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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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Barbarian (2022)
The thrill of seeing three tangential storylines wind around one unassuming house and its chilling, subterranean dungeons in Barbarian makes for a truly shocking piece of horror cinema, as through Zach Cregger’s agile, perspective-shifting narrative we learn to discern which monsters hiding in its depths deserve either our utmost disdain or sorrowful pity.
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We Are Who We Are (2020)
Though the episodic storytelling of We Are Who We Are leads to some shagginess in Luca Guadagnino’s narrative, its wandering pace offers his complex characters all the time they need to explore questions of sexuality, gender identity, and grief, foregrounding the vague but sweet relationship between two teenagers living on a U.S. military base in…
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Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)
Though disappointingly bland from a visual standpoint, Ryusuke Hamaguchi builds the strength of his anthology film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy on the fatalistic, formal connections between each self-contained chapter, offering up sincere meditations on our attempts to find happiness within a cruel, mischievous universe.
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Amsterdam (2022)
There is certainly madness to David O. Russell’s elaborate plotting of conspiracies and murders throughout Amsterdam, but with his intimately framed close-ups and stylish rendering of 1930s New York, he builds a humorously sweet affection between the main trio of accidental detectives that outlasts any vicious political manoeuvring surrounding them.
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Blonde (2022)
Accusations of abhorrent crudity may be fairly lobbed at the subject matter of Blonde, but certainly not at Andrew Dominik’s talents as a provocative, implicating filmmaker, solemnly studying Norma Jean and Marilyn Monroe as dual identities in perpetual conflict, and disturbingly manifesting their world as a surreal, existential nightmare psychologically fusing them together.
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Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Bodies Bodies Bodies delivers a perverse thrill in seeing its ensemble of cynical, two-faced narcissists tear themselves down over the course of one bloody, wild party, as Helina Reijn offers the darkly comedic, neon-tinted murder mystery a Gen Z twist, exposing the fraught insecurities and secrets that lie beneath their insincerity.