5 best movies of 2023 so far

Why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists when it comes to movies? A number of films have already received more than three stars from critics.

Throughout the year, we’ll update this list — bookmark it! — with films we enjoyed and recommendations for where to see them.

British television veteran Joanna Scanlan gives a BAFTA-winning performance as a woman who discovers that her recently deceased husband had a second wife and family. The Post’s Thomas Floyd says there’s no mystery about what makes this measured melodrama so devastating: “Joanna Scanlan’s steely performance as a widow pulling at the threads of her late husband’s carefully woven double life.”

Noémie Merlant and Kit Harington play new parents in the assured writing-directing debut of playwright Bess Wohl — part drama of maternal ambivalence, part gothic horror. Ann Hornaday says: “Like such classics as ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ as well as more recent series like ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble,’ ‘Baby Ruby’ morphs from a social critique of how American society fails women along the entire spectrum of reproduction to a nuanced — and often uncomfortably candid — portrait of a new mother navigating profound anxiety, alienation, self-doubt and barely containable rage.”

3- Creed III

Actor Michael B. Jordan makes a strong directorial debut, reprising his role as boxer Adonis “Donny” Creed in this third installment of the “Rocky” spinoff series. Ann Hornaday says that Jonathan Majors, who plays Donny’s pugilistic nemesis “with a fascinating combination of menace and sensitivity,” is more than a stock villain, possessing a “singular ability to recruit the audience to his side virtually at first sight, [troubling] that easy read to create a character who manages to be sympathetic even at his worst.”

4- Emily

Emma Mackey plays the title character, author Emily Brontë, in actress-turned-filmmaker Frances O’Connor’s provocatively revisionist biography. Ann Hornaday says: “O’Connor takes what little we reliably know about Emily’s life as the daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman and self-effacing sister to three artistically expressive siblings, and fleshes it out with generous helpings of speculation and outright fiction, using Brontë’s one and only novel, ‘Wuthering Heights,’ as a lens on her own inner wildness and longing.”

5- The Five Devils

Adèle Exarchopoulos (“Blue Is the Warmest Color”) is as commanding as ever in this supernatural French melodrama about the past coming to haunt a group of people. But Michael O’Sullivan says that viewers will most remember the performance of the “remarkably self-possessed newcomer” Sally Dramé, playing a strange young girl with a heightened sense of smell that not only allows her to replicate any aroma but also to use people’s scents to open up “a kind of cosmic wormhole in the time-space continuum through which the little girl is able to observe, firsthand, events from years ago.”

Daily Times