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 684 works across all media 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
good kid, m.A.A.d city
2012
Subtitled a short film, and the story runs in order across one day. The interludes are voicemails from his parents asking where the van is.
★ 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
Channel Orange
2012
Days before it came out, Ocean published an open letter about falling in love with a man, and then let the record speak.
★ 8.2
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
M.A.A.D City
2012 · From good kid, m.A.A.d city
Sounwave and THC build the first half, Terrace Martin the second, and MC Eiht walks in from Compton's own past.
★ 7.7
Niggas in Paris
Kanye West and Jay-Z
2011 · From Watch the Throne
Hit-Boy's beat, a Blades of Glory sample, and twelve straight encores of it one night in Paris.
★ 7.6
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
Get Lucky
2013 · From Random Access Memories
Rodgers' guitar, Pharrell's vocal, Nathan East on bass, and disco walked back onto the radio wearing robot helmets.
★ 7.6
Money Trees
2012 · From good kid, m.A.A.d city
DJ Dahi slowed Beach House's guitar intro and ran it backwards, and Jay Rock's verse steals the whole record.
★ 7.6
Blank Space
2014 · From 1989
Swift plays her own tabloid caricature, a clicking pen for percussion, and she replaced herself at number one.
★ 7.5
Midnight City
2011
Gonzalez built that shrieking hook from his own distorted voice, then let James King's saxophone close the record.
★ 7.5
Rolling in the Deep
2010 · From 21
Written with Paul Epworth in one afternoon after a breakup, and the credits list stiletto heels as percussion.
★ 7.5
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
Thinkin Bout YouFrank Ocean
Thinkin Bout You
2012 · From Channel Orange
Ocean wrote it for Bridget Kelly's album, kept it instead, and the falsetto he reaches for does the rest.
★ 7.5
Someone Like You
2011 · From 21
Dan Wilson of Semisonic at the piano, Adele singing, nothing else added; five weeks at number one.
★ 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
Do I Wanna Know?
2013 · From AM
A stomping riff, a desert studio in Joshua Tree, and the band's first single to reach the Billboard Hot 100.
★ 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
Royals
2013 · From Pure Heroine
Sixteen years old, the lyrics done in half an hour, the title from a 1976 photo of George Brett.
★ 7.5
Uptown Funk
2014
Six studios, eighty-two takes at the guitar part, Ronson collapsing in the studio, and fourteen weeks at number one.
★ 7.5
Swimming Pools (Drank)Kendrick Lamar
Swimming Pools (Drank)
2012 · From good kid, m.A.A.d city
T-Minus made the beat for Trey Songz, who passed; Lamar turned the rejected demo into a study of addiction.
★ 7.4
Chandelier
2014
Written first for Rihanna, kept by Sia instead, and given a video where an eleven-year-old dancer did the acting.
★ 7.4
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
PyramidsFrank Ocean
Pyramids
2012 · From Channel Orange
Cleopatra dragged into the present, two halves hinged on a midpoint beat switch, and John Mayer's uncredited closing solo.
★ 7.4
Breaking Bad · 2012
All of the Lights
Kanye West and Rihanna
2010 · From My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Rihanna sings the hook, Elton John plays piano, and West spent two years stacking fourteen singers behind the horns.
★ 7.3
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
Drunk in Love
2013
Detail's beat was called "Drunk" before Beyoncé heard it; she and Jay-Z freestyled their verses in Manhattan.
★ 7.2
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
We Found Love
2011
Calvin Harris wrote and produced it alone, and Rihanna rode ten weeks at number one, 2011's longest run.
★ 7.2
Game of Thrones · 2015
Style
2015 · From 1989
Ali Payami and guitarist Niklas Ljungfelt built the track; Swift turned an on-off romance into a fashion metaphor.
★ 7.1
Hold On, We're Going Home
2013 · From Nothing Was the Same
Drake wanted a record that weddings would still play in ten years, and Majid Jordan's synths delivered exactly that.
★ 7.1
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
Wicked Games
2012
Doc McKinney and Illangelo built the guitar figure and the fog; Tesfaye gave away House of Balloons for free.
★ 7.0
If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.
The Social Network · 2010
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
Latch
Disclosure and Sam Smith
2012
Too weird for radio, not clubby enough for clubs, by the duo's own reckoning; Sam Smith's falsetto settled it.
★ 6.8
I Knew You Were Trouble
2012 · From Red
A wobble bass drop grafted onto a country breakup song, and Swift's full move to pop became inevitable.
★ 6.8
Random Access Memories
2013
They put the drum machines away and hired session players who had made the records they grew up on. Giorgio Moroder narrates his own life.
★ 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
Happy
2013
Written first for CeeLo Green, whose label passed, cut in Miami, and given pop's first 24-hour video.
★ 6.7
The Passage of Power
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV
2012 · 712 pages
Three years of humiliation as Kennedy's vice president, then Dallas, and Johnson seizes a stunned government. Caro tracks it week by week to the civil rights bill the South had blocked for decades.
★ 6.7
The Sleepwalkers
How Europe Went to War in 1914
2012 · 736 pages
Clark reconstructs the July crisis of 1914 and finds no villain, only leaders watchful but unseeing, each rational step carrying Europe closer. He reopened the fiercest fight over war guilt in decades.
★ 6.7
The Hare with Amber Eyes
2010 · 368 pages
A maid hid 264 Japanese carvings in her mattress while the Nazis stripped the Vienna palace of the Ephrussi bankers. De Waal, their descendant, follows the objects through his family's rise and ruin.
★ 6.7
My Brilliant Friend
2011 · 336 pages
No novelist has written female friendship with this much competition. Elena and Lila grow up in a violent Naples neighborhood in the 1950s, and only one is allowed to stay in school.
★ 6.7
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
2012 · 288 pages
Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a slum beside the Mumbai airport, following a teenage garbage trader, a woman scheming her way to power, and the neighbor whose self-immolation puts them on trial.
★ 6.7
Capital
2013 · 816 pages
Piketty mined two centuries of tax records for the engine of inequality: capital grows faster than the economy, so fortunes pull away from wages. It made inequality the West's central political question.
★ 6.7
Barbarian Days
2015 · 464 pages
Finnegan chased waves from a Honolulu schoolyard to Fiji and Cape Town, then reported wars for the New Yorker. He writes surfing with a physicist's exactness and counts what the obsession cost.
★ 6.7
SPQR
A History of Ancient Rome
2015 · 608 pages
Beard covers a thousand years of Rome, opening on Catiline's conspiracy and closing the day Caracalla made every free inhabitant a citizen, and she cares as much about slaves as emperors.
★ 6.7
Holocene
2011 · From Bon Iver, Bon Iver
Horns and clarinets swell over guitar in a converted Wisconsin veterinary clinic; Grammy voters nominated it for record and song.
★ 6.7
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
Blood on the LeavesKanye West
Blood on the Leaves
2013 · From Yeezus
Nina Simone's 1965 Strange Fruit against TNGHT's blaring horns, a breakup rendered enormous; platinum without ever being a single.
★ 6.6