Best movies of the 2020s

Dune: Part Two▲ Rising

Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides mounts a sandworm mid-desert and the theater erupts—Denis Villeneuve delivering the rare sequel that dwarfs its predecessor in scale and menace. The Feyd-Rautha coliseum sequence, shot in an alien monochrome that turns black-and-white photography into a weapon, alone justifies its place among the decade's essential blockbusters. It proved IMAX spectacle and genuine political tragedy aren't mutually exclusive, turning Paul's messianic rise into a warning rather than a triumph.

Year: 2024Director: Denis VilleneuveIMDb: 8.5/10Oscars: 2

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Oppenheimer▲ Rising

Christopher Nolan stages the Trinity test in near-silence, holding the blast until the sound catches up—a formal gamble that mirrors the film's entire thesis about consequences arriving too late. Cillian Murphy's haunted, hollow-eyed physicist carries three hours of courtroom hearings and moral reckoning into must-see event cinema, proving a talky biopic about bureaucratic guilt could out-gross superhero movies. It reset Hollywood's sense of what audiences would show up for, and swept the Oscars doing it.

Year: 2023Director: Christopher NolanIMDb: 8.3/10Oscars: 7

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The Batman▼ Falling

Matt Reeves reimagines Gotham as a noir crime procedural, with Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne less playboy than grief-soaked recluse scrawling case notes under eyeliner. The Riddler's Zodiac-style domestic terrorism and that Nirvana needle-drop during the Batmobile chase gave the character a grounded menace missing since Nolan, while the flood-lit finale reframed heroism as disaster response rather than punishment. It's the rare superhero film that feels like it belongs to a specific genre lineage instead of a franchise algorithm.

Year: 2022Director: Matt ReevesIMDb: 7.8/10Oscars: 0

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Everything Everywhere All at Once▼ Falling

Michelle Yeoh fights across infinite universes with a fanny pack and googly eyes, and somehow lands on hot dog fingers, a rock with subtitles, and a bagel that swallows meaning itself. The Daniels turned multiverse chaos into a devastatingly sincere story about a mother and daughter failing to understand each other, culminating in the Best Picture sweep that made Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan overnight Oscar legends. No film this decade better argues that maximalist absurdity and raw emotional truth aren't opposites but the same joke.

Year: 2022Director: DanielsIMDb: 7.8/10Oscars: 7

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