We’re seven years into the 2020s, and The Atlantic’s David Sims has picked "The Decade's 10 Most Defining Movies (So Far)," a snapshot of how movies look, feel and get made right now.
A few readers sent me this URL today, and the reaction was mostly confusion. "A very weird list,” one wrote. Many of these are not “defining” but rather a display of taste.
This has indeed been a strange decade for cinema so far, one marred by a pandemic, production shutdowns, endless release delays and big studios fearing creative risk (save for Abdy and De Luca, who went rogue and were fired for it). It didn’t help that the 2023 strikes happened as well, starting the vicious cycle all over again, and further disrupting production.
Sims gets his main ones out of the way: "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer," which opened the same July 2023 weekend in the middle of the strikes. He calls it the decade's defining cultural event, and argues that Hollywood has spent every year since trying to bottle that lightning again.
Here's his list:
"Da 5 Bloods" (Spike Lee)
"The Worst Person in the World" (Joachim Trier)
"Drive My Car" (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
"Tár" (Todd Field)
"Nope" (Jordan Peele)
"RRR" (S.S. Rajamouli)
"Asteroid City" (Wes Anderson)
"Red Rooms" (Pascal Plante)
"Eddington" (Ari Aster)
"Backrooms" (Kane Parsons)
Some of these are expected (“Tár” should be in consideration for film of the decade). Others are... interesting. To Sims, "Da 5 Bloods" is Lee's lost pandemic-era masterpiece and deserves a big-screen re-release. He reads "Asteroid City" as a quarantine allegory dressed up in 1950s pastels. He admits that review got him yelled at by readers who hated it, but he's now doubling down. Respect. "Eddington," which divided critics last summer, gets a defense as a film that saw the online toxicity of the last six years more clearly than any others. S.S. Rajamouli’s “RRR”? And then there's "Backrooms," the YouTube-born horror film directed by a 20-year-old, which Sims thinks has pointed Hollywood in a new direction. If that’s his argument, didn’t “Obsession” also deserve a mention?
It's also a good opportunity to shout out Pascal Plante's “Red Rooms,” a nifty Canadian thriller with shades of Fincher that tackles the bottomless rabbit hole of being online. Sims describes it as "the best horror movie ever made about being on your computer too much." Side note: Plante is finishing his next film, King's Daughters, a 17th-century historical survival drama with folk-horror undertones. Sold!
Back in November 2024, I conducted our own World of Reel mid-decade poll, asking more than 100 critics to name the best films of the 2020s so far. "Oppenheimer" came out on top with 22 votes, just ahead of "Tár" at 20, with "Drive My Car" and "The Zone of Interest" tied for fourth at 14 votes each.
Still, lists like this — no matter how early — are what keep the conversation going, and Sims at least doesn’t go for the obvious, but don’t call them “defining.” With three years left in the decade, plenty could change, but if I had to bet, "Tár" will remain a defining moment of 2020s U.S. cinema.
What are your picks?
A few readers sent me this URL today, and the reaction was mostly confusion. "A very weird list,” one wrote. Many of these are not “defining” but rather a display of taste.