Barack Obama has shared the list of his favorite movies of 2023 and included a message acknowledging the writers and actors strikes that halted Hollywood.
“Earlier this year, writers and actors went on strike to advocate for better working conditions and protections. It led to important changes that will transform the industry for the better,” Obama shared in a social media post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
UPDATE: Being an ex-President has its privileges. Today, Obama updated his 2023 list with a tweet.
Obama included films produced by Higher Ground, the production company founded by him and his wife Michelle Obama. The former U.S. President acknowledged his favoritism to films like Rustin, Leave the World Behind and American Symphony.
“I’m biased since these movies were produced by Higher Ground, but these are in fact three of the best films I saw this year,” he wrote.
Obama also shared his “other” favorite movies of the year, which included Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which starred Cillian Murphy playing the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The Ben Affleck-directed movie Air, about the origin of the basketball shoreline Air Jordan, also made the list. A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, about a woman who kidnaps her son from the foster care system, was one of Obama’s favorite films of the year.
Other films that made it into Obama’s list included The Holdovers, Blackberry, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Monster, Past Lives, and Polite Society.
Obama had previously shared a list of his favorite books, which included Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing, Paul Harding’s This Other Eden and James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
