My review of the year reaches its end in the way it always does: with the best films I watched for the first time in 2023, plus a few honourable mentions, and a list of notable new releases I missed.

For almost a decade now, my annual “top ten” has actually been my “top 10%”, the final total of entries taking its cue from how many first-time watches there were that year. Well, this year there were 103, and 10% of 103 is 10.3, which rounds down to 10 — so, for the first time since 2014, my top ten is actually a top ten. Huh.

As alluded to in the previous paragraph (but I’ll spell it out again), all the movies I watched for the first time in 2023 are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. In the past I’ve also provided a yearly rank for the films that were released during the previous year, but in 2023 I only saw 17 such films, and less than half of them were what you’d call “major” releases. More to the point, only one of them appears in my top ten, so there’s not much point providing a “2023 ranking”.

So, let’s crack on…

Once played by Chevy Chase in a couple of ’80s films I’ve never seen, here Jon Hamm takes over the role of Fletch, a journalist who seems to have a habit of getting embroiled in mysteries. Hamm is one of those guys that Classic Hollywood loved but we don’t see enough of anymore: typically handsome fellas who can also be hilariously funny. That makes him perfect to lead this comedy thriller, which manages to be consistently bouncy fun while also unspooling a pretty decent mystery storyline. We deserve a whole pile of sequels, but I suspect we won’t get any. I guess I’ll have to see if those two earlier flicks measure up, or maybe even read the books.

The basic plot — small-time hustler with big ambitions gets in over his head — feels familiar from many a noir, but the devil’s in the details, which here include an absolutely superb performance from Richard Widmark as wannabe-somebody Fabian and first-rate direction by Jules Dassin, plus a post-war London setting that brings a different flavour than the genre’s usual LA/NY locales. Fabian may have only been “so close” to greatness, but Dassin certainly achieved it.

Louis Malle’s debut tells a film noir narrative with a dose of French Nouvelle Vague style, which results in an unpredictable thriller with a kind of tragic beauty and casual existentialism you don’t often get from the genre’s hard-boiled American counterparts.

The first screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story covers the original work in its opening sequence — and what a sequence it is — before spinning off into an entirely original narrative to explain the backstory to that opening. Following an insurance investigator as he pieces together one man’s life, it’s like noir’s answer to Citizen Kane; and, at its best, that’s a comparison it stands up to. Burt Lancaster’s swagger belies this being his screen debut; screenwriter Anthony Veiller juggles a nonlinear storyline to revealing effect; and director Robert Siodmak gets to show off with scenes like a single-take heist — and that opening, of course, which was so good, the two hitmen characters who briefly star in it earnt their own (radio) spin-off.

One of the great things about film noir being a trend that was observed retrospectively, as opposed to a genre that had been codified and its makers were aware of, is that you can come across well-established and widely-agreed noir films that don’t feel much like anything you’d expect of the ‘genre’. That’s true of these next three entries in my top ten (yes, from #9 to #4 is a straight run of noir). In a Lonely Place starts out like a Hollywood-insider screwball comedy, with wry observations of the industry and amusing rat-a-tat dialogue. But then there’s a murder — suddenly, oh so noir. But kinda not really, because what follows is more of a character study. To say too much would be spoilersome, other than to add that Humphrey Bogart’s performance starts out as fairly standard fare for the star, but develops into something incredible.

Even more so than In a Lonely Place, here’s a noir that’s almost (almost) one in technicality only. James M. Cain’s novel about a housewife struggling to make her way, while contending with a self-absorbed and demanding daughter, has been described as a psychological thriller, but plays on screen as a familial melodrama — except screenwriter Ranald MacDougall’s adaptation adds a murder investigation framing device, sliding it sideways into noir. The end result runs all three simultaneously, to magnificent effect.

At first blush, this might not look like your typical noir: it’s centred on a grifting New York talent agent (Tony Curtis, in what feels like the role he was born to play) and an influential newspaper columnist (Burt Lancaster, also excellent), the former desperate for the attention of the latter to promote his clients. Hardly the world of private dicks and gangsters and femme fatales that you’d expect of the genre. But, really, noir is about the dark side of the American dream, and that can play out as well in the cutthroat world of Broadway as anywhere. Like every great dystopia, it’s made to seem so appealing you want to be part of it, even as we’re shown that to actually live it would be horrid.

There’s been a sense from some quarters that Oppenheimer represents writer-director Christopher Nolan finally realising his potential as a Serious Filmmaker, making this clearly his best film. I don’t know about that (I love Bond-type films at least as much as Nolan himself, so my taste still errs toward The Dark Knight and Inception and maybe even Tenet, and we can’t disregard The Prestige or Interstellar either), but there’s no doubting this is his most “mature” work to date. It is, to be clear, a stunning achievement — a three-hour partially-black-and-white character-driven drama, mostly told through scenes of men (and occasionally women) sitting in rooms talking, that is gripping throughout. But even that description is reductive, because there’s so much more going on in the way Nolan tells this story — the juggling of time; the use of montage. He’s always done that kind of thing to an extent (Memento, Inception, and Dunkirk foreground it), but here it feels less formalised, more intuitive, and that pays dividends.

It took me a long time to get round to this, meaning it had been through multiple praise/backlash cycles, so I approached it with an odd mix of hype and trepidation. As it turned out, it’s very much My Kinda Thing: science fiction with big ideas; character drama with big emotions; action with a sense of fun; all cut with enough comedy and bizarreness to take the edge off any earnestness, but without undermining the heart. And when I say “bizarreness”, I truly mean it — it’s not just “ooh, a little quirky”, but tossed through with crazy, random concepts. I’m sure some people find that kind of thing off-putting, but for me, it just makes it all that much more fun.

If Knives Out felt zeitgeisty in its pillorying of rich people, Glass Onion is full-on prophetic: the character the plot revolves around is a thinly-veiled spot-on parody of idiot-billionaire Elon Musk, but the film was only released as the depths of his stupidity were beginning to be publicly exposed. His disastrous reign at Twitter X has only further clarified the parallels. If Glass Onion has a problem, that may be it: its cast of influencers and wannabes are sometimes more caricatures than characters. Or maybe that’s just the fault of the vapidity of the modern world. Either way, it offers a murder mystery narrative full of clever reveals and reversals, rewarding both if you try to second-guess it (good luck) or just allow yourself to be swept along. [Full review.]

As usual, getting the 103 new films I watched in 2023 down to a top ten proved a challenge. Indeed, as the statistics ultimately revealed, this was a year of high quality, so it follows naturally that it would be hard to narrow it down to just a small number of favourites. Now, while I always include some “honourable mentions” at this point in my “best of” post, I don’t normally just list films that almost made it in to my top ten. I figure if I’m going to do that, I may as well just expand the list. But I’m making something of an exception this year, simply because the final list ended up so dominated by noir that I watched for WDYMYHS. Maybe that was inevitable when I put specific effort into watching a pile of highly-acclaimed movies from a genre I love, but it also feels kinda unfair.

So, other films that made it as far as my “top 20” list, but didn’t quite go all the way, included (in alphabetical order) The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, The Pied Piper, Remember the Night, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Shiva Baby. There were also a couple more noirs that didn’t quite make it: Nightmare Alley and Scarlet Street. All great films, but there’s only so much room.

Indeed, if my top ten was based on films’ best individual sequences rather than, y’know, the entire movie, there are some “almost made it”s that would actually top the chart — films like Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (for Revolting Children, a proper anthem of a song by Tim Minchin that Matthew Warchus directs the hell out of) and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (for the whole train climax… or the Rome car chase… or even just the absolutely perfect cut into the opening titles) and John Wick: Chapter Four (for… oh God, I can’t even decide: it’s wall-to-wall extravagantly fantastic action set pieces). Some films from the actual top ten would feature in such a list too, like the opening diner sequence from The Killers, or the finale of Oppenheimer (so good, even the Linkin Park meme version is a banger).

Moving away from the top ten itself, let’s recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month — some of which have already been mentioned in this post, but some of which haven’t. In chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Glass Onion, Ace in the Hole (another great noir!), Everything Everywhere All at Once, Scarlet Street, The Shiver of the Vampires, In a Lonely Place, Night and the City, All the Old Knives, The Pied Piper, Alien Love Triangle, The Killers, and Mildred Pierce.

Finally, as always, a mention for the 17 films that earned a 5-star rating this year. All ten of my top ten made the grade this year, but the other seven were (again, in alphabetical order) Ace in the Hole, The Banshees of Inisherin, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Pied Piper, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Scarlet Street.

With the caveat that I’ve inevitably forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films designated as being from 2023 that I haven’t yet seen. They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, representing a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

Anatomy of a Fall
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Asteroid City
Barbie
Bottoms
The Boy and the Heron
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Cocaine Bear
The Creator
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
The Exorcist: Believer
Expend4bles
Extraction 2
Fast X
Ferrari
Five Nights at Freddy’s
The Flash
Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
The Killer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Knock at the Cabin
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The Little Mermaid
Maestro
The Marvels
May December
Meg 2: The Trench
Napoleon
No Hard Feelings
Past Lives
Plane
Poor Things
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
Saltburn
Saw X
Scream VI
Silent Night
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
Wish
Wonka

So, that’s it for 2023. All wrapped up within the first week, same as last year. I feel like I’ve got this down to some kind of science. (Oops — fate: tempted. Next year I’ll probably wind up having to post this stuff throughout the whole of January.)

And with a new week — the second of the year, already — beginning tomorrow, I feel like there’s no time to waste: onwards to 2024!