2020s

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.

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.

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…

Soaring mountaintops and deep oceans become fitting metaphors for the dangerous longing between detective and suspect in Decision to Leave, as Park Chan-wook follows this obsession with a keen, stylistic precision and melancholic ambiguity that threatens to topple both in their pursuit of love.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 proves there is still life to be found in Tom Cruise’s perilous undertakings seven films deep into the franchise, creatively playing on renewed fears of an artificial intelligence takeover with its intangible villain, and setting the stage for a series of thrillingly practical set pieces.