Our Picks for the Best Films of the Decade

As we say goodbye to the 2010’s – The Teens? – it’s time to reflect on the top 10 movies of the past decade. It’s a tough job, given how many outstanding films graced the big screen. But our expert correspondent Abbie Martin Greenbaum has waded into the fray. Here are our picks for the best films of the decade that’s now drawing to a close.

what were the best movies of the past decade?

As we say goodbye to the 2010’s – a decade defined by social media, by Marvel, by streaming services, and by immense shifts in the world around us – it is time to look back and select our favorite ten films released over the past ten years.

Of course, there is a lot of pressure when making lists like this, to not only select films that are fun to watch, but that in one way or another define something about this period of time. We are making a kind of film syllabus, so that when the people of the future look back, they could watch these ten movies and understand something about the way the world felt at this time.

There are no right answers here. By limiting ourselves to one movie per year, we are pushing out many other worthy options from years that had multiple list-worthy films. But in each of these ten films, there is something undeniably special, a longevity that deserves to last far beyond this decade, to when future historians are looking back at a medium called film, and trying to decide what all the fuss was about.

our picks for the best films of the decade

Here are the ten best films of the 2010’s.

2010: The Social Network 

How prophetic that the best film of 2010 would be The Social Network? Written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, the seething origin story of the website Facebook was eerie to watch then. But so much eerier to watch now, as we have now witnessed the ways in which the social media platform that has all but swallowed our entire existence as a culture.

Having seen the way Mark Zuckerberg has persisted as a questionable public figure in recent years, seeing him portrayed as a questionable public figure ten years ago feels now like all but a a flashing apocalypse sign. It is strange to think that the earliest movie on this list might just be the one to define them all. The Social Network feels as significant now as it did ten years ago.

2011: Pariah

This was maybe the best decade of all time for coming of age films. Finally, filmmakers were willing to see young people not only as personifications of youthful idealism and high school tropes, but as real people who experience problems that are as serious as any adult’s.

And one of the best coming of age films of the decade came in 2011, with Dee Rees’s Pariah. This is the story of a young black girl who is coming to terms with her sexuality, and with coming out as gay to her uncertain parents. Like all the best coming of age films, this one walks a careful line: it is honest and brutal in its telling, but it offers the possibility for a more hopeful, happy future after its conclusion, in the way that only coming of age films can.

2012: Stories We Tell  

Technically Stories We Tell had its formal release in the spring of 2013, but as its first release was in the fall of 2012, we are cheating just a little to include it here. It is also the only documentary on this list.

Sarah Polley’s quest to tell the story of her family and her paternity seems at first glance to be a rather small endeavor. But the more you watch, the more you realize this little film has so much more to say, both about perspective and truth, and also about film-making. Though the story they are telling does have its twists and turns, what’s really amazing is to see the way many points of view can come together to create a tight-knit, beautifully heartbreaking narrative that an outsider is able to see and understand.

2013: Short Term 12

While it is maybe not the flashiest movie of the era, this quietly perfect film is both an underrated gem, and also a who’s who of nearly everyone who came into major success in the latter half of the decade.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (of Marvel’s upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Short Term 12 is about a house for “underprivileged children” starring Brie Larson, John Gallagher Jr., Stephanie Beatriz, Rami Malek, Kaitlyn Dever, and LaKeith Stanfield.

While it covers themes of abuse and trauma, it manages to maintain a certain free-spirited sensibility that is contagious – by the time you get to the end of the film, you feel, somehow, a little bit better than you did at the start.

2014: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Described on Wikipedia as an “Iranian vampire western,” it is hard to imagine a film more stylistically specific than Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

In some ways, the film positions itself as a feminist precursor to a movie like 2019’s Hustlers. After all, its star is a female vampire, who stalks “Bad City,” killing only those who really deserve it – mostly men who have done something bad. What it lacks in chattiness, it makes up for with gorgeous shots that are some of the best of the decade. And with an open-ended conclusion that leaves the viewer free to imagine what might happen next.

2015: Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is perhaps the most polarizing film on this list, drawing strong reactions from everyone who saw it.

But perhaps the naysayers are simply afraid of what they are seeing. The movie is one long existential question about what it means to be human. Wrapped up in some clever twists and turns, four amazing performances, and some pulse-racing action sequences. It is a brave film, and we can only hope that unlike Social Network, this glance at AI is not a look at what’s to come.

2016: Moonlight

If there were official awards given to the film of the decade, a lot of people would argue that it should be Moonlight.

Barry Jenkins’ gorgeous, personal epic is at first glance a character study, but manages to transcend that genre and become so much more. Watching Chiron through three chapters in his life – youth, adolescence and adulthood – you see the ways in which the most difficult themes of his life persist, shaping him from one minute to the next in ways that feel both inevitable and impossible to predict. It is by far the most emotional film on this list, and also has the benefit of being visually stunning.

2017: Get Out 

Director Jordan Peele changed cinema forever with Get Out. Previously, the horror movie genre had been more of a spectacle than something cinematically serious. But then Peele came along, and changed it into an artistic vehicle for social commentary.

This is a flawless film in every way, about a young black man (played by Daniel Kaluuya) who goes home with his white girlfriend to meet her parents, only to discover that they are part of a racist and murderous cult. It is not only that Get Out came along to make a vital point in need of making. But also that it did it differently, and in a movie that was as widely commercial as it was intelligent.

2018: Capernaum

2018 was a year particularly full of great movies (Roma, Black Panther, Eighth Grade, and Shoplifters, to name a few of many) that are worth holding onto in the years to come.

And then there was Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum. Look, it is the nature of a Best-Of ranking that many of the films on this list are difficult to watch. And yet, Capernaum is somehow the most difficult of all of them, the kind of cinema that really will leave you feeling changed by what you’ve witnessed on screen.

On paper, the movie is about a young boy who is suing his parents for giving birth to him. But really, it is about the traumatizing experiences that brought him to that point. It is the film on this list that feels of the grandest scale, like a modern Odyssey film, but about a small child, and absolutely devastating. Watch it.  

2019: Parasite

It might sound like hyperbole, but if you ask us, Parasite is a perfect film, and is Moonlight’s only competition for film of the decade. Bong Joon-ho’s film seems to have found near-unanimous acceptance, being praised as the best movie of the year by nearly everyone, everywhere. There is something soothing about films that are so high concept, you know from the moment you hear about them that you will want to watch them over and over. After all, with many films, it is not what they are but how they are made that makes them so extraordinary.

But with Parasite, it’s both: yes, it is brilliantly made, with the kind of precision that only an auteur could manage, but it is also a brilliant, rare idea. This is a movie we will all be talking about for years to come.

the best films of the decade

That’s it – our picks for the best films of the past decade. Did we miss one of your favorites? What’s a the top of your list?

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Abbie Martin Greenbaum grew up in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn, where she drinks a lot of coffee and matches roommates together for a living. At Oberlin College, she studied English and Cinema, which are still two of her favorite things, along with dessert and musical theater. She believes in magic.

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