Only 10 Movies From the 2020s Are Actual Masterpieces
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
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We're only just over halfway through, and the 2020s have already been an eventful decade for cinema. The pandemic brought the theatrical industry to its knees and streaming services became more dominant than ever, yet great filmmakers continued to push the medium in bold new directions.
Today, after a few years of uncertainty, cinema is thriving more than ever on both the big and small screens. The result has been a stellar collection of modern classics, from intimate dramas about memory and grief to enormous and ambitious historical epics. Each of these movies has earned the label of "masterpiece," and time can only be kinder to their already growing reputation.
'The Father' (2020)
"I feel as if I'm losing all my leaves." This psychological drama is one of the most powerful depictions of dementia ever put to screen. An Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins delivers one of his finest performances (which is truly saying something) as the elderly Anthony, whose mind is slowly slipping away from him. The audience is placed inside his disorientation: we watch as Anthony's apartment subtly changes around him, characters inexplicably appear with different faces, and seemingly settled facts become unreliable.
Time loops back on itself, conversations repeat with slight variations, clever editing hammering the stylistic approach home. The directorial choices are visionary across the board. For instance, to replicate the confusion of face blindness and memory gaps, the film swaps actors without warning. Masterclass performances from all involved, including Olivia Colman and Rufus Sewell, do the rest of the heavy lifting.
'The Souvenir Part II' (2021)
"Anthony was a junkie." This is the finest film by director Joanna Hogg, a master of restrained dramas. The Souvenir Part II is the rare sequel that not only expands on its predecessor but fundamentally changes how viewers understand it. Following Anthony's (Tom Burke) death at the end of the first movie, it sees Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) returning to film school and attempting to process a relationship that she increasingly realizes she never completely understood. Her grief gradually becomes inseparable from her development as an artist.
Rather than being dry or dour, the story that follows is funny, awkward, painfully intimate, and remarkably perceptive about the creative process. Subtle writing, strong performances, and three-dimensional characters are at a premium here. The Souvenir Part II is deeply autobiographical, too, with Hogg drawing on some of her experiences to create one of the decade's most poignant cinematic self-portraits.
'Sentimental Value' (2025)
"Why didn't our childhood ruin you?" Sentimental Value is the latest masterpiece from The Worst Person in the World's Joachim Trier, reuniting the director with star Renate Reinsve. Here, she plays Nora, a successful stage actress who is close to her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter-Lilleås) but estranged from their father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), an acclaimed Ingmar Bergman-type filmmaker. It's a rich family drama, a layered story about parents and children, sisters, artists, inherited trauma, and the messy ways people attempt to communicate.
Instead of sticking to a linear narrative, Trier structures the 2-hour-and-14-minute runtime like a multi-perspective novel divided into distinct chapters. Even one great character study would have been impressive, but here he presents several. He's assisted by a superb, committed cast that also includes Elle Fanning. Each of the four main players complements the others perfectly, making Sentimental Value way more than the sum of its parts.
'Aftersun' (2022)
"I think it's nice that we share the same sky." Charlotte Wells' astonishing, semi-autobiographical feature debut follows 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a Turkish holiday with her young father Calum (Paul Mescal). Their vacation initially appears almost mundane, consisting of swimming, meals, excursions, jokes, arguments, and shaky camcorder footage. Beneath that ordinary surface, however, something is terribly wrong. The adult Sophie is effectively reconstructing a memory, attempting to understand a father whom she loved but could never fully know.
This dual perspective infuses everyday, happy vacation moments with an overwhelming, retroactive sense of dread and heartbreak. In the process, Wells demonstrates a remarkable capacity to convey inner experiences cinematically. Her direction here is at times almost impressionistic. Mescal and Corio deserve praise too: the former is brilliantly restrained, while the latter turns in the greatest performance by a child actor in years.
'Drive My Car' (2021)
"We must keep on living." Based on the fantastic Haruki Murakami short story, Drive My Car introduces us to theater director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), reeling from the sudden death of his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima). He's traveling to Hiroshima for a production of Uncle Vanya, and festival rules require him to accept a chauffeur, Misaki (Tōko Miura). Throughout their journeys, the initially distant pair gradually develop an unusual intimacy.
Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi doesn't rush his characters (the film is three hours long), instead allowing scenes to breathe and conversations to unfold in real-time. It's a slow-burn, but when the emotional dam finally breaks, the payoff feels earned, and all the more powerful for it. The story's weight and complexity sneaks up on you, making for a quiet, introspective, memorable statement on the limits of knowing another person.
'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023)
"Can you find the wolves in this picture?" With Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese turns the murders of wealthy Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma into something stranger and more unsettling than a conventional historical drama. Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his most unusual performances here as Ernest Burkhart, a weak, greedy man who somehow appears capable of loving Mollie (Lily Gladstone) even while participating in the conspiracy destroying her Osage family, all of it orchestrated by his uncle, the charismatic, diabolical William Hale (Robert De Niro, at the top of his game).
The film has the scale and aesthetic of a Western epic, yet it fundamentally dismantles a lot of American mythology. In the end, Killers of the Flower Moon is simultaneously a revisionist Western, a gangster movie, a love story poisoned by betrayal, and a reckoning with a country's violent history.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?
Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don't just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What's yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film's ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what's even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it's ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn't want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it's about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it's about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn't be possible. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
'Asteroid City' (2023)
"You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." Yet another pastel gem from Wes Anderson. Asteroid City operates on several levels simultaneously: a TV broadcast documenting the creation of a stage play called Asteroid City, as well as the play itself, a sprawling ensemble piece set in a retro-futuristic version of the American Southwest in the 1950s. The cast is fittingly massive and studded with stars, including Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman, Tom Hanks, and many more.
At first glance, Asteroid City appears to contain everything people imitate when parodying a Wes Anderson movie: immaculate compositions, deadpan performances, stylized dialogue, eccentric children, elaborately constructed sets, and more. Yet underneath that unmistakable style lies one of the director's saddest and most searching stories. Really, Asteroid City is about people attempting to understand experiences for which no satisfying explanation exists.
'One Battle After Another' (2025)
"What time is it?" Paul Thomas Anderson teamed up with Leonardo DiCaprio for this banger. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, One Battle After Another follows former revolutionary Bob Ferguson as the consequences of his radical past return years later, placing his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) in danger. Leo is tremendously funny as Bob, while an Oscar-winning Sean Penn turns Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw into a grotesque embodiment of authoritarian obsession.
The film is ambitious and symphonic, marshaling an array of tones into a cohesive whole: political thriller, black comedy, action movie, and family drama. At the same time, it's a portrait of a country whose ideological conflicts have become simultaneously frightening and absurd. That message proved divisive, with the movie quickly being dragged into the culture wars, yet none of that ever overshadows its heart: the bond between father and daughter.
'Oppenheimer' (2023)
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Although The Odyssey is grander in terms of visual bravura and production sweep, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan's greatest achievement in terms of themes and character. Cillian Murphy delivers an amazing lead performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, presenting him as brilliant, arrogant, charismatic, self-destructive, and increasingly haunted by the consequences of his achievement. He becomes a great stand-in for humanity as a whole and our uneasy relationship with our most dangerous creations.
Nolan's restless editing transforms scientific discovery and political maneuvering into something resembling a thriller, while Ludwig Göransson's score helps maintain an almost relentless sense of momentum. We get temporal trickery, pioneering visual effects, phenomenal sound design, and a chilling message. Oppenheimer frames the creation of the atom bomb not as a historical event that ended a war, but as the beginning of a chain reaction that still threatens the world today.
'The Zone of Interest' (2023)
"The life we enjoy is very much worth the sacrifice." There have been plenty of Holocaust films over the decade, yet Jonathan Glazer still found something new and urgent to say with The Zone of Interest. It focuses on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family as they pursue an almost idyllic domestic existence in a house immediately beside the concentration camp. The children play, the adults worry about mundane matters, and beyond the wall, mass murder continues.
Glazer never shows that violence directly; instead, it exists primarily through sound: gunshots, screams, machinery, trains, and an ominous industrial rumble that becomes part of the family's everyday environment. The result is a powerful portrait of the banality of evil. By stripping away the cinematic tropes of mustache-twirling villainy, The Zone of Interest exposes a far more terrifying reality: how easily ordinary human beings can compartmentalize atrocity.
The Zone of Interest
8 10
- Release Date
- December 15, 2023
- Cast
- Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrensmeier, Lilli Falk, Anastazja Drobniak, Cecylia Pekala, Kalman Wilson, Maximilian Beck, Stephanie Petrowitz, Benjamin Utzerath, Thomas Neumann, Klaudiusz Kaufmann, Marie Rosa Tietjen, Jakub Sierenberg, Marek Łukasik, Shenja Lacher, Imogen Kogge, Christine Schröder, Ralph Herforth, Daniel Holzberg, Rainer Haustein, Wolfgang Lampl, Freya Kreutzkam, Leo Meier, Sascha Maaz, Ralf Zillmann
- Runtime
- 105 minutes
- Director
- Jonathan Glazer
- Writers
- Jonathan Glazer
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