the exhaustive biography American Prometheus, can’t in bound form, Nolan’s action-movie sensibilities split the very atoms of his subject to understand not the what, but the how and why.

Bouncing from the early days of a daydreaming scientist to the congressional hearings of his eventual political confidant to Oppy’s eventual time at Los Alamos, his $2 billion built-from-the-ground-up research base, Nolan litters the drama with factual detail ripped straight from the book. Yet at every turn, he ditches the Bohemian Rhapsody school of explanation to handwave away complicated mathematical explanations and legalese that might tie a complicated situation up in knots. Like in everything from The Dark Knight to Dunkirk, stakes do the talking — Oppenheimer must end the war. Throughout time he wrestles with turbulent family life, the burial scrutiny of a blacklist-giddy government that wants names of his Communist pals, and the heartbreaking fact that the Jewish people, his people, are under attack… but it all comes back to the bomb. There’s a ticking clock, and yet again, Nolan takes full advantage.

Part heist movie, part courtroom drama, part dreamscape, the swirl of Oppenheimer is at constant crescendo thanks to a kinetic camera, Ludwig Göransson’s humming score, and what might be the most stacked cast in movie history. Every IMAX-sized close-up of Cillian Murphy reveals layers to Oppenheimer that are easily assumed. Robert Downey Jr. takes the right lessons from Tony Stark to imbue Oppenheimer’s political adversary, Lewis Strauss, with swagger. Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh. Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, and so many more all show up to deliver — and yet there’s still room for The Santa Clause’s David Krumholtz to be the MVP. They all fire off life-or-death lines, sweat under the pressure of the job, stagger backward when they realize what they’ve done, and under the eye of Nolan, reach the quantum realm of impossible choices. Oppenheimer has a magnitude worthy of the Trinity tests, but most admirable is that it never fetishizes the accomplishment of the bomb. The end will leave a person furious, as it must. —Matt Patches

10. EARTH MAMA

• Genre: Drama
• Run time: 1h 37m
• Director: Savanah Leaf
• Cast: Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander, Doechii
• Where to watch: Available for digital rental/purchase

I hadn’t heard a word about Earth Mama before watching it in a nearly empty theater and was surprised to see the A24 banner ahead of its opening credits. In hindsight, the film doesn’t fit with its distributor’s brash arthouse aesthetic. It’s smaller and more challenging than something like Talk to Me, which played in the theater right next door, and whose bass could be felt during Earth Mama’s quietest scenes.

Gia, a pregnant single mother in the Bay Area, seeks to recover her two children from foster care while considering adoption for her unborn third child. She’s barely old enough to legally drink, but her life is already burdened with more obligations than hours in a day. She balances a job at a mall photography studio, mandatory drug sobriety courses, and check-ins with Child Protective Services, perpetually rushing from one to the other. The history of cinema isn’t wanting for films that gawk at poverty through the dehumanizing eyes of wealthy, typically white male directors, but Earth Mama isn’t that. With her debut, director Savanah Leaf displays a bottomless compassion not just for her lead, but for each character who passes the lens.

Everybody has their moment to be more than a supporting character. In the middle of the film, Leaf drops the film’s naturalism for poetry, taking the men who hang outside Gia’s apartment catcalling her after a long day and placing them in front of drab portrait studio backdrops. To the camera, they talk about their childhoods in and out of the CPS system. Leaf pulls in close, letting us see the wrinkles of their faces, every tiny flinch of their performances.

The close-up is Leaf’s flex. She uses the shot with a confident abundance that few other directors dare. On each character, she moves in close, like a friend at a party with a secret to tell under the loud music. When that intimacy is shared with Gia herself, what differentiates Earth Mama comes into focus. We are not observing this woman from a distance; we are sitting beside her, listening closely and hoping for the best. —Chris Plante

11. ASTEROID CITY

• Genre: Comedy, drama
• Run time: 1h 45m
• Director: Wes Anderson
• Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, and many more
• Where to watch: Peacock, or for digital rental/purchase

To people who don’t know Wes Anderson’s work well, he’s a known quantity that’s easily replicated and parodied: If you’re watching one of his films, you’re going to see a lot of fast-talking people responding with unemotive calm to extraordinary events, against a backdrop of meticulously designed pastel sets. But fans see a lot of nuance within that formula, as Anderson’s voice (especially his sense of humor) develops from film to film.

In Asteroid City, his ridiculously meta story-within-a-story sci-fi film about an alien encounter, that voice hones in on the question of art and creativity — who it’s for, what it brings the artist and the audience, why any form of recognition or acclaim is good enough for one creator while another strains to find connection and resonance in their work. It’s the kind of film that moves so quickly and with so little attempt to hold the audience’s hands and tell them what to feel, that it takes some work to scratch the surface.

But it’s worth diving into the movie’s connections and themes, as a who’s who of actors — many from Anderson’s usual stable, and some debuting here — bounce off each other, looking for meaning in an isolated desert setting. The cast (including Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Sophia Lillis, Edward Norton, and many, many more) navigate familial death, meaningless plaudits, and that alien visitor with the same straight-faced aplomb. This may not be a movie designed for passionate emotional response, but as usual for Anderson, it’s remarkably specific, idiosyncratic, beautifully assembled, and intentional. —TR

12. PAST LIVES

• Genre: Drama, Romance
• Run time: 1h 45m
• Director: Celine Song
• Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro
• Where to watch: Available for digital rental/purchase

In the immediately captivating first scene of Past Lives, Nora, a Korean Canadian woman, sits at a New York City bar with her husband, Arthur, and her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung, intermittently translating their words to one another.

The movie follows Nora’s life in 12-year segments: her childhood, right as she leaves Korea and goes on her first (and last) date with Hae Sung; her young adulthood, where as a graduate student in New York City, she reconnects with Hae Sung, but that happy reconciliation slowly is undermined by distance and technological struggles; and then the present day, where after years of not talking, Hae Sung visits a married Nora in New York City. It’s beautifully bittersweet, a poignant meditation on growing as a person, and how that affects the people we meet at various stages in our lives.

At one point in the movie, Nora and Arthur lie in bed together and Arthur remarks that in this story, he sounds like the villain — the American husband keeping away two estranged lovers. But this is not such a movie. Writer-director Celine Song takes great care not to villainize anyone. Both men love Nora, but neither of them is the bad guy. They were both the right person at different times and as the movie’s title suggests, the right person in another life. —Petrana Radulovic

13. TALK TO ME

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 34m
Directors: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Cast: Sophie Wilde, Joe Bird, Miranda Otto, Alexandra Jensen
Where to watch: Available for digital purchase

Talk to Me is like the horror-movie version of a perfect comedy sketch. It’s got a perfect premise, a brilliant turn you saw coming from the start but that hits even better than you expected, and it ends before it wears out its welcome. It helps that it’s also one of the most stylish and shocking horror movies of the last few years.

The film brings a twist to the more traditional demonic possession narrative: A few kids have acquired the hand of a dead person, and if you say the right words and grasp the hand, you can summon a spirit back from the dead and even invite them into your body. So like all good teens, the kids immediately use possession as a party drug. As it turns out, if you don’t let the spirit overstay its welcome, you can ride the temporary high without losing control forever — all you have to do is drop the hand and you’re good. As you might imagine, someone eventually isn’t quite as precise with their timing as they should be.

Once the movie’s turn hits and a demon overstays its welcome, the film shows off a flash of brilliant violence, and filmmaking, and queasy makeup work at its absolute, stomach-churning best.

Between its abrupt bursts of violence, possession-party montages, and creeping family tension, by the time Talk to Me’s brisk (just under 90 minutes before the credits roll) run time is up, it feels like you were one of the lucky kids who let go of the demon hand at exactly the right moment for the maximum high. —AG

14. THEATER CAMP

• Genre: Comedy
• Run time: 1h 34m
• Directors: Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman
• Cast: Jimmy Tatro, Ben Platt, Molly Gordon, Noah Galvin
• Where to watch: Hulu

All great camp movies are about found family, and there are a few subcultures that theme fits better with than theater kids. Theater Camp, the new movie from Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, is well aware of this and plays its excellent (and specific) jokes to the cheap seats for an audience it knows has felt its characters’ pains and joys themselves.

Theater Camp is a mockumentary about a performance-art camp whose beloved founder falls ill and passes the camp off to her bro-y YouTuber son, Troy, played by American Vandal’s Jimmy Tatro. Troy and the documentary crew following the camp then introduce us to a lovable cast of friends who find themselves misfits anywhere else. Of course, the camp is losing money thanks to how much Troy’s mom was racking up debt to make everyone happy, and it’s up to Troy and the kids to save the camp with one big show.

Perhaps Theater Camp’s biggest strength is how expertly it walks the line of poking fun at its characters without ever laughing at them or letting us lose sympathy. It’s a movie full of theater people who all love what they do enough to realize the parts of it that deserve a little bit of playful mocking. Most importantly, by playing so far inside its lane, with in-jokes aplenty, it still manages to hit broad enough comedy to pull laughs from someone who’s never set foot on a stage — thanks in large part to the ridiculous commitment of Jimmy Tatro.

What Theater Camp understands best about its subjects, and what Tatro’s YouTuber character fits perfectly into, is that being a theater kid means never really leaving a stage. It’s all performance, whether it’s for an audience, your best friend, your campmates, or alone yourself. And it doesn’t matter if you’re laughing or crying, as long as you enjoyed the show. —AG

15. SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

• Genre: Superhero
• Run time: 2h 16m
• Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
• Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Daniel Kaluuya
• Where to watch: Netflix

How do you top a movie that redefined mainstream studio animation? 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a game-changer for American animation studios, a wildly creative and mold-breaking new way of telling an animated story. The sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, was stuck with the task of trying to go even bigger and bolder. It’s a daunting challenge, but the new movie rises to the occasion, packing the screen with dizzying fights and flights, and sending teenage Spider-Man Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) on a fractal journey across different dimensions where he meets hundreds of different takes on Spider-Man.

This time, Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), aka “Spider-Gwen,” is a full-fledged co-protagonist with her parallel journey, and the two of them navigate family tension and big decisions together and separately while coming to terms with the fact that Miles may be the biggest threat to the Spider-Man multiverse. While this movie is only half a story, a complicated setup for 2024’s Beyond the Spider-Verse, it’s still one of the year’s most ambitious films. It’s packed with big themes and small moments. Above all, the creators play around with textures and colors, with moods expressed through constantly shifting visual styles and music, and with huge ideas about the same thing Stories have always been about power, responsibility, sacrifice, choices, and soldiering on after devastating loss. The emotions in this movie are as big as the storytelling choices, and it’s a heady experience. —TR

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

16. THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT

• Genre: Crime action
• Run time: 1h 45m
• Director: Lee Sang-yong
• Cast: Ma Dong-seok, Lee Joon-hyuk, Park Ji-hwan
• Where to watch: Nowhere at the moment, but we’ll keep you posted

Ma Dong-seok is a unique action star. There’s his size — he’s huge, throwing around his massive fists with unimaginable force — but also his charm, which acts like a cooling salve to his hard-hitting ways.

American audiences might be familiar with Ma from his work in Train to Busan, or as Gilgamesh in Eternals, but more people should watch the very fun Crime City movie franchise that has soared at the Korean box office and brought Ma into another echelon of action superstardom.

No Way Out is the third movie of the series, following 2017’s The Outlaws and 2022’s The Roundup, and it’s the best one yet. Ma returns as detective Ma Seok-do, this time going up against the yakuza and corrupt cops in his search for justice. No Way Out is the best match yet between the movie’s visual style and Ma’s skills, using hyperkinetic camera movements and sensational foley work to bring out the most of every one of his blows. Add in his effortless charisma, and it all combines into one of the best action movies of the year. —PV

17. MASTER GARDENER

• Genre: Drama
• Run time: 1h 51m
• Director: Paul Schrader
• Cast: Joel Edgerton, Quintessa Swindell, Sigourney Weaver
• Where to watch: Available for digital rental/purchase

One of our greatest living filmmakers has been fully On One recently. His thematic “Man in a Room” trilogy started with the masterpiece First Reformed in 2017, continued with the underrated The Card Counter in 2021, and has now been completed with the understated and beautiful Master Gardener.

The most low-key of the trilogy, Master Gardener follows Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), a reformed former white supremacist who now lives in witness protection and works as the expert horticulturist of a grand estate in the South. When the young Black relative (Quintessa Swindell) of the owner of the state (Sigourney Weaver) arrives to be Narvel’s apprentice, the two form an unlikely bond.

Master Gardener is a gorgeous movie, filled with fields of flowers, quiet contemplation, and excellent performances from Edgerton and Swindell. The movie distinguishes itself from many other “reformed racist” movies by having Narvel already distanced from his past self, rather than relying on his relationship with a Black person to spur that change. He’s a new person, but that doesn’t erase his history. Schrader is a true master at work, and Master Gardener is a wonderful coda to a terrific trilogy. —PV

18. BLACKBERRY

• Genre: Historical dramedy
• Run time: 2h
• Director: Matt Johnson
• Cast: Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson
• Where to watch: Available for digital rental or purchase

Matt Johnson will not be boxed in.

After making an astounding debut with The Dirties, a school-shooter-themed… comedy?..., weaponizing the mockumentary with 2016’s Operation Avalanche, then jumping to TV with the cult favorite Nirvanna the Band the Show, the genre-bender returned in 2023 with BlackBerry, a docudrama rise-and-fall account of the mobile device. More Social Network than the recent streak of corporation-flavored inventories (Air, Tetris, The Beanie Bubble), Johnson’s indie take on tech breakthroughs, boardroom screaming, and capitalism fails, while more straightforward than his previous work, still pokes the hive and finds the laughs in his style. And at the heart of the movie are two great performances destined to fly under the radar.

Out of work and low on luck, wannabe businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) knocks on the door of a lowly inventor, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), with a proposal: Make me CEO of your goofball tech operation and I’ll sell whatever device you’re attempting to build. Jim doesn’t believe Mike has truly reinvented the mobile phone, but the gamble is better than nothing. Except Mike has — and the ragtag team of Doom-playing brainiacs behind the BlackBerry are Jim’s ticket to the top. Johnson’s screenplay, co-written with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller, delivers all the bravado one expects from this type of movie. Howerton gets to rewire his Always Sunny Dennis persona into a true warhead. Baruchel’s visionary inventor gets to pop under pressure, and Johnson, who co-stars as Mike’s right-hand man (and eventual millionaire) Doug, balances it with his comedic slacker energy. BlackBerry is a searing indictment of a tech world we all know too well and a showcase for its ensemble. The keyboard clicks, but the cast roars. —MP

19. THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS

• Genre: Drama
• Run time: 2h 27m
• Directors: Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch
• Cast: Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Elena Lietti
• Where to watch: Criterion Channel, or for rental/purchase

Directed by Felix van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown) and his partner Charlotte Vandermeersch, The Eight Mountains plots the intimate story of two childhood friends through the jaw-dropping setting of the Italian Alps. The city-raised Pietro (Luca Marinelli of The Old Guard and Martin Eden) met farm kid Bruno (Alessandro Borghi of On My Skin) when his parents whisked the family away for an extended stay in the mountains of Grana. Time took its toll on the BFFs, but when the two reconnect in their 30s, the beauty of the land reforges the bond and provokes new questions about what drove them in opposite directions.

Adapted from a slim novel by Paolo Cognetti, the two-and-a-half-hour film deep-breathes its way through the ups and downs of Pietro’s and Bruno’s lives while basking in the backdrop. This is not a movie draped with green-screened matte shots; van Groeningen and Vandermeersch hauled cameras, crew, and their acting troupe to mountain peaks to frame pithy scenes of two men talking in ways that are typically exclusive to IMAX nature films. The clash makes what could be a navel-gazing character study into a profound look at what it means to live — and touch the grass. —MP

20. ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET

• Genre: Coming-of-age dramedy
• Run time: 1h 46m
• Director: Kelly Fremon Craig
• Cast: Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie
• Where to watch: Starz, or available for digital rental/purchase

Judy Blume’s coming-of-age novel is one of the most challenged in the country, because of its direct discussion of periods and the idea of a young girl choosing her religion, which did not vibe with many “concerned parents.” But it’s a staple of children’s literature, and director Kelly Fremon Craig’s movie is a gem. She previously wrote and directed Edge of Seventeen, so she knows her way around crafting a tender, awkward, relatable coming-of-age movie.

Like Turning Red, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a movie that thrives on specificity. It’s very much of its time, written and set in the 1970s when access to information about changing bodies and growing up was limited. The girls in the movie steal anatomy textbooks to look at pictures of penises, muster the courage to purchase menstruation products, and do stretches in the mirror to increase their bra size (“We MUST, we MUST, we MUST increase our bust!”).

Margaret’s parents Barbara and Herb, Rachel McAdams, and Benny Safdie are big scene stealers. But the movie wouldn’t be as strong as it is without the cast of young actors, particularly Abby Ryder Fortson, who imbues Margaret with just the right amount of enthusiasm and awkwardness. — Petrana Radulovic

21. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3

• Genre: Superhero
• Run time: 2h 29m
• Director: James Gunn
• Cast: Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper
• Where to watch: Disney Plus, or for digital rental/purchase

James Gunn’s presumably final outing with his Marvel team of spacefaring aliens and misfits is calculated to a fault, full of little “gotcha” setups designed specifically to make viewers want something out of a given character so it’ll be fun when it pays off later. (When Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer snarls that dancing is for idiots, so he doesn’t ever dance, you know full well what he’s going to be dancing by the end of the movie.) But it’s an effective ploy, frankly, at least for people who already have any affection for the Guardians movies and their messy team of badly broken people who just need a win, no matter how small and specific.

Guardians 3 goes darker than the previous two movies, with a graphic storyline about Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and his harrowing past as a lab experiment, and with nominal team leader Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) descending into alcoholism as he mourns his relationship with Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), who died, then emerged from a different timeline where she never got to know him. But it’s still much the same in spirit as the previous two movies, with a lot of ridiculous straight-faced banter, some manic action, some heartfelt personal connection, and a whole bunch of small personal payoffs.

Even though most of the characters here aren’t human, this movie has a lot more human emotion than most Marvel movies manage, and it pulls together a ton of micro storylines into something resembling both a satisfying goodbye and a hello for a potential new team of Guardians. Despite the film’s darker elements, this one is all candy, and it’s appropriately sweet. —TR

22. GUY RITCHIE’S THE COVENANT

• Genre: Thriller
• Run time: 2h 3m
• Director: Guy Ritchie
• Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dar Salim, Antony Starr
• Where to watch: Prime Video

Two movies with essentially the same basic plot came out this spring — an American operative gets out of a dangerous situation in the Middle East with the help of his interpreter. I am delighted to tell you both Kandahar and Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant are way more complex than that straightforward narrative explanation and are among the best action movies that have come out this year.

In The Covenant, Jake Gyllenhaal is U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sgt. John Kinley, was a charismatic leader among his unit. He’s assigned a new interpreter, Ahmed Abdullah (Dar Salim). Abdullah is an incredibly intelligent man who has gained a reputation in the U.S. Army for being difficult because he’s not content to simply follow orders when he sees a better way. The relationship between Kinley and Abdullah is the heart of the movie, as the two work together to get to safety when things go very wrong very quickly. Gyllenhaal is fantastic, as always, but it’s Salim who is the true star.

The Covenant goes to some very unexpected places — it’s part high-tension military thriller and part bureaucratic drama — but all of it is executed at a very high level, with precision from both Ritchie and the cast. The Covenant stands alongside Wrath of Man as an excellent return to form for Ritchie. —PV

23. SUZUME

• Genre: Fantasy adventure
• Run time: 2h 2m
• Director: Makoto Shinkai
• Cast: Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura (Japanese); Nichole Sakura, Josh Keaton (English)
• Where to watch: Nowhere at the moment, but we’ll keep you posted

Suzume is a fantastical adventure, featuring a giant earthquake-causing worm, portals to the afterlife, and a hot guy turned into a chair. But it’s also a grounded exploration of trauma and grief and is fundamentally about reconnecting with the world around and rediscovering the will to live.

Makoto Shinkai has once again woven a vibrant film that bursts with funny moments — any scene with the leading chair hobbling around, for instance — that never undermines the heavier emotional beats. Suzume, a high school student, and Sōta, the hot-guy-turned-chair, take a road trip across Japan, chasing after a mischievous cat spirit to stop impending disasters. Along the way, Suzume meets a whole host of different people and reconnects with her aunt, all while being forced to grapple with her past in a way she has avoided for years.

Those familiar with Shinkai’s previous works — particularly his two most recent films, Your Name and Weathering With You — will recognize familiar themes: star-crossed lovers, gorgeous blue skies, and the idea of connecting with others when the whole world is crashing down. But everything that didn’t quite work in those two films triumphantly coalesces in Suzume. —PR

24. POLITE SOCIETY

• Genre: Action Comedy
• Run time: 1h 43m
• Director: Nida Manzoor
• Cast: Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya, Nimra Bucha
• Where to watch: Prime Video, or for digital rental/purchase

Imagine your sister has dropped out of art school — sure, OK, who hasn’t taken a break from their studies? Now imagine she’s also engaged to some jabroni she’s only known for a month. It’s a little more concerning, considering she used to be your partner in crime, there to encourage and film every new stunt move. This (admittedly increasingly specific) hypothetical is the lived reality for Ria (Priya Kansara), who dreams of being a stuntwoman and loves her sister deeply. Of course, the combination of those two things means she does what any of us would: plan a wedding heist to rescue her sister from what’s surely a fate worse than death.

Written and directed by Nida Manzoor, Polite Society excels because it never feels like Ria’s mindset is wrong per se it revels in it, overflowing with style and confidence. The movie jumps between genres and tones and makes it all look easy, melding the wedding prep comedy of Lena’s (The Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) nuptials with Ria’s action thrill ride. Sister fights become knockdown stunts, and a beauty routine becomes literal torture.

What Polite Society has in spades is heart. It never settles into a single groove, instead dancing its way to a conclusion that pulls together all its various threads in a predictably grand fashion. Ria’s story may be singular, but all of us can relate to the enthusiasm and care she brings to her life. (Even if the rest of us are still trying to nail our flying reverse spinning kick.) —Zosha Millman

25. THE POPE’S EXORCIST

• Genre: Horror
• Run time: 1h 43m
• Director: Julius Avery
• Cast: Russell Crowe, Franco Nero, Laurel Marsden
• Where to watch: Netflix, or for digital rental/purchase

Like its protagonist, The Pope’s Exorcist knows exactly what it’s about. Father Gabriele Amorth (an Italian-accented Russell Crowe) is, as the title suggests, the exorcist whose boss is the pope. He does not take guff from anyone, be that a demon taunting him about his sins or a panel of cardinals questioning his methods (something he laughs off with a few sips of his doppio and a reminder of who he answers to — again, the pope). Father Amorth does his job, and he does it well.

The Pope’s Exorcist is the same way. As Father Amorth faces his most ferocious demon yet, the exorcism flick dips into horror and comedy with equal glee, artfully teasing out its story with a knowing wink and artful camera shots. A particularly shuddering one as the demon takes hold of its host is enough to shake off any preconceived notions you might have of this film: this Pope’s Exorcist is gonna be a banger.

And lo, it is. The real Father Amorth claimed to have performed some 160,000 exorcisms throughout his career, but The Pope’s Exorcist covers just one of them, at a small, former abbey in Spain. Such contained chaos gives the movie license to just go off: Father Amorth and his assistant uncover a vast conspiracy, and the movie rises to meet the challenge. Crowe’s performance anchors the whole movie with the warm wisdom, small, easy chuckle, and absolute devotion that a premise like this needs. It all adds up to make something surprisingly deft, an exorcism movie with a knowing smile and Russell Crowe riding around Rome on a Vespa. That’s divine cinema, baby. —ZM

26. KILL BOKSOON

• Genre: Action
• Run time: 2h 19m
• Director: Byun Sung-hyun
• Cast: Jeon Do-Yeon, Sol Kyung-gu, Esom
• Where to watch: Netflix

Netflix’s first action movie banger of 2023, this stylish Korean thriller is about a world-class assassin balancing the challenges of her job with the difficulties of being a single mom. Jeon Do-Yeon stars as Gil (“Kill” to her co-workers) Boksoon, the top assassin at her firm. She’s looking for a way out, as she realizes she barely knows her teenage daughter.

Let me sell you on one specific fight sequence, to give you an idea of what the movie’s got for you. Boksoon and an ally are engaged in fights on opposite sides of the same wall. The wall has two doors — one on the far left, and one on the far right — that are both open. As the two groups fight on either side, the camera continually rotates through the open doors. Director Byun Sung-hyun punctuates the moments where the camera passes through the doors with action beats of people being slammed into the wall (sometimes appearing on the other side), giving the whole scene a vibrant rhythm and connecting the two fights while still keeping them separate.

With playful fight sequences (one involves a whiteboard marker, another invokes Raiders of the Lost Ark), clever editing (we see Boksoon play out multiple approaches to a variety of situations, whether it’s a target she’s trying to kill or a daughter she’s trying to parent), a powerhouse lead performance, and beautiful sets and costumes, Kill Boksoon is a delight for the senses and great mix of domestic drama and rollicking fun action thrills. —Pete Volk

27. HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE

• Genre: Crime thriller
• Run time: 1h 43m
• Director: Daniel Goldhaber
• Cast: Ariela Barer, Lukas Gage, Forrest Goodluck
• Where to watch: Hulu, or for digital rental/purchase

An unconventional adaptation of the controversial 2021 nonfiction novel, How to Blow Up a Pipeline applies the ethos of the book (which argued sabotage is a necessary part of environmental activism) to a fictional scenario. In the movie, a group of people from different walks of life gather in Texas with a plan: to blow up an oil pipeline and finally enact some real change. And the movie rules.

It’s a perfect marriage of the heist thriller genre and the movie’s radical politics, with a likable group of young people and an extremely tense final act. Sure to be one of the buzziest and most controversial movies of the year, don’t mistake it for an empty vehicle for controversy; How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a thoughtful, masterful work that weaves in the principles of what makes heist thrillers fun to great effect. Don’t miss it. —PV

28. FIRST OF THE CONDOR

• Genre: Martial arts drama
• Run time: 1h 25m
• Director: Ernesto Díaz Espinoza
• Cast: Marko Zaror, Eyal Meyer, Gina Aguad
• Where to watch: Hi-Yah!, or for digital rental/purchase

Marko Zaror is one of the most exciting action stars working today. He’s an incredibly skilled martial artist and acrobat who has made a career out of jaw-dropping fights as villains in direct-to-video action hits (Undisputed 3: Redemption, Savage Dog), guest spots in blockbusters (Machete Kills, Alita: Battle Angel, and most recently John Wick: Chapter Four), and leading roles in Chilean action cinema (Kiltro, Mandrill, Redeemer).

Fist of the Condor sees Zaror team up once again with director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza in an 85-minute old-school martial arts drama in which he plays twin brothers at odds with each other over an ancient text that teaches the movie’s titular martial art. Zaror, who also choreographed the movie’s fight scenes, excels, as Fist of the Condor and makes the most of his considerable skills. There are high-flying kicks, rapid displays of martial arts forms, and the drama inherent to great cinematic fights.

The movie is at its best when leaning into the action, but that’s not all it has to offer. In addition to the story of long-lost brothers pitted against each other, Espinoza shoots the landscape of Chile in a way that builds the drama of the fights and adds an element of tranquility to the chaos. For fans of martial arts cinema, Fist of the Condor is a must-watch. And for the curious, watch Zaror’s jaw-dropping fight against Scott Adkins in Undisputed 3, and then make your decision. —PV

29. RYE LANE

• Genre: Romantic comedy
• Run time: 1h 22m
• Director: Raine Allen-Miller
• Cast: David Jonsson, Vivian Oparah, Benjamin Sarpong-Broni
• Where to watch: Hulu

Something of a shorter, jazzier, more free-form take on Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, set in the trendy, arty young people’s London of I May Destroy You, Rye Lane puts two strangers together on a long, breezy walk-and-talk that neither of them wants to end.

Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) are both fresh off major breakups. When they meet at a mutual friend’s terrible art showing, there’s no sense that either of them is hunting for their next relationship — but they find a spark in each other. This isn’t a rom-com in the sense most people mean the term these days: It’s funny and romantic, but fairly short on the kind of magical-realism story contrivances or big, ridiculous barriers that would keep the couple apart. What it has instead is a first-time director energetically playing with visual and narrative style, running through lenses and angles with abandon, giving the whole film a subjective feel that crawls into the characters’ heads (sometimes literally) to see how they visualize each other’s stories or see each other differently after the latest exchange of ideas. It’s a very small, personal getting-to-know-you movie that goes big and stylish, with huge emotions and outsized romantic gestures as part of the landscape, in addition to the actual landscape of London’s Peckham and Brixton neighborhoods. Even for people weary of rom-coms and screen romance, it’s a surprisingly engaging, slyly winning movie. —TR

30. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4

• Genre: Action
• Run time: 2h 49m
• Director: Chad Stahelski
• Cast: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Ian McShane
• Where to watch: Starz, or available for digital rental/purchase

John Wick: Chapter 4 is almost too big of a movie. Almost.

The latest entry in Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski’s massive action series takes the character, and the world, right up to its logical limits with some of the biggest and best action-blockbuster set-pieces ever, each given the inventive and creatively violent love and care the series has made its name on.

Perhaps most impressive about this particular film in the John Wick series is the fact that John’s not its main character at all. Instead, that honor falls more squarely to the terrific Donnie Yen, who plays Caine, a blind assassin and longtime friend of John’s who has been set on his trail by the High Table and its Marquis (Bill Skarsgård).

With Caine getting most of the emotional arc of the movie, and its payoff, John is freed to highlight one of the things Keanu Reeves is best at supporting. Whether it’s as a scene partner in an emotional or epic moment or as an opponent in an action scene, Reeves is tremendous at shaping his body, performance, and style to fit the things that the other actors around him are most adept at.

This fact is a large part of the reason the John Wick series’ endless list of action-movie icons always looks their best — along with the hard work of Stahelski and his crew of stunt choreographers and action veterans. But whether it’s a gunfight with a flaming shotgun, a discotheque duel with Scott Adkins, or even a showdown at dawn with Yen, Reeves is always helping his John Wick 4 scene partners shine, which carries the series to new, and previously impossible to imagine, heights in its fourth entry. —AG

31. CREED III

• Genre: Sports drama
• Run time: 1h 56m
• Director: Michael B. Jordan
• Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Jonathan Majors
• Where to watch: Prime Video, or for digital rental/purchase

The third installment in the Creed series sees franchise star Michael B. Jordan not only step back into the ring as heavyweight boxing scion Adonis Creed but also, for the first time, take the role of director. Set several years after the events of 2018’s Creed II, a now-retired Adonis is enjoying the fruits of his labor, raising his young daughter, Amara, along with his wife, Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and mentoring the next generation of heavyweight boxing champs. That all changes when Damian Anderson (Jonathan Majors), a formerly incarcerated childhood friend of Adonis, reenters his life with the request that Adonis allow him to fight for the championship himself. When Damian’s machinations are brought to light, Adonis must face not only his old friend, but his long-buried past in search of reconciliation, resolution, and atonement.

In the same way that no director other than Ryan Coogler could produce a movie like the original Creed, no director other than Michael B. Jordan could make a sequel quite like Creed III. Jordan’s idiosyncrasies and passions for visual storytelling and editing are writ large and deep across every shot of Creed III, from the film’s many (many) nods to anime, to his distinctive, exhilarating approach to fight choreography and framing. Jordan is entirely in his element throughout Creed III, as is Majors, whose performance as Anderson elevates the character from a mere paper-thin antagonist to a fully formed character as compelling as Adonis himself, equal turns insidious and sympathetic in his own right. In Creed III, Adonis isn’t fighting to claim his birthright or right the injustices incurred by his father, but transcend both his birth father Apollo, and his surrogate father Rocky Balboa to become his own man and fight for his legacy. For both Michael B. Jordan and Adonis Creed, Creed III is nothing short of a triumph. —TE

32. THE OUTWATERS

• Genre: Found-footage horror
• Run time: 1h 40m
• Director: Robbie Banfitch
• Cast: Robbie Banfitch, Angela Basolis, Scott Schamell, Michelle May
• Where to watch: Tubi, Plex, Roku Channel, Vudu, or Hoopla

Found-footage movies don’t often feel like something new, which is exactly what makes The Outwaters so remarkable. Joining trend-bucking movies like Lake Mungo or the original Paranormal Activity, The Outwaters shakes the genre hard enough to send it straight to the gory cosmic center of horror.

The Outwaters follows a group of friends who head into a remote part of the Mojave Desert to film a music video. As the crew ventures farther and farther into the heat and sand, they eventually find something they shouldn’t have and realize it’s far too late for all of them. Up until that moment, The Outwaters feels like a normal, if a little slow, found-footage horror movie. But once things kick off in the Mojave, the movie never stops to breathe for even a second, bucking the slow ramp-up that most of the genre leans on.

Even more impressive is the way The Outwaters uses its camera. In some moments, the camera is almost self-consciously the focal point through which we see everything, like when we get a sideways view of the world as a character shuffles through the desert with the camera in their hand and their arms at their sides. Other times, the pretense of the camera feels like it melts away completely and we instead get eerie point-of-view shots, like the camera has momentarily melded with the eyes of the movie’s characters.

These moments, often lit by nothing other than a disembodied flashlight, help give the movie is creeping cosmic dread, melding found-footage staples with the feeling of being watched from just over your shoulder by a presence you can never see. Adding to this is The Outwaters’ outstanding effects and sound design, including slithering desert creatures and ominous creatures that feel like they’re emanating at once from outer space and the center of planet Earth. And that’s not to mention the movie’s copious and disgusting, but oh-so-effective, gore.

All of this may sound a little bit like a mess, but that itself is part of The Outwaters’ appeal too. Good found-footage horror transports you to the scene of something terrible, envelops you in the dread of the characters, and makes you feel like you’re part of their world. What makes The Outwaters special is that it makes you feel like you aren’t part of any world at all. —AG

33. KNOCK AT THE CABIN

• Genre: Family drama (Shyamalan variant)
• Run time: 1h 40m
• Director: M. Night Shyamalan
• Cast: Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Rupert Grint
• Where to watch: Prime Video, or for digital rental/purchase

If you haven’t checked in with M. Night Shyamalan’s brand of earnest filmmaking in a minute, you might’ve missed that the guy’s been on a bit of a hot streak. For whatever jokes people might make about his twist endings or his rocky post-Sixth Sense years, Old found poignancy in what could be a punchline, and Glass ambitiously capped off a long-running trilogy about superherodom.

Knock at the Cabin continues this run, and it’s some of his best direction in years — maybe primarily because it’s the first story in a while that’s felt like it can bear the weight of his skill. A family (Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and Kristen Cui) suddenly finds themselves held hostage by four people who claim the only way to stop the apocalypse is for their family to willingly choose one person to sacrifice. For all its philosophical prodding, Shyamalan keeps Knock at the Cabin grounded and contained. Within the titular cabin, he finds angles that tell the whole story, lingering on reactions to the sorrow to better show the true horror at hand. Every scene feels rich, a series of individual visual narratives getting woven together into something deeply human.

Most important to me, someone who likes to yell about movies, is the fact that Knock feels dense enough to bear scrutiny. Whether the sincere or ponderous or even undisguised parts of the story resonate with you almost feels beside the point. Knock at the Cabin earns its place on this list because it is a rich showcase from a director totally in control of what he’s trying to say. —ZM

34. INFINITY POOL

• Genre: Horror
• Run time: 1h 57m
• Director: Brandon Cronenberg
• Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman
• Where to watch: Hulu, or for digital rental/purchase

Death doesn’t have to be real in the world of Infinity Pool, at least not if you’re rich enough to turn it into a fun night out. Brandon Cronenberg, the director of 2020’s stellar Possessor, sets his third movie in a world that’s seemingly just like ours, with the one exception of a little island nation called La Tolqa that survives off of tourism and a very strange legal code: If someone commits a crime on the island, they will either be killed by a person they have wronged, or they can pay for a clone of themselves, one with all their exact memories and emotions, to be created and killed in their place.

The film follows Alexander Skarsgård as a writer named James Foster who’s vacationing on this island with his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), who’s also paying for everything. When James and Em meet a strange couple played by Mia Goth and Jalil Lespert, they quickly fall into a night of drinking, drunk driving, and sneaking out of the heavily guarded walls of the island’s vacation resort. When James accidentally kills a pedestrian, he gets thrown into the island’s legal system, where he has to watch himself die. But that’s just Cronenberg ramping up.

James eventually falls into a social circle so wealthy that they’ve started committing crimes just to watch themselves die, obscuring their own identities and the very concept of death so completely as to rob them of any meaning at all. Rather than let the movie sit with the unfathomable existential horror of watching a carbon copy of yourself die, and being forced to wonder if you’re still really you or whether or not you’d be able to tell the difference, Cronenberg uses this moment as a jumping-off point to dive headlong into the themes of identity and corporeal ownership that seem to obsess him — at least based on his first two movies.

Infinity Pool is a bizarre, if not as bizarre as some might hope, look into the void of identity, and one of the most queasily fascinating, and existentially dreadful, movies of 2023 so far. —AG

35. PATHAAN

• Genre: Spy thriller
• Run time: 2h 26m
• Director: Siddharth Anand
• Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, John Abraham
• Where to watch: Prime Video

Global megastar Shah Rukh Khan made his long-awaited return to movie screens in Pathaan, the fourth entry in the blockbuster YRF Spy Universe franchise. And boy, did he deliver.

SRK is Pathaan, a former special agent who returns to the fold to take down an exiled former operative (John Abraham) who is planning a dastardly scheme that could threaten millions of lives. In the process, Pathaan teams up with a Pakistani agent (Deepika Padukone) and an old friend from earlier in the franchise.

Pathaan is a spy blockbuster that harkens back to turn-of-the-(latest)-century Hollywood, taking notes from the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies and early Mission: Impossible movies for a globetrotting fun time. There are high-octane set-pieces, cool gadgets, big explosions, double- and triple-crosses, and gorgeous outfit after gorgeous outfit. It’s a feast for the senses, and there’s a good reason it’s the highest-grossing Indian movie of the year. A sequel is already on the way. —PV

36. MISSING

• Genre: Mystery
• Run time: 1h 51m
• Directors: Nicholas D. Johnson, Will Merrick
• Cast: Storm Reid, Nia Long, Ken Leung
• Where to watch: Netflix, or for digital rental/purchase

If Knives Out has proven anything, it’s that people are hungry for mysteries on the big screen. Missing — the spiritual sequel to 2018’s Searching — is what people don’t know they’ve been looking for. It’s a web of clues, a mess of mystery, all played within the computer screen of June (Storm Reid), who’s left to figure out what happened when her mom (Nia Long) doesn’t return from a vacation with her boyfriend.

Where Searching eked out its mystery by showing the struggles that a father can have with modern technology, Missing flips the script, using June’s more natural understanding of the internet to complicate her investigation. It’s smart — suddenly June and the audience are getting pulled down a rabbit hole with knowing suggestions. And because she’s more fluent in the ways of the computer, the mystery gets to be more complex.

Sure, Missing can strain the credulity of the whole exercise, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. I don’t care! June should be able to hire a person in a different country to go scout security footage or leave her FaceTime up in the background just so we can see it. Once you get on board with those needs of the story you can acknowledge just how well Missing works from start to finish: It’s twisty and fun, smarter than it needs to be as it remixes the desktop-based tropes of Searching (and, in part, the mystery genre as a whole) to build a satisfyingly well-paced mystery. The mystery genre deserves more, movies that feel big and meaty. And whether it’s splashed across the big screen or just a computer one, Missing manages to bring its A-game. —ZM

37. BROKER

• Genre: Crime dramedy
• Run time: 2h 9m
• Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
• Cast: Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Bae Doona, Lee Ji-eun
• Where to watch: Hulu, or for digital rental/purchase

Shoplifters is one of my favorite movies of the 2010s, so it makes sense that I would be similarly susceptible to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s newest found-family movie, Broker.

Kore-eda’s second production outside of Japan (following 2019’s French production The Truth), Broker is another story about a group of people without ill intent committing crimes to survive. This time, it’s two men (Song Kang-ho and Gang Dong-won) who sell babies dropped off at a church’s baby box on the adoption black market. But when a young woman (Lee Ji-Eun, also known as the singer IU) changes her mind and returns to pick up her baby, she learns of their scheme and becomes entangled in it.

The result is a sometimes messy depiction of a series of weighty concepts: The impossible expectations of motherhood in a society that doesn’t adequately provide support, the way children are treated as objects instead of people with autonomy, and of the many different forms of family units can take. But it’s not the narrative that draws me to Broker. Instead, it’s Kore-eda’s camera, aided by master cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite, Burning). Broker is a breathtaking movie, contrasting gorgeous seaside images with cramped car interiors, and often shooting Lee’s character Moon So-young wide with space around her or close with her face obscured, highlighting her isolation from the world around her. Kore-eda is one of the finest at cinematic blocking we have today, and it is on exquisite display in Broker.

The performances from the cast also stand out and make Broker special. Song Kang-ho and Bae Doona reunite for the fourth time (and the first since 2018’s The Drug King), delivering electrifying performances — Song as another shifty, funny schemer who is in way over his head, and Bae as a hard-headed cop pursuing them on the road. But it’s Lee Ji-eun who steals the show as So-young, with a fierce intelligence and hardened worldview concealed by a veneer of youthful innocence. Plus one very adorable baby. That never hurts. —PV

38. SICK

• Genre: Horror
• Run time: 1h 23m
• Director: John Hyams
• Cast: Gideon Adlon, Bethlehem Million, Dylan Sprayberry
• Where to watch: Peacock

A slick April 2020 period piece (remember wiping down cereal boxes?) from one of our great undersung directors, Sick is another solid genre entry this year that brought new life to the COVID slasher.

In Sick, two friends travel to a cabin in the woods at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. One is explicitly going to quarantine, to help prevent her from exposing her at-risk father to the disease. One is just trying to get away from school. When the two of them start getting creepy texts, an unwelcome visitor arrives and changes the nature of their getaway.

Director John Hyams is a master at building tension, as seen in his heralded direct-to-video masterpiece Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, but also in other underrated works like the Netflix zombie show Black Summer and the thriller Alone. He brings that energy to Sick, and it’s much to the movie’s benefit — eschewing music in favor of natural eerie sounds like buzzing electricity to heighten the anxiety in the movie.

Hyams’ background in action also helps — there are some gnarly kills in this movie, with a standout fight scene in a dorm room in the beginning. He also loves ambitious one-take shots, and we see a few of them in Sick as well.

The COVID stuff is hit-or-miss for me in Sick — some of it works, some of it doesn’t — but what’s undeniable is the craft on display. Hyams’ action sequences and penchant for building tension move the story along at a brisk pace, and it’s a nice movie to look at — even the night scenes are lit well, which is a lesson some other recent horror movies could take some notes from. Another thing some other movies could take notes on is that it’s 83 minutes long. —PV

39. THUNIVU

• Genre: Crime thriller
• Run time: 2h 26m
• Director: H. Vinoth
• Cast: Ajith Kumar, Manju Warrier, Samuthirakani
• Where to watch: Netflix

Tired of snark-heavy action heroes, or ones that rely on relatability? Looking for something closer to the larger-than-life action heroes of the Hollywood days of yore, who seemed to define “cool”? Look no further than Thunivu, a delightful Tamil-language heist movie with one of the suavest bank robbers you will ever meet.

In Thunivu, a group of criminals intricately plan a bank job, complete with miniatures. They’ve thought of everything: the timing, the location, having an inside man, and the escape. But they couldn’t plan for Dark Devil, a master operative who was already there, also planning to rob the bank.

Thunivu takes on this big-time bank robbery from all angles: the robbers (and there are many), the police, the corporate executives, the government, the public, the media — you name it, it plays a significant role.

Much of Thunivu takes place inside the bank, with multiple explosive action sequences. The movie effectively sets us up for that with the opening planning sequence: Using miniatures and an immersive camera that flies through the rooms, it gives the audience a grounding in the geography of the bank, making it easier to follow when things get hectic.

The action is strong, too — there are impressive stunts and lots of explosions, and Thunivu effectively uses lively camera movements, slow-motion effects, wirework, and VFX to augment the stylized action. And like any good heist narrative, Thunivu slowly unspools narrative complications, revealing schemes upon schemes to keep the audience guessing.

But the real heart of the movie is star Ajith Kumar, who brings an unreal level of swagger and charm to the silver-haired Dark Devil. (He comes by it honestly, too — he previously took a sabbatical from acting to try his hand at being a professional race car driver, and even competed in Formula 2). Always smiling, always confident, always in control, we’re introduced to him in an explosive manner that quickly sells us on both his charm and his hyper-competence with violence. It’s a true movie star performance and one that Thunivu successfully hitches its wagon to. —PV

Thunivu is available to watch on Netflix.

40. M3GAN

• Genre: Horror
• Run time: 1h 42m
• Director: Gerard Johnstone
• Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald
• Where to watch: Prime Video, or for digital rental/purchase

The anxiety about AI art, AI writing, and AI just overall ingesting everything humans create and then spitting it all back out again in new forms has hit a fresh high in 2023, which makes it a good year for a fresh take on the tired old “new technology is inevitably scary and evil” horror trope. But as evil AI by way of the Chucky movies goes, M3GAN is refreshingly funny and engaging, on top of actually being reasonably scary. Allison Williams stars as the tech whiz who’s so unnerved by being granted guardianship over her dead sister’s kid that she builds that kid a robot companion to handle all the difficult aspects of parenting. And then the robot gets protected. Scripted by Akela Cooper with the same shamelessly messy, giddy verve she brought to Malignant, M3GAN isn’t deathless, uplifting cinema. But it’s an unabashed good time for horror fans, who will catch the referential humor and wink-wink acknowledgments to the silliness of this whole endeavor, and then get some solid thrills out of the action to boot. —TR