Top 5 Films Of 2023

It has been a weirdly OK year. Whilst you could say that come this time of year, that every year is weird or OK, for the movie going year, this year has been OK, but to a weird degree! The year in movies has produced some real standout movies, but everything else was either bad, or more often, just simply OK.

You had a collection of big budget movies that had quality productions, but average content, and smaller independent films which stood out for content, but average quality. So, films like The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes, or Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, featured great quality in their productions, from things like cast, effects, sets, sound and more, but then delivered products which when all wrapped up together were just largely forgettable. Not forgettable in a bad way, just not much good to shout out about afterwards.

Meanwhile smaller sized productions, which were far more creative like The Creator, or Five Nights At Freddy’s, looked really cool and carried an interesting idea, but didn’t carry out it’s potential to the max, rather just go down an easier route, and create stand out moments, which were not in its favour.

I am not saying it has been a bad year, I have largely had a positive experience with nearly every film I have seen this year. But, coming up with a full and definitive top 5 has been tricky, as only the Top 3 seem to be dead certainty’s as the best films of the year, the other 2, just seem sadly like add-ons. But, even if they are add-ons, they still stand out in their own way above all the rest.

So, as the end of they year is finally upon us, it’s time to rank movies from the year that has been 2023. But as usual, I would still like to mention a few others I have enjoyed this year too. So, here they are for those who are interested:

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, The Creator, Meg 2: The Trench, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Five Nights At Freddy’s, and John Wick: Chapter 4.

And so, without further ado, here are My Top 5 Favourite Films from the year that all historians shall one day call 2023; Enjoy!

5. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – This film came out so early this year, that it genuinely feels older, like I saw it last year or the year before. Rather luckily, I got to see it at the cinema. It’s a really nice, and sad film too. The animation style, as well as the world and character design is a really nice mix, as it looks both like the drawings in a book of fairy tales, and also it looks like a classic piece of animation too. The story is well told, and features great character development…for everyone; as would be villains become great heroes, allowing the real villains to shine as particularly bad eggs. Plus it has the occasional sweet song too!

4. The Tunnel To Summer, The Exit Of Goodbyes – If there were Academy Awards for the film with either the longest title, or the hardest one to pronounce in one go, then this film would win both. Seriously, that title is so difficult to pronounce and remember in full, I have to use abbreviations in mentioning it to friends. But, weird title aside, this was a pretty cool film. It’s a film about characters who have lost things, and think they can get them back by exploring a mysterious tunnel, with an un-earthly time lag. The characters in the film are nicely made and developed, with a nice switch and twist, as to who lives on, and who becomes the most desperate to reclaim what they have lost, leading to a predictable, but still decently good conclusion!

3. Suzume – No surprise as to what the first big standout of the year was. Makoto Shinkai‘s latest future classic, is a really cool film, which takes the adventure stylings of fantasy stories, and places them not in an imaginative world, but in the modern real world, with a lead character taking on a parallel calamity, and facing it in our world, not it’s. So, we go on a spectacular adventure across modern Japan, and meet an electric group of characters, from all mundane walks of life. It’s a great film, just hampered a bit by being a bit too similar, to Shinkai’s two previous classics!

2. Oppenheimer – No surprises here; another fantastic film from Christopher Nolan, which more than makes up for Tenet. Oppenheimer is a film about the man who ran the Manhattan Project, leading up to the creation of the first Nuclear Bomb, but the film looks less at the science, and more at the man; from his younger days, to the creation and detonation of the bomb, and the rather tragic years since. It’s a long film, a very long one, but one which packs the screen to the brim with information, and detail to keep you hooked and fascinated from start to finish; almost like a Michael Crichton novel!

1. Godzilla Minus One – Alright, knowing me, this one is a bit obvious, but this is not just good for simply being a Godzilla film, it’s good for being one of the outright best films in the entire series. It starts off with a bang, but then lightly plods along, as it looks at the human cost of Japan losing World War Two, and the effect that has on the population. But as things seem to finally be getting better, something terrifying happens, when a Giant Monster appears, and as far as anyone can tell, its unstoppable, and it comes down to those brave enough to do something about it. It’s so well made, the effects more than rival American studio’s larger budgets, the chaos and destruction rivals most disaster movies, and the drama is so realistic, for a film about a giant monster. It’s not like watching a film, it’s like watching a news story about something that is actually happening, it feels real!