Ten-best lists may be silly, but denying their uses and pleasures always struck me as sillier. And so, with the year half over, here are my favorite new movies of 2023 so far, listed in some semblance of alphabetical order (in some cases, I’ve paired two movies that seem to be in conversation with each other). As ever, I’m astonished by the range of good and even great movies I’ve seen already, and excited for the many more still to come:
‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’
A cinematic shock to the senses, this latest work from the documentary filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel (“Leviathan,” “Caniba”) deservedly won the Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. But don’t let that — or the movie’s many unblinking, up-close scenes of human surgery — scare you off. More than just an endoscopic-horror tour de force, it’s also a deeply moving portrait of medical experts in action, reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman in its understanding of the agony and the necessity of human work. (“De Humani Corporis Fabrica” is still playing in select U.S. theaters.)
‘The Eight Mountains’
Two boyhood friends are torn apart, then fatefully reunite years later, in this superbly acted (by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi) and soaringly beautiful adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s 2016 bestseller. The Italian Alps scenery is glorious, of course, but it’s to the credit of the directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch that they present their mountainous landscapes as more than mere eye candy. At the heart of this decades-spanning love story is a bone-deep understanding of the deeply personal bonds we forge with our surroundings, and also the ones we try — and often fail — to move on from.
‘Other People’s Children’
It may begin with a shot of the Eiffel Tower at night, but Rebecca Zlotowski’s sneakily affecting Parisian romance subsequently sidesteps every cliché as it draws us into the life of a schoolteacher who becomes close to her lover’s 4-year-old daughter. The movie’s exquisitely tender truths flow directly from the lead performance of Virginie Efira, one of the finest European actors at the moment (she won a César for her work in the just-released “Revoir Paris”), but they also flow from an understated awareness of how life’s sharpest cruelties go hand-in-hand with its sweetest graces.