Pan's Labyrinth
In post-Civil War Spain, a young girl escapes into a dark fantasy world to cope with her brutal fascist stepfather.
Proved that dark fantasy could be rigorous political allegory. The Pale Man is cinema's most disturbing creature design.
Set in Franco-era Spain — the fairy tale is explicitly about how the powerless survive totalitarianism through imagination.
Post-9/11 trauma shaped a decade of cinema. Superheroes became relevant (Spider-Man arrived seven months after). War films returned. Torture became contested on screen (Zero Dark Thirty). New Yorkers refused to be shown threatened cities for years.
The financial crisis prompted a wave of class-conscious cinema: Margin Call, The Big Short, and eventually Parasite were all responses to the same structural wound.