The (Objectively) Best Movies of 2023
Thomas Flightâs Totally Objective and Scientifically Rigorous List of The Top 10 Best Movies of 2023â˘
Itâs December, which means I spent a lot of my month catching up on movies, working on my Best Movies of 2023 list, and perusing the many other best of the year lists.
At some point during the month I thought it would be interesting if someone used all these lists to rank the movies in all these lists and make some kind of meta-list of the best movies of the year. Rotten Tomatoes presumably kinda does this, but not really in the way that I wanted. And so, not finding anyone who does this1 I decided to take the task upon myself.
An âobjectiveâ Best Movies of 2023 isnât truly possible. Really all these list should be called âour favoriteâ but Iâm not here to get into a debate with the cultural lexicon. However if we add up all the subjective individual best of lists, we should end up with a slightly-less-subjective list of the top movies, which for brevityâs sake weâll just call objective.
Thereâs a bunch of ways you could collect and score this data, and Iâm not saying I chose the best method, but it seemed to work okay, so here was my pretty hap-hazard approach:
I collected a bunch of lists from individual critics and various aggregation sites. (List of my sources below). I didnât have a method really for which ones I chose, I mostly went with the top results until I had what felt like a significant sample size. (n=~212). Then from each list I pulled the top 10 movies (had to cut it off somewhere I donât have all day) and scored the films in a spreadsheet. Each film got a score based on where it ranked in each list.
Then you add up the scores and presto:
Thomas Flightâs Totally Objective and Scientifically Rigorous List of The Top 10 Best Movies of 2023â˘
Past Lives [95]
Oppenheimer [92]
Killers of The Flower Moon [90]
Poor Things [71]
Barbie [65]
Zone of Interest [53]
The Holdovers [44]
Asteroid City [44]
May December [43]
Showing Up [39]
Anatomy of a Fall [38]
All of Us Strangers [37]
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse [34]
The Boy and The Heron [26]
Passages [24]
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 [24]
Fallen Leaves [21]
Super Mario Bros The Movie [20]
Menus-Plaisirs â Les Troisgros [17]
A Thousand and One [13]
I think itâs a pretty solid list overall. Iâve seen most of these and all the ones Iâve seen Iâd consider to at least be a good movie (Note: Super Mario Bros The Move is one of the ones I havenât seen). Itâs even a pretty diverse list; weâve got MCU films, a 4 hour documentary about a Michelin Star restaurant, and basically the whole gamut in between.
I love that Past Lives is getting so much love, even though it wasnât at the top of my list, itâs one of the most beautiful movies of the year, was an absolute joy to watch and Iâm so excited to see what Celine Song does in the future.
With the exception of Menus-Plaisirs â Les Troisgros all of these ranked on at least 3 of the sources I pulled from. Many of the top 10 ranked on 7-10 different lists. Honestly the only big shocker is Super Mario Bros The Movie, which only made it in because I included Box Office numbers and Letterboxdâs âMost Popularâ ranking. But hey, this is cold, hard science so who am I to argue.
Hereâs the list of list I sourced from:
Sight and Sound: The 50 best films of 2023
Metacritic - Top Rated Movies of 2023
Letterboxd: Top Rated Movies of 2023
Letterboxd: Most Popular Movies of 2023
IMDB: The Top 10 Movies of 2023
Rolling Stone: The 20 Best Movies of 2023
Polygon: The 50 best movies of 2023, ranked
Worldwide Box Office: Top 2023 Movies
The New Yorker: The Best Movies of 2023
Vulture: The Best Movies of 2023
Esquire: The 65 Best Movies of 2023
The New York Times: Best Movies of 2023
Rotten Tomatoes: Best New Movies of 2023 Ranked
Vanity Fair: The Best Movies of 2023
USA Today: What was the best movie of 2023?
Collider: The 30 Best Movies of 2023
Variety: The Best Movies of 2023
IndieWire: The 25 Best Movies of 2023
Cahiers du Cinema Names Best Films of 2023
TIME: The 10 Best Movies of 2023
Hollywood Reporter: The Best Films of 2023
That should tide us over, at least until we get to the truly objective measure of quality: The Golden Globes.
Happy New Year everyone! Hereâs to another great year for film.
Special Thanks this year to the Nebula Viewers, Patrons, and Paid Subscribers on Substack for helping support my work!
If anyone out there is doing this please let me know. Iâm sure there are other people who would be better suited for the spreadsheets and calculations involved in this than I am.
21 being the number of individual sources I pulled from, but since some of these (like the Sight and Sound Poll) use a large sample to come up with their ranking theoretically this number is much higher.
I'm always delighted any time A Thousand and One makes one of these lists. I feel like I didn't see many people talking about it, either on social media (for whatever that's worth) or podcasts or mid-year lists. But it's such an incredible film.
I don't know about you, but I thought this was a pretty strong year, at least at the high end. For example, I too adored Past Lives, but it's only at number 17 on my list. And Barbie couldn't crack the top 20.
Thanks for doing this - you may be aware that criticstop10.com and metacritic do/did compile an annual aggregated list of top 10 films. Both have their issues - metacritic stopped publishing them this year even though it was comprehensive, one-of-a-kind, and had a sensibly weighted scoring system; criticstop10.com is too simple in comparison (and some may argue includes some questionable critics in the name of quantity).
I admire your effort to make your own version at the same time as the inner statistician in me disagreeing with the selection of sources - they are a combination of popularity (box office, IMDb, etc) and critical opinion, which muddies the water and reduces your sample size. Then we get to Rotten Tomatoes and their use of a (in my opinion) flawed binary metric. Also... US only?
It would be good to know more about your scoring system and the weightings you have used. Happy to help with the spreadsheet and tidying things up statistically. If you do get in touch with criticstop10.com and collaborate, do consider my offer extended to them as well.