Parasite
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
2019
The first film not in English to win Best Picture: Bong turned class rage into something so entertaining that the whole world watched it and then argued about what it meant.
★ 8.9
Browse by time · decade
2010s
2010 – 2019
Showing 64 films from the 2010s
The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher
2010
The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.
★ 8.7
Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2010
Proof that a summer blockbuster can be genuinely difficult: Nolan stacked four levels of dream on top of each other and audiences argued about the last shot for years.
★ 8.6
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Directed by Celine Sciamma
2019
Sciamma made a love story with almost no men in it and built the entire thing out of glances, firelight and the things two people decline to say.
★ 8.5
Boyhood
Directed by Richard Linklater
2014
Nobody had tried this before: Linklater filmed the same cast a few days a year for twelve years, so you watch a real child turn into a real adult.
★ 8.5
A Separation
Directed by Asghar Farhadi
2011
The first Iranian film to win the foreign language Oscar: Farhadi built a moral maze where every person is partly right, and you will change sides several times.
★ 8.4
Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
2016
One life told in three chapters by three different actors, and shot in blues and purples so tender the film almost hums: nothing about it looks like anything else.
★ 8.4
12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
2013
The first Best Picture from a Black director, and the least evasive film ever made about American slavery: McQueen holds shots long past comfort and refuses to look away.
★ 8.3
Whiplash
Directed by Damien Chazelle
2014
Shot in nineteen days on three million dollars, and cut like a thriller: a drummer, a teacher who throws chairs, and the question of what greatness costs.
★ 8.0
Before Midnight
Directed by Richard Linklater
2013
The third film is the one that hurts: Linklater and his two actors let nine more years pass, then take it somewhere the first two politely refused to go.
★ 8.0
The Act of Killing
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn
2012
Oppenheimer asked the men who carried out Indonesia's mass killings to restage them as movie scenes, and they agreed gladly: no documentary has ever been braver or harder to sit through.
★ 7.8
The Tree of Life
Directed by Terrence Malick
2011
It won the Palme d'Or and audiences walked out of it: Malick set a 1950s Texas boyhood against the formation of the universe and left the connections to you.
★ 7.7
Lady Bird
Directed by Greta Gerwig
2017
Gerwig's first solo film became the best reviewed of its year: a Sacramento teenager and her mother fight about everything, and the film refuses to take a side.
★ 7.6
Amour
Directed by Michael Haneke
2012 · France
The film everyone should see once and nobody wants to see twice: Haneke barely leaves one Paris apartment while a marriage of decades reaches its last stretch.
★ 7.5
Inside Llewyn Davis
Directed by Coen Brothers
2013
The Coens made the saddest film about failure that anyone has managed to make funny: a folk singer plays beautifully, sleeps on couches, and gets absolutely nowhere at all.
★ 7.5
The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2013
Three hours of pure excess that never once slow down: Scorsese was seventy-one years old, and it moves faster than films made by directors a third his age.
★ 7.5
First Cow
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
2019
Reichardt makes the quietest films in American cinema, and this one is her warmest: two men on the Oregon frontier, one borrowed cow, and one very small crime.
★ 7.4
Toy Story 3
Directed by Lee Unkrich
2010
Pixar took a third film in a series somewhere nobody expected it to go: the toys end up far from a toy box, and the last act is genuinely harrowing.
★ 7.4
Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2013
Nothing else has made space feel this physically dangerous: Cuaron opens on a shot running almost thirteen minutes, and ninety minutes later you notice you stopped breathing.
★ 7.3
The Rider
Directed by Chloe Zhao
2017
Chloe Zhao cast a real rodeo rider and his real family to play themselves: the line between documentary and fiction never appears, and neither does a false note.
★ 7.3