Cinema — motion pictures — is the art of telling stories through movement. It’s no surprise that since the inception of film as an art form, the adventure genre has been one of the most prolific. After all, adventure movies are characterized by movement, following characters as they embark on some sort of quest through an unknown, potentially dangerous, and exotic location.

Though there have been plenty of outstanding adventure movies over the years, it’s interesting to pay special attention to the ones that have been made in the past half-decade. With audiences craving bigger, more thrilling stories, studios have complied and offered some of the best adventure films of the 21st century over the past five years. From pop culture phenomenons like Avengers: Endgame to Oscar-winning spectacles like Everything Everywhere All At Once, cinematic adventures have lately been at the top of their game.

10 ‘Avengers: Endgame’ (2019)

Directed by Joe Russo and Anthony Russo

Marvel Studios spent over a decade creating the most unprecedentedly gargantuan movie franchise in the history of cinema. Starting with 2008’s Iron Man, the MCU quickly rose to become the most popular franchise the medium had ever seen. The culmination of these eleven years of movies was Avengers: Endgame, where the titular team gets together to travel in time and reverse the effects of Thanos’s devastating actions in Avengers: Infinity War.

Whatever issues Endgame‘s script and direction may have, it more than makes up for them with just how ambitious, producing a colossal pop culture event that defined a generation. Never before had such a large number of interconnected films built up to such an ambitious crossover, which — though admittedly far from perfect — works far better than anyone could have expected, even five years after its release. Exciting and ever-entertaining, Avengers: Endgame blends heist thrills with a classic sense of adventure.

9 ‘The Boy and the Heron’ (2023)

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki promised his retirement and then broke his promise a few times too many. Still, as long as the master of anime cinema delivers movies as outstanding as The Boy and the Heron, it’s hard to complain. Set during World War II, the film is about Mahito, a boy who’s grieving the death of his mother and confused about his father’s remarriage. After they move to the countryside, he ventures into a dreamlike world where the living and the dead live together.

As one could expect from pretty much any Miyazaki film of this sort, The Boy and the Heron ranks among the best animated coming-of-age movies ever made. It’s a magical, atmospheric tale of courage, grief, and the challenges of growing up in difficult times. Mahito’s adventure through the delightfully surrealist world he discovers is engrossing, and its outcome is beyond satisfying, brought to life through beautiful animation and a vast and creative scope that defies conventions.

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8 ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ (2024)

Directed by George Miller

George Miller has one of the most peculiar filmographies of any contemporary director, with titles as different as Happy Feet and Mad Max under his name. The latter, released in 1979, spawned a surprisingly successful franchise that Miller has only grown closer to as his career has evolved. The latest installment in the series is the feminist revenge saga Furiosa: a Mad Max Story, about the origins of the renegade warrior and her endless struggle to return to the home she was taken from as a child.

Furiosa works equally well from all sorts of angles: as a female rage piece, an unconventional coming-of-age film, and a high-octane desert adventure. Adding deep lore to the iconic wasteland that these fascinatingly bizarre characters operate in, Furiosa is an exhilarating character-driven action film, a quality that feels like a breath of fresh, or, in this case, scorching, air in the modern action film landscape.

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7 ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ (2022)

Directed by Joel Crawford

It’s not exactly controversial to say that the Golden Age of DreamWorks Animation is behind them. However, on a few precious occasions, the studio releases a movie that’s on par with their most iconic outings. Case in point: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, a vibrantly animated adventure where the titular character discovers that he’s burned through eight of his nine lives. Thus, he embarks on an epic journey to restore them by finding the mythical Last Wish.

No one expected the sequel to one of DreamWorks’s most forgettable films to be as outstanding as The Last Wish is. It has a gripping story, a delightful sense of humor, a variety of surprisingly profound and philosophical themes, and some of the most colorful and eye-popping animation the studio has ever produced. Against all odds, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is an existentialist journey through an exotic land that’s impossible not to enjoy.

6 ‘Civil War’ (2024)

Directed by Alex Garland

Though he’s mainly known in Hollywood as a screenwriter, Alex Garland has been proving to be an interesting directorial voice since 2014. His latest movie, Civil War, is an adrenaline-pumping road trip thriller that follows a team of journalists journeying through a dystopian future United States that has been ravaged by war. They must reach DC to get an interview with the president before rebel factions reach him first.

Civil War intriguingly decides to stay distant from overt political messaging, instead telling a hard-hitting story about the power of images and the importance of war journalists. The decision proved controversial, but it allowed the film to remain engaging and primarily focused on the narrative rather than the message. Anchored by a number of incredible performances by the likes of Kirsten Dunst and rising star Cailee Spaeny, Civil War is one of the best movies from indie studio A24.

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5 ‘RRR’ (2022)

Directed by S.S. Rajamouli

The epic Telugu-language action adventure film RRR might be just a little over three hours long, but the memory of it is a treasure that will thankfully last a lifetime. Full of catchy music, grand-scale action set pieces, and mythological elements, it’s the tale of a fearless warrior on a dangerous mission, who comes face to face with a cop serving in the British forces in pre-independent India.

Full of the kind of vibrancy and personality that only an Indian film could provide, RRR is easily one of the best action movies of the last decade. Everything any audience member could ever possibly want out of a film is present here. Impromptu musical numbers? Check. Brutal slow-motion action? Check. Touching romance and an even cooler bromance? Check. There really is something in RRR for everyone, which is impressive in and of itself, making it one of the best adventure movies of the 2020s thus far.

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4 ‘Godzilla Minus One’ (2023)

Directed by Takashi Yamazaki

Saying that the Godzilla franchise is a bit uneven in terms of quality is somewhat of an understatement. As such, everyone was taken by surprise by Godzilla Minus One, which some may go so far as to call the best Godzilla film since the 1954 original. It follows Shikishima, a disgraced WWII kamikaze pilot who sees a chance at redemption when a giant monster emerges in post-war Japan, baptized in the horrific power of the atomic bomb.

Brilliant, but without ever losing sight of its “big kaiju go roar, city go boom” roots, Minus One tells a surprisingly mature and human story that’s balanced perfectly with some of the best action and adventure scenes of the Godzilla franchise. It all serves a narrative that, at its core, is about the destructive power of nuclear paranoia and the importance of community in times of crisis.

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3 ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ (2023)

Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson

When it came out in 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse took the world by storm, proving to be one of the best and most rewatchable big-screen adaptations of the Wall-Crawler. The sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, somehow lived up to expectations. In it, Miles Morales travels across the multiverse after he clashes with other Spider-People on how to handle a new threat.

Across the Spider-Verse is as much an incredibly entertaining examination of what it means to be a hero as it is a much more specific meditation on what the Spider-Man mythos has come to represent throughout its long history. Tremendously animated and with a shocking number of equally fantastic characters, it’s a multiverse-hopping adventure that all fans of superhero stories are bound to love.

2 ‘Dune: Part Two’ (2024)

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Frank Herbert‘s Dune is one of the most influential sci-fi novels in history, long believed to be an elusive literary work that simply can’t be turned into a good big-screen adaptation. Alas, Denis Villeneuve proved the naysayers wrong in 2021 with his adaptation of the first half of Herbert’s seminal masterwork. In 2024, he followed that up with one of the best sci-fi sequels of all time, Dune: Part Two, where Paul unites with the native people of Arrakis to get revenge against the conspirators who killed his father.

Dune: Part Two ties up everything that the first film set up gorgeously, telling a deep and nuanced story about the nature of fate and the dangers of religious fanaticism. The desert planet of Arrakis is a beautifully constructed world, and Paul’s adventures through all the obstacles that it has to offer are enthralling, to say the least. This movie is the product of mixing the imagination of one of sci-fi literature’s greatest minds with that of one of the best filmmakers working today.

1 ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (2022)

Directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

Winner of a commendable seven Oscars, Everything Everywhere All At Once is among the most exquisitely ambitious films that have come out of Hollywood in decades. One of the most rewatchable modern sci-fi films, it’s a Sisyphean adventure about a middle-aged Chinese immigrant who’s swept up into a multiverse-hopping battle for the survival of all existence.

This wild and refreshingly daring film mixes an absurdist sense of humor, delightfully surreal visuals, excellent performances, and a script so packed with thought-provoking themes that it simply must be experienced to be believed. Everything Everywhere All at Once is existentialist cinema at its very best. The film jumps through realities, exploring countless possibilities and defying what audiences expect from a sci-fi movie, with an unquenchable sense of adventure oozing from every frame.

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