Six best films of 2023 so far

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Critics can occasionally do with a custard pie to the face. How else to take the biggest cinema hit of the year so far: the all-conquering Super Mario Bros Movie? That a film this wilfully, pointedly dull has become the most popular title of 2023 serves as a blunt reminder of the gulf between film-snob favourites and what often works at the box office. (And yes I know it’s for kids; kids’ movies can still blow your mind.)

And yet, with half the year over, all manner of excellence and invention has made it up on screen too. (Some of it even drawing a crowd.) So with the moviegoing world’s limited attention span about to be claimed by the triple whammy of Oppenheimer, Barbie and Tom Cruise accepting another Mission: Impossible, it feels a good moment to spotlight the best six films of 2023 so far.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

These are hard times for the feature documentary: fine work is still being made, but it is struggling for space in cinemas or on once-supportive streamers. When better then, to seek out All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s chronicle of artist Nan Goldin battling the art-washing of Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of notorious painkiller OxyContin. The raw reportage is hugely compelling; the woven-in portrait of Goldin makes the film unmissable. On digital platforms in the UK and US

Asteroid City

Even for a fan of the mannered stylings of Wes Anderson, his new story of a tiny American desert resort, Asteroid City, might set the teeth itching. (If I offered refunds to dissatisfied customers, I’d bankrupt myself.) But for my money, there’s wonderment here if you stick with it. For one, a crackerjack hyper-retro production design of the kind it’s too easy to be blasé about. For two, wrapped inside it, a film that gives the lie to the idea of the director as nothing but a delivery system for whimsy. Deep down, the movie is as heavy as the bomb. In cinemas now

The Beasts

Some filmmakers would take the real criminal case that inspires The Beasts and turn it into a police procedural. Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen does things differently — and brilliantly. Unfolding in the hills of rural Galicia, the story concerns an escalating feud between a local family and a French couple arrived to become organic farmers. But Sorogoyen holds every aspect of what transpires up to the light, asking us to look hard at the human factor at the heart of events. Simply put, The Beasts is stunning, and all but impossible to shake from the mind. On Curzon Home Cinema in the UK

EO

You hope that EO isn’t the last film directed by veteran Polish maestro Jerzy Skolimowski, 85 this year. But if we can safely call this his late career, the movie is a grand addition to it. As if in response to recent zoological documentaries Gunda and Cow, Skolimowski stages an odyssey for the stoic grey donkey of the title. The result is a vivid riff on Robert Bresson’s stark arthouse landmark Au Hasard Balthazar, but made with dark wit and kaleidoscopic brio, and doubling as a travelogue through modern Europe. On digital platforms

Saint Omer

Call it the collective unconscious that two of the year’s most remarkable films have channelled the same idea: the power of the verbatim. Tina Satter’s Reality built a mesmeric movie from the word-for-word detail of the FBI interrogation of American whistleblower Reality Winner. Meanwhile, documentary maker Alice Diop’s dramatic debut Saint Omer used court transcripts as the basis of the script, a haunting study of a young woman accused of killing her baby. In both cases, nothing but the truth proved to have singular power. On digital platforms

Tár

It feels as if this list should spotlight films that might have fallen through the cracks more than movies that have already been surrounded by chatter. (Hence the lack of plugs for Till and The Fabelmans, contenders in the last awards season that snuck into this year’s UK release schedule.) So put it down to the sheer charisma of Cate Blanchett’s orchestral svengali Lydia Tár that I still can’t avoid including her much-discussed portrait by writer-director Todd Field in Tár. Between them, they made the movies a far more interesting place. On digital platforms

What are your favourite films of the year so far? Let us know in the comments below