The 25 Best Films of the 2020s So Far

The 2020s have been a rather unusual decade to say the least. For a fifth of the time, we were locked inside, quarantined for fear of the effects of COVID-19. The four years after have found us trying to slowly get back to a place of normalcy, while the world socially and politically feels as uneven as it ever has felt. It is in these uncertainties that we cling to our viruses and, especially, are vices to get us through our troubling times, and for many, that includes escaping into the world of cinema. Not only has the film industry dealt with its fair share of setbacks from the pandemic, but it has also faced multiple industry strikes, evolving demands from audiences around the world, and the threat of AI and streaming services knocking out the theatrical model as well as physical media at home. Yet every time faced with adversity, a film or two or ten come along and restore faith in the process, having us proclaiming from the rooftops that “cinema is back” and assuring ourselves that this art form will continue to thrive as long as we seek the bold imaginative projects that made us fall in love with movies in the first place.

With this in mind, the AwardsWatch staff have come back again to count down what they think are the 25 best films of the decade so far, 2020-2024. Featured on this list are films from some of the biggest names in film right now, making their biggest and boldest statements of their careers. The list features one of the best directorial debuts of the century, but also includes films from masters of their craft that have been making movies for close to six decades, showcasing that they still are able to captivate us in the latter parts of their careers. Massive blockbusters go side by side with personal, emotional independent films, as the list showcases the range of cinema released in the last five years, as well as where the collective taste of the team has gravitated to over the course of this half-decade.

Obviously, as the decade goes on, there will be films that replace the 25 films on this list, and titles might get pushed around from their initial order. Or they might get replaced by films in our team’s honorable mention section, as time and rewatches sometimes help a film rise in admiration from the first time viewing: titles like All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, All Quiet on the Western Front, Anatomy of a Fall, Anora, Asteroid City, Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Benedetta, Crimes of the Future, Da 5 Bloods, Dahomey, Dune, Ferrari, Hard Truths, Hundreds of Beavers, Maestro, Mank, Minari, No Other Land, Nomadland, Nosferatu, Passages, Pig, Priscilla, Queer, Spencer, The Boy and the Heron, The Eternal Daughter, The Holdovers, The Iron Claw, The Killer, The Last Duel, The Nest, The Room Next Door, The Taste of Things, Top Gun: Maverick and Trap. But until then, the AwardsWatch team is excited to share what they think are the 25 best films of the decade so far.

The following list features contributions from Ryan McQuade, Erik Anderson, Sophia Ciminello, Cody Dericks, Jay Ledbetter, Dan Bayer, Karen Peterson, Mark Johnson, Trace Sauveur, Josh Parham, and Griffin Schiller.

25. Barbie (2023)

The big screen, live-action Barbie movie went through many iterations over many years before it became the biggest film of 2023. Originally conceived as a funny ode to the legendary doll, Barbie became something much different when it was handed over to director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach. Rather than a simple, silly and likely regressive movie about an anthropomorphic doll, Gerwig and Baumbach crafted a how-to guide for blending a nostalgic love for childhood toys with messages suited for a modern audience. And in the case of this film, a hilariously honest appraisal of the very idea of nostalgia itself.

The Oscar-winning Barbie deftly navigates themes of patriarchy, feminism, and unrealized dreams while draped in delicious, candy-colored production and costume design. Many versions of Barbie and Ken are brought to life through a deep cast that includes Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Alexandra Shipp, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir and many, many more. Michael Cera is the unconfident yet non-toxic Allen and Kate McKinnon is the embodiment of every girl’s Weird Barbie. There are nods to forgotten history like the creepy, pregnant “Happy Family” Midge (Emerald Fennell) and Sugar Daddy Ken (Rob Brydon). And then, of course, there are the iconic outfits, mansions, and dream cars. Combining Barbieland with the real-life, end-of-her-rope mom Gloria (America Ferrera) and tween daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), the film became a cultural movement and a rallying cry that was also wildly entertaining and rewatchable. And if that wasn’t enough, it would eventually deliver the greatest musical performance in Academy Award history. – KP

24. Challengers (2024)

Sweat dripping on the lens. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist in a sauna. Balls flying at my nose. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is our greatest cinematographer. Luca Guadagnino knows how to eke out sex and sensuality maybe better than anyone, sometimes making us think we’re seeing more than we are because he’s tapped into our imagination titillation so well that we’re filling in the gaps ourselves. There’s no actual sex in Challengers. Horniness is the seduction. Tennis is the sex. This movie is crazy, sexy, cool. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross keep it throbbing. Makes me want (to be) a churro real bad. Doubles, anyone?

At the end of the day, we want to see boys kiss and Zendaya just wants to watch some good fucking tennis. – EA

23. Past Lives (2023)

Many of us have spent time pondering our choices, musing about what might have been. From the job offer accepted to the college not chosen, no matter how well things turn out, it’s normal to wonder where we could have ended up instead, who we might have been and who with. Director Celine Song wondered this when she wrote her tender, semi-autobiographical, romantic drama Past Lives. In parallel stories, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Nora (Greta Lee) are childhood friends who were separated when Nora’s parents moved her to the United States. After military service, writing retreats, relationships and a lot of life, Hae Sung and Nora eventually reconnect in New York City, culminating in an exquisite scene in a quiet bar where Nora introduces Hae Sung to her husband Arthur (John Magaro). 

Song infuses Korean culture into her universally relatable story as Nora and Hae Sung discuss the concept of inyeon, a deep, fated connection between people over multiple lifetimes. There are some versions of this story that may end with regrets or with Nora upending her life in an attempt to reclaim the past, but Song’s Academy Award-nominated debut thoughtfully gives her characters space to linger in the possibilities of their alternate paths, to feel satisfaction in their current places in the world, and ultimately leaves us with the sweetness of hope for whatever the future may hold. It is an impressive introduction to a filmmaker with a fascinating perspective on the lovely messiness of people. – KP

22. I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

What scares you? No, what really scares you? I Saw the TV Glow, the extraordinary second feature from Jane Schoenbrun, brushes past typical sources of fear like knife-wielding slashers and blood-sucking creatures to hone in on something much more terrifying: the existential worry that we may not be living the life we should. The film follows Owen (Justice Smith, delivering the performance of his career) from childhood to young adulthood and – startlingly – even all the way up to their old age. Through Owen, Schoenbrun explores the idea of identity and how formative events from a young age can set an immovable mark on one’s soul. Even something as seemingly inconsequential as the chilling young adult mystery-adventure show The Pink Opaque leaves an impression on Owen that sets them on a course that may not have been clear without it. The TV show and their friendship with a prickly girl named Maddy (Jack Haven) reveal truths about Owen to themself that they clearly find destabilizing. Like too many suppressed and oppressed people, Owen can’t face the reality of their entire personhood. As brilliantly depicted and personified by Schoenbrun, Owen’s stifling of their own identity (which the film never makes explicitly clear, but IYKYK) leads to a life scarier than any horror movie. The world Schoenbrun constructs around Owen is a terrifying echo chamber; lonely and dark, it’s a perfect visual expansion of Owen’s inner unrest. Such unified, assured world creation immediately led to the film being called Lynchian and Cronenbergian, but the specifics of the director’s vision are so unique to their creator that the film can most appropriately be called Schoenbrunian. – CD

21. The Brutalist (2024)

The American dream is dead, or was there ever such a thing? This is one of many things that is found at the heart of writer-director Brady Corbet’s historical epic, alongside the idea of wrestling with one’s religion, their relationship to the art they are creating, the dangers of trusting those you don’t know. The Brutalist follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, who immigrates to the United States looking to find his place in the land of hope and dreams. In doing a project at a wealthy family’s house in upstate Pennsylvania, Tóth becomes connected with Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an industrialist who becomes László’s primary client, but is envious of his artistic creativity. In their partnership, Tóth is assigned the chance to create a lavish community from the mind of Van Buren, which over time becomes the staple work of his long, celebrated career. But the journey to this destination is one of personal pain, abuse, sorrow, and complications; all the things found in those who struggle to make a life for themselves once they get into this country. Corbet crafts a cautionary tale of the American myth, pontificating that the nostalgia of the past is built on the back of tragedy, and those who are in power are the ones who can manipulate the truth. At the same time, Corbert is also using The Brutalist as a meta-commentary about his industry, how hard it is to make a film like this without sacrificing multiple pieces of yourself and your final film. It’s daunting, fearless filmmaking made on a fraction of the epics of the past and present, with an incredible lead performance by Brody anchoring this vessel to shore. – RM

20. Petite Maman (2021)

Sometimes when I look back at photos of my own mother from her childhood–playing outside with my aunts, awkwardly sitting for a school picture, clutching my grandmother at the fair–I can’t help but see my own childhood reflected back at me. I’ve known this woman for my entire life, but what was she really like then? What was she like at her core when I wasn’t even a thought yet? When did she start to have an idea of my sister and me? These questions are all at the center of Celine Sciamma’s stunning fairy tale, Petite Maman, which follows an eight-year-old girl named Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) in the immediate aftermath of the death of her grandmother. Alongside her grieving mother (Nina Meurisse), Nelly travels to her grandmother’s house to tie up some loose ends before leaving the place behind. At first, Nelly is introduced to her mother’s past in simple ways: her childhood bedroom that scared her in the dark, her breakfast table, and her favorite spot to play in the woods. Everything shifts, though, when Nelly meets a little girl in the woods named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), who happens to bear a striking resemblance to her.

Sciamma’s earlier triumph, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, is a more mature exploration of desire, yet it’s remarkable how similarly the two films approach yearning. In Petite Maman, that yearning isn’t in the romantic, but instead, in the familiar and the familial. For Nelly, she not only wishes to understand her distant mother, but also to say goodbye to the grandmother she once loved. Sciamma’s tale bends the rules, allowing Nelly to share time and space with her mother as a peer and to highlight their shared perspective. Importantly, too, Nelly’s grandmother is also alive and physically present as a much younger woman, Marion’s mother. Early in the film, Nelly walks into the various rooms of her grandmother’s facility to say “au revoir” to everyone, as if to make up for not being able to say goodbye to the person in her life who is no longer there. How beautiful it is then when Sciamma not only grants a young Nelly the opportunity to finally tell her grandmother, “au revoir,” but also gives her the comfort of knowing that she’s still there–whether in the next room as she and a young Marion play, or within her and her mother as they live on. – SC

19. The Green Knight (2021)

The Green Knight is a breathtaking reinvention of Arthurian legend from director David Lowery that slices through centuries of myth and cinematic repetition with staggering originality. It’s timeless, yet contemporary in its musing on masculine ego and the loss of virtue – a crisis at the forefront of our culture. Drawing from the 14th-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Lowery strips away the chivalric gloss and heroic posturing of earlier adaptations to unearth a tale about fear, maturity, and moral reckoning. In his hands, Camelot isn’t a shining kingdom but a crumbling relic of its own myth, ruled by aging, ghostlike monarchs with no future in sight. Dev Patel’s Gawain emerges from the rot as a directionless, indulgent young man who sleeps his nights away with a mistress and finds little in the way of productivity in Camelot. His mother, Morgana, sees this, her dismay palpable. It is strongly implied that she manipulates the arrival of the Green Knight such that Gawain is the one who challenges him, is the one forced on a journey of discovery. She is not trying to send her son to his death; rather, she is providing him with the opportunity to truly become a Knight, to stake his claim as a successful heir to the throne. Gawain is reluctant to seize purpose until his own mother thrusts it upon him. Through his surreal, episodic journey toward the Green Chapel, Gawain’s courage, gratitude, humility, nobility, and selflessness are tested through various trials, and through each trial, he fails to rise to the occasion. He succumbs to his selfish desires and an ego born of his mother’s coddling. 

What elevates The Green Knight from yet another fantasy retelling of Arthurian lore to a touchstone of 2020s cinema is its willingness to interrogate the very foundation of legend. Lowery rewrites Gawain’s path not as a celebration of knightly virtue, but as a cautionary tale about ego, legacy, and male privilege. Gawain starts this story as a lecherous, snotty, arrogant punk, to a point where an audience would lack investment in this character. Patel’s casting at least places all of the character’s unlikable traits under a charismatic and agreeable facade, ensuring that we don’t loathe Gawain and at least want to see him attempt to be better. That’s the central journey of the film, and the juxtaposition between how much we love Dev Patel and dislike Gawain’s demeanor is essential in allowing us to believe, when he does eventually realize that what he’s been chasing is something wicked and selfish, and ironically something that Gawain doesn’t even truly desire, when he finds the courage to truly face the Knight and allow him the opportunity to strike Gawain down if he wishes, fulfilling the agreement he made on behalf of his King, that he has earned this discovery. And so, when the Green Knight praises Gawain, the latter having found his dignity and bravery – therefore truly completing the game in the way the Green Knight desired – it feels earned, and it comes as a relief to the audience rather than as an injustice.

In transforming the Green Knight from a narrative trick in the original legend into an elemental, near-spiritual force of nature, the film reframes heroism as an internal reckoning, not an external conquest. Gawain must pay the price for his arrogance and honor his oath as the man he has become, sparing Camelot of certain destruction that would ensue under his arrogant, adolescent rule. In the end, The Green Knight is a film about choosing honesty over legacy, death over delusion, and transformation over triumph. Something the leaders of our world could do with embracing. Now, off with their heads. – GS

18. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), directed by Martin McDonagh, is a quietly powerful film about a friendship that suddenly falls apart and the quiet heartbreak that follows. Colin Farrell gives one of his best performances as Pádraic, a kind and simple man who’s blindsided when his friend Colm, played by Brendan Gleeson, abruptly cuts him off. Their relationship drives the story, and the emotional weight of its suddenness is felt in every scene. Barry Keoghan brings a strange, sad charm to Dominic, while Kerry Condon’s Siobhán feels like the only one truly grounded, carrying her own quiet frustrations. McDonagh’s writing walks a fine line between darkly funny and deeply sad, and the way he captures the small, windswept island makes the setting feel as lonely as the people in it. The music and visuals are understated but perfectly matched to the mood.

What makes the film stand out is how deeply it cuts without ever feeling forced. In a time when so many movies chase spectacle, this one pulls you in with silence, awkwardness, and unspoken hurt. It’s about pride, regret, and the simple human need to feel like you matter to someone. McDonagh lets it all unfold at its own pace, never rushing the emotions. It’s not just beautifully acted and written – it sticks with you, quietly, long after it ends. – MJ

17. After Yang (2022)

“What the caterpillar calls “the end” the rest of the world calls a butterfly,” says Yang, the technosapien at the center of a story about connection, impermanence and love. Justin H. Min’s delicate performance as the A.I. helper of a family and his close relationship to young Mika (the wonderful Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and her parents Jake (a maybe never better Colin Farrell) and Kyra (a luminous Jodie Turner-Smith) is like comforting cup of tea.

This is lo-fi sci-fi at its best (like Gattaca, The Vast of Night), with echoes of Kubrick, Ozu and Kore-eda, some of Kogonada’s many admired filmmakers, but never feeling directly lifted from or even necessarily homages. It’s more like barely detectable DNA. First with Columbus and now they upcoming A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (reuniting him with Farrell), Kogonada has become one of our most cerebral filmmakers. Like Gattaca, the use of mid-century modern homes and furniture evoke the air of possibility that the 1950s and 1960s brought; where science might meet fiction, where it seemed like the future was limitless. If only. – EA

16. The Worst Person in the World (2021)

I know that Joachim Trier’s thrillingly brilliant character study The Worst Person in the World is about Renate Reinsve’s 20-something Julie, and she gives one of the best performances of the century so far in the role – funny, maddening, sexy, insecure, self-possessed, a bundle of contradictions that always feels authentic. But the moment I knew that this was one of my all-time favorites centers on Anders Danielsen Lie’s cancer-stricken cartoonist Aksel. Maybe it’s because I was roughly the same age as Aksel is supposed to be when I first saw this, but his late-film monologue about nostalgia touches on so much that I’ve rarely, if ever, seen it on screen before. “I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects,” he laments. “No, it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.” Aksel is afraid, and, knowing that he’s going to die and thus without anything to look forward to, he can only look back, and suddenly the things that once brought him joy now make him sad. It’s a powerful thing to be confronted with one’s own mortality decades before one expects to be, and this masterfully written scene conveys what it must feel like with such deeply felt tenderness that I feel the bottom drop out from under me whenever I watch it. Which is quite often, since The Worst Person in the World also happens to be one of the most enjoyable, most singular films of the decade so far. – DB

15. Decision to Leave (2022)

A stylish neo-noir was always going to be fertile ground for cult favorite South Korean director Park Chan-wook, whose previous genre-laden cinematic forays include the devilishly nasty Oldboy and the tempestuous polish of The Handmaiden. Even played with a certain remove from much of the violent intensity that populates large swaths of those films, Decision to Leave is still such a distinct degree of cerebrally fervent that it slots directly in with the more brutal entries of his catalog. The magnitude of Decision to Leave’s head-on ferocity may be toned down, but it’s still plenty psychologically bruising and emotionally wrenching.

That said, Park knows there’s a certain level of humor intrinsic to many classic noirs, and he fills the 2+ hour runtime of this phenomenal contemporary detective procedural with plenty of small ironies and smirking wit — in the form of a figurative perpetual rain cloud that accompanies our quietly bumbling protagonist, detective Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il). He’s a classic noir lead updated for a modern world, driven by the weight of despair that begets (or is perhaps brought on by) his sense of folly, which materializes in an obsession with the suspect in his current murder case, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei). She’s a model femme fatale, stringing along the hopelessly guileless Hae-joon, handily manipulating and weaponizing his obsessive nature, which has begun to center on Seo-rae rather than the case he’s supposed to be solving. 

Even with the manifest foibles of the lead character, Park directs the hell out of Decision to Leave, such that you still feel the deep, anguished emotional ache resting between the two beautiful, tormented leading players. This is a wonderful and varied-looking movie, with cinematography by Kim Ji-yong that makes a case for the splendor of digital photography — he achieves painterly landscapes, dynamic, careening camera movements, and quietly astounding instances of in-camera innovation, like a conversation set against the two-way mirror in an interrogation room that trades off deep focus and shallow focus on either side of the frame as each character speaks. Along with novel cutting from Park’s regular editor Kim Sang-bum, often punctuating the action at unexpected moments with interlacing cutaways, Park crafts Decision to Leave so that the viewer is perfectly aligned with the feverish, ill-judged psyche of its central character’s burning desire — which is what makes the film’s unforgettable final moments so ruthlessly mournful. – TS

14. First Cow (2020)

First Cow begins with the discovery of a pair of skeletons. They lie side by side in the earth, embodying within them the centuries of societal advancement that have since passed overhead, as the story of America was pressed forward by everything from westward expansion to the Industrial Revolution, driven by a relentless faith in capitalism and perpetual growth. As these long-buried remains are unearthed, Kelly Reichardt’s film gently unveils their experience at the very outset of America as a so-called land of opportunity, a place whose secrets and resources had yet to be fully exploited for capital gain. We flash back to the Oregon Territory in the 1820s to meet these future corpses in the flesh: the quiet, soft-hearted cook Cookie (John Magaro) and the Chinese immigrant drifter King-Lu (Orion Lee), whose bond forms by chance — two itinerant souls seeking a foothold in a vast and indifferent frontier.  

They find their opportunity in the form of a cow — the first in the territory — shipped in by a wealthy British landowner. Under cover of night, Cookie and King-Lu steal milk from the animal and launch a modest baking business, selling pastries to the locals in the settlement. Part low-level heist movie, part buddy movie, and part exacting period piece, Reichardt charts the ambitions of her two leads with a serene grace typical of her working style. Even when Cookie and King-Lu are eventually found out and sent on the run, First Cow operates in a mode of steady, calm observation, with Reichardt’s regular cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt composing sublime images of an American landscape suggestive of wondrous possibilities, but nevertheless at the cusp of the commercialist ruin felt by its scrappy protagonists. The genius of First Cow’s story of two newfound friends running a makeshift baking racket is that such hustling is intrinsic to the philosophy that the land was seized in the name of; the poetic tragedy of its final frames comes from its depiction of two companions whose generous loyalty to one another was damned by the vicious system they attempted to game for themselves. – TS

13. Licorice Pizza (2021)

Late in Paul Thomas Anderson’s limber portrait of the 1970s, Licorice Pizza, Alana (Alana Haim) maneuvers a truck in reverse down the winding hills of the San Fernando Valley. When she and Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and the gaggle of boys in the back finally make it to the gas station, she sits on the curb and looks on as the teenage boys make crude jokes with the gas cannisters. She’s been running on empty for a while now. From the rainstorm of frogs in Magnolia to Eli Sunday’s death by bowling pin in There Will Be Blood, Anderson’s films are often unpredictable, but the biggest surprise of Licorice Pizza doesn’t lie in the plot. Instead, it’s how the film’s focus shifts from Gary to Alana, brilliantly evolving from a freewheeling comedy to a melancholic memory of trying to find your way.  

Gary Valentine is a self-anointed showman, a child actor, and an entrepreneur who moves through the world with the sort of optimism that only a fifteen-year-old could have. After meeting at his high school picture day, twenty-something Alana isn’t quite sure why she agreed to meet Gary for dinner at his local haunt, Tail o’ the Cock. Alana lacks the joie de vivre that Gary possesses and is, instead, quite listless, working a job she hates and living at home with her parents and two older sisters (all played by the Haim family). Through equal parts boredom and insecurity, Alana finds a place in Gary’s world, accompanying him as a chaperone to a TV guest spot, securing an audition with a casting agent (a hilarious Harriet Sansom Harris), and assisting with his burgeoning (so he hopes) waterbed business. But through it all, Anderson smartly depicts the stupidity and childishness of men, specifically, the danger of their hubris, violence, carelessness, and arrested development. The examples are endless, yet all feel like honest fixtures of the time and place: a racist restaurant owner (John Michael Higgins), the arrogant cad Jack Holden (Sean Penn), the volatile Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), and the dishonest aspiring Councilman Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie). While Gary interacts with some of these men, it’s Alana who is subject to their worst impulses. Like Phantom Thread’s Alma, Alana is thoughtfully written and painfully realistic. In a brilliant debut performance, Haim perfectly evokes the feeling of being completely unsure of who she is and what to do with the attention she’s receiving from the men around her. It’s one of the most accurate depictions of the sort of memory that we file away in hopes of forgetting, but that’s a crucial part of self-discovery.

The film’s magic trick is that it’s a vivid portrait of a time, capturing what it must have felt like to live during that era. When we reflect on a particular season or the moments within our past, it’s not linear, with every little detail filled in. Memories are made up of songs, favorite outfits that are now lost, stories with faded endings that are too wild to be true. Licorice Pizza is Anderson’s ode to the place where he grew up, the sour and sweet coexisting. It has a very powerful feeling. – SC

12. The Fabelmans (2022)

Some artists create to share their perspective with the world. Some do it to try and change the world. And some do it because they have no other choice. With The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg reveals the origins of his creative process, beckoning viewers into his mind and all the wonderful, painful paths that lie within. And although this is an autobiographical story with some for-the-screen artistic liberties, it’s far from self-indulgent. In fact, Spielberg’s lifting of the veil on the family dramas that shaped both his youth and his future adulthood is so painfully honest, it’s difficult to fully comprehend without feeling overwhelmed with emotion. After all, it can’t have been easy for Spielberg to, say, capture a line as truthfully raw as, “You don’t owe anyone your life, not even me,” coming from the mouth of the on-screen version of his own mother. Spielberg and strong contender for the title of greatest living writer, Tony Kushner crafted a screenplay that takes the highly personal story that served as their inspiration and somehow magicked it into a stunning piece that reverberates outward from the family at its center, impacting all who watch it. The film’s success can also be partly attributed to the stunning breakthrough performance of Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy Fabelman – the proxy Spielberg. He plays our protagonist as headstrong, stubborn, and drawn to the creative process like a self-aware moth to flame. Through him, Spielberg offers an explainer for what compels him and why. And one of the more incredible accomplishments of The Fabelmans is how it retroactively colors all of Spielberg’s films that came before. Just try and watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, or even something as comparatively inconsequential as Hook without thinking about the story of Sammy Fabelman and the genius filmmaker that he represents. – CD

11. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Killers of the Flower Moon is a 209-minute stranglehold of a movie, relentlessly dragging the viewer through the mud of prejudicial murder set in an era so regularly romanticized in American cinema. It is also a collaboration of many of the most legendary talents in the history of the medium: director Martin Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Jack Fisk, screenwriter Eric Roth,  lead Leonardo DiCaprio, and co-star Robert de Niro, among others (and that doesn’t even speak to the brilliance of the film’s secret weapon, Lily Gladstone.) By any practical standard, paying $200 million for a difficult, thorny Martin Scorsese film about the Osage Murders doesn’t seem financially prudent, but what resulted was an artistic triumph. The movie feels limitless, the visuals and design feeling like they extend for miles after the screen ends. Fisk’s world feels plucked out of time and large in ways that contemporary films rarely feel large. It is also an extension of what one could call Scorsese’s “Re-Assessment Era”. Marty has an inherent ability to capture taut drama, but he has become increasingly interested in what it means to depict compelling drama in his later years. This was brought to its apotheosis at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon, when the director inserts himself into the film as a reader of a radio drama reflecting on the fact that justice was never served in this story. Scorsese is a purveyor of injustice with good intent, but he clearly has an instinct that it is for naught. In a world where The Wolf of Wall Street is as much frat boy aspiration as cautionary tale in the eyes of the culture, who could blame him? – JL

10. Aftersun (2022)

Sometimes you just know you’re in the presence of greatness. We’ve certainly seen stories of filmmakers digging up their own past to either reclaim it or therapize it but when Charlotte Wells gave us Aftersun, she became a generational voice. The story of an 11-year girl named Sophie (top tier first time performance from Frankie Corio) on what would be the last trip with her 31-year old father Calum (played to emotional perfection by Paul Mescal, who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance) just days before his birthday, watches Wells grasping and grappling as she searches for a reconciliation of sorts.

The use of Polaroids, miniDV footage and eerie reflection frames what we see in such a way that Calum feels like an apparition, a ghostly memory. The “Under Pressure” sequence, which has been teased for us like a horror film since the film’s beginning, culminates in the most harrowing scene of the film, a shattering realization of loss being codified in a single moment. For me, this is the best film of the decade so far. The birth of a new talent and the birth of a star. – EA

9. Drive My Car (2021)

Grief is truly one of the most powerful emotional events that we can endure. It’s a transformative experience that has an almost magical quality in the ways it can expose varying degrees of passion that are buried within. The tragic, unrelenting regret lives in harmony with memories of bittersweet joy, confounding our brief existence on this planet while appreciating the complexities we continually explore. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car takes it time to ruminate in these thoughts, utilizing all of its three hours to contemplate the process by which we come to terms with the decisions that have created such trauma in our lives, as well as the opportunities that present themselves to evolve into a more mature soul. His storytelling is quiet and reserved, valuing the intimate spaces that exist between characters who reveal impactful truths through simple conversations. But, of course, nothing about these dynamics lacks nuance. Through art itself, reaching across time and translated through cultures, we find past experiences reflected back at us, and sometimes it takes an act of deep bonding to understand what we’ve lost and what’s left to celebrate. These themes are beautifully embodied by this entire ensemble, anchored by Hidetoshi Nishijima’s stoic performance. He captures the still tragedy that runs underneath, desperate to maintain composure through turbulent waters. But he knows exactly when to let the cracks form, leading to one of the most heartwrenching finales that exceptionally underlines how impactful the act of listening can be. Reaching towards the depths of despair is not always an effort in futility. There is both sorrow and healing in this endeavor, and few films have grasped this commentary quite like Hamaguchi’s incredible masterpiece. – JP

8. May December (2023)

It’s all about perception in Todd Haynes’ domestic, satirical May December. When we first meet Gracie (Julianne Moore), she’s worried about how many hotdogs they have for their family BBQ, which is all nerves given the fact that actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is coming to shadow her for a role in an upcoming film about Gracie’s life and how she met her much younger husband Joe (Charles Melton). When Elizabeth arrives, her first interaction with Gracie is a tad awkward, with not a word spoken between her and Joe. She gathers a glass of wine and moves over to a chair and sits down, watching the couple as they interact with their guests; the perfect image of the modern American family. But Elizabeth knows the truth (or at least a version of the truth), that Gracie and Joe got together when she was 36 and he was 13, causing a scandal heard around the country, loosely inspired by real life events in the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal. But as the actress gets closer and closer to understanding her subject matter, the more we start to see the blurring of what is truth and what is fiction in Gracie’s world. As the two women are playing mind games with one another, May December opens up about the quiet, ignored world that Joe walks in every day, as a man who never got to grow up normally, and is about to watch the children he and Gracie had leave the nest, leaving him alone with nothing to really show for in this world. With a complex, brilliant screenplay from Oscar nominee Samy Burch, May December is a darkly humorous, heartbreaking look into modern domesticity, a subject matter that Haynes is very familiar with in his early work Safe and Far from Heaven. But what makes this feature so memorable outside what Burch delivered on the page, the trio of excellent performances, the brilliant melodramatic score by Marcelo Zarvos, is the dark realities of the perception we put out in the world, and no matter how much we try to understand, the truth is far more distressing than what you read in the tabloid or hear from the gossip around town. Gloriously thorny by nature, May December captivates you as it tangles its web around the viewer, consuming them, and leaves them curious for more. – RM

7. All of Us Strangers (2023)

One of the most powerful objectives that drives human beings is our extreme longing for connection. We yearn for fulfilling relationships, whether they be romantic, platonic or familial. The opportunity to forge meaningful bonds is so vital, and the absence of such ties is a deep sadness that’s almost impossible to endure. It’s a theme that has run constantly through Andrew Haigh’s filmography: the budding romance in Weekend, the fear of betrayal in 45 Years, the journey of self-fulfillment in Lean on Pete. It’s no wonder that he should continue this commentary with All of Us Strangers and deliver yet another moving and tender portrait. This is a character study that examines the crippling isolation which hardens through time, self-inflicted by emotional trauma that prevents such significant ties from forming. It is only when confronted with those choices, of loss and grief, that a beautiful catharsis can emerge. Haigh captures this setting with a tenderness that is so full of vibrant emotion, tactfully detailing both the elation and heartbreak of seeking love in all its forms. His efforts are aided by a brilliant performance from Andrew Scott, so raw and vulnerable as he navigates a fragile mental state that seeks to find the glimmer of light from the consuming darkness. The optimism, represented by a charming Paul Mescal, and the haunting grief, spectacularly portrayed by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, give this piece deeper resonance. The film is an analysis not just on love and loss, but the ways in which overcoming such agony is only won by its direct confrontation. As such, it fits perfectly within Haigh’s repertoire. It is yet another powerful showcase of the desperate attempt to find one’s place next to those who will appreciate all the tattered parts of your soul, both the parts that are irrevocably scarred but also those that can heal through affection. – JP

6. Nickel Boys (2024)

With Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross takes the idea of reflecting on history to new heights, stripping away the comfortable distance provided by a camera to hold the audience by the shoulders and truly confront the atrocities on the screen; it is not uncommon to see evil in a movie, but it has rarely been this empathetically or compellingly portrayed. The first-person POV that the film deploys could be written off as a wanting trick in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, but Ross does so with explicit intent. By showing the film through the eyes of the subjects, it removes the pre-established context of the story. It is an exercise of empathy unparalleled in the last decade of filmmaking. It is a film that requires a degree of acclimation. It is a new mode of storytelling for a film of this ilk. It is not a means for adrenaline or inertia, it is a way to contemplate the very idea of photography. We are used to seeing the subjects, well, subjected to the acts around them in the frame. In Nickel Boys, the safety of third-person is removed and the history suddenly becomes the present. The world of the film is the here and now. It is only upon reflection that you are able to fully pick the pieces apart and grapple with the experience. It is a film of small moments, epic truths, and a statement of early mastery from cinematographer Jomo Fray and director RaMell Ross. One of the great films of the 21st century. – JL

5. Nope (2022)

For his third feature, writer/director Jordan Peele — known for his polished genre excursions — expands both his thematic ambitions and his visual and textural palette. Riding the wave of goodwill and box office success from his distinctly contemporary social horror breakthroughs Get Out and Us, Peele shifts into a more classical Hollywood blockbuster mode with Nope, a film that is at once deeply critical of, and endlessly enamored with, the very spectacle it seeks to showcase. He lays the track for a throng of heady themes in this tale of brother-sister duo OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) living in the rural mountains of California, who inherit their late father’s business of hiring out horses for film productions, and soon begin to notice a strange anomaly gliding among the clouds above their ranch.

Nope encompasses a substantial scope of individual ideas that enrich its larger whole: the forgotten history of Black talent and labor in Hollywood; a broken family’s efforts to reassemble itself in the face of a terrifying unknown; the obsessive devotion and the work required behind the scenes to capture the awe-inspiring on camera, — in other words, making a movie. But Nope finds its most cogent focus in the insidious nature of show business itself: how the industry eagerly exploits the helpless or the unfamiliar — here, meaning both children and animals, earthly or otherwise — and finds a way to turn a profit. In making a movie about a group of individuals trying to capture the perfect shot of an alien lifeform, Nope probes the very nature of what it means to observe and commodify via the lens of a camera. 

Peele communicates these themes through a Spielbergian sense of immersive awe and wonder, pairing that master’s flair for startling creature horror and rousing sci-fi set-pieces with his own distinct vitality that turns this UFO thriller into a pop movie triumph. The film features a standout cast, with Kaluuya’s unconventionally hushed and dryly funny cowboy and Palmer’s bubbly, gung-ho hustler bringing essential warmth to Peele’s panoramic and pointed vision of Hollywood history.  Accounting for both the failures and absurdities of his industry, he nevertheless prioritizes the great joy of skillfully entertaining an awestruck audience, alchemizing all of his big, disparate ideas into a striking piece of potent American filmmaking all its own. – TS

4. The Power of the Dog (2021)

Jane Campion begins her 1920s-set, neo-western masterpiece, The Power of the Dog, by posing a question: “For what kind of man would I be if I did not protect my mother? If I did not save her?” After moving to a remote Montana ranch when his mother, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), marries George (Jesse Plemons), the seemingly timid and feeble Peter (a brilliant Kodi Smit-McPhee) becomes even more motivated to protect her. It isn’t George who inspires this (he’s lovely to Rose), but rather his imposing, wicked brother Phil (a never-better Benedict Cumberbatch), who revels in control, power, and the dirt; core tenets of the brand of masculinity that still plagues American men today. But underneath that dusty veneer is something far more volatile; he’s harboring a secret that Peter threatens to chip away upon his arrival. 

Across her filmography, Campion is perhaps best known for her delicate yet direct look at a woman’s work through the eyes of her female protagonists (The Piano, Bright Star), making her pivot to the experiences of men even more striking. Naturally, the western, with its established and practiced tropes, is the perfect playground for a tactile filmmaker like Campion, who uses the genre framework to create a detailed, blistering slow burn that upends genre conventions at every turn. Alongside cinematographer Ari Wegner (an Oscar robbery I’m still not over), Campion illustrates the similarities between Peter and Phil through a series of parallel images (a comb and a banjo; a hula hoop and a wooden chair; a paper flower and a tassel). On the surface, these images code as masculine and feminine, illuminating the characters’ performances and lived differences, while threatening to expose Phil’s secret: his love for his former mentor, Bronco Henry, whose ghost lingers over the film like Du Maurier and Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Just as Peter asks at the beginning of the film, Campion is most interested in protection, and perhaps more specifically, who and what men feel the need to shield and conceal, and why. – SC

3. The Zone of Interest (2023)

It’s a rare, special thing to realize in the middle of a cinema that you are watching one of The Great Films in its initial theatrical run. The New York Film Festival press screening of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest was the first time I’ve really felt it. The film does sort of announce its greatness right upfront, with that blinding title card and Mica Levi’s droning, inhuman score over black, forcing you to sit in the middle of nothingness – perhaps this is the same void where Scarlett Johansson’s alien took her victims in Glazer’s best-of-the-century contender Under the Skin. So much has been written (and will be written) about the film’s genius, Oscar-winning sound mix, but there’s one moment that has stuck with me since that first viewing. Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig is tending her backyard garden, and we start cutting to different flowers, first large groups from far away, then singular flowers in successively closer close-ups. As we get closer to the flowers, the screams and gunshots and beatings on the soundtrack slowly fade out, getting replaced by buzzing bees, until all you can hear are the loudest, most painful sounds, at which point the screen fades to red. Just when it seemed as though there couldn’t possibly be any new way to make a film about the Holocaust, Glazer and his brilliant craftsmen and women force the audience to stew in the juices of the most awful things human beings have ever done to each other and ask, “What would it be like to live with this every day? Could you? What kind of person could? And what would it do to them?” The answer seems to be that only a true believer could survive this kind of environment, but they only do so at the cost of their soul. Glazer doesn’t have to reach for present-day relevance, but no one who saw The Zone of Interest could possibly have been surprised when he called for support of Palestine when accepting the Academy Award for Best International Feature. Unlike so many Holocaust films that drown in sentimentality and wallow in misery, The Zone of Interest is presented with the feeling of a fly-on-the-wall documentary with moments of art-film flourishes (perhaps a nod to the granddaddy of Holocaust films, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog). Its chilliness and unpleasant nature are very much the point, as you would have to be chilled to the bone in order to survive as long as the Höss family has in this place. But even today, so many are content to just look at the flowers and listen to the bees, not thinking about the pain and suffering happening even in their own backyard. The problem is that bees sting. Eventually, you’ll pay a price for ignoring what’s on the other side of the wall you’ve built around your comfortable life. The Germans did, and you will, too. – DB

2. Oppenheimer (2023)

The decade so far for blockbuster cinema has been defined as either bold, original, nostalgic experiences built to entertain audiences around the world, i.e., Barbie, Top Gun: Maverick, Dune, Wicked, Avatar: The Way of Water, just to name a few. But one film has stood taller than all blockbusters of the modern era, collecting all of these definitions and crafting them into a film that is the culmination of an entire filmmaker’s career, stretched across a three-hour, 70 millimeter IMAX biopic epic that captivated audiences and declared a new definitive voice in cinema; this of course is Christopher Nolan and the film is Oppenheimer. Based on award winning novel American Prometheus by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer follows the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (long time Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy) as he becomes the most renowned theoretical physicist in the world and is recruited by the United States government to develop the first nuclear weapons in human history to put an end to the Nazis as well as World War II all together. As we are watching him and his colleagues craft the bomb at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Nolan thrusts us into the future, mostly in black and white sequences, showcasing the perspective of after the war through the eyes of Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a retired Naval Reserve officer and high-ranking member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and someone who sees Oppenheimer as a rival, and looks to take down his credibility as the most trusted scientific mind in the world. As we’ve grown accustomed to within Nolan’s work, we just back and in time to fully understand the man, myth, legend, and downfall of one of the most important figures in history, using a script mostly told through the perspective of Oppenheimer, and in doing this, have us empathize with him as a tragic, flawed, brilliant mind.

Nolan, given the book by his producing partner Charles Roven as well as diaries of Oppenheimer from his talent co-lead Robert Pattinson, became enamored with the idea of Oppenheimer and his team having the power of setting off a device that’s chain reaction has the slight possibility of destroying the world. With this informative seed of doubt, Oppenheimer created the weapon to end all wars, thus springing us all into the nuclear world he manifested, and for Nolan, it was the catalyst that sprung him into making the definitive masterpiece of his career and our time. Led by an all-star cast that includes one of the best performances of the decade by Murphy in the titular role, as well as Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Josh Hartnett, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Alden Ehrenrich, David Krumholtz, and the rest of Hollywood that wasn’t in Barbie, Oppenheimer is a perfect throw back to the kind of big, epic filmmaking that not only push the form of filmmaking forward (shot incredibly by Hoyte van Hoytema), but leave audiences entertained and wanting to come back for more. Making nearly a billion dollars at the box-office while also becoming the recipient of dozens of accolades including seven Academy Awards highlighted by wins for Best Picture, Best Director (Nolan), Best Actor (Murphy), and Best Supporting Actor (Downey) is a pretty marvelous thing to achieve, showcasing the film’s blend of being populist entertainment and prestige filmmaking. But beyond those markers is the real reason Oppenheimer will stand the test of the time as a unique film in our modern landscape; it’s a picture that shakes us to our core, seeing a man decent into shame for creating something so powerful, that one it’s been released, there is no going back, and just like Oppenheimer, we must grapple with our own moral scruples on how dangerous our world has become. Only Nolan, a man that has defined a generation of blockbuster filmmakers and audiences, could’ve made a movie as grand in spectacle and ideas as Oppenheimer that still resonates as the world around us descends into chaos. – RM

1. TÁR (2022)

After sixteen years away from the director’s chair, Todd Field returned with one of the defining works of art of the modern era, TÁR. In the film’s opening, Adam Gopnik leads a Q&A at the New Yorker Festival and describes our titular anti-heroine by saying, “Lydia Tár is many things,” before launching into an exhaustive litany of academic and professional achievements. Sure, her Harvard degree, posts at the “Big Five” American orchestras, and EGOT are important notes, but just as he does throughout the brilliantly detailed script, Field signals that there are hidden traits that shape a powerful person; characteristics that can both enable their rise and lead to their demise. After witnessing Field’s deft, 15-minute trick of exposition, it would be tempting to see Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) as a conductor at the peak of her powers. She flies (private) around the world, is the subject of a major artistic event, and has plans to finally record Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with her current home orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic. Upon closer inspection, however, Lydia is becoming a bit lazy and starting to reveal what’s under her mask. A favor for a friend at Juilliard turns into an unnecessary bout of public humiliation, and a flirtatious fan’s gaudy red handbag winds up back home with her in Berlin. “We’ve made our point,” she shares, as she considers opening up the women-centered Accordion Fellowship to men. Then, there’s the ghost that she can’t cast out: her former blacklisted student, Krista Taylor.

What makes TÁR such a smart and savvy portrait of the #MeToo era is that Field doesn’t find it necessary to explicitly describe or depict the details of Tár’s bad behavior. We know all too well that that’s never how it works when a person of her prominence and stature is accused. And while that specific point in time is perfectly rendered, what gives TÁR its staying power is that Field and Blanchett make Lydia Tár far more than just a time-bound emblem. Instead, this is a razor-sharp character study and an augury of unchecked power. At the center of it all is a titanic Blanchett, whose Lydia is strong, yet weak; beautiful yet terrifying; a genius yet hilariously embarrassing. It’s a towering creation and the best performance by an actor this decade. After she plinks away at her piano in her Berlin flat, Field’s camera transitions with a bang as we witness Tár conducting Mahler from below. We look up at her in wonder and awe, in the same way that we will view Blanchett and Field’s modern opus for years to come. – SC