The best movies of 2023 so far

It’s only February, but it’s already been a great year at the movies.

We’ve had surprise box-office hits, strong genre fare, early awards contenders, and everything else in between. If the first two months of 2023 are any indication, it’s looking to be a fantastic year for cinema.

We’re launching our list of the best movies of 2023 in February, but we will continue to update it as the year goes along, adding our favorite movies as we catch up with them. At the end of the year, this will then turn into our definitive list, with our staff voting on the best movies of 2023.

For now, consider this a sampling platter — a rolling list that encapsulates the many different kinds of good movies that have been released this year, and the different tastes in movies we have on our staff. There’s plenty in here for any kind of movie watcher to enjoy.

Because this list is not ranked (yet), we’ll be listing the entries in reverse chronological order. That means the most recent release will be listed first, and then the next most recent, all the way down to the earliest release of the year that we liked. That also means new additions will be surfaced earlier in the list. Because we’re thinking of you, dear reader.

Without further ado, here are the best movies of 2023 so far, and where to watch them. Enjoy!

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Talk to Me

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 34m
Directors: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Cast: Sophie Wilde, Joe Bird, Miranda Otto, Alexandra Jensen

Talk to Me is like the horror-movie version of a perfect comedy sketch. It’s got a perfect premise, a brilliant turn you saw coming from the start but that hits even better than you expected, and it ends before it wears out its welcome. It helps that it’s also one of the most stylish and shocking horror movies of the last few years.

The film brings a twist to the more traditional demonic possession narrative: A few kids have acquired the hand of a dead person, and if you say the right words and grasp the hand, you can summon a spirit back from the dead and even invite them into your body. So like all good teens, the kids immediately use possession as a party drug. As it turns out, if you don’t let the spirit overstay its welcome, you can ride the temporary high without losing control forever — all you have to do is drop the hand and you’re good. As you might imagine, someone eventually isn’t quite as precise with their timing as they should be.

Once the movie’s turn hits and a demon overstays its welcome, the film shows off a flash of brilliant violence, and filmmaking, and queasy makeup work at its absolute, stomach-churning best.

Between its abrupt bursts of violence, possession-party montages, and creeping family tension, by the time Talk to Me’s brisk (just under 90 minutes before the credits roll) run time is up, it feels like you were one of the lucky kids who let go of the demon hand at exactly the right moment for the maximum high. —Austen Goslin

Talk to Me premiered at Sundance and will be at South by Southwest. It is expected in theaters this summer.

Theater Camp

Genre: Comedy
Run time: 1h 34m
Directors: Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman
Cast: Jimmy Tatro, Ben Platt, Molly Gordon, Noah Galvin

All great camp movies are about found family, and there are few subcultures that theme fits better with than theater kids. Theater Camp, the new movie from Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, is well aware of this and plays its excellent (and specific) jokes to the cheap seats for an audience it knows has felt its characters’ pains and joys themselves.

Theater Camp is a mockumentary about a performance-art camp whose beloved founder falls ill and passes the camp off to her bro-y YouTuber son, Troy, played by American Vandal’s Jimmy Tatro. Troy and the documentary crew following the camp then introduce us to a lovable cast of friends who find themselves misfits anywhere else. Of course, the camp is losing money thanks to how much Troy’s mom was racking up debt to make everyone happy, and it’s up to Troy and the kids to save the camp with one big show.

Perhaps Theater Camp’s biggest strength is how expertly it walks the line of poking fun at its characters without ever laughing at them or letting us lose sympathy. It’s a movie full of theater people who all love what they do enough to realize the parts of it that deserve a little bit of playful mocking. Most importantly, by playing so far inside its own lane, with in-jokes aplenty, it still manages to hit broad enough comedy to pull laughs from someone who’s never set foot on a stage — thanks in large part to the ridiculous commitment of Jimmy Tatro.

What Theater Camp understands best about its subjects, and what Tatro’s YouTuber character fits perfectly into, is that being a theater kid means never really leaving a stage. It’s all performance, whether it’s for an audience, your best friend, your campmates, or alone to yourself. And it doesn’t really matter if you’re laughing or crying, as long as you enjoyed the show. —AG

Theater Camp premiered at Sundance and will be at South by Southwest.

Polite Society

Genre: Action comedy
Run time: 1h 43m
Director: Nida Manzoor
Cast: Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya, Nimra Bucha

Imagine your sister has dropped out of art school — sure, OK, who hasn’t taken a break from their studies? Now imagine she’s also engaged to some jabroni she’s only known for a month. It’s a little more concerning, considering she used to be your partner in crime, there to encourage and film every new stunt move. This (admittedly increasingly specific) hypothetical is the lived reality for Ria (Priya Kansara), who dreams of being a stuntwoman and loves her sister deeply. Of course, the combination of those two things means she does what any of us would: plan a wedding heist to rescue her sister from what’s surely a fate worse than death.

Written and directed by Nida Manzoor, Polite Society excels because it never feels like Ria’s mindset is wrong per se — in fact, it revels in it, overflowing with style and confidence. The movie jumps between genres and tones and makes it all look easy, melding the wedding prep comedy of Lena’s (The Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) nuptials with Ria’s action thrill ride. Sister fights become knockdown stunts, and a beauty routine becomes literal torture.

What Polite Society has in spades is heart. It never settles into a single groove, instead dancing its way to a conclusion that pulls together all its various threads in predictably grand fashion. Ria’s story may be singular, but all of us can relate to the enthusiasm and care she brings to her life. (Even if the rest of us are still trying to nail our flying reverse spinning kick.) —Zosha Millman

Polite Society premiered at Sundance and will be released in theaters April 28.

The Outwaters

Genre: Found-footage horror
Run time: 1h 40m
Director: Robbie Banfitch
Cast: Robbie Banfitch, Angela Basolis, Scott Schamell, Michelle May

Found-footage movies don’t often feel like something new, which is exactly what makes The Outwaters so remarkable. Joining trend-bucking movies like Lake Mungo or the original Paranormal Activity, The Outwaters shakes the genre hard enough to send it straight to the gory cosmic center of horror.

The Outwaters follows a group of friends who head into a remote part of the Mojave Desert to film a music video. As the crew ventures farther and farther into the heat and sand, they eventually find something they shouldn’t have and realize it’s far too late for all of them. Up until that moment, The Outwaters feels like a normal, if a little slow, found-footage horror movie. But once things kick off in the Mojave, the movie never stops to breathe for even a second, bucking the slow ramp-up that most of the genre leans on.

Even more impressive is the way The Outwaters uses its camera. In some moments, the camera is almost self-consciously the focal point through which we see everything, like when we get a sideways view of the world as a character shuffles through the desert with the camera in their hand and their arms at their sides. Other times, the pretense of the camera feels like it melts away completely and we instead get eerie point-of-view shots, like the camera has momentarily melded with the eyes of the movie’s characters.

These moments, often lit by nothing other than a disembodied flashlight, help give the movie is creeping cosmic dread, melding found-footage staples with the feeling of being watched from just over your shoulder by a presence you can never see. Adding to this is The Outwaters’ outstanding effects and sound design, including slithering desert creatures and ominous creatures that feel like they’re emanating at once from outer space and the center of planet Earth. And that’s not to mention the movie’s copious and disgusting, but oh-so-effective, gore.

All of this may sound a little bit like a mess, but that itself is part of The Outwaters’ appeal too. Good found-footage horror transports you to the scene of something terrible, envelops you in the dread of the characters, and makes you feel like you’re part of their world. What makes The Outwaters special is that it makes you feel like you aren’t part of any world at all. —AG

The Outwaters is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.

Knock at the Cabin

Genre: Family drama (Shyamalan variant)
Run time: 1h 40m
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Rupert Grint

If you haven’t checked in with M. Night Shyamalan’s brand of earnest filmmaking in a minute, you might’ve missed that the guy’s been on a bit of a hot streak. For whatever jokes people might make about his twist endings or his rocky post-Sixth Sense years, Old found poignancy in what could be a punchline, and Glass ambitiously capped off a long-running trilogy about superherodom.

Knock at the Cabin continues this run, and it’s some of his best direction in years — maybe primarily because it’s the first story in a while that’s felt like it can bear the weight of his skill. A family (Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and Kristen Cui) suddenly find themselves held hostage by four people who claim the only way to stop the apocalypse is for their family to willingly choose one person to sacrifice. For all its philosophical prodding, Shyamalan keeps Knock at the Cabin grounded and contained. Within the titular cabin, he finds angles that tell the whole story, lingering on reactions to the sorrow in order to better show the true horror at hand. Every scene feels rich, a series of individual visual narratives getting woven together into something deeply human.

Most importantly to me, someone who likes to yell about movies, is the fact that Knock feels dense enough to bear scrutiny. Whether the sincere or ponderous or even undisguised parts of the story resonate with you almost feels beside the point. Knock at the Cabin earns its place on this list because it is a rich showcase from a director totally in control of what he’s trying to say. —ZM

Knock at the Cabin is now in theaters. It will be available for digital purchase on Feb. 21.

Infinity Pool

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 57m
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman

Death doesn’t have to be real in the world of Infinity Pool, at least not if you’re rich enough to turn it into a fun night out. Brandon Cronenberg, the director of 2020’s stellar Possessor, sets his second movie in a world that’s seemingly just like ours, with the one exception of a little island nation called La Tolqa that survives off of tourism and a very strange legal code: If someone commits a crime on the island, they will either be killed by a person they have wronged, or they can pay for a clone of themselves, one with all their exact memories and emotions, to be created and killed in their place.

The film follows Alexander Skarsgård as a writer named James Foster who’s vacationing on this island with his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), who’s also paying for everything. When James and Em meet a strange couple played by Mia Goth and Jalil Lespert, they quickly fall into a night of drinking, drunk driving, and sneaking out of the heavily guarded walls of the island’s vacation resort. When James accidentally kills a pedestrian, he gets thrown into the island’s legal system, where he has to watch himself die. But that’s just Cronenberg ramping up.

James eventually falls into a social circle so wealthy that they’ve started committing crimes just to watch themselves die, obscuring their own identities and the very concept of death so completely as to rob them of any meaning at all. Rather than let the movie sit with the unfathomable existential horror of watching a carbon copy of yourself die, and being forced to wonder if you’re still really you or whether or not you’d be able to tell the difference, Cronenberg uses this moment as a jumping-off point to dive headlong into the themes of identity and corporeal ownership that seem to obsess him — at least based on his first two movies.

Infinity Pool is a bizarre, if not as bizarre as some might hope, look into the void of identity, and one of the most queasily fascinating, and existentially dreadful, movies of 2023 so far. —AG

Infinity Pool is now in theaters, and available for digital purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu.

JUNG_E

Genre: Action/sci-fi
Run time: 1h 38m
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Cast: Kang Soo-yeon, Kim Hyun-joo, Ryu Kyung-soo

Yeon Sang-ho is consistently one of the most interesting sci-fi filmmakers working today, touching on different branches of the genre, like apocalyptic fiction (Train to Busan, Hellbound) and superhero fiction (Psychokinesis). His latest movie, JUNG_E, harkens back to even more classic science fiction touchstones: artificial intelligence, cloning, robots, and the commodification of people and bodies (with a side of the more modern “humans as data products”).

In JUNG_E, most humans have been sent fleeing to space after the ravages of climate change. Two factions have emerged from these space colonies, and have been warring for decades. Instead of a sprawling war movie, Yeon instead decides to focus on a much smaller story, much to JUNG_E’s benefit: one of a lonely scientist tasked with cloning the perfect soldier from the brain of her comatose mother. It’s a stirring performance from the late Kang Soo-yeon, who died before the release of the movie, one that requires her to interview versions of her mother before shutting them down for good.

While not as consistently thrilling as some of his previous projects, JUNG_E is still very solid science fiction action fare. The movie thrives on its designs, with great creatures augmented by incredible sound effects like shifting gears and whirring machinery that bring the mechanical creatures to life. Yeon’s animation background goes a long way to making this work, clearly aiding his ability to frame and integrate CG characters into the rest of JUNG_E’s environments. It is also bookended by some banger fight scenes, which is always a plus. —Pete Volk

JUNG_E is available to watch on Netflix.

Missing

Genre: Mystery
Run time: 1h 51m
Directors: Nicholas D. Johnson, Will Merrick
Cast: Storm Reid, Nia Long, Ken Leung

If Knives Out has proven anything, it’s that people are hungry for mysteries on the big screen. Missing — the spiritual sequel to 2018’s Searching — is what people don’t know they’ve been looking for. It’s a web of clues, a mess of mystery, all played within the computer screen of June (Storm Reid), who’s left to figure out what happened when her mom (Nia Long) doesn’t return from a vacation with her boyfriend.

Where Searching eked out its mystery by showing the struggles that a father can have with modern technology, Missing flips the script, using June’s more natural understanding of the internet to complicate her investigation. It’s smart — suddenly June and the audience are getting pulled down a rabbit hole with knowing suggestion. And because she’s more fluent in the ways of the computer, the mystery gets to be more complex.

Sure, Missing can strain the credulity of the whole exercise, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. I don’t care! June should be able to hire a person in a different country to go scout security footage, or leave her FaceTime up in the background just so we can see it. Once you get on board with those needs of the story you can acknowledge just how well Missing works from start to finish: It’s twisty and fun, smarter than it needs to be as it remixes the desktop-based tropes of Searching (and, in part, the mystery genre as a whole) to build a satisfyingly well-paced mystery. The mystery genre deserves more, movies that feels big and meaty. And whether it’s splashed across the big screen or just a computer one, Missing manages to bring its A game. —ZM

Missing is now in theaters. It will be available for digital purchase March 7.

Broker

Genre: Crime dramedy
Run time: 2h 9m
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Bae Doona, Lee Ji-eun

Shoplifters is one of my favorite movies of the 2010s, so it makes sense that I would be similarly susceptible to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s newest found-family movie, Broker.

Kore-eda’s second production outside of Japan (following 2019’s French production The Truth), Broker is another story about a group of people without ill intent committing crimes to survive. This time, it’s two men (Song Kang-ho and Gang Dong-won) who sell babies dropped off at a church’s baby box on the adoption black market. But when a young woman (Lee Ji-eun, also known as the singer IU) changes her mind and returns to pick up her baby, she learns of their scheme and becomes entangled in it.

The result is a sometimes messy depiction of a series of weighty concepts: The impossible expectations of motherhood in a society that doesn’t adequately provide support, the way children are treated as objects instead of people with autonomy, and of the many different forms family units can take. But it’s not the narrative that draws me to Broker. Instead, it’s Kore-eda’s camera, aided by master cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite, Burning). Broker is a breathtaking movie, contrasting gorgeous seaside images with cramped car interiors, and often shooting Lee’s character Moon So-young wide with empty space around her or close with her face obscured, highlighting her isolation from the world around her. Kore-eda is one of the finest at cinematic blocking we have today, and it is on exquisite display in Broker.

The performances from the cast also stand out and make Broker special. Song Kang-ho and Bae Doona reunite for the fourth time (and the first since 2018’s The Drug King), delivering electrifying performances — Song as another shifty, funny schemer who is in way over his head, and Bae as a hard-headed cop pursuing them on the road. But it’s Lee Ji-eun who steals the show as So-young, with a fierce intelligence and hardened worldview concealed by a veneer of youthful innocence. Plus one very adorable baby. That never hurts. —PV

Broker will be available for digital rental or purchase Feb. 21.

Sick

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 23m
Director: John Hyams
Cast: Gideon Adlon, Bethlehem Million, Dylan Sprayberry

A slick April 2020 period piece (remember wiping down cereal boxes?) from one of our great undersung directors, Sick is another solid genre entry this year that brought new life to the COVID slasher.

In Sick, two friends travel to a cabin in the woods at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. One is explicitly going to quarantine, to help prevent her from exposing her at-risk father to the disease. One is just trying to get away from school. When the two of them start getting creepy texts, an unwelcome visitor arrives and changes the nature of their getaway.

Director John Hyams is a master at building tension, as seen in his heralded direct-to-video masterpiece Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, but also in other underrated works like the Netflix zombie show Black Summer and the thriller Alone. He brings that energy to Sick, and it’s much to the movie’s benefit — eschewing music in favor of natural eerie sounds like buzzing electricity to heighten the anxiety in the movie.

Hyams’ background in action also helps — there are some gnarly kills in this movie, with a standout fight scene in a dorm room in the beginning. He also loves ambitious one-take shots, and we see a few of them in Sick as well.

The COVID stuff is hit-or-miss for me in Sick — some of it works, some of it doesn’t — but what’s undeniable is the craft on display. Hyams’ action sequences and penchant for building tension move the story along at a brisk pace, and it’s a nice movie to look at — even the night scenes are lit well, which is a lesson some other recent horror movies could take some notes from. Another thing some other movies could take notes on: It’s 83 minutes long. —PV

Sick is available to watch on Peacock.

Thunivu

Genre: Crime thriller
Run time: 2h 26m
Director: H. Vinoth
Cast: Ajith Kumar, Manju Warrier, Samuthirakani

Tired of snark-heavy action heroes, or ones that rely on relatability? Looking for something closer to the larger-than-life action heroes of the Hollywood days of yore, who seemed to define “cool”? Look no further than Thunivu, a delightful Tamil-language heist movie with one of the suavest bank robbers you will ever meet.

In Thunivu, a group of criminals intricately plan a bank job, complete with miniatures. They’ve thought of everything: the timing, the location, having an inside man, and the escape. But they couldn’t plan for Dark Devil, a master operative who is already there, also planning to rob the bank.

Thunivu takes on this big-time bank robbery from all angles: the robbers (and there are many), the police, the corporate executives, the government, the public, the media — you name it, it plays a significant role.

Much of Thunivu takes place inside the bank, with multiple explosive action sequences. The movie effectively sets us up for that with the opening planning sequence: Using miniatures and an immersive camera that flies through the rooms, it gives the audience a grounding in the geography of the bank, making it easier to follow when things get hectic.

The action is strong, too — there are impressive stunts and lots of explosions, and Thunivu effectively uses lively camera movements, slow-motion effects, wirework, and VFX to augment the stylized action. And like any good heist narrative, Thunivu slowly unspools narrative complications, revealing schemes upon schemes to keep the audience guessing.

But the real heart of the movie is star Ajith Kumar, who brings an unreal level of swagger and charm to the silver-haired Dark Devil. (He comes by it honestly, too — he previously took a sabbatical from acting to try his hand at being a professional race car driver, and even competed in Formula 2). Always smiling, always confident, always in control, we’re introduced to him in an explosive manner that quickly sells us on both his charm and his hyper-competence with violence. It’s a true movie star performance, and one that Thunivu successfully hitches its wagon to. —PV

Thunivu is available to watch on Netflix.

M3GAN

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 42m
Director: Gerard Johnstone
Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald

The anxiety about AI art, AI writing, and AI just overall ingesting everything humans create and then spitting it all back out again in new forms has hit a fresh high in 2023, which makes it a good year for a fresh take on the tired old “new technology is inevitably scary and evil” horror trope. But as evil AI by way of the Chucky movies goes, M3GAN is refreshingly funny and engaging, on top of actually being reasonably scary. Allison Williams stars as the tech whiz who’s so unnerved by being granted guardianship over her dead sister’s kid that she builds that kid a robot companion to handle all the difficult aspects of parenting. And then the robot gets protective. Scripted by Akela Cooper with the same shamelessly messy, giddy verve she brought to Malignant, M3GAN isn’t deathless, uplifting cinema. But it’s an unabashed good time for horror fans, who will catch the referential humor and wink-wink acknowledgements to the silliness of this whole endeavor, and then get some solid thrills out of the action to boot. —Tasha Robinson

M3GAN is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu.