What do the majority of 21st-century films from Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, the Coen brothers, and Quentin Tarantino have in common? Besides a mean quality that could be described with restraint as “above average,” the collective filmography of these beloved American directors has been, for the past quarter-century, dominated by period pieces. There are some exceptions (though notably, many of those exceptions are set in the future), and there are plenty of important American filmmakers who are bolder about staying in the moment—Spike Lee comes insistently to mind; he had a movie making explicit and repeated references to 9/11 in theaters 15 months after it happened—but there’s a tendency for our most distinctive, heavy-hitting auteurs to dig into the past, rather than evoke their own present.
The fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another takes place not in the ’70s (when several of PTA’s movies are set), nor the ’80s (when its loose source material is set), but some kind of slightly ambiguous amalgam of the present, recent past, and near future feels like a major shift. Two months before that film’s release was another and much stranger milestone: Eddington contains the first clear depiction in a major American movie of a man who very obviously has COVID-19. (Joaquin Phoenix’s character only remains technically undiagnosed by virtue of his refusal to listen to his test results.) Yes, the movie is specifically set in 2020, which technically is a period. But though you may not see COVID testing sites or many masking debates in 2025, Eddington‘s endless scroll of contemporary issues make it exceedingly, uncomfortably current. If it’s a period, it’s one we’re still in. Case in point: Bugonia isn’t as fully filtered through smaller phone screens as Eddington, but it’s still shot through with fried post-COVID nerves and mid-2020s desperation.
So, is 2025 the year that auteur movies, led by films like One Battle After Another, Eddington, and Bugonia, finally got contemporary? Yes and no. Many of the year’s best U.S. films—and your mileage may vary on that, depending on your Eddington fandom—still linger in the various stretches of the 20th century. Put together, however, they add up to more than a collection of period pieces. They feel like a long, digressive history built on cascading endings.
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams covers the most temporal ground here, picking up early in the 20th century and following Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) from childhood until his death in 1968. The majority of the film, however, takes place in the first half of the century, where it overlaps a bit with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which is set over the course of a few days in 1932, following two Black World War I vets turned gangsters turned juke-joint operators. That early-decade vantage is also seen in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, which follows illicit, large-scale business wheelings and dealings in the year 1950; and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which follows illegal, small-scale wheelings and dealings in the year 1970. One Battle doesn’t fill out the remaining time completely, but Sinners has a crucial epilogue that at least gives audiences a taste of the early ’90s, and whatever 16-years-and-change that Anderson’s movie covers (whether it actually begins in the early Obama era in order to jump forward to now, or starts later and jumps to a near/alternate future) helps bring us up to date.
It’s not a perfect timeline by any means, but it’s still an impressive sampling of 20th-century American history. Last year, the odd couple of The Brutalist and Here covered similar ground all by themselves. Neither felt quite so elegiac, even when peeking in on their protagonists in advancing age. This year’s crop, by contrast, insists that the 20th century was a series of endings—even or especially when they could be framed as new beginnings instead. The second wave of industrialization gradually sweeps across the landscape of Train Dreams, as Grainier initially gets a job building a bridge for a railroad that, the narration notes, he won’t ride until many years later. Soon Grainier is logging in the Pacific Northwest, a job that is crudely low-tech and dangerous by many standards, yet also designed to clear the way for progress. “We just cut down trees that have been here for 500 years. Upsets a man’s soul whether they recognize it or not,” says Grainier’s coworker Arn, who works explosives for the lumber company while questioning the sense of it all. Later, he’s killed by a falling tree branch.
That might sound pithy, but that’s just the relentless forward motion of Train Dreams, felt even when the actual narrative skips ahead or briefly jumps back. Not every technological advance or industrial landscape gets its own lament; the movie ends, in fact, on Grainier riding in a biplane and experiencing something like genuine wonder that would he would not have been able to access, at least not in that form, at the beginning of his episodic, tragic, poetic story. But the quietness of that life is easy to drown out with industrial equipment—something echoed by No Other Choice, a non-U.S. 2025 movie that connects deforestation to a larger sense of ending, and to fighting for the last few spots on whatever final departing vehicle you can find.
Sinners shrinks all that down to a day and change. The experiences of Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan, echo beyond the timeframe of the film, as well as leading up to it in the movie’s ample sense of offscreen history. But just as Coogler presides over a fantastical, hallucinatory expansion of time when a blues jam gives way to a period-defying continuum of Black music, the single night that Smoke and Stack are able to operate their juke joint winds up feeling like a microcosm of a cultural movement: a sense of community-based reclamation followed by a violent attempt at assimilation (in this case, from literal vampires). The cathartic Klan-massacre finale keeps the movie from feeling hopeless, yet it still haunts Sammie (Miles Caton) long after he escapes. He explains it to an immortal Stack in that 1992 coda: He still has nightmares about the vampire attack, and he still remembers the day leading up to it as the best of his life. Even with all of his success (and Stack’s subsequent immortality), their freedom doesn’t feel equal to that day.
It’s not unlike the sentiments expressed at the end of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel back in 2014. His 2025 film The Phoenician Scheme is less mournful; it ends quite happily, all things considered, with an immoral rich man finding some level of humility by losing his fortune and finding greater meaning in his family. If it were taking place today, the movie might even risk appearing overly hopeful about the prospects of a rich man seeing heaven, or even just avoiding hell (whether for himself or what he’s created for others). But by setting the movie in 1950, not long before the Eisenhower years that would see postwar prosperity (for some, anyway) and end with the president warning about the “military-industrial complex,” Phoenician Scheme intentionally hedges on its “infrastructure”-obsessed, heavily armed hero. There will be more like him, not all subject to clever, redemptive fables, never to settle for modesty when more is attainable. Even those who merely aspire to his wealth, like the conniving art thief at the center of The Mastermind, more often meet the ignoble fate reserved for that film’s ’70s dropout without a cause: In a Coen-ish bit of poetic injustice, he’s arrested as a Vietnam War protestor—his minor, selfish spree brought to a close by seismic political events.
The year’s most unambiguous depiction of ending, though, comes from a movie casually set sometime in the 1990s. Carson Lund’s Eephus is an unassuming little picture about the last game played at a Massachusetts ballfield by two amateur baseball teams, taking place over the course of that game as it stretches on, running out the clock. We see gameplay, game delays, petty arguments, passersby with their own observations, and day turning into night. Lund cleverly eschews grandstanding about why the field has to go; it’s making way for a new middle school, not some kind of soulless corporate development or technological encroachment, which adds some extra laughs when the players grouse about it anyway. This doesn’t have to be the last time any of these mostly middle-aged guys play ball, and for some of them, it probably won’t be. But the movie is suffused with the bittersweet acceptance that for some of them, it will be. A single-day timeframe for a movie normally reflects a compressed immediacy—an intentional limitation. Here, it becomes a quietly stunning depiction of time’s passage.
One Battle After Another, meanwhile, uses more conventional time-jumps to get us up to something resembling the present. In some ways, the movie feels like an apocalyptic culmination of the forces at work in the aforementioned period pieces. The French 75, a revolutionary group that includes the future Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) alongside a bunch of more capable Black women, seem to be rebelling against some kind of emerging fascist threat (and if they’re just rebelling against something like our current government, well, actually…). Years later, with Bob and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) in hiding, have conditions worsened? Stayed the same? The movie is intentionally vague, and its vagueness about its revolutionary politics—they’re the good guys, but Anderson isn’t offering a handbook—has rankled those who see those politics as smirky window dressing for a sometimes-slapsticky comedy of aging. You’re laughing? The United States as we know it is ending after years of struggle, and you’re laughing?
On a continuum with these other films, though, One Battle After Another feels most invigorated about the future, even without a specific plan beyond accepting our kids’ ability to make good trouble—maybe accepting, even, the many finalities that make up our lives. That doesn’t invalidate its grimmer companions in here-and-now cinema, the Bugonias or Eddingtons of the year. But it does make them seem a little smaller, even as they tackle a broad swath of modern issues. By making his first mostly contemporary film in over 20 years, one that flows so naturally from a whole century-spanning crop of movies this year, Anderson (alongside these other American filmmakers) has produced work that feels richer and fuller without sacrificing its present-day relevance. America is still a relatively young country, and the wounds of the 20th century are fresher than they might first appear. The specific damage of the past five years is obviously worth examining, but some of 2025’s best movies suggest that the truths found in so-called “period pieces” are more fluid, reflective, and even dangerous than their reputation.
