The Best Movies Of 2023 All Have One Thing In Common (And It's Not What You Think)

As T.E. Lawrence exclaims in "Lawrence of Arabia" (or, if you prefer, the line that the sociopathic android David imitates in "Prometheus"): "Big things have small beginnings." That axiom holds generally true of most things in life, of course, yet it curiously applies to a great number of films released in 2023. 

Over the last decade and change, we've been privy to many "big things" in American cinema; such trends as the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its brethren have ensured that world-ending stakes (or larger) became the order of the day on screen, and such stakes were allowed to rise given their films' not-so-humble beginnings (for example: Tony Stark in "Iron Man" begins as a billionaire playboy military weapons manufacturer).

While there has never been a complete end to a more modest style of storytelling focused on average, everyday characters, the prevalence of the superhero film and the need for Hollywood to get butts in seats as screens dwindle meant that fewer risks were taken while the bar kept being raised. Then, the pandemic happened — that event saw virtually every aspect of life take a hit, causing an inevitable sea change in arts and entertainment from within and without. After the movies of 2021 and 2022 finished out the slates that had mostly been planned before COVID, 2023's films feature a noticeable shift in budgets and artistic approaches without a major loss of spectacle or scope.

There were still Big Things happening this year on our movie screens, but intriguingly, many of these events had Small Beginnings, usually featuring people talking (and/or conspiring, arguing, working together, etc.) in rooms. The films of 2023 went out of their way to connect the interior to the exterior, making a series of rooms not just ordinary spaces but, as Lin-Manuel Miranda once said, "the room where it happens."

When it comes to putting drama inside the proverbial bottle of a single location, genre films are the undisputed king. After all, setting a horror film or an action movie in one place allows for inventiveness when it comes to staging set pieces and kills, and it also ramps up the suspense via the claustrophobia that comes with the location. Many of 2023's horror movies exploited the fear of being trapped inside with danger: "A Haunting in Venice," "The Blackening," "Insidious: The Red Door," "The Nun II," "Cobweb," "The Last Voyage of the Demeter," "The Exorcist: Believer," and "Five Nights at Freddy's" all made judicious use of a single, interior location.

Even more intriguing are the horror films that tied the interior to the exterior, either blurring the lines between the two or demonstrating the effects that the events of the interior had on the outside world. The relatively intimate events of "Beau is Afraid," "Knock at the Cabin," "No One Will Save You" and "Evil Dead Rise" are shown to have far-reaching ramifications — even (and especially) apocalyptic ones. The most original horror film of the year, "Skinamarink," is built wholly around the fear of liminal spaces, with the child characters of the film trapped inside their home by a demon who can manipulate time and space.

2023's action films were no slouch in the single-location department either, and they also demonstrated how their on-screen conflicts connected to larger, world-threatening events. Most of "Expend4bles" takes place on a boat with nuclear warheads aboard; in "The Equalizer 3," Denzel Washington's fixer is hiding in a small Italian town where a cadre of terrorist bombers are located; Joel Kinnaman's devastated dad in "Silent Night" takes on an entire criminal gang inside his small suburban home and a high-rise building; Liam Neeson's financier is held hostage inside his car by someone bombing an entire city in "Retribution"; and in "Hypnotic," Ben Affleck's cop follows the trail of a mesmerist bank robber down a path that reverses the exterior-interior relationship, discovering he was inside more than outside all along.

In real life, the two most obvious arenas of "things happen in small rooms that have worldwide ramifications" are business and politics. Both were well represented on screen in 2023, and in the case of the former, were presented in well-rounded fashion. The two most preeminent examples, Ben Affleck's "Air" and Matt Johnson's "Blackberry," act like two sides of the same coin: Both films feature groups of men operating like hustler desk jockeys, their sweat and by-the-seat-of-their-pants bluster focused on landing that big sale. Of course, in "Air," the men are inspiring heroes, and in "Blackberry," they're egotistical buffoons.

That dichotomy is given a deliberate social class analogy in Craig Gillespie's "Dumb Money," where the haves are the calloused hedge fund investors and the have-nots are the scrappy internet underdogs who shoot GameStop's stock to the moon. David Fincher's blistering satire "The Killer" blends both of these aspects into a single character: Michael Fassbender's assassin, who despite his extensive air mileage and clothing budget nonetheless shops at Amazon, Starbucks and McDonalds, all while executing his job inside dehumanizing, low-income spaces like an abandoned WeWork.

2023 also saw an uptick in the rising scourge of AI, that nebulous thing that grifting tech bros are so bullish on and everyone else is confused about. Sure enough, Hollywood (through insight or sheer coincidence) had on offer a few films about the potential sentience of Artificial Intelligence and the dangers therein. Granted, such material has been a sci-fi staple practically since the medium of cinema began (hello, "Metropolis"), but "The Creator" examined how human life integrated with AI might look on a micro as well as macro level. Meanwhile, the toy makers of "M3GAN" found themselves pushing the tech too far, beginning the sentient doll's life in their labs and then allowing it to embrace its deadlier, more destructive programming in a suburban home.

On the politics side, many films since Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" have explored the relationship between men in rooms planning out everything from policies to wars and the people who are affected by them outside those four walls. Yet 2023 had a sharper focus on those rooms, and how the men in them are hardly all that great.

One of the most impressive films of the year, Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer," does this by making the movie mostly subjective: Its centerpiece is the Trinity test of the atomic bomb, sure, yet the titular scientist only experiences his creation's devastating effect on Japan — and, by extension, the entire world — through his neuroses and hallucinations. Where "Oppenheimer" is deliberately claustrophobic, Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" and Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon" don't shy away from depicting the consequences of egotistical and/or evil men setting their plans into motion from the comfort of their palaces and homes. "Napoleon" has extensive battle sequences bolstered by on-screen statistics of people killed, while "Flower Moon" shows the brutal murder of Osage people combined with the historical whitewashing of the events that followed.

Elsewhere, Daniel Goldhaber's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" shows its conspirators enact a plan that began in a series of small meetings, building to a literal and figurative explosion. Michael Mann's "Ferrari" sees the automobile magnate callously disregard the safety of his employees and race car drivers for the sake of his own ambition. Despite the obvious exterior spectacle that both "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" and "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning" build to, both films feature lengthy scenes of people speaking portentously inside hotel rooms, board rooms, and — as it happens — trains. Even Japan's "Godzilla Minus One" features group meetings about how to solve the problem of that delightful metaphor-for-war, Godzilla.

2023's most insidious movie, Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest," takes this disconnect between people with political power not understanding the effects they have on the outside world until it's too late to heart, following the day-to-day life of an Auschwitz Commandant and his family who live directly outside a concentration camp during Nazi rule. Where many Holocaust films choose to depict the atrocities committed by the Nazis, "Zone" keeps them out of sight (though not out of earshot), just as its characters do, making the tension between the interior and the exterior incredibly taut.

Romance is an emotion that is primarily internal, so it's no big surprise that the most romantic movies of 2023 don't feel the need to pull a "Gone With the Wind" and set their lovers against a massive backdrop. Unlikely lovers discover their surprising affection for each other while in small, quiet spaces, such as in "Master Gardener" and "Sanctuary," while established relationships begin to fracture and split apart inside the apartments of "You Hurt My Feelings" and "Fair Play." Even the sprawling estate of "Saltburn," which holds the promise of decadent liaisons, is revealed to harbor more threatening desires instead.

Elsewhere, the meticulous interior spaces of "May December," "Eileen" and "Priscilla" almost feel hermetically sealed, cut off from the outside world lest it invade and crush the love that's been allowed to blossom inside. By contrast, the affection seen in "Poor Things," "Past Lives" and even "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" transcend distance, allowing lovers to connect despite their physical separation.

As always, Hollywood loves making features about artists and other creative types, although those films typically don't dwell on the more interior parts of the creative process. That's not true of the movies of 2023: Bradley Cooper's "Maestro" directly connects Leonard Bernstein's home life with his musical life, while Cord Jefferson's "American Fiction" depicts Jeffrey Wright's author literally conversing with his fictional characters while writing in his room. Kristoffer Borgli's "Dream Scenario" takes similar visual flights of fancy, as Nicolas Cage's humdrum professor finds versions of himself turning up in the minds of the world's dreamers.

Other disciplines of creativity and thought found advocates on screen this year. The scrappy underdogs of "Theater Camp" literally put on a show to save their favorite place to be themselves, while the troupe at the center of "Asteroid City" transcends the fourth wall of the proscenium arch to blur the line between reality and fiction, film and theatre, heartfelt humanity and fanciful sci-fi. When Dominic Sessa's abandoned boarding school student is trapped over Christmas break with his teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), in "The Holdovers," the professor opens up the world of history to his student, and the two find a common bond between them. As Hunham explains during one scene: "History is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present."

The films of 2023 — like any movie since the medium began — are living historical documents, albeit time-shifted ones. During the pandemic, so many of us were trapped inside our rooms as ourselves, yearning for the outside world. We were suddenly made to see the symbiotic relationship between the interior and exterior we all took for granted. Now that most of us are outside again, the movies of 2023 are here to remind us that every action has a consequence, every cause an effect, every big thing a small beginning.