What is the best film of 2023?

By IQ Score on TV Intelligentsia, Oppenheimer (Best Picture) and The Zone of Interest (193) anchor the year's Masterclass tier. Past Lives, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall, and Poor Things round out the canonical entries.

Why is The Zone of Interest ranked so high?

The Zone of Interest (Glazer, 2023) scores 193 on the TVI rubric, among the highest scores in the entire database. The film's formal commitment to rendering the Auschwitz commandant's family domestic life with documentary-grade banality (the camp violence is heard, never shown) is the rare prestige-cinema work whose form IS the argument.

Was Barbenheimer 2023 a watershed moment?

The July 21, 2023 simultaneous release of Oppenheimer (Nolan) and Barbie (Gerwig) became the year's defining cultural moment, both films broke commercial expectations while operating at very different prestige-and-commercial registers. The 'Barbenheimer' meme drove theatrical attendance at a scale post-COVID Hollywood badly needed.

Cinema · 2023 Ranked

Best Films of 2023, Ranked by IQ Score

The year auteur cinema dominated theatrical and Oscar conversation simultaneously. The films of 2023, ranked by IQ Score.

2023 is the year auteur cinema dominated theatrical and Oscar conversation simultaneously. Oppenheimer (Nolan, Best Picture), The Zone of Interest (Glazer), Past Lives (Song), Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese), Anatomy of a Fall (Triet), Poor Things (Lanthimos), all released within twelve months.

The structural argument for 2023-as-canonical-year: the Barbenheimer summer-2023 cultural phenomenon, Scorsese's most-ambitious epic since The Irishman, Glazer's first feature in 10 years winning Best International Feature, Celine Song's directorial debut anchoring Best Picture conversation, and the Greta Gerwig + Christopher Nolan + Greta Lee + Sofia Coppola simultaneous-2023-release year.

19 titles · ranked by IQ Score

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Best Films of 2023, Ranked by IQ Score

The Zone of Interest

Oppenheimer

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Holdovers

The Boy and the Heron

May December

Poor Things

Anatomy of a Fall

Asteroid City

Priscilla

Showing Up

The Killer

Barbie

Maestro

Saltburn

American Fiction

Past Lives

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

John Wick: Chapter 4

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