AARP’s Favorite Movies of 2023

The Holdovers

Director Alexander Payne, 62, made actor Paul Giamatti, 56, famous in his 2004 California wine country comedy Sideways. They reunite in an Oscar-touted hit about a curmudgeon (Giamatti’s specialty) who teaches at a New England prep school and is stuck on campus to babysit a few students over Christmas break in the early 1970s. He bonds with one chronic misfit kid (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s mourning her son, a former student at the school who was headed for Swarthmore but, cash-poor, was sent to die in Vietnam. This is a hilarious, poignant movie in a beautiful, character-rich retro-1970s style. It’s a Christmas movie as uplifting as the saddest of Christmas songs, and as full of hope against all odds. Rated R

Apple TV+

Killers of the Flower Moon

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita on Earth were the Native Americans of Osage County, Oklahoma, who made a canny deal to own the mineral rights under the land to which they had been exiled. It was thought worthless until they struck oil, and they soon owned more luxury Pierce-Arrow autos than people in any other American county. But local philanthropist and plutocrat William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro) devised a plan and urged his dim-witted nephew (Leonardo DiCaprio) to marry a wealthy Osage diabetic (Lily Gladstone), who keeps getting mysteriously sicker. It’s Martin Scorsese’s ultimate gangster film with a moral core, gripping for 206 minutes straight and scary because true. It’s a master class in acting by two generations’ worth of top talents — De Niro, 80, and DiCaprio, 49 — and they’re still upstaged by the radiant Gladstone. Rated R

AARP Membership— $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal

Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine.

Join Now

Jason McDonald/Netflix

Maestro

Director and star Bradley Cooper dazzlingly embodies the contradictory whole of symphony conductor and West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein. And as his Costa Rica–born Broadway star wife Felicia Montealegre, Carey Mulligan is even better. We feel her luminous intelligence and big heart, the spark between them, and her exasperation when he courts handsome youths at their legendary posh parties. Like Cooper’s 2018 debut hit A Star Is Born, it takes you on a wild ride of success and reckless romance, only this time it really happened. It captures two lives well — if tumultuously — lived. Rated R

Liz Parkinson/Netflix

Nyad

Annette Bening, 65, is generating Oscar buzz for this biopic of Diana Nyad, a competitive swimmer who long dreamed of swimming from Cuba to Florida. Decades after a failed attempt at age 28, she returned to the waters to try again. And again. And again. With the support of a loyal friend and coach (Jodie Foster, 61) and a sea captain (Rhys Ifans, 56), she eschews a shark cage and battles jellyfish, the elements and her own demons. This is the feel-good story of one stubborn and determined woman who made history at an age when people thought she couldn’t, and it doubles as a moving grownup buddy picture. Rated PG-13

A24 Films

 Past Lives

When her old friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) visits from her native country, a modern Korean American woman, Nora (Greta Lee), finds herself at a romantic crossroads. Will she remain with her supportive Manhattan hipster husband Arthur (John Magaro)? Or is the power of the past so compelling that she’ll embrace the soulmate best friend, now grown, whom she left in South Korea two decades before when she emigrated with her family? In this leisurely, graceful, mesmerizing romance, the magnetic Lee navigates between the past and the present, pragmatism and magical possibilities. It’s a movie about something a lot of grownups do: ponder who we are versus who we were, and weigh the life we’ve chosen against what might have been, and who we still could be. Rated PG-13

Apple TV+

 Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

“Still” may be the last adjective we’d think of when discussing Back to the Future’s Michael J. Fox, 62. The diminutive Canadian found domestic TV success at 16, then stole the show Family Ties as Alex P. Keaton, the conservative son of left-leaning parents, with his hyper-physicality and targeted zingers. In this moving bio-doc, Fox addresses the kinetic youngster he was, and the wall he hit on the cusp of 30, in 1991, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Decades later, married with four grown children, the ’80s icon reveals how he copes with pain and muscle tremors — and how his quick wit remains utterly unimpaired. He’s not the only one who’s going to have to reconsider priorities after an ailment strikes  and figure out how to make the most of life when the unthinkable happens. Still is a deep dive into a fascinating and inspiring mind. Rated R

A24 Films

 The Zone of Interest

In a loose adaptation of Martin Amis’ best-selling novel of the same name, the “Queen of Auschwitz” (Sandra Hüller), the wife of Nazi commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), tends to her kids in an Edenic garden lit by the crematoria yards away. She tries to support her husband’s career ambitions and comforts herself with items stolen from the camp’s victims, like fur coats and, occasionally, a tube of stolen toothpaste in which somebody hid precious jewelry. The most original Holocaust movie in recent memory, it offers insight into the banality of evil as penetrating as Hannah Arendt’s famous book on Adolf Eichmann, Hüller, a German, is the most brilliant new foreign actress to win worldwide fame in 2023. Rated PG-13

Love our picks? Think we missed something? Scroll down to the Conversation section and share your favorite movies.