35 Great Movies from 2023 Streaming Right Now (2024)

“Air” (Prime Video)

Each actor in Affleck’s latest film gives a powerful and awards-worthy performance. “Air” is a slam dunk and ultimately one of the best sports movies ever made. Affleck successfully captures Nike’s heartwarming and hilarious marketing journey while paying respectful homage to all involved. “Air” is a tremendous underdog story filled with lovable characters. It’s truly a film about legends made by legends. —Marisa Mariabal

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Air”

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” (Starz, VOD Platforms)

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” isn’t just the best Blume adaptation currently available, it’s also an instant classic of the coming-of-age genre, a warm, witty, incredibly inspiring film that is already one of the year’s best. This will likely not come as news to anyone who loves Blume’s books or was treated to Fremon Craig’s first feature (itself also an instant classic, this woman is two-for-two!), but that doesn’t diminish the absolute joy of this film (or the revelation that, yes, decades-old IP really can yield modern masterpieces). —Kate Erbland

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”

“Asteroid City” (Prime Video, VOD Platforms)

Like any movie by Wes Anderson, “Asteroid City” is the epitome of a Wes Anderson movie. A film about a television program about a play within a play “about infinity and I don’t know what else” (as one character describes it), this delightfully profound desert charmer — by far the director’s best effort since “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and in some respects the most poignant thing he’s ever made — boasts all of his usual hallmarks and then some. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Asteroid City”

“Barbie” (Max, VOD Platforms)

Gerwig, as ever, has assembled a stellar supporting cast. All Barbies delight, but the Kens, appropriately enough, launch a real sneak attack, especially Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Michael Cera nearly makes off with the whole thing as the singular sidekick Allan. There’s also a murderer’s row of below-the-line talent: Opuses can and will be written about Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Jacqueline Durran’s costumes. “Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch. It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic. —Kate Erbland

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Barbie”

“Beau Is Afraid” (Paramount+ with Showtime, VOD Platforms)

A sickly picaresque guilt trip that stretches a single Jewish man’s swollen neuroses into a three-hour nightmare so queasy and personal that sitting through it feels like being a guest at your own bris (in a fun way!), Ari Aster’s seriocomic “Beau Is Afraid” may not fit the horror mold as neatly as his “Hereditary” or “Midsommar,” but this unmoored epic about a zeta male’s journey to reunite with his overbearing mother eventually stiffens into what might be the most terrifying film he’s made so far. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Beau Is Afraid”

“Bottoms” (MGM+, VOD Platforms)

The easiest way to describe Emma Seligman‘s sophomore feature, “Bottoms“? It’s hilariously weird. Director Seligman and star Rachel Sennott reunite in their follow-up to “Shiva Baby,” taking as hard a pivot from their 2020 breakout(and a script they co-wrote) as they come. This is a queer teen sex comedy that wears its influences on its sleeve, yet still resembles no other film. It cements Seligman and Sennott as two of the most exciting young voices in cinema today, delivering a hit in the making with a tone that brings movies like “Wet Hot American Summer” and “Not Another Teen Movie” to a whole new generation. —Rafael Motamayor

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Bottoms”

“The Delinquents (MUBI, VOD Platforms)

Arguably the first slow cinema heist movie, Rodrigo Moreno’s dreamy and discursive “The Delinquents” might kick off with one of the most low-key bank robberies anyone has ever attempted, but it’s hard to overstate how thrilling it feels once the thief finally tells us about what he stole. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Delinquents”

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” (Paramount+, MGM+, VOD Platforms)

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” conjures its own type of movie magic that proudly stands apart from other fantasy films. The heartfelt story, enchanting characters, dazzling visual effects, and fun-filled nature will allow the film to be a treasured classic. An adaptation of this caliber could be considered a roll of the dice to some, but “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” has already proved itself to be an ironclad winner. —Marisa Mirabal

“Earth Mama” (Paramount+ with Showtime, VOD Platforms)

Learn the names Savanah Leaf, first-time feature filmmaker, and Tia Nomore, first-time feature actress, right now, because their debut film “Earth Mama” is a shimmering stunner. A former Olympic volleyball athlete, Leaf has a canny eye for locating the subversion and beauty within a welfare-system drama about a single mother fighting for her life and children. What sounds, on paper, like a challenging sit is actually a wondrous 97-minute feature, whose director and star are obviously poised for greatness. —Ryan Lattanzio

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“The Eight Mountains” (VOD Platforms)

“The Eight Mountains” lovingly adapts Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, a valentine to brotherhood and a shape-shifting tale of self-discovery, resilience, nature and love — platonic but more steely than any rock you could climb – that somehow rarely feels like it treads a single step of the endless stream of movies and literature capturing the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of all of those just mentioned things since time immemorial. —Ella Kemp

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“Elemental” (Disney+, VOD Platforms)

So much of modern Pixar comes mired in “almost’s” and “what-if’s,” and Peter Sohn’s “Elemental” is no exception. It’s as conflicted as they come: a heavy-handed, mixed bag immigrant metaphor punctuated by a genuinely moving romance. It gets frequently lost down the rabbit-hole of its own conceptual details, but at the same time, it yields occasionally stunning images and thoughtful aesthetics — like Thomas Newman’s incredibly effective Indian-inspired score — resulting in a film that embodies the very best and worst of the studio’s recent output, defined more by its potential than whether or not it fulfills it. —Siddhant Adlakha

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“The Eternal Memory” (Paramount+ with Showtime, VOD Platforms)

Director Maite Alberdi set out to capture the experience of living with Alzheimer’s disease but at times even subject Paulina Urrutia forgot she was filming the documentary “The Eternal Memory.”

The film centers on a Chilean couple, Augusto Góngora and Urrutia, who grapple with Góngora’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The duo have been together for 25 years, but Urrutia, an actress-turned-Minister of Culture and the Arts in Chile, is awaiting the day her love does not recognize her anymore. “The Eternal Memory” is distributed by MTV Documentaries and won the 2023 Sundance World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize. Director Alberdi later won DOC NYC’s award for Documentary Excellence. —Samantha Bergeson

Watch IndieWire’s full conversation with “The Eternal Memory” subject Paulina Urrutia

“Fast X” (Peacock, VOD Platforms)

Justin Lin may no longer be in the driver’s seat of the “Fast & Furious” franchise, but his blockbuster fingerprints are all over “Fast X.” The tenth — and most outrageous installment yet — in the ongoing fast-moving franchise delivers on its promise of high-octane thrills while very clearly setting-up a finale to the massive series, entering every living player from its past into the race. —Jude Dry

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Fast X”

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” (Peacock, VOD Platforms)

A film about a haunted Chuck E. Cheese clone doesn’t exactly need to be complex to be watchable. But “Five Nights at Freddy’s” somehow misses the arcade for the flashback forest, undercutting the obvious appeal of animatronic cartoon characters as menacing slasher villains by refusing to ever become a real horror movie. The result feels like one of the sleeping pills Mike downs during his security shifts, too bloodless and biteless to provoke the YouTube freakouts the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” name is most known for. Even non-gamer filmgoers would be better served staying at home and looking up two-hour “Five Nights at Freddy’s Reactions” videos. There’s infinitely more scares to be had that way. —Wilson Chapman

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Five Nights at Freddy’s”

“Four Daughters” (VOD Platforms)

It’s easy to get trapped in circuitous arguments surrounding documentary ethics at the best of times, but Kaouther Ben Hania’s metafictional “Four Daughters” — involving young children, abuse, trauma and re-enactments — appears to chart these knotty waters as a barefaced challenge. This Tunisian entry into Cannes’ Official Competition is a bold behemoth of an undertaking, which is veiled, unveiled and then re-veiled with endless angles and perspectives; it’s a veritable snakepit of uneasy decisions that grips you with its novel approach to so-called truth-telling before lapsing into something a little more conventional. Far from a gamble made in the service of naturalism, this heightened and strange piece of fiction re-enactment exposes itself for critique in a way that you almost have to respect. For its sins, it seems to —just about— succeed. —Steph Green

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Four Daughters”

“The Holdovers” (VOD Platforms)

Set in the winter of 1970 and shot to look as if it had actually been made back then, Alexander Payne’s nuanced and hyper-literate “The Holdovers” takes great pleasure in defying every impulse of modern cinema from even before the moment it starts (the studio fanfare includes a “throwback” Focus Features logo, which is a cute little in-joke about a company that wasn’t founded until 2002). And yet, it might take even greater pleasure in embracing some of the movies’ most time-honored tropes and traditions. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Holdovers”

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (Disney+, VOD Platforms)

An empty slog of a movie that only exists to smooth over any of the stray fan complaints that have splintered the franchise’s audience over the last 15 years, “The Dial of Destiny” is a globe-trotting adventure movie so safe that even its 80-year-old hero never seems to be in any significant danger (a more accurate “Star Wars” comp would be “The Force Awakens,” but that legacy sequel had the luxury of promising something new, whereas this one just devotes itself to untying perfect knots into loose ends). —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”

“John Wick: Chapter 4” (Starz, VOD Platforms)

The “John Wick” franchise has evolved from a small-scale tale of revenge for the death of a wife and the killing of a do to a globe-trotting epic that spans continents, dozens of characters, and an intricate mythology. In its fourth chapter, director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves bring this franchise back to its roots while expanding the world and the story to bigger and bolder places. The result is not only the best movie in the franchise, but the best American action blockbuster since George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.” —Rafael Motamayor

Read IndieWire’s full review of “John Wick: Chapter 4”

“The Killer” (Netflix)

There are few surprises in this straight-line thriller, well-executed within a millimeter of its life as ever by the “Gone Girl” and “Social Network” director. Here, the perfectionist, you-might-say-control-freak director punches up a nimbly sketched screenplay by “Seven” scribe Andrew Kevin Walker that evokes no sympathy for its protagonist, played with Zen-cool by a no-pulse Fassbender. —Ryan Lattanzio

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Killer”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” (VOD Platforms)

It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns “Killers of the Flower Moon” into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Killers of the Flower Moon”

“The Little Mermaid” (Disney+, VOD Platforms)

But it’s star Halle Bailey, appearing in her first leading role, who makes the best case for why this classic Disney tale needed to be made into a live-action affair. Just look at her face, so expressive and so open, so deeply and wonderfully human and alive. There are some things even the most lovingly rendered pieces of hand-drawn animation just can’t match, and Bailey’s emotive skill is one of them. (And her stunning singing? Further icing on the “this young woman is a movie star” cake.) —Kate Erbland

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Little Mermaid”

“Maestro” (Netflix)

“Maestro” is a technical triumph in terms of checking all the boxes of multihyphenate-ism — Cooper funnels himself into the project at every creative level — but this handsomely made Oscar-tailored package actually belongs to another person entirely, and that would be Carey Mulligan, playing Bernstein’s wife of nearly four decades, Felicia Montealegre. She was both the adoring but also the suffering end of a lavender marriage in which she enabled Bernstein to have affairs with an endless train of men (including some of his proteges) as long as he was home on the weekends and didn’t let his sex life impact their three children. To play the sparky Costa Rica-born actress, Mulligan puts on a kind of Transatlantic accent and later a deep, worn-in inner graveliness by the end of her life, cut off by cancer in 1978. Mulligan is wonderful and never overwhelming or overstating in portraying a woman who never set aside her own ambitions for the sake of her husband — even while having to stand by in the wings of his greatness. —Ryan Lattanzio

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Maestro”

“May December” (Netflix)

A heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp that teases real human drama from the stuff of tabloid sensationalism, Todd Haynes’ delicious “May December” continues the director’s tradition of making films that rely upon the self-awareness that seems to elude their characters — especially the ones played by Julianne Moore. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “May December”

“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” (VOD Platforms)

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”

“Oppenheimer” (VOD Platforms)

At first, I thought that if J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t exist, Christopher Nolan would probably have been compelled to invent him. The exalted British filmmaker has long been fixated upon stories of haunted and potentially self-destructive men who sift through the source code of space-time in a desperate bid to understand the meaning of their own actions, and so the “father of the atomic bomb” — a theoretical physicist whose obsession with a twilight world hidden inside our own led to the birth of the modern age’s most biblical horrors — would seem to represent an uncannily perfect subject for the “Tenet” director’s next epic. And he is. In fact, Oppenheimer is so perversely well-suited to the Nolan treatment that I soon began to realize I had things backwards: Christopher Nolan only exists because men like J. Robert Oppenheimer invented him first. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Oppenheimer”

“Pacifiction” (MUBI, VOD Platforms)

What do you want when you already have paradise? That question looms over Albert Serra’s singularly mysterious cinematic immersion into Tahiti, “Pacifiction.” The indigenous Polynesians living there would likely argue that this paradise hasn’t been theirs in a long time. Serra, the Catalan filmmaker behind such boundary-pushing works of experiential filmmaking as “Honor of the Knights” and “Story of My Death,” is yet another outsider coming to their shores, but he avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most movies set in some tropical locale. “Pacifiction” is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself. —Christian Blauvelt

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Pacifiction”

“Passages” (MUBI, VOD Platforms)

A signature new drama from a director whose best work (“Keep the Lights On,” “Love Is Strange”) is at once both generously tender in its brutality and unsparingly brutal in its tenderness, the raw and resonant “Passages” is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Passages”

“Past Lives” (VOD Platforms)

On paper, “Past Lives” might sound like a diasporic riff on a Richard Linklater romance — one that condenses the entire “Before” trilogy into the span of a single film. In practice, however, this gossamer-soft love story almost entirely forgoes any sort of “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” dramatics in favor of teasing out some more ineffable truths about the way that people find themselves with (and through) each other. Which isn’t to suggest that Song’s palpably autobiographical debut fails to generate any classic “who’s she gonna choose?” suspense by the time it’s over, but rather to stress how inevitable it feels that Nora’s man crisis builds to a bittersweet quiver of recognition instead of a megaton punch to the gut. Here is a romance that unfolds with the mournful resignation of the Leonard Cohen song that inspires Nora’s English-language name; it’s a movie less interested in tempting its heroine with “the one who got away” than it is in allowing her to reconcile with the version of herself he kept as a souvenir when she left.
—David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Past Lives”

“Priscilla” (VOD Platforms)

Long compelled by the negative space between young women and the worlds they inhabit (a gap that “The Virgin Suicides” described as “an oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name”), Coppola has made a career out of freeing privileged girls from gilded cages; girls who are desperate to escape the sense that they’re merely disguised as themselves, always watched but seldom seen. From “Lost in Translation” to “Marie Antoinette,” her films have often framed marriage as the purgatorial first step in a heroine’s path towards actual personhood. Her latest feature makes it impossible to shake the feeling that Sofia Coppola would probably have been moved to invent Priscilla Presley if Priscilla Presley hadn’t ultimately found a way to invent herself. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Priscilla”

“Saltburn” (Prime Video)

A daft but undeniably amusing stick in the eye that dares to imagine what Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema” might have been like as a piece of Abercrombie & Fitch spon-con from 2003 (a magical time when shirtless hunks stood outside of history’s most pungent mall stores like bouncers to a world of elite white belonging), Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” is a movie sustained by the friction between identity and reinvention, and therefore a fitting second feature by a filmmaker whose Oscar-winning debut made it hard to tell if she was an underachieving dramatist or an overachieving provocateur. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Saltburn”

“Showing Up” (Paramount+ with Showtime, VOD Platforms)

“First Cow” may not have been anywhere near as soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film about desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul. Or, a fowl, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up,” a slight knowing smile of a movie starring Michelle Williams as a stressed-out Portland ceramist with a pageboy haircut who reluctantly finds herself nursing an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite career. —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Showing Up”

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (Netflix, VOD Platforms)

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is awash in stories — its first five or so minutes, an ostensible prologue, is a dynamic tragedy in miniature, and that’s just the first five minutes — all built around an idea one of its characters tosses out during a similarly information-packed voiceover: They’re going to “do things differently.” It’s precisely what the film‘s predecessor, the rightly Oscar-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” did four years ago, taking a well-worn concept (a Spider-Man origin story? again?) and turning it into an actual masterpiece built on a wealth of stories, new and old, told with legitimate energy and innovation. And it’s what Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson attempt to replicate in their sequel, an aim that pays off mightily. —Kate Erbland

Read IndieWire’s full review of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (Netflix, VOD Platforms)

From the decision to cast the onetime Least Offensive Actor on the Planet Chris Pratt in the titular role to the production design that seems to be an exact replica the Wii-era Mario games, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” largely plays things by the book, which is exactly what the assignment called for. Co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic have delivered a perfectly serviceable movie that is going to make a lot of kids very happy and a lot of adults very rich. —Christian Zilko

Read IndieWire’s full review of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”

“A Thousand and One” (Prime Video, VOD Platforms)

“A Thousand and One” culminates in a gutting conclusion that turns the entire movie on its head — it’s one best left entirely unspoiled — and serves as a sobering reminder of how fucked-up beginnings can hopefully bring about better endings. Cross is effective in a key scene surrounding this revelation, but it’s Taylor who anchors Rockwell’s direction and screenplay with her powerhouse performance. Taylor has worked with the likes of Tyler Perry in comedies, but it’s her seeming kinship with Rockwell (and Taylor’s own story as a New Yorker) and a performance as fiercely committed to the project as Inez is to Terry that signal a major acting talent. —Ryan Lattanzio

Read IndieWire’s full review of “A Thousand and One”

“20 Days in Mariupol” (PBS Documentaries, VOD Platforms)

The most telling element of “20 Days in Mariupol,” Ukrainian photographer Mystylav Chernov’s pulsating documentary about the first three weeks of a Russian siege that killed tens of thousands of people, is what soldiers make of Chernov and his team. At first the AP camera crew, the last journalists left in Mariupol, are a nuisance. As apartment buildings are evacuated. Chernov is told to “turn the cameras off” by Ukrainian soldiers he politely refers to as “shy.” He replies: “This is a historical war.” —Adam Solomons

Read IndieWire’s full review of “20 Days in Mariupol”