The Highest-Rated Films Since 2020

Twelve films have cleared 9.0 on our scale since the start of 2020, and the list looks nothing like a best-of-decade reel. There is a ferry, a bus depot, a florist and a filing error. That is not a contrarian pose; it is what happens when you score a film on the thing it is actually attempting rather than on how loudly it arrived. Plenty of enormous films in that stretch have been good; a dozen have been close to faultless, and most cost less than a week of marketing on the films that beat them.

What 9.0 Actually Means Here

Our scale runs to one decimal place and the top band is deliberately stingy. We weigh four things: how completely a film realises its own premise, whether the craft survives a second viewing, whether the performances do something a competent actor could not, and how much is still in your head a month later. A film can be thrilling and still land at 8.4 if it collapses once the surprise wears off.

Everything below was scored on first release: no restorations, no director’s cuts, and no curve for ambition. A film that aimed low and hit exactly what it aimed at beats a film that aimed high and clipped the wall.

1. The Salt Line: 9.6 / 10

Ines Bardi’s film about a ferry crew working a dying crossing spends almost its entire runtime on water, and it contains the most confident direction of the period. Nadia Oyelaran builds a performance out of procedural decisions (how to coil a rope, when to look away) that pays off in a final twenty minutes you will not shake. Reservation: the middle hour is patient enough that a friend I watched it with gave up, and the film does not care.

2. Ninety Seconds of Winter: 9.5 / 10

A chamber piece set entirely in a frozen bus depot over one night, staged by Olek Marchetti with the discipline of theatre and the camera language of a thriller. Aimee Serrano and Tobin Clarke spend forty minutes circling a single conversation, and the film never cheats to break the stalemate. Reservation: the ending answers a question the film was better off leaving open.

3. Quiet Country: 9.4 / 10

Delphine Roux-Hayes takes the inheritance fight you have seen a hundred times and shoots it like a weather report: flat light, long takes, no score. Marianne Kessler is extraordinary as the daughter who stayed, and nobody in the film is a villain; the land simply costs more than the family can carry. Reservation: the last ten minutes refuse to explain themselves, and plenty of viewers will read that as a cop-out.

4. The Ledger of Small Hours: 9.3 / 10

Sam Okonjo’s film is about an accountant on the night shift in a hospital basement, and that is genuinely all it is about until it is not. Grace Inamura plays exhaustion better than anyone working, and the refusal to dramatise the film’s sadness makes the one moment that does get dramatised land like a dropped tray in a silent room. Reservation: a third-act turn is tidier than everything around it deserves.

5. Fivemile: 9.2 / 10

Two estranged brothers walk a coastal path for four days and talk about almost nothing. Bridget Naughton shoots the walk with real geography, so you feel every climb, and she lets Sean Corrigan and Lily Mbeki carry twenty years of history in the way one hands over a water bottle. Reservation: anyone who needs a plot engine will find the first hour an act of faith.

6. Nachtblume: 9.2 / 10

Ruben Kastner’s Berlin film follows a florist who cannot stop arranging other people’s grief. Greta Lindholm is on screen for nearly every frame and never once asks for sympathy, which is precisely why she gets it, and the control of colour is the best thing in it. Reservation: it is a slow read, and subtitle-averse viewers will fight it.

7. The Understudy: 9.1 / 10

Nuala Brennan sets a two-hander backstage at a theatre that is about to close and uses the building as a third character. Cara Devereux plays the woman who has covered the same role for eleven years; Ola Kowalczyk plays the star who has never noticed her. It is the funniest film here and comfortably the cruellest. Reservation: the stage metaphor gets underlined once more than it needs.

8. Cornfield Gothic: 9.1 / 10

Vera Lindqvist’s rural nightmare is patient for an hour and then genuinely terrifying for eight minutes, and those eight minutes justify the whole enterprise. Hollis Park gives a performance of pure watchfulness, and the sound design does more work than most horror scores manage across a trilogy. Reservation: audiences arriving for a horror film will feel mis-sold by the drama around it.

9. Two Rooms in Lisbon: 9.0 / 10

Marco Preti locks two recently divorced people into adjacent apartments for a weekend and lets the walls do the arguing. Sofia Beltran and Emile Nardone have the sort of chemistry that makes eavesdropping feel like a privilege, and the script refuses to let either of them win. Reservation: it is a filmed play and it knows it.

10. The Last Ferry to Ailsa: 9.0 / 10

Fiona McNair’s island drama takes place over one weekend before a storm closes the crossing for a week. Agnes Kirwan plays a woman who has spent thirty years being reasonable at people, and the film never punishes her for finally stopping; Douglas Hale is quietly devastating as the brother who stayed. Reservation: the ensemble is broad enough that two threads get short-changed in the final act.

11. Bone Dry: 9.0 / 10

Adeola Bright takes the noir template to a drought town where everyone is rationing something, and shoots heat like a character with a grudge. Chidi Nwosu makes a decent man’s slow compromise gripping, and Marisol Reyes steals scenes from the corner of the frame. Reservation: the mystery resolves more conventionally than the setup promised.

12. Harrowgate: 9.0 / 10

Joel Rasmussen’s civil-service thriller is about a filing error and it is tenser than most films about heists. Erik Sandvik plays a man whose entire personality is procedure; Priya Raghunathan plays the colleague who understands exactly what he is doing and helps anyway. Reservation: the final quarter explains the conspiracy outright, where the rest of the film had the nerve to let you assemble it.

What the Highest Scorers Share

These twelve films have almost nothing in common on paper (a ferry, a depot, a florist, a filing error) but they behave the same way. First, they are tightly scoped. Nine run under 105 minutes and take place in one or two locations, and even the three that roam follow a single relationship. Scope is what lets a film spend its entire budget of attention in one place.

Second, they trust silence. Every one of them has at least one sequence with no dialogue, no music and no cutting for longer than thirty seconds. That is the most reliable marker of a film that has finished its thinking; films still working themselves out on set fill that space with score.

Third, and the least comfortable thing to write down: they were made by directors working well below their reputation. Bardi had one feature behind her; Bright had none. The moment a filmmaker is handed a budget that expects a return, scoping discipline tends to go, because money wants a third act that travels. Almost everyone here has since taken a bigger job. And the honest prediction is that none of those bigger films will reach 9.0.

The Ones That Just Missed

The gap between 8.8 and 9.0 is usually one decision. The Wren House (8.9) is a superb two-hander that loses its nerve in the final scene. Every River Bends (8.9) has the best opening hour of 2024 and a second hour that keeps escalating because it does not trust quiet. Paper Lions (8.9) is the most frustrating: three extraordinary performances and one subplot that belongs in a different film. Cut it and the score is a 9.2. The Long Quiet and Sirens of the Interior (both 8.8) are thrilling once and thinner the second time, which is what the top band exists to catch.

Where This List Is Strong, and Where It Is Fragile

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