A longtime contributor to Screen, Jonathan Romney also writes for Film Comment, Sight & Sound and The Observer, and teaches at the UK’s National Film and Television School.
Read our other critics’ top tens here.
Top 10
1. The Zone Of Interest
Dir. Jonathan Glazer
Glazer’s audacious drama confronts the enduring ethical and dramatic questions of how to represent the Holocaust — or not represent it. The horrors of Auschwitz remain hidden behind a wall, but unsettlingly audible, in a depiction of the domestic life of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant and his wife. An entirely fresh and challenging response to the theme of the ‘banality of evil’, the film makes us see Nazism in a new light, but also asks us to think about our time and our own capacity to accept the unacceptable.
2. Daaaaaali!
Dir. Quentin Dupieux
French cinema’s most prolific joker pays tribute to a Surrealist founding father, with Anaïs Demoustier playing a journalist determined to land an interview with an elusive and mercurial Salvador Dali. With multiple actors playing Dali, Dupieux’s structure channels Luis Buñuel in a labyrinth of sight gags, blind alleys and non sequitur invention.
3. The Delinquents
Dir. Rodrigo Moreno
A year after Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, here is another Argentinian drama that joyously warps the rules of storytelling. Starting out as the downbeat story of a bank worker planning to screw the system, Moreno’s film slyly diverts onto another course entirely, towards a rural idyll with echoes of westerns. But the path there is strewn with doublings, outrageous coincidences, self-referential winks and early 1970s Latin American blues rock — a uniquely inventive mix.
4. Music
Dir. Angela Schanelec
A fitting title for a director whose work is edging closer to a form of avant-garde opera. Following her enigmatic I Was At Home, But…, Schanelec’s latest is an ostensibly more readable yet far from straightforward retelling of the Oedipus myth — and a disquisition on fate, history and music. Whatever else it may be is up to the viewer.
5. Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World
Dir. Radu Jude
The most shape-shifting of Romanian directors is in bullishly provocative mode, unpicking the 21st-century European malaise in the story of a film worker, a corporate safety video, a cab driver in an early 1980s film and a scabrous TikTok routine. Few of this year’s films were so urgently of 2023 as this lawless satire.
6. Poor Things
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
7. On The Adamant
Dir. Nicolas Philibert
8. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell
Dir. Pham Thien An
9. Dream Scenario
Dir. Kristoffer Borgli
10. Fallen Leaves
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki
Best documentary
1. The Eternal Memory
Dir. Maite Alberdi
The director of The Mole Agent offers a tender, super-intimate portrait of a Chilean couple contending with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The relationship of Augusto Gongora and Paulina Urrutia is all the more moving and compelling because of their own longstanding engagement with the memory of a traumatised nation.
2. Little Girl Blue
Dir. Mona Achache
Part documentary, part dramatic reconstruction, part filmed installation work, this bold hybrid from a hitherto mainstream-friendly director sees Achache contemplate the troubled life of her writer/photographer mother, with help from Marion Cotillard.
3. Man In Black
Dir. Wang Bing
Chinese documentarian Wang takes a sidestep with this concise but powerful portrait of 86-year-old modern composer Wang Xilin, who lays himself bare — figuratively and literally — in a searing reminiscence of the Cultural Revolution.
Performance of the year
Franz Rogowski/Adele Exarchopoulos/Ben Whishaw in Passages
Dir. Ira Sachs
While the year’s best single performance might have been Emma Stone’s turn in Poor Things, here is some outstanding ensemble acting from three very different actors. They are perfectly tuned to each other’s rhythms in a Parisian love triangle drama that allows all three to be sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes brutally comic, while exploring the surges of desire in a physically upfront way. Rogowski’s monster narcissist provides one of 2023’s funniest moments in a painful ‘meet-the-parents’ scene.
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