Oscar: Films to watch in 2023

Just when you think you’re out of it, the Oscars inevitably pulls you back.

The biggest movie night of the year is set for March 12th at 8pm ET and will be televised by ABC in keeping with tradition (and with a lucrative deal for the Academy). Cinema’s highest honor has been broadcast to viewers at home since 1953, when Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” won Best Picture.

At the 95th Academy Awards ceremony, as many analysts focus on the success of the show itself as on the winners of each category. As Hollywood competes for the audience’s attention, exactly which people tune in to the Oscars — and the more opaque question of why — casts a shadow not only over the future of respect for the art of cinema, but also the copper tax to be paid at the box office. .

“Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” stand out as crowd-pleasing blockbusters and top honorees. In the Best Picture race are “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Elvis,” “The Fabelmans,” “LIBRARY,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Women Talking,” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which leads the competition with an astounding 11 nominations.

Where should you go after you finish making the 2023 masterpieces? Start by checking out the other performances in the Best Actor and Actress categories (Paul Mescal is devastating in “Aftersun”), scroll through the gorgeous Best Animated Feature nominees (here’s looking at you, Marcel), or find a place to watch all 15. dazzling shorts candidates.

In alphabetical order until the end of the shorts race, here are the 51 movies you need to know about this year’s Oscars. Also, check out IndieWire’s 2023 Oscars streaming guide and our list of the competition’s most surprising jokes.

Samantha Bergeson, Ryan Lattanzio and Christian Zilko contributed to this story.

“Aftersun”

Courtesy of the Everett Collection

“Aftersun”

Nominated for: Best Actor (Paul Mescal)

“Charlotte Wells’ stunning debut ‘Aftersun,’ which unfolds with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, is more than just an honest film about how we remember the people we’ve lost—fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere at once. – it is also a heartbreaking act of self-remembering. Here, in an oblique but tender story that seems small enough to fit in a snapshot (or squeeze into the LCD screen of an old camera), Wells creates a film that gradually goes far beyond frames. By the time it reaches a fever pitch with the biggest Freddie Mercury needle this side of “Wayne’s World,” “Aftersun” has begun to tremble under the crushing weight of all that we can’t leave behind and all that we might not have. they are known to take with us first and foremost.” —David Ehrlich

Read IndieWire’s review of “Aftersun.” (grade: A)

“Quiet on the Western Front”

©Netflix/Courtesy of the Everett Collection

“Quiet on the Western Front”

Nominated for: Best Film, Best International Feature Film, Best Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay (Edward Berger, Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson), Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Sound, Best Original Score

“We may gain new insight from the new adaptation of ‘All Quiet,’ despite its ripple effect: the war, unfortunately, is not over because of the movies that tell us how terrible it is. And its futility and absurdity remain constant, even as its face evolves with age. Unfortunately, Edward Berger’s handsome but expected version of the story doesn’t add much to the canon, except for a few strikingly beautiful sequences.” —Katie Rife

Read IndieWire’s review of All Quiet on the Western Front (grade: B)

“Everything That Breathes”

Courtesy of IDA

“Everything That Breathes”

Nominated for: Best Documentary

“If it is inevitable that such a detail-obsessed portrait is at times overwhelmed by possibilities, death has the unfortunate ability to refocus our attention, and this goes hand in hand with Sen’s non-hierarchical view of life in Delhi. “All That Breahes” doesn’t look directly at the horror that erupts from the city’s anti-Muslim fervor — it watches the violence on TV, then later confronts us with unsettling stills of the devastation it leaves behind — but it’s a testimony. to the film’s slow build-up, that this tragic climax is a testament to the urgency of Wildlife Rescue and not just the people running it.” – BUT

Read IndieWire’s review of “All That Breathes.” (grade: B+)

“All beauty and bloodshed”

Courtesy of the Everett Collection

“All beauty and bloodshed”

Nominated for: Best Documentary

“That title. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” was already getting chills in the Venice Film Festival competition before it was screened, sounding more like a line from a Yeats poem than the latest documentary from the “CITIZENFOUR” director. The big news: the movie lives up to it. Laura Poitras, already a powerful director, delivered a towering and devastating work with shocking intelligence and even greater emotional power.” —Sophie Monks Kaufman

Read IndieWire’s review of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (grade: A+)

“Argentina, 1985”

©Amazon/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Argentina, 1985”

Nominated for: Best International Feature Film

“The American mythmaking machine’s penchant for pumping out heroes like sausages in so many capes is countered in Argentina 1985, an entertaining biopic about recent Argentine history that takes the baton from Shakespeare’s idea that ‘some men are great burdened them. This is very much the case for Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darín), a family man who is shocked to be named lead prosecutor in what has come to be known as the “Trial of the Juntas.” – SMK

Read IndieWire’s review of “Argentina, 1985.” (grade: B+)

“Avatar: The Path of Water”

©Courtesy of The Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection

“Avatar: The Path of Water”

Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design, Best Sound

“Cameron has always treated story as a direct extension of the visuals needed to bring it to life, but the Anthropocene relationship between narrative and technology was a little uneven in the first ‘Avatar,’ which obscured the old behind a veil of new. his earlier films allowed them to intertwine more. An out-of-body theatrical experience that makes its predecessor feel like a glorified proof of concept, “Avatar: The Way of Water” is a stunning improvement over the original because its visuals don’t have to compensate for its story. ; in vintage Cameron fashion, it’s the film’s visuals that allow its story to be told so well.” – BUT

Read IndieWire’s review of Avatar: The Last Airbender (grade: A-)

“Babylon”

©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Babylon”

Nominated for: Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score

“A rambling Caligulan ode to Hollywood’s early days, Damien Chazelle’s massive ‘Babylon’ may begin in 1926, but the film is soon burdened by a lucidity that allows it to get stuck in time. Several characters in the epic are haunted by glimpses of a future they are powerless to prevent, a curse that the director draws inspiration from across the spectrum of film history.

Knowing that this $80 million studio project could be the last of its kind, “Babylon” refracts Hollywood’s first major identity crisis through the prism of its latest. It reminds us that movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then interprets it—the heart-exploding, mesmerizingly galaxy-brained prayer of the finale—as uplifting proof that they will indeed live forever. You just have no idea how the movies are going to do that or where the hell they’re going to go from here.” – BUT

Read IndieWire’s review of Babylon (grade: B)

“Bardo, a false chronicle of a handful of truths”

©Netflix/Courtesy of the Everett Collection

“Bardo, a false chronicle of a handful of truths”

Nominated for: Best cinematographer

“‘Bardo’ gets away with it have your cake and eat it too to ambivalence because Iñárritu makes such a ridiculous spectacle of trying to resolve it. Once a scruffy young filmmaker, he’s since become an Oscar-winning author with several nice houses, but nothing that really feels like home. Now it seems as if Iñárritu’s increasingly overwrought efforts to assert his own relevance—to create art of such undeniable importance that it no longer needs roots—are stuck in the Bardo, haunted by the same voices that inspired him. write the bitter critic played by Lindsay Duncan in Birdman. – BUT

Read IndieWire’s review of “Bardo, The False Chronicle of a Handful of Truth.” (Grade: C+)

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