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A recent thread on X went looking for the essential movies of the 2020s, so far. It’s a good question, and it doesn’t feel weird to start looking now, given that this decade—which kicked off with Covid quarantines and progressed into multiple global wars and one of the most stressful Presidential campaigns pretty much ever—has been going for about 30 years at this point. So hey! Let’s drown our high cortisol levels in some movie snacks, and take a look at some of the key movies of the almost half-decade. Along the way, we might even uncover some themes that speak to our troubled, and generally annoying, times.
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
If the title doesn’t sum up the decade so far, I’m not sure what would. One of the darkest satires of recent memory, Ruben Östlund’s surprising Oscar frontrunner feels like at least three movies in one, with narratives that take sharp right turns at unexpected moments, taking potshots at greed and skewering capitalism all the way—with a memorable central section onboard a luxury cruise ship divided between the haves (passengers) and have-nots (the crew) that climaxes in literal explosions of vomit and shit. Brilliant and hilarious, if you’ve got the stomach for it.
Where to stream: Hulu, digital rental
The People’s Joker (2022)
Vera Drew’s highly autobiographical film feels like at least two miracles at once: first, that the painstakingly crafted low-budget satire ever got made, and second, that it was ever released. Drew draws from clear love of DC Comics characters to tell her own story, after a fashion, using the Batman villain as a lens. In a dystopian world in which the Bat is a judgmental Big Brother, it’s the weirdos, queerdos, and freaks he’s monitoring who are the real heroes. It’s very weird, intensely personal and, maybe best of all, it feels like a vat of acid tossed in the face of our world of corporate IP cinema. Maria Bamford, Tim Heidecker, Scott Ackerman, and Bob Odenkirk also star.
Where to stream: digital rental
RRR (2022)
Unlike many an American blockbuster, there is not one single dull moment in this brisk Tollywood epic. A historical drama that touches on the national trauma brought on by the British Raj, the movie depicts two real-life revolutionaries who died as martyrs to the cause of independence—none of which sounds like it would be a ton of fun, and yet! Filled with brilliantly choreographed action sequences that put Marvel to shame as well as cheer worthy musical numbers, RRR moves nimbly between tones, the context making everything all the more satisfying. Find me a more thrilling moment in the movies this decade than the bit where a truck full of wild animals is forcefully unleashed upon a sedate gathering at a British politician’s estate.
Where to stream: Netflix
Oppenheimer (2023)
Barbie won the zeitgeist, but Oppenheimer won the awards. It’s OK! They’re very different, and Barbenheimer weekend taught us that it doesn’t always have to be a competition. This Best Picture Oscar winner follows brilliant, conflicted Cillian Murphy as the titular theoretical physicist, who helped America develop the world’s first nuclear weapons during World War II. Amid a talky screenplay peppered with occasional bravura effects sequences, writer/director Christopher Nolan never loses sight of his complicated lead, nor of the muddy, ugly morality behind Oppenheimer’s work. Nolan’s real achievement here is in treating the scientific, personal, and political aspects of the story with nearly equal rigor, a reminder that change never happens in a vacuum.
Where to stream: Prime Video
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
On a sweaty, boozy, bluesy afternoon in the Chicago of 1927, the great Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) shows up at the studio to make a new album. She’s been contracted by white promoters, and she’s fully aware that their deference to her is entirely dependent on her bankability as a singer. She does not give a shit. Over the course of the session, tensions rise and conflicts erupt, particularly between Ma Rainey and Chadwick Boseman’s Levee Green. Davis is so good that she’s practically channeling the blues legend, while Chadwick Boseman is brilliant in his final role.
Where to stream: Netflix
River (2023)
It’s a much smaller movie (in many ways) than just about any on this list, but this Japanese import feels like an essential bit of counter programming for just that reason. At a spa in tiny Kibune, Japan, life moves at a snail’s pace for staff and guests until, paradoxically, a mishap in time finds everyone living in a repeating two-minute time loop. For some, it’s a boon to be able to hang out in the same few moments of time, while others are desperate to move forward. It’s a cute, clever, and frequently very funny movie about the benefits of slowing down in our increasingly chaotic world and looking at life from as many perspectives as possible.
Where to stream: Tubi, digital rental
Robot Dreams (2023)
Who needs dialogue when you have a movie this simple and effective? A shy and lonely dog in New York City finds himself a robot companion, the two becoming utterly inseparable. Until they’re separated. Beautifully animated, the movie is darn cute and frequently very funny, but also isn’t afraid to go deep and a bit dark. Grab a hankie. In an entertainment era that’s so wildly nostalgia-driven, the movie’s message about the inevitability of change is refreshing. Moving forward is hard, sometimes heartbreaking—but so often necessary and worth it.
Where to stream: Apple TV+
Beau Is Afraid (2023)
When this decade is done, Beau Is Afraid will probably still be one of the wildest and most thoroughly polarizing films we’ll have encountered. Ari Aster, director of Hereditary and Midsommar, here brings us either his best or worst film, depending on who you’re talking to (I say best), about Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged schlub with extreme anxiety. A lot that goes on is surreal and psychedelic, but it often feels like a very precise rendering of a world seen through the eyes of someone constantly anxious and afraid. And who the fuck can’t relate to that? Patti LuPone is brilliantly awful in a supporting turn as Beau’s mother.
Where to stream: Paramount+, digital rental
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
This groundbreaking and absurd comedy-drama received the lion’s share of the love at the Oscars by blending a soulful and genuinely moving premise with some of the most wonderfully silly moments you’re likely to find in a major motion picture (show me another Best picture Oscar winner that makes such creative use of a butt plug). This deeply weird and relatively low-budget movie had no business being as successful as it was, with much of the credit going to writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—and to the uniformly great performances from leads Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu, the wonderful Ke Huy Quan, and Michelle Yeoh.
Where to stream: Netflix, digital rental
Candyman (2021)
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman movie plays as both reboot and sequel, introducing elements (and characters) from the original without getting bogged down by any of it. The original had good intentions in its commentary on race in America, but feels deeply compromised in its mission by its very white perspective. Here, in contrast, we get a much deeper dive into the ways in which our culture (and the police) turns marginalized victims into villains, with incredibly inventive and smart visual flourishes. It’s also scary, with some brutal body horror elements! A legacy sequel done right.
Where to stream: Freevee
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
A wildly and impressively kinetic film, Da 5 Bloods is nearly three hours long, but doesn’t feel it in the least. Four veterans (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr.) return to Vietnam in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader (Jonathan Majors), and the gold he helped them hide. Revisiting the Vietnam War film genre with an insistent focus on the (often ignored) experience of Black Americans, Spike Lee brings new relevance to stories from the period by drawing some stark and straight lines between then and now. The performances are uniformly great, including from Chadwick Boseman in one of his final roles.
Where to stream: Netflix
Drive My Car (2021)
Japanese filmmakers are well-represented on this list (and we’re not done yet). It’s simply been a very good decade, so far, for Japanese filmmakers—at least in terms of films that are getting international distribution. The story on which the movie is based, from Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore, IQ84) only runs to around 45 pages, and yet Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s adaptation luxuriates in the material. It’s the story of a widowed theater director who forges a bond with the young woman assigned to drive him to Hiroshima for his latest project. It offers little in the way of incident, and relatively minimal dialogue, though the cinematography the sound design make those silent stretches captivating. Ultimately, it’s a story about the transcendent beauty of human connection, even through all of the pain that keeps us apart. It’s also a particularly timely film given its central theme: It’s OK sometimes to chat with your Lyft driver.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, digital rental
My Octopus Teacher (2020)
For all our technological linkages, it feels like the real story of this decade is about disconnection, whether the divide is political or physical. Filmmaker and naturalist Craig Foster spent a year forming a relationship with a wild common octopus—a creature that, we’re discovering, can be shockingly intelligent in recognizable ways, and utterly alien in so many others. Still, Foster and the octopus become something like good friends, hanging out and playing with each other as Foster is allowed deeper access into her underwater world. The dangers of that world, and the naturally short lifespan of the species, tee up genuinely moving lessons about the deep fragility of life and the joy and value of interaction with nature. It suggests that connection is possible, if we’re willing (and know how to swim).
Where to stream: Netflix
Nimona (2023)
Ballister Boldheart, alongside his boyfriend Ambrosius Goldenloin, is about to be knighted by the queen, and he’d be the first commoner ever to receive the honor. It’s all good, until he’s framed for the queen’s murder and forced to flee, becoming the criminal that the snobs already took him for. Luckily (or not) he’s joined by Nimona, a teenager outcast shunned for her shapeshifting powers. The two work together to clear Ballister’s name, even as Nimona has things to teach Ballister about living authentically and not being so worried about what the haters think. Based on the graphic novel from ND Stevenson, Nimona traveled an incredibly rocky road to the screen, surviving delays, company shutdowns, the pandemic, and pressure from Disney to knock it off with the queer stuff. Luckily, none of that drama made it into the finished product (eventually brought to streaming by Netflix). It’s a heartfelt, joyful, and funny fantasy set in a futuristic world full of medieval trappings.
Where to stream: Netflix
Godzilla Minus One (2023)
If you had told me we’d get an essential Godzilla movie in this decade—well, I would’ve been excited. But also dubious. Yet here we are, with one of the best entries in a very, very long running franchise, but also a movie that stands on its own as a thrilling, and genuinely moving and melancholy adventure. A prequel of sorts to the original 1954 film, this one finds kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) encountering Godzilla multiple times over the years following World War II. That wartime trauma, which harkens back to the original film while mirroring our own turbulent times, lends this one a kaiju-sized emotional weight. Nearly as important: The masterful, Oscar-winning visual effects make Godzilla scary again, and the action sequences have real weight and stakes. Eschewing the more-is-more approach of the American Godzilla series, writer/director Takashi Yamazaki offers up this reminder that Japanese filmmakers really know their monster king.
Where to stream: Netflix, digital rental
Challengers (2024)
Zendaya stars as Tashi, a former tennis pro turned coach who coaxes her husband Josh (Mike Faist) out of a losing streak by getting him to participate in a low-level challenger event. All well and good until he looks across the net to see his old bestie and Tashi’s one-time boyfriend. It’s a tennis movie, sure—and by all accounts an impressively accurate one. I’ll have to take their word for it. But it’s from Call Me By Your Name’s director Luca Guadagnino, bringing us the smart and impressively horny bisexual romantic sports drama we didn’t know we needed. In our all-ages blockbuster era, it’s nice to see sex sneaking back onto the big screen.
Where to stream: MGM+, digital rental
Problemista (2023)
Julio Torres (creator of Los Espookys and Fantasmas) wrote, produced, directed, and stars in this surreal and autobiographical comedy about a toy designer from El Salvador working in the United States under a visa that’s about to expire. What to do but take a desperation job with quirky, volatile artist Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton)? The movie is impressively stylish and very, very weird—but also deeply humane in its bold contention that maybe, just maybe, someone like Torres isn’t a complete monster for believing in his own American dream. RZA, Greta Lee, and Isabella Rossellini also star.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Barbie (2023)
Oppenheimer might have won the Oscars, but Barbie owned the discourse—and the box office, with the pink candy-colored pro-feminist raking in more money than any other movie of 2023. Margot Robbie is perfect as the fish-out-of-water doll stranded in the real world, Ryan Gosling is more than Kenough, and it’s the third triumph in a row from director Greta Gerwig (after Lady Bird and Little Women). The fact that it seems to have inspired development of more movies based on toys rather than on movies that offer messages of personal empowerment and/or place women front and center kinda sucks, but can hardly be blamed on the movie.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Decision to Leave (2022)
The plot here is simple, if elliptical: An insomniac investigating the death of a man in the remote mountains winds up developing obsessive feelings, Vertigo-style, for the deceased’s increasingly mysterious wife—who doesn’t seem all that upset about being a widow. Like most of writer/director Park Chan-wook’s films (including Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and The Handmaiden), this one’s nearly impossible to classify by genre. It alternately feels like a romance, a thriller, and a mystery—or all three at once. The mysterious and gorgeously directed film won Park Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.
Where to stream: Mubi, digital rental
Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
A huge hit on the festival circuit (the line for a showing in my hometown literally reached around the block), Hundreds of Beavers delighted roadshow audiences with its live-action Looney Tunes-esque charms and, naturally, an abundance of beavers. 19th century applejack (that’s a kind of booze) salesman Jean Kayak kicks off a war with said beavers (played by humans in giant, wonderfully absurd costumes) when one of the critters eats through a support beam and destroys his home. What ensues is absolute comic anarchy, with one legitimately hilarious silent film-style gag after another.
Where to stream: digital rental
Dicks: The Musical (2023)
There’s no socially uplifting theme or message here, but you have no idea what you’re in store for if you haven’t seen this genuinely raucous musical about a couple of separated-at-birth twins (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson), both misogynistic jerks, who take to impersonating each other in order to reconcile their long-separated parents (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally). It’s a simple, silly premise—but things quickly get more and more wild. Mom Evelyn’s vagina fell off years ago, newly out dad Harrison keeps a couple of mutant “sewer boys” in a giant birdcage in his apartment, and the brothers get maybe a little closer than brothers should. It’s the most wonderfully, jaw-droppingly weird movie of recent memory. And it co-stars Megan Thee Stallion! Just perfection.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Wonka (2023)
I did not have high expectations for this Chocolate Factory prequel (I couldn’t imagine caring where about Willy Wonka’s origin story), but boy oh boy was I wrong. This is a wonderfully old-school family-friendly musical with modern production values, and feels like a thoroughly refreshing throwback to a less cynical time. It boasts some memorable songs, as well as some genuine (i.e. non-cynical) emotional beats that really land. Wonka’s in the zeitgeist, what with that horrifying Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience, but Timothée Chalamet’s turn as our favorite vaguely threatening chocolatier definitely offers the superior take.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Nope (2022)
Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the sibling caretakers of a rural California horse ranch, scions of a long line of Black ranchers and horse trainers, who find themselves beset by … something? Wildly original, if frequently vexing, Jordan Peele’s latest offers up neither easy answers nor pat interpretations, but the Twilight Zone-esque feel of the film is deeply unsettling and impressively entertaining. It’s the rare Hollywood film in which it’s truly tough to figure out what’s going to happen next.
Where to stream: Starz, digital rental
The Zone of Interest (2023)
The banality of evil is another theme of our era, and Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar winner examines that very thing in the story of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (the always brilliant Sandra Hüller), living ostensibly ordinary lives while being complicit in the extraordinary evil always happening just outside of the frame. It’s very specific in its treatment of the Holocaust and the real-life figures portrayed, but also suggests, more universally, that we all are capable of turning our backs to the horrors we have a hand in, and even benefit from.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)
A fascinating portrait of photographer, artist, and activist Nan Goldin, lauded for work documenting the HIV/AIDS crisis, and then the somewhat more recent opioid epidemic after her own near-death from a fentanyl overdose. At the movie’s center is a moral conflict: Goldin’s tireless work against the Sackler family’s companies, for their roles in relentlessly marketing OxyContin, puts her in a tricky spot when it comes to displaying her work. Having encouraged the arts community to divest from these pharmaceutical giants, she also comes to question the value of displaying her work at museums, many of which are heavily funded by the Sacklers. How much must an uncompromising artist compromise for the greater good? Nan’s experience is very specific, of course, but it also speaks to the increasingly complex nature of right and wrong in a world that seems to offer only choices between lesser evils.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
If Anything Happens I Love You (2020)
A very short (under 15 minutes) film with an epic emotional kick, the movie follows two parents, grieving the death of their daughter in a school shooting, as they find themselves growing apart in the aftermath. The simply, but beautifully, animated Oscar winner finds some hard-earned light in the darkness of grief.
Where to stream: Netflix
The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Writer/director Joachim Trier’s latest is, despite its title and his reputation for disturbing cinema, surprisingly sweet and life-affirming. Renate Reinsve brilliantly plays Julie, a medical student—for a minute—who has absolutely no idea what she wants to do with her life, and a complete fear of commitment to anything and anyone. She’s a messy 20-something, in ways that you’ve seen before in other, lesser movies—but The Worst Person in the World plays those tropes for all their worth, offering up all the joys of cinematic romantic dramas that we’ve seen before while feeling a bit more like real life. No small feat.
Where to stream: Hulu, digital rental
Past Lives (2023)
The always-great Greta Lee plays Nora, whose family emigrated from South Korea to the United States when she was a child. Years later, and then over the course of several years, she reunites with childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), forcing an examination of her life as it is, and as it might have been. Plot-wise, there’s not much more to it than that, but the performances are beautifully rendered, and anyone who’s ever seriously pondered roads not taken will find something to relate to here.
Where to stream: Paramount+, digital rental
Sisu (2022)
A grizzled, broken-looking lone prospector trudges northern Finland during the last days of World War II, hoping to trade in his gold find in town. Some Nazis heading out of the country decide that he’s easy game—but it quickly turns out that they’ve fucked with the wrong guy. The formula here is very much John Wick in the 1940s, but with actual Nazis. Wouldn’t have expected that to be so relevant in modern times, but here we are. Wild, over-the-top violence, but still a ton of fun.
Where to stream: Starz, digital rental
My Father’s Dragon (2022)
Based on Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 children’s novel of the same name, the film follows a boy named Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) and his shopkeeper mother, Dela (Golshifteh Farahani), who leave their tight-knit town in favor of a bigger city—though the promise of better circumstances doesn’t quickly materialize. Elmer’s patience is rewarded, though, when a talking cat invites him to take a beautiful, candy-colored adventure. The movie is from the director of the wonderful The Breadwinner, and Cartoon Saloon, production company behind animated movies like the beautiful Irish folk tale, Wolfwalkers. It’s geared toward young kids, but doesn’t insult the intelligence of its audience.
Where to stream: Netflix
