It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 24 films in theaters in 2023 that were actually released in 2023, a 33.3% increase over 2022 as COVID-19 retreated slightly into the bushes and folks began making more movies, many of them watchable. That number doesn’t include seven Academy Award nominees that were officially 2022 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest. It also doesn’t include the 2023 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle.

Of those 24 releases, 15 were sequels or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. Eight were superhero films. Two were animated. Two were entirely subtitled. Ten had scenes during or after the end credits. Four were screenings at the 32nd annual Heartland Film Festival, not all of which have received wide U.S. runs as of this writing. In young-adulthood I used to scoff at critics who’d fill their year-end Top 10s with films they saw at festivals that none of their readers would be able to watch for another few months, if ever. Now that I’ve participated in a festival myself, those four totally count and I’m not cheating because this is, like. just different.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2023, for better or worse, starting as always at the bottom. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference. On with the countdown! Except for one:

INCOMPLETE: A Disturbance in the Force. This insightful, frequently jaw-dropping documentary about the making of The Star Wars Holiday Special places that debacle within its historical context — that bygone era when variety shows were an intrinsic and intrinsically awful part of American society — and explains a heck of a lot about what went wrong, thoroughly and often hilariously. (For starters: whither George Lucas?) Sadly our theater’s digital file of the film was corrupted, so they couldn’t show us its final six minutes and simply had to dismiss the audience early. It’s now available for streaming rental, but I shouldn’t have to pay an extra five bucks to compensate for someone else’s tech-support issue. Call me when it comes to Kanopy.

23. Shazam! Fury of the Gods. TV’s Chuck with a cape and muscle tone made the first one a pretty fun Beck/Binder throwback. This time he’s the most petulant, annoying character, even more adolescent than his actually adolescent counterpart who’s barely on screen. I lost my patience with a family of villains who show nary a shred of believable familial chemistry, nonsensical plot moves, outnumbered decently jokey bits, disengaging CG clutter, and a literal deus ex machina that earned my most scornful laugh of the year. 2023 wasn’t a total write-off for the DC Extended Universe, but maybe execs should’ve sicced their plug-pulling gremlins on some other productions and left Batgirl alone.

22. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Michael Bay’s exile from Cybertron didn’t solve all the toyetic franchise’s problems. I can’t begrudge Hamilton‘s Anthony Ramos or Swarm‘s Dominique Fishback the opportunity for good paychecks and a working vacation in Peru, but I wish there’d been some way other than propping up a mediocre confluence of We Love the ’90s! nostalgia-pandering and rock-’em sock-’em robot-animal mishmash. Look, Pete Davidson is the best thing about this, okay? Pete Davidson. Yes, THAT Pete Davidson.

21. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It wasn’t 2023’s first superhero letdown nor its worst, but its half-baked graphics, runway of costume models too undefined to be called “characters”, head-scratching attempt to promote Paul Rudd’s perfectly entertaining comic-relief hero to a Serious Superhero, and rote secondary objective as a 150-minute cliffhanger teaser trailer for Marvel’s next dozen films was the Exhibit A in countless Hollywood-news sites’ “Are Superhero Films Over?” doomsayer thinkpieces. I was ready to blame Rudd for possibly tiring of playing slap-happy earnest doofuses and wanting a change of pace at Scott Lang’s expense, but then I saw the trailer for the next Ghostbusters sequel and realized, nope, Bobby Newportverse variants are still very much his self-confined wheelhouse. The idea of grooming him into our next Cap or Iron Man was someone else’s sorry fixation.

20. The Flash. The fiasco is behind us at last, but the scars are still fading. The hill on which WB took their stand became the DCEU’s burial mound, and their battle-picking criteria shall be universally ridiculed for as long as the current anti-creative regime remains in power…and yet, this didn’t have to suck. Toxic rap sheet notwithstanding, somewhere in the multiverse is a reality where the initially engaging performances by Ezra Miller and Ezra Miller could’ve coexisted in the shadow of Grant Gustin’s best CW seasons, but it wallowed in, and choked on, its own excesses — the clown-car-stuffing with too many superfolks for maximum optioning of action figures and spinoffs, the relentless nostalgia-pandering (which, to be fair, Michael Keaton leaned into like a pro till his avatar boarded the Batplane), CG renderings even shakier than Shazam! 2‘s (y’all had YEARS to work on this), and the fad-surfing multiverse-mania of the final act, which was merely Snyder-level bad until the ghastly fan-art montage at the end that Andy Muschietti tried selling us with a straight face at today’s ticket prices. Do you want more Scorsese lectures? Because this is how you get more Scorsese lectures.

19. The Marvels. Congrats to that one-season-and-a-movie gem, TV’s Ms. Marvel, for netting far more Marvel Cinematic Universe participation than most of its Disney+ siblings. Iman Vellani was a lovable revelation in her fantastic little show, which was faithful to the heart of the original Wilson/Alphona tales and was a big hit in our household and apparently nowhere else. Her big-screen leap is unfortunately an incoherent mess in the style of Moffat-era Doctor Who, putting the flashy parts up front and dumping all the necessary exposition — i.e., the parts that give meaning to anyone and anything — somewhere in the middle, so the narrative only makes sense if you watch it two or more times but rings hollow if you refuse an encore. The rapport among the three lead actresses is intermittently endearing but hobbled by the dogged insistence on making Captain Marvel happen without her actually happening, and everyone’s so quantum-entangled that my wistful wish for a Ms. Marvel-only supercut of the film would make even less sense.

18. The Creator. Gareth Edwards’ extravagantly world-built allegory for imperial atrocities in Southeast Asia rushes through standard undercover-cop motions in its prologue before settling for “Robots Are People Too” comfort sci-fi by way of Lone Wolf and Cub, pitting John David Washington’s subpar fighter and his tiny Chosen One ward against a downscale flight-pin-shaped Death Star equipped with a wide-dispersal Blue Laser Death Ray™ and, more fearfully, an over-the-top Allison Janney who eats anger management coaches for breakfast. It’s indisputably the prettiest work I caught in a Dolby Cinema this year, but rusty framework and dour self-importance dull Edwards’ hopeful freshening of old tropes. Between this and Tenet, today’s would-be blockbusters aren’t doing Washington any favors.

17. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. After the Crystal Skull travesty I had zero expectations despite Logan‘s James Mangold taking the director’s chair. Grandpa Indy’s last round of world-travelin’, Nazi-punchin’, deathtrap-dodgin’, crowd-pleasin’ high adventure is at least as loony and illogical as any given Saturday morning serial that inspired Raiders, setting a cranky, necessarily stunt-doubled Harrison Ford on the trail of two half-MacGuffins, a pre-MacGuffin, and a red-herring MacGuffin With Cheese. Mangold probably tops what Spielberg might’ve wrought, and I deeply wish blockbuster filmmakers would cut it out with the de-aging pixel-makeup that’s 200% more distracting than the way old cinematographers used to smear Vaseline on their lenses to coddle aging starlets who were sensitive about their wrinkles. (In a superior timeline, River Phoenix would’ve been available to reprise Young Indy.) Nevertheless, if you’re old enough to have seen any of the original trilogy in theaters, this one’s a frequently thrilling return to form and a better canon-capper than Crystal Skull was.

16. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Jason Momoa dons the jocular King of Atlantis’ crown for probably the last time and pops another batch of underwater popcorn for the fans as he and his abs ripple through what’s basically a DLC expansion pack for the first film, even costarring almost exactly the same pals as last time (sans Willem Dafoe, killed offscreen like a chump). The first half is a wade through ludicrous, uninspired, overlit murk but the second half was rewritten against all odds into a far more watchable Sunday afternoon action-breeze, replete with big fun moments for every cast member (even Amber Heard!), journeys to two different Mordors, Jon Peters giant robot spiders with “OCTOPUS” rubber-stamped on their battery hatches, and what might be a career-best performance for Patrick Wilson as Our Hero’s half-brother/arch-villain Orm, who enjoys a complicated Tango & Cash team-up with his gnarly king-bro. And with that final stunt, James Wan put the chairs on the tables, turns out the lights and locks the DCEU behind him as he leaves.

15. The Promised Land. Our man Mikkelsen is better served here in a return to antiheroics — convincingly dutiful, unkind, and self-defensively savage as an 18th-century retired badass who responds to a (real-life) decree from the weirdly anonymous King of Denmark to go forth and farm the fallow Jutland heath for wealth and honor. He’s unkind to his employees and servants until he learns a Very Special Lesson that takes him down a short path from world-weary nihilism to grimdark humanism, raising his pulse only when threatened by a disenfranchised noble who looks and overacts like an ancestor of Matt Smith’s prancing Morbius madman. This Danish film, not yet released here in the States, is a comeback of sorts for director Nikolaj Arcel, who’s returned home after his Stateside letdown adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, but all his efforts at historical-fictional tragedy are undermined by multiple codas that feel as if he hasn’t yet dusted all the Hollywood dandruff off his coat. That said, as films about agricultural secret warriors go, it’s still better than Rebel Moon. Call their shared nascent sub-sub-subgenre “agro-aggro”, I suppose.

14. Scream VI The Radio Silence director-duo who took over Wes Craven’s meta-horror franchise return along with the survivors of the fifth one, who all move to Manhattan (minus Neve Campbell, who deserves to stop being stabbed) so they can start living again and not go through Ghostface shenanigans so many times that they turn into a modern-day Scooby Gang, but then it all happens again and they turn into a Scooby Gang anyway, in an increasingly digital world where cell phones can’t save them and “fake news” skepticism can be turned against them as they run from one cramped upscale tenement to the next. The scares are effective, a bloody set piece in a bodega is especially chilling, but they ditch the “meta” approach that the fourth and fifth ones lived up to surprisingly well, instead going fully retro for the most old-fashioned murder motive ever and a means that dates back to Agatha Christie times, but with nowhere near the believability. And without a meta finale, how is it even a Scream?

…

We’ve now reached base camp midway up Mount Listicle, where we can all stop for oxygen and snacks. From here to the peak it’s all pretty great movies that I’d highly recommend. I wish I could just declare a 13-way tie and stop writing these capsules, but that isn’t how this works.

…

13. Blue Beetle. I’m still mad at the public who felt so burned by Shazam! 2 and The Flash that they slept on The Best DC Comics Film of the Year, which died unloved and unshilled during the combined Writers’ Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which shouldn’t’ve had to happen in the first place, but studio execs gotta exec. Stressed-out college grad Jaime Reyes (charming youngster Xolo Maridueña) stumbles into an Alien Power Artifact different from Green Lantern’s power ring, finds himself wielding super awesome weapons-loaded armor like Iron Man’s, runs afoul of cheesy corporate villains like 90% of today’s action movies (‘sup, Beekeeper?), and flips all these used parts into a scrappy old-school superhero origin that’s better than the sum of its parts and thrives on the power of a supportive family who all know his secret and do a ride-along anyway, refreshingly without all of them becoming helpless hostages. Fans of the original Giffen/Rogers/Hamner/Albuquerque comics, or fans of savvy characters who don’t exist in a pop-culture vacuum and know this is all wacky hi-jinks on some level (with or without an Uncle Ben grief interlude), should be ashamed for missing out.

12. The Boy and the Heron. Pour out a bottle of ramune for Hayao Miyazaki’s final farewell to animation unless he changes his mind again, assuming Studio Ghibli’s inheritors haven’t been so exasperated with his relentless perfectionism that they’ve already changed the locks. One of the few remaining holdouts on the remote island of 2-D cel-animated feature films, the legendary writer/director reflects on his World War II childhood, knotted family history, side effects of grief, and generational ignorance. Signposts along the odyssey include an annoying two-faced heron. a magical forest tower, time travel, his trademark floating puffy creatures, his trademark kindly matrons who’re more than they seem, and more flocks of evil birds than Hitchcock’s worst nightmare. No two viewers’ interpretations will match, because Miyazaki loves seeing everyone argue while all simultaneously being wrong. This is his beautiful legacy.

11. Creed III. Michael B. Jordan returns once more as Adonis “Donnie” Creed, the world heavyweight champion who’s matured through the trilogy from a hotheaded group-home orphan into a suave millionaire businessman, though still a muscular one who could uppercut any real-life billionaire into the ceiling. Then in walks Jonathan Majors, a man with anger issues and legal problems, playing a man with anger issues and legal problems…sorry, anyway, Jordan’s directorial debut doesn’t quite touch Ryan Coogler’s first round, but he stages stylish fights heavy on anime influences that add a whole new kind of flair, and — much like the best Rocky movies — drills down to the hearts of the two title-bout opponents to deliver some much-needed contemplation on the sins of the past, manly repression, reckless ambition, and the infantile inability of men today to just talk to each other. The best scene of all is an unexpectedly quiet denouement outside the ring.

To be concluded! And for any superhero fans who feel upset right now, rest assured we still have two more of their films to go!