By Ken Miyamoto from ScreenCraft · January 3, 2024
Are you looking for a New Year’s resolution for 2024? Try watching the best-reviewed movies of 2023 according to the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score, which reflects the proportion of favorable reviews from professional critics for a particular film or TV show. This score is computed once a movie garners a minimum of five reviews.
Notable films in the Top 50 include movies like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, The Holdovers, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, They Cloned Tyrone, John Wick: Chapter 4, and Talk to Me.
Movies that missed the Top 50 mark, but are still Certified Fresh include popular flicks like Oppenheimer (#54), Air (#55), M3gan (#56), Poor Things (#57), Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (#72), Barbie (#98), Creed III (#99), The Killer (#119), Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 (#133), and Maestro (#142).
This Top 50 list prioritizes critical acclaim over box office success. As a result, you’ll discover some new and surprising movies that may not have shown up on your radar.
Without any further ado, here are the 50 best movies of 2023 according to Rotten Tomatoes. (The best-reviewed movies, anyway.)
Note: These ratings are as of the date of publication. The first rating represents the critics while the second rating (if applicable) represents the Audience Score.
Follows 17-year-old Ryota Miyagi, who struggles to accomplish his late elder brother’s dream of becoming a basketball star.
When her family moves from the city to the suburbs, 11-year-old Margaret navigates new friends, feelings, and the beginning of adolescence.
The story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone.
Japan is already devastated by the war when a new crisis emerges in the form of a giant monster.
Two youngsters reeling from bad breakups connect over an eventful day in South London.
In modern-day Helsinki, two lonely souls in search of love meet by chance in a karaoke bar. However, their path to happiness is beset by obstacles – from lost phone numbers to mistaken addresses, alcoholism, and a charming stray dog.
The youngest son in a traditional Pakistani family takes a job as a backup dancer in a Bollywood-style burlesque and quickly becomes infatuated with the strong-willed trans woman who runs the show.
In this edge-of-your-seat thriller, an expatriate French couple operates an organic farm in the Spanish countryside but clashes with villagers.
Just when Julie finally gets an interview for a job that will let her raise her children better, she runs into a national transit strike.
Cook Eugenie and her boss Dodin grow fond of one another over 20 years, and their romance gives rise to dishes that impress even the world’s most illustrious chefs. When Dodin is faced with Eugenie’s reluctance to commit, he begins to cook for her.
A young Iranian mother and her six-year-old daughter find refuge in an Australian women’s shelter during the two weeks of the Iranian New Year (Nowruz).
Carla Nowak, a dedicated sports and math teacher, starts her first job at a high school. She stands out among the new staff because of her idealism. When a series of thefts occur at the school and one of her students is suspected, she decides to get to the bottom of the matter on her own. Carla tries to mediate between outraged parents, opinionated colleagues and aggressive students, but is relentlessly confronted with the structures of the school system. The more desperately she tries to do everything right, the more the young teacher threatens to break.
A solitary woman re-evaluates her isolated existence after her neighbor dies alone in his apartment.
When Abel learns that his mother is about to marry a man in prison, he freaks out. With the help of his best friend, he will do whatever it takes to protect her. But meeting his new stepfather may well offer him a new perspective.
In Part I of the two-part epic adaptation of the beloved classic by Alexandre Dumas, D’Artagnan arrives in Paris trying to find his attackers after being left for dead, which leads him to a real war where the future of France is at stake. He aligns himself with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, three musketeers of the King.
After flight MH17 crashes in eastern Ukraine, violent tensions disrupt the lives of an expecting couple living in Donetsk.
A twenty-five-year-old French woman returns to Korea, the country she was born in before being adopted by a French couple, for the very first time. She decides to track down her biological parents, but her journey takes a surprising turn.
After unapologetic and fiercely loyal Inez kidnaps her son Terry from the foster care system, mother and son set out to reclaim their sense of home, identity, and stability, in a rapidly changing New York City.
A mother demands answers from a teacher when her son begins acting strangely.
Valeria has long dreamed about becoming a mother. After learning that she’s pregnant, she expects to feel happy, yet something’s off.
Donya works for a Chinese fortune cookie factory. Formerly a translator for the U.S. military, she struggles to put her life back in order. In a moment of sudden revelation, she sends a special message in a cookie.
Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrested apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Twenty years later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront notions of love and destiny.
A cranky history teacher at a remote prep school must remain on campus over the holidays with a troubled student who has nowhere to go.
The film follows the Turtle brothers as they work to earn the love of New York City while facing down an army of mutants.
A woman is suspected of her husband’s murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the main witness.
Valeria has long dreamed about becoming a mother. After learning that she’s pregnant, she expects to feel happy, yet something’s off.
A modern action-adventure road story where a 17-year-old girl named Suzume helps a mysterious young man close doors from the other side that are releasing disasters all over Japan.
A morgue technician successfully reanimates the body of a little girl, but to keep her breathing, she will need to harvest biological materials from pregnant women. When the girl’s mother, a nurse, discovers her baby alive, they enter into a deal that forces them both down a dark path of no return.
Chronicles a variety of stories, but the main one follows Henry Sugar, who can see through objects and predict the future with the help of a book he stole.
A non-judgmental analysis of the driving forces of human behavior when confronted with the unknown, of the way we perceive the other, and of how we relate to an unsettling future.
An intimate coming-of-age story of a pregnant single mother who embraces her Bay Area community as she determines the fate of her family.
A middle-aged tailor and his wife find their relationship challenged by the arrival of a handsome new apprentice.
Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. Filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses to fill in their absence.
Miles Morales catapults across the Multiverse, where he encounters a team of Spider-People charged with protecting its very existence. When the heroes clash on how to handle a new threat, Miles must redefine what it means to be a hero.
A series of eerie events thrust an unlikely trio onto the trail of a nefarious government conspiracy in this pulpy mystery caper.
In 1988, a closeted teacher is pushed to the brink when a new student threatens to expose her sexuality.
When a knight in a futuristic medieval world is framed for a crime he didn’t commit, the only one who can help him prove his innocence is Nimona — a mischievous teen who happens to be a shapeshifting creature he’s sworn to destroy.
Three British teenage girls go on a rites-of-passage holiday – drinking, clubbing, and hooking up, in what should be the best summer of their lives.
Maja, a Danish has-been actress, falls in love with Leah, a Jewish academic from London. Leah suffers a mysterious seizure, and Maja returns with her to London. There, she meets Leah’s mother, Chana, a woman who could hold dark secrets.
Amanda, 24, lives mostly isolated and has never had any friends, even if it’s the thing she wants the most. Amanda chooses as her new mission to convince her childhood friend that they are still best friends.
John Wick uncovers a path to defeating The High Table. But before he can earn his freedom, Wick must face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe and forces that turn old friends into foes.
When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far and unleashes terrifying supernatural forces.
A novelist’s longstanding marriage is suddenly upended when she overhears her husband giving his honest reaction to her latest book.
When an ex-soldier who discovers gold in the Lapland wilderness tries to take the loot into the city, Nazi soldiers led by a brutal SS officer battle him.
A gay couple’s marriage is thrown into crisis when one of them impulsively begins a passionate affair with a young woman.
A crew of environmental activists plot a daring plan to disrupt an oil pipeline.
Follows Rama, a novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly at the Saint-Omer Criminal Court to use her story to write a modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but things don’t go as expected.
Georgie, a dreamy 12-year-old girl, lives happily alone in her London flat, filling it with magic. Suddenly, her estranged father turns up and forces her to confront reality.
A group of vigilantes called the “tobacco forces” is falling apart. To rebuild team spirit, their leader suggests that they meet for a week-long retreat, before returning to save the world.
It is said that every investigator has a crime that haunts them, a case that hurts them more than the others, without them necessarily knowing why. For Yohan, that case is the murder of Clara.
Read More: 50 Best Movies of 2022 According to Rotten Tomatoes
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Ken Miyamoto has worked in the film industry for nearly two decades, most notably as a studio liaison for Sony Studios and then as a script reader and story analyst for Sony Pictures.
He has many studio meetings under his belt as a produced screenwriter, meeting with the likes of Sony, Dreamworks, Universal, Disney, Warner Brothers, as well as many production and management companies. He has had a previous development deal with Lionsgate, as well as multiple writing assignments, including the produced miniseries Blackout, starring Anne Heche, Sean Patrick Flanery, Billy Zane, James Brolin, Haylie Duff, Brian Bloom, Eric La Salle, and Bruce Boxleitner, the feature thriller Hunter’s Creed, and many Lifetime thrillers. Follow Ken on Twitter @KenMovies and Instagram @KenMovies76
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