10 Awesome Recent Movies You Probably Missed

The most recent Academy Awards ceremony was a largely satisfying affair in which the right movies mostly won, but one Oscar that perhaps should've gone to a different movie was the one for Best Foreign Language Feature. I'm Still Here is a great movie and a worthy winner by any reasonable metric, yet there was something even more incredible lurking in there - Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Much like I'm Still Here, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a devastating indictment of an oppressive regime. Sadly, while the former film focused on historical oppression, Seed's narrative is more contemporary. It blends documentary and fiction in a way that's characteristic of Iranian cinema, with real events being worked into the narrative, and the film took on a new meaning when Rasoulof was sentenced to imprisonment for his repeated defiance of censorship. He and some of the cast and crew actually fled to Europe not long after the film was completed.

Regardless, even without this backstory, Seed is a masterful film. Rasoulof's tense direction and layered screenplay show a fantastic filmmaker at the height of his powers, and his terrific work here is buoyed by exquisite performances from an astonishingly good cast.

Seed has received a fairly limited release and it won't have reached as many people as it should have, which is so frustrating. Hopefully, it'll find a wider audience soon, for it is arguably one of the best films of the 2020s so far.