The 15 Best Movies You Missed in 2023—and Where to Watch Them
While Barbenheimer was undoubtedly the biggest movie story of 2023, the year in film was one jam-packed with dozens of truly great movies—not all of which managed to generate the nonstop headlines or mainstream traction that an iconic doll and the “father of the atomic bomb” did. It was a stellar year for first-time directors as well, as evidenced by films like Emily, The Unknown Country, and A Thousand and One.
If you’ve seen Barbie, Oppenheimer, and many of the year’s higher-profile movies, here are 15 that you maybe haven’t seen that are definitely worth your time.
BlackBerry
Between Air and BlackBerry, business origin stories had a big year in 2023. While the latter got less press (possibly because of the former’s star-studded cast of Oscar winners), BlackBerry is arguably the more riveting of the two. Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) is the cofounder and CEO of Research in Motion, the continent’s first wireless data technology developer, with a passion for creating an internet-enabled smartphone. Eventually, with the help of Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), a ruthless negotiator who holds grudges and refuses to take no for an answer (or else), they manage to launch the world’s first smartphone, the BlackBerry, while narrowly avoiding a hostile takeover. But being at the top typically comes with an expiration date, and BlackBerry traces both the challenging rise and devastating fall of the company. Given the status symbol that the “crackberry” was for about a half-dozen years in the early aughts, the bootstrap backstory of their operation is fascinating. But it also makes lots of room for some seriously deadpan comedy and gives Howerton what might be the juiciest role of his career. Consider this our “for your consideration” Oscar endorsement for his work.
Ear for Eye
In 2018, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, British playwright Debbie Tucker Green debuted Ear for Eye at London’s Royal Court Theatre. This film, Green’s sophomore effort, is essentially just a filmed version of that staged production—but in an experimental style that effectively conveys what it feels like to live the Black experience in today’s world, both in England and America, across every generation. It also serves as an important reminder that “anger”—a feeling which is so often, and wrongly, weaponized—can be just what is needed to enact change.
Emily
For more than 20 years, Frances O’Connor has been a familiar face to fans of British period dramas, having played Fanny Price in Mansfield Park (1999) and the title character in Madame Bovary (2000). So it seems appropriate that she’d make her debut as a writer-director with this “biopic” of Emily Brontë, which takes plenty of fun creative liberties to paint the famed author as a rebel outcast who bucks convention and the restrictions placed on women at the time to follow her passion and write Wuthering Heights.
Flora and Son
Ever since writing and directing the Oscar-winning 2007 film Once, John Carney has been the go-to filmmaker for feel-good, music-driven movies—and Flora and Son is his latest offering. Dubliner and single mom Flora (Eve Hewson) is feeling constantly at odds with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). Desperate for a way to reel in his rebellious behavior, she buys him an acoustic guitar with the hope that it might ignite his creative side. Instead, it’s Flora who ends up learning to play, with the help of Zoom tutor in Los Angeles (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Though her plans for Max don’t work out exactly as she planned, ultimately they find their own way to reconnect through the bond of music.
Godland
There’s something mysterious happening just beyond the frame in Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland, but the less you know going into the film the better. A Danish priest journeys to a remote part of Iceland to help build a new church and get to know—and photograph—the people who occupy this vast and brutal landscape. But the more he learns about the place, the further he begins to stray from his mission and mores. It’s a bleak film, to be sure, yet it also holds space for moments of humor, making for a surprising cinematic experience.
Linoleum
Jim Gaffigan delivers an Oscar-worthy performance (yes, really) in this strange but oddly beautiful sci-fi dramedy that made some noise at SXSW. Cameron Edwin (Gaffigan) is the son of a famed scientist but is living a quiet life in Ohio as the host of a children’s show that no one is really watching. Just when his life starts to go to hell—his wife (Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn) wants a divorce, and he’s about to lose his job—mysterious events change its course. When a piece of a rocket lands in his backyard, it reignites his long-held dreams of becoming an astronaut, and he hatches a plan to rebuild the aircraft. Ultimately, what…
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