The Year’s Best Movies

I found myself at the movies this year more often than last. The data suggests that I’m not alone.

The number of tickets that U.S. movie theaters sold this year is up 23 percent compared to 2022, according to The Numbers, which tracks film industry statistics. With a month left to go, the domestic box office has already grossed $800 million more than it did last year, according to Box Office Mojo. And though neither metric has yet rebounded to prepandemic levels, it finally feels like the movies are, in some sense, back.

Maybe it was the last gasp of widespread Covid precautions. Maybe it was the monotony of at-home streaming or just the desire to finally get off the couch. Maybe it was the popcorn. But I suspect that much of the reason Americans flocked to theaters this year had to do with the quality and variety of what was on offer there.

A quick scan of The New York Times’s list of the year’s best movies makes the point. The films, picked by the critics Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson, span a number of genres, including dramas and biopics. They came from legacy studios, tech companies and independent studios alike. They’re the work of veteran directors like Wes Anderson and Steve McQueen, as well as new ones like A.V. Rockwell and Celine Song.

What electrified our critics this year? For one thing, they recoiled at the “ordinary evil” — as Alissa terms it — at the center of the Martin Scorsese film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which chronicles a spate of greed-based murders against members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s. Our critics also lauded several visually striking, sharply observed documentaries, including one that follows a Chilean journalist’s descent into Alzheimer’s, and another that explores trans and nonbinary identity.

Both Manohla and Alissa make the point that originality, freshness and subverted expectations seem to have won Americans’ wallets this year, not just the critics’ praise. Instead of an action-adventure blockbuster or franchise sequel, the year’s top-grossing movie was Greta Gerwig’s technicolor-pink “Barbie.” The “Barbenheimer” phenomenon — a pop-cultural fusion of Gerwig’s movie and the Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer,” which also made our critics’ lists — became a meme-able magnet for theatergoers, myself included.

The movies rebounded this year despite the labor strikes that paralyzed Hollywood for months. Still, the resurgence doesn’t settle all questions about the future of the industry, like whether theaters can fully recover their pre-Covid luster or audiences have lastingly turned the corner on big-budget superhero C.G.I.-fests.

But for now, as Manohla concludes, 2023 was “a terrific movie year.” I can’t wait for the sequel.

For more

NEWS

Israel-Hamas War

George Santos

• To protect the island of Catalina, a conservancy proposed a plan that has angered many residents: Kill all the deer.

• The authorities arrested a suspect in the killing of three homeless men in L.A. They also connected him to a fourth homicide.

• Research has identified Loma Linda as a Blue Zone, where people exceed life expectancy. Pickleball and religion may explain why, The Los Angeles Times reports.

Other Big Stories

• After the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada, U.S. federal agents received a tip that helped prevent another death.

• Getting a button-down washed in New York can set you back $6. Still, one cleaner makes only 13 cents on each.

FROM OPINION

“A great step toward our survival”: Atef Abu Saif, of the Palestinian Authority, records his escape from northern to southern Gaza.

As funding is cut, scholars want to show society that there is value in the humanities. But trying to justify the discipline’s existence has only politicized it, Agnes Callard writes.

Here are columns by Thomas Friedman on a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, Maureen Dowd on OpenAI and Ross Douthat on fertility in South Korea.

The Sunday question: Was Henry Kissinger a war criminal?

After Kissinger fostered the 1973 coup in Chile and supported the dictatorship that followed, Ariel Dorfman imagined that the former secretary of state “would stand in a court of law and answer for his crimes,” he writes in The Los Angeles Times, adding that it was “a dream that vanished with his death.” But the key to understanding Kissinger is his insistence “that foreign policy was nearly always about making choices between evils,” Niall Ferguson writes in Bloomberg.

MORNING READS

Earlier this year, I spoke with Colin Koopman, the author of the influential book “How We Became Our Data,” about how our personal data can dictate our lives.

Can you explain more what it means to say that we have become our data? Because a natural reaction to that might be, well, no, I’m my mind, I’m my body, I’m not numbers in a database.

My claim is that your data has become something that is increasingly inescapable in the sense of being obligatory for your average person living out their life. It now becomes possible to say, “These data points are essential to who I am.” A lot of people have that relationship to their credit score, for example. It’s both very important to them and very mysterious.

But what does the use of our data in that way in the first place suggest, in the biggest possible sense, about our place in society?

We’re in this position of, I’m taking my best guess how to optimize my credit score or, if I own a small business, how to optimize my search-engine ranking. We’re simultaneously loading more and more of our lives into these systems and feeling that we have little control or understanding of how these systems work.

Isn’t it necessarily the case that there have to be collection and flows and formatting of personal information that we’re not going to be fully aware of or understand? How would the world operate otherwise?

Industrialized liberal democracies have a decent track record at putting in place policies, regulations and laws that guide the development and use of highly specialized technologies. That basic regulatory approach is a valuable one, but we’ve run up against the wall of unbridled data acquisition by these huge corporations. They’ve set up this model of, You don’t understand what we do, but trust us that you need us, and we’re going to vacuum up all your data in the process.

Read more of the interview here.

More from the magazine

BOOKS

Endgame: Harry and Meghan’s sympathetic biographer, Omid Scobie, writes a critical view of palace machinations and calls the royals “tone-deaf, racist and financially reckless.”

Puzzle: Can you find the hidden titles? Take our quiz.

Our editors’ picks: “Skeletons in the Closet,” a novel about corruption, and eight other books.

Times best sellers: Britney Spears’s memoir “The Woman in Me” reclaims the top spot on the latest hardcover nonfiction list.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Use these flannel sheets and blankets for winter.

Watch the 50 best shows on Netflix right now.

Infuse this cake with Thai tea.

THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For

• This year’s winner of the Turner Prize, for British artists, will be announced on Tuesday.

• Fox News will host a town hall in Iowa on Tuesday with Donald Trump.

• The fourth Republican presidential primary debate is Wednesday. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are expected to participate.

• Hanukkah begins on Thursday.

• Leaders of the E.U. and China will meet on Thursday for a two-day summit in Beijing.

What to Cook This Week