The Best Films of the Decade (so far)

Featuring late style from the old masters, established auteurs reaching the peak of their powers, and distinctive newcomers.

Mainstream cinema is in crisis, and the great independents seem to be getting pushed further and further out into the margins.

Film critics and letterboxders alike have bemoaned the decline and fall of the empire much more frequently in the last half-decade than any time that I can historically account for, other than the mid 1960s, when the classic Hollywood studio system was in collapse. Is the median Hollywood product being outmoded by newer forms of artistry like it was sixty years ago? The young filmmakers that revolutionized American film style were influenced simultaneously by national genre traditions and a burgeoning international arthouse scene. For example, one only needs to look at the genre revisionism of Robert Altman, who brought Leonard Cohen to the old west, hippies to the world of Philip Marlowe, and dark, cynical, detached humor to the war picture tradition. The filmmakers who were learning about Truffaut, Fellini, and Kurosawa in college while Altman worked on industrials and TV shows furthered his efforts to re-establish the language of cinema, updated for the second half of the 20th century with reupholstered genres and distribution strategies.

However, one does not feel the same sense of revolution in the air by looking at the state of American cinema in 2024. The major-minors such as A24 and NEON with their politics of respectability have effectively split the difference between the prestige and the arthouse, and increased the value of the median awards season movie while decreasing the value of the median genre film. Factors such as a global pandemic, labor struggles in Hollywood, and technological advancements accelerating faster than filmmakers can learn to properly integrate them have resulted in an undefinable cluster of cinema in the 2020s. If there is one unifying theme, it’s that time is running out. The masters of New Hollywood are reaching the ends of their lives. The state of climate change has reached a crisis point, and the human race’s remaining time on this planet is precious.

That is not to say that all of cinema should be seen with a ticking clock of doom and gloom. As an art form, there will always be great filmmakers, but it seems that we are in a period where the younger ones are, more often than not, hidden in the recesses of the internet. Some of these filmmakers are on this list, and while putting micro-budget projects only known to particular corners of the web into conversation with modern masters like Paul Thomas Anderson or hitmakers like Michael Bay sounds a bit absurd, it may be the only way forward.

50. Zeros and Ones

Abel Ferrara, 2021

The most incomprehensible film that I enjoyed this decade, Sean Price Williams’ extremely noisy digital cinematography captures Ethan Hawke as lost in the plot as the viewer, wandering around a quarantined Rome. Ferrara has previously made films with dissociative elements, but that feeling extends to an entire runtime here, as he represents the feeling of being lost in a new world, despite the old world still being visible. The film even included a video from Ethan Hawke, who admitted to not understanding it.

49. Ambulance

Michael Bay, 2022

Although he may never again reach the pinnacle of mayhem that was Bad Boys 2, Michael Bay’s thriller boasts the gnarliest action of the last few years. Drone cameras swing up and down like bungee jumpers, but digital fakery never outweighs the physicality of real car crashes. In what may be the most politically relevant premise for an action movie that one can imagine today, it all starts with medical bills unpaid by insurance and left in the hands of a desperate man.

48. The Civil Dead

Clay Tatum, 2022

The type of small indie production that filmmakers outside of the Hollywood system should be making, relying on a humorous and heartfelt script realized by actors with palpable chemistry rather than the spectacle that comes with a big budget. Filmmaker/actor Tatum and his co-star Whitmer Thomas have worked together for decades now, and this feature has a cumulative feeling that has been long-gestating. Coming from crudely amateur comedy videos and live shows that I attended, to Vimeo shorts (The Buddhist is a stand-out), The Civil Dead is a great sign of things to come from the funny and sensitive filmmaker.

47. Malignant

James Wan, 2022

Over the last year, I’ve tried to avoid using terms like “dumb” or “smart” to describe films, because films are not sentient. Also, if they were, movies would be smarter than humans. However, Malignant is the dumbest movie on my list, taking great pleasure in the thudding obviousness of its music cues and shockingly telegraphed scenario. Despite the fact that half of this film plays like a comedy, its horror and action setpieces (particularly one at a police station) are so well imagined and contain such kinetic camerawork and montage that I found myself re-evaluating the film’s IQ in real time.

46. Between the Temples

Nathan Silver, 2024

A depressing Jewish comedy of embarrassments that invokes New Hollywood (Elaine May, Albert Brooks, Woody Allen), and trends of 21st century mumblecore-adjacent indies in equal doses. Playfully kaleidoscopic editing and grainy handheld cinematography (by the MVP of 2020s images, Sean Price Williams) aide the presentation of this incredibly impressive two-hander by Jason Schwartzman and Carole Kane.

45. The Worst Person in the World

Joachim Trier, 2021

A character study about bad behavior, millennial malaise, and the changing tides of the modern world from an extremely European Film Festival perspective. That this received such a warm welcome in the states was a pleasant surprise, although it doesn’t take much in-depth criticism to understand why Renate Reinsve’s performance is so beloved as an embodiment of contemporary anxieties.

44. Pomp & Circumstance

Adrian Anderson & Patrick Gray, 2024

A freewheelin’ arthouse comedy written by, about, and partially for college students, Anderson and Gray’s 16mm feature debut at first recalls the early Godardian comedies of Brian de Palma. Despite references to Whit Stillman and Greetings, the campus novel as literary form seems to be the foundation here rather than any cinematic reference point. Ideological flights of fancy such as voluntary homelessness or The Cartesian Elvis can either be taken as satire of youth in academia or one puzzle piece of campus life’s contemporary changes and eternal recurrences.

43. The All Golden

Nate Wilson, 2023

One of two Toronto microbudget features on this list that I would describe as schizophrenic, Nate Wilson’s The All Golden works on the levels of its contradictions. Film history is at the fingertips of the director (and protagonist), but never does the formal approach feel like homage or reference. The film’s sense of sexuality is impressive given the leading lady’s crippling leg injury and her boyfriend’s crippling cinephilia. As I noted upon my first viewing, it’s very similar to what I would imagine Damon Packard’s films would look like if he had sex instead of gooning to AI-generated short films.

42. Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola, 2024

The longest-gestating project and biggest swing of the decade so far is Francis Ford Coppola’s call for a great debate about the future. While the plotting is closer to that of the televisual than Shakespearean or Roman, the way the geriatric auteur conceives his world is equally baffling and beautiful. The CGI backdrops often look like technology has not progressed since the Star Wars prequels, but once in a while introduces a texture never before seen. The use of ensemble is inspired, with performances that are disparate in their aims but united by a sense of extremism. As a vocal fan of Dirty Grandpa’s intergenerational climax of Aubrey Plaza mounting Robert De Niro and proclaiming that he is, indeed, the title character, I was more than tickled by this film’s show-stopping scene in which Jon Voight bait-and-switches her and a raucous Shia LaBeouf with the ol’ boner/bow and arrow trick. You know the one. Plaza’s embodiment of the sensationalism of tabloid reporting and over-sexualization of media at large is one of the decade’s great performances.

41. Trap

M. Night Shyamalan, 2024

Since the beginning, Shyamalan’s films have been filled with a clunky sense of humor that is easily definable as that of a father. His greatest dad joke yet comes in 2024 with the release of one child’s debut feature film, The Watchers, and the other’s co-starring role in Trap, a not-so-sly advertisement for her pop music career. The core conceit of the film rests entirely on the shoulders of Josh Hartnett, who delivers the goods with ease. His facial expressions, lensed in startlingly intimate close-ups by SPW’s cohort on the first-team all-cinematography ballot Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, run the gamut of concern, paranoia, and smiling in the face of it all. Although more effective as a dad comedy than a thriller, Shyamalan retains his unique place in Hollywood with yet another misunderstood great time at the movies.

40. Oppenheimer / Tenet

Christopher Nolan, 2023 / 2020

In the post-Zimmer era of Christopher Nolan’s filmography, a high-concept action film and a best picture-winning biopic further cemented his legacy as the last of a dying breed, the capital-A auteur making crowd-pleasing films for major studios while never compromising his vision. Tenet sees Nolan’s instincts for physics and logic above humanity being pushed to their logical limits, while Oppenheimer injects a great deal of personal subjectivity to a film bathing in ‘objectively’ accurate period detail. It’s a balancing act that I’m not entirely convinced he pulls off, but if every Nolan film is a self-conscious attempt to make a Masterpiece, getting 75% of the way there still lands you a spot on my best-of list. I might slightly prefer the less historically and politically ambitious aims of Tenet, but I think that both are among his best and most mature films.

39. Stillwater

Tom McCarthy, 2021

As something of a devout auteurist, this was the biggest surprise on the list. Tom McCarthy is someone who I admire as an actor, particularly as Templeton on The Wire. He directed a best picture winner in Spotlight that I think is fine, but more important to his legacy, he directed one of the worst Adam Sandler films, The Cobbler. As a movie star, and one of our greatest, Sandler generally follows the pattern of making money with his Happy Madison-produced broad comedy films, and then taking chances with more serious filmmakers who want to utilize his underrated dramatic abilities. These films are always as good or bad as their directors, with the constant variable being a great performance by the Sandman. The best of these films are James L. Brooks’ Spanglish and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. The worst of these films are Jason Reitman’s Men, Women, and Children and Tom McCarthy’s The Cobbler, which create atmospheres so repellant and misguided that they make derided Happy Madison productions Blended and Just Go With It feel as natural and loving as Brooks or Anderson. This is a long way of saying that my advanced metric of evaluating a director based on the quality of their Adam Sandler film projected McCarthy to be among the dregs of the hacks.

The reliable model for evaluating a filmmaker based on their Adam Sandler film

And then came Stillwater. From the moment Matt Damon’s exaggerated wide gait waddled across the stealthily beautiful vistas, I knew I was on the film’s side. The script, following Damon from Oklahoma to Marseille to visit his daughter who is being held for a murder, is reminiscent of scenarios from the 2010s films of Clint Eastwood. There is a logline’s worth of a crime film, but more than that, the pleasures are in the small scenes of characters either adapting to new environments or soaking in familiar ones. It’s overly long, but the slow pace allows the viewer to luxuriate in somewhat flatly shot scenarios that allow Damon’s huffing, puffing, and wide-walking to shine in one of his best roles. Somehow, the French location work never feels touristic, even as we accompany Damon to an Olympique de Marseille match. Tom McCarthy beat the model.

38. Last Summer

Catherine Breillat, 2024

Catherine Breillat’s latest is unfathomably French: a post-Me Too film dissecting the power dynamics of a young man having an affair with his stepmother. Beyond sex’s relationship with power, class and national identity play a large part in this tightly controlled and masterfully shot moral tale. Breillat takes a nearly structuralist approach to the sex in this film; the first sex scene consists solely of Léa Drucker’s face while her husband makes obligatory love to her, and the next never leaves the face of the young Samuel Kircher. Characters’ internal thoughts and feelings are defined by their expressions and physicality while screwing. This is a movie about sex, after all.

37. My Falcon

Dominik Graf, 2023

Appropriately light for its TV movie ambitions, Graf’s steady hand in the world of procedurals allows the forensic professional milieu to exist realistically off to the side while honing in on the personal/family drama at the protagonist’s core. Inga’s recently divorced ex-husband and cantankerous father agree that she spends too much time on work and not enough with her loved ones, so like any well-adjusted person she develops a new obsessive hobby. Her father also thrusts upon her a potential new sister-in-law, but Inga’s focus remains on the bird. Personally, falconry is not the first place I would look to in a situation like this, but I am not one to question the idiosyncrasies of fictional characters.

The scenes between Inga and Charlotte, whose fantasies of sisterhood are being fulfilled, are played with a level of earnestness that may turn off some viewers. However, there’s an earned sense of deep sadness and loneliness in these characters that don’t just excuse but inform the desperation at the core of the forged relationship. Graf’s style is fairly subtle and staid for the first half of the film, but starts to open up as it moves along with some zippy camera work and Falcon’s POV drone work. It’s a very clean and naturalistic digital look that evokes both television and cinema without straining to “elevate” anything.

36. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something has Passed

Joanna Arnow, 2024

Joanna Arnow’s comedy of errors is just as uncomfortable as Breillat’s drama, with surprisingly similar aims. Ann (played by Arnow herself) undergoes a series of sadomasochistic rituals in both her sex life and her professional life. The film is nearly Bressonian in its visual precision and deadpan, and Lena Dunhamesque in its comedy of embarrassments. While New York is often depicted as a sensory overload due to its overpopulation and wacky characters, this film allows its protagonist to be so alienated and disquieted by the world around her that we, the viewer, withdraw into her version of New York instead of the real one.

35. Both Sides of the Blade

Claire Denis, 2022

What, on the surface, may appear to be a simple love triangle film goes a lot deeper thanks to a clever script and Denis’ thoughtful direction. Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon embody real characters with real history, a palpable relationship that can have a wrench thrown into it at any time by someone coming out of the past. On top of the core dramatic movement of the film, there are sociopolitical digressions and dialogues that range from the broad ideas of postcolonial thought to the specifics of this particular domestic situation.

34. RRR

S.S. Rajamouli, 2022

A filmgoing event that spread like wildfire across America following its success in India, S.S. Rajamouli’s action spectacular demonstrates the power of friendship and anti-colonial violence. It’s far from a perfect film in terms of both storytelling and its ideological aims, but the exhilaration of fighting and dancing alike was undeniable. There was also a novelty to being the only white guy in the crowd on opening weekend, a sensation that has faded as the film developed its genre cult audience. Now, it’s a staple in programming and even part of the internal advertising for Los Angeles non-profit cinema Vidiots, and thus, an Indian film is part of the language of Los Angeles cinephilia.

33. Can’t Get You Out of My Head

Adam Curtis, 2021

In something of a sequel to his Hypernormalization, Adam Curtis turns the clock back to evaluate the present moment. While the US and UK are the national perspectives being taken into consideration, this miniseries focuses on Chinese history in a way that informs the west’s past and present fixations on the east. The subtitle, “An Emotional History of the Modern World”, is apt; this isn’t a documentary about corroborating historical trends on a factual one-to-one level, it’s about how eccentric major moments created ripples through the gut responses of the west.

32. Slow Machine

Joe DeNardo and Paul Felton, 2020

The first feature by Felton and Denardo is a very funny, grainy psychodrama-thriller, and one of the best debuts of the decade so far. The breezy 70m runtime is filled with a counter-terrorism agent who loves Avant Garde Downtown Theater, a damaged actress hiding in (or from?) a role and a scene, oblique scenarios and raggedy locations.

31. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man

Braden Sitter Sr, 2024

A shoestring budget feature depicting the real story of a man who ran around Toronto flinging buckets of shit and piss on unsuspecting people. A film about schizophrenia induced in equal parts by contemporary life, psychedelic drugs, and to a lesser extent, cinephilia. A film that reminded me of Thomas Pynchon, Harmony Korine, and Tim & Eric, but if I explain why, it will spoil the pleasures therein. I'd be hard-pressed to think of another contemporary work with so many film references that still manages to retain its own individuality. A film with its own world of logic, rules, and inside jokes that seem to extend far beyond its runtime. A film called The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man.

30. Red Rocket

Sean Baker, 2021

The trashiest and best film to date by a filmmaker whose cinephilic vigor and high-energy direction likely leads viewers to think he’s younger than he actually is. Red Rocket uses Texan industrial backdrops to create something like a trailer-trash Red Desert, with the dreams of the sleaze industry and the reality of small town America butting up against each other in ways that are alternately hilarious and hideous.

29. A Different Man

Aaron Schimberg, 2024

One of the most subversive films of 2024, a black comedy about the expectations of disability narratives and the inability of certain people to achieve their full potential. Aaron Schimberg’s direction is subtly artsy with its grainy cinematography and use of narratives within narratives to echo blocking and gestures across multiple characters and scenarios. However, this is a comedic film about the human resources-ification of life and the value of charisma. Contains the funniest exchange of dialogue regarding presidential assassinations that I’ve ever heard, and multiple great Woody Allen references.

28. The Killer

David Fincher, 2023

Fincher takes a victory lap in his return to pure pulp, bringing his digital aesthetic and matured sensibility to the cynical, snarky thrillers that were once his calling card. The Killer himself is played by Fassbender with an emotional detachment and authorial presence that resemble the director from the jump. He communicates through voiceover, to the point where certain scenes feel like an industrial procedural for hitmen, complete with director’s commentary. His mantra makes a big deal about avoiding emotions, due to the vulnerability and lack of success that would ensue if he were to open his heart. He also exclusively listens to The Smiths, with Morrissey being one of the most vulnerable and nakedly emotional rock songwriters of all time. The connection between Moz and the cold-hearted killer is miserablism. In scenes depicting a dilapidated WeWork, an Equinoxa-like, Amazon Basics shipped to Amazon Lockers, PostMates, etc, I was reminded of Fight Club’s infamous IKEA monologue. Fight Club’s narrator starts the film in the anonymous and draining but financially comfortable office-job setup that encapsulated the middle class American life at the time. 24 years later, there is no American middle class, and our narrator fits hand-in-glove into the hyper-individualist Motivation Grindset stereotype that has plagued the gig economy and created some of the most illiterate popular meme pages on instagram.

27. The French Dispatch

Wes Anderson, 2021

A nesting doll of film form that evokes knee-jerk “up his own ass” reactions from viewers unwilling to meet the director on his own terms, The French Dispatch is the most successful Anderson film post-Budapest due to the exploratory nature of its director. He’s throwing everything at the canvas and adding layers upon layers of artifice, but the sadness at the core of Wes Anderson will always be there, no matter how obscured by stylistic flights of fancy.

26. The Holdovers

Alexander Payne, 2023

I found it funny that online audiences welcomed the latest from Alexander Payne as “a new Christmas classic”, given how depressing the material is. For the unindoctrinated, it may appear to be a return to form for the middle-brow auteur who hasn’t pleased anybody since Nebraska a decade prior. However, those people haven’t given proper consideration to what might be his greatest film, Downsizing. While this film doesn’t speak to the current moment like his maligned spec-fi comedy, it uses modern tools (like digital faux-film grain) to create a nostalgic feel, leaning into the pain of remembrance rather than the often sepia-toned beauty. A throwback to the Hal Ashby films of the 1970s that serve as comfort food to New Hollywood fans, with a central performance by Giamatti that reminded the film world of his masterful abilities.

25. Afire

Christian Petzold, 2023

After Phoenix and Transit dealt with the past through genre, Christian Petzold crafted a contemporary and internal drama about impending climate doom and the creative process. A writer being cranky on vacation — we’ve seen it before, but Petzold’s slyly masterful visual style and slow build toward a nearly apocalyptic ending are subtle touches that only a great filmmaker could conjure.

24. Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron, 2022

Cameron adds more poetry to the pulp this time around, with a contemplative middle hour that explores the elements, bringing him closer to a Bozo Malick than a Perverted Spielberg/Lucas. Sure, the narrative is objectively clunky, but who cares about the push and pull of a traditionally successful 3 act story when you can simply spend 192 minutes on Pandora? The tech fetishism is as strong as ever, in the text and the form. The mech suits are skeletal and lean and Edie Falco drinks coffee while in one. There are weird crab robots. The frame rate changes in my screening jarring. Some of the HFR looks absolutely stunning and makes me think it’s the future of genre cinema. Some of it looks like World of Warcraft. The physics of the carnage are also top class here (per usual for JC), using CG to invoke scale of objects vs bodies in this hyper-real cartoon world and also to chop dudes arms off. I did not think the crux of this movie was gonna be a big-ass whale that knows sign language, but I’m so glad it is. The whale steals the show, but those insane dinosaur looking sea horse things they ride blew me away. In the air coasting along the ripples and plunging beneath, a creature with its own scientific and spiritual background like everything else on Pandora.

23. Chime

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024

Kiyoshi Kurosawa premiered three films in 2024, but Chime was the only one officially* released (in the US) during the year. Throwing back to his classic J-Horror stylings, Chime is a 45-minute film about dread and its never-ending nagging at one’s psychology. With his Lynchian sound design from Cure making its return, Chime feels like a straight shot of feel-bad artistry rather than a three-act arc. The violence is brutal, the compositions are masterfully eerie, and the lead performance by Mutsuo Yoshioka builds in its disquiet and discomfort as slowly as the short runtime allows.

22. Beau is Afraid

Ari Aster, 2023

The City and The Suburbs are presented by Aster as everything in contemporary American life that one can be afraid of, even without the personal context of Beau. It’s a satire on the way the wealthy fear the urban landscapes they often tower over, grounded in the real feelings any person would have walking through a city of people dying on the street. The suburbs aren’t much better, even if Nathan Lane wants to make you his new adult son. Prescription drug addiction/abuse, the ghosts of young men who voluntarily died in a war everyone agrees was wrong, and the crumbling of the nuclear family. All of this is clearly played both through Aster’s satirical attitude and Beau’s anxiety. Then, we go inward…. The second half doesn’t quite live up to the first (which I think is genuinely masterful and erased any doubts I had about Aster as a filmmaker), but still very strong, especially on a conceptual level. Aster invokes Roth (a hefty dose of his more fanciful and grotesque tendencies in works like The Breast), Woody Allen’s segment in New York Stories, “Oedipus Wrecks”, and Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life- he’s pulling from the masters of 20th century Jewish comedy. Yes, comedy is a genre just like horror, but it’s a much stronger venue for a straight-ahead statement of purpose, which is why I found myself understanding Ari Aster this time around, compared to my detached indifference toward his first two features. Despite the 3 hour runtime and plenty of indulgences, it’s not the film of a free man. It’s the film of a man who desperately wants to be free.

21. The Card Counter

Paul Schrader, 2021

The follow-up to Paul Schrader’s most critically acclaimed film to date was highly anticipated in filmgoing circles, particularly because the legendary writer/director who had been stuck in the VOD ghetto for a decade was finally getting to make films on his own terms again. Once again returning to the Bressonian genre cinema well, Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish are a bit of an odd couple, but the push and pull of her wants and needs in the gambling world intersecting with his and their differing outlooks on life create a very interesting relationship. The trauma of Oscar Isaac (playing a character named… William Tell..) committing heinous acts while working at Abu Ghraib comes back to haunt him in a way that feels like a somewhat traditional build-up to crime film redemption, but in the hands of Schrader, becomes a self-destructive force. The score is fairly terrible, but I think that the more decisions Schrader makes in bad taste, the more miraculous his high water mark achievements become.

20. France

Bruno Dumont, 2021

Between this film, The French Dispatch, and The Beast, there is a very clear case to be made for Léa Seydoux as the actor or actress of the decade. In Bruno Dumont’s drama, she quite literally embodies the nation as the titular boots-on-the-ground TV reporter. The satire of facile media reportage and the celebrity culture of journalism is very strong, and the balancing act of mockery and pathos is delicately achieved by Dumont and Seydoux. There is a major car accident in the film that is elongated in such a way that I’m not sure if Dumont wants the audience to eventually cave in and laugh, or if he is just drawing out the melodramatic moment to its logical conclusion. Either way, it’s a Lynchian moment of a (blonde) woman involved in the TV industry suffering catastrophic violence that borders on the surreal.

19. The History of the Seattle Mariners

Jon Bois, 2020

For nearly a decade now, Jon Bois’ video projects have been elevated to the level of Cinema by viewers like me, and his nearly four-hour treatise on the Pacific Northwest’s favorite sons is the high watermark. For the uninitiated, Bois’ technique involves the mise-en-scene of digitally rendered 3D charts and graphs, telling stories of athletic achievement (and lack thereof) through the visualization of data alongside newspaper clippings and other archival material. This, like his early effort The Bob Emergency, explores the idea that sports are not about winning or losing. Sometimes they’re not about the games at all. They’re about the characters, and the human narratives that thrill, delight, and ultimately, disappoint. Unlike another baseball story on this list, Bois never quite gets into the feeling of watching or playing a full game (or inning), but instead zooms out far enough to see a game’s evolution, the micro digressions that make up macro movements, and the underrepresented emotional turmoil of simply watching sports for a long time.

18. The Films of Hong Sang-soo (tie)

The Woman Who Ran (2020), Introduction (2021), In Front of Your Face (2021), The Novelist’s Film (2022), Walk Up (2022), In Water (2023), In Our Day (2023)

The Novelist’s Film is the stand-out of Hong’s 2020s output, particularly with its transcendent coda.

18. The Films of Motern Media (tie)

Heard She Got Married (2021), Metal Detector Maniac (2021), Magic Spot (2022), Boston Johnny (2023), Heard She Got Murdered (2023), Local Legends: Bloodbath! (2024)

Metal Detector Maniac

The number 18 entry on my list is technically a tie, technically two filmmakers, and technically an idea, that of prolificity. Hong Sang-soo has been making, on average, 1 and a half movies per year since the turn of the century. Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh’s output for Motern Media may have started off a bit slower than that, but they’re catching up. Both entities (Hong and Motern) make extremely low-budget and extremely personal films, identifiable from any given still frame. There are recurring ensemble cast members, recurring themes, and even a string of legacy-bending sequels from the Motern camp in recent years. Hong’s films play festivals, while Farley and Roxburgh use the internet to distribute their work, with a few groundbreaking theatrical engagements in 2024 spreading the gospel beyond the web.

The 2020s show an aging and maturing Hong Sang-soo, taking over more of the crew responsibilities of his films, that are decreasing in production value year by year to the point where they’re now on the level of Farley and Roxburgh. While still showcasing the dramatic abilities of his muse Kim Min-hee, Hong opts for older characters to bear the dramatic brunt in films like Introduction, In Front of Your Face, and Walk Up. In Water was the greatest departure from regularity for the filmmaker, who lensed the film while losing his eyesight, and an on-set accident turned into a radical stylization as the film is shot out-of-focus, abstracted like an impressionist painting rendered by a cheap digital camera. Although In Water isn’t one of his best films (in fact, possibly among his weakest), the radical visual style showed that Hong always has a surprise up his sleeve.

Motern Media has been trending in the opposite direction, making ever-so-slightly larger scale pictures, and taking a lot more risks while doing so. The pair of Heard She Got Married and Metal Detector Maniac marked a departure from the filmmakers’ usual approach toward genre material, for more downbeat and serious films whose absurd humor is more tastefully deployed than in something like Riverbeast. This was expanded further in the time-travel family drama Magic Spot, which sees Motern Media reach sentimental heights unthinkable to viewers who were rocking out to “The River Mud Shuffle” a few years before. Then, rather than following Magic Spot down a dramatic trail, Farley embodied the titular character in Boston Johnny, which is as silly as anything the outfit has ever produced. Finally, sequels to the decade-old Local Legends and the more recent Heard She Got Married synthesize the new progress that Farley and Roxburgh have made and audience they’ve cultivated with their earlier, goofier aims, undercutting the dramatic sensibility of the original films with horror-comedy thrills.

In a mainstream film landscape becoming more dire with the year, I’m always thankful to have something new by our friends Hong Sang-soo, Kim Min-hee, Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh.

16. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Radu Jude, 2024

A film about a production assistant running errands, that turns from realistic and modern to existential in its protracted driving scenes. The end of the world isn’t some grandiose apocalypse, it’s the state of contemporary capitalism. Using an older Romanian film to cross-cut for comparison, director Radu Jude never loses sight of history despite his hyper-contemporary approach. A film without manners for a world losing its pleasantries.

15. Red Rooms

Pascal Plante, 2024

Dual monitor cinema. Kelly-Anne, a model and online poker hustler, attends the public trial for a viral criminal case, and gets too attached to the story of depravity as the film goes on. We know that true crime fanatics are cosplay detectives, but in this narrative the costuming goes too far in a scene that pushes the film into overdrive, where our protagonist attends a child-murder trial dressed as one of the victims. After the cosplay stunt, she loses her job for being too involved with the case as an outsider and provocateur. She may be obsessed with her own digital privacy, but there is no VPN to protect your actions in public. In 2002, the end of Demonlover proposed the idea that any kid with his dad’s credit card could access real, live snuff footage. Twenty years later, the only difference is that in Pascal Plante’s world, he’d need the Tor browser and a hefty BTC wallet.

14. Eephus

Carson Lund, 2025

I have to open with a disclaimer here: I worked on Eephus as the set decorator and prop master. Even if I didn’t work on the film, I’d be carrying a bias going into the film, as it was made by friends of mine. Cast member and co-writer Nate Fisher in particular has been a cinephilic partner-in-crime of mine for years now, and so when he sent me the kickstarter for a baseball film he wrote with Carson Lund and Mike Basta, I forked over my money. From our first chats, I knew that Nate had the vision to make something great.

Eephus is a film about America’s pastime, America, and the passing of time. Towns and traditions are built over and replaced, people get old, and the sun goes down on everything. The humor in the film is so dense, so many off-handed jokes and slight physical gags, I can see the future where its fans don’t figure out the real quotables until the third or fourth repeat viewing, and then those turns of phrase become lifelong favorites like the arc of so many classic hangout comedies. Carson’s framing and blocking (aided by cinematographer Greg Tango) evokes 50s cinemascope pictures — whether your point of reference is Minnelli melodramas or Anthony Mann westerns — more than the New Hollywood films to which hangout comedies often draw comparisons. The baseball action itself is choreographed in a way that borders balletic, but the physique and motion of adult rec league baseball players keep it more grounded and often funny.

I’ve worked in the art department on plenty of major TV shows and commercials, but this is the only time I’ve been proud of that work.

13. Juror #2

Clint Eastwood, 2024

An unadorned late-period drama from one of the last living masters of filmmaking with a connection to the classical era, Clint Eastwood. A direct morality play about the contradiction of the phrase "In God We Trust" as applied to a broken justice system whose procedures are convoluted beyond reason. Civic duty, fate, responsibility, and guilt are the major themes that are handled deftly by Jonathan Abrams’ script and demonstrated on screen deftly by Nicholas Hoult’s soft expressions and haunted memories, and Toni Collette’s judgmental gaze. Many have compared this to the courtroom thrillers of the 1990s, but I see it closer to the films of the late classic Hollywood era, the late 1950s into the 1960s, as the early masters were entering their periods of late style, such as Fritz Lang with Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In both the Lang and Eastwood films, the visual styles that defined the auteurs at other points of their careers are hard to find, but the thematic recurrences that have accumulated over the decades are pushed to the limit. In a 30-year stretch of making “final” films starting with Unforgiven, it’s fitting that what might end up being Eastwood’s last picture ends with a lack of closure, a sense of unease, a shot-reverse at a character’s front door that could swing the narrative post-credits in a completely different direction.

12. Old

M. Night Shyamalan, 2021

Unlike other filmmakers on this list, I am giving M. Night Shyamalan two slots, rather than combining his films. I’m doing this because, as much as I enjoyed Trap, its relationship to Old is as distinctively minor-major as it gets. Old is a true signature film from an auteur who has been through the ringer in Hollywood, the highs and lows that very few filmmakers experience. It’s a film whose ending sparked plenty of debate between befuddled viewers and true believers alike, whose clunky dad humor works as a rorschach test for viewers’ ability to remove themselves from traditional modes of character identification to grand-scale voyeurism, punctuated by the twisty cameo by the auteur himself. It’s a film about family, because it is an M. Night Shyamalan film, but it’s sadder than usual. Watching the sun go down on Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps, hand-in-hand, ready to age into the next plane of existence, I felt a rupture within myself, torn between laughing along with the 50s b-horror absurdism and giving myself over to the family melodrama. It’s a line that Shyamalan has toed before (Signs, The Sixth Sense), but never more successfully than here.

11. The Empty Man

David Prior, 2020

A genuine cult article, the best horror film of the decade was unceremoniously dumped into theaters by 20th Century amidst a corporate turnover and a lockdown. However, the internet did its work in reclaiming the debut feature by David Prior, who made his bones creating special edition DVD and Blu-Ray features for David Fincher among others. Like Red Rooms, it’s a film that uses online research as the new rabbit hole, following retired cop James Badge Dale into the darkness. Featuring a very brief Stephen Root performance that made me think he should step into the Philip Seymour Hoffman-sized hole in Paul Thomas Anderson’s repertory company. The film is incredibly stylized in its digital anamorphic framing, dingy location work and eerie sound design.

I had the pleasure of interviewing writer/director David Prior.

10. Caught by the Tides

Jia Zhangke, 2025

Caught by the Tides repurposes footage shot around Jia Zhangke’s film productions post-Platform into his most abstract work, which manages to never lose sight of his investigation into China’s changing landscape in the 21st century. Spanning multiple decades, camera formats, and aspect ratios, it roughly takes the shape of a documentary about the life of a filmmaker who never appears on screen or in voice-over, and his muse. Jia doesn’t sulk in the failures of the past for too long, but he is historically minded as ever, and must show us the last twenty years before taking a look at the present moment and what the future can bring. Early in the film, in the academy ratio, consumer-grade footage that appears to be BTS from the production of Unknown Pleasures, we see an empty, run down “Workers Cultural Hall” with an old portrait of Chairman Mao on display. The painting is so faded that in the master shot, the hat on his head looks more like a boyish bowl haircut, suggesting a warped collective memory. The Unknown Pleasures-era footage, much like that film, is heavy on loud music and the visual distortion that nightclub lighting causes on consumer-grade video. The slightly higher-quality footage set around the Three Gorges Dam is from the production of Still Life, and the segment of the film in which the viewer can begin to piece together the abstracted narrative after the disorienting first segment. We see Zhao Tao beginning her search for ex-lover Bin while the landscape changes in front of our eyes, as it did in Still Life. The extremely loose narrative cobbled together from old footage with a bit of new stuff shot during COVID allows for the filmmaker to work in purely symbolic modes, even more than in his previous films.

After the failed lover’s reunion – where dialogue is replaced with silent-style intertitles – the film transports Zhao and the viewer to 2022, to a scope frame in glorious 4K. The world is now bordering on antiseptic (thanks, COVID), and Bin’s search for work leads him to an absurd scenario involving a famous TikToker dancing to a Genghis Khan tribute song. This section of the film also sees yet another stylistic evolution for Jia, who takes advantage of new 360 degree cameras to whip and zoom all over the place in two different scenes, jolting the viewer out of what otherwise appears to be a contemporary cinema-of-quality image. After another failed reunion between the film’s two lovers, Zhao solemnly cries while eating a dumpling in her work locker room, a shot that recalled Paul Walter Hauser as the title role in Richard Jewell crying into his donut. To both of these characters, the modern world is unfair.

9. Days

Tsai Ming-liang, 2020

One of the greatest filmmakers to emerge since the 1990s, every new addition to the Tsai Ming-liang catalogue is a gift. He is one of the embodiments of the slow cinema movement, and his style gets more and more parsed down with each effort. Many critics thought his career had reached its culmination in Stray Dogs’ penultimate shot, in which his longtime muse Lee Kang-sheng stares at a wall for some fifteen minutes. However, Days takes it a step further, and removes dialogue entirely to create a new version of the silent cinema using contemporary film tools. The sound design is sumptuous, the takes are often longer than a mag of real film would allow, and the relationship between Lee and Tsai’s camera takes yet another step forward in its intimacy. Echoing real life (Lee’s chronic neck injury) and perhaps sublimating the artist-muse relationship into an on-screen couple, the film is filled with quiet aching and as personal as Tsai has made.

8. The Films of Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021), Drive My Car (2021), Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

The overall MVP of the young decade, and owner of the hottest streak in contemporary cinema, is Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With 2021’s pair of Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, he cemented what had been teased with the critical success of Asako: Parts 1 & 2, that he is indeed a Major Filmmaker. Drive My Car was a surprisingly popular film, exposing plenty of American viewers to the sensitive dramatist’s pleasures for the first time. Its length and origins in literature (adapted from Hamaguchi, making use of Chekov) may have been the artistic bonafides that certain Western viewers needed to take this seriously as an art film on its own terms, and not just a Best Foreign Film Submission. Oddly enough, I preferred Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a shorter and lighter film that wasn’t any less ambitious than Drive My Car, but seemed to operate as its B-Side. Hamaguchi’s handling of a largely female ensemble in this film was very impressive in its sensitivity, subtlety, and light humor. My favorite of Hamaguchi’s current streak, however, is his latest. Evil Does Not Exist was the subject of my first post on this blog, the contemporary film that accomplishes the rare feat of motivating me to write. His generally lackadaisical pace turns outright glacial at points here, giving himself and the audience over to the beauty of nature and the complications of a community met with an unwanted outside force. I wouldn’t be the first to point out the similarities between the town meeting with the representatives of the glamping development and the cinema of Frederick Wiseman, but it’s Hamaguchi’s use of this mode alongside the slow cinema of the first third and the slow-burn thrills of the third act that create such a uniquely pleasurable and dynamic experience.

Evil Does Not Exist

7. Tár

Todd Field, 2022

The overall acting MVP of the decade may have been Léa Seydoux, but the single great performance of the 2020s so far was Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár. A psychodrama about a conductor engaging in bad behavior, Field’s stylization of the film swings from low-key to audacious from scene to scene, but Blanchett can outperform any kind of long-take magic, as shown in the now-infamous Julliard scene. In a lecture, she dresses down a self-identified “BIPOC pan-gender person” for his inability to appreciate Bach. What could be as thuddingly obvious and reactionary as a viral “Music Teacher OWNS Snowflake Gen Z Student With History” video is instead a phenomenal long-take of anxiety, always building with the length between cuts and punctuated by the student’s nervous ticks. The film is ambiguous enough to allow the viewer to make up their own mind about these hyper-contemporary hot-button issues, but above that, allows the space for Cate Blanchett to chew scenery on a level she’s rarely reached before. Her swaggering, domineering presence is matched with her befuddlement, haunted by her own mistakes toward the end of the film. However, it’s not simply a comeuppance film, because that would be too easy. Instead, to paraphrase what the titular character said about Bach in the aforementioned scene, Todd Field is more interested in the questions than the answers.

6. Crimes of the Future / The Shrouds

David Cronenberg, 2022 / 2025

As firmly in the Late Style phase of his career as anybody else, David Cronenberg’s recent pair of films are among his most personal, and arguably, his best. A few months back, I saw The Shrouds at AFI Fest, and I hope that its theatrical release in the Spring is wide enough for everybody to see it in a theater. Made after the passing of his wife, The Shrouds follows Vincent Cassel as the Cronenberg stand-in, also recently bereaved. He runs a cemetery where you can look at your dead relatives through an in-casket 3D camera, controllable from an iPhone app. Is this the final frontier of surveillance technology, following targets into the afterlife? Contemporary tech (AI assistants and self-driving cars) fit right into doomed spec-fi futurist gadgets. The theme of dualism, before and after loss, as demonstrated by Kruger's double duty (triple if you count her voicing the AI assistant) is a substantial thread throughout the film, but above all else it is about the surreality of grief, subjective to everyone's experiences but always unified by the sense of the unreal. The film ends in an unsettling dream, bringing about the feeling that Cronenberg is still processing all of this, even after composing a film drenched in the sense of finality. No answers, just bodies.

Crimes of the Future is a bit more connected to genre, but only as much as it needs to be for Cronenberg to make an extremely personal film about art and partnership. In a world where underground bod-mod subcultures are infused with people making breakthroughs in surgery, Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux’s partnership is put to the test through vague cloak-and-dagger espionage involving plastic-eaters. The film was produced in Greece for monetary reasons, but the ruins of the past further decayed in the future make for a fitting backdrop to an atmosphere of dread.

5. Close Your Eyes

Victor Erice, 2023

Producing just his third fictional feature in a fifty year career, Spanish master Victor Erice’s return to the cinema suggests an artist who has withdrawn within his own medium and passion for decades, rather than trying to escape it like your standard reclusive artist archetype. In the only review I had read before watching the film, a colleague of mine noted its strong sense of finality, which stuck with me for every minute. It’s a film that allows its strongest scenes to essentially take a bow by fading to black, and earns every curtain call. The first footage we see is from the incomplete film-within-a-film, The Farewell Gaze. A Von Sternberg joke appears to be a throwaway at first, before a Shanghai Gesture and picture of a girl who employs it become a major clue in the meta mystery. Miguel’s film was abandoned under mysterious circumstances, and we see a detective plot of sorts play out in which he searches for his missing actor years later. When he finds his former leading man Julio suffering from amnesia, the film then becomes about a caretaking relationship with meditations on memory and family. This is where the ideas of life beyond cinephilia are embodied at their best; a melding of the real people in our lives with the characters we love or even create, and our narrative justifications for our own failures being informed by the narrative shapes we’ve watched on screen every day for a lifetime. This isn’t The Fablemans — it’s not about a young man falling in love with the movies, it’s about an old man dying for them.

4. The Beast

Bertrand Bonello, 2024

A film about loneliness in three periods: 1910, 2014, and the sludged out future of 2044, as Léa Seydoux travels through her past lives to wipe her emotional slate clean. Filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s ability to fluctuate between arthouse contemplation and genre thrills is apex-level here, particularly with the climax of the 2014 segment, the scene of the year. A four-way split-screen surveillance set-up lays the staging plain, but the cutting creates a time-space rupture with its repeats, glitches, skips and freezes. The arthouse sci-fi has gone full home-invasion horror, and nothing feels out of place because of the near avant-garde cutting. It’s a film that uses the past and the future as a means of diagnosing the present. Nothing else in the 2020s looked so good, felt so bad, and surprised me so consistently with its gallows humor.

3. Memoria

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021

Alongside Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong is a leader of the slow cinema, with his film style embodying the movement. His films have been so particular in their use of his homeland of Thailand, and so I was curious how his first film in the western hemisphere would fare. He enlisted Tilda Swinton to play the Scottish visitor to the Columbian locations. A mysterious sound is heard, and she seeks answers. Swinton looks for the source of the sound in the forest, because it could have been a natural phenomenon. She also visits a recording studio, with the hope of replicating it. The thought process is unnatural, because the narrative is, too. There isn’t much more to it than that, until a genre twist occurs toward the end, with crude digital special effects that wouldn’t be out of place in Twin Peaks: The Return. The style is as meditative as ever for Apichatpong, but filled with a newfound curiosity about the filming locales that is matched by Swinton’s touristic gaze.

2. Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021

The latest and lightest in PTA’s string of masterful two-handers, a film about how perplexing the prospects of love and work are when you’re young. Anderson’s return to anamorphic widescreen framing and the San Fernando Valley was enough to lock in a top 10 spot sight unseen, returning to the territory of Boogie Nights just a few years earlier and a few miles away. The way that the lead couple, Gary and Alana, move from one chapter of their relationship to the next through the supporting characters that they use and are used by, all the while using one another, is no small feat of writing. The humor is goofy and juvenile, and the emotions are high-strung and all over the place. I’d have to do an official tally, but this might have the most needle drops of any Anderson film, and boy, do they pack a punch. I don’t even like The Doors, but “Peace Frog” being deployed over one of Gary and Alana’s many hustles was an invigorating piece of montage, reminiscent of the best chunks of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. However, more than his early ensemble films, this has such a deeply felt sense of character, with these two dynamic performances balancing out nearly every facet of young life, every single scene finding a way to show the disparity of power, love, and admiration between the two without straining. It’s a film with a slightly ugly undercurrent about capitalism and self-sufficiency in America, but more than enough romanticism and hilarious moments to never leave the realm of the feel-good.

1. City Hall

Frederick Wiseman, 2020

Fred Wiseman has been busy in the 2020s, following up City Hall with Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros and Un couple, the latter being a streak-breaking fictional narrative film, presented as one monologue. His studies of western institutions have poked and prodded into how people within these spaces function for nearly half a century. What unassuming viewers may think is a fly-on-the-wall perspective always produces critique through a combination of montage and observation, and City Hall might be the best of these films that I’ve seen. His towering four-hour study of Boston in late 2018 and early 2019 shows every facet of the city and how it operates, as he did previously in films like In Jackson Heights. However, this film is unique in its use of Mayor Marty Walsh, who was misidentified as something of a protagonist by some critics, when in fact, he is more of a Master of Ceremonies — a showman and a fool. Wiseman’s juxtaposition of Walsh’s speeches with the reality of situations that he describes is stunning and biting. Despite the ability of the viewer to laugh at Walsh’s half-measures and brazenly superficial politicking, the film also carries a sense of resigned compromise. Walsh, both to his aides and public crowds, bemoans the Trump administration, and Wiseman even called it an Anti-Trump film, saying that “The mayor and the people who work for him believe in democratic norms. They represent everything Donald Trump doesn't stand for." Wiseman’s critiques of American institutions often place his films in critical spheres that are left of the Democratic party line, so to some viewers, this dutiful sense of compromise in the face of a psychotic right-wing administration plays more like tragedy than resilience and resistance. It’s the last true document of how an American city operated before COVID, and feels sacred for that reason alongside its place as a capstone achievement in a filmography full of masterpieces.