Critics’ choice: The best movies of 2013

1. 12 Years a Slave

“Movies are the most powerful ways Hollywood has to say it’s sorry,” but that wasn’t the mission of this cinematic landmark, said Wesley Morris in Grantland.com. Working from an 1853 memoir written by a freeborn black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, director Steve McQueen and star Chiwetel Ejiofor instead made excruciatingly vivid “the privilege of whiteness,” a systemic abuse of power that still haunts America all these years after the lynchings and whippings ended. The movie doesn’t aim to shame; it “bears witness to grim matters of fact.”

2. Gravity

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“Words can do little to convey the visual astonishment this space opera creates,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play two astronauts adrift in a dark, vast emptiness, and their strong performances are crucial, but the great lure of Alfonso Cuarón’s dazzling film is how it makes us feel stranded too. Gravity represents the most accomplished use of 3-D yet, and it “revels in its ability to create images that convey the beauty, enormity, and terror” of “being so, so far out there.”

3. Her

“It’s official: Joaquin Phoenix is one of the very best movie actors we have,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. In Spike Jonze’s “moving, creepy, funny” light masterpiece about a man who falls in love with an intelligent computer operating system, Phoenix’s “astonishingly subtle” -performance—and Scarlett Johansson’s engaging voice—help us see how easily most of us could follow the same path. Jonze’s near-future fable isn’t an anti-technology screed. It’s a profound reminder that though we may think we all are seeking love, “we really just crave attention.”

4. Inside Llewyn Davis

The Coen brothers’ ode to the 1960s New York City folk scene may be “the saddest, sweetest, most tragic work of art these great American filmmakers have crafted yet,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Playing the aspiring singer of the title, Oscar Isaac “gives the year’s breakout performance” as a thoroughly irresponsible artist who discovers that talent isn’t enough.

5. American Hustle

David O. Russell somehow managed to turn a 1970s political scandal into “the sharpest, most exhilarating comedy in years,” said Richard Corliss in Time. Christian Bale stars as a con man who cooperates with an FBI agent in a sting that topples several elected officials, but Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams dominate scene after scene in their roles as the swindler’s conniving wife and striving mistress. The movie “makes fond fun of the music, clothes, and decor” of the era, but all in service of capturing “the flailing energy” of a time and place where everyone was on the make.

6. The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese has never before made a movie “this free and spirited and insane and fun,” said Rene Rodriguez in The Miami Herald. Working from another true story—about a brash young cheat who made millions on 1990s Wall Street—the 71-year-old director gave the facts “a manic comic spin,” inviting audiences to come along for the debauched ride through a world of cocaine, hookers, and white-collar robbery before the inevitable downfall. Star Leonardo DiCaprio “has rarely been better.”

7. Before Midnight

The third film inRichard Linklater’strilogy about one couple’s lifelong love story provides “a remarkably intimate and provocative study of marriage,”said Steven Rea in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The actors know the characters deeply now, so as Ethan Hawke’s flinty writer and Julie Delpy’s passionate environmentalist wrap up a vacation in Greece, the talk between them flows naturally even as they contemplate a life change that pushes them each to wonder if, in middle age, they still love one another.

8. Blue Is the Warmest Color

Many words could describe this controversial film from France, “but for now I’ll settle for just one: glorious,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Much was made of the graphic lesbian sex scenes performed by stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. But Blue’s intent is to fully capture one young woman’s awakening to adulthood, so forgive it if it pushed one aspect too far. Across the film’s three-hour span, Exarchopoulos’s character “acquires a depth and grandeur that make her equal to some of the great heroines of literature.”

9. Stories We Tell

Documentarian Sarah Polley uncovered some uncomfortable truths when she started interviewing family members about her deceased mother, but she then turned her quest for truth into “a turbulent, melancholy, and enthralling journey,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. “Ordinary lives can be filled with secrets and lies,” it turns out, even when the propagators of the untruths have the best intentions.

10. Nebraska

Bruce Dern is quietly heartbreaking in this simple road movie about an old codger who insists on traveling hundreds of miles for a high-odds sweepstakes prize, said Richard Lawson in VanityFair.com. But as humble as Nebraska is in its dramatic scope, it ultimately “offers up a bittersweet theory on the meaning of life.” Director Alexander Payne hasn’t made a film this good since About Schmidt.

How the list was created: We generated our rankings by weighting the end-of-year Top 10 lists of 50 Web and print publications, including The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Salon.com, USA Today,VanityFair.com, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.