It’s still close enough to the end of 2023 to slip in one more “best of the year” article. In this case, it’s my list of my favorite films, given there are plenty I missed that have won acclaim. But after two-plus years of COVID-19 mostly kept me watching things at home, it was simply a treat to get back to actual cinemas in 2023.

Oppenheimer — I don’t usually pay attention to the hype surrounding certain movies, books, or other artistic works that come along. If anything, I’m suspicious if every critic is raving about something, figuring they’re jumping on the bandwagon because they’re afraid someone will think they can’t recognize the obvious brilliance everyone else sees.

But Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” lived up to its hype. Even at three hours, this densely layered portrait of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, never felt long. It’s an immersive story on a pivotal moment in U.S. history and science, and it integrates the complex politics surrounding the development of the bomb — the Manhattan Project of World War II — with sharp sketches of the people in Oppenheimer’s life, such as his neglected but loyal and steely wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt).

As Oppenheimer, Irish actor Cillian Murphy is a revelation, seeming to grow ever more gaunt as the famous and resourceful scientist who’s increasingly haunted by what he’s unleashed with the bomb. Robert Downey Jr. is also outstanding as a Washington, D.C. bureaucratic infighter who’s determined to bring Oppenheimer down in the postwar anti-communist fever gripping the country.

The film’s soundtrack sometimes felt a little overwhelming, but that’s a problem hardly limited to “Oppenheimer.” Overall the movie felt like a big improvement over Nolan’s “Dunkirk” from 2017, which also got great reviews but to me felt like an extended exercise in CGI effects that lacked real drama.

Maestro — Hats off to Bradley Cooper for his triple crown role in this biopic of Leonard Bernstein, which Cooper directed, co-wrote and starred in. “You never sit still,” Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre (the excellent Carey Mulligan), says to him at one point, and indeed, “Maestro” is a film of almost constant motion, changing camera angles, and shifts from black and white to color.

As the most famous, honored, and versatile American conductor and composer of his era, Bernstein lived a rich and dramatic life that “Maestro” has to condense to two hours. But Cooper captures the musician’s whirlwind energy and restlessness; there’s almost never a time you see him without a cigarette in his hand or mouth or in a nearby ashtray, and he’s a bon vivant at every party, embracing everyone with obvious relish. “I love people,” he says.

But Bernstein also lived a double life; he was gay, or maybe bisexual (the movie doesn’t make it completely clear), and his affairs with men caused his wife terrible pain. One of the few times Cooper is not in motion is when Mulligan says to him, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to die a lonely old queen,” leaving him standing by himself in a room in their home, head hanging; it’s a quietly devastating scene.

The Holdovers — I loved Paul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s 2004 film “Sideways,” and I’ve enjoyed Payne’s other films such as “Nebraska,” “Election,” and “About Schmidt.” So when the two joined forces again for “The Holdovers,” I was all in, and I wasn’t disappointed.

As a hidebound and sarcastic history teacher, Paul Hunham, at a boys prep school in Massachusetts circa 1970, Giamatti is both hilarious and maddening as he’s forced to oversee a lonely and embittered student, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), who’s unable to go home for the two-week Christmas break. Joining the two is the school’s head cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s mourning the death of her son in the Vietnam War.

Thrown together as such, the three form an unlikely bond even as Tully tests the boundaries of the two adults, forcing Hunham to reveal some of his background and inner pain as he attempts, if a bit clumsily, to help his young charge, especially during a road trip to Boston. “The Holdovers” offers lots of laughs but also plenty of heart and humanity — a nice holiday message indeed.

Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery During WWII — Directed by Julia Mintz, a documentary filmmaker who splits her time between Northampton and New York City, “Four Winters” presents an absorbing look at a lesser-known chapter of WWII: how Jews in Eastern Europe fought back against the Nazis.

Screened in Northampton and numerous other locations last year, the film is told almost entirely through the voices of eight elderly men and women who escaped into the forests of Poland, Lithuania and Russia and learned to handle a range of weapons. Staging from their woodland camps, they attacked Nazi supply columns, destroyed railroad tracks, and sometimes fought pitched battles against German troops.

The documentary features great vintage photos and film clips. But its strength comes from the emotional testimony of people who, as teenagers and very young adults, saw many of their family members and friends murdered. They grew up fast as they steeled themselves to fight back — and their story helps dispel the myth of Jewish passivity in the face of Nazi violence.

The Burial — A thoroughly enjoyable, old-school film about a strange court case in Mississippi in 1995 in which an all-Black jury awarded a staggering $500 million to a white, small-scale funeral home owner for breach of contract. It’s based on a New Yorker article that Northampton writer Jonathan Harr published in 1999, which was optioned for film but then took over 20 years to make it to the screen.

That journey intrigued me when I wrote about it last year. But the resulting film, though it takes liberties with Harr’s story, can stand on its own, offering a good balance of drama and comedy. It features great performances by Jamie Foxx as a Black, up-from-his-bootstraps lawyer; Tommy Lee Jones as the elderly funeral home owner who’s been wronged; and Jurnee Smollett as a Black, Ivy League-educated defense attorney.

Along with the laughs are some pointed observations on race and class made by Director Maggie Betts, which Variety says she “orchestrates in such a way that ... you want to clap your hands and shout ‘Amen!’”

Leave the World Behind — With apologies to anyone who liked the 2020 novel this is based on and didn’t care for the cinematic translation, this apocalyptic drama and thriller offers plenty of tension and fear and some solid performances, though it’s admittedly uneven.

A white family of four from New York City, vacationing in a Long Island beach house, find their idyll going horribly wrong. An oil tanker crashes onto the shore; phone, computer, and TV service disappears; and a Black man and his daughter show up at the house in the dead of night, saying they own the home and are fleeing a complete blackout in the city.

Mutual distrust, confusion and fear mount as more unexplained things occur, like planes falling out of the sky and a sudden onslaught of piercing, high-pitched sounds that shatter glass. There’s some suggestion of a nationwide cyberattack, and maybe worse, by unknown terrorists or rogue actors. Kevin Bacon, in a cameo as a scary, rifle-toting survivalist, claims “It’s the Koreans.”

The fear of the unknown goes hand in hand with the way the thin veneer of civilization seems to get stripped away; our high-tech world is revealed to be built on a foundation of sand.

Julia Roberts, playing a misanthropic advertising director, suggests the breakdown might be an appropriate sentence for a bankrupt society: “We [expletive] every living thing on this planet over, and we think it will be fine because we use paper straws and order the free range chicken.”

Honorable mention: May December, Anatomy of a Fall, and Joan Baez I am a Noise.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.