‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Was Mentioned in Over 463 Critics Top 10 Lists, #1 for 2023

It’s become a tradition for film critics to publish their top 10s of any given movie year. Last year, over 1000 of these lists showed up in one form or another. Can you believe that? There are, at least, 1000 critics out there. The field has been completely diluted.

If we rewind 20 years ago, to 1994, around 200 critics lists could be found. Go back another 10 years, the count was around 174. The internet has changed the game. Now, practically anybody can be a self-proclaimed critic.

The folks over at CriticsTop10 have been rounding up top 10 lists for well over a decade now, and their research has managed to get tabulations dating all the way back to the 1920s. The site itself is a lot of fun to navigate. It also is archival proof that critics can sometimes, many times, get it very wrong — the most cited film of 1978 was not “The Deer Hunter” or “Days of Heaven,” but rather Paul Mazursky’s dated “An Unmarried Woman” (which I still find great things to like).

In 2023, 888 lists were amassed. Comparisons will get made to this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture — 8 titles in the top 10 were nominated. It just goes to show that film criticism influences the Academy much more now than it used to. Here are the 20 most cited films by critics in 2023:

1) Killers of the Flower Moon — 463 lists
2) Oppenheimer — 419
3) Past Lives — 379
4) May December — 338
5) Barbie — 313
6) Poor Things —274
7) Anatomy of A Fall —268
8) The Holdovers — 267
9) The Zone of Interest — 226
10) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — 205

11) Asteroid City —189
12) Showing Up — 155
13) The Boy and the Heron — 132
14) American Fiction — 124
15) Fallen Leaves —124
16) All of Us Strangers — 122
17) Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret — 116
18) Maestro — 108
19) Passages —106
20) John Wick: Chapter 4 — 101

While writing this article, I realized that I didn’t even publish my own list. I’ll low-key add it right here, and I’ve cheated a bit by turning it into a top 20. I’m just not ready to even rank these in order of appreciation …

Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Anatomy of a Fall, The Boy and the Heron, May/December, Memory, Rotting in the Sun, American Fiction, The Iron Claw, The Zone of Interest, Asteroid City, De Humanis Corpis Fabrica, The Delinquents, Passages, Reality, Leave the World Behind, Ferrari, BlackBerry, Pacifiction, Tori et Lokita, How to Blowup a Pipeline