It can be fun, and also risky, to look at relatively recent movies and try to pick out those that’ll potentially be classics one day. You run the risk of looking silly decades from now, if you mention something that everyone genuinely forgets about over the course of many years, but also, maybe these words won’t be accessible decades from now, so perhaps it’s not worth worrying about.
If you are to do such a thing, though, you’re best off looking at movies that currently feel perfect, hoping that the difficulty in finding potential flaws within will continue as time marches on. For now, these movies from the past seven years (going back only as far as 2019, at the time of writing) are among the very best and hardest to fault, so there’s a good chance time will be kind to them going forward.
10
‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes On’ (2021)
A wonderfully simple movie that’s appropriate for all ages, but not overly childish by any means, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is super charming and effortlessly capable of juggling comedy and drama. It’s about a shell who’s been separated from most of his family, and he befriends a documentary filmmaker, with the pair working toward finding where Marcel’s family might’ve gone.
Marcel himself, and various other tiny characters, are animated, yet they exist within an otherwise live-action world, so maybe it scratches the same itch as Who Framed Roger Rabbit on a technical front (while narratively, the somewhat fantastical search for family and an exploration of an unusual friendship recalls E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial). Yes, those movies are classics, but Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is worthy of being compared to them, and it’ll hopefully be considered a full-blown classic itself one day, once enough time has passed.
9
‘Aftersun’ (2022)
Paul Mescal is particularly good at thriving in downbeat movies, so it seems, with Aftersun contributing considerably to this notion. In it, he plays a father who goes on a vacation with his daughter, but the movie is framed as the now-adult daughter looking back on the whole experience, realizing, to a greater extent, what her father was going through at the time.
It’s not entirely laid out, because some of Aftersun remains ambiguous, even by the end, but you do feel it and understand certain things more and more as it reaches a remarkable conclusion. It’s a patiently paced film, and maybe not a lot happens compared to most movies, but it is undeniably rewarding in the end, as a character study, and for what it manages to do emotionally.
8
‘Marty Supreme’ (2025)
It’s been pointed out that it’s sort of darkly funny how Marty Supreme, a movie about going to great and self-destructive lengths to win some kind of personal victory, didn’t win any of the Oscars it was nominated for, but it was a competitive year. That doesn’t take away from it being an amazing movie, and also one of the most wonderfully weird done on a rather large scale in recent memory.
See, Marty Supreme is kind of a sports movie about table tennis, of all things, but it’s more concerned with being a character study of a very ambitious and dangerously driven young man who wants to be one of the greats in that particular sport. It’s a movie that jumps in all sorts of odd directions throughout, with the whole table tennis thing being forgotten for long stretches of time, but not in a bad way. It’s all chaotic, uncompromising, darkly funny, and surprisingly moving throughout, and for now, it feels there’s a good chance it’ll age well and hold up as time goes on.
7
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (2022)
Speaking of chaotic movies that got some pretty significant attention at the Academy Awards, here’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, which actually managed to win quite a few Oscars, including Best Picture. It’s one of the least Oscar-baity movies to ever win so big, largely thanks to the fact that it’s a science fiction movie that also dips in and out of just about every other genre there is.
It makes sense to do this, because Everything Everywhere All at Once is about the multiverse, and the stakes here are at once very personal and family-related, yet also about as high as stakes can get, what with the destruction of all the universes being something that needs preventing. Words can only really do something like this a limited amount of justice, because you really just need to watch it (possibly a few times; rewatches are rewarding, here) for yourself.
6
‘The Irishman’ (2019)
Serving as a final statement on the gangster genre on the part of Martin Scorsese, The Irishman is a remarkably somber and engaging film, and a much better one than some make it out to be. It’s framed as a confession of sorts, with an elderly man who used to “paint houses” (kill people, in other words) for the mob looking back on his life and some of the violent acts he carried out.
The way it’s written and edited is immense, especially by the time The Irishman starts wrapping up, and the whole movie – feeling, as mentioned before, like a final statement/epilogue – enters its own devastating epilogue. As far as 21st-century epic movies go, it’s easily one of the best and most ambitious, and yeah, it might well even be a highlight of Scorsese’s impressive filmography that goes back many decades now.
5
‘All of Us Strangers’ (2023)
All of Us Strangers is always hard to talk about, since it’s another movie like Aftersun (hi again, Paul Mescal) where the ending is more or less everything. Things build to it very patiently, and the whole movie makes more sense both narratively and emotionally once you know where it ends up. Yet telling someone ahead of time where it ends up would feel like a pretty rotten thing to do.
So, what can be said? Much of All of Us Strangers is about exploring grief, it’s kind of fantastical, and there’s also a good deal of romance here, genre-wise. There’s a uniquely eerie atmosphere throughout, even though it’s not a horror movie, and it’s all expertly shot, acted, and written. You can’t say for sure whether something relatively recent will be a classic one day, but with All of Us Strangers, reaching that status eventually feels likely.
4
‘Perfect Days’ (2023)
The right kind of movie for current/turbulent times, Perfect Days is pretty low-key throughout most of its runtime, but not in a way that ever feels boring. It takes place in Tokyo, and follows a man who works as a toilet cleaner as he goes through various routines, day by day. It sounds like it could – or maybe even should – be boring, yet that’s really not an issue, when it comes to Perfect Days.
It’s a grounded drama that still finds interesting things to say and explore, albeit in a quieter fashion than most movies. If you watch it while distracted, it’s unlikely to have much of an impact, which might sound like a strange thing to say when the whole movie is fairly light on narrative. It’s not so much that there’s an intense plot you need to follow or keep track of; more just that it helps to settle into the film’s rhythm, much as the central character here has settled into a routine of his own.
3
‘Godzilla Minus One’ (2023)
You might think the giant monster sub-genre would’ve exhausted itself by now, considering you can go back about a century and find monster movies that have similar beats to the ones nowadays, but Godzilla Minus One shows, with considerable success, that there’s still gas left in that monstrous tank. It might look like just another Godzilla movie, yet in execution, it’s so much more.
Godzilla Minus One has got the right balance overall, sometimes being quite frightening and intense, and at other times feeling exciting and even heartwarming.
It does a great deal to make you care about what’s happening, all the while not forgetting about spectacle and action, so it’s simultaneously great as a drama (with a memorable period setting, which sets it apart from a good many Godzilla movies) and as a monster movie. It’s got the right balance overall, sometimes being quite frightening and intense, and at other times feeling exciting and even heartwarming, making it plain to see why it’s already earned a reputation for being one of the very best entries in the long-running film series it belongs to.
2
‘The Worst Person in the World’ (2021)
Like Aftersun, The Worst Person in the World is an unconventional coming-of-age movie, in a way, even though both films do admittedly focus on characters of very different ages. With The Worst Person in the World, it’s about someone who is well into adulthood, but she’s still struggling with a lot of everyday problems that eventually prove overwhelming, once enough of them keep happening back-to-back.
She’s also discovering things about herself, even in her late 20s and early 30s, and in that sense, The Worst Person in the World feels very honest, laying out how it can actually take a very long time to get used to being an adult. Along the way, the movie does manage to be somewhat funny and maybe even a little romantic, so if you want to call it a rom-com, maybe it kind of is, even though it’s the dramatic side of things here that proves more memorable and eye-opening/soul-crushing.
1
‘Parasite’ (2019)
Of all the international movies to have been nominated for Best Picture (not as many as you’d expect, though the Oscars are getting better than they used to be with highlighting non-English-language movies), Parasite is probably the very best. It did ultimately win Best Picture, after all, and sure, some Best Picture winners don’t hold up the best, or even felt like questionable picks at the time, but Parasite is not one of those winners.
It was a deserving film to highlight for that top prize, and that it did so in a year as strong as 2019 is saying a lot. Speaking of saying a lot, that’s what Parasite does, and it also pulls off a great deal in terms of balancing different genres and wildly varying emotions. It should collapse under its own weight, as a comedy/drama/satire/thriller/tragedy/borderline-horror movie, yet it doesn’t, because it really is just that remarkable as a filmmaking achievement.
Parasite
- Release Date
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May 30, 2019
- Runtime
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133 minutes
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Lee Sun-kyun
Park Dong-ik
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