Every critic ranks films on the same handful of things: story, performance, does it move you. Fair enough. But when I watch a film, I can’t help watching it as a director first — where the camera is, what got cut, what a scene is doing with silence, why a shot holds a beat longer than it needs to. That’s the lens for this list.
We’re just over halfway through the 2020s, and it’s already been a strange, disrupted, occasionally brilliant stretch for cinema — a pandemic shutdown, two industry strikes, and somehow still a run of films I think we’ll be studying in film schools in twenty years. Here are the ten that impressed me most, not for what they made me feel, but for what they made me think about as someone who makes this stuff for a living.
10. The Northman (2022, dir. Robert Eggers)
Most directors soften a brutal story to make it easier to watch. Eggers does the opposite — he leans all the way into the mud, the firelight, and the ritual violence of the world he’s built, and never once winks at the audience to say “we know this is a lot.” That commitment, sustained for two hours, is harder to pull off than it looks. Very few directors trust their own tone this completely.
9. Poor Things (2023, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
This is a masterclass in using production design as narrative. As Bella’s understanding of the world expands, the film’s own visual language expands with her — the black-and-white opening gives way to increasingly saturated colour and increasingly ambitious sets, so you’re tracking her development through the frame itself, not just the dialogue. That’s directing decisions doing storytelling work that a script alone couldn’t.
8. Nomadland (2020, dir. Chloé Zhao)
Zhao mixes professional actors with real nomads playing versions of themselves, and the seams never show. That’s an enormously difficult balancing act — get it wrong and the whole film feels like a stunt. Get it right, as she does here, and you end up with something that feels less directed than simply witnessed, which is exactly the illusion the best documentary-adjacent filmmaking is chasing.
7. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, dir. Martin Scorsese)
At this point in his career, Scorsese doesn’t need to prove anything, and this film has the confidence of a director who knows it. It’s patient in a way a lot of contemporary studio films aren’t allowed to be — long scenes, long takes, a willingness to let discomfort sit on screen rather than cut away from it. That patience is a directorial choice as much as a stylistic one, and it pays off.
6. The Zone of Interest (2023, dir. Jonathan Glazer)
The boldest directorial decision on this list might be what Glazer chooses not to show. The horror of the film lives almost entirely in sound design and what happens just outside the frame, while the picture itself stays fixed on the mundane domesticity of the family at its centre. It’s a masterclass in restraint, and proof that what you withhold from an audience can be more powerful than what you give them.
5. Past Lives (2023, dir. Celine Song)
Song’s debut is built on scenes that most directors would feel pressure to fill with dialogue, and she just… doesn’t. She lets silences run long, lets characters not say the thing, and trusts two actors’ faces to carry entire emotional arcs without a word. For a first feature, that’s a remarkable amount of directorial nerve.
4. Dune: Part Two (2024, dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Blockbuster filmmaking at this scale usually means leaning entirely on visual effects, but Villeneuve keeps building real sets and shooting in real deserts wherever he can, and it shows in every frame. The result is a film that feels genuinely enormous rather than digitally enormous — a distinction that’s getting harder to find in modern studio filmmaking, and one worth paying attention to.
3. The Holdovers (2023, dir. Alexander Payne)
Payne’s real skill here is tonal control — this film moves between comedy and genuine grief scene to scene, sometimes line to line, without the shift ever feeling jarring. That’s an incredibly hard balance to strike, and it only works because every performance is calibrated to the same register. Directing tone consistently across a whole ensemble is one of the least visible skills in filmmaking, and one of the hardest to fake.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022, dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert)
This film shouldn’t work. It jumps genres, tones, and visual styles constantly, sometimes within a single scene, and somehow never loses the emotional throughline connecting it all. That’s an editing and directing achievement as much as a writing one — keeping an audience oriented through that much chaos while still landing the quiet, human moments takes an enormous amount of directorial control hiding underneath the apparent anarchy.
1. Oppenheimer (2023, dir. Christopher Nolan)
Top of the list, and it’s not close. Nolan takes one of the most talked-about scientific events in history and turns it into three hours of people in rooms talking, and somehow makes it as tense as anything with a bigger budget and more explosions. The shifts between black-and-white and colour aren’t a gimmick — they’re doing structural work, separating subjective and objective perspective in a way that took real directorial discipline to sustain across a three-hour runtime. It’s the most purely “directed” film on this list, in the sense that every choice feels deliberate, and it’s the one I go back to most when I need reminding what the job is actually for.
Honourable Mentions
A handful of others that just missed the cut but are worth your time: Anatomy of a Fall, for its courtroom scenes that never once feel like a courtroom drama; The Substance, for committing so completely to body horror as metaphor; and Top Gun: Maverick, for proving that a legacy sequel can still be built around real stunt work and real stakes rather than nostalgia alone.
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