The 50 Best Movies of the 2010s

Director Darren Aronofsky takes no prisoners. Rather, he ushers his leading men and women to the brink of sanity, and then ever so brilliantly provides the final push that sends them over. He did it with Jared Leto and Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and Jennifer Lawrence in Mother. But it’s his collaboration with Natalie Portman on Black Swan, a dance thriller about a ballerina spiraling into madness, that is absolute tops—not only of this decade, but of all the decades Aronofsky’s work spans.

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If it weren’t for indie director Debra Granik’s sophomore film set in the Ozarks, we may have never met The Red Dress. You know the one. After a breakout performance, Jennifer Lawrence made her Oscars debut in Calvin Klein in 2011, with her red-hot sartorial skills on full display. But even better, her work in the film as Ree, a teenager mulling through meth and murder to find her drug dealer father, proved her to be an even snazzier actress.

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Whenever you see that a film is directed by Christopher Nolan, you know two things: 1) This is a must-see film, and 2) This is a must-see film that will probably require subsequent viewings. Nolan, a highly conceptual and visionary filmmaker, doesn’t babysit his viewers by detangling his webbed plotlines. With Inception, a thriller within a thriller within a thriller, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Tom Hardy, and several more, the director reaches near perfection.

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Leave it to David Fincher (Fight Club, Gone Girl) to turn something historically labeled as nerdy—we are talking algorithms here—into cool school. A dramatized and slightly fictionalized retelling of the creation of Facebook, with Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network crept into the 2010 zeitgeist with all the likes, thanks to original music from Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor (a.k.a. Nine Inch Nails), and a screenplay from the ultimate whip-fast linguist Aaron Sorkin.

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Just imagine this elevator pitch: “Stunt driver never says a word. Lets his hammer do the talking. Falls in love with the wrong girl. It’s violent. It’s romantic. We’ll get Gosling to star.” Only Nicolas Winding Refn, whose abstract body of work includes Bronson and The Neon Demon, would ever think to muzzle an actor like Gosling. And only Refn would soak his graphic, high-octane mob thriller not just with the blood of the Italian mob, but the neon sound of dreamy ‘80s-inspired synth pop. All cylinders, this one.

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A rule-breaking comedy in front of and behind the lens, Bridesmaids ushered in an entirely new subgenre: the female raunch com. Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, and the rest of the cast proved to its male-dominated category that women can not only break laws, drops F-bombs, and crap their pants all in the name of laughing out loud; they can also craft a damn fine screenplay. See: Writers Wiig and Annie Mumolo receiving Oscar nods for their writing.

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Steve McQueen, a contemporary director who has never met a boundary that didn’t need pushing, has a powerful body of work that includes only groundbreaking cinema. In his second project with actor Michael Fassbender—the first being Hunger, a crippling true story about a prison hunger strike—McQueen pulls back the covers on a secretive, solitary, and severely misunderstood condition: sexual addiction.

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Released a year after David O. Russell’s The Fighter starring Mark Wahlberg, the martial arts thriller Warrior was shrugged off by moviegoers as a cheap imitation. But, man, were they wrong. Starring Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte in a late-career-defining role, Gavin O’Connor’s drama is full of surprises and, dare we say, the unanimous winner between the two.

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One of the greatest auteurs of this generation, Martin Scorsese escaped the mob genre to lend his abilities to high-brow, family-friendly fare. Hugo, an absorbing masterpiece that somehow weaves the director’s adoration of film into a mystery surrounding an orphan boy and an automation, was an instant classic the day it was released in 2011.

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Smack-dab in the middle of the decade’s McConaissance, awakened by the actor’s critically acclaimed performances in Bernie and The Lincoln Lawyer, Matthew McConaughey would receive his very first Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. But that wasn’t his best film of the decade. That superlative goes to Killer Joe, a gonzo, Southern-fried genre-bender from The Exorcist helmer, William Friedkin, which stars the Texas native in the title role.

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Zebras, tigers, and monkeys, oh my. There is every kind of creature in Ang Lee’s visionary Oscar winner—including man. A religious parable borrowed from the pages of the same-name philosophical novel by Yann Martel, Life of Pi is a glorious journey that belongs to a castaway whose cargo ship carrying his family and the zoo animals they own capsizes, leaving him bound to a rescue boat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

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By far the most original piece of filmmaking to grace the screen this entire decade, debut director Benh Zeitlin’s celebration of the South pulses with all the energy, emotion, and imagination a tenacious six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy can muster. About a Louisiana bayou community repairing after a devastating flood, it’s a drenched fairy tale that won’t only pull on your heartstrings, it will fray the hell out of them.

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Sandra Bullock takes one step for woman and one giant leap to the Oscar stage with her work as cosmonaut Ryan Stone in director Alfonso Cuarón’s two-hander that costars George Clooney. Nominated for Best Actress, Bullock and her tender performance as a woman lost in life and space are the subtle compliment to a film whose technological fancies catapult it to the pinnacle of visually effective cinema.

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Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 eponymous memoir written by Solomon Northup, a man who was born free in New York then kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, is essential viewing. It’s bolstered by revolutionary performances from everyone above the line, namely Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon and Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, a woman whose story will break you.

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Once upon a time, there was a princess whose sister had magical frozen fractal powers and whose Prince Charming wasn’t so charming. So goes the gist of the Disney film no one was ready for back in November 2013. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel loan their pipes for a movie musical-turned-pop culture phenomenon that was co-directed by a woman, Jennifer Lee, and redefined the phrase “happily ever after.”

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Spike Jonze writes and directs a cerebral techno-romance about a forlorn divorcé (Joaquin Phoenix) whose broken spirit gets a boost once he logs on to his new operating system, an artificially intelligent software named Samantha designed to indulge his every need. A near-future love story, the film sees the two fall in and out of love. Which, with the advancements in AI these days, isn’t all that unrealistic. Right?

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It’s easy to see why The Wolf of Wall Street became Martin Scorsese’s biggest box-office hit. Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort—a Wall Street prodigy who eventually pleaded guilty to fraud and stock-market crimes—the movie is a three-hour adrenaline rush of excess, greed, and complete chaos. Leonardo DiCaprio is magnetic as Belfort, delivering one of his most unhinged performances to date, while Margot Robbie commands every scene in the breakout role that made her a star. With its cocaine-fueled parties, lavish lifestyles, and moral free fall, Scorsese turns the rise and crash of a corrupt empire into something wildly entertaining that became one of the decade’s most talked-about and referenced films.

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A millennial version of John Cusack, Miles Teller might be the most misunderstood actor of his time; but what he does in front of the camera needs no explanation. He’s a revelation as Andrew Neiman in Damien Chazelle’s breakout film, Whiplash. As a promising drummer at odds with his sadistic band instructor (played by J.K. Simmons, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), he bleeds his heart into the role—and his drum kit—and deserves every standing ovation he receives.

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Martin Luther King Jr. is a man whose story is no stranger to a film adaptation, but you’ve never seen the civil rights movement’s central figure like this before. Rather than offer a familiar history lesson, director Ava DuVernay reveals another side to the story of the activist: the human side. Starring a brilliant David Oyelowo, Selma chronicles the epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, while giving audiences a peek into its revered leader.

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More a feat in filmmaking than a potential instant classic, Birdman was conceived as an entirely single-shot film. And though editing tricks of the trade and the talents of award-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki were at play here, what director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and leading man Michael Keaton pulled off with Birdman, a drama about a fading movie star who turns to the stage, is nothing short of magical.

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