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I’ve said it more than once and I’ll say it again: I don’t like using best-of lists and rankings to organize works of art. It’s a practice that only makes sense to me if the pieces being pitted against each other are, say, pulling from the exact same source material and working to achieve a similar outcome (and even then). 

I see more loosely put-together lists like the one below — which encompasses my favorite new releases I was able to catch before the end of 2023 (I still have so many things to see) — as fairer, more a venue to reflect and to pull readers in directions with which they might be unfamiliar. I was lucky in 2023 in that I rarely encountered a movie I outright hated; I was rewarded with an abundance of striking, original works made by both emerging and established filmmakers, some of which found a big audience and some of which were unfairly overlooked. Read on for my favorite movies of 2023, in no particular order (with the caveat that Northwest filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up was indeed my very favorite). 

Read the full list on 425.