Top Films of 2023

Top Films of 2023

Happy New Year from OVID! Here's a roundup of our top fifty most-watched films and programs in 2023. The list is based upon the total number of views for each film, and it is ranked from # 1 to # 50. Look out for surprises, and some great films you may have missed!

Go here for the top films of 2022.

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Top Films of 2023
  • Devil in the Flesh (Marco Bellocchio)

    Directed by Marco Bellocchio • Drama • With Maruschka Detmers • 1986 • 109 minutes

    One of the most controversial Italians films of the '80s, DEVIL IN THE FLESH takes Raymond Radiguet's classic novel and updates it to modern times. Dealing with the legacy of Italy's "leaden years" and the afterma...

  • How to be a Good Wife

    Directed by Martin Provost • Drama • With Juliette Binoche • 2020 • 110 minutes

    Maintaining a household and stoically submitting to conjugal duty are the skills Paulette Van Der Beck (Juliette Binoche) teaches with fervor in her homemakers institute. Her certainties are shaken when she finds her...

  • The Wobblies

    Directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer • Documentary • 1979 • 89 minutes

    Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) took to organizing unskilled workers into one big union and changed the course of American history. This compelling documentary of the IWW (or “The...

  • Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)

    Directed by John Cameron Mitchell • Drama • With Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Justin Vivian Bond • 2006 • 101 minutes

    NSFW. Contains nudity and graphic depictions of sex.

    John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS explores the lives of several emotionally challenged characters as they navigate the comic an...

  • Adam Smith, The Birth of the Free Market

    Directed by Ilan Ziv • Documentary • 2014 • 53 minutes

    'The magical circle of investment and conquest... begins with the discovery of the Americas. This is the engine of two wheels: the wheel of scientific discoveries and the wheel of capitalist economy. Credit, investment, profits. More credit,...

  • The Maids

    Directed by Christopher Miles • Drama • With Vivien Merchant , Susannah York , Glenda Jackson • 1975 • 94 minutes

    Jean Genet, one of the most celebrated creative minds of the 20th century, receives an unbridled, expertly cinematic rendering in this long unseen film based on his perverse play. Th...

  • A Teacher

    Directed by Hannah Fidell • Drama • With Lindsay Burdge, Will Brittain • 2012 • 76 minutes

    Part psychological thriller and part provocative character study, A TEACHER explores the unraveling of a young high school teacher, Diana (Lindsay Burdge), after she begins an affair with one of her teenag...

  • My Imaginary Country

    Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2022 • 83 minutes

    One day, without warning, a revolution exploded. It was the event that master documentarian Patricio Guzmán had been waiting for all his life: a million and a half people in the streets of Santiago, Chile, demanding justice, education...

  • The Divided Brain

    Directed by Manfred Becker • Documentary • 2021 • 78 minutes

    THE DIVIDED BRAIN is a mind-altering odyssey about one man's quest to prove a growing imbalance in our brains, and to help us understand how this makes us increasingly unable to grapple with critical economic, environmental and social ...

  • When Jews Were Funny

    Directed by Alan Zweig • Documentary • With Shecky Green, Howie Mandel, Shelley Berman, Gilbert Gottfried, David Steinberg, David Brenner, Marc Maron • 2013 • 89 minutes

    Insightful and often hilarious, When Jews Were Funny surveys the history of Jewish comedy, from the early days of Borsht belt ...

  • And There Was Israel

    Directed by Romed Wyder • Documentary • 2018 • 52 minutes

    The birth of the modern state of Israel was far from inevitable. As AND THERE WAS ISRAEL compellingly shows, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the current crisis is rooted choices made in response to 19th century geopolitics, colonia...

  • Obscene

    Directed by Daniel O'Connor, Neil Ortenberg • Documentary • With Barney Rosset, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti • 2007 • 97 minutes

    OBSCENE is the definitive film biography of Barney Rosset, the influential publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. He acquired the then fledgling Gro...

  • The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg

    Directed by Jerry Aronson • Documentary • With Joan Baez, William F. Buckley, William S. Burroughs • 2005 • 84 minutes

    This documentary chronicles the life of American beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Born and raised in New Jersey, Ginsberg attends Columbia University alongside fellow beats Jack Keroua...

  • Secret Museums

    Directed by Peter Woditsch • Documentary • 2008 • 77 minutes

    Throughout the ages, erotic art has been created by some of the world's best-known artists, but it is rarely on public display. Whether it is held in private collections, or kept under lock and key in museums and libraries worldwide, e...

  • No Gods, No Masters - Pt. I

    Directed by Tancrède Ramonet • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes

    This episode of NO GODS NO MASTERS shows how anarchism emerged from the horrendous social conditions facing workers at a time when industrialization was, paradoxically, providing better hygiene and social standards – for some. In an ...

  • The Lover

    Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud • Drama • With Tony Leung, Jane March, Melvil Poulpaud, Jeanne Moreau • 1992 • 112 minutes

    Set in 1920s colonial Indochina, a pretty, virginal French teenager (Jane March) meets a handsome Chinese playboy (Tony Leung Ka Fai) from a respectable family. Going agains...

  • Matter Out of Place

    Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2023 • 105 minutes

    Waste on the shores, waste on the mountains. On ocean floors and deep down in the earth. The term “matter out of place” refers to objects in a place they originally do not belong to. And there are many such objects in the places ...

  • This Stolen Country of Mine (w/ Fernando Villavicencio)

    Directed by Marc Wiese • Documentary • With Paúl Jarrín Mosquera, Fernando Villavicencio • 2022 • 93 minutes

    Chinese mining in Ecuador’s mountains sets the stage for an epic battle between eco-guerrillas and a corrupt government in an intensely dramatic documentary.

    This Stolen Country of Mine ...

  • The Two Sights

    Directed by Joshua Bonnetta • Documentary • 2020 • 90 minutes

    The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta (co-director, El Mar La Mar), The Two Sights (An Dà Shealladh) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. As we listen to locals' accounts of haun...

  • The Story of Looking

    Directed by Mark Cousins • Documentary • 2021 • 87 minutes

    On the day before an operation to save his eyesight, filmmaker Mark Cousins explores what looking means to him, and the role our visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power...

  • The Celluloid Bordello

    Directed by Juliana Piccillo • Documentary • With Annie Sprinkle, Carol Leigh, David Henry Sterry • 2021 • 86 minutes

    Since the dawn of cinema, sex workers have served as muses to movie-makers. From the early white slavery pictures like The Girl Who Went Astray from 1900 to countless dramas and ...

  • Sexy Baby

    Directed by Jill Bauer, Ronna Gradus • Documentary • 2012 • 83 minutes

    These days, sex doesn't just sell, it saturates our culture. In the age of runaway social media and "sexting," raunchy rap songs on pop radio and hardcore pornography at the click of a mouse—what's it like to be a woman? A gi...

  • Geographies of Solitude

    Directed by Jacquelyn Mills • Documentary • 2022 • 103 minutes

    An immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic, the film follows Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived there for over 40 years collecting, cleaning and doc...

  • Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe)

    Directed by Oliver Laxe • Drama • With Amador Arias • 2019 • 85 minutes

    Following Mimosas, Oliver Laxe's third feature brings us to his ancestral home of Galicia. Here, in this remote Spanish region, where the grandeur of nature is both beautiful and terrifying, Laxe unfolds a story of the uncon...