The ten best films of the 2020s, so far

A very Eurocentric listicle

I’m sure we can all agree that the worst film of the 2020s so far is, of course, the diabolically crap Poor Things. But what’s the best? (No spoilers.)

10. The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers)

Yeah, it’s a boy film. No, I don’t care. The sheer fucking rippling muscle on Alexander Skarsgård as he crushes yet another fur-wrapped Muscovite into the stinking mud of the village he and his fellow wolf-berserkers are pillaging is too much of a distraction for me to listen to the complaints of the whiny New Yorkers who think this Viking film was a bit, you know, fashy. In fact, this film is two and a quarter hours long, based the same inspiration as Hamlet – eat your heart out, Maggie O’Farrell – and at no point does it give you even 30 seconds to really breathe, let alone think. Instead, it’s all Willem Dafoe barking and casting spells and burning sage; it’s a Valkyrie screaming into the night as two naked men hack each other to pieces in the bowl of an Icelandic volcano; it’s the skinniest blond child you’ve ever seen swearing vengeance on the dark-browed uncle who slew his father and stole his jarldom. I will avenge you father! I will save you mother! I will kill you Fjölnir! It’s sick. Boy film.

9. The Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher)

For those yet to see it, the Italian-language La chimera¹ follows a group of lackadaisical yet avaricious grave robbers in 1980s Italy, who rely on a jaded Englishman named Arthur to dowse his way to the Etruscan tombs they plunder, before reselling their grave goods on the black market. It is Josh O’Connor², as Arthur, who propels this movie from the sort of pleasant Euro-film periodically popular among London’s middle classes to a genuinely moving and darkly hilarious ghost story, his quiet irritation with his fellow thieves always underlying his quest to find a long-gone lover who may or may not be this side of the (literal) underworld. Imagine a more chthonic version of a Paolo Sorrentino film and you’re halfway there. Italo-pop, giallo, the anni di piombo, and the utter corrugated-iron griminess and un-chic of mafia Italy – all are paid tribute to, and the result is wonderful.

8. All of Us Strangers (dir. Andrew Haigh)

I’ll be honest: I didn’t clock the twist in All of Us Strangers until so late as for it to be embarrassing.³ I think I was probably too preoccupied trying not to tear up at Andrew Scott’s plaintive, understated performance as screenwriter Adam, a single gay man who returns to visit his parents at his childhood home, having not seen them for decades. A worthy challender to Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together as the best queer film I’ve ever seen, All of Us Strangers is also so much more than that label reduces it to: a time capsule encompassing 1970s suburban London, a ghost story, even something approaching a psychological noir. Further credit to Paul Mescal, too, who plays Adam’s sole neighbour in an otherwise empty block of new-build flats, and his eventual lover, gradually and sensitively bringing Adam out of his shell, and encouraging him to reconnect with his parents – whatever form that may take.

7. Tár (dir. Todd Field)

If All of Us Strangers is a film about being haunted by your past, then Tár is all about being haunted by the present. Here, Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, an imperious, take-no-prisoners maestro of an orchestra conductor, stands at the cusp of achieving a lifetime’s ambition: to conduct and record all of Mahler’s symphonies with an orchestra implied to be the Berlin Philharmonic. Even as she does, she imperils her induction into the canon of transcendent conductors – alongside Bernstein, von Karajan et al – through her inability to comprehend why others around her do not view the world as she does. Tár is an art monster; she has little time for those who stand in the way of her (unquestionable, per the film) greatness, and when she sees something she wants, such as an attractive young cellist in her orchestra, she takes it. We all know people like this, and they fascinate us even as they might revile us. Director Todd Field is smart enough never to tip too far in either direction, stringing (ha ha) your sympathy along for this mad, brilliant, awful woman for a pitch-perfect two hours and 40 minutes.

6. The Eight Mountains (dir. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch)

Despite the fact that male roles reign supreme in Hollywood and many, many films still fail the Bechdel Test, there’s a surprising dearth of good films about male friendships (real friendships; don’t tell me that the Fast and Furious movies or John Wick are the benchmark for any sort of meaningful platonic relationships between guys). Happily, Le otto montagne – The Eight Mountains in English – is an antidote to that, following the 30-year friendship between two men, Bruno and Pietro, after a series of childhood summers spent together in Bruno’s sequestered Alpine village beginning in 1984. Turinese, middle-class Pietro is initially fascinated by – and perhaps jealous of – the more rugged and rustic Bruno’s bravery and strength up in the mountains. Years later, when Pietro’s father dies and leaves him a piece of land near the village, the two decide to build a log cabin. As the men grow up and the pressures of adulthood bring them onto more equal footing – it becomes clear to Pietro, if not Bruno, that one can’t just hide from one’s obligations up in the mountains forever – their friendship deepens even as their respective disappointments with middle age do, too.

Shot in an old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio, the film itself feels somehow rustic, and directing (and life) partners van Groeningen and Vandermeesch spend a considerable chunk of their 147-minute runtime making the most of the valleys and meadows of the Italian Alps that form the backdrop to Pietro and Bruno’s lives. The result is a slow but hypnotic film in which, if you listen carefully, you can hear the mountains growing. One that will make you want to take up your boots and walking sticks and head for the hills by the time the credits roll.

5. Civil War (dir. Alex Garland)

It’s not going to happen. Americans are too old, too unfit, too sclerotic to carry out a shooting war against each other in the manner depicted in Alex Garland’s Civil War. The best they will likely manage is something resembling the low-level sectarian civil war of attrition that we had here in the UK from 1969-1998. But did the film leave some extremely potent images on our retinas, despite that? You bet.

The complaints about the lack of context and exposition to Civil War’s American conflict were utterly stupid. If there had been any context – if you knew which side was “Trump” and which was “Biden” – it would have lost all its power, like a magician revealing his tricks. Instead, this was a tight-frame character study about the grating addiction that is war photography – closer to The Hurt Locker than Gone With The Wind or Cold Mountain. I overheard a journalist I know describe it as “a journalism film disguised as a war film”, which I think was accurate: every character was a journo you knew in real life, from Wagner Moura’s jaded writer (you could just picture him penning languid profiles for Rolling Stone before the war broke out) and Cailee Spaeny’s bright-eyed greenhorn to Stephen McKinley Henderson’s veteran braces-wearing New York Times correspondent, and Kirsten Dunst’s shellshocked, empty husk of a decorated photojournalist.

And, of course, there was that scene with Jesse Plemons. Those red glasses still give me nightmares.

4. How to Have Sex (dir. Molly Manning Walker)

Anyone who’s ever been a teenager will recognise the heightened anticipation with which the three 16-year-old girls in How To Have Sex fly to Malia for what they think will be the post-GCSE holiday of their lives. What follows is a bacchanalian three nights of tequila shots, neon face paint and fishbowls, as well as disappointment, exhaustion, and fraying tempers after the girls befriend their apartment-complex neighbours and navigate the hypersexual atmosphere that pervades the Med’s party towns.

At the heart of this rite-of-passage masterpiece is Mia McKenna-Bruce’s Tara, who hides a lack of sexual experience (at least, relative to her two friends) behind a studied extroversion and a willingness to always take one more shot. The baby-faced McKenna-Bruce was 24 when the film was shot on location back in 2021, but she is an utterly believable teenager; Tara is as empathetic – and indeed lonely – in the chaos of a boisterous pre-drinks as she is in the quiet daytime heat of a hangover. By the end of the film, you just want to give her a hug and tell her to drink some water.

3. Another Round (dir. Thomas Vinterberg)

You know that thing where you have two pints, or perhaps three-ish glasses of wine, and the world suddenly aligns and clarity of thought descends like a mist of cool water upon your usually fogged and overheated hypothalamus? Turns out there’s a real pseudo-scientific theory about that, and it has been posited that a blood alcohol level of 0.05% is the optimum point of tipsiness for human creativity, confidence and eloquence.⁴ Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (which is called Druk, or “binge drinking”, in Danish) follows four sad-sack gymnasium teachers who take this concept to its logical end point, which is to try to remain very mildly drunk at all times as part of an experiment to see if their lives improve. And they do improve. Initially.

Vinterberg’s films are always equal parts thoughtful and anarchic, and his long-time collaborator Mads Mikkelsen is excellent as usual as Martin, a timid history teacher whose career and marriage are both stalling until he starts swigging vodka in the school toilets. There’s also something peculiarly Danish about this film, from the admirably egalitarian and frank relationships between the feckless teachers and their pupils, to the preoccupation and cultural acceptance around heavy drinking in public (if you’ve ever been on a Danish train, those guys put it away, believe me). An American remake with Leonardo DiCaprio is on the cards, apparently, but this film could never believably take place in the States. I have no idea how it will recapture what made Druk special in the first place.

2. Red Rocket (dir. Sean Baker)

A while back, someone posed the question on Twitter: which mainstream filmmakers working in America could genuinely be considered leftists, rather than liberals, or politically centre-left. Other than the avowed communist Boots Riley, it’s possible that Sean Baker, director of Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket and Anora is, realistically, probably the only other answer.

Like all Baker’s projects, Red Rocket deals with the permanent American underclass, in this case embodied by a guy called Mikey. Mikey is a washed-up male porn star who moves back to Texas to live with his ex-wife in a clapboard shack in the shadow of a giant chemical plant. Despite resolving to get a job and turn his life around, he soon starts selling weed in the car park of a local doughnut shop, where he becomes smitten by a 17-year-old girl called Strawberry. Posing as a successful producer, he plans to take her with him back to LA and turn her into the world’s most successful porn star.

Red Rocket is therefore a sort of post-industrial Lolita, a Chinese thumb trap of a film where you think can justify Mikey’s behaviour because he’s forced to be like that by society: he has to use the cute, sexually precocious Strawberry as his ticket out of shithole Texas. It’s the American Dream, right? Except, of course, you can’t justify it, because Mikey is grooming a teenager into sex work, and that’s abhorrent. Except, you can, because sex work is legitimate work if undertaken consensually and over the age of 18, right? …Right?

Mikey is the sort of character that Baker is perfect at bringing to life in scripts and on screen: charismatic, hilarious, hopeless and insufferable (the film Zola, inspired by a viral Twitter thread and released a year earlier, shares some of its white-trash DNA with Red Rocket, and so does the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time). Baker knows these people are self-destructive, but doesn’t quite go so far as to blame them, letting their mistakes play out on screen and leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions.

Red Rocket is also very, very funny: without spoiling it, there’s an – I use this word deliberately and carefully – iconic scene of full-frontal male nudity set to *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” which had the audience in uproar when I saw it in the cinema. And the film is all the better for the winking fact that Simon Rex, who plays Mikey, shot a couple of male porn films before his career took off, giving the whole project a slightly metatextual aspect. Rex was in a few films including Scary Movie 3, 4 & 5 in the early 2000s, before experiencing a lull in his career as he chose to pursue rapping instead of acting; he was living in a studio flat made out of two shipping containers when he was sent the script by Baker. Like Mikey, Rex was looking for a project that would get him back on track, and back in the limelight. In Red Rocket, he found it.

1. The Worst Person in the World (dir. Joachim Trier)

I’m not generally a big fan of the first person in film reviews, so forgive me in advance. I saw The Worst Person in The World shortly after turning 28, the same age as Julie, the film’s aimless protagonist, who drifts through Oslo going from job to job and relationship to relationship, and it left an indelible sense of… not quite weltschmerz, but more of a sense of wistfulness. It had a relatability that I haven’t seen in a film before or since, really, as to how it feels when the options of your life to start closing off a little, and the fear that you’re getting it wrong, somehow, begins to mount. Does that say more about me than about the film? Perhaps, but now, at 30 – roughly the age that Julie is at the end of TWPITW – I relate to how Julie feels by the film’s conclusion. I’m not going to elaborate too far here, because it’s a movie everyone should watch without knowing what happens, but things change for her, as they do for everyone, in ways both good and bad (spoiler: she’s not the worst person in the world, actually).

This is a film whose plot is more about relationships than events. Stuff happens, but it’s secondary to how people feel, and any film where nothing hugely dramatic takes place naturally relies on its leads to carry the human conflict of each scene. Here, they do so with aplomb. Renate Reinsve, who plays Julie, has this indomitable sadness to her, hidden behind a devil-may-care façade of flirtatious cheek that, to put it bluntly, only someone that pretty can really get away with. Reinsve was deservedly the breakout star of the film, but Anders Danielsen Lie, as Aksel, one of two men Julie dates over the course of the movie, is just as good. If Julie is uncertain about her ambitions, flitting from job to job like a mayfly and working one week in a book shop before deciding to take up photography the next, then the slightly older Aksel knows his mind, and his art (he is a satirical cartoonist in the Charlie Hebdo vein, and abrasively debates free speech on Norwegian radio when accused of insensitivity). But the events of the film snatch success away from him with a brutality that is shockingly realistic, and – again, no spoilers – his reaction is articulate, charismatic, and bitter all at once.

Romantic without being saccharine, knowing without being cynical, The Worst Person In The World acknowledges that you can be one of the most privileged people on the face of the planet – in your health, in your education, in your place of birth, in your youth and beauty and magnetism – and still feel without purpose, and in fact that perhaps you’re even more likely to feel without purpose. And it carries this all off with panache, remaining supremely watchable while switching effortlessly between naturalism and high stylisation; for a film with extremely heavy themes, it’s never a heavy watch. Presented in a cinematic wrapper that could double as a Visit Oslo advert – you can almost smell the fjord-borne freshness of the summer air – it’s as beautiful as it is moving. The Worst Person in the World is the best film of the 2020s, so far.

Honourable mentions go to Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which never really stood a chance of breaking into the top ten but was really, really funny and avoided the most dangerous traps of IP filmmaking, and to Challengers, on which I probably overcorrected for recency bias and so didn’t include. I also really liked Top Gun: Maverick, Anatomy of a Fall and Dune: Part One.

This post was inspired by a short poll I took part in run by Kevin Bertolero on Twitter. In all, 683 people voted, nominating 732 films. Their combined top ten was as follows:

1.     Killers of the Flower Moon

2.     Tár

3.     Oppenheimer

4.     Drive My Car

5.     Nope

6.     The Zone of Interest

7.     The Fabelmans

8.     Aftersun

9.     Challengers

10.  Memoria

You can see the full results here, if you’d like.

1. It wasn’t the inspiration for the name of this newsletter, so stop asking – that was just a coincidence. (But it is a cool name, isn’t it?)

2. He of recent Challengers fame, though I’ve personally been holding stock since seeing him in Harry Wootliff’s Only You opposite Laia Costa way back in 2018.

3. The trailer, which I didn’t see before watching the film, signposts it a lot more clearly…

4. Posited, admittedly, by a convicted fraud, which somehow feels appropriate.