6. Tenet (2020)

Tenet revolves around John David Washington’s “The Protagonist” (cue cheers), a CIA agent recruited into a mission to prevent World War III. He is armed with some unique tools, primarily the inverted entropy of objects, but also a friend named Neil (Robert Pattinson). Though Tenet’s inversion motif is hammered at every way (see: the title), it was a balm for anyone fatigued by hegemonic tentpoles. It is opaque, obnoxiously so, and buoyed by the machismo of its exhilarating physics-be-damned set-pieces which come off like Call of Duty by way of Andrei Tarkovsky.

But the movie’s silver bullet rests in the melodrama of Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki), a key character dead set on escaping her abusive marriage to a criminal oligarch (Kenneth Branagh in a Cold War-era Russian accent). Through her, Tenet turns transformative, serving up a story that blurs determinism and free will to posit that whatever we must do, we’re already capable of. Tenet is a James Bond-style summer action thriller, and a good one that comes sharply dressed in arthouse themes.