Best Movies of the 2010s

Ten years that built the multiverse, killed the mid-budget drama, and put a Korean black comedy at the top of the global box office.

The 2010s started with Avatar setting the all-time box office record and ended with Parasite winning Best Picture. In between: the rise of Marvel as the dominant industrial force in mainstream cinema, the consolidation of streaming as the primary delivery system, the slow extinction of the mid-budget adult drama from cinemas, and a cohort of new directors — Villeneuve, Gerwig, Jenkins, Bong, Peele — establishing themselves at scale.

This is our ten-film picks for the decade. Where we have a full review, we've linked through.

The ten

  • Parasite (2019) — Bong Joon-ho. The decade's defining international film and a study in class allegory that turns mid-film into horror.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) — George Miller's two-hour chase. Practical effects, almost no dialogue, every frame composed.
  • The Social Network (2010) — Fincher and Sorkin. The film that defined how the early-2010s tech moment was understood.
  • Moonlight (2016) — Barry Jenkins's three-part character study. Won Best Picture in the most chaotic ceremony in Oscar history.
  • Inception (2010) — Christopher Nolan made an original IP science-fiction blockbuster work commercially. The film changed what studios were willing to finance.
  • Boyhood (2014) — Richard Linklater shot the same cast for twelve consecutive years. There is nothing else like it in cinema.
  • Interstellar (2014) — Nolan again. The black-hole simulation produced scientific papers; the score by Hans Zimmer is one of his best.
  • Arrival (2016) — Villeneuve. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the plot of a $47m studio film.
  • The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) — Wes Anderson's most fully achieved film. Aspect ratios shift with timeline.
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — The animation that opened the floodgates. Every animated studio film since has been measuring itself against it.

The trends that mattered

The MCU went from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019) — over thirty films in eleven years, the most successful franchise expansion in industry history.

Streaming, which started the decade as a back-catalogue service, ended it as the primary release platform for serious adult drama. Roma, Marriage Story, The Irishman — Netflix had become a studio.

International cinema reached mainstream American audiences in a way the previous decade hadn't permitted. Parasite was the breakthrough; Bong, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Asghar Farhadi, Pedro Almodóvar, Céline Sciamma all reached significant US audiences.