Variety's Best Movies of 2023

Looking back, 2023 was a year of wild swings. And two big strikes (if you’ll forgive the pun) — first the Writers Guild and then the Screen Actors Guild took the studios and streamers to task, forcing production to a halt. Yet whatever was going on behind the scenes, Hollywood had a grand-slam year, asserting its audacious cultural relevance with the historic double-header that was “Barbenheimer.”

Variety’s two chief film critics agree that Christopher Nolan’s portrait of the man behind the Manhattan Project is one for the ages — a “Lawrence of Arabia”-level feat about a turning point in human...