A Ranking Of The Best Films Of 2023
There's no getting away from the fact that 2023 was a strange year for film. The writers' strike and the actors' strike put a stop to movies for months. "Barbenheimer" fever gripped the nation in the summer. Pop stars took over the screens in the fall.* Everything was up in the air — but when we look back, we still got to watch a ton of excellent films. These are 2023’s very best movies.**
*The movies from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé did not qualify for this list as they are not narrative movies. Sorry!
**To create our list, we combined the ratings from IMDb, Metacritic, the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score for each film — multiplying the IMDb score by 10 to make the math work — and arrived at an average score for all of them. The movie with the highest average wins, with any ties broken by the IMDb score. Figures were correct as of December 5, 2023.
40. Leo
IMDb Score: 7
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 80
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 93
Metacritic Score: 65
Our Score: 77
Adam Sandler's second foray into animated movies for Netflix proved a big hit with families. It probably didn't hurt that he pulled together a cast that included Bill Burr, Cecily Strong, Jason Alexander, and himself.
That massive 93 audience score on Rotten Tomatoes shows how much people like this animated lizard. Empire magazine called the movie "fun" and "warm" and commented, "Leo is an animated adventure with kindness and celebrating individuality on its mind — and is a great showcase for Sandler’s voice talents."
39. Dream Scenario
IMDb Score: 7.4
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 70
Metacritic Score: 74
Our Score: 77.5
Nic Cage is on something of a roll, and Dream Scenario catches him at the peak of his form. This surreal movie sees his character entering the dreams of people all over the world — making him into an unwitting celebrity.
If Rotten Tomatoes is anything go by, the critics were much higher on Dream Scenario than the audience. It seems that fans were left particularly "frustrated" with the ending, but critics enjoyed figuring out what the movie had to say about modern culture.
38. Leave the World Behind
IMDb Score: 7
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 79
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 88
Metacritic Score: 74
Our Score: 77.8
It can be difficult to adapt a bestselling novel into a movie — but not if you've got Julia Roberts in front of the camera and Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail behind it. Leave the World Behind proved to be an end-of-year treat when it dropped on Netflix on December 8.
But fans of the book should watch out. "Something that works in a literary medium may not work in a cinematic medium," Esmail told Reuters, adding, "[The] book and the film are kind of two different standalone pieces that kind of operate independently of one another."
37. Passages
IMDb Score: 6.8
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 73
Metacritic Score: 79
Our Score: 78.5
Passages caused controversy in the U.S. when it received an NC-17 certificate from the Motion Picture Association. Director Ira Sachs slammed it as "a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBT imagery to exist."
The movie's distributor, Mubi, labeled the rating "disappointing" and decided to release the film unrated. This didn't result in big box-office numbers, but the movie did earn rave reviews and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor for Franz Rogowski.