Latest news with #GuillermodelToro
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Netflix viewers need a TV licence this weekend to watch this one huge show
In the UK, it is mandatory for each household to hold a TV licence if they watch or record live television broadcasts, irrespective of the channel. However, individuals who don't stream BBC iPlayer or watch or record live television broadcasts do not have to own a TV Licence. Generally, this means viewers who exclusively use streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix aren't required to have a licence. However, all this may now change due to Netflix's new offerings. Netflix has started broadcasting live events, including WWE and this week they are broadcasting a special event called Tudum. For money-saving tips, sign up to our Money newsletter here READ MORE: Strictly Come Dancing stars issue 'sad' update as duo forced to alter show READ MORE: These are the acts in the final of Britain's Got Talent 2025 On Sunday, June 1, British Netflix subscribers can tune in to the live event from 1am GMT, which will share new information about the streaming giants productions. Viewers will see updates and trailers for several upcoming movies like Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro and Happy Gilmore 2. As well as updates on critically acclaimed series like Bridgerton, Squid Game, Wednesday and Stranger Things to name a few. Nevertheless, due to a live event being streamed by Netflix, those in the UK intending to watch must have a TV Licence. As relayed last year by the BBC, a TV Licence is necessary for viewing any live events on platforms such as Netflix. Most of Netflix's catalogue does not trigger the requirement of a TV Licence fee unless it's being broadcast live, these moments are exceptions when a TV Licence isn't needed. So, you may be wondering who does and doesn't need a TV licence? You need a TV licence if you view or record live TV across any service or channel e.g BBC or ITV and you also need a licence if you utilise BBC iPlayer. You don't need a TV licence for: Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney Plus On-demand content via services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video. Online video platforms including YouTube. Watching videos or DVDs. If you're over the age of 75, you may not need a TV licence. If you are a UK resident aged 75 or older and you receive Pension Credit you can acquire a TV Licence at no cost instead of the standard fee of £174.50. TV Licensing advises: "Free TV Licences are only available if you're 75 or over and you, or your partner living at the same address, are receiving Pension Credit. "If you think you're eligible for a free licence but can't apply online, please call 0300 790 6117* and speak to one of our advisors to request an application form (our lines are open between 8.30am and 6.30pm, from Monday to Friday). "Once we've received your application it may take a few weeks to process. If there are any problems we'll write to let you know. We may also call you if you have given us your phone number."
Wales Online
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
Netflix viewers need a TV licence this weekend to watch this one huge show
Netflix viewers need a TV licence this weekend to watch this one huge show Netflix viewers could risk a £1,000 TV licence fine this weekend if they want to watch some of the streaming giants new offering Netflix's live event Tudum will share updates on upcoming productions including Squid Game. (Image: Netflix ) In the UK, it is mandatory for each household to hold a TV licence if they watch or record live television broadcasts, irrespective of the channel. However, individuals who don't stream BBC iPlayer or watch or record live television broadcasts do not have to own a TV Licence. Generally, this means viewers who exclusively use streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix aren't required to have a licence. However, all this may now change due to Netflix's new offerings. Netflix has started broadcasting live events, including WWE and this week they are broadcasting a special event called Tudum. For money-saving tips, sign up to our Money newsletter here On Sunday, June 1, British Netflix subscribers can tune in to the live event from 1am GMT, which will share new information about the streaming giants productions. Viewers will see updates and trailers for several upcoming movies like Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro and Happy Gilmore 2. As well as updates on critically acclaimed series like Bridgerton, Squid Game, Wednesday and Stranger Things to name a few. Nevertheless, due to a live event being streamed by Netflix, those in the UK intending to watch must have a TV Licence. As relayed last year by the BBC, a TV Licence is necessary for viewing any live events on platforms such as Netflix. Most of Netflix's catalogue does not trigger the requirement of a TV Licence fee unless it's being broadcast live, these moments are exceptions when a TV Licence isn't needed. So, you may be wondering who does and doesn't need a TV licence? You need a TV licence if you view or record live TV across any service or channel e.g BBC or ITV and you also need a licence if you utilise BBC iPlayer. You don't need a TV licence for: Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney Plus On-demand content via services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video. Online video platforms including YouTube. Watching videos or DVDs. If you're over the age of 75, you may not need a TV licence. If you are a UK resident aged 75 or older and you receive Pension Credit you can acquire a TV Licence at no cost instead of the standard fee of £174.50. TV Licensing advises: "Free TV Licences are only available if you're 75 or over and you, or your partner living at the same address, are receiving Pension Credit. "If you think you're eligible for a free licence but can't apply online, please call 0300 790 6117* and speak to one of our advisors to request an application form (our lines are open between 8.30am and 6.30pm, from Monday to Friday). Article continues below "Once we've received your application it may take a few weeks to process. If there are any problems we'll write to let you know. We may also call you if you have given us your phone number."
Economic Times
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Economic Times
Netflix TUDUM 2025: Here's global streaming date, time, and what to expect
Netflix TUDUM 2025 is set to stream live from Los Angeles at the end of May. The event will begin at 5 PM PST on May 31. For viewers in Europe and Asia, it will air early on June 1. Netflix will showcase new and upcoming movies and shows with appearances from top event will take place at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. It will be streamed worldwide. The schedule for various time zones is 5:00 PM PT, 6:00 PM MT, 7:00 PM CT, 8:00 PM ET, 9:30 PM VET, 9:00 PM ART and 9:00 PM BRT. On June 1, it will be released at 1:00 AM GMT and 2:00 AM CET. Also Read: Elden Ring: Nightreign: Global release date, time for PC and consoles and how to preload Netflix will share updates and trailers for several upcoming movies:Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro, expected in November Happy Gilmore 2, the long-awaited sequel starring Adam Sandler My Oxford Year, a romantic movie with Sofia Carson and Corey MylchreestThe Life List, possibly receiving a sequelThe RIP, an action film with Ben Affleck and Matt DamonWake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third entry with Daniel Craig Netflix will highlight both returning and new series, including America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (Season 2), Bridgerton (Season 4), Emily in Paris (Season 5), Forever (Season 1), Ginny & Georgia (Season 3), Love is Blind, My Life with the Walter Boys (Season 2), Nobody Wants This (Season 2), ONE PIECE (Season 2), Outer Banks (Season 5), Squid Game (Season 3), Stranger Things (Season 5), Wednesday (Season 2) and WWE. Also Read: HBO Harry Potter TV Series: Who are Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton and Alastair Stout? Here's all about cast, release window, filming and where to watch Many actors, creators, and personalities will attend the live event. The confirmed lineup includes Antonia Gentry, Ben Affleck, Caleb McLaughlin, Choi Seung-Hyun (T.O.P), Emily Rudd, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Guillermo del Toro, Iñaki Godoy, Jenna Ortega, Lily Collins, Matt Damon, Millie Bobby Brown, Sofia Carson and Steven Yeun. What is Netflix TUDUM 2025? Netflix TUDUM 2025 is a global fan event that shares updates on Netflix shows, films and celebrities through a live broadcast from Los Angeles. Where can I watch Netflix TUDUM 2025? The event will stream live on Netflix's official YouTube and social channels at 5 PM PST on May 31. ( Originally published on May 28, 2025 )
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Guillermo del Toro to Host Canadian Horror Film Festival (Exclusive)
Guillermo del Toro's film school will be back in session in Toronto this summer when the Oscar-winning director hosts a lecture series on Canadian horror movies at TIFF Lightbox. The July 9 to 13 curated showcase for TIFF Cinematheque, entitled From Rabid to Skinamarink: Canadian Movie Madness, will see the maestro of monsters take audiences through a series of iconic genre pics like David Cronenberg's sophomore feature Rabid (1977), Vincenzo Natali's Cube (1997) and John Fawcett's supernatural fright pic Ginger Snaps starring Katharine Isabelle (2000) to reveal and explain their horror genre beats. More from The Hollywood Reporter Edge of Seventeen: How the K-Pop Powerhouse Is Reinventing Itself 'A Light That Never Goes Out' Is a Cannes Debut Opus on Outcasts, Depression, Music, and Hope Netflix, BBC Studios Team on Comedy Podcast 'The Big Pitch With Jimmy Carr' The Mexican director will also explain the mechanics of Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (2008), and Kyle Edward Ball's feature directorial debut, Skinamarink (2022) for their own visual and emotional impacts on audiences. Del Toro has made Toronto a second home after Los Angeles. And the Canadian city has hosted production for a number of his movies, including Mimic, the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim, Nightmare Alley and more recently the Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein. His TV series The Strain was also shot locally. That proximity has allowed del Toro to develop a close association with the Toronto International Film Festival and its year-round headquarters, TIFF Lightbox. His master classes on filmmaking techniques often coincide with production on his latest movie projects in Toronto. And del Toro has hosted an earlier lecture series at TIFF Lightbox on Mexican cinema, Alfred Hitchcock films and film noir pics. The prolific director's creative ties to Toronto also includes key positions in his locally-shot movies, besides himself as director and Hollywood leads, being filled by Canadians down to longtime producer and collaborator J. Miles Dale, the production designer, costume designer, editors and other technical posts. TIFF Lightbox and del Toro have also partnered on a free, upcoming outdoor screening of The Shape of Water as part of the film festival's 50th anniversary this summer. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
USA Today
a day ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Ranking the top 25 films of the 2020s so far, from Tár to Nope
Ranking the top 25 films of the 2020s so far, from Tár to Nope As hard as it is to believe, we are more than halfway through the 2020s. A decade that started with masks on our faces and quarantines to abide by, we didn't spend nearly as much time at the movie theater as we did huddled in our living rooms for Netflix binges and movie marathons as cineplexes were closed across the globe. Thankfully, the doors opened once again for moviegoers, and we've gotten to experience some truly special films together in the years that have followed. Pinpointing this exact May 2025 moment we're in, how has the cinematic decade that was shaped up for us? While we've still got a ways to go until we look at the 2020s in the grander view of film, it still feels prudent to take a look back at the 2020s at (roughly) the halfway point and see what the best films are to this point. Certainly, this list is highly subjective to the author's preference and prone to just a bit of cheating in one spot. Also, we've seen Sinners three times now, and limiting ourselves to 2020-2024 wouldn't allow us to rank one of the best movies of the decade. So, we're going to veer just a bit into 2025 to include the singing vampires. With new insights and revised insights from past reviews we liked for what they said at the time, let's break down the top 25 films of this decade so far, a surely flawed list that will continue to ebb and flow in ranking and estimation as time goes on, as all of these lists are destined to do until the end of time. Films we regretted leaving off and might include if you asked tomorrow: BlackBerry, Dune: Part One, Bloody Nose Empty Pockets, Poor Things, West Side Story, We're All Going to the World's Fair, Asteroid City, Nomadland, Turning Red, Godzilla Minus One, You Hurt My Feelings, RRR, The Northman, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, The French Dispatch, The Power of the Dog, Licorice Pizza, Hit the Road, Hundreds of Beavers, Anatomy of a Fall, Driveways, Babygirl, The Killer, A Real Pain, David Byrne's American Utopia, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Anora, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Bad Education, The Matrix Resurrections, Annette, The Last Duel, Air, Ferrari, Past Lives, Trap, Civil War, Rap World, Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl Two films we love that we also understand you are upset are not on this list, but please understand the amount of films viewed for consideration here: Top Gun Maverick, Barbie Some NFSW language to follow. 25. Tár What's striking about Tár after all these years is how clear-eyed is in such a compellingly complicated portrait of a great artist who might also be a terrible person. The film takes such a comfortable moral footing in Lydia Tár's journey that the generational rigors of Cate Blanchett's brilliant performance ignite even brighter sparks. You never doubt for a second how this film feels about its central character, but you still can't help but dive into your own personal dissection into who this woman is and why she does what she does. Todd Field painted the most compelling singular portrait of the decade in Tár, a fictional character who felt so, so upsettingly real. 24. Aftersun Charlotte Wells made Aftersun a searing collective memory that transported off the screen into your subconscious, pulling out all those fragmented pains of your youth and reconfiguring them into striking revelations you can only find once you're older, wiser and so much more like those you remember. Wells' film so carefully pieces together the film's vacation vignettes into a story so unassumingly relatable that its final gut punch hits you with the unexpected jolt it hits its reminiscing main character. It's trite to say a film is unforgettable, but Aftersun is a film you quite literally can't forget because it was with you all along. 23. Megalopolis One day, the film nerds of tomorrow will reclaim Francis Ford Coppola's bedazzled, bewildering fever dream Megalopolis as a vital work of opulent genius, speaking a language that played much more clearly to the people who would eventually get it. We're going to go ahead and get ahead of the curb and give Coppola his flowers now as opposed to being caught flat-footed down the road. There might not be a film released this decade that has quite as much optimistic imagination as Megalopolis. Coppola hooked up the connector cables to his dreams and brought them to the big screen in full, technicolor wonder. Rendering his hope for the future through old Hollywood grandeur and making his societal warnings with Tim and Eric cringe-disaster, Coppola went so for broke with his passion project that he will probably never get these resources ever again to make another movie. So be it if so; this was a stargazing grand slam from an all-time auteur to celebrate. 22. Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese's only film of the 2020s was yet another one of his American masterpieces, studying the nation's original sins of racism and greed with the same urgency and precision that marks all his great films. Its ending, one of an artist conceding his film's limitations and mourning a world where this story must even be told in the first place, lingers with you. Combined with the beating heart of Lily Gladstone, the cowardice of Leonardo DiCaprio and the slithering evil of Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon is cinematic mourning. 21. Avatar: The Way of Water Nobody makes big movies quite like James Cameron, and his second Avatar film felt like a genuine leap forward for the medium in how it transports viewers, quite literally, to another world. The underwater scenes in IMAX 3D filled the theater in a way no film ever has, as you quite literally felt like you were swimming under the sea with all of Pandora's teeming aquatic life. The story was a genuine improvement from the original, and the film's show-stopper of a climax stamped in why Cameron is a Mount Rushmore blockbuster director. 20. Spontaneous Brian Duffield made his directorial debut with 2020's unbelievably prescient Spontaneous, somehow the defining film about living in the cruel ironies and personal devastations of the COVID-19 pandemic. Duffield couldn't have had any idea how revenant his debut was, making it in a world where COVID-19 didn't even register a single infection. However, as it stands, no film quite captured the uncertainties and terrors of the invisible virus that shut our world down. Even past that, Duffield's film is a rallying cry for a defiant generation that is sick and tired of watching the vicious cycle without any answers. It's an essential high school film. 19. Challengers Luca Guadagnino revived the modern sports movie with Challengers, a bracing love triangle set against the enthralling balance of tennis. It's hard to really describe what a titanic force this film is when you get Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' strobe-light score pulsing through your veins and see Guadagnino tossing about Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connell in the winds of fierce, unforgiving competition. Seeing this in a loud theater, basking in the electricity of the final act and watching everyone quite literally crash into each other with reckless abandon ... it's why we love the movies, folks. (More here) 18. Nickel Boys "Cinema as immersion" has never been as palpable as it is in Nickel Boys, which really might be the singular filmmaking achievement of the decade so far. RaMell Ross' instant classic adapts Colson Whitehead's novel with innovation, putting viewers right behind the camera by taking a first-person view through the entire film between its two main characters. We see what they see as if it's happening right in front of us. The way Nickel Boys is made makes it impossible not to feel the warmth of childhood and shudder at the the terror of oppression. You're right there because that's how Ross intends his film to play. There is no screen; merely a window. This film is impossible to shake because of how it completely transports you. You leave this film feeling as if you've been given the memories of others, as if the ghosts in the empathy machine of cinema need you to remember them forever. That's filmmaking in the highest order. (More here) 17. I Saw the TV Glow The 2020s gave us Jane Shoenbrun, perhaps the biggest auteur to make their debut in this decade. Their stirring debut We're All Going to the World's Fair broke down loneliness and anxiety in the internet age better than any film of its class, and I Saw the TV Glow confirmed that promise with a barnburner of a masterpiece. Inviting you in with the late-night discomfort and allure of 1990s Snick-era young adult television and stunning you with the still-shock of David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Ari Aster, Schoenbrun's triumphant coming-of-age horror fantasy will serve as a life-changer for some and a fierce call for empathy for others. It's a monument of trans cinema and a breathtaking leap for Schoenbrun into auteur status. This film is a major work of the decade so far, and the closer it draws you in to its glow, the more you're likely to avoid the perils that await staying still. (More here) 16. The Fabelmans Great filmmakers got into a rhythm of making their autobiographies through their chosen medium over the last decade, but none of those were as affecting as Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans. One of Spielberg's best films of the millennium, he turned the camera back onto himself with this domestic drama and grappled with some piercing truths about his upbringing, his love for film and how they ultimately intersected. Introspection via filmmaking is nothing new, but for it to come from Spielberg in this exact way felt particularly powerful. 15. The Brutalist Brady Corbet's searing epic about art and assimilation has garnered a lot of attention for its size. It's about three-and-a-half hours with an intermission. The imagery is grand and unforgettable, particularly on an IMAX screen. The ideas are vast, about the toll of immigration in a land that may not welcome you, about the never-ending battle between creation and commerce. The performances are big and expressive, none more so than Adrien Brody's spellbinding breath of life into László Tóth. However, it's in the small details where Corbet solidifies his masterpiece. (More here) 14. Dick Johnson is Dead Few films have made you feel quite alive this decade as documentarian Kirsten Johnson's euphoric act of coping with her father's dementia diagnosis. Making a film about death so life-affirming deserved a lot of credit, but Johnson went past even that by traversing the path to the heart and to life's grandest truths through such wacky creativity and endearing gallows humor. Watching Dick Johnson "die" so many times and he and his daughter embrace his death makes you want to live and love even harder than you already do. 13. Beau is Afraid Ari Aster's epic breakdown of arrested development and paranoia is easily his best film yet, one of the towering works of the decade and yet another showcase for why Joaquin Phoenix can literally do anything. Beau is Afraid is as obtuse an odyssey as you're likely to go on anytime soon, one that unpacks the painful truths about our relationships to the ways we were raised and how they might set us up to run screaming away from whatever on Earth is trying to chase us. While you have to wait until the third act to meet Patti LuPone's sneering matriarch, the entire journey is absolutely unforgettable and, perhaps, so close to home you feel like you're actually there. (More here) 12. Dune: Part Two Denis Villeneuve knew he had to go as big and bold as possible to widen the spectacle and stakes of his adaptation for the second part, but he someone managed to both outdo himself and deliver one of the definitive tentpole experiences of the decade so far with Dune: Part Two. It's a vital experience in a theater and a rigorous moral maze for the mind, one that interrogates power and freedom in the vacuum of the messiah complex. It's also got giant sandworm battles and blistering combats that rival the sheer scope and cosmic shock of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. (More here) 11. Oppenheimer Oppenheimer is a tricky film, one that recognizes its titular scientist's brilliance while openly deliberating on its immeasurable horror. Once that genie got out of the bottle, we couldn't put it back in. Christopher Nolan's Best Picture winning-film film might end on an increasingly pessimistic note to some, but it feels like an earnest plea for change, one that we can obtain if we actually try. It's the most urgent film of Nolan's career and easily one of his best. It's an all-timer in every sense of the phrase, and it really is one of the defining theatrical experiences of the 2020s so far. (More here) 10. Titane Julia Ducournau's unhinged masterpiece delivered a devastating study of how right the concept of "nature versus nurture" really is. Sure, a film about a serial killer who is attracted to cars pretending to be the missing child of a steroid-pumping firefighter might sound a little wacky, even for the most extreme corners of experimental French cinema. However, Ducournau contorts such a seemingly tasteless story into something that affects you in the grand and minutia. Titane is a tidal wave of love and grace disguised in shock and horror, a fierce testament to just how disarming it is to have even a slight ounce of genuine care and affection in your life from somebody who finds worth in you. Ducournau couples her flamethrower filmmaking talents with two generational performances from Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon, giving the audience something absolutely unforgettable. Even the most twisted wayfaring strangers can change with some TLC. 9. The Holdovers The radiant, barbed warmth of The Holdovers will wear you down until you finally scoot over and let it sit right by you by the fireplace. The Holdovers is one of those once-in-a-lifetime movies, one where everything works so perfectly in unison with the cast, script, direction, setting, sentiments and aura to create a film that literally transports you to a distant holiday in your own head. The Holdovers isn't an easy film to watch around Christmastime, bittersweet in its resolution and unforgiving in its practicalities. However, it is a vital one in trying to understand ourselves in the most unusual of moments during the most sensitive time of year, those moments where we need those people we'll never forget and never would've considered if not for the season at hand. It's a perfect holiday film, one that would melt even unchanged Scrooge's heart. (More here) 8. Bo Burnham: Inside To live in the aftermath of the pandemic meant to grapple with the lingering anxieties of the age. No film did a better job of capturing the brain freeze of the COVID-19 pandemic like Bo Burnham's showstopper of an experimental standup special. Burnham mixed his penchant for comedy songs with the uneasy, ironic dread that suffocated 2020, pouring his audience a warm cider spliced with absinthe. The film plays like that lingering feeling of uncertainty you feel when you wake up from an afternoon nap right when the sun is going down, culminating in two of his finest moments as a performer: "That Funny Feeling" and "All Eyes On Me." The first perfectly encapsulates that pit in your stomach of trying to live during such unprecedented times, while the latter is a masterclass in marrying his unique storytelling ability with the confinement of the project. All eyes were on Burnham during this heart-open house concert, and he owned the moment for all time. 7. Babylon Damien Chazelle went buckwild for his acidic silent Hollywood elegy, a rip-roaring, debauched frat party of dizzying Tinseltown splendor and ruin. It's almost the anti-La La Land, a pitch-perfect flipped side of the coin of what it's like to make your way in an industry that will chew you up and spit you out all while you have the best and worst time of your life. To Chazelle, you have to be positively insane to give your life over to such a radioactive tire fire as the show business, but the eternal sparks from the flames will keep you alive long after you're gone. Anchored in Margot Robbie's finest moment as an actor, Chazelle's shirt-ripping bacchanal gives as much of a hooray as a horrified holler for the movies, cementing their on-screen glory and ghastly underbelly in equal measure. Only could humans make something so wonderful out of such ribald chaos. In an era where there is such worry about the future of movies, Babylon proves that they're just too powerful to die. 6. Red Rocket Simon Rex's Mikey returns to his small Texas town as a sordid Pied Piper, weaving tales of his adult film exploits to any listening ear all while concocting cons to stay afloat with promises of a better life he has no intentions of filling. Move over, Wicked, Sean Baker's Red Rocket is the real Wizard of Oz prequel we need. No American film has captured the Trumpian rot better than Red Rocket, with Rex delivering the decade's best performance so far in a character that perfectly encapsulates how deranged charm can make people bend over backwards for even the most derelict of actors. Weaving in the *NSYNC seminal pop stunner "Bye Bye Bye" as a nefarious bookend to Mikey's hometown gambit, Baker doesn't even need to say you know who's name to deliver the most damning portrait of his political rise and continued stranglehold over the citizenry. 5. Small Axe We're going to cheat a little here, as Steve McQueen's five-part Small Axe still feels like a gut punch in five parts, all interlocked together to create maximum impact. The astounding anthology film series takes five different looks at West Indian immigrants trying to make their way in London during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. One part, Mangrove, is a gripping courtroom drama based in racial injustice, while another, Lovers Rock, is an intoxicating house party buoyed by Shabier Kirchner's floating camerawork on the dance floor. McQueen's central thesis flows effortlessly between all five parts, as he varies his approach for the dreamlike Lovers Rock to the brutal realities of the John Boyega police study Red, White and Blue. All five parts make for a sensational whole, as McQueen's Small Axe hit with elegiac force in 2020 and sticks with us to this day. 4. On the Count of Three Jerrod Carmichael's directorial debut features two wayward souls planning to off each other after whatever would quality as the perfect last day on Earth. It's a deliriously unsettling template for any film to follow, and one that would be so, so, so, so easy to fumble without the most careful of approaches. The fact that Carmichael takes such disparate depression and literally cruel irony and morphs it into something so life-affirming cements him as one of the most promising filmmakers of his generation. On the Count of Three mines its jaw drop of a premise for some humdinger happenings and shocking pathos, as Carmichael and co-star Christopher Abbott make for the perfect odd couple to go about this ordeal together. It's as piercing a commentary on how society treats the mentally ill as we've gotten in some time, and Carmichael's filmmaking style feels like a brilliant splice between small-scale Robert Altman and early David Gordon Green. There is no possible way to remove On the Count of Three from your mind, nor do you ever want to forget what it was like to live this fateful day with these two confused souls. It's so far the independent filmmaking thrill of the 2020s. 3. Sinners Filmmaker Ryan Coogler has been building to this film for his entire career, as Sinners as the kind of rollicking jolt to the senses that makes you feel positively alive. It's hard to overstate just how important a film like this is, a wholly original film in love with its genre flourishes and reaching for the highest peaks in the craft. Only five films in, Coogler has already asserted himself as a generational talent, one of the anointed filmmakers in his class who can call himself a household name. After putting in his time with all-time franchise work, he finally made his magnum opus. This is the first original blockbuster since Nope that has a chance to reach the zeitgeist, and that's beyond worth celebrating. Also, that IMAX 70mm presentation is to bite for. (More here) 2. Tenet We really did live in a twilight world when Tenet hit theaters in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Christopher Nolan finally made his true homage to James Bond and Michael Mann's Miami Vice in one fell swoop. Tenet unfortunately came out in a year where repeat viewings for such a tangled web as what Nolans weaves were felt unwise. However, in the nearly five years since Tenet's release, it's clear that the best way to enjoy this film is to just let go and let the immaculate vibes wash over you. As wonderful and important as Oppenheimer was, Tenet was Nolan's best film this decade. That Nolan has two films in this top 20 cements what a special place he's in as a filmmaker right now, where it feels like every new project could hit masterpiece status as these two clearly have. Tenet is the true culmination of his impeccable talents crashing against his dreamworld logic, as it plays with the breathless thrill of stepping onto a new planet for the first time. You still might not fully grasp the concept of inversion, but you feel Tenet in your bones by film's end. 1. Nope Jordan Peele has as much of a pulse on the world we live in as any filmmaker working right now, and nobody in recent memory has taken their first-film clout and ran with it into such wildly original directions as he has. As hard as it is to compare to Get Out, one of the few films released in the last 10 years that automatically earns a spot in one of those "great movies of all time" montages people edit together for awards shows, Nope might be an even better movie. His scorching parable of the sensationalism era takes a clenched fist to our unhealthy obsession with tragedy-as-entertainment and our desire to turn real-world consequence into our personal blockbusters. It's a sci-fi Western horror drenched in 2020s urgency, and Peele's filmmaking is of the highest order. You'll never look at a cloud the same way again, that's for sure... all for the better, we say.
