Cascadia Critics Ten Best Films of 2023

If you don’t know who we are yet, we are the Cascadia Film and Television Critics Association. We represent critics in the Cascadia region, which we currently define as British Columbia, Canada and Washington, United States. To introduce ourselves to the world, in our first act of business, we want to honour the movies of the past year while setting ourselves up for the future. We asked our members to name their ten favourite films of the year, and from there, we crafted this list: the Cascadia Critics Ten Best Films of 2023. Each film has an advocate of someone in our group who ranked the film highly on their list, so their admiration is genuine. 

If you love stats as much as we do, you’ll like these: A total of 61 different films appeared on our 12 ballots. While 10 films made our final cut, an additional 13 received more than one vote. Honourable mentions go to The Holdovers, The Killer, BlackBerry, The Delinquents, The Teachers’ Lounge, Asteroid City and Fallen Leaves.

We will continue to name our top ten films of the year in future years, but look forward to us giving out more specific awards as well! You can view our nominees for our 2023 Best Cascadian Film award right here (with a winner to be announced soon). Huge thank you to all of our members for voting and all the contributions made in this article. 

Cascadia Critics Ten Best Films of 2023

10. The Killer

David Fincher’s tale of a perfectionist discovering he is not perfect is so deeply layered that it’s easy to see its focused, fading protagonist as a creative metaphor. Every artist inserts themselves into their work, and Fincher is certainly here in spirit – a man who insists he does not feel (despite evidence to the contrary), who does not make mistakes (until he does) – but it’s not important to nail down whether this is his response to numerous Fight Club misreads, or years of professional criticism. Because, even just taken at face value, The Killer is a masterpiece of storytelling.

Flawless technique, an intelligent script, and a star turn by Michael Fassbender that would feel cold if he weren’t so adept at showing inner turmoil and rage. Then a final beat of acceptance that brings the whole film into frame, and Fincher reminds us that many things count as a victory.

– Simon Best

9. Evil Does Not Exist

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist is a hushed nature walk of a film that moves at the slow plodding pace of life itself, but it is utterly spellbinding; laced with mystery and subtext and puzzling little discoveries along the way. The story, about a small Japanese village’s stance against encroaching urbanization, unfolds details of its characters and its setting—and about the characters’ relations to the setting—to hypnotizing effect. It is exactly my kind of nature walk, one that becomes transportive and transformative just when you think you’ve got your bearings.

It is a film to chill and slurp noodles with or chop wood to… until it isn’t.  

– Taylor Beaumont

8. Afire (Roter Himmel)

Afire begins with Felix and Leon driving the final miles to their destination, a cabin Felix’s family owns that the young men plan to stay at as they work on their school projects as summer ends. But the cabin isn’t empty when they arrive, Nadja, the daughter of Felix’s mother’s friend is staying at the cabin for the summer too. As the summer wears on the three become entangled in a moral tale of self-absorption, intimacy, and loneliness.

The film’s strength lies not just in its characters but in its indirect characterization of them and the space they each have along the film’s runtime to round themselves out. The minuteness of their foibles and the sunken passion and longing driving their behavior. We all know the feelings Petzold puts on screen, but rarely do we see such a range of the human experience and its many desires presented in such a thoughtful way.

– Taylor Baker

7. Spider-Man: Across the the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse features some of the most breathtaking animation that we have recently seen in an animated film, and that is only the start of its excellence! Daniel Pemberton’s musical score electrifies the film with excitement, while the voice performances across the board are spectacular in bringing to life these memorable characters.

Combined with an ambitious scope to the story that is being spun that is exhilarating, full of emotional stakes and some truly shocking moments that will leave audiences speechless, it is not only an unforgettable experience that ranks among 2023’s best films, but one of the greatest superhero films of all time.

– Darren Zakus

6. The Zone of Interest

When you think of Nazism in film there’s Ralph Fiennes’ brutal Amon Goeth or Bruno Ganz’s frothing Hitler. It‘s all so dramatic and over the top. You never think about the banality of evil. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the Commandant of a concentration camp takes business meetings on how to gas Jews more efficiently and he entertains officers to play the political game. His wife (Sandra Hüller), is mostly concerned with maintaining their house. Just in the background of said well-kept home is a place of unseen terror. Trains roll into the grounds, at night the chimneys burn bright and gunshots periodically sound.

This is the look and feel of a genocide happening just beyond our vision, one that as viewers we can’t stop or interrupt. Jonathan Glazer returns to force us to sit with our knowledge of what is going on, but refuses to give us catharsis. In a lesser director’s hand this would be an unmitigated disaster, instead it’s a masterpiece.

– Dakota Arsenault

5. Barbie

There was never any doubt that Barbie was going to be good, Greta Gerwig is too good of a director for that. What we didn’t know ahead of time was how good, or what kind of good, and it turned out that Barbie was the best kind: fun, funny, and heartfelt whilst also investigating and illuminating feminism, the patriarchy, relationships, finding one’s place in the world, horses, masculinity, consumerism, and the list goes on and on.

Two solid dance numbers, several great songs, a slew of perfectly targetted jokes, and excellent work from Ryan Gosling and especially Margot Robbie, make Barbie one of the best movies of the year.

– Matthew Simpson

4. Anatomy of a Fall

Throughout Justine Triet’s meticulously detailed exploration of a tragic event, a relationship is dissected, and the assumed gender and power dynamics of a relationship are laid bare. Those dynamics inform a film laced with ambiguity as audiences watch a courtroom drama where everything in a person’s life is evidence. Anatomy of a Fall moves at a brisk pace despite lingering on and untangling every word and action made by its protagonist – until fact and fiction are almost interchangeable.

At the heart of it all is a family thrust under the microscope and forced to confront the truths kept from those we love most. Sandra Hüller’s intense performance as a writer forced to defend her life, combined with a matter-of-fact approach to an unclear situation, turns Anatomy of a Fall into one of the most thrilling courtroom dramas ever made and one of the best films of 2023.

– Christopher Cross

3. How to Blow Up A Pipeline

Fourteen months ago, following the world premiere of How to Blow Up a Pipeline at the Toronto International Film Festival, I called Daniel Goldhaber’s eco-terrorist thriller the “most important film of the festival.” This fast-paced, tightly-woven heist flick tells the tale of a ragtag – meant literally – group of activists who set out with the titular goal: to stand up against the profiteers of the Earth’s destruction, by fighting fire with fire. Much like the film’s source material, Andreas Malm’s eponymous book, Pipeline is less an instruction manual – and more a manifesto. It carries within it the outrage of rebellion and necessity.

Since the world premiere, wildfires raged from Syria to Hawaii, floods swept through central Africa, history’s strongest Pacific hurricane nearly wiped Acapulco off the map, and Earth burnt through the hottest twelve months ever recorded. Now, it’s clear, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is more important than ever.

– Todd Pengelly

2. Past Lives

Past Lives is a rapturous film about connection and longing that is more than worthy of audience adoration. In her remarkable feature writing and directorial debut, Celine Song tells the story of childhood friends Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) as they connect and reconnect with each other in 12 year intervals. What makes Past Lives so enamoring is the maturity in which Song handles their hard-to-define relationship. When Nora’s partner-turned-husband Arthur (John Magaro) is added to the equation midway through the story, relationships that could’ve easily devolved into a complicated and dramatic love triangle are instead utilized as catalysts for vulnerability, understanding, and compassion between the characters.

Crafted around a magnificent screenplay, Past Lives speaks to the value of connection between individuals, with enough In-Yun in one film to endure over many lifetimes.

Thomas Stoneham-Judge

1. Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s powerful storytelling and superb technical filmmaking combine for a mesmerizing and thoroughly educational experience walking through the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer as he conceives of, leads a team to create, and suffers the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. anchor the film with masterful performances, supported by a brilliant ensemble cast, in this complex biographical epic that dances in many genres over several timelines and is deeply human but also challengingly dense. Riveting from start to finish despite its 3-hour runtime, Oppenheimer is a special blockbuster the likes of which we rarely see and worthy of all the praise it receives.

– Aaron White