The Best Movies of the 2010s, Ranked
The 2010s were the decade when directors started making large films again with genuine ambition. Streaming changed the economics, the Academy broadened its membership, and for a few years it was possible to make a two-hundred-million-dollar science fiction film with almost no dialogue and a Best Picture winner in Korean. The films on this list are the ones that took those opportunities and did something specific with them rather than merely filling a release slot.
How we ranked these: Ranked by formal achievement, durability, and how well the film's argument holds up. We weight craft and structure heavily and treat box office and awards as irrelevant. Only films with a full review in our collection are eligible.
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1. Parasite
The decade's most complete film: a comedy, a thriller, a horror film, and a tragedy in sequence, with a house as its central argument. Bong's vertical staging does work no dialogue could manage.
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2. The Social Network
The best American screenplay of the decade, matched to a director who refuses to treat it as sacred. Sorkin's deposition structure is elegant and Fincher's control is total.
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3. Interstellar
The most emotionally effective use of relativity in any mainstream film, held together by McConaughey's performance and a docking sequence that stands with the best action of the decade.
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4. Mad Max: Fury Road
The best action film of its decade. Centre-framed staging makes complex sequences completely legible, and the practical production gives it weight that digital work cannot replicate.
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5. Inception
An original blockbuster with a genuine idea at its centre. Five simultaneous timelines executed with real clarity, and an emotional core that is actual grief rather than a plot device.
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6. Blade Runner 2049
A legacy sequel that deepens rather than repeats. Deakins' photography assigns each location a distinct visual argument, and the film's decision to make its protagonist incidental is genuinely unusual.
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7. Whiplash
A lean, brutal film about the cost of excellence that refuses to resolve its own central question. The editing is structured as musical rhythm rather than accompaniment.
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8. Get Out
A debut of extraordinary control that fuses horror mechanics with social critique so completely they cannot be separated. The Sunken Place is one of the great modern horror images.
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9. La La Land
A formally beautiful film that uses the musical genre to argue against the genre's central promise. The songs are the best written for film in a decade.
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10. The Grand Budapest Hotel
Anderson's best film and the clearest demonstration that his formalism is a delivery system rather than an evasion. Funny throughout and genuinely mournful by the end.
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11. Joker
A remarkable performance in a film that does not deserve it. Phoenix is extraordinary and Hildur's score is superb; the surrounding film is a Scorsese pastiche without a coherent thesis.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best film of the 2010s?
The Social Network is our highest-rated film of the decade on craft, and Parasite is the most complete. Both are defensible and the argument between them is genuinely interesting.
Why is Joker on this list if the review is critical?
Because a film can be significant and flawed at the same time. Phoenix's performance is one of the decade's best, and the film's confused politics are worth examining rather than ignoring.
Which 2010s film was the most influential?
Mad Max: Fury Road for action staging, Get Out for the social thriller template, and Inception for the way blockbusters began using complex structure.
Which 2010s film has aged best?
Parasite and The Social Network. Both were about systems that have only become more visible since release, and neither depends on technology that dates.
Keep reading
Our ranked lists are deliberately opinionated. Each one places films against each other inside a defined frame and explains the ordering, which means they disagree with each other and with us on different days. That is the point.