The Best Movies of 2023

It’s December, which means I spent a lot of my month catching up on movies, working on my Best Movies of 2023 list, and perusing the many other best of the year lists.

At some point during the month I thought it would be interesting if someone used all these lists to rank the movies in all these lists and make some kind of meta-list of the best movies of the year. Rotten Tomatoes presumably kinda does this, but not really in the way that I wanted. And so, not finding anyone who does this I decided to take the task upon myself.

An “objective” Best Movies of 2023 isn’t truly possible. Really all these list should be called “our favorite” but I’m not here to get into a debate with the cultural lexicon. However if we add up all the subjective individual best of lists, we should end up with a slightly-less-subjective list of the top movies, which for brevity’s sake we’ll just call objective.

There’s a bunch of ways you could collect and score this data, and I’m not saying I chose the best method, but it seemed to work okay, so here was my pretty hap-hazard approach:

I collected a bunch of lists from individual critics and various aggregation sites. (List of my sources below). I didn’t have a method really for which ones I chose, I mostly went with the top results until I had what felt like a significant sample size. (n=~21). Then from each list I pulled the top 10 movies (had to cut it off somewhere I don’t have all day) and scored the films in a spreadsheet. Each film got a score based on where it ranked in each list.

Then you add up the scores and presto:

Thomas Flight’s Totally Objective and Scientifically Rigorous List of The Top 10 Best Movies of 2023™

Past Lives [95]

Oppenheimer [92]

Killers of The Flower Moon [90]

Poor Things [71]

Barbie [65]

Zone of Interest [53]

The Holdovers [44]

Asteroid City [44]

May December [43]

Showing Up [39]

Anatomy of a Fall [38]

All of Us Strangers [37]

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse [34]

The Boy and The Heron [26]

Passages [24]

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 [24]

Fallen Leaves [21]

Super Mario Bros The Movie [20]

Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros [17]

A Thousand and One [13]

I think it’s a pretty solid list overall. I’ve seen most of these and all the ones I’ve seen I’d consider to at least be a good movie (Note: Super Mario Bros The Move is one of the ones I haven’t seen). It’s even a pretty diverse list; we’ve got MCU films, a 4 hour documentary about a Michelin Star restaurant, and basically the whole gamut in between.

I love that Past Lives is getting so much love, even though it wasn’t at the top of my list, it’s one of the most beautiful movies of the year, was an absolute joy to watch and I’m so excited to see what Celine Song does in the future.

With the exception of Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros all of these ranked on at least 3 of the sources I pulled from. Many of the top 10 ranked on 7-10 different lists. Honestly the only big shocker is Super Mario Bros The Movie, which only made it in because I included Box Office numbers and Letterboxd’s “Most Popular” ranking. But hey, this is cold, hard science so who am I to argue.

Here’s the list of list I sourced from:

Sight and Sound: The 50 best films of 2023

Metacritic - Top Rated Movies of 2023

Letterboxd: Top Rated Movies of 2023

Letterboxd: Most Popular Movies of 2023

IMDB: The Top 10 Movies of 2023

Rolling Stone: The 20 Best Movies of 2023

Polygon: The 50 best movies of 2023, ranked

Worldwide Box Office: Top 2023 Movies

The New Yorker: The Best Movies of 2023

Vulture: The Best Movies of 2023

Esquire: The 65 Best Movies of 2023