The best hidden gem movies of 2023, from Godland to Quiz Lady

There are thousands upon thousands of movies released each year. Too many, it could be argued – anyone who has leapt into the bowels of Prime Video will be greeted by an absurd number of new films that no one in their right mind will have seen or even heard of.

But sometimes these disappeared movies warrant a look – they’re the equivalent of finding a £10 note down the crack of the sofa. While our film critic Clarisse Loughrey has already curated a top 15 of the year in cinema – championing everything from Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City to the penis-tastic black comedy Rotting in the Sun – we’ve gathered together 10 hidden alternatives.

These aren’t necessarily the secret best of 2023, or even movies you’d be remiss to never see. Instead, consider them to be the juicy off-cuts of the year in film – occasionally imperfect little things still brimming with potential and worthiness.

If there was an Oscar for “Best Face in a Movie”, it ought to go to Teyana Taylor, the one-time R&B star who fled an increasingly toxic music industry in 2020 to become an actor. Blessed with the killer cheekbones and sharp eyes of some kind of Egyptian hieroglyphic, Taylor is mesmerising here as a struggling single mother in early Nineties New York, who kidnaps back the son taken away from her after she was briefly imprisoned. Directed by debuting filmmaker AV Rockwell, A Thousand and One tackles maybe too many themes over the course of its two hours – gentrification, motherhood, poverty, America’s prison-industrial complex – but is otherwise harnessed by Taylor, who here crafts one of the most complex and bruised yet resilient characters of the year. (AW)

Streaming on Sky Cinema and Now, and available to buy

If Denis Menochet is in a film, you’d better stand to attention. While mostly being known by international audiences for his appearance in the tense opening scene of Inglourious Basterds, he’s delivered a relentless stream of standout roles throughout his career (see: By the Grace of God, Francois Ozon’s takedown of the Catholic Church, and Xavier Legrand’s divorce drama Custody). With 2023 hidden gem The Beasts, he has added another to the list. The film follows the escalating tensions between a French couple and their Spanish neighbours in the Galician countryside. To best preserve the film’s secrets, that’s all you should know going in. (JS)

Streaming on BFI Player, and available to rent and buy

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Following a successful festival run, Eric Gravel’s nail-bitingly tense Full Time finally arrived in UK cinemas this year. The film charts one week in the life of a single mother living in the French suburbs, as she attempts to keep her job as a chambermaid during a time of transport strikes and general upheaval in Paris. Laure Calamy, who UK viewers will best know as Noemie in Call My Agent!, delivers a striking performance as Julie, whose stress levels are endlessly pushed to the limit. The film is, at just 87 minutes long, a succinct triumph. (JS)

Available to rent and buy

Back in March, I wrote that Hlynur Palmason’s Godland “should be considered one of the year’s greatest films when those ‘Best of…’ lists roll in this December”. My stance hasn’t changed. The film stars Elliott Crosset Hove as a Danish Lutheran priest named Lucas, who is sent on an expedition to oversee the completion of a new parish church in Iceland. There are stretches throughout Lucas’s journey where Palmason captivatingly plays with form, often chillingly accentuating the loneliness caused by the language barrier between Lucas and his assigned Icelandic guide (Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson). The result may test casual viewers’ faith – much like Lucas’s is tested by the harsh weather conditions he finds himself in – but this approach, combined with the breathtaking backdrop, makes Godland amount to something special. (JS)

Streaming on BFI Player, and available to rent and buy

Lotfy Nathan’s Harka is inspired by the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor who died by suicide in a protest against Tunisia’s autocratic regime. Bouazizi’s act was a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring against corruption. In Harka, Adam Bessa plays a man who faces eviction while caring for his two younger sisters. His dreams of a better life, and his frustrations at being refused help at every turn, makes for a devastating but necessary film. Bessa in particular is extraordinary, and was jointly awarded – along with Vicky Krieps for Corsage – Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard for his performance in 2022. (JS)

Available to rent and buy

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One of the year’s most moving films came in the form of Belgian drama Love According to Dalva. The movie introduces us to a distressed 12-year-old as she is taken into foster care – the film then explores her subsequent abuse from her very eyes. It’s an extraordinary debut from filmmaker Emmanuelle Nicot, who tells Dalva’s story with necessary tenderness, which is heightened by an equally extraordinary debut performance from Zelda Samson. Remember the name – if Dalva is anything to go by, this is the start of a long career for the child star. (JS)

Streaming on BFI Player, and available to rent and buy

This is a deceptively simple character study exploring a woman’s desire to have a child, heightened by the bond she forms with her boyfriend’s daughter. The French film, written and directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, features a tender performance from Virginie Efira (Benedetta), whose likeable Rachel continually hides her frustrations behind a smile. There are no showdowns, no screaming matches, no overreactions; this is a slice-of-life drama unafraid to show reality as it usually is – and is a better film for it. (JS)

Streaming on Prime Video, and available to rent and buy

There are shades of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion to this daffy buddy comedy, starring Sandra Oh and Awkwafina as mismatched sisters who conspire to win a popular quiz show in order to pay off mobsters who’ve kidnapped their dog. Released to little fanfare on Disney+ in November (partly due to the actors’ strike), this is the kind of upbeat, vaguely surreal riot that would have gone down a storm in cinemas a decade ago, but now gets coughed up on streaming platforms before rapidly disappearing into the algorithm. It’s well worth throwing on – Oh is marvellous, Awkwafina isn’t as exhausting as she can be, and the zingers are relentless. Jason Schwartzman, Will Ferrell and the late, great Paul Reubens provide solid support, too. (AW)

Streaming on Disney+

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The first two Scream movies are filled with sweat-inducingly tense set pieces – helpless college students climbing over unconscious murderers, Neve Campbell stumbling across rooftops to evade masked killers, Drew Barrymore menaced over the phone. With Sick, Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson seemed to pose himself a challenge: what if an entire movie was one long set piece? Here, Gideon Adlon is pursued inside and around a secluded lake house by a masked killer for much of its runtime, and it is thrilling. Sick doesn’t quite stick the landing once we’re clued in to what’s been happening, but the journey there is at least a very good time. (AW)

Streaming on Sky Cinema and Now

Thanks to the international renown of his work, Makoto Shinkai is often placed in conversation with the great Hayao Miyazaki, another titan of Japanese animation whose work tends to be as dazzling as it is thematically rich. But those comparisons also flatten the very singular magic of watching a Shinkai movie. His latest, Suzume, serves as his follow-up to films that include Your Name and Weathering with You, and it matches their busy, confounding sense of spectacle. It’s the tale of a teenage girl who encounters a mystical doorway which unleashes a spirit god in the form of a three-legged chair, and that kind of dream logic sums up where it goes from there. But even if you can’t square the climate metaphors or surrealism, Suzume is still remarkable in its sheer beauty. (AW)

Streaming on Crunchyroll

Perhaps the most intriguing release of the year was Argentine-German project Trenque Lauquen. The film begins as a man named Ezequiel “Chicho” Pierri attempts to track down an acquaintance named Laura (Laura Paredes), after she ups and leaves the sleepy titular province of Buenos Aires. But what initially seems a straightforward mystery drama about the disappearance of a botanist evolves into something else entirely. It’s through a series of unsettling discoveries made by Chicho during his search for Laura that this epic tale – split into 12 parts – takes on a labyrinthine, genre-shifting form. Nothing is as it seems here, in a film that has shades of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. A truly unique work from Argentine director Laura Citarella. (JS)

In cinemas now, and streaming on Curzon Home Cinema