What are the best films of 2023 for the New York Times

Estonian director Anna Hints rescues a local tradition – the smoke sauna – at the center of a documentary that presents a unique and intimate portrait of women. According to film critic Alissa Wilkinson, “it achieves an authenticity that few fiction films can fully capture.”

Wes Anderson calls upon his entire battery of resources to construct a film which takes place mainly in a community in the United States desert and which brings together a fair of young people interested in science. The place welcomes love, pain and the appearance of something extraordinary, but that’s not all: the story is part of a theatrical production.

Premiering at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, this acclaimed film by Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason arrived in American theaters at the start of the year. It revolves around the tribulations experienced by a Danish priest who goes to Iceland at the time when it was a territory of Denmark.

Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson agree that the best film of the year is Martin Scorsese’s about the 1920s murders in the Osage Nation. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a veteran who marries Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a community woman grieving the loss of her family circle due to a conspiracy.

Through the eyes of an aspiring chaplain, this documentary delves into a New York hospital and the corners where patients struggle between life and death during the pandemic. American director Luke Lorentzen (midnight family) triumphed at the last Sundance Festival with this reflection on faith and the end of existence.

Christopher Nolan’s cinema reached one of its peaks thanks to his portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ranges from his early years to the dark legacy he left on the world.

Sydney Sweeney (The White Lotus) stars in this fact-based drama about Reality Winner, the former US intelligence specialist accused of leaking classified information about the Russian government’s intervention in the 2016 US presidential election. of the dialogue corresponds to a verbatim transcription of the interrogation to which she was subjected by the FBI at her home before her arrest.

Frederick Wiseman, the wonderful 93-year-old American documentarian, looks at the owners and diners of a French restaurant and the result is a “deeply enjoyable film”, according to Manohla Dargis. The establishment belongs to the Troisgros, a dynasty of chefs who have managed to keep a three-Michelin-starred place alive for more than half a century.

Director of 12 years of slavery (2013) and Small ax (2020) makes its documentary debut with this four-plus hour film about Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation in World War II. The feature film is based on a book by Dutchwoman Bianca Stigter, the filmmaker’s wife.

Maite Alberdi addresses the intimacy of Augusto Góngora and Paulina Urrutia in this powerful feature film which speaks of love and collective and private memory. For Alissa Wilkinson, this is the ninth best film of the year released in theaters in the United States.

The acclaimed feature debut from filmmaker AV Rockwell revolves around Inez (Teyana Taylor), a woman who decides to remove her six-year-old son from the social services system and raises him in the 1990s. The film was released in theaters in the United States at the beginning of the year and is available in Chile through digital platforms.

The new film by Jonathan Glazer (Under the skin) was one of the events of the last Cannes Film Festival. Based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the family formed by Commander Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig near the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams have become one of the most attractive partnerships in cinema in recent years. This time the actress plays Lizzy, a sculptor from Portland who is preparing a new exhibition and is inspired by different exchanges with her environment.

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in the headlines May Decemberthe latest feature film from the director of Carole (2015). The first plays an actress and Moore puts herself in the shoes of a woman she visits in search of inspiration for her next role. The complication is that she served time for having sex with a minor whom she later married.

Céline Song’s directorial debut is one of the most talked-about films of the past 12 months. It centers on the reunion of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), two South Korean childhood friends who relive their past when they meet in New York.