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
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2010
Showing 115 works across all media from 2010
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
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
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
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
If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.
The Social Network · 2010
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
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
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
Bloodbuzz Ohio
2010 · From High Violet
Cut in Aaron Dessner's Brooklyn garage, a horn part stripped out late, leaving that rolling drum pattern and Berninger's baritone.
★ 6.4
Washington
A Life
2010 · 928 pages
The marble Washington was a performance: Chernow finds a man of hot temper, sharp ambition, and constant calculation underneath, and follows him from surveying to Mount Vernon's slave quarters to the presidency.
★ 6.3
Tightrope
2010
Cut at Wondaland with Big Boi guesting, a horn-driven groove Monae wrote about staying level under praise and criticism.
★ 6.3
Teenage Dream
2010
Bonnie McKee rewrote it repeatedly until Benny Blanco suggested studying a Teenagers single, and one word cracked the chorus open.
★ 6.3
Pursuit of Happiness
2010
Ratatat cut the beat before Cudi arrived, MGMT added vocals, and Steve Aoki's remix made a song about intoxication ubiquitous.
★ 6.2
Fuck You
2010
Twinkling piano, bumping bass, the Smeezingtons doing sixties Motown, and a typography video that went viral on release day.
★ 6.1
Love The Way You Lie
2010 · From Recovery
Alex da Kid's beat, Skylar Grey's demo hook, Rihanna's vocal cut in Dublin, seven weeks at No. 1.
★ 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
The Suburbs
2010 · From The Suburbs
A rolling piano, Butler's boyhood in The Woodlands outside Houston, and an album he called a letter from the suburbs.
★ 5.8
6 Foot 7 Foot
2010 · From Tha Carter IV
Bangladesh built the beat around Harry Belafonte's Day-O, and Wayne released it six weeks after leaving jail.
★ 5.7
Just the Way You Are (Bruno Mars)
2010
Every instrument played by Mars and Ari Levine at Levcon Studios, and a Grammy for male pop vocal followed.
★ 5.7
Carlos
Directed by Olivier Assayas
2010
Nearly six hours across eight languages and a dozen countries: Olivier Assayas films a terrorist's whole career as a business, with clients, invoices, expense disputes and a payroll to meet.
★ 5.6
The Town
Directed by Ben Affleck
2010
Affleck filmed in the Charlestown blocks the story is about: bank crews in nun masks, and a robber who wants out of a neighborhood with no intention of releasing him.
★ 5.6
The Fighter
Directed by David O. Russell
2010
Christian Bale plays the older brother who threw away his own career and cannot stop coaching: Lowell, Massachusetts shot from inside the family, which is the hardest opponent in it.
★ 5.6
127 Hours
Directed by Danny Boyle
2010
Boyle built a thriller around someone who cannot move: James Franco is pinned by a boulder in a Utah canyon, and the camera keeps finding movement in a space three feet wide.
★ 5.5
The Emperor of all Maladies
A Biography of Cancer
2010 · 571 pages
Cancer gets a full biography, traced from an Egyptian physician's papyrus to the leukemia ward where Mukherjee treats a young kindergarten teacher. He makes the invention of chemotherapy read like a war.
★ 5.5
Teen Dream
2010
Recorded in a converted church in upstate New York, and built almost entirely from an organ, a drum machine and a slide guitar.
★ 5.4
The Suburbs
2010
Win Butler and his brother grew up outside Houston, and the record is built around driving through places like it as teenagers.
★ 5.4
Only Girl (In The World)
2010
Cut in New York, finished by Sandy Vee in Paris, and Rihanna's ninth Hot 100 number one; euphoria on demand.
★ 5.3
Not Afraid
2010 · From Recovery
Boi-1da's beat, Resto's keyboards, and Eminem setting the Slim Shady mask aside; it debuted at number one.
★ 5.3
Just Kids
2010 · 320 pages
Patti Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe met in 1967 New York, broke and twenty, and held each other to the promise of becoming artists. She wrote it at his dying request.
★ 5.3
What's My Name
2010
Stargate's synth organ, Drake's first number one, and Rihanna turning a chorus of nonsense syllables into flirtation.
★ 5.2
Halcyon Digest
2010
Bradford Cox, the singer, wrote the last song for a friend who had just died, and it ends by simply stopping partway through.
★ 5.0
The Map and the Territory
2010 · 288 pages
Jed Martin, an artist, makes his name photographing Michelin road maps and painting people at their trades. Houellebecq writes himself into the novel, has himself murdered, and gives Jed a dying father.
★ 5.0
Rill Rill
2010
Funkadelic's Can You Get to That, looped and sweetened, under the one Sleigh Bells song that whispers.
★ 5.0
The King's Speech
Directed by Tom Hooper
2010
Made for eight million pounds and returned thirty times its budget: Colin Firth plays a duke who dreads a microphone, and Geoffrey Rush the unqualified Australian who will not defer to him.
★ 5.0
California Gurls
Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg
2010
Perry's West Coast answer to Empire State of Mind, the misspelling saluting Big Star, six weeks at number one.
★ 4.9
The Big Short
2010 · 291 pages
Michael Burry, a one-eyed doctor turned investor, read the mortgage documents no one else opened and bet against American housing. Lewis turns credit default swaps into a thriller about who saw it coming.
★ 4.7
Grenade
2010
Rebuilt two days before the album was due, its surf-pop guitars gone, and Mars sings it like a wound.
★ 4.7
All I Do Is Win
2010
Three rappers, one T-Pain hook, and a brass fanfare Obama walked out to at the 2013 correspondents' dinner.
★ 4.6
Black and Yellow
2010
Stargate's beat, a yellow Challenger with black stripes, and a Pittsburgh hometown chant that reached number one.
★ 4.6
Mine
2010 · From Speak Now
A leak forced its release nearly two weeks early, and Swift's lead Speak Now single still debuted at number three.
★ 4.5
Brothers
2010
The Black Keys took two people and a lot of noise to Muscle Shoals, and came out with the record that filled the arenas.
★ 4.5
The High Road
2010
Mercer and Burton met at Roskilde in 2004, then recorded in secret; the result shuffles beautifully toward resignation.
★ 4.4
Revival
2010 · From Halcyon Digest
Two minutes long, given away to fans who posted flyers, and jangling its way toward something like salvation.
★ 4.4
The Trip
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
2010 · United Kingdom
Two comedians play unpleasant versions of themselves and improvise the whole thing: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drive around northern England eating well and competing over Michael Caine impressions.
★ 4.3
Thank Me Later
2010
Drake had been a teenage actor on a Canadian school drama, and made a record that raps and sings without marking where one stops.
★ 4.3
If I Die Young
2010
Kimberly Perry wrote it alone, and banjo, fiddle and mandolin carry her meditation on mortality across fifty-three Hot 100 weeks.
★ 4.2
Nothin' On You
B.o.B and Bruno Mars
2010
A Joe Tex drum break under a Smeezingtons hook, and Bruno Mars stepping out from behind the songwriting desk.
★ 4.2
Aston Martin Music
2010
Filmed among Aston Martins in Miami, with J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League's beat and Drake turning Ross's luxury boast wistful.
★ 4.1
Just a Dream
2010
Jim Jonsin and Rico Love built the beat, and Nelly took the heartbreak to number three.
★ 3.9
Your Love (Nicki Minaj)
2010
A leaked demo forced its own release, and an Annie Lennox sample gave Minaj eight weeks atop the rap chart.
★ 3.7