The 100 Best Movies of the Decade
Ten years ago, it seemed like we all had a pretty solid idea of movies — what they can do, who they’re for, and where they’re watched. That idea was inflexible, and supported by a century of precedent. It came with the added benefit of making the people in charge comfortable with the idea that cinema’s future wouldn’t look all that different from its past. DVD sales were strong, Netflix was still just a sad little envelope at the bottom of your mailbox, and China was starting to give studios the biggest safety net it ever had. Perhaps the arrival of James Cameron’s “Avatar” in the waning moments of 2009 could have been seen as a harbinger of strange things to come, but no one in Hollywood has ever lost sleep over a movie that grossed nearly $3 billion.
Things have changed. Cinema is in a constant state of flux, but it’s never mutated faster or more restlessly than it has over the last 10 years. And while the decade will no doubt be remembered for the paradigm shifts precipitated by streaming and monolithic superhero movies, hindsight makes it clear that the definition of film itself is exponentially wider now than it was a decade ago. Places. Products. Mirrors. Windows. Reflections of who we are. Visions of who we want to be. A way of capturing reality. A way of changing it. If the most vital work of the 2010s has made one thing clear, it’s that movies have never been more things to more people than they are today. And our week-long celebration list of the Best Films of the 2010s has us more excited than ever about what they might be to you tomorrow.
As the week goes on, we’ll be posting lists of the decade’s best performances, scenes, scores, and posters, as well as a timeline of the news stories that shaped the last 10 years, and interviews with the filmmakers who made it all happen.
But for now, IndieWire is proud to kick things off with our list of the 100 best movies of the 2010s.
“Inherent Vice” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
“The Loneliest Planet” (Julia Loktev, 2011)
“The Great Gatsby” (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)
“All These Sleepless Nights” (Michal Marczak, 2016)
“Girl Walk // All Day” (Jacob Krupnick, 2011)
“The Arbor” (Clio Barnard, 2010)
“Happy Hour” (Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, 2015)
“Mother of George” (Andrew Dosunmu, 2013)
“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018)
“Fire at Sea” (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016)
“Private Life” (Tamara Jenkins, 2018)
“Support the Girls” (Andrew Bujalski, 2018)
“We Need to Talk About Kevin” (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)
“Her Smell” (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)
“Kate Plays Christine” (Robert Greene, 2016)
“The Illusionist” (Sylvain Chomet, 2010)
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)
“Synonyms” (Nadav Lapid, 2019)
“Sunset Song” (Terence Davies, 2015)
“High Life” (Claire Denis, 2018)
“No Home Movie” (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
“Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” (David & Nathan Zellner, 2014)
“Inside Out” (Pete Docter, 2015)
“The Souvenir” (Joanna Hogg, 2019)
“Leave No Trace” (Debra Granik, 2018)
“A Star Is Born” (Bradley Cooper, 2018)
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (Rian Johnson, 2017)
“La La Land” (Damien Chazelle, 2016)
“The Handmaiden” (Park Chan-wook, 2016)
“Goodbye to Language” (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
“Pariah” (Dee Rees, 2011)
“The Duke of Burgundy” (Peter Strickland, 2014)
“Jackie” (Pablo Larraín, 2016)
“At Berkeley” (Frederick Wiseman, 2013)
“Force Majeure” (Ruben Östlund, 2014)
“Melancholia” (Lars von Trier, 2011)
“Mission: Impossible — Fallout” (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)
“Inception” (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
“Shoplifters” (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2018)
“Faces Places” (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
“Black Panther” (Ryan Coogler, 2018)
“The Farewell” (Lulu Wang, 2019)
“The Turin Horse” (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)
“Tangerine” (Sean Baker, 2015)
“Happy as Lazzaro” (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018)
“Frances Ha” (Noah Baumbach, 2012)
“Cold War” (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2018)
“A Ghost Story” (David Lowery, 2017)
“Eden” (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014)
“Elle” (Paul Verhoeven, 2016)
“The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” (Takahata Isao, 2014)
“Before Midnight” (Richard Linklater, 2013)
“Parasite” (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
“The Lost City of Z” (James Gray, 2016)
“Hereditary” (Ari Aster, 2018)
“A Separation” (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
“Cameraperson” (Kirsten Johnson, 2016)
“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
“Zero Dark Thirty” (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
“Margaret” (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)
“Personal Shopper” (Olivier Assayas, 2016)
“The Babadook” (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
“Timbuktu” (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014)
“Roma” (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)
“Spring Breakers” (Harmony Korine, 2013)
“Only Lovers Left Alive” (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
“Stories We Tell” (Sarah Polley, 2012)
“Madeline’s Madeline” (Josephine Decker, 2018)
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” (Wes Anderson, 2014)
“Somewhere” (Sofia Coppola, 2010)
“This Is Not a Film” (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011)
“First Reformed” (Paul Schrader, 2018)
“Paddington 2” (Paul King, 2017)
“The Wind Rises” (Miyazaki Hayao, 2013)
“Magic Mike XXL” (Gregory Jacobs, 2015)
“Amour” (Michael Haneke, 2012)
“Boyhood” (Richard Linklater, 2014)
“O.J.: Made in America” (Ezra Edelman, 2016)
“Burning” (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
“Get Out” (Jordan Peele, 2017)
“Phantom Thread” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)
“Toni Erdmann” (Maren Ade, 2016)
“Call Me by Your Name” (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)
“World of Tomorrow” (Don Hertzfeldt, 2015)
“The Social Network” (David Fincher, 2010)
“Dogtooth” (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2010)
“Leviathan” (Vérena Paravel & Lucien Castain-Taylor, 2012)
“The Tree of Life” (Terrence Malick, 2011)
“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2011)
“The Wolf of Wall Street” (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
“Lady Bird” (Greta Gerwig, 2017)
“Mad Max: Fury Road” (George Miller, 2015)
“The Master” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
“Carol” (Todd Haynes, 2015)
“Holy Motors” (Leos Carax, 2012)
“Inside Llewyn Davis” (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2013)
“The Act of Killing”/”The Look of Silence” (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2013/2015)
“Certified Copy” (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
“Under the Skin” (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
“Moonlight” (Barry Jenkins, 2016)