10 overlooked modern movies destined to be hailed as masterpieces

Vortex (Gaspar Noé, 2021)

Dementia might not seem like the most bankable of topics for a film, but it is a surprisingly fitting one for the medium. Gaspar Noé, the French provocateur whose 2015 film Love earned international notoriety for its prodigious depictions of unsimulated sex, is not a one-trick pony. Vortex is a stunning work of cinema, and one of the rare films that is able to demonstrate in a new way what the medium can accomplish.

It stars filmmaker Dario Argento as Lui, a writer, and director Françoise Lebrun as Elle, a retired psychologist. They live together in a cluttered flat where Lui is writing a book. We learn that Elle recently suffered a stroke and has been sliding into dementia ever since. Noé highlights the parallel lives they lead by literally separating them. The film unfolds in a split-screen, with Lui working away on his writing and leaving voicemails while Elle wanders aimlessly through the streets, leaves the hob on, and descends ever further into a world of her own.

Vortex is a film about ageing, loss, and dying, which all sound incredibly depressing. And it is. But the simplicity and lack of condescending sentimentality with which these topics are handled lead to a mesmerising and profound experience.

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

Century-hopping science fiction is always a tough sell, just look at Cloud Atlas. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that when Bertrand Bonello tried to throw romance and incel culture into the mix, audiences wouldn’t be particularly receptive. The Beast stars Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle, a woman in the 1910s who knows that she will meet with tragedy in the future. When she meets George McKay’s character, he promises to protect her from this “beast” that follows her, only to appear in the present day as a murderous incel. In the distant future, when artificial intelligence has taken over the world, Gabrielle appears again, this time trying to erase all memories of her past.

When Bonello submitted the film to the Cannes Film Festival, it was rejected. That might sound harsh, considering that the director had already had numerous movies premiere there and was even on the jury one year, but this is a polarising movie, even by Cannes standards. It has a confounding narrative structure and taps into universal questions about fate and love. It’s the type of movie that is so complex that it can sometimes feel opaque, and for that reason, it seems destined to become a classic that can be assessed and reassessed.

Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018)

By definition, most science fiction movies depict a world that doesn’t exist, but the best films in this genre convince the audience that they someday might. Annihilation was Alex Garland’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Ex Machina. Like the Jeff VanderMeer novel it’s based on, it veers into the surreal almost immediately, depicting a world that looks eerily familiar but is festering with horrors. It follows a group of scientists led by Natalie Portman who enter a mysterious restricted zone called the Shimmer, which is teeming with mutated plants and animals.

Like an Agatha Christie novel, the characters are picked off one by one in increasingly gruesome ways. Beauty and horror mix in this movie, leaving you with a constant sense of dread. The sound design is just as terrifying as the visual effects. When a mutated creature that resembles a bear hunts the remaining scientists, the sound that comes out of its mouth may be the single scariest thing in the film.

For many viewers, the final act of Annihilation goes completely off the rails, hurtling into abstract existentialism far outside the bounds of interpretation. But the same has been said of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and though this film does not reach the same heights, it deserves to be studied and theorised for decades to come.

Babylon (Damien Chazelle, 2022)

When Babylon was released, the general tone of reviews was that director Damian Chazelle had gotten out over his skis. After the electrifying jazz thriller Whiplash and the sweeping musical La La Land, Babylon was a wildly ambitious, big-budget homage to Old Hollywood that was drowning in excess. Dismissed as a self-indulgent, shambolic mess, its hype faded quickly, and with a three-plus hour runtime, it flopped at the box office.

Set in Hollywood around the time that sound was being introduced, it stars Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt as stars on opposite trajectories – he on his way down, she on her way up. It is an indictment of the era’s excess, an over-the-top orgy of cinema that explores the toxicity of the film industry. But it also has plenty to say about the tension between artists and the people who exploit them and the balance between ambition and integrity. In the future, Babylon will not only be a snapshot of a critical point in early Hollywood, but, as with all period pieces, of the era in which it was made.

C’mon C’mon (Mike Mills, 2021)

Mike Mills is not yet acknowledged as one of the greatest directors of his generation, and that might be because of the type of movies he makes. They invariably lack the sort of attention-seeking drama that most plots do, and that makes the experience of watching them hard to describe. Mills began his career as a graphic designer, and meticulous attention to visual detail is present in all of his films. However, they are also marked by their compassion towards their characters, something which, again, lacks the type of narrative spectacle that usually snags the attention of people scrolling through titles on Netflix.

C’mon C’mon stars Joaquin Phoenix as a journalist who is tasked with taking care of his nine-year-old nephew (Woody Norman) while his sister is away. They bond during a road trip from Los Angeles to New York, and Phoenix’s character is able to reconnect with his estranged sister over the phone. Shot in black and white, it’s the soundtrack, sound design, and acting that do the heavy lifting. Like all of Mills’s films, it is a gentle triumph, a masterpiece completely lacking in melodrama that, if enough people give it a try, is destined to become a classic.

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

Before Jonathan Glazer picked up an Oscar for 2023’s Zone of Interest, he made a much smaller, much stranger science fiction movie that blends fiction and documentary. It stars Scarlett Johansson as a mysterious extraterrestrial creature in a woman’s body who roams the streets of Glasgow, preying on unsuspecting men.

Despite having one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the lead role, the rest of the cast is mostly made of first-time actors. In an effort to make the movie feel more realistic, Glazer also filmed large portions of the action with hidden cameras, including a sequence in which the alien drives around the city in a van trying to pick up passengers.

Where most science fiction movies focus on the otherworldly fictional elements of the story, Under the Skin takes the opposite approach, using the extraterrestrial character as a lens through which to see the familiar human world in a new light. There is no spectacle here, no green aliens or dramatic scenes of conflict, but it is revelatory and a film that, if marketed better, would have found a wider audience. As it stands, it is destined to be a cult classic.

The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)

“Masterpiece” might be a bit of a stretch when describing a buddy cop movie involving Russell Crowe, but this one is uncommonly excellent. With just the right amount of noir references and the surprising chemistry between the two leads, this movie is nothing short of bewitching, even if that description embarrasses the masculine sensibilities of a portion of its fanbase.

Set in 1970s Los Angeles, it stars Crowe and Ryan Gosling as the titular nice guys, mismatched investigators who team up to find a missing woman, only to find themselves in way over their heads. It’s an old formula, but Black brings it back from the dead with a lively script and a twisty plot.

This film should be iconic for the facial hair alone, but Gosling has been defined by many a moustache before, so that’s only part of it. The banter and the madcap incompetence of the private eyes make this film such a joy to watch. With a body count high enough to keep things interesting and a soundtrack that hits all the right notes, this is a high point for the buddy cop genre, and deserves a prominent place in the canon.

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

Some films provide such perfect encapsulations of their time that their masterful specificity goes unnoticed when they’re released. Although All of Us Strangers was met with near-universal critical acclaim, it was largely overlooked by the major awards and has seemed to fall out of the conversation far too quickly. It stars Andrew Scott as a screenwriter living alone in a block of shiny new flats overlooking London. One evening, he meets the only other tenant in the building, played by Paul Mescal, and the two begin a romance. At the same time, Scott’s character visits his childhood home, only to find that his parents still live there and are exactly the same age that they were when they were killed in a car accident decades before.

The film is a ghost story on a surface level, but at its heart, it captures the loneliness of the post-pandemic years, when human contact has been outsourced to screens, and a spotless apartment can become a prison cell. Future generations will watch this film as a time capsule of the moment in which it was made, an aching portrayal of loneliness and the longing for human connection that has defined the decade.

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012)

Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio certainly has its fans, but it is yet to be hailed as the masterpiece of horror that it is. It stars Toby Jones as an uptight English sound engineer who travels to Italy to work on a film called The Equestrian Vortex. Assuming that it will be about horses, he quickly discovers that it is actually a gory giallo horror movie and that the sound effects he has to make are more of the bone-crunching variety than the hoof-pounding variety. As he works on the film, he finds himself becoming increasingly disconnected from the real world and caught up in the gruesomely mesmeric experience of creating the hellish sounds of the film.

Berberian Sound Studio is hard to categorise, which is probably why it struggled to find its audience. Though heavily influenced by giallo cinema, it often feels more like the sonic equivalent of a body horror film. It features one of the best soundtracks of the genre, and recaptures some of the hallmarks of classic horror without recycling it.

Good Time (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2017)

If you have never seen a film by the Safdie brothers, make sure you’re well-rested and relaxed before diving in. They go beyond suspense and into sheer panic. Though 2019’s Uncut Gems is arguably more stressful to watch, Good Time features a much more engaging story. Robert Pattinson stars as a volatile street criminal who tries to break his disabled brother out of police custody to help him pull off a robbery.

It’s hard to shoot a film on a city street and make it feel like anything other than a manicured movie set, but the Safdies manage to make New York look as grimy and unpredictable as William Friedkin did in The French Connection. Good Time is a breathless thriller that takes a detour into the psychedelic without ever wandering from the grit and chaos of the city streets. It’s not the sort of movie that you’ll want to watch again right away, but its brilliance practically slaps you in the face, and not surprisingly, it lingers.