The Best Movie of 2023

Considering 2023 was a year that saw some real lows for the movie industry – specifically the near-complete shutdown of Hollywood for months due to the writers and actors strikes – it also had some moments of genuine affirmation for fans of the cinema who have been fearing that the good old act of going to the movies may be on its way out. From Five Nights at Freddy’s to Taylor Swift’s music doc of her Eras Tour to two of our nominees for Best Movie of 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer, there wound up being some legit “you gotta see these movies at the movies” moments this year.

It’s always a tricky thing picking our Best Movie nominees for the IGN Awards each year, because while we are aware of, and in some cases adore, the more hoity-toity arthouse fare that critics groups may go for during the inevitable EOY awards rush, we are also lovers of movies of all kinds – superhero movies, horror movies, sci-fi movies, and perhaps best of all… Keanu Reeves movies! However, these types of films don’t always get the level of recognition they deserve in other year-end round-ups or at awards shows. But they’re an integral part of what keeps the Hollywood machine ticking, and we at IGN can’t live without them.

So our picks for the best of 2023 range that very gamut and beyond, from the latest Martin Scorsese epic to the return of Miles Morales and his friends. From Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the man behind the A-bomb to the culmination of Baba Yaga’s four-film odyssey, we have tried to represent our favorite films from across the spectrum. But what is IGN’s Best Movie of the Year? Let’s get into it…

The Best Movie of 2023

Runner-Up: John Wick: Chapter 4

There’s no way that Keanu Reeves playing gun fu for the fourth and maybeeee final time was going to escape our consideration, as the John Wick movies have become one of our premiere franchises since its debut nine years ago. Add to that the almost three-hour running time (in a good way), the continued escalation of the series’ stunts and gun battles by director Chad Stahelski and his team, and the culmination of Wick’s storyline, and it’s no wonder the IGN staff voted Chapter 4 into contention.

Reeves is game as ever to blow guys away for, like, 20 minutes at a time, and Stahelski, having directed all four films, continues to find new and interesting ways to present said blowing away (an extended sidearm ballet amid the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is particularly mesmerizing). But it’s new player Donnie Yen as blind High Table killer Caine who steals the show as he’s forced to hunt down his old friend. And vice versa. That Caine is seeking to protect a loved one while Wick’s entire story began with the death of a loved one brings a sort of perfect symmetry to the saga.

That said, the film received just 6.7% of the vote – a respectable showing, but not enough to get a room at the Continental, let alone take the top prize here. But John Wick was never about winning it all anyway. He just wanted to carve out his small place of peace in the world with his dog. In fact, we hope that he’s reading this somewhere right now, taking some small comfort in the fact that the fourth film in the John Wick series is being recognized as a runner-up for best movie of the year. To quote Wick himself, “Yeah.”

Runner-Up: Killers of the Flower Moon

Cinema legend Martin Scorsese beat out Keanu Reeves this year, but just barely, nabbing 8.3% of the vote for his adaptation (with Forrest Gump scripter Eric Roth) of the non-fiction David Grann book Killers of the Flower Moon. This is the “see, we like serious movies too” part of our nominees because you know what? We do.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and a standout Lily Gladstone head a cast of familiar faces (Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, etc.) in the true story of a series of Native American murders that took place over a number of years in the early 20th century in Osage County, Oklahoma. While DiCaprio and De Niro deliver expected and terrific-as-always DiCaprio and De Niro performances, it’s Gladstone who brings it all together as the woman who endures the tragedy happening around her as her fellow Osage tribespeople are seemingly dying for the basest of reasons: greed.

An epic at three-and-a-half hours, Scorsese’s film is a mix of genres – crime, mystery, western, romance, and more – but it’s still a Scorsese movie, and all that has come to represent, as Killers of the Flower Moon looks deeply, unflinchingly, into the evil that men do.

Runner-Up: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse did what most sequels can’t, simultaneously making everything bigger while also making everything better. Well, maybe not better, because the first film, Into the Spider-Verse, was pretty freaking good. So let’s just say Across the Spider-Verse is “more good.” Is that grammatically correct?

Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld and Jake Johnson return as, respectively, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and Peter B. Parker, three of our favorite Spider-People. But they’re also joined by a variety of new faces – that’s what a multiverse is for, after all – including Jason Schwartzman’s comic/tragic/eventually scary villain The Spot and Oscar Isaac’s anti-hero (or worse?) Miguel O'Hara/Spider-Man 2099. (There’s also, of course, Spider-Woman, the Indian Spider-Man, Spider-Punk, and many, many more faces populating this film. It’s a Spider-Fan’s dream come true.)

Across the Spider-Verse represents the animation genre on our Best Movie list, with 20% of the IGN staff voting for it as their top movie (Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron is also one of our honorable mentions), and it’s no wonder considering the amazing artistry and innovation of the picture. Whereas the first film’s visual inventiveness took a little getting used to for some viewers, by now this series has essentially become a tastemaker to be copied in terms of design.

That said, it seems likely that the film’s cliffhanger ending took some of the wind out of the Spider-Verse sails during the vote – people were surprised that the film ended with no real resolution. But still, we are very much ready for the next chapter of Miles’ story. And heck, Beyond the Spider-Verse will be here before you know it.

Runner-Up: Oppenheimer

It wasn’t much of a surprise that our top pair of movies wound up being the two halves of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and really we’d have it no other way. As both Oppenheimer and Barbie took the box office by storm this past July and made going to the theater relevant again in a way that had been missing largely since before the pandemic, it just feels right.

And it was a close race too, right up until the final day of voting when Christopher Nolan’s biopic was tied with Greta Gerwig’s fantasy/comedy. But in the end, Oppenheimer fell just a bit short, garnering 25% of the vote compared to Barbie’s 30%.

Starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who’s considered the father of the atomic bomb, Nolan’s film unfolds over two timelines – you know how much the filmmaker loves to play with time. One timeline is the past, largely set during Oppenheimer’s early career and then the development of the bomb, and the other is in the “present,” or post-bomb period where the scientist was forced to reckon with his creation and what it meant for humanity. These timelines are also separated by perspective, as one is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view while the other is told from the point of view of Lewis Strauss, a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission played by Robert Downey, Jr. in a delightful pivot from his Tony Stark persona.

Nolan’s storytelling conceits and visual tricks keep Oppenheimer from being more than just another historical biography, and Murphy is excellent as the obsessed scientist who changed the world forever, and then had to live with that inescapable fact.

Winner: Barbie

Like Oppenheimer, Barbie brought people out once again for the movie theater experience. You saw all those pictures of folks dressed in pink filing in to see Greta Gerwig’s movie, you shared all the memes on social media, and maybe, just maybe, you remembered that sometimes there’s more to movies than just sitting on the couch with remote in hand… And the fact that this was all for the live-action adaptation of a Mattel toy? It just makes it all the more astounding.

Hollywood has an appetite – an all-consuming hunger – for recognizable licenses to adapt. So of course a Barbie movie was going to happen eventually (it had been in development in various forms going back at least as far as 2009). But the fact that Gerwig and star/producer Margot Robbie were able to take the concept of “Barbie” the doll and turn it into a story that had genuine resonance for people – and not just women – in the year 2023 is frankly exciting. Yes, the studios want their big, recognizable franchise names to drive butts into seats, and to also sell secondary merchandise around, but that such a project could be done in such a fun, funny, and sweet way has to be heartening for movie fans everywhere.

Even as mega-franchises like the MCU appear to be losing steam, we can see in our Best Movies of 2023 list that it’s not as simple as just saying audiences don’t want big movies or sequels based on famous characters anymore. For every Oppenheimer, there’s a Barbie or a Spider-Verse or a John Wick – quality films of all kinds that are doing new and interesting things, even if it’s with familiar characters or concepts. And they’re giving us a reason to go to the actual movies along the way.

Barbie, you did it. And we want more movies like you for now on.