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
Django Unchained
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2012
Tarantino turned American slavery into a spaghetti western and got away with it: a freed slave rides with a German bounty hunter, and the dialogue never stops crackling.
★ 7.2
Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2012
Bigelow filmed a decade-long manhunt as pure procedure and let the audience sit with what it cost: the torture scenes started an argument that has never been settled.
★ 7.2
The Great Beauty
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
2013 · Italy
The closest anyone has come to remaking La Dolce Vita and surviving it: an aging Roman journalist drifts through parties and ruins, and the city has never looked better.
★ 7.2
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Directed by David Gelb
2011
It will alter how you think about doing one thing for an entire lifetime: an eighty-five-year-old sushi master in a Tokyo subway station, still not satisfied with himself.
★ 7.0
The Hunt
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
2012 · Denmark
Few films are this hard to endure: a kindergarten teacher is accused of something he did not do, and Vinterberg shows how fast a village makes up its mind.
★ 7.0
True Grit
Directed by Coen Brothers
2010
The Coens went back to Charles Portis's actual sentences and rationed contractions almost out of existence: a fourteen-year-old girl hires a drunk marshal to avenge her father.
★ 7.0
Drive
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
2011
It looks and sounds like nothing else from its decade: neon Los Angeles, a synth score, a driver who barely speaks, and sudden violence that arrives without warning.
★ 6.8
The Wind Rises
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2013 · Japan
Miyazaki announced his retirement with it, a retirement he later took back: a young man designs beautiful aircraft that become weapons, and nothing about that is resolved.
★ 6.8
Black Swan
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
2010
Aronofsky filmed ballet as body horror and somehow made it work: a dancer's discipline turns on her, and Natalie Portman trained for a year to make it convincing.
★ 6.8
How to Train Your Dragon
Directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois
2010
Animation has never conveyed the physical sensation of flight this well: Roger Deakins consulted on the lighting, and a Viking boy who cannot fight befriends the creature he was raised to kill.
★ 6.8
Moneyball
Directed by Bennett Miller
2011
A film about a spreadsheet that plays like a thriller: Sorkin and Zaillian turn Billy Beane's 2002 Oakland roster into an argument between a broke general manager and every scout in his building.
★ 6.7
Skyfall
Directed by Sam Mendes
2012
Roger Deakins photographed a James Bond film and the series has never looked the same: the Shanghai fight plays out in silhouette against neon, and the plot finally asks what Bond is for.
★ 6.6
Captain Phillips
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2013
Barkhad Abdi had never acted and was cast out of a Minneapolis open call: he holds the screen against Tom Hanks through the last hour on a lifeboat off Somalia, and never blinks.
★ 6.4
Moonrise Kingdom
Directed by Wes Anderson
2012
Twelve-year-olds run away together across a New England island in 1965: Wes Anderson's warmest film, and the adults chasing them are lonelier than the children they are trying to catch.
★ 6.4
Midnight in Paris
Directed by Woody Allen
2011
Woody Allen's biggest hit at the box office is also his gentlest: a screenwriter stuck on a novel steps into a car at midnight in Paris and is driven straight into the 1920s.
★ 6.3
Argo
Directed by Ben Affleck
2012
The CIA really did produce a fake science fiction movie to get six Americans out of Tehran, and kept it classified until 1997: Affleck plays the operation completely straight.
★ 6.1
Nebraska
Directed by Alexander Payne
2013
Payne wanted monochrome and the studio fought him over it: an old man believes a sweepstakes letter and sets off walking toward Nebraska, and his son drives him rather than argue.
★ 6.0
Winter's Bone
Directed by Debra Granik
2010
Jennifer Lawrence was eighteen and unknown when Debra Granik cast her: a girl in the Ozarks has a week to find her father or lose the house, and nobody local will help.
★ 6.0
Life of Pi
Directed by Ang Lee
2012
The tiger is almost entirely digital and you will not be able to tell: Ang Lee made the most beautiful 3D film there is, about a boy sharing a lifeboat with a predator.
★ 6.0
Lincoln
Directed by Steven Spielberg
2012
Day-Lewis found a high, reedy voice for Lincoln because the historical accounts describe one: Spielberg and Tony Kushner build a whole film out of counting votes for the Thirteenth Amendment.
★ 6.0