The 2023 Reveal Subscriber Poll

Our second annual paid subscriber poll yields a Scorsese/Nolan battle royale at the top and suggests future cult status for 'Beau is Afraid' and 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline.'

With last year’s inaugural Reveal Subscriber Poll, we were thrilled to be able to revive an idea I had during the ‘00s at The A.V. Club, presuming (correctly) that we’d have enough ballots and commentary from our community to give a good picture into the movies that you cared about in 2022. The results were reasonably close at the top, but Todd Field’s Tár wound up pulling away, with Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Banshees of Inisherin trailing closely behind. It was obvious this year would be more of a nail-biter, with two directorial titans, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan, delivering historical epics that each explored, in their own way, some dark, crucial part of the American soul. But really, we were most excited to hear your voices and once again, you did not disappoint. The poll results and my notes are below, along with lots of excellent commentary from our participants on the film that dazzled them in 2023. Thanks again to our paid subscribers for supporting this little venture and for bringing so much passion to this project. Let’s get to it! 

The Top 10

1. Killers of the Flower Moon (201 pts., 59 ballots) 

2. Oppenheimer (191 pts., 53 ballots) 

3. Past Lives (151 pts., 45 ballots)

4. May December (144 pts., 45 ballots) 

5. The Zone of Interest (132 pts., 42 ballots) 

6. The Holdovers (101 pts., 31 ballots) 

7. Poor Things (93 pts., 33 ballots) 

8. Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse (85 pts., 29 ballots)

9. The Boy and the Heron (84 pts., 27 ballots) 

10. Asteroid City (81 pts., 27 ballots) 

Significant others: Anatomy of a Fall (80 pts.), Beau is Afraid (48 pts.), Showing Up (46 pts.), All of Us Strangers (44 pts., 17 votes), Godzilla Minus One (44 pts., 15 votes), Barbie (40 pts.), The Killer (30 pts), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (27 pts.), Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret (26 pts.), John Wick: Chapter 4 (23 pts.) 

Some notes on the results: 

As usual, the math on these poll results is as simple as can be. Readers submit their Top Five picks and points are allotted thusly: 5 points for #1, 4 points for #2, etc. In the future, I may attempt to conduct the poll through a site that will allow voters to divvy up points in relation to their passion about a given film, so we can get an even better feeling for how much people care about their favorites. (It’s also more fun, based on my experience voting in Mike D’Angelo’s Skandies poll for a decade, to have the flexibility to vote more strategically.) That said, we can still do a little basic math and get a sense of how much support individual films received. If we were to reorder the Top 10 based on the average score—points divided by ballots—the results would come out thusly: Oppenheimer (3.6), Killers of the Flower Moon (3.41), Past Lives (3.35), The Holdovers (3.25), May December (3.2), The Zone of Interest (3.14), The Boy and the Heron (3.1), Asteroid City (3.0), Poor Things (2.89), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2.93). 

• There’s not a massive shake-up in the Top 10 based on average points, but you can see that Killers of the Flower Moon edged out Oppenheimer more through the number of submissions than placement on individual Top 5 ballots, and you have some titles moving up (The Holdovers, The Boy and the Heron, Asteroid City) and others going down (May December, Poor Things, Spider-Man) slightly on the passion scale. Digging deeper into the poll, the shrinking sample sizes give you some wonkier results, but I was most struck by how much people who loved Beau is Afraid really loved it, which may not be that surprising given how polarizing that film turned out to be. Those 48 points were earned through only 12 ballots, giving it a whopping 4.0 on the passion scale, cruising comfortably past Oppenheimer. Save for the two people who voted for Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves—one at #1, the other at #2—nothing on the “also receiving votes” level came close to Beau is Afraid. As your resident New Cult Canonizer, that kind of response marks it as a cult favorite in the making, embraced by the passionate few. 

• As for surprises, I was a little caught off guard by Barbie’s poor showing. That film was the opposite of Beau is Afraid in that it appeared on a decent number of ballots (19), but only scored 40 points, which averages out to middling 2.11. (Again, this is math for literature majors.) On the other hand, I was excited to see the support for How to Blow Up a Pipeline, an indie film we didn’t cover on The Reveal until I did my annual ranking of the Neon end-of-the-year box. We also had five votes for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, another film we didn’t cover on the site and one that didn’t have nearly the distribution clout of his previous films. (Well Go USA put it out in the states.) 

• How did Reveal voters measure up to Academy voters? I would say the results were unusually aligned, which of course means that the Academy did not screw things up as royally as it usually does. Six of the 10 Best Picture nominees are in our Top 10, including #1-3 and #5-7, providing more evidence that May December got a bit shorted. (Nothing for the performances, Academy? Really?!) The other four Best Picture nominees got decent support from us, by and large, with Anatomy of a Fall right on the cusp of our Top 10 and Barbie in what would be the #16 slot. American Fiction and Maestro had a tougher time with our voters, with the former on five ballots and the latter on only two. (Though Maestro was the #1 choice for one of those two voters, so if Bradley Cooper were the sort to find it worthwhile just to inspire one person in the audience, mission accomplished.) 

• A notably brutal year for documentaries. The only docs to appear on more than one ballot was Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica. (Two awesome films, granted, but extremely limited in their appeal and their distribution.) A bad year for horror films, too, with only Skinamarink and When Evil Lurks getting multiple ballot mentions. (Again, good job on those, folks.) 

• On a personal note, we could not be more grateful for your contributions to this poll and for your support throughout the year. The time many of you put into writing about your favorites, too, is humbling and inspiring. Even if your comments didn’t ultimately make the cut below, please know that they were all read and appreciated. 

• The picture below was submitted by Pamelyn Woo, who likes to do thumbnail paintings of her Top 9 films of the year. How delightful is that? 

Now on to your commentary: 

ON THE WINNERS

Killers of the Flower Moon

With its portrayal of a problematic but very real loving interracial relationship—the impossibility of it and the fact that it ends so tragically between them—Killers of the Flower Moon is such a powerful metaphor for what we see racially and historically in America. It makes me cry thinking about it. Marty captured this joy between these two people and I think that’s one of the most important and profound statements to be made. I think a lot of people just think race is an impassable obstacle when it comes to love, but it’s just the biggest myth out there. Now that it’s streaming on Apple, I sometimes cue up the storm scene. It’s the best scene I’ve seen in years and I think about it on a daily basis. The fact that this woman has this compelling power over fucking Leonardo DiCaprio, this ability to quiet and still him, and the fact that he wants to listen to her and defer to her in that moment. I was and still am shaken. — Kristen SaBerre

Many smarter people have written at length about this film, so I’ll just say that I’ve found Scorsese’s melancholic late career trilogy of Silence, The Irishman, and now Killers of the Flower Moon to be deeply affecting, mournful films in dialogue with both his career and his understanding of history (national, in the latter two cases, and Catholic, in the former), and all three have lingered in my mind long after my first viewing. The radio play coda of Killers, in particular, was one of the most inspired sequences I saw this year, and felt like a profoundly intimate moment of self-reflection by Scorsese. That’s not the kind of thing you get to see very often, and I treasured it. — Alex Schneider

Oppenheimer

My most anticipated movie of the year didn't disappoint, though it took two viewings (one in digital IMAX, one in standard 35mm) for me to fully love it. At once an intricate chamber piece and a gratifyingly unwieldy epic, Oppenheimer again demonstrates Christopher Nolan’s talent for streamlining abstract ideas, whether political, scientific, or philosophical, while preserving their complexity. The reality of modern warfare, with its emphasis on strikes from a distance and blurred line between combatants and civilians, looms over history like an inverted shadow. — Amy Woolsey

Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer is ostensibly a period piece, but unlike many other historical dramas or “great man” epics, it feels thrillingly propulsive, current and alive, never getting stuck in nostalgia. It’s pop avant-garde history, akin to Damien Chazelle’s portrait of Neil Armstrong, First Man, where the sound design and cinematography emphasize the enormity of the events being witnessed while the performances keep things grounded and all-too-human. Despite its dozens of characters, multiple timelines and 3-hour runtime, there is a flow to this film; a feeling that Nolan is orchestrating things as a conductor would a symphony. Every piece fits and every piece matters. And at the end of things, there is the overwhelming weight of what has transpired, and the contrast between the animating forces of the universe with the pettiness and self-interest of the people who seek to harness them. — Aaron Maurer (a.k.a. “Santos L. Halper”)

Past Lives

An extremely affecting romantic drama about the roads not taken manages to touch upon many other huge aspects of the human condition. It’s about global technological connection, and changing as you grow older, and the immigrant experience, and marriage. These all come together in the form of people who, reflecting on their past, are blasted with the universe of opportunities they turned down. In becoming who they are, they lost the chance to become someone else. — Alexander Throndson

May December

Drenched in the sweltering heat of Savannah, Ga., and scored like a ‘40s film noir, the sultry camp on display in Todd Haynes’ masterpiece belies the damning cultural examination buried beneath. Prepping for a movie role, opportunistic young actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) shadows Gracie (Julianne Moore) and her much younger husband Joe (a revelatory Charles Melton) to learn more about the scandalous and criminal origins of their relationship. In doing so, the notions of what is true and what isn’t get murkier and murkier, becoming tainted by her own ambitions. Through Elizabeth, Haynes puts our true crime-crazy world under the microscope. Not letting anyone off the hook, he criticizes our fascination with the genre through actors, through the Hollywood system, through us the audience, even criticizing himself as its maker. Haynes invites so many layers of analysis through simple luscious filmmaking coupled with a few ingenious visual tricks with cameras and mirrors. When its final twist is revealed, Haynes opens a chasm of the unknown before us. Real lives are so complex and contain actions without motivations, relationships that shouldn’t work out, and aspects that don’t make narrative sense. We crave to know, but by nature they are unknowable. — Brad McDermott

Blends the line between comedy and drama seamlessly, and ultimately ends up making a point about performance in both film and real life; how we construct our own realities to deal with the horrors we experience or commit. It’s a shame none of the performances were nominated for Oscars, especially Charles Melton, who is heartbreaking as a sort of real-life Bella Baxter who has to learn truths about the world in the most devastating way possible. — Ben Seitelman 

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer is a master of his form; each of his films is a perfect, visceral, disturbing morsel. Somehow, he just keeps topping himself, and this—perhaps the most essential Holocaust film to date—is his most visceral and disturbing project yet. I have not been able to shake the image of Christian Friedel retching as he descends the stairs at the end of the film, as if trying to dislodge some dark cancerous mass of which he has just become aware. Of course, he cannot, because he has already rotted from the inside out. There is nothing to dislodge; there is nothing left. (Zone would make for an astonishing, and soul-crushing, double feature with Killers of the Flower Moon. These are titanic works, and I wish they didn’t feel so relevant today.) — Alex Schneider

I’ll be honest, I had been anticipating this since the moment Cannes reviews dropped, to the point I was worried it would disappoint. It’s one thing to read about it; it's another thing to experience. Less “the banality of evil” and more evil set up as a million little choices, an acceptance, a trickling-down until it seeps into every part of you and your environment. You can ignore it as much as you want, but the impact of your actions is all around whether you want to see it or not. So stunning I had to walk seven blocks in the cold to clear my head. — Devan Suber

Rarely shot in closeups, the expansive, liminal spaces that surround the Höss family in Johnathan Glazer’s exceptional masterpiece cry out to be filled with humanity. It’s an absent void, a vacuum of death that permeates every shot, edit and moment in this great film. That humanity is being extinguished, as Rudolf Höss was a high-ranking officer in the Nazi party, and he along with his wife and children live in a stately but respectable upper-middle class home situated on the other side of the wall at Auschwitz. Seemingly oblivious to the nightmare they’re instigating, their daily concerns are the same as any domestic family. Glazer’s choice of filmmaking, to allude to the atrocities being committed only through images at the edges of the frame, and most prominently in the film’s sound, is very much a deliberate choice. It’s a film that incriminates us, the viewer, as we watch it. As the Höss family compartmentalizes, rationalizes, and distances themselves from the immense human suffering they’re causing, Glazer forces us to witness their point of view. As atrocities continue to happen in the world, Glazer asks us to contend with our own capacity, or lack thereof, to do the same. — Brad McDermott

Poor Things

An enlightenment fable where reason and rationality prevail over benighted custom and the forces of oppression (at least in the life of the protagonist). A more radical Barbie with sex, violence, and duck-dog hybrids. And maybe the most fun I had at the movies this year. — Jamsheed Siyar

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

It’s absolutely wild to me that an animated sequel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe landed in my top 50 films of the year, let alone the top 5. This film completely transcended the very commercial universe it was placed in by actually exploring multiverses in a truly original way. This is a true feat given how much multi-versal content we have been inundated with the last few years, and I think this film uses the conceit in the most unique and transformative way, by playing with the form of animation itself, exploring the history the art form, and tying it in with the story. I tried really hard to bump this out of my top 5 because of so many films that I think deserve that placement this year, but I can’t deny how this movie left me exiting the theater: just repeating “wow.” — Noah Schuettge

The Boy and the Heron 

“Eat up! We’re going deeper.”

Paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of a line delivered halfway through Miyazaki’s latest, and it’s an apt summation of both the film itself and the body of work that precedes it. Miyazaki’s eye for the fantastic is equaled and informed by his eye for the mundane, one always feeding the other, sometimes literally. Butter-jam toast sparks a spiritual connection; a freshly caught fish provides fuel for cosmic rebirth; parakeet chefs whet butcher knives, licking blunted beaks. Miyazaki's world is a strange one, but no stranger than our own: Like those of his previous films, it's rooted in the textures of nature, and subject to nature's rhythms. Life begins, life ends--but what do you do in the meantime? How do you live? Miyazaki asks this explicitly, and he offers an answer that is, like everything before it, both wondrous and painfully ordinary: 

“Two years after the war, my family moved back to Tokyo.” — David Wilson (a.k.a. Utah, Gimme Two) 

Asteroid City

With his latest film, Wes Anderson takes a leap forward with his signature style into the abstract. A circle of subplots and celebrities around him, Anderson daringly asks the big questions of human existence. Are we alone in the universe? Why do we dream? What happens when we die? And as the layers of reality collapse in the climax, Anderson asks us to question the meaning of life. In the 1950s, it seemed a brave new world and the story of America was being written, much as it is today. Anderson posits that there’s nothing else to do but continue telling it, into the unknown. — Brad McDermott

ON THE ALSO-RANS

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

I'm reminded of some of the tenets of the old Production Code: criminals and their actions could not be made to seem heroic; police could not be made fools of; your movie had to make clear that the criminals were wrong, and that they were punished for their actions. More filmmakers should take better advantage of the fact that we no longer work under the Production Code by making, for instance, a movie about a successful act of eco-terrorism. Exciting, tense, wonderfully humane. These people are not perfect, but the fury is righteous, the cause is just, and the moral compass is steady. A cri de coeur for Gen Z, and a sign that perhaps all is not lost for Millennials. — Sloan Bradford

My #1 choice is more a political choice than a reflection of the true quality of the film. Do I really think How to Blow Up a Pipeline was the best film of 2024? No, I don’t. But I do think it was the most important and should have had a much larger audience. That film was a conduit for the rage and despair our younger generations feel at the state we’ve left the planet in for them, and at our worldwide failure to stem the ravages of climate change. There is no more important issue than this because it is an issue that affects and will continue to affect every living human and their children. By that measure, every other film this year did little more than rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic, even one as important as Barbie. If you don't walk out of How to Blow Up a Pipeline feeling a profound sense of complicity in the murder of our planet, then you’re either one of the few trying to do something about it or you’re a sociopath. That it’s a well-made and absorbing (if modest) thriller too is just icing on the cake—or should I say, permafrost on the Arctic? — Bill Shunn

The Killer

The nameless protagonist (Michael Fassbender) who guides us scene by scene through David Fincher’s remarkably sleek modern thriller details for us, through an intense voiceover, the step-by-step process he is taking to commit an assassination-by-sniper-rifle across a busy Paris street. Holed up in an abandoned WeWork office, we wait with him, until at last he has his mark, takes the shot, and…misses. As the repercussions of the miss mount and “The Killer” scrambles across the globe, Fincher uses these voiceovers to paint a pitch black satire on self-delusion in the modern world and the fallacies of striving for perfection. As “The Killer” betrays every mantra he wanted you to believe he followed, Fincher asks us to consider just how much of our humanity we’ve lost in our increasingly dispassionate and transactional society, as we attempt to obtain a robotic, emotionless ideal. — Brad McDermott

The Royal Hotel 

The Royal Hotel had me on the edge of my seat more than any film in the last year. Every turn of the film, every drawn-out bar scene, I felt danger (maybe??) lurking. It was this very ambiguity and questioning of violence— are these just harmless, lonely, drunk men or truly dangerous people?— that creates the destabilizing thrill, and results in a film that explores patriarchy and how we each navigate the world under it, in such a visceral and nuanced way. I am not (and will never be) a young woman, broke while traveling in Australia, but I feel like I have met so many men like these at dark bars like this one, asking myself: do I need to be afraid right now? This was a home viewing experience I won’t forget any time soon and it left me shaking and cheering more than any horror film (a true down year for the genre) this year. It had me digging back into the wonderful, dusty, dirty grime of Wake in Fright. — Noah Schuettge

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret

This was sweet enough and real enough to get past my aversion to cringe comedy, and then it just kept winning me over. Some teen movies, including director Kelly Freeman Craig’s own The Edge of Seventeen, portray characters who fall into nastiness while finding themselves; Margaret is a gentler beast even as it covers religious division and bullying. It’s about the consequences of trying to fit in and the reasons to find your own identity. It’s also blessed with wonderful, expressive performances and a supporting cast with equally moving problems. — Alexander Throndson

Godzilla: Minus One

It turns out there were two major meditations on the Atomic Bomb in 2023, and the Japanese one is as superior as the original Godzilla was to the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Where the American version is all navel-gazing (ending with a lament about the authenticity of awards ceremonies no less!), Godzilla Minus One is a parable for how a society must adjust to a new hostile age. Here we see a bruised people learning to survive in a world with newly emergent nuclear superpowers, translating much of the subtext of that initial installment into text. — Christopher Broome

Enys Men

Some films have the advantage of discovery. Movies like Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer and Barbie and Anatomy of a Fall are great - I damn well hoped they’d be after all the expectations built about them. Then you encounter a movie like Enys Men and every unknown step is an exploration. The high mark for sound design this year and a confounding set up that had me leaning into the screen trying to see more. — Chris (a.k.a. “The Ploughman”) 

Fallen Leaves

Fallen Leaves is deceptively simple in its empathetic depiction of two blue-collar loners who struggle with money, romantic failure, and health-related obstacles as they embark on a casual courtship that, appropriately, blossoms at the cinema. All the hallmarks of the Finnish master’s work are on display, right down to the script, which shares DNA with many of his other pictures, particularly my longtime favorite, Shadows in Paradise. Set in present-day Helsinki against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Fallen Leaves is a film for our times that exists outside of time with Kaurismäki's distinctive retro-modern style. No other living filmmaker can so effortlessly synthesize incidents of tragedy and ideas of hope into elegant compositions that generate great depth of feeling. This film is a balm: a lovely tale of human connection in the face of great suffering. — Jared Gores

Dream Scenario

This one was 100% For Me, and the discourse bums me out because I feel like I heard the same really dismissive things. The Dream Scenario I saw was a movie about a guy who shows up in everyone’s dreams. That’s it. That the world within the movie tried to monetize it, use him, then ruin him isn’t a commentary on anything outside of, maybe, “the world sure is gross.” It only has one metaphor, that of a man hiding in the herd whose life is ruined by sticking his head out. 

It made me feel the way Being John Malkovich made me feel almost 25 years ago: walking out of a theater knowing I had just looked into someone’s incredibly weird brain and that I will probably never decipher anything they do, but I will be there for all of it. After this and Sick of Myself, Kristoffer Borgil has a free pass. I’ll see anything he does next, even if it’s Meg 3. — Virgilio Ramon de la Cruz