Survival horror, dystopia, and visions of collapse. These films hold up a cracked mirror to our anxieties and dare us to keep looking.
Back to HomeGeorge Miller was 70 years old when he made the most kinetically thrilling action film of the century. Fury Road is a two-hour chase scene across a dying desert, and every single frame is composed like a Renaissance painting dipped in gasoline. Charlize Theron's Furiosa is the real protagonist -- her war rig escape is liberation cinema at its most primal. The practical effects, the real stunts, the Doof Warrior playing a flame-throwing guitar on a moving vehicle. Nothing about this film should work on paper. It's a miracle of cinema.
"What a lovely day."
The defining dark futures of 2015-2025
Peele's third film is his most ambitious and arguably his best. On the surface it's a UFO movie about two horse-ranch siblings trying to capture impossible footage. Underneath, it's a dense meditation on spectacle, exploitation, and humanity's fatal addiction to looking when we should look away. The Jean Jacket reveal is one of the great creature designs in modern horror-sci-fi. The "Gordy's Home" subplot is Peele at his most disturbing.
The premise is brutally simple: make a sound, you die. Krasinski builds an entire post-apocalyptic world around silence, and the result is one of the most tense theatrical experiences of the decade. The nail-on-the-stairs scene is a masterclass in suspense. Emily Blunt giving birth in a bathtub while aliens hunt overhead is almost unbearably intense. Horror and sci-fi rarely merge this effectively.
A near-future revenge thriller where a paralyzed man gets an AI chip implanted in his spine. The AI (STEM) starts fighting for him -- literally puppeteering his body in some of the most inventive action choreography of the decade. Whannell shot the fight scenes by strapping the camera to Logan Marshall-Green's chest, giving the combat an eerie, inhuman precision. The twist ending is genuinely dark. Made for $5 million, it outclasses films with 40 times the budget.