[beart]

Perhaps you can share some examples of the films you are referring as "mindless banter in between sex and explosions". I'm not sure that description really fits most of the films coming out recently. If you said, "Dumb comic book films", I would maybe agree with you, but there isn't typically any sex in those so I assume you are not referring to them.

Covid halted the production of a lot of movies, and changed how others were made. It also shut down theaters. So, "since covid", is really talking about before and after an era. Kind of like saying, "since 9/11", in terms of the impact on culture. A lot of creativity has moved from the movie theaters to streaming services and from films to more episodic content.

However, here is a short list of films worth seeing (imo) since covid (2019).

Zone of Interest (2023) The Holdovers (2023) Parasite (2019) Dune (2021) Dune Part Two (2024) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) 1917 (2019) The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) The Substance (2024) Palm Springs (2020) Oppenheimer (2023) The Lighthouse (2019) Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Barbarian (2022) Flow (2024)

[tuveson]

Oppenheimer had sex and explosions, but the banter part might be more subjective

[sleepybrett]

Just to toss in a couple of 'dumb comic book movies' that hit different, the two (so far) Spiderverse films. They put Flow to shame both visually and emotionally (at least for me).

[drdaeman]

> Flow (2024)

"Flow" was a huge disappointment for me. I couldn't get past the animation jerkiness and overall unrealistic look. I have two cats, and cats simply don't move like pictured: while most of the keyframes were perfectly fine, the transitions between them were off, which completely broke it for me. Heck, "Stray" (the video game) had much more realistically moving cat than "Flow" and I think it's supposed to be the other way around. I get that it was "indie" stuff done on a relatively small budget, but those broken movements became sort of an uncanny valley for me.

I guess, I also had wrong expectations from the beginning. The movie was heavily advertised as non-verbal, so - naturally - I expected it to portray the behaviors of non-human consciousness (with slight allowances for plot reasons, sure). And then the animals behaved as if they were unquestionably and heavily anthropopsychic.

To sum it up, "animals don't move like this and don't behave like this" paired with some invalid pre-expectations, sadly, was too much to break my suspension of disbelief and ruin the movie for me.

But yeah, it's certainly not a "mindless banter in between sex and explosions".

[snowwrestler]

The animals behave like animals at the beginning of the movie, but differently by the end. That’s clearly a choice by the filmmakers.

I think Flow is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years, in part because of how it chooses to depart from reality.

I think it also helped that I saw it in a theater which I find far more immersive than watching at home.