2020s

In Asteroid City’s grand metaphor for life, everyone is performing roles that they may not fully understand, yet through the metatextual union of art and reality Wes Anderson reverberates a sweet, formal harmony across a youth astronomy convention visited by aliens, and the backstage drama of the play it exists within.

The mysterious, embalmed hand that invites deceased spirits into the minds of teenagers makes for a dangerous party drug in Talk to Me, as well as a terrifying metaphor that the Philippou brothers tease out with an uneasy subjectivity, haunting those who can’t seem to tear themselves away from its supernatural intoxication.

Just as the tiniest of quantum processes may produce explosive reactions, so too does the father of the atomic bomb set off seismic ripples across human history in Oppenheimer, and from beneath his shadow Christopher Nolan whisks us forward through a relentlessly non-linear narrative to witness the tortured Destroyer of Worlds emerge out the other…

Armed with self-aware humour and a kitschy production design, Greta Gerwig delivers a camp visual treat in Barbie, balancing a feminist interrogation of the doll’s controversial place in pop culture against the innocent, whimsical joy of everything it was intended to represent.

As the mystical powers of one mute Indigenous Australian boy begin to emerge within a 1940s Catholic orphanage in The New Boy, Warwick Thornton delicately weaves a magical realist allegory of spirituality, assimilation, and colonialism’s stranglehold on ancient cultures, set against the backdrop of the beautifully unfathomable outback.