2020s

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.

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.

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.

There is no need to complicate the simple concept of an extra-terrestrial hunting humans for sport, as Dan Trachtenberg smartly chooses to build Prey on the primal relationship between a hunter and its quarry, offering an assorted blend of genres that creatively brings the Predator franchise’s sci-fi conventions to one Comanche village and its scenic…

The awareness of storytelling conventions that one lonely scholar brings to her meeting with a Djinn in Three Thousand Years of Longing offers George Miller’s self-conscious metanarrative great passion for its artistic traditions, crafting an uneven yet vivid collage of fairy tale motifs greater than the sum of its mythological fragments.