FMFAU

A decade that began at home

The 2020s opened with cinemas closed across most of the world. Films that had been made for the big screen were sent to streaming services instead, and audiences who had planned an evening out watched new releases from the sofa. The One and Only Ivan, Magic Camp and Safety all arrived this way through Disney's service. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga gave millions of households something to sing in a summer when the real contest was cancelled, and its ballad about an Icelandic fishing town was nominated for the Academy Award for best song.

When the doors reopened, the habit stayed. Viewers had learned that a romantic comedy, a family adventure or a true story could be enjoyed just as well at home, and the services responded with a steady supply. At the same time the cinema rediscovered its own strengths with big, colourful productions meant to be shared: Elvis, Jungle Cruise, The Fall Guy, A Complete Unknown. The result is a decade with two front doors, and FMFAU lists films from both with equal care.

Something else changed quietly. Awards that once went only to cinema releases began to recognise films from the services. CODA was bought at a festival, released online and went on to win best picture. tick, tick... BOOM! and Being the Ricardos earned nominations for their leading actors. The distinction between a television film and a cinema film, firm for seventy years, has all but dissolved, and the films on this guide are the proof. The finding titles page lists every route into the catalogue.

2020 and 2021

Sixty-four films come from the first two years. CODA is the one to start with. Ruby Rossi is seventeen and the only hearing member of her family; she interprets for her parents and brother on their fishing boat off Massachusetts, and she loves to sing, a gift they have a hard time imagining. Siân Heder's film is funny, salty and generous to every character, and the scene in which Ruby's father places his hands on her throat to feel her voice is among the most moving of the decade. It won all three Academy Awards for which it was nominated, with Troy Kotsur honoured as best supporting actor.

King Richard tells how Richard Williams drew up a plan for two tennis champions before his daughters Venus and Serena were born, and then carried it out on the public courts of Compton. Will Smith won the Academy Award for the part. Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's memory of his own childhood on a single street in 1969, is filmed in black and white with a child's sense of wonder and a soundtrack of Van Morrison; it won the award for original screenplay.

Musicals had a remarkable year in 2021. In the Heights fills a corner of upper Manhattan with dancers, including one number staged in a public swimming pool with hundreds of performers. tick, tick... BOOM!, the first film directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, stars Andrew Garfield as the young composer Jonathan Larson, racing to finish a show before his thirtieth birthday. A new Cinderella gave the heroine a dressmaking business and a pop score.

The adventure of 2020 was The Call of the Wild, with Harrison Ford and a computer-animated dog named Buck in the Yukon of the gold rush. Dolittle put Robert Downey Jr. among talking animals, and Jungle Cruise, released the following summer, sent Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt up the Amazon on a ramshackle steamer in the spirit of the old adventure serials. Bill & Ted Face the Music reunited two much-loved heroes, now middle-aged fathers, with one last song to write.

Smaller films of these two years reward attention. C'mon C'mon pairs Joaquin Phoenix, as a radio journalist, with a nine-year-old nephew on a trip across America, in black and white. The Duke, the final feature of the director Roger Michell, tells the true story of a Newcastle pensioner who was tried in 1965 over the disappearance of a Goya portrait from the National Gallery. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain gives Benedict Cumberbatch the role of the Victorian artist who taught Britain to love cats. One Night in Miami..., Radioactive, Misbehaviour and Penguin Bloom are drawn from life too. All sixty-four are on the 2020 to 2021 shelf.

2022 and 2023

Sixty-one films cover the middle of the catalogue. Elvis is the loudest of them. Baz Luhrmann tells the singer's life at the speed of a fairground ride, from the Beale Street clubs to the Las Vegas residency, with Austin Butler in a performance that earned an Academy Award nomination and Tom Hanks as the manager who kept him close. It received eight nominations in all and brought the songs to a generation that had known them only by reputation.

Past Lives could hardly be quieter. Two childhood friends in Seoul are separated when one family emigrates. They find each other online twelve years later, and meet in New York after another twelve, when she is married. Celine Song's first film is about the lives we might have led, and it ends with a walk to a taxi that viewers discuss for days. It was nominated for best picture and holds one of the highest ratings on FMFAU.

The spring of 2023 produced a small wave of films about how famous products came to be. Air, directed by Ben Affleck, follows a basketball scout at a struggling sports company who stakes everything on signing a rookie named Michael Jordan; Matt Damon and Viola Davis lead the cast. BlackBerry is the comic rise and fall of the Canadian engineers who put email in a pocket. Flamin' Hot, directed by Eva Longoria, tells of a factory janitor with an idea for a spicy snack, and The Beanie Bubble revisits the soft-toy craze of the 1990s.

Family and fantasy were well served. Disenchanted returned Amy Adams to the role of Giselle fifteen years after Enchanted, now a suburban stepmother whose wish goes wrong. Slumberland sends a lighthouse keeper's daughter through a world of dreams with a horned rogue played by Jason Momoa. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile moves a singing reptile into a New York brownstone, and Chupa hides a gentle winged creature on a ranch in Mexico. Downton Abbey: A New Era takes half the household to the south of France while a film crew occupies the house.

The true stories of these years are among the most inspiring on the site. A Million Miles Away follows José Hernández from the fields of California, where he picked crops with his family as a boy, to the International Space Station. The Boys in the Boat, directed by George Clooney, rows with the University of Washington crew to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The Burial is a courtroom story with Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones, and The Lost King recounts how an amateur historian found the grave of Richard III beneath a Leicester car park.

Three films from Britain and Ireland show the strength of the smaller production. Flora and Son, from the director of Sing Street, has a Dublin mother rescue a battered guitar from a skip and take lessons online from a teacher in Los Angeles. The Old Oak, which Ken Loach has called his last film, sets the regulars of a pub in a former mining village beside newly arrived Syrian families and finds what they share. What's Love Got to Do with It? follows a London film-maker as she documents her neighbour's arranged marriage. The 2022 to 2023 shelf holds all sixty-one.

2024 to 2026

The newest shelf has forty-five films and is still filling. A Complete Unknown leads it. James Mangold's film covers four years, from Bob Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 with a guitar and a notebook to the evening in 1965 when he plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival. Timothée Chalamet sings and plays every song himself, and the film received eight Academy Award nominations. Maria, with Angelina Jolie as the soprano Maria Callas in her final week in Paris, is its operatic counterpart.

The Fall Guy is a love letter to stunt performers, with Ryan Gosling as a stuntman who has to find a missing film star and win back the director, played by Emily Blunt. IF, written and directed by John Krasinski, imagines what becomes of imaginary friends when their children grow up. Paddington in Peru sends the bear and the Brown family up the Amazon in search of Aunt Lucy, with Olivia Colman as a suspiciously cheerful nun and Antonio Banderas as a riverboat captain.

The true stories continue. Young Woman and the Sea is the story of Trudy Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the English Channel and beat the men's record by nearly two hours. Arthur the King follows an adventure racer and the stray dog who attached himself to the team for hundreds of miles through the Dominican jungle. The Beautiful Game visits the Homeless World Cup, and My Penguin Friend tells of a Brazilian fisherman and the penguin that returned to him each year.

From 2025 come Freakier Friday, which reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan for a swap involving four people this time; Train Dreams, a contemplative portrait of a railway labourer in the American Northwest of a century ago; Jay Kelly, with George Clooney as a film star on a journey through Europe; A Big Bold Beautiful Journey; and Goodbye June, the first film directed by Kate Winslet. Five titles carry the date 2026, among them Voicemails for Isabelle and The Love Hypothesis. The whole shelf is at 2024 to 2026, and the year by year page picks four from each period.

Romance

Seventy-two films are love stories, and the decade has given the genre a second spring. For some years the romantic comedy had almost vanished from cinemas. The streaming services brought it back in quantity, and by the middle of the decade it was returning to the big screen as well. The films on FMFAU show the whole revival, from light holiday escapes to some of the most admired dramas of recent years.

The travel romance is the decade's signature form. A heroine with a plan arrives somewhere beautiful, the plan collapses, and a local with opinions is standing by. In Love in the Villa two strangers are booked into the same house in Verona. In A Perfect Pairing a Los Angeles wine executive works a season on an Australian sheep station. Irish Wish grants a wish on a windy cliff, La Dolce Villa restores a house in Tuscany, Find Me Falling retires a rock star to Cyprus, and Solo Mio sends a jilted groom on his Italian honeymoon alone. The Wrong Paris plays the idea for laughs: its heroine signs up for a dating show in France and lands in a town of the same name in Texas.

A second group grows out of two series that began in the previous decade. To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You and To All the Boys: Always and Forever carry Lara Jean from her first real relationship to the choice of a university. The Kissing Booth 2 and The Kissing Booth 3 do the same for Elle. Around them stand Along for the Ride, Chemical Hearts, Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between and The Map That Leads to You, gentle stories of the summer before adult life begins.

The premise comedies are great fun. Love Hard matches a Los Angeles writer with a man whose online profile used a friend's photographs. Your Place or Mine has two old friends, played by Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, swap homes and coasts for a week. Upgraded bumps an art-world intern into first class, where she lets a stranger believe she is her own boss. Meet Cute uses a time machine to repeat a perfect first date, About Fate a mistaken address on New Year's Eve, and Voicemails for Isabelle a telephone number that now belongs to somebody else.

And then there are the romances that stay in the mind. Past Lives is the finest. The Idea of You, with Anne Hathaway as a gallery owner of forty who falls for a singer sixteen years younger, treats its heroine's happiness as something worth defending. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey sends two strangers through doors into moments from their pasts. Love at First Sight gives an airport meeting the full weight of chance, and Persuasion and Rosaline play with Jane Austen and Shakespeare in a modern voice. The romance page sorts the shelf by mood, and the romance shelf holds all seventy-two.

Comedy

A hundred and four films are comedies. The big ones are built around performers the public already loves. Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams, as the Icelandic duo Fire Saga, are ridiculous and sincere at once. Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy lets himself be thrown through windows with a rueful grin. Melissa McCarthy grants wishes in a New York December in Genie, Eddie Murphy fights the decorations in Candy Cane Lane, and Adam Sandler defends his hometown in Hubie Halloween. Seth Rogen plays both a modern app developer and his own great-grandfather, preserved for a century in brine, in An American Pickle.

The comedies with a true story behind them have a special sweetness. Jerry & Marge Go Large follows a retired couple from Michigan who spot a flaw in the arithmetic of a state lottery and use the winnings to revive their town. Champions puts Woody Harrelson in charge of a basketball team of players with intellectual disabilities, who teach him more than he teaches them. The Duke is British comedy at its most humane, and The Lost King finds humour in one woman's refusal to be told she is wrong.

Inventive small films keep the genre fresh. Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick epic in black and white, made for a tiny sum, in which a fur trapper of the old Northwest battles animals played by people in costumes; it has to be seen to be believed. Theater Camp is a mock documentary about a summer school for stage-struck children and the adults who love it too much. Cha Cha Real Smooth finds a recent graduate his first job, as a party starter at bar mitzvahs, and Good Fortune sends a well-meaning angel, played by Keanu Reeves, to rearrange two lives.

Family comedy has its regulars: a new Cheaper by the Dozen, a new Father of the Bride set among Cuban Americans in Miami, Home Sweet Home Alone, Book Club: The Next Chapter with four friends in Italy, and Freakier Friday. The comedy page picks a dozen to start with, and the comedy shelf holds them all.

Family viewing

Thirty-six films suit the whole household. Several bring back characters that parents remember from their own childhoods. Paddington in Peru is the third outing for the bear in the blue coat. Disenchanted revisits a fairy-tale princess in the real world. Freakier Friday returns to a mother and daughter who once woke in each other's bodies, and A Christmas Story Christmas finds Ralphie, of the 1983 classic, grown up with children of his own. Bill & Ted Face the Music belongs here too, since its heroes are now outshone by their daughters.

Imagination is the decade's favourite family subject. In IF a girl discovers she can see everyone's forgotten imaginary friends, among them a huge purple creature voiced by Steve Carell. Harold and the Purple Crayon lets a storybook boy draw his way into the real world. Slumberland and Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, a musical about a toymaker and his inventive granddaughter, are feasts of design. The Legend of Ochi sends a farm girl across a misty island to return a small creature to its family, with puppetry in place of computer effects.

Adventure for younger viewers comes from many directions. Finding ʻOhana is a treasure hunt through the caves of Oʻahu with two siblings from Brooklyn. Secret Society of Second-Born Royals trains the spare heirs of Europe as heroes. The Main Event hands an eleven-year-old a magic wrestling mask, and Go! puts an Australian teenager on a go-kart track. Blue Miracle tells the true story of a Mexican orphanage that entered a fishing tournament to save its home, and Home Team of a professional coach who takes on his son's sixth-grade side. The family page sorts the shelf by age.

Teen favourites

Seventeen films were made for viewers of school age, and the best of them take their characters seriously. CODA is, among other things, a superb film about being seventeen. Stargirl follows a girl with a ukulele who refuses to blend in at her Arizona high school. All Together Now has a relentlessly cheerful pupil hiding the fact that she and her mother live on a bus, and Words on Bathroom Walls treats a teenager's illness with honesty and hope.

Dance and music give the shelf its energy. Work It assembles a team of misfits for a national dance contest, and Feel the Beat sends a failed Broadway dancer home to coach a small-town class. Mean Girls of 2024 is the film of the stage musical of the 2004 comedy, with the songs intact. A Cinderella Story: Starstruck, Prom Pact, Zoey 102 and Sidelined: The QB and Me keep the lighter traditions going. The teen favourites page has the full list.

Animal stories

Sixteen films give a leading part to a creature, and many are true. Rescued by Ruby is about a state trooper and the unruly shelter dog who became his search partner. Dog Gone follows a father and son along the Appalachian Trail in search of a lost pet. Arthur the King is named after the stray who joined a racing team in mid-course and refused to be left behind. Penguin Bloom tells how an injured magpie helped an Australian family through its hardest year, and My Penguin Friend how a penguin swam thousands of miles each year to visit the man who had cleaned oil from its feathers.

The fictional animals are as memorable. Buck, the great dog of The Call of the Wild, is entirely animated and entirely convincing. Ivan, the gorilla of The One and Only Ivan, paints pictures in a shopping-mall circus and dreams of trees. Lyle the crocodile sings in the bath. Black Beauty retells the classic with a wild mustang in the American West, Think Like a Dog links a boy's mind to his pet's, and Puppy Love lets two dogs arrange a romance for their owners. The animal stories page groups them by species.

Christmas

Nineteen films belong to December, more than on any comparable shelf, since the services now release a new batch every year. Santa himself appears in The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, and his origins are told in A Boy Called Christmas, from the book by Matt Haig. 8-Bit Christmas remembers the winter when every child wanted the same games console, and Candy Cane Lane brings the figures of a famous carol to life in a suburban street.

The holiday romances come in every flavour: an heiress with amnesia in Falling for Christmas, an American novelist who buys a Scottish castle in A Castle for Christmas, two exes under one roof in Our Little Secret, a vineyard romance in A California Christmas and its sequel, and two travellers who take each other's trains in Your Christmas or Mine?. The Noel Diary and Oh. What. Fun., with Michelle Pfeiffer as a mother who decides it is her turn, complete the shelf. The Christmas page puts all nineteen in order.

True stories

Twenty-seven films are drawn from real lives. The decade has been especially good at the story of an idea, in which the drama lies in a meeting room, a kitchen or a garage. Air turns a shoe contract into a thriller, although every viewer knows how it ends, and gives its finest speech to the player's mother. BlackBerry is told with the nervous energy of a documentary. Flamin' Hot and Jerry & Marge Go Large celebrate ordinary people who looked at something familiar and saw what everyone else had missed. Tesla and Radioactive, about the inventor and about Marie Curie, reach further back for the same theme.

Artists and entertainers form a second group. Elvis, A Complete Unknown and Maria have been mentioned. Being the Ricardos, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, spends one tense production week with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, played by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. tick, tick... BOOM! is a tribute from one composer to another. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is as eccentric and colourful as its subject's drawings.

The stories of perseverance are the ones that families watch together. A Million Miles Away lists the ingredients its hero's father gave him for reaching a goal, and applies them one by one across eleven rejected applications to the astronaut programme. True Spirit sails with Jessica Watson, the Australian who circled the globe alone at sixteen. American Underdog follows Kurt Warner from stacking shelves in a supermarket to the Super Bowl, and Safety tells of a university footballer who secretly raised his younger brother in his dormitory. The true stories page lists all twenty-seven with the people behind them.

Sport

Fourteen films turn on a game or a race. King Richard is as much about parenthood as about tennis, and its long final match is a model of how to film the sport. Air contains hardly a minute of basketball and is one of the best films ever made about it. Champions finds its comedy in the locker room and its heart on the bus to the finals.

Water has three films. Young Woman and the Sea recreates the cold, the jellyfish and the darkness of a Channel crossing with real swimming in open water. The Boys in the Boat shows eight working-class students finding the rhythm that makes a crew move as one. True Spirit spends seven months at sea in a pink yacht. On land, The Beautiful Game gathers teams from around the world in Rome for a tournament where taking part is the victory, with Bill Nighy as the England manager. The sport page sets them out by game.

Music

Twenty-five films sing, play or dance. The musicals of the decade have been bold. In the Heights treats a city block as a stage and its residents' small dreams as worthy of full orchestration. tick, tick... BOOM! moves between a stage performance and the life it describes. Mean Girls and Cinderella reach for a pop audience, and Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey gives the Christmas film a set of original songs and a Victorian world of clockwork.

The biographies take different routes to the same destination. Elvis is all spectacle. A Complete Unknown is all listening: it trusts the songs and lets them play in full. Maria lives inside the memory of a great voice. One Night in Miami..., the first film directed by Regina King, imagines a hotel-room conversation in 1964 between four famous friends, one of them the singer Sam Cooke, and ends with a song.

The small-scale music films are the most affectionate. CODA has the school choir. Flora and Son shows a mother and a teenage son who can barely speak to each other making a track together on a laptop. I Used to Be Famous pairs a former boy-band singer with a gifted young drummer who has autism. The High Note is set among assistants and producers in Los Angeles, and Theater Camp ends with a school show so heartfelt that the jokes fall away. The music page suggests where to begin, and the music shelf holds all twenty-five.

Adventure, fantasy and science fiction

Forty-one films leave the everyday behind. The expeditions are old-fashioned in the best sense. Jungle Cruise has a cursed conquistador, a leopard and a great many puns. Uncharted sends Tom Holland after the lost gold of the Magellan voyage, with a fight aboard galleons hanging beneath helicopters. The King's Daughter hides a mermaid at Versailles, and The Call of the Wild follows the gold seekers north.

Science fiction on FMFAU is mostly gentle. After Yang is about a family whose android companion stops working, and about what they find in his memories; it is one of the calmest and loveliest films of the decade. Swan Song gives Mahershala Ali a choice that would spare his family grief. Moonshot is a romantic comedy on a passenger ship to Mars, Space Cadet sends a Florida bartender to astronaut training, and TRON: Ares brings a program out of the computer and into the city. Nine Days and In the Blink of an Eye are fables about what makes a life. The adventure page maps the shelf.

Drama

Ninety-three films are dramas, and the decade's finest tend to be intimate. Belfast sees great events from the height of a nine-year-old. C'mon C'mon listens to children talk about the future. Train Dreams compresses eighty years of a quiet man's life into a hundred minutes of forest light. Here, directed by Robert Zemeckis with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, keeps its camera fixed on one corner of one living room across generations.

Mike Leigh's Hard Truths is a portrait of a woman at odds with the world and the sister who keeps reaching out to her, with a remarkable performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Armageddon Time is James Gray's memory of a friendship at a New York school in 1980. My Salinger Year spends twelve months in a literary agency answering a famous author's post, and Goodbye June gathers grown siblings around their mother. Turtles All the Way Down, from the novel by John Green, is an honest account of a teenager living with anxious thoughts. The drama page groups the shelf by theme.

Ten films worth discovering

Some films on the site have been seen by fewer people than they deserve. Hundreds of Beavers tops any such list. The Duke and The Lost King are British storytelling at its most engaging. Flora and Son has a closing song that sends viewers back to the start. Theater Camp is ninety minutes of pure affection, and Cha Cha Real Smooth is wiser about being twenty-two than most films dare to be.

Blue Miracle and A Million Miles Away are family films with real substance. Penguin Bloom, with Naomi Watts, is a small story beautifully told. The Legend of Ochi looks unlike anything else made this decade, and Float, set in a small Canadian town where a visitor learns to swim and to stay, is a summer romance with an unhurried charm. Each is a short search away, and most sit on the Top rated shelf.

Where the stories happen

The films of the 2020s are great travellers, perhaps because so many were planned when travel was a dream. Italy is the favourite destination: Verona in Love in the Villa, Tuscany in La Dolce Villa and Made in Italy, Rome and Venice in Book Club: The Next Chapter, and the whole peninsula in Solo Mio. Ireland hosts Irish Wish and Flora and Son, Scotland A Castle for Christmas, and the south of France the Crawley family's holiday.

Further off, Paddington in Peru climbs to the cloud forests, A Perfect Pairing and Penguin Bloom show two sides of Australia, Finding ʻOhana explores Hawaii, and Past Lives moves between Seoul and New York with equal tenderness for both. In America, CODA smells of the Massachusetts fish docks, In the Heights of a hot summer in Washington Heights, and Train Dreams of cedar and river water. An evening with FMFAU can be a way of going somewhere.

Second chapters

The 2020s have a fondness for going back. A striking number of films on FMFAU continue stories that began years or decades earlier, and the best of them use the gap in time as their subject. Bill & Ted Face the Music arrived twenty-nine years after the previous adventure and is openly about middle age. Disenchanted asks what happens after happily ever after. Freakier Friday finds its mother and daughter two decades on, with a new generation ready to misunderstand them both, and A Christmas Story Christmas brings back the same actor, nearly forty years older, to the same snowy street.

Other returns are faster. The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, Downton Abbey: A New Era, Book Club: The Next Chapter and Paddington in Peru each rejoin a cast that audiences had missed. TRON: Ares extends a series that started in 1982, when computer imagery itself was new. Even the remakes look backwards with affection: Cheaper by the Dozen, Father of the Bride, Home Sweet Home Alone, Mean Girls and Black Beauty all retell stories that earlier guides to earlier decades would list in their original forms.

There is comfort in that, and a little wisdom. A sequel made long afterwards has to admit that its characters have aged, that children have grown and that the world has moved on, and comedy and feeling both flow from the admission. Watching the first film and its late successor on consecutive evenings is one of the particular pleasures this decade offers.

Films about making things

One more thread deserves notice. Many of the decade's most satisfying films are about people who make something with care: a shoe, a snack, a telephone, a song, a boat that moves as one. Air, Flamin' Hot and BlackBerry belong here, and so do Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, whose hero is a toymaker, The Fall Guy, which honours the craft of stunt work, and Maintenance Required, set in a garage run by its owner with pride. Theater Camp and tick, tick... BOOM! are about the making of shows, and My Salinger Year about the making of books.

These films suit an age that has rediscovered the appeal of practical skill. They are also, quietly, films about collaboration, since hardly anything worth making is made alone. The rowing eight of The Boys in the Boat is the clearest image of the idea, and a good one to hold in mind while browsing.

Directors and stars

A hundred and sixty-two directors made these films, and a few names recur. Kogonada directed both After Yang and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Joachim Rønning made Young Woman and the Sea and TRON: Ares, two films that could hardly differ more. Michael Showalter has The Idea of You and Oh. What. Fun., and Nisha Ganatra The High Note and Freakier Friday. Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Robert Zemeckis, Baz Luhrmann, Kenneth Branagh, James Mangold and Noah Baumbach each appear once.

The decade has also been generous to actors who step behind the camera. Ben Affleck directed Air, George Clooney The Boys in the Boat, Eva Longoria Flamin' Hot, Regina King One Night in Miami..., Lin-Manuel Miranda tick, tick... BOOM!, John Krasinski IF, Aziz Ansari Good Fortune and Kate Winslet Goodbye June. Their films share a visible pleasure in performance.

Among the stars, Emily Blunt rides the Amazon in one film and plays a film director in another. Lindsay Lohan returns in four films, three of them romances and one a reunion. Emma Roberts, Zoey Deutch and Camila Mendes are the faces of the new romantic comedy, and Tom Hanks appears as a manager, and as a husband seen across sixty years. Type any name into the search field and the films appear at once.

What the ratings say

The small badge on each poster is the average score given by viewers on TMDB, out of ten. Sixty-two of the 170 films stand at seven or higher and form the Top rated shelf. Its upper end includes CODA, Past Lives, King Richard, tick, tick... BOOM!, The Call of the Wild, A Million Miles Away, Young Woman and the Sea and Arthur the King.

Two notes on reading the numbers for recent films. First, a film released in the last year or two has fewer ratings behind its score, so the figure may still settle. Second, the light romances and Christmas films are scored by a broad audience and tend to sit between six and seven, which says little about how well they do the job they were made for. Use the badge together with the summary and the cast.

How films reach you now

Since this guide covers a period of change, a word on where these films live may help. A film of the 2020s usually belongs to one service in its first years, the one that produced or bought it, and may stay there for good. Others open in cinemas, move to rental and purchase after a few weeks, and settle on a subscription service some months later. A handful appear free with advertising. The arrangements differ from country to country and shift over time.

That is the reason FMFAU sends every Watch now button to JustWatch, which tracks these arrangements daily. Choose your country on the film page, press the button, and you see where the film is available today and on what terms. For a new release it is worth looking again after a month or two, since rental prices fall and subscription windows open.

Using FMFAU

The home page opens with a question, What would you like to watch tonight?, above a rounded search field that glows a little when you select it. Type a title, an actor, a director or a year and matching films appear as you type. Beneath come eight sections of film tiles. Each tile lifts onto a dark panel when the pointer passes over it and shows the title with the year after a small dot. A View more button at the head of each section gives the size of the shelf.

A film page shows the poster, the title, the year, the running time and the rating, then the director, the leading cast, the genres and the summary. The Add to My List button keeps a film for later. Bookmarks, the navy button in the top bar, shows what you have saved, each with a Remove button. The shortlist lives in your own browser on your own device, and the list page can save a copy as a file. The Bookmarks page describes each step.

Films for different evenings

Choosing is easier with an occasion in mind. For a family evening with young children, Paddington in Peru, IF and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile are safe and good. With older children, try A Million Miles Away, Blue Miracle or The Call of the Wild. For a night in with friends, The Fall Guy, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga and Theater Camp reward a noisy room.

For two, the range runs from the lightness of Your Place or Mine and Love at First Sight to the depth of Past Lives. For an evening alone with time to think, After Yang, Train Dreams and C'mon C'mon are companions that ask for attention and repay it. For a lift after a hard week, CODA, Champions, Jerry & Marge Go Large and The Duke can be relied upon. And in December the Christmas shelf has nineteen ways to begin.

Seven evenings, seven years

For a tour of the decade so far, take one film from each year. Begin in 2020 with Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, then CODA for 2021 and Elvis for 2022. Give 2023 to Past Lives, with Air as an encore if the evening allows.

A Complete Unknown stands for 2024 and Train Dreams for 2025, and Voicemails for Isabelle brings the tour to 2026. Seven evenings will take you from an Icelandic harbour to a Massachusetts fishing boat, a Memphis stage, a New York pavement, a Greenwich Village club and a forest in Idaho. The sections on the home page will suggest what to see next.

Questions and answers

The questions below are those most often asked about FMFAU, with short answers. Fuller help is on the help pages named throughout this guide, including the how to watch page.

Questions