The 8 Most Divisive Movies of the 2020s So Far, Ranked
Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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Movies that divide people are kind of great, because even if you're not one of the people who falls on the “Oh, this is quite good” side of any related debate, you'll still have interesting things to talk about. Arguing about divisive movies can be fun, and if it’s not too petty or cruel, it can even be rewarding, owing to the value that comes with being able to see and understand (or even feel) two opposing points of view.
As the following titles hopefully demonstrate, some of the most interesting movies of the 2020s so far have also been quite divisive. In the eyes of this particular writer, these movies range in quality from good to great, but he can usually see why not everyone feels that way. Also, the closer to “love-or-hate” status a movie is, the more likely it is to appear here, so controversial or confounding movies that most people seemed to dislike (like Megalopolis and Joker: Folie à Deux) won’t appear here.
8 'Tenet' (2020)
Tenet is the one Christopher Nolan movie where some people admit it’s all a bit much, or that he Nolan-ed a bit too hard, but it is a cool film and still offers a fair amount of things that are found in his movies that get more praise. He’s played around with time a lot before Tenet, and on a grand scale, too (see Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk), yet this feels like Nolan pushing all that kind of stuff to its absolute limits.
Basically, this is a spy movie where there exists a technology that allows some objects and people to go back in time, rather than forward, and plenty of set pieces in Tenet involve things (or people) on those two timelines interacting, and it’s somehow more mind-bending than that makes it sound. It’s possible to either overthink or under-think Tenet and come away feeling frustrated, but if you can find the precise happy medium between two such extremes, you're likely to get something out of this one.
7 'The Killer' (2023)
2023 was probably the most exciting year for cinema since 2019, because films were being made again post-COVID, but then strikes also happened that year, and then that impacted releases for 2024 and 2025, with 2026 being another comeback year of sorts (at least it feels that way at the time of writing). Anyway, that could be a reason why The Killer goes a bit overshadowed, never really feeling like it got the praise it deserved.
It’s a very slick crime movie with some solid action, at least on the surface, but then digging into it reveals something a little more subversive and darkly funny, albeit in a way some people might not have really caught onto. You could argue the same thing happened with Fight Club, with some people not getting it in 1999, and then some people misreading it in the years following 1999. Not that The Killer is as good or groundbreaking as Fight Club, but it is another well-made and worthwhile David Fincher film, possibly even being worthy of a second look if it kind of came and went for you three years ago.
6 'The Apprentice' (2024)
More than a little controversial, and certainly very challenging at the same time, it’s hard not to look at The Apprentice as nonetheless doing the thing that it set out to do. It’s uncompromising as a look at perhaps the most divisive figure of the 21st century so far, Donald Trump, though he was a household name long before he got into politics, as The Apprentice – which takes place in the 20th century – explores. Call it a real-life origin story, if you want.
Or somewhat real life. There are swings taken here with depicting certain confronting events, and whether you feel like they could've happened or not (or happened in the way depicted) might depend on how you feel about Trump. It was always going to be controversial because it was about him, and then the ways it’s about him… look, this is all putting it as mildly and neutrally as possible, but different people are going to either like or dislike this for very different reasons. Donald Trump is villainized and humanized here (at least to some extent) at the same time, and the unique approach here does ultimately help make The Apprentice a continually intriguing film.
5 'Eddington' (2025)
Released around the mid-point of the 2020s while being explicitly about the early part of that same decade, Eddington feels like a “too soon” kind of film, albeit by design. You can find it incredibly unpleasant to watch while admiring the gutsiness of it all at the same time, because the lockdown era and all the division that came with it still feels pretty recent in the overall scheme of things, and Eddington seeks to throw you right back into all that messiness.
As a very strange Western with a ton of dark comedy that’s so dark it’s honestly not really all that funny a lot of the time (again, it feels intentional), it’s got plenty to offer.
Depending on your experiences in 2020 and some of 2021, you might well get mild PTSD from parts of Eddington, and like with The Apprentice, there are probably a few different reasons why someone could come away from this with a negative view on the movie’s quality. But as a very strange Western with a ton of dark comedy that’s so dark it’s honestly not really all that funny a lot of the time (again, it feels intentional), it’s got plenty to offer, so long as you're mostly ready for a challenging viewing experience.
4 'Digger' (2026)
Ah, good old Digger. This was the movie that inspired this whole ranking, honestly. It’s pretty essential among “big swings that not everyone liked” sort of movies, if that can be labeled as a movement or some sort of weird sub-genre. And a good deal of why this movie’s surprising and divisive comes down to where it goes narratively and thematically, ultimately being a different sort of film than what you might expect going in.
To some extent, it is a dark comedy about trying to prevent the end of the world, and Tom Cruise does get to go big with his central performance in various scenes, though there’s more to it than something like Don’t Look Up, and a more varied performance from Cruise than you might anticipate. That’s all that can be said, and even when Digger is no longer a recent release, that’s all that should be said without a spoiler warning, as people in the future deserve to watch this as unruined as possible (the same can be said about films like The Cabin in the Woods and One Cut of the Dead, with their early and game-changing reveals).
3 'Blonde' (2022)
Blonde was a novel published in 2000, and notable for being one of the bleakest books perhaps ever, so it’s not too surprising that this 2022 film adaptation is also absolutely harrowing. It’s a long film, just as the book was also quite hefty in terms of length, with it painting a fairly abstract portrait of the life of Marilyn Monroe, definitely focusing on the darkest parts of her life while intentionally not being too concerned with historical accuracy.
That approach is the part some critics and viewers found troubling, to say the least, and you can appreciate what Blonde is saying about abuse and exploitation without necessarily liking the fact that it uses a real-life person to do that. But since it’s divisive, not everyone feels that way, and taking this approach while choosing to cover what gets covered is very much eye-opening and startling. The film’s intentions are good, but aspects of the execution ultimately divide.
2 'Saltburn' (2023)
It wouldn’t be right to call Wuthering Heights divisive in the conventional sense, because it felt like that one annoyed more people than it satisfied. There were some things to appreciate, and certain reviews were positive, but few seemed glowing or truly enthusiastic. If you turn to the other two Emerald Fennell movies, both are a little more divisive in the true sense of the word, though with Promising Young Woman, it’s mostly just the ending that splits people a ton, driving a whole lot of conversation.
That leaves Saltburn, and this is comfortably the most uncomfortable and divisive of the three, being some kind of unholy mash-up of Brideshead Revisited, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and like a late 1990s or early 2000s teen comedy if it was given an arthouse spin. Not much is shied away from, and Saltburn is all very sly and even ambiguous about where its intentions and messaging lie, which is either very interesting to think about or very frustrating to feel; one or the other, and you will almost certainly fall on one of those two sides, ultimately.
1 'Babylon' (2022)
Damien Chazelle was on a good streak throughout much of the 2010s, thanks to Whiplash, La La Land, and First Man all coming out within a few years of each other. The last of those wasn’t as successful at the box office, relative to its budget, but those who did see First Man had largely positive things to say about it. Then came the 2020s, and if you're a Babylon fan, then you probably see it as a movie that kept that whole hot streak going, though if you're not Team Babylon, then… well, obviously, you're not going to feel that way. And you might even feel like it was something that derailed Chazelle’s whole directing career.
This movie’s huge and purposefully chaotic, looking at Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s, showcasing what movies mean to people and also how terrible the film industry was (and maybe still is) toward those who work to make those movies that people love. Babylon celebrates and condemns cinema, much as Whiplash showed catharsis and tragedy with the pursuit of greatness. People got it when it came to Whiplash and its more personal focus, yet not many people seemed to wrap their heads around the fact that Babylon was doing the same thing, but for a whole industry. In time, hopefully they’ll come around, and ideally – also in time – this film will be widely loved, rather than merely loved by a very devoted group of cult followers.
Babylon
8 10
- Release Date
- December 23, 2022
- Runtime
- 189minutes
- Director
- Damien Chazelle
- Writers
- Damien Chazelle
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