As many literal-minded people pointed out, 2019 was not in fact the last year of movies. Many good films have been made since then. Last year great films from all over the world were released in the US. A random list of disparate and original films seen on American screens in 2024 includes La Chimera, About Dry Grasses, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, The Settlers, A Different Man, Universal Language, and, yes, Megalopolis. One of the best movies of the year summed it all up, not just in its title but in subject matter and style—in its whole approach to what a movie is and can be in the mid-2020s: Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. It’s a film about a certain kind of filmmaking being done under certain conditions that seem, in their way, more perilous than the ones under which Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was made.

I think 2019 will come to be seen in film history as a golden year and an inflection point, the same the way 1939 and its movies exist in the popular imagination as a series of classics constantly open to new investigation and debate—not just The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but also The Rules of the Game (of course), Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, Love Affair, Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln, and at least a couple dozen others. The 2019 version of this inventory includes Parasite, The Irishman, Uncut Gems, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Souvenir, Ash Is Purest White, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and as in 1939, a number of other films whose reputations will grow and wane and grow again—Peterloo, Atlantics, La Flor, Midsommar. The films of 1939 arrived at a time of burgeoning right-wing authoritarianism, and 2019 was similarly set on a precipice.

The difference between 2019 and now is that films from six years ago already seem the product of a different world. As it says onscreen in a film made at another turning point in history, “That era has passed. Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore.”