Not really.
Of the recent movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a storytelling masterpiece. Since you mentioned it, I personally rate it alongside Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
I thought it was so awful I gave up half way through. Maybe it gets better after that. But I agree on Pulp Fiction.
I bounced off of it at first, but I bounced (hard) off of Lebowksi as well.
I don't think it's PTA's best film (or that I will come around to that opinion eventually), but it's pretty good.
I genuinely didn’t really think there was a story, just spectacle.
But that movie just dragged on, and now I look back and see it as a bungled opportunity. It could've been so much tighter in the edit. They could've cut a third of the movie and made the whole thing so much better.
The first half has me thinking instant classic, my hope is sky high. But then toward the end I find myself looking at my watch and realize it's simply not going to the stick the landing.
OTOH, many acclaimed streaming series have generally done this well. My take is that as long-form storytelling has evolved, movies have transitioned into this post-modernist phase as directors/writers don't feel they have the runway to tell something truly cohesive that doesn't end up being trite. It's much more about saying 'something' or imbuing a feeling than telling a fully fleshed 3 act story.
I feel that way with Inception. That out of nowhere 30-minute snow action part dragged on forever.
It would become just an action movie with crazy plot then.
The scene where the antagonist is walking down a hallway while the background keeps changing — is among the best fight scenes / visuals in any film, ever.
Even setting its influence aside, Pulp Fiction is the better movie.
How so? This is an intriguing statement and I want to hear more.
Triangle of Sadness https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7322224
Coming Home in the Dark https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6874762
* American Fiction
* The Holdovers
* Oppenheimer
* Perfect Days(!)
* Nosferatu
* Conclave
* Challengers
* The Mastermind
I can rattle off more but those seem pretty hard to argue with. All of them are better than EEAAO.
It's not going to a template for lots of similar films. It's more of a one-off.
But anyway, that was several years ago, it stretches the meaning of "recent".
> Not really.
Not really meaning you can't really name one good movie a year (i.e., agreeing with OP)? Because your example of a good recent movie was 4 years ago.
