Chris Duncan
Every year, thousands of films are released from all over the world, every single one of them involving the tireless effort of large groups of people, working collaboratively, maximizing limited resources, making compromises, and getting lucky in order to see their vision come to life. Many of these efforts simply never see the light of day. Every completed and released film is, in its own way, a miracle.
The tools and means to make films are, of course, becoming much easier to access. This is an industry, however, that makes getting a film in front of an audience more difficult nearly every year. In America, we see the evidence of this in just how uniform the past few years of blockbuster filmmaking has been, how the Oscars have seemed to only consistently recognize non-white talent relatively recently, and the persistent difficulties that emerge in getting films made by diverse and marginalized voices in front of audiences.
The year 2023 was a great one for film. Cultural developments and box office trends certainly present question marks for the future of Hollywood. Who knows what the future holds? But most importantly, there were lots and lots and lots of good movies that came out from all over the world. Our attention spans are short, and our access to films is often outside of our control, so naturally, many great movies escaped our attention.
But how joyful is it to discover a great movie that you might have easily missed? It is an experience that us, as critics, so often have, an experience that feels like a privilege. And it is important, furthermore, to go to bat for films like these, to make sure they’re seen, engaged with, and appreciated. This is particularly important for critics, who of course watch more movies than most people. Hence, this year, we at Film Obsessive hope to highlight the films we feel went overlooked and underseen in 2023.
Our hope with this list is to do more than just gush about films we love. If something catches your fancy here–whether it be a performance from one of 2023’s stars in Lily Gladstone, a thrilling sports anime, or simply a charming romantic comedy—we implore you: seek these films out! You might find among them some of the best work released in 2023.
Rye Lane
So many of my favorite movies can be boiled down to this basic plot: two people, who are clearly into each other, wander around a city and fall in love. And what a year 2023 has been for that genre. There’s Celine Song’s Past Lives, Kim Tae-yang’s Mimang, Dominic Savage’s Close to You, and Raine Allen-Miller’s Rye Lane. The two people in question are Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah). They are both fresh out of a relationship, still reeling from the heartache, and yet…there’s just something about wandering aimlessly through candy-colored Peckham and Brixton that could make anybody fall in love. Well, only if you’re somebody who waves at boats (you’ll get it when you watch). — Tina Kakadelis
The Unknown Country
While Lily Gladstone is earning raves and awards buzz for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, many missed her spectacular turn in Marissa Maltz’s gorgeous directorial debut The Unknown Country. The Unknown Country is a beautiful and emotional road trip movie about Tana (Gladstone) who travels from Minnesota to Texas in search of catharsis following the death of her grandmother. She makes several stops along the way, from gas stations to motels to an Indian reservation her family lives and encounters several strangers along the way.
Working with only an outline and inspired by the likes of Wim Wenders and Agnes Varda, Maltz makes us feel like a fly on the wall to Tana’s journey. We are with Tana the entire film and feel every emotion she feels, like the joy she feels when she attends a family wedding or the fear that sits over her as she pumps gas at a dark gas station late at night. Gladstone carries the film on her shoulder, being in every frame and opening us up to everything Tana is feeling and going through, which makes the ending of the film so heartfelt and satisfying. — Kevin Wozniak
Black White and the Greys
Led by the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tumultuous events of 2020 have reverberated for three (going on four) years. While many of the drastic societal changes from that year proved to be merely temporary for circumstances, plenty of scars were carved that sting to this day. Movie plots have begun to address and include COVID and Black Lives Matter in their settings and history, albeit in small inclusions and mentions. Nonetheless, the micro-budgeted indie Black White and the Greys is one of few films, large or small, with the courage to go all the way into 2020.
Written, directed, and starring Marchelle Thurman and Casey Nelson, Black White and the Greys shows many of the tragic headlines of that year filtering through one interracial married couple quarantining together at home with their young daughter. As the months pass, the societal unrest happening far away tests the mettle of this couple, challenges moral foundations, and fractures their marriage. Kept extremely grounded, the dramatic acting in the film is extremely impressive and never hackneyed. It seems like mini-eras of history always eventually have one quintessential movie that best captures and speaks to their time period. Black White and the Greys, if discovered and appreciated by more people, can be that champion for the pandemic era. It is streaming on Tubi and available to rent or buy on Amazon and other platforms. — Don Shanahan
The Royal Hotel
The Royal Hotel slowly ratchets up the suspense, tightening its grip on the viewer without ever retreating to cheap, hyperbolic schlock. I have nothing against such schlock—it has its place. But the compulsion to over-dramatize and hyper-sensationalize with horrific violence and didactic clarity is largely overkill. Kitty Green moves in the opposite direction. By lowering stakes to a credible level, she amplifies the disquietude, tapping into the latent tensions of everyday interactions with nerve-wracking incisiveness. Delving beyond the surface notions of misogyny, chauvinism, and toxic masculinity in today’s #MeToo landscape, Green fixates on the raw and unsettling frictions women feel within inhospitable settings.
Like The Assistant, one of the few films that tackled workplace gender harassment with the nuanced sophistication it deserves, The Royal Hotel catalogs the ill-advised arrival of two young, attractive women in a backcountry Australian town overrun by volatile men. Flammable desperation pervades the proletarian setting: a desolate desert pitstop where inebriation is a survival skill and turpitude breeds amid the daily admixture of booze, lust, degrading labor, and loneliness. Thus, for two young unaccompanied women, the threat of sexual aggression lurks everywhere—underneath surly glares, barked drink orders, sexualized puns, quotidian flirtation, and the uncouth vernacular of grubby miners.
What makes The Royal Hotel especially notable is how the two leads—female backpackers from “Canada” (an inside joke obfuscating their real origins)—differ and how their distinct personalities and temperaments interpret and influence situations. Hanna (Julia Garner) attracts negative attention partially due to her standoffish attitude, sense of superiority, and pragmatic disdain toward the vulgar locals frequenting the bar she’s stuck tending. Meanwhile, Liv (Jessica Henwick) is either immune or refuses to see the insidious undertones, experiencing a more amiable milieu among the regulars.
This polarity is one of the many complex aspects of Kitty Green’s screenplay for The Royal Hotel. She populates the film with erratic figures, enigmatic encounters, and shadowy intentions because she knows that reading a scene and determining the right action forward is rarely clear. We don’t exist in a noble, well-meaning utopia; the further away from cosmopolitan safeguards one ventures, the more paranoid one must become, treating each gesture with severe caution.
Far from the beaten path in a snake-infested territory where sin and iniquity reign supreme, there’s no telling how things will end. Whether Hannah and Liv vibe with the locals or leave the town ablaze is impossible to predict, creating an ominous tension. The great storytellers lean into indeterminacy and refrain from certainty. Instead of moralizing a theme into a tautological dead-end, Green keeps her worlds perpetually combustible–ever suspended between stability and conflagration. — Paul Keelan
Brother
Clement Virgo’s Brother is a decades-spanning portrait of Black life and the immigrant experience in 1990s Canada. The film follows Michael (Lamar Johnson) and Francis (Aaron Pierre), sons of two Caribbean immigrants, who face questions of masculinity, identity, and family set in the backdrop of Toronto’s early hip hop scene in the 1990s.
Virgo, adapting David Chariandy’s novel of the same name, smartly uses a non-linear narrative to tell the story of the two brothers. Spanning twenty years, the film flips back and forth between the brothers when they are younger, to when they are older, to a time in life when Francis is no longer around. The mystery of Francis’s disappearance looms large over the film and because of its structure, the film’s finale hits like a ton of bricks.
Brother also features a commanding and textured performance by Pierre as Francis. Pierre’s performance is so strong that you can’t take your eyes off him when he’s on screen and you miss his presence when he is off it. It is one of the best performances of 2023. — Kevin Wozniak
Surrounded
It is sad to think that perhaps even less than a decade ago, a film like Surrounded, with a modestly well-known (and phenomenally talented) cast and a once-great studio behind it, would likely have seen a wide release and ample marketing push, maybe even an awards campaign. Instead, Surrounded, anchored by Letitia Wright and Jamie Bell, and featuring the final, powerful appearance of the late, great Michael K. Williams, was dumped on digital this last June.The film, which finds Wright’s Old West drifter Mo Washington guarding the captured outlaw Tommy Walsh (Jamie Bell) on the open plains as she waits for help to arrive, contends with the many different facets and parties of the world of Hollywood westerns. Its meditation on race in the western genre and American history is not necessarily revolutionary, but its cast buys into it completely, bolstering the already thrilling and visually captivating adventure at its core. — Chris Duncan
A Rising Fury
Just getting its legs on the festival circuit, the stunning documentary A Rising Fury, co-directed by Ukrainian-born filmmakers Lesya Kalynska and Ruslan Batytskyi, explores the roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War using a novelistic approach. Rather than taking the expository perspective full of maps, diagrams, expert interviews, and historical overview, the filmmakers go up close and personal, focusing primarily on an idealistic young soldier enlisted to defend his country’s fragile, hard-won independence and the intelligent, charismatic volunteer with whom he falls in love while doing so.
The film’s documentary footage is stunning, culled from on-the-ground-and-frontlines skirmishes over the last decade, some of which shows the explosive, violent nature of battle better than any fictional war film. How they managed to capture, then edit, this content is nothing short of remarkable; focusing the film’s narrative on the love and loss faced by its two protagonists lets even less-informed viewers into the tensions that mark the conflict. While U.S. funding for Ukraine dwindles and attention to the war effort disappears in our media, A Rising Fury provides a stark reminder of what the Ukrainian people are fighting to defend. — J Paul Johnson
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
William Friedkin’s passing was one of the saddest things to happen in 2023 and it was unfortunate that his final film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, was so unceremoniously dropped on Paramount+. A master like Friedkin deserves better, but the fact his final movie was a gripping, methodical, and well-performed courtroom drama makes the lack of fanfare even more baffling. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people haven’t heard of this movie or might assume it’s one of those direct-to-video movies you find on Amazon. Do yourself a favor and watch The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a film chronicling a court-martial trial about a mutiny that happens aboard the Caine ship (I love a title that tells you all you need to know about a movie).
Set almost exclusively through long monologues and testimonies in a courtroom, Friedkin captures tension and pressure to a high extent and in typical entertaining fashion. I was never bored during this movie and was enthralled by the strong performances from Jason Clarke, Jake Lacy, and a perfectly used Kiefer Sutherland. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial won’t be talked about among the masterpieces in Friedkin’s masterpieces, but it’s a wildly underrated and excellent movie. — Aqib Rasheed
The First Slam Dunk
2023 was a great year for animated movies. And though movies like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Boy and the Heron are garnering a lot of the attention (and rightly so), the animated movie that surprised me the most in 2023 and is easily one of the best is The First Slam Dunk, an exhilarating anime sports film and the best basketball movie in over a decade. Adapted from the Slam Dunk manga comics, The First Slam Dunk finds Ryota Miyagi (Shugo Nakamura), a young point guard, and his basketball team trying to win a high school championship against a tough opponent.
The film takes place during one basketball game, and there is as much drama on the court as there is off of it. We see the ups and downs of Miyagi and the team during the game; winning, losing, fouls, trash talking, and we also get backstories on every player and their relationship with Miyagi, who is still processing the death of his brother, a basketball star himself, and trying to live up to the expectations everyone has for him. The animation is stunning, the basketball action is tough and exciting, and the film is loaded with emotional ups and downs. You are rooting for Miyagi and the team while also gripped by Miyagi and team’s story. The First Slam Dunk is easily one of the great animated achievements of 2023. — Kevin Wozniak
Jules
Jules is a delightful gem of a film released with little fanfare during the 2023 SAG strike. Not many alien films are known to tug at the heartstrings, but Jules does just that thanks to an earnest, understated performance by the incomparable Ben Kingsley. Kingsley plays Milton—an aging yet stubbornly self-sufficient man whose grown daughter is concerned with his slipping memory. Things take a turn when a cute, nonverbal alien crash lands his spaceship in Milton’s yard—and Milton enlists the help of a couple nosy yet well-meaning neighbors to figure out what to do next. Jane Curtain and Harriet Sansom Harris delight in their supporting roles. A movie that provides laughs and even a few tears, Jules is a lovely little tale of lonely people coming together and forming an unlikely bond.— Cassie Hager
Linoleum
Sure, the first impression of Jim Gaffigan will likely always be his near-deadpan standup comedy persona. That may be rightfully so, but underneath that crass everyman stage act is an emerging and legitimate actor. Since 2015, he’s been hitting it hard, popping up in as many as seven films in a single year. Even better, he’s been challenging himself away from comedies with dramas and thrillers. His best performance to date, Linoleum, came and went through theaters and VOD this past February and is available on Amazon Prime.
Gaffigan plays Cameron Edwin, a failing host of a children’s TV science show who laments missing out on his dream to become an actual astronaut. At the same time his career takes a dive and his wife (an impressive performance from Rhea Seehorn) starts the legal road toward divorce, Cameron finds part of a crashed rocket in his backyard that sparks his ambition to chase that youthful dream again. That all sounds quaint enough, but there’s more to it from writer/director Colin West.
Linoleum flips everything about its ongoing midlife crisis on its head with dramatic revelations to defy all expectations. And it’s Gaffigan, of all people, front and center selling the profundity of those heartbreaking twists, in a performance that has to be seen to be believed. Linoleum has become the movie I’ve recommended to friends the most for people tired of seeing the same kind of thing. This one is a mold-breaker. — Don Shanahan
Moon Garden
As great as Moon Garden is, it may portend of even greater films yet to come from its creator. The plot isn’t too far from The Wizard of Oz, taking place largely in the fantastic mindscape of a conflicted child’s troubled imagination. Only child Emma (Haven Lee Harris), wide-eyed and cherubic, is witness to her parents’ crumbling marriage: dad Alex (Brionne Davis) is a harried novelist struggling with writer’s block and anger issues; mom Sara (Augie Duke) suffers from a depression that has her longing for a lost youth.
When little Emma witnesses a terrible fight between her parents, she flees the violent scene and falls, landing unconscious. She awakes in an eerie dark forest populated by bizarre creatures, some threatening, others helpful, her mother’s voice a muted echo far in the distance, and the little girl must find her way back to consciousness.
With this audacious debut, Mark Stevens Harris—also the film’s writer, editor, sound designer, and animator—has created a work of art that feels stunningly, remarkably, absolutely new and fresh, even as it harks back to the classics of cinema’s past. Its array of stop-motion, practical visual effects, clever puppetry, simple props, forced perspectives, miniatures, and set designs is nothing short of magical. Made on a shoestring budget, with a pitch-perfect performance from its lead child actor (Harris’s daughter) and an unearthly garden of inspired visual delights, Harris’ film is a wild and traumatic journey through the mind of a coma-ridden child that never hits a false note. — J Paul Johnson
The Passenger
This unique coming-of-age thriller stars Kyle Gallner and Johnny Berchtold. What begins as a bad day soon turns into something far worse, yet the sinister spiral which ensues quickly reveals itself to be a tragic descent.
The Passenger follows sad sack Randy Bradley. When his coworker Benson kills everyone at work with a shotgun, yet spares Randy, insisting they clean then flee the scene together.
The Passenger could have easily devolved into a bloody revenge story blasting bullies. Instead, it becomes an exploration of violence’s futility. Each scene gets deeper into the troubled main characters, and the layers of this onion increasingly make clear violence cannot solve their issues.
Kyle Gallner makes the dangerous Benson hypnotic, intensifying scenes with a toxic swagger that becomes less badass and more of a sad testament to someone fatally broken. Meanwhile, Berchtold is a gem as the meek Bradley desperate for a way out. — Jay Rohr
Shortcomings
Shortcomings is a smarmy, acerbic delight. Imagine a modern-day Annie Hall, only inverted—more misanthropic, caustic, emotionally stunted, and romantically challenged. Randall Park does a solid job in his directing debut, and the screenplay, an adaptation of the titular graphic novel, is incredibly clever, crafting a charming Woody Allen-style character study with a real sense of time and place. Along with Blindspotting, Fruitvale Station, and Sorry to Bother You, it captures the East Bay with precise detail. (Replete with scenes featuring Half Price Books, Albany Cinema, Amoeba Records, Pegasus Books, Oakland warehouse parties, and Berkeley flea markets.) There are also countless movie references: Ruben Ostlund, Bong Joong Ho, and a solid curation of posters to appeal to any Letterboxd user (The Future, Spa Night, Lucky Grandma, House, etc.).
Ben, the insufferable lead, is an excellent character to study. From his blatant takedown of a pandering Crazy Rich Asians-style comedy in the opening sequence (“I just can’t stand an audience losing their minds over a shitty movie just due to representation”) to his defense of porn starring actresses who don’t resemble his girlfriend (“If you were stranded on desert island, you wouldn’t be dreaming about sand and sun”) to his working title for an avant-garde picture montage of morning pee (“call it e-piss-temology“), his snark and wit are something to behold—equally alienating and funny.
Many critics seemed upset by how unpalatable Ben can be. I merely feared 3rd act developments might veer into traditional rom-com territory, redeeming his character undeservingly. It turns out to be anything but a conventional romcom. It’s quite the opposite—an examination of a miserable intellectual with the sophistic dexterity to frame interpersonal conflicts in ways that suit his ego and uproot external validation where it doesn’t exist. As an evisceration of a horny cinephile/hipster (see: Rick Alverson’s The Comedy) eager to escape existential insecurities, loneliness, and anxiety, it’s an underrecognized gem. — Paul Keelan
Asteroid City
I can’t believe we’ve gotten to a point where a Wes Anderson movie is on a list of overlooked movies, but here we are. After Variety’s Owen Gleiberman inexplicably put Asteroid City on his worst movies of 2023 list, I feel that I have to go into full defense of this incredible movie. I never like to be the “you just didn’t get it” guy because art contains multitudes, but if you didn’t like Asteroid City, you probably didn’t get it. I completely understand—and agree—that the framing device of the film is confusing and could have been simplified, but once you get past that, this is such a wonderful film and one of Wes Anderson’s best. This is a movie about grief, moving on, growing up, existentialism, and so much more. There are outstanding actors and performances all around, some even for just a scene. It looks incredible, is very funny, and will leave your heart completely full by the end of it. Margot Robbie and Jason Schwartzman’s scene on the balconies is a top-three scene of the year and that fully encapsulates what this whole movie has been about. It’s not about understanding everything or always finding out the why, it’s about telling the story—that’s what matters. Asteroid City is a stunning movie by one of the masters and everyone needs to watch it.— Aqib Rasheed
Sisu
Technically, Sisu came out in 2022, but it didn’t reach U.S. audiences until 2023. That said, this outlandish action thriller contains some of the most stunning, over-the-top exploits of all year. Inspired by the historical figure Simo Häyhä, a sniper who killed 500 soldiers, Sisu follows Jorma Tommila as Aatami Korpi through the Lapland War. While the Nazis pull out of Finland during the close of World War II, they’re burning everything in sight. When they run afoul of Korpi, a man who just wants to be left alone, unreal carnage ensues.
The plot is simple, but Sisu shines through a fantastic visual atmosphere and unparalleled action. There are things audiences have never seen before in this film. And while Nazis are easy to hate, there’s a strange self-awareness motivating the villains in this story that’s truly unique. Sisu is a one-of-a-kind historical action thrill ride. —J ay Rohr
Theater Camp
The studio comedy is very much alive despite many (me included) proclaiming its demise. Out of all the comedies in 2023 I enjoyed—No Hard Feelings, Joy Ride, Bottoms—Theater Camp was my favorite and is one more people need to see. A mockumentary-style comedy set at a theater camp, there were jokes, bits, and running gags abound in this hilarious movie, something we’ve been missing for many years. Theater Camp isn’t raunchy or overtly gross like many of the Apatow comedy classics, but it does borrow one very important thing all those movies had: big performances from young stars. With Molly Gordon and Ben Platt at the helm (and rib-tickling side turns from Ayo Edibiri, Jimmy Tatro, and Patti Harrison), these are actors in touch with the vernacular and dialect with how young people talk and it all feels so natural, even with such an over-the-top premise. I’m especially bullish on Gordon, whose Rebecca-Diane is one of my favorite comedic characters from the past 10-15 years. Every scene she’s in had me laughing out loud and I have a strong feeling she’s going to be a big star. This is not just one of 2023’s more underrated movies, it’s one of the best of the year and I could not recommend it enough.— Aqib Rasheed
