There's a particular kind of film for a rainy night alone - absorbing enough to pull you fully in, good enough that you don't check your phone once.
Despite everything, the 2020s have produced some genuinely remarkable cinema. Films made under pressure that somehow carry none of it.
Great sci-fi uses the impossible to illuminate the real. Distance from the present is what allows these films to say things that otherwise couldn't be said.
When Lois Lane is killed, an unhinged Superman decides to take control of the Earth. Determined to stop him, Batman creates a team of freedom-fighting heroes. But when superheroes go to war, can the world survive?
Humans built huge engines on the surface of the earth to find a new home. But the road to the universe is perilous. In order to save earth, young people once again have to step forward to start a race against time for life and death.
After finding themselves ensnared in a death trap, seven disillusioned castoffs must embark on a dangerous mission that will force them to confront the darkest corners of their pasts.
Powered with incredible speed, Sonic The Hedgehog embraces his new home on Earth. That is, until Sonic sparks the attention of super-uncool evil genius Dr. Robotnik. Now it's super-villain vs. super-sonic in an all-out race across the globe to stop Robotnik from using Sonic's unique power for world domination.
A fanboy of a supervillain supergroup known as the Vicious 6, Gru hatches a plan to become evil enough to join them, with the backup of his followers, the Minions.
These films use the grammar of science fiction â the technology, the strangeness, the distance â to say things that couldn't be said any other way.
In San Francisco, Jill Valentine is dealing with a zombie outbreak and a new T-Virus, Leon Kennedy is on the trail of a kidnapped DARPA scientist, and Claire Redfield is investigating a monstrous fish that is killing whales in the bay. Joined by Chris Redfield and Rebecca Chambers, they discover the trail of clues from their separate cases all converge on the same location, Alcatraz Island, where a new evil has taken residence and awaits their arrival.
Seven years since the Monsterpocalypse began, Joel Dawson has been living underground in order to survive. But after reconnecting over radio with his high school girlfriend Aimee, Joel decides to venture out to reunite with her, despite all the dangerous monsters that stand in his way.
On one last grueling mission during Army Ranger training, a combat engineer must lead his unit in a fight against a giant otherworldly killing machine.
After years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend April O'Neil helps them take on a mysterious crime syndicate, but they soon get in over their heads when an army of mutants is unleashed upon them.
As a grisly virus rampages a city, a lone man stays locked inside his apartment, digitally cut off from seeking help and desperate to find a way out.
Great films that make you cry do so because they've made you care. By the time the emotion lands, you're not surprised - you're just not ready for it.
These films earn their place in the canon not through spectacle but through the seriousness with which they treat their ideas. The wonder is a bonus.