Tag: 2020s

Films released from 2020 onward, beginning with a year the theaters closed. The reviews here cover a period still deciding what it is: the franchise model showing strain, the theatrical window shortened and then partly restored, and a run of films that would not have been financed a decade earlier arriving alongside sequels nobody asked for. Judgments here are provisional in a way the older decades are not.

Abigail (2024) film poster2020s

Abigail (2024)

Kidnappers grab a twelve-year-old ballerina who turns out to be a centuries-old vampire. The film's clever structure borrows from the heist movie.

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Sinners (2025) film poster2020s

Sinners (2025)

Ryan Coogler's Jim Crow-era vampire film uses the genre to explore Black art and cultural memory. It establishes the stakes of everything that follows.

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Renfield (2023) film poster2020s

Renfield (2023)

Nicolas Cage's gloriously unhinged Dracula anchors a comedy about escaping a toxic boss, undercut by an overstuffed plot. Reframe Dracula's servant Renfield as a man in a toxic codependent relationship with his narcissistic boss, and play it as a workplace…

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Nosferatu (2024) film poster2020s

Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers brings obsessive period craft to the third great Nosferatu, with a ferocious Lily-Rose Depp at its center. Nosferatu earns its 8 as the most beautiful and uncompromising vampire film in years, Robert Eggers bringing his obsessive period craft…

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The Invitation (2022) film poster2020s

The Invitation (2022)

A promising gothic premise about a sinister aristocratic family hiding a Dracula secret, sanded smooth for mass appeal. The film's fatal flaw is its caution.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) film poster2020s

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

The Last Voyage of the Demeter earns its 6.5 by taking a few haunting pages from Dracula and building an entire film from them, with mixed but genuinely entertaining results. The film's great strength is its vision of Dracula as…

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Violent Night (2022) film poster2020s

Violent Night (2022)

Violent Night is Tommy Wirkola's 2022 American action-comedy depicting Santa Claus, played as a disillusioned former Viking warrior, trapped inside a wealthy family's Connecticut compound as mercenaries take the family hostage on Christmas Eve, leading Santa to fight back with…

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