10 great black-and-white films of the 2020s

Why make a film in black and white today? The decision is sometimes viewed cynically, as the recourse of filmmakers seeking to have an instant sense of ‘art,’ prestige and seriousness of intent conferred upon a project.

In fact, the motivations for using black and white in contemporary film are diverse. Sometimes, it’s a way of paying homage to cinema’s past while also taking it forward. In the outré output of Guy Maddin, Canada’s great contemporary guru of early film, for instance, it’s about the conjuring of bygone cinematic worlds, a re-engagement with lost expressionist potential. 

For Béla Tarr, monochrome was vital to the avoidance of what the Hungarian auteur termed “colour chaos”: a way to defamiliarise, and to eschew the inherent “kind of naturalism” of colour film. According to Tarr, “with black and white you can keep it more stylistic, you can [maintain] more of a distance between the film and reality”. 

Other filmmakers, by contrast, have viewed black and white as a way of enhancing authenticity. It’s been essential, for one, in the period projects of Paweł Pawlikowski. Returning to Poland to make Ida (2013) and then Cold War (2018) with DP Łukasz Żal, Pawlikowski did so in a startlingly different style to his previous work, using 4:3 aspect ratio and austere black and white – means of reconnecting emotionally with memories of the past. As Fatherland, the third part of Pawlikowski’s unofficial mid-century European trilogy, arrives in cinemas, we take a look at 10 other films of the decade so far that have reminded audiences of the value, after all, of seeing the world in black and white. 

Director: Jacques Audiard

In making Paris, 13th District in black and white, Jacques Audiard has said that he wanted to find a way of filming Paris as though it wasn’t Paris. Yet in transposing American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine’s work to this vibrant, multicultural area of the French capital, Audiard and co-screenwriters Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius also give a freewheeling, French New Wave resonance to a very contemporary story about a quartet of twenty-and-thirtysomethings negotiating life and relationships in the digital age. 

A productive play between time periods is evident from the film’s exploratory opening pan around Les Olympiades. A gleaming, practically sci-fi air is bestowed upon the high-rises before the film settles into an episodic focus on its intersecting protagonists. Complete with split-screen interludes and exciting bursts of Rone’s synth score, Paris, 13th District is fresh, funny, sad and sexy as hell, and Paul Guilhaume’s black-and-white cinematography is central to the special sense of intimacy the film creates. 

Director: Rebecca Hall

When Passing was released, so much focus was placed, in the press and promotion, on the racial background and family history of Rebecca Hall – essentially establishing her personal investment in and ‘right’ to tell this story – that the formal strategies and aesthetics of the film itself were sometimes overlooked. 

That’s a pity, since, in adapting Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel, about the charged re-encounter between two women of colour (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga) – childhood friends whose paths have diverged, in 1920s New York – Hall’s debut feature succeeds in immersing the viewer in an intoxicating but tension-filled world. Eduard Grau’s silky black-and-white images and the 4:3 ratio contribute vitally to the film’s characterisation and its themes of perception and deception, appearance and identity, in a place and period where, it’s claimed, “we’re all passing for something”.

Director: Joel Coen

Practicalities as well as artistic choices can sometimes motivate the use of black and white. Joel Coen had intended to shoot his film adaptation of the Scottish Play in Scottish locations in 2020, but the Covid pandemic meant that the production had to relocate to Californian soundstages. 

Coen and cinematographer Bruce Delbonnel decided to make a virtue of those constraints, and to fully embrace the possibilities offered by black and white. This was both for its cinematic resonances – the film is replete with visual references to Carl Dreyer and German expressionism, to Japanese cinema and Orson Welles – and as a way of “abstracting the image” to make the sets appear less obvious. The result is a potent rendering of the play that manages to combine intense intimacy with its own kind of stylised, epic sweep.

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Before it was as fashionable as it has again become today, Kenneth Branagh showed his enduring affection for black and white in a couple of projects: Dead Again (1991), with its 1940s sequences, and 1995’s backstage comedy In the Bleak Midwinter. Branagh turned to black and white once more for Belfast, and, collaborating with cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, used it to bring a poetic, heightened quality to his most personal project to date: a fictionalised account of growing up in the late 60s and early 70s during the Troubles.

In combining a child’s eye-view of the violence with a focus on the tensions and joys of family life, Belfast nods affectionately to John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987), as well as Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes (1992). The use of black and white allows Belfast to develop a distinct identity, though. Like several of the other films featured here, Belfast also briefly incorporates colour footage, showing the city as it is today. The film is both love letter and remembrance, and one of the director’s warmest, most likeable works. 

Director: Hong Sang-soo

One of two films made in 2022 by one of cinema’s most prolific and dedicated miniaturists was this Silver Bear winner. With characteristic quiet aplomb, Hong Sang-soo delivers another modest, self-reflexive work, a musing on creativity in which, as the title suggests, a writer decides to try her hand at making a film. 

Here, high-contrast black and white adds to the film’s casual, spontaneous, observational vibe, with much focus on chat between the protagonist Jun-hee and her friends, acquaintances and collaborators. The attention to digressive, intimate conversation indicates that Hong is considerably more invested in the talk than in laying bare the nuts-and-bolts of the filmmaking process. But his committed cast – especially a compelling Lee Hye-young, reuniting with the director – keep the viewer pleasantly relaxed and engaged, up to a lovely final flourish. 

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Disturbed by the situation unfolding at the Poland-Belarus border in 2021 – with refugees being forced back and forth between the two countries and essentially left to survive or perish in Białowieża Forest – Agnieszka Holland channelled her dismay into a powerful feature film. Green Border is a multi-character portrait which encompasses the perspectives of migrants, activists and Border Guard officers.

For Holland, the situation also had unsettling historical echoes. She convinced cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk to shoot in black and white, the better to simultaneously evoke past parallels and to bring a documentary-like immediacy to the depiction of the refugees’ ordeal. The forest also takes on a primeval, nightmarish quality in the film’s images. Green Border quickly became contentious in Poland, though its condemnation by the government also perhaps helped to turn it into a huge domestic box office hit and vital cultural talking point. 

Director: Paola Cortellesi

The spirit of Italian neorealism is felt in There’s Still Tomorrow, actor and director Paola Cortellesi’s exploration of family life, friendship, political change and gendered violence in post-WWII Rome. But that’s far from the only tone of the film, which is infused with comedic and musical elements, creating a work whose crowd-pleasing inclinations – encapsulated by its hopeful title – don’t blunt the seriousness of its intentions. 

Cortellesi’s use of black and white suggests both an homage to cinema past and also an era-appropriate way of honouring the experiences of female forebears, in particular the grandmothers whose stories inspired the period setting. A big box office success in Italy, There’s Still Tomorrow also had an important social impact in its homeland, and was even shown in schools. “This is a contemporary movie,” Cortellesi affirmed. “It’s set in the past, but it’s about the female condition.”

Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios

Inspired by British writer Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, Alonso Ruizpalacios’s film moves the action to a huge, manic Manhattan eaterie, The Grill. Here, Estela (Anna Díaz) joins the staff, which includes the highly-strung chef Pedro (Raúl Briones) and a majority of undocumented migrant workers. Tensions – racial, sexual and professional – inevitably run high in this hothouse environment, and are sure to explode.

In plunging the viewer into this particular hell’s kitchen, Ruizpalacios uses a nervy, restless style and shoots in striking high-contrast black and white, with a few sudden shifts into colour. The effect is at once immersive and disorientating, a challenge to romanticised, crowd-pleasing depictions of food preparation in cinema. Moments of solidarity and connection crop up, but ultimately La cocina is unsparing in its intense and weirdly balletic vision of the daily grind at The Grill. 

Director: Magnus von Horn

Sweat (2020), the previous film by Magnus von Horn, was mostly about briskness, colour and dash – its style suited to the existence of the social media influencer at is centre. Von Horn clearly adapts himself to his subjects, and he followed Sweat by turning to black and white for The Girl with the Needle, a haunting maternal melodrama that unfolds with the nightmare logic of an adult fairytale. 

Based on a real-life case, the film is set in between-the-wars Copenhagen and focuses on the relationship between a young mother (Vic Carmen Sonne) who gives up her baby, and the older woman (Trine Dyrholm) who apparently arranges for the child’s care. The social details feel right – the factory workplaces, the dingy dwellings – but from the opening montage of contorted, superimposed faces, Michał Dymek’s images also achieve a hallucinatory quality, creating a mood of quiet, creeping dread. 

Director: François Ozon

François Ozon already made one exceptionally beautiful black-and-white film in Frantz (2016), which was loosely based on Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932). The Stranger is another adaptation, but of much more renowned material: Albert Camus’s 1942 existentialist novel. Here cinematographer Manu Dacosse’s monochrome images don’t duplicate the warmth of Frantz, but instead create a certain distancing that feels appropriate for a cinematic rendering of the perspective of Camus’s affectless protagonist, the young Frenchman Meursault, in 1930s French Algeria.

Opening with archive footage, Ozon’s adaptation makes that historical context key, infusing the film with an acute awareness of Franco-Algerian colonial relations. The first half, in particular, has something of the power of silent cinema (Ozon briefly toyed with the idea of making it a silent film). And with the white accentuated in the images to convey the sun’s heat and glare, The Stranger is also another chapter in the filmmaker’s ongoing exploration of how life-altering events can happen at the beach.

Fatherland screens at the 70th BFI London Film Festival and is in UK cinemas from 23 October.