The Year’s Fab Five Variety’s chief film critics on their fave films of 2023

Peter Debruge’s Top Five

1. Poor Things

The benign Godwin Baxter continues his father’s research, reanimating a fully grown woman with the brain of an infant, whom he christens Bella (a fearless and very funny Emma Stone). This tragicomic premise sets up a boldly expressionistic social critique from “Dogtooth” director Yorgos Lanthimos, who assembles a demented, Buñuelian satire of gender roles that’s part “Pygmalion,” part “Lolita,” and otherwise totally distinct from anything else on the scene. While “Barbie” poked fun at the patriarchy, born-again Bella upends it.

2. Oppenheimer

Grand as anything David Lean ever directed, Christopher Nolan’s awe-powered biopic had been marketed as the making of the atomic bomb, the detonation of which occurs at the two-hour mark, with a third of the movie still to go. Turns out, that last hour holds the (moral) key to why Nolan had to tell this story. J. Robert Oppenheimer (a never-better Cillian Murphy) faces the terrifying ramifications of what he’s wrought: We now live in a world of nuclear weapons, whose secrets inevitably fell into dangerous hands.

3. Chicken for Linda!

The best film at this year’s Cannes debuted quietly in the festival’s indie-centric sidebar, ACID. The hand-drawn feature from directing duo Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach captures the complicated relationship between a single mother and her 8-yearold child better than any live-action movie. The setup is simple: Linda can’t remember her late father, so she asks Mom to cook his signature dish. This observant toon entertains the kids, while giving exasperated parents permission to be imperfect.

4. Past Lives

Celine Song’s poetic debut offers a poignant counterpoint to “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” while suggesting a low-key alternative to that movie’s multiverse premise: What if, instead of there being infinite parallel realities, old souls found one another again and again over the centuries? Here, Nora (Greta Lee), a New York-based playwright born in South Korea, reconnects with her childhood sweetheart (Teo Yoo), confronting what her life might have been.

5. The Monk and the Gun

Oscar nominated for “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” Bhutanese director Pawo Choyning Dorji rewinds the clock a few years, as his home country was preparing for its first democratic election. Dorji, who studied in the States, invites Western viewers to observe his idyllic kingdom, contrasting modern materialism with traditional Buddhist values via the film’s lone American character, a rare-gun collector who travels halfway around the world to retrieve a rare Civil War rifle.