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The Best Films of the 2020s Decade (so far)
The greatest films of the 2020s so far, from the growth of auteur television to boundary-pushing metamodernism.
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El Conde (2023)
Pablo Larraín’s creative historical revisionism in El Conde transforms Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet into a vampiric icon of fascism, continuing to feed on society’s most vulnerable in his old age while descendants, lovers, and organised religion seek to profit off his legacy, giving this monochrome political satire a viciously witty bite.
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2023)
With their veneers of whimsical innocence that mask quiet tragedies, it is clear through Wes Anderson’s adaptations of four short Roald Dahl stories that he sees parts of himself in the children’s writer, keeping his spirit alive with a curated, theatrical style that creatively reimagines fables of eccentric psychics, bullies, exterminators, and patients.
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The Creator (2023)
The Creator’s stimulating combination of grand theological questions and sci-fi action spectacle offers the genre fresh spiritual depth, using a futuristic conflict between humans and artificial intelligence as a messianic allegory of insecure gods, their tortured children, and the dehumanisation of enemies in wartime.
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A Haunting in Venice (2023)
As flamboyant detective Hercule Poirot is drawn into a murder mystery of mediums, seances, and vengeful ghosts in A Haunting in Venice, the foundations of his hardened logic are confronted with chilling visions of the impossible, effectively imbuing Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie with a Gothic horror that complicates our search for rational truth.
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Past Lives (2023)
The bittersweet romanticism of Past Lives flourishes in the sweet ambiguity between a Korean immigrant and her childhood sweetheart, weaving its metaphysical understanding of reincarnation through a triadic structure that intersects their paths every twelve years, and seeing the possibilities of their undefined love become infinite.
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BlackBerry (2023)
With much of Hollywood recently taking to the feel-good stories of successful entrepreneurs, the unlikely pairing of a naïve tech bro and cutthroat businessman in BlackBerry proves to be a satirically wry subversion of that formula, taking us behind the scenes of the most catastrophic business failure of the 21st century with a sharply cynical…