The best films of 2023, as chosen by ABC critics: How many have you seen?

It has been a huge year for the film industry, and I'm not just talking about Barbie.

That hot pink juggernaut surpassed $1 billion in the box office, made Greta Gerwig the highest-grossing female movie director in history and even sparked a geopolitical incident.

But, despite what the endless (highly enjoyable) think pieces and streams of merch might have you believe, there were other great films released this year.

There were heartbreakers and gritty films reckoning with things like colonialism and abuses of power. There were heartlifters about community and family and long-lost love. There were silly and hilarious films that lightened things just when we needed it most.

It's so hard to narrow all of those down to a top 10, but we made our film critics — Keva York, Luke Goodsell, Jason di Rosso and Michael Sun — do it nonetheless (and then let them throw in a few honorable mentions, too).

We hope you see your favourite in there, or discover new favourites.

1. EO

Undoubtedly the most troubling sequence from Disney's 1940 version of Pinocchio is the one in which the guileless puppet finds himself on Pleasure Island, where wayward boys run riot. Their hooting and hollering soon turns to braying as the lads are transformed, limb by limb, into donkeys.

Jerzy Skolimowski's EO is disturbing not for its donkey debauchery, but rather for the innocence of the titular creature, as is offset by the confusion and callousness of the human world through which he wanders.

After being removed from a travelling circus, EO passes between various guardians and companions — including a rowdy football team and a countess played by the always erotically austere Isabelle Huppert — subject to small kindnesses and more or less gross exploitation.

In Robert Bresson's 1966 masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar, the donkey protagonist is a Christ-figure; through his submissiveness and impassivity, he becomes a mirror of human cruelty. In his contemporary riff on the tale , Skolimowski (best known for such singularly uneasy fables as The Shout), doesn't just bestow interiority upon his furry star — hopes, dreams — but also a perspective, colouring certain sequences in heavy metal red and black.

This decentring of the human perspective is audacious, thrilling and supremely tender.

— Keva York

Available to rent on Apple TV and Google Play. Read the full review here.

2. Tar

Did Tár come out just this year? This chilly tale of a monstrous conductor (Cate Blanchett) already feels embossed onto time itself, though I'm glad its January release date in Australia meant it could warrant an inclusion here.

She is the leader of the Berlin Philharmonic and a self-mythologising, old-world maestro whose every movement is calibrated like sheet music: consciously modest on stage; megalomaniacal in private.

Director and writer Todd Field constructs a character study with an eerie remove, a crisp sheen laminating each image. This is a rarefied world within a rarefied world — in the highest echelons of classical music, we witness the downward spiral of Lydia Tár as ghosts of her past misdemeanours haunt the present.

It is a descent that spills into the airless chambers of opera halls, inviting a contemporary ugliness into baroque tradition. That conflict lends the film its shuddering dread and streaks of satire as it hurtles towards the slyest denouement this year — easily.

— Michael Sun

Available on Binge and to rent on Apple TV. Read the full review here.

3. Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan's tense, paranoid thriller about a genius beset by grave doubts and near-debilitating remorse was one of the year's most poignant dispatches from Hollywood.

The story of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer — who oversaw the development of the atom bomb that was instrumental in ending World War II and caused the death and suffering of millions — is anchored by a captivating lead performance from Cillian Murphy.

Around him, the film is bombastic without feeling leaden, epic without losing sight of the high-stakes personal drama.

Much credit goes to Nolan's instincts for tension and timing. As the sole screenwriter on the film, adapting a biography by journalists Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, he skilfully blends two timelines: the wartime race against the clock, and a post-war investigation that saw Oppenheimer placed under intense scrutiny designed to destroy him.

It's a typically puzzle-like structure from the director and, aside from a gauche sex scene involving Florence Pugh and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, he barely puts a foot wrong.

— Jason di Rosso

Available to rent on Apple TV, Google Play and Prime Video. Read the full review here.

4. St Omer

This haunting fiction debut from acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alice Diop takes the tropes of the courtroom drama — with its grandstanding speeches and neat narrative payoffs — and turns them on their head.

Based on a true crime case that rocked France in 2016, Saint Omer follows a French Senegalese novelist (Kayije Kagame) drawn to the trial of a Senegalese woman (the riveting Guslagie Malanda) accused of drowning her 15-month-old daughter.

While the crime seems undeniable, the reasons why this highly educated, softly spoken defendant might commit such an act are perplexing — even to herself. Had she taken leave of her senses? Was she the victim of a curse?

Diop's finely calibrated direction draws on her documentary experience to tackle the complex subject matter with sensitivity, bearing witness to fascinating issues of race, moral complicity and the ambiguity of language in the process.

A film as disquieting as it is moving, and all the more powerful for it.

— Luke Goodsell

Available to rent on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Video and YouTube. Read the full review here.

5. Asteroid City

This year brought not one, but two dazzling atomic anxiety dramas.

Like Oppenheimer, Wes Anderson's latest fabulation is set in the mid-century American southwest, and is chock-a-block with more famous faces than can be enumerated here (including many from Anderson's regular retinue: Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe).

That doesn't mean the film is pure retro-futurist flight of fancy. More so than his last offering, The French Dispatch (2021), it feels like there's genuine emotional weight here — an insistent ache beneath the deadpan, rigorously blueprinted detail.

Jason Schwartzman is at the centre of the expansive ensemble, as a recently widowed photojournalist and father to a precocious teen (played by Jake Ryan). They're newly arrived at the eponymous desert outpost, where the esteemed Junior Stargazer convention is set to take place.

Strictly speaking, Schwartzman and Ryan actually play actors in a (fictional) play — also called Asteroid City — which unfolds within the context of a (fictional) TV documentary presentation. That may sound complicated, but Anderson knows his way around a nested narrative, and this one chugs along like winning opening ditty, The Last Train to San Fernando.

— Keva York

In cinemas now, and available to rent on Apple TV, Google Play and Prime Video. Read the full review here.

6. The Fabelmans

The Fabelmans saw Steven Spielberg turn the camera on his own story, and it inspired one of his greatest and most personal movies.

Based on his own coming of age in the 50s and 60s, it flows like cascading memories, many of them resembling dreamlike visions — or nightmares.

We are plunged into the America of the director's youth — a conformist, post-war suburbia where the family are often the only Jews — where his alter ego Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) finds escape in the larger-than-life visions of Hollywood, which he soon tries to recreate at home with his wind-up camera.

Michelle Williams is deeply affecting as the mother — a woman whose bohemian spirit is cloistered in a passionless marriage. Her infidelity, and the messy divorce that follows, is depicted with compassion and nuance. Paul Dano, playing the emotionally distant father, and Seth Rogen, as his business partner who betrays him, are both excellent.

The seismic societal upheavals of the 1960s that transformed gender and familial relations are palpable in these events. Spielberg's film is both a reflection of broader history, and a searing personal memoir that's hard to forget.

— Jason di Rosso

Available on Prime Video, or to rent on Apple TV or Google Play. Read the full review here.

7. Killers of the Flower Moon

What a gift this late act of Martin Scorsese's career has been.

At an age when most of his peers have long since retired or lost their spark, the 81-year-old filmmaker, budding TikTok star and scourge of the superhero plague went and made what might be one of the greatest — and certainly most vital — movies of his already storied career.

Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth transform David Grann's non-fiction book about the spate of murders that terrorised the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, turning it into something far more thorny.

They lean into their outsider perspective — and acknowledge its limitations — by shifting the focus from the FBI investigation to the complicit dupe (Leonardo DiCaprio) caught up in his uncle's (Robert De Niro) scheme to fleece the indigenous people of their land.

At the same time, Killers of the Flower Moon feels like a work of genuine collaboration and community, affording the indigenous actors (many of them real-life Osage) the space to tell their story, and — in Lily Gladstone's soulful, quietly seismic performance — to reflect the treachery of a genocide that's all-too familiar to history.

— Luke Goodsell

In cinemas now and available to rent on Apple TV. Read the full review here.

8. One Fine Morning

French writer director Mia Hansen-Løve has an instinct for finding the friction points in the lives of her characters. More often than not, these stem from life's most vertigo-inducing challenges — a death, an illness, a break up, a sudden career change.

One Fine Morning is one of her best — a novelistic, keenly observed drama starring Léa Seydoux as a widow who juggles parenting a tween daughter with work as an interpreter.

As the film opens, she's coming to terms with her father's recent diagnosis with a rare neurodegenerative disease, which has nearly destroyed his sight and has forced him out of his job as a philosophy professor. But soon she's also dealing with another of life's curveballs: falling in love … with a married man.

It's a complicated and knotty story, typically French in a way, and Hansen-Løve performs a miraculous balancing act between the forces of grief and desire that pulsate through it.

Her directing style is deceptively naturalistic, creating an illusion of spontaneity around the film's meticulous narrative structure, and Seydoux is in fine form, perfectly attuned to the film's multiple emotional frequencies.

— Jason di Rosso

Available to rent on Apple TV and Google Play. Read the full review here.

9. Beau is Afraid

"I want to put you in the experience of being a loser," Ari Aster said of his neurotic odyssey, in which the eponymous Beau — a middle-aged schlub given doleful animation by Joaquin Phoenix — embarks on a journey to his mother's house, beset by obstacle upon obstacle.

When Beau is Afraid was released in April, theatregoers voted with their feet: they did not want to walk even a mile in this loser's shoes, let alone attempt the full three-hour trek.

Much like Beau himself, the film — budgeted significantly higher than either of Aster's two previous ventures, the super-buzzy Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) — turned out to be a flop.

Dense with story world detail and visual gags, bristling with pointedly uncanny performances by an excellent supporting cast that includes Patti LuPone and Parker Posey, Beau is Afraid delivers laugh-out-loud comedy alongside nail-biting humiliation (especially in the bravura first act). It's Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) for the Adult Swim generation.

While Phoenix is now back on the big screen in Ridley Scott's latest saga, this critic finds his Beau much more interesting than his Bonaparte.

— Keva York

Available to rent on Apple TV, Google Play or Prime Video. Read the full review here.

10. Petrol

Nothing is settled in Alena Lodkina's Petrol.

The Russian-Australian director's second feature loops and weaves around itself, speaks in whispered riddles, and often changes directions and tempos at will — as if buoyed by little more than the breeze. If you succumb to its anarchic charms, it is a ceaseless source of wonders.

Lodkina's acclaimed debut Strange Colours (2017) mapped the alien terrain of opal mining town Lightning Ridge, in regional New South Wales. In Petrol, she makes the landscape of inner-city Melbourne feel equally as foreign.

Here, a young film student (Bump's Nathalie Morris) struggles with her final assessment; a chance encounter with the savvier, older Mia (Hannah Lynch) invigorates her work and provides her an appropriately enigmatic muse.

But their friendship quivers with mysticism, from the lightly magical circumstances of their first meeting to the vaguely spectral phenomena around the house they soon share. Lodkina ruptures the film with frequent discursions into dream logic and hints of the macabre that never materialise into tangible horror.

When Petrol's credits roll, you might feel awakened from a deep slumber — from a dream rapidly slipping out of reach.

Available on SBS On Demand. Read the full review here.

Honourable Mentions

Picking a top 10 out of so many incredible offerings is a tough job, and lots of amazing stuff didn't make it onto the list (*Barbie*).

Here are the films that didn't quite make it through to the final 10, but our critics still wanted to celebrate.

Bottoms

Emma Seligman's brazen and boisterous teen movie feels like a genuine shot of life to a genre that's been going through the motions of late.

An obviously way-too-old Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri play outcast besties who start a high school fight club as a means to hook up with the popular cheerleaders of their dreams — an underhanded plan that predictably backfires with messy, hilarious results.

Unapologetically horny, defiantly queer and frequently absurd — shout out to Nicholas Galitzine as a permanently shoulder-padded jock blissing out to Total Eclipse of the Heart — Bottoms affectionately plays into teen movie cliché even as it subverts it.

A cult classic in the making.

— Luke Goodsell

In cinemas now. Read our interview with Emma Seligman here.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Winner of the 2022 Golden Lion (Venice Film Festival's top gong) and nominated for an Oscar for best documentary, Laura Poitras's film about art, addiction, corruption and protest is a series of small marvels.

Her subject is Nan Goldin: the photographer whose devoted documentation of queer life and the New York downtown scene in the 80s made her an art world superstar.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is half-biography, half-diary of a political movement. It follows Goldin's experience with addiction after being prescribed OxyContin by a doctor,and her subsequent activism against the American corporations behind the opioid crisis — and their funding of cultural institutions around the world.

The camera, for Goldin, has always been a lifeline. Here, it becomes a weapon too.

— Michael Sun

Available on Stan and SBS On Demand. Read our full review here.

Sick of Myself

How far would you go for a bit of attention, that most precious, most fickle resource?

Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) — the uber-stylish uber-narcissist at the centre of Kristoffer Borgli's caustic debut feature — discovers dangerous new lows in her pursuit of an adoring audience: knowingly gobbling a monstrous amount of an unregulated medication reported to cause unseemly physical side effects.

Sick of Myself is a funny, slick and (perhaps) darkly relatable satire of our social media-fuelled culture of self-obsession. Borgli's follow-up — the Nicolas Cage-helmed Dream Scenario, which is slated for a January 1, 2024 release here — confirms the Oslo-to-L.A. transplant as one to watch.

— Keva York

In cinemas now. Hear more about it here.

Because We Have Each Other

Sari Braithwaite’s poetic and moving documentary about a blended family living in the Brisbane suburb of Logan is a triumph of observational filmmaking.

Janet and Brent are a couple with a swag of teenage children who live in a modest brick-and-tile home. The film documents their everyday struggles and milestones, exploring themes of neurodiversity and even historic abuse (the alleged perpetrator is never shown).

A cynical filmmaker might have exploited their struggles with a voyeuristic, even tabloid sensationalism, but Braithwaite doesn't betray their trust. With palpable affection for the joys and discontents of Australian suburbia, she celebrates resilience and love.

— Jason di Rosso

Available on docplay. Read our full feature on it here.