The following list is a small, partial sample of films with "art film" qualities, compiled to give a general sense of what directors and films are considered to have "art film" characteristics. The films in this list demonstrate one or more of the characteristics of art films: a serious, non-commercial, or independently made film that is not aimed at a mass audience. Some of the films on this list are also considered to be "auteur" films, independent films, or
experimental films. In some cases, critics disagree over whether a film is mainstream or not. For example, while some critics called
Gus Van Sant's
My Own Private Idaho (1991) an "exercise in film experimentation" of "high artistic quality",
The Washington Post called it an ambitious mainstream film. Some films on this list have most of these characteristics; other films are commercially made films, produced by mainstream studios, that nevertheless bear the hallmarks of a director's "auteur" style, or which have an experimental character. The films on this list are notable either because they won major awards or critical praise from influential film critics, or because they introduced an innovative narrative or film-making technique.
1920s–1940s '' In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers did not set out to make "art films", and film critics did not use the term "art film". However, there were films that had sophisticated aesthetic objectives, such as
Carl Theodor Dreyer's
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and
Vampyr (1932), surrealist films such as Luis Buñuel's
Un chien andalou (1929) and ''
L'Âge d'Or'' (1930), or even films dealing with political and current-event relevance such as
Sergei Eisenstein's famed and influential masterpiece
Battleship Potemkin. The American film
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by
German Expressionist director
F. W. Murnau uses distorted
art design and groundbreaking cinematography to create an exaggerated, fairy-tale-like world rich with symbolism and imagery.
Jean Renoir's film
The Rules of the Game (1939) is a
comedy of manners that transcends the conventions of its genre by creating a biting and tragic satire of French upper-class society in the years before WWII; a poll of critics from
Sight & Sound ranked it as the fourth greatest film ever, placing it behind
Vertigo,
Citizen Kane and
Tokyo Story. Some of these early, artistically oriented films were financed by wealthy individuals rather than film companies, particularly in cases where the content of the film was controversial or unlikely to attract an audience. In the late 1940s, UK director
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger made
The Red Shoes (1948), a film about ballet, which stood out from mainstream-genre films of the era. In 1945,
David Lean directed
Brief Encounter, an adaptation of
Noël Coward's play
Still Life, which observes a passionate love affair between an upper-class man and a middle-class woman amidst the social and economic issues that Britain faced at the time.
1950s In the 1950s, some of the well-known films with artistic sensibilities include
La Strada (1954), a film about a young woman who is forced to go to work for a cruel and inhumane circus performer to support her family, and eventually comes to terms with her situation; Carl Theodor Dreyer's
Ordet (1955), centering on a family with a lack of faith, but with a son who believes that he is
Jesus Christ and convinced that he is capable of performing miracles;
Federico Fellini's
Nights of Cabiria (1957), which deals with a prostitute's failed attempts to find love, her suffering and rejection;
Wild Strawberries (1957), by Ingmar Bergman, whose narrative concerns an elderly medical doctor, who is also a professor, whose nightmares lead him to re-evaluate his life; and
The 400 Blows (1959) by François Truffaut, whose main character is a young man trying to come of age despite abuse from his parents, schoolteachers, and society, this film is the first big step in the
French New Wave and for cinema, it showed that films can be made with little money, amateur actors, and a small crew. In Poland, the
Khrushchev Thaw permitted some relaxation of the regime's cultural policies, and productions such as
A Generation,
Kanal,
Ashes and Diamonds,
Lotna (1954–1959), all directed by
Andrzej Wajda, showed the
Polish Film School style.
Asia In
India, there was an art-film movement in
Bengali cinema known as "
Parallel Cinema" or "Indian New Wave". This was an alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema. It was known for its serious content,
realism and naturalism, with a keen eye on the social-political climate of the times. This movement is distinct from mainstream commercial cinema and began around the same time as
French and
Japanese New Wave. The most influential filmmakers involved in this movement were
Satyajit Ray,
Mrinal Sen and
Ritwik Ghatak. Some of the most internationally acclaimed films made in the period were
The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), a trio of films that tell the story of a poor country boy's growth to adulthood, and
Satyajit Ray's
Distant Thunder (1973), which tells the story of a farmer during a
famine in Bengal. Other acclaimed
Bengali filmmakers involved in this movement include
Rituparno Ghosh,
Aparna Sen and
Goutam Ghose.
Japanese filmmakers produced a number of films that broke with convention.
Akira Kurosawa's
Rashomon (1950), the first Japanese film to be widely screened in the West, depicts four witnesses' contradictory accounts of a rape and murder. In 1952, Kurosawa directed
Ikiru, a film about a Tokyo bureaucrat struggling to find a meaning for his life.
Tokyo Story (1953), by
Yasujirō Ozu, explores social changes of the era by telling the story of an aging couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children, but find the children are too self-absorbed to spend much time with them.
Seven Samurai (1954), by Kurosawa, tells the story of a farming village that hires seven master-less samurais to combat bandits.
Fires on the Plain (1959), by
Kon Ichikawa, explores the Japanese experience in World War II by depicting a sick Japanese soldier struggling to stay alive.
Ugetsu (1953), by
Kenji Mizoguchi, is a ghost story set in the late 16th century, which tells the story of peasants whose village is in the path of an advancing army. A year later, Mizoguchi directed
Sansho the Bailiff (1954), which tells the story of two aristocratic children sold into slavery; in addition to dealing with serious themes such as the loss of freedom, the film features beautiful images and long, complicated shots.
1960s The 1960s was an important period in art film, with the release of a number of groundbreaking films giving rise to the European art cinema. Jean-Luc Godard's
À bout de souffle (
Breathless) (1960) used innovative visual and editing techniques such as
jump cuts and
hand-held camera work. Godard, a leading figure of the French New Wave, would continue to make innovative films throughout the decade, proposing a whole new style of film-making. Following the success of
Breathless, Godard made two more very influential films,
Contempt in 1963, which it shown his view on studio filmmaking system, beautiful long take, and film within film, and
Pierrot le fou in 1965, which it is a mash of mash of crime and romance films with and his anti Hollywood style.
Jules et Jim, by François Truffaut, deconstructed a complex relationship of three individuals through innovative screenwriting, editing, and camera techniques. Italian director
Michelangelo Antonioni helped revolutionize filmmaking with such films as ''
L'Avventura (1960), influential for its landscape photography and framing techniques, follows the disappearance of a young upper-class woman during a boating trip, and the subsequent search by her lover and her best friend; La Notte (1961), a complex examination of a failed marriage that dealt with issues such as anomie and sterility; Eclipse (1962), about a young woman who is unable to form a solid relationship with her boyfriend because of his materialistic nature; Red Desert (1964), his first colour film, which deals with the need to adapt to the modern world; and Blowup'' (1966), his first English-language film, which examines issues of perception and reality as it follows a young photographer's attempt to discover whether he had photographed a murder.
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman began the 1960s with chamber pieces such as
Winter Light (1963) and
The Silence (1963), which deal with such themes as emotional isolation and a lack of communication. His films from the second half of the decade, such as
Persona (1966),
Shame (1968), and
A Passion (1969), deal with the idea of film as an artifice. The intellectual and visually expressive films of
Tadeusz Konwicki, such as ''
All Souls' Day (Zaduszki
, 1961) and Salto'' (1962), inspired discussions about war and raised existential questions on behalf of their everyman protagonists. Federico Fellini's
La Dolce Vita (1960) depicts a succession of nights and dawns in Rome as witnessed by a cynical journalist, this film is a bridge between his previous
Italian neorealist style and his later
surrealist style. In 1963, Fellini made
8½, an exploration of creative, marital and spiritual difficulties, filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer
Gianni di Venanzo. The 1961 film
Last Year at Marienbad by director
Alain Resnais examines perception and reality, using grand tracking shots that became widely influential.
Robert Bresson's
Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and
Mouchette (1967) are notable for their naturalistic, elliptical style. Spanish director Luis Buñuel also contributed heavily to the art of film with shocking, surrealist satires such as
Viridiana (1961) and
The Exterminating Angel (1962).
Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's film
Andrei Rublev (1966) is a portrait of the medieval Russian
icon painter of the same name. The film is also about artistic freedom and the possibility and necessity of making art for, and in the face of, a repressive authority. A cut version of the film was shown at the
1969 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the
FIPRESCI prize. At the end of the decade,
Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) wowed audiences with its scientific realism, pioneering use of special effects, and unusual visual imagery. In 1969, Andy Warhol released
Blue Movie, the first adult art film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States. and in the early 1980s,
Les Cahiers du Cinéma placed the film in its top 10 list. In 1967, in
Soviet Georgia, influential Georgian film director
Tengiz Abuladze directed
Vedreba (Entreaty), which was based on the motifs of
Vazha-Pshavela's literary works, where story is told in a poetic narrative style, full of symbolic scenes with philosophical meanings. In Iran,
Dariush Mehrjui's
The Cow (1969), about a man who becomes insane after the death of his beloved cow, sparked the new wave of
Iranian cinema. Puppeteer
Jim Henson had an arthouse success with his 1965 Oscar-nominated non-
Muppet short
Time Piece.
1970s In the early 1970s, directors shocked audiences with violent films such as
A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick's brutal exploration of futuristic youth gangs, and
Last Tango in Paris (1972),
Bernardo Bertolucci's taboo-breaking, sexually-explicit and controversial film. At the same time, other directors made more introspective films, such as
Andrei Tarkovsky's meditative science fiction film
Solaris (1972), supposedly intended as a Soviet riposte to
2001. In 1975 and 1979 respectively, Tarkovsky directed two other films, which garnered critical acclaim overseas:
Mirror and
Stalker.
Terrence Malick, who directed
Badlands (1973) and
Days of Heaven (1978), shared many traits with Tarkovsky, such as his long, lingering shots of natural beauty, evocative imagery, and poetic narrative style. Another feature of 1970s art films was the return to prominence of bizarre characters and imagery; which abound in the tormented, obsessed title character in
German New Wave director
Werner Herzog's
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1973), and in
cult films such as
Alejandro Jodorowsky's psychedelic
The Holy Mountain (1973) about a thief and an alchemist seeking the mythical
Lotus Island. The film
Taxi Driver (1976), by
Martin Scorsese, continues the themes that
A Clockwork Orange explored: an alienated population living in a violent, decaying society. The gritty violence and seething rage of Scorsese's film contrasts other films released in the same period, such as
David Lynch's dreamlike, surreal and industrial black and white classic
Eraserhead (1977). In 1974,
John Cassavetes offered a sharp commentary on American blue-collar life in
A Woman Under the Influence, which features an eccentric housewife slowly descending into madness. Also in the 1970s,
Radley Metzger directed several adult art films, such as
Barbara Broadcast (1977), which presented a
surrealistic "Buñellian" atmosphere, and
The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), based on the play
Pygmalion by
George Bernard Shaw (and its derivative,
My Fair Lady), which was considered, according to award-winning author
Toni Bentley, to be the "crown jewel" of the
Golden Age of Porn, an era in modern American culture that was inaugurated by the release of Andy Warhol's
Blue Movie (1969) and featured the phenomenon of "
porno chic" in which
adult erotic films began to obtain wide release, were publicly discussed by celebrities (such as
Johnny Carson and
Bob Hope) and taken seriously by film critics (such as
Roger Ebert).
1980s In 1980, director
Martin Scorsese gave audiences, who had become used to the escapist blockbuster adventures of
Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas, the gritty, harsh realism of his film
Raging Bull. In this film, actor
Robert De Niro took
method acting to an extreme to portray a boxer's decline from a prizewinning young fighter to an overweight, "has-been" nightclub owner.
Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner (1982) could also be seen as a science fiction art film, along with
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Blade Runner explores themes of
existentialism, or what it means to be human. A box-office failure, the film became popular on the arthouse circuit as a
cult oddity after the release of a "director's cut" became successful via
VHS home video. In the middle of the decade, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa used realism to portray the brutal, bloody violence of Japanese samurai warfare of the 16th century in
Ran (1985).
Ran followed the plot of
King Lear, in which an elderly king is betrayed by his children.
Sergio Leone also contrasted brutal violence with emotional substance in his epic tale of mobster life in
Once Upon a Time in America. '', including this recreation of a medieval gate. Other directors in the 1980s chose a more intellectual path, exploring philosophical and ethical issues like
Andrzej Wajda's
Man of Iron (1981), a critique of the Polish communist government, which won the 1981
Palme d'Or at the
Cannes Film Festival. Another Polish director,
Krzysztof Kieślowski, made
The Decalogue for television in 1988, a film series that explores ethical issues and moral puzzles. Two of these films were released theatrically as
A Short Film About Love and
A Short Film About Killing. In 1989,
Woody Allen made, in the words of
New York Times critic
Vincent Canby, his most "securely serious and funny film to date",
Crimes and Misdemeanors, which involves multiple stories of people who are trying to find moral and spiritual simplicity while facing dire issues and thoughts surrounding the choices they make. French director
Louis Malle chose another moral path to explore with the dramatization of his real-life childhood experiences in
Au revoir les enfants, which depicts the occupying Nazi government's deportation of French Jews to concentration camps during World War II. Another critically praised art film from this era,
Wim Wenders's road movie
Paris, Texas (1984), also won the Palme d'Or. Kieślowski was not the only director to transcend the distinction between the cinema and television.
Ingmar Bergman made
Fanny and Alexander (1982), which was shown on television in an extended five-hour version. In the United Kingdom,
Channel 4, a new television channel, financed, in whole or in part, many films released theatrically through its
Film 4 subsidiary.
Wim Wenders offered another approach to life from a spiritual standpoint in his 1987 film
Wings of Desire, a depiction of a "fallen angel" who lives among men, which won the
Best Director Award at the
Cannes Film Festival. In 1982, experimental director
Godfrey Reggio released the surprise arthouse hit
Koyaanisqatsi; a film without dialogue, which emphasizes cinematography (consisting primarily of
slow motion and
time-lapse cinematography of cities and natural landscapes, which results in a visual
tone poem) and philosophical ideology about technology and the environment. Another approach used by directors in the 1980s was to create bizarre, surreal alternative worlds.
Martin Scorsese's
After Hours (1985) is a comedy-thriller that depicts a man's baffling adventures in a surreal nighttime world of chance encounters with mysterious characters.
David Lynch's
Blue Velvet (1986), a
film noir-style thriller-mystery filled with symbolism and metaphors about polarized worlds and inhabited by distorted characters who are hidden in the seamy underworld of a small town, became surprisingly successful considering its highly disturbing subject matter.
Peter Greenaway's
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) is a fantasy/
black comedy about
cannibalism and extreme violence with an intellectual theme: a critique of "elite culture" in
Thatcherian Britain. According to
Raphaël Bassan, in his article "
The Angel: Un météore dans le ciel de l'animation",
Patrick Bokanowski's
The Angel, shown at the
1982 Cannes Film Festival, can be considered the beginning of contemporary animation. The characters' masks erase all human personality and give the impression of total control over the "matter" of the image and its optical composition, using distorted areas, obscure visions, metamorphoses, and synthetic objects. In 1989,
Hou Hsiao-hsien's
A City of Sadness became the first
Taiwanese film awarded the
Golden Lion at the
Venice Film Festival. The film shows the history of Taiwan through one family, and marks another step of the Taiwanese New Wave, which tends to depict realistic, down-to-earth life in both urban and rural Taiwan.
1990s In the 1990s, directors took inspiration from the success of
David Lynch's
Blue Velvet (1986) and
Peter Greenaway's
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) and created films with bizarre alternative worlds and elements of surrealism. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's
Dreams (1990) depicted his imaginative reveries in a series of vignettes that range from idyllic pastoral country landscapes to horrific visions of tormented demons and a blighted post-nuclear war landscape. The
Coen Brothers'
Barton Fink (1991), which won the
Palme d'Or at the
Cannes Film Festival, features various literary allusions in an enigmatic story about a writer who encounters a range of bizarre characters, including an alcoholic, abusive novelist and a serial killer.
Lost Highway (1997), from the same director as
Blue Velvet, is a psychological
thriller that explores fantasy worlds, bizarre time-space transformations, and mental breakdowns using surreal imagery. Other directors in the 1990s explored philosophical issues and themes such as identity, chance, death, and existentialism.
Gus Van Sant's
My Own Private Idaho (1991) and
Wong Kar-wai's
Chungking Express (1994) explored the theme of identity. The former is an independent road movie/buddy film about two young street hustlers, which explores the theme of the search for home and identity. It was called a "high-water mark in '90s independent film", a "stark, poetic rumination", and an "exercise in film experimentation" of "high artistic quality". explores themes of identity, disconnection, loneliness, and isolation in the "metaphoric concrete jungle" of modern Hong Kong.
Todd Haynes explored the life of a suburban housewife and her eventual death from toxic materials in the 1995 critical success,
Safe. In 1991, another important film of
Edward Yang, a Taiwanese New Wave director,
A Brighter Summer Day is portrayal of one normal teenager life that evacuated from China to Taiwan which affacted by political situation, school situation, and family situation that make a main protagonist murders a girl in the end. In 1992,
Rebels of the Neon God, first feature film of
Tsai Ming-liang, second generation of Taiwanese New Wave, it has his unique style of filmmaking like alienation, slow movement of actor (his recurring cast,
Lee Kang-sheng), slow-paced, and a few dialogues. Daryush Shokof's film
Seven Servants (1996) is an original high art cinema piece about a man who strives to "unite" the world's races until his last breath. One year after
Seven Servants,
Abbas Kiarostami's film
Taste of Cherry (1997), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, tells a similar tale with a different twist; both films are about a man trying to hire a person to bury him after he commits suicide.
Seven Servants was shot in a minimalist style, with long takes, a leisurely pace, and long periods of silence. The film is also notable for its use of long shots and overhead shots to create a sense of distance between the audience and the characters.
Zhang Yimou's early 1990s works such as
Ju Dou (1990),
Raise the Red Lantern (1991),
The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and
To Live (1994) explore human emotions through poignant narratives.
To Live won the Grand Jury Prize. Several 1990s films explored existentialist-oriented themes related to life, chance, and death.
Robert Altman's
Short Cuts (1993) explores themes of chance, death, and infidelity by tracing 10 parallel and interwoven stories. The film, which won the
Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup at the
Venice Film Festival, was called a "many-sided, many mooded, dazzlingly structured eclectic jazz mural" by
Chicago Tribune critic Michael Wilmington.
Krzysztof Kieślowski's
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) is a drama about the theme of identity and a political allegory about the East/West split in Europe; the film features stylised cinematography, an ethereal atmosphere, and unexplained supernatural elements.
Darren Aronofsky's film
Pi (1998) is an "incredibly complex and ambiguous film filled with both incredible style and substance" about a paranoid mathematician's "search for peace". The film creates a
David Lynch-inspired "eerie
Eraserhead-like world" shot in "black-and-white, which lends a dream-like atmosphere to all of the proceedings" and explores issues such as "metaphysics and spirituality".
Matthew Barney's
The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) is a cycle of five symbolic, allegorical films that creates a self-enclosed aesthetic system, aimed to explore the process of creation. The films are filled with allusions to reproductive organs and sexual development, and use narrative models drawn from biography, mythology, and geology. In 1997,
Terrence Malick returned from a 20-year absence with
The Thin Red Line, a war film that uses poetry and nature to stand apart from typical war movies. It was nominated for seven
Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Some 1990s films mix an ethereal or surreal visual atmosphere with the exploration of philosophical issues.
Sátántangó (1994), by the
Hungarian director Béla Tarr, is a -hour-long film, shot in black and white, that deals with Tarr's favorite theme, inadequacy, as
con man Irimias comes back to a village at an unspecified location in Hungary, presenting himself as a leader and
Messiah figure to the gullible villagers. Kieslowski's
Three Colors trilogy (1993–94), particularly
Blue (1993) and
Red (1994), deal with human relationships and how people cope with them in their day-to-day lives. The trilogy of films was called "explorations of spirituality and existentialism" that created a "truly transcendent experience".
The Guardian listed
Breaking the Waves (1996) as one of its top 25 arthouse films. The reviewer stated that "[a]ll the ingredients that have come to define
Lars von Trier's career (and in turn, much of modern European cinema) are present here: high-wire acting, innovative visual techniques, a suffering heroine, issue-grappling drama, and a galvanising shot of controversy to make the whole thing unmissable".
2000s Lewis Beale of
Film Journal International stated that Australian director
Andrew Dominik's western film
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is "a fascinating, literary-based work that succeeds as both art and genre film". Unlike the action-oriented
Jesse James films of the past, Dominik's unconventional epic perhaps more accurately details the outlaw's relinquishing psyche during the final months of his life as he succumbs to the paranoia of being captured and develops a precarious friendship with his eventual assassin,
Robert Ford. In 2009, director
Paul Thomas Anderson claimed that his 2002 film
Punch-Drunk Love about a shy, repressed rage-aholic was "an art house
Adam Sandler film", a reference to the unlikely inclusion of "frat boy" comic Sandler in the film; critic Roger Ebert claims that
Punch Drunk Love "may be the key to all of the Adam Sandler films, and may liberate Sandler for a new direction in his work. He can't go on making those moronic comedies forever, can he? Who would have guessed he had such uncharted depths?"
2010s Apichatpong Weerasethakul's
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the 2010 Cannes Palme d'Or, "ties together what might just be a series of beautifully shot scenes with moving and funny musings on the nature of death and reincarnation, love, loss, and karma". Weerasethakul is an independent film director, screenwriter, and film producer, who works outside the strict confines of the Thai film studio system. His films deal with dreams, nature, sexuality, including his own homosexuality, and Western perceptions of
Thailand and Asia. Weerasethakul's films display a preference for unconventional narrative structures (such as placing titles/credits at the middle of a film) and for working with non-actors.
Terrence Malick's
The Tree of Life (2011) was released after decades of development and won the Palme d'Or at the
2011 Cannes Film Festival; it was highly praised by critics. At the Avon Theater in
Stamford, Connecticut, a message was posted about the theater's no-refund policy due to "some customer feedback and a polarized audience response" to the film. The theater stated that it "stands behind this ambitious work of art and other challenging films".
Drive (2011), directed by
Nicolas Winding Refn, is commonly called an
arthouse action film. Also in 2011, director
Lars von Trier released
Melancholia, a movie dealing with
depression and other mental disorders while also showing a family's reaction to an approaching planet that could collide with the Earth. The movie was well received, some claiming it to be Von Trier's masterpiece with others highlighting
Kirsten Dunst's performance, the visuals, and realism depicted in the movie.
Jonathan Glazer's
Under the Skin (an example of "
arthouse sci-fi") was screened at the
2013 Venice Film Festival and received a theatrical release through indie studio
A24 the following year. The film, starring
Scarlett Johansson, follows an
alien in human form as she travels around
Glasgow, picking up unwary men for sex, harvesting their flesh and stripping them of their humanity. Dealing with themes such as sexuality, humanity, and objectification, the film received positive reviews and was hailed by some as a masterpiece; critic
Richard Roeper described the film as "what we talk about when we talk about film as art". This decade also saw a re-emergence of "
art horror" with the success of films like
Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010),
Black Swan (2010),
Stoker (2013),
Enemy (2013),
The Babadook (2014),
Only Lovers Left Alive (2014),
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014),
Goodnight Mommy (2014),
Nightcrawler (2014),
It Follows (2015),
The Witch (2015),
The Wailing (2016),
Split (2016), the
social thriller Get Out (2017),
Mother! (2017),
Annihilation (2018),
A Quiet Place (2018),
Hereditary (2018),
Suspiria (2018;
a remake of the 1977 film of the same name),
Mandy (2018),
The Nightingale (2018),
The House That Jack Built (2018),
Us (2019),
Midsommar (2019),
The Lighthouse (2019),
Color Out of Space (2019) and the
Academy Award for Best Picture winner
Parasite (2019).
Arthouse animation (with Oscar-nominated titles like
Song of the Sea and
Loving Vincent) was also gaining momentum during this era as an alternative to mainstream animated features alongside the works of acclaimed animators
Makoto Shinkai,
Satoshi Kon,
Don Hertzfeldt and
Ari Folman from the previous decade.
Tom Shone said of the work of
Christopher Nolan: "He has completed eleven features, [...] all ticking the boxes of studio entertainment, yet indelibly marked with the kind of personal themes and obsessions that are more traditionally the preserve of the art house: the passage of time, the failures of memory, our quirks of denial and deflection, the intimate clockwork of our interior lives, set against landscapes in which the fault lines of late
industrialism meet the fissure points and paradoxes of the
information age."
2020s During the 2020s,
art-house cinema expanded globally through online platforms. The
COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift: major
festivals went virtual, enabling global audiences (critics and cinephiles alike) to see independent and experimental films without travel. Many art-house cinemas also launched virtual programs and
streaming services to reach broader audiences. New storytelling forms emerged. "
Desktop cinema" films―narratives unfolding entirely on computer or mobile screens―treat the screen as both camera and canvas, reflecting contemporary online culture. ==Criticism==