Aren's Top 50 Films of the Decade (2010-2019)

1. Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) dir. Travis Knight

In an era when animated films are the sturdiest studio products out there (the remarkable consistency of Pixar comes to mind), smaller animation studios like Studio Ghibli and Laika are still the best places to find significant artistic works disguised as commercial products. Laika, which has been making stop-motion feature films since 2009’s Coraline, made the film of the decade in 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings, a little-seen August release that was advertised as a Japanese-influenced adventure comedy. To be sure, there is thrilling adventure in Kubo and The Two Strings as well as surprisingly-effective comedy (largely a result of Matthew McConaughey’s inspired voicework). The animation is also astounding, arguably the peak of stop-motion artistry. For instance, Laika constructed over 40,000 individual facial components to capture over 40 million expressions for the main character, Kubo (Art Parkinson). This is not so much a film that is animated, but a film that seems performed in how hyper-specific and tactile the animation is, with every element calibrated to perfection. However, the film is most powerful not just as a beautifully-animated story, but as a treatise on storytelling itself, especially the stories we tell our children.

In one way, Kubo and the Two Strings is a mythical adventure about a demigod, the young Kubo, who seeks three holy artifacts with the help of two magical protectors, Monkey (Charlize Theron) and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), in order to defeat his evil grandfather, the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes), who seeks to steal his remaining eye and with it his power. There’s a mythological aspect to the story of feuding supernatural relatives and the quest for sacred artifacts in order to defeat a fearful god-being—there are elements of Kronos from Greek myth in the Moon King and Kubo is obviously influenced by Hercules, Perseus, and other demi-gods. But director Travis Knight doesn’t use the mythological elements of the story simply as a shorthand to generic adventure; instead, he treats the story like myth itself, weaving familiar patterns into its fabric in order to tell us truths about the way we forge our identities in relation to those of our ancestors.

The masterstroke of the film is foregrounding the storytelling aspect itself, so that the film is not only about its thematic interests—family, resilience, identity, forgiveness—but about the stories we tell about those essential human concerns. Kubo and the Two Strings opens with narration from Kubo warning the viewer about the film to follow—he is telling a story and asks you to pay attention. The film closes with Kubo ending that story. He directs his final words to his dead parents and illustrates a heartbreaking reality about the disconnect between life and stories: “This was a happy story, but it could still be a whole lot happier. I don’t know exactly what the rules are or how this works, but if there were any way to... You know, I still need you. So I can say this has been a happy story, I could feel it. We could all feel it. Then we could end this story. Together.” And then to grant Kubo’s wish, the film ends with a heartbreaking image of Kubo and his ghostly parents standing alongside the river looking into the lens of the camera, essentially saying that this is not real, but aching for it to be so. This resolution is important because the film is aimed at children and about the stories we tell children; it acknowledges the bittersweet tension between the fact that we tell children made-up stories in order to teach them lessons that are ultimately unattainable, but that the quest to achieve them is what makes life worth living. Kubo and the Two Strings is beautiful, wise, and overwhelmingly poignant. Its emotional power cannot be overstated.

2. Skyfall (2012) dir. Sam Mendes

If the 2010s is the decade of the franchise, then Skyfall is the film of the decade. It’s the franchise film that did more than any other to capture what is so appealing about mainstream cinema in the first place: the ability to explore truths about the world while indulging our imaginations and desires for entertainment in ways that are impossible in any other medium. While Disney, Warner Bros., and seemingly every other mainstream studio fought for the crown to comic book cinema, the James Bond 007 franchise—one of the oldest and most successful in Hollywood history—avoided franchise novelties and instead went back to basics in order to produce its definitive statement. Skyfall strips down the character of Bond, avoids the apocalyptic scale of modern blockbuster cinema, and boils the franchise appeal down to its core essence: beautiful women, dangerous villains, stunning action, and a complicated man that “men want to be and women want to be with.”

Directed by the steady hand of Sam Mendes and inspired by the works of Christopher Nolan, Skyfall is as beautiful as mainstream films get. Roger Deakins’ stunning, silhouette-heavy digital cinematography elevates the visual language of action cinema and makes Bond into something approaching a mythical hero. The narrative delves into the ethics of espionage and the personal cost of serving Queen and country, which grows ever more relevant in a time when nation-states (including Britain) teeter on the brink of irrelevance. Skyfall does not delve into human psychology or the structures that define our society in the ways that other films on this list do, but it does embody what is best about mainstreaming filmmaking, from its emotional lessons to its endless capacity for excitement. If studio filmmaking is to continue to dominate our viewing habits and crowd out smaller, independent fare, then studios should learn the lessons of Skyfall and ensure that their tentpole blockbusters are not only iconic, but leverage all the best tools of filmmaking in order to craft the most effective entertainment possible. They should make their blockbusters matter. Skyfall matters and it won’t soon be forgotten.

3. The Social Network (2010) dir. David Fincher

David Fincher’s masterpiece on the origin myth of Facebook grows more relevant and instructive with each passing second, as more people fall prey to the endless cycle of rage, ego-stroking, and collective apathy that is social media. We live in the information age and no director is better able to siphon information and distill its meaning than David Fincher, who specializes in stories of individuals trying to suss order out of chaotic systems. Working from a script by Aaron Sorkin (doing his best work ever, by far), Fincher balances Sorkin’s idealistic didacticism with some necessary nihilism and positions Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) as both a technological genius and a profoundly destructive narcissist. It’s the “both/and” approach that makes The Social Network so remarkable. It marvels at the ways Mark manipulates friends and allies and leverages his considerable technical knowhow into the formation of Facebook and its eventual cultural domination. But it also knows that beneath every technological innovation is a petty, instinctual motivation: in this case, it’s Mark’s misanthropy and pathological need for control over his social sphere. The film concludes that no matter how technologically advanced we humans have become, we’re still beings in thrall to primitive impulses. The Social Network sums up our 21st century world, in all its marvellous, idiotic glory.

4. The Wind Rises (2013) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

The Wind Rises was supposed to be the swan song of master animator and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. Although we now know that retirement will likely never hold for Miyazaki (he has a new film reportedly due out later this year), that doesn’t change the fact that The Wind Rises, which tells the story of plane designer Jiro Horikoshi before and during World War II, is a personal statement by the world’s greatest living animator. At its core, it explores the idea of compromised artistry, which is to say, all artistry. Miyazaki is saying that just as Jiro’s planes were turned into weapons of war by Imperial Japan, his films are turned into commercial products; both works of art were compromised and belittled by reality. The Wind Rises beautifully explores this compromise central to the lives of all artists and an unavoidable aspect of trying to bring uncomplicated beauty into a world that perverts everything it touches. The Wind Rises will not end up being Miyazaki’s final film, but it will always feel like his definitive statement on the challenges of art itself.

5. The Tree of Life (2011) dir. Terrence Malick

No medium is better equipped to depict the passage of time than film, which forces us to experience stories one frame at a time, much as we experience life one second at a time. Terrence Malick, the foremost spiritual poet of modern cinema, uses this element of cinema to craft a film that captures how memory shapes us and our conception of the universe. It depicts the personal and the cosmic, the sacred and the profane, or, as Christians put it, being “in the world, but not of the world.” In a phrase, The Tree of Life captures the transcendent tension of existence. Its touching story of a boy growing up in mid-20th-century Texas shows the intimacy of first experiences, while the cosmic interludes place those intimate moments in the context of the universe. The structural back-and-forth of the editing is essential to the effect and something that can only be done in film. It captures the experience of memory—how we can feel the past and the present simultaneously, just as we are living in the world, but drawn to something beyond it.

6. Dunkirk (2017) dir. Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan has made more ambitious or inventive films than Dunkirk, but none that are as perfect in their clockwork precision. Dunkirk charts the World War II evacuation of British soldiers at Dunkirk, when civilian boats came across the English Channel to rescue thousands of soldiers in the nick of time. Nolan presents the film as occurring in three simultaneous overlapping timelines, following a young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) on the beach over the course of a week, a civilian yacht captain (Mark Rylance) and his crew over the course of a day, and a fighter pilot (Tom Hardy) over the course of an hour. The film is an example of parallel editing taken to its furthest, most thrilling extreme, where the simultaneous presentation provides context while keeping us stuck in the moment. This presentation amasses tension that doesn’t let up until the final frame of the film and captures the dread of wartime. As well, by focusing exclusively on a retreat and by championing survival over victory, Nolan achieves something as close to an anti-war effect as is possible in mainstream filmmaking. It sees war as an absolute negative and peaceful survival as the only outcome worth celebrating.

7. It Follows (2014) dir. David Robert Mitchell

Horror plays on the subconscious in ways no other genre can. It Follows is the best horror film of the decade because it mines that subconscious effect for all its worth. It uses a genius central concept—a spectre is passed through sex and relentlessly hunts down the last person to catch it—that mines the associations of sex and death and preys on their connection in our subconscious. But the concept is not only interesting on a thematic level; it’s terrifying in the moment. David Robert Mitchell savily uses a tracking camera, 360-degree pans, and deep focus to prey on the terrors lingering in all corners of the frame, turning the very act of watching a movie into a threat. The tension (aided by the exceptional electronic score by Disasterpeace) permeates every scene because the spectre is always on the hunt and capable of appearing at any moment and in any form. That this spectre represents death makes it infinitely dangerous in the world of the film, but that it also represents the complicated fears about growing up and newfound maturity and sexuality gives it a liminal affect that lingers long after the credits roll. For anyone who found their teenage years a confusing, waking nightmare—even if only on a purely hormonal level—It Follows offers a terror that cannot be contained.

8. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) dir. Joel and Ethan Coen

If there is a film more defined by pathos this past decade, I haven’t seen it. Inside Llewyn Davis traces the life of a talented but ornery singer-songwriter, Lwelyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), who is loosely based on folk musician Dave Van Ronk. His music is great, but his personality turns everyone off, which means he’s doomed from the get-go. The Coens trace one week in his life, looping back to the same moment that begins and ends the film, as if saying that he’s fated to follow this cycle of personal crisis and professional shortcoming for the rest of his life, like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill. The film alternates between bitter comedy and touching emotional notes with an almost-biblical torpor over the whole endeavour, as if Llewyn has been cursed by God, like Job or Cain. The soundtrack is an all-timer, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film is how it boils down the entire artistic struggle into one pithy, heartbreaking line: “I don’t see a lot of money here.”

9. Phantom Thread (2017) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

In its own peculiar, particular way, Phantom Thread charts the essential tensions of marriage better than any other film this decade. It also shows how much Paul Thomas Anderson has grown as a director, even if he proved to have already considerable cinematic abilities when he arrived on the scene with Hard Eight (1996). Phantom Thread follows a relationship between a brilliant, difficult fashion designer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and a headstrong young immigrant (Vicky Krieps) and the ways it unravels their lives and re-sews them into new forms. It’s a film with a stunning attention to detail, both in terms of design (the dresses are rapturous) and character. The way it charts the emotional fluctuations of its two leads is remarkable, as well as how it shows their personal strengths and deficiencies commingling to complement each other in ways that are only possible in a marriage.

10. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) dir. Martin Scorsese

A three-hour frat comedy should be an oxymoron and yet it took one of cinema’s most respected old masters to show that it’s possible. The Wolf of Wall Street, which charts the scamming, partying, and shocking debauchery of Jordan Belfort (a never-better Leonardo DiCaprio) on Wall Street in the early 1990s, is a hoot. Like so many of Scorsese’s films, it embodies the invigorating contradiction of showing the thrills of a certain lifestyle while also exposing all its dirtiest secrets and moral failings. Thus, you can excuse viewers for revelling in the debauchery on display and howling in laughter at the stupidity of the characters involved (you’re meant to do so), but the film’s neatest trick is how it pulls the rug out from under us as viewers in its closing moments. It shows us that no matter how many times we’re scammed by false visions of success and life being an endless party—how many times we fall prey to a certain vision of capitalism, in short—we’ll always keep coming back for more.

11. Certified Copy (2010) dir. Abbas Kiarostami

The late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami mines the tension between original and copy in this emotional puzzle about a middle-aged couple (Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel) spending an afternoon in Tuscany. A mid-film twist reveals the truth about their relationship (or does it?) and recalibrates everything that came before it—and that comes after. It engages the profound, elemental question of whether meaning is tied to originality. It mines familiar territory for Kiarostami, but makes it new through the performances and distinctly-European presentation.

12. Inception (2010) dir. Christopher Nolan

The high-concept action movie has been standard since the mid-1980s, but Inception raised the bar beyond even the highest of high-concepts. Set largely in dreams, Christopher Nolan frees the action film from the confines of the waking world and the conventional clock. Inception is a thrilling example of big-budget tools being used in the service of an idiosyncratic vision, one that both is universally accessible and completely personal.

13. Son of Saul (2015) dir. László Nemes

Son of Saul does something that is almost unthinkable, which is to make the Holocaust palpable on screen. It’s not the first narrative film to take place during the Holocaust, but it’s the first that doesn’t shrink away from the horrors that define it. Only the gas chambers are off limits in Nemes’ horrifying vision of hell on earth. Everything else is in the frame, often out of focus, as we follow a sonderkommando (Géza Röhrig) as he tries to attach some meaning to life in the inferno of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Historical cinematic storytelling has never been this visceral or horrifying.

14. Annihilation (2018) dir. Alex Garland

Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina (2015) and adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel is a potent depiction of depression and the human compulsion to burn down our own lives. Mining iconography from The Thing, Stalker, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Garland crafts a stunning extraterrestrial world that’s as equally full of wonders as terrors.

15. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019) dir. Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino’s most laidback film since Jackie Brown (1997) and far-and-away his wisest, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood charts the lives of a washed-up cowboy actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman (Brad Pitt) in Hollywood in 1969. The film is his ode to Old Hollywood and gives Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) the fairy tale ending she deserved.

16. Silence (2016) dir. Martin Scorsese

Scorserse tackles the silence of God in this adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel, which follows two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) in Shogunate Japan at a time when Christianity was outlawed and brutally suppressed. Teasing out themes explored in many of his previous works, especially The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese investigates the cost of martyrdom and foundational aspects of the Christian faith.

17. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) dir. Denis Villeneuve

Denis Villeneuve makes the implicit explicit in his sequel to Ridley Scott’s science-fiction classic, positioning an android (Ryan Gosling) as the main character in order to directly investigate what makes a human being a human being. The approach pays off in remarkably emotional ways and makes Blade Runner 2049 something of a Pinocchio story in addition to a visually-stunning sequel to the original classic.

18. The Act of Killing (2013) and The Look of Silence (2015) dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

Companion pieces that explore the Indonesian genocide of communists and ethnic Chinese in the 1960s. The Act of Killing allows the perpetrators of the genocide (including the scary, charismatic Anwar Congo) to implicate themselves in their war crimes through cinematic recreations. The Look of Silence then confronts these criminals outright and opens the door for potential healing. One film is truth, the other reconciliation. Together, they are the essential documentaries of the decade.

19. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) dir. George Miller

George Miller could finally do what he always wanted to with the world of Mad Max in this long-gestating sequel, which follows Max (Tom Hardy) as he gets caught up in a dangerous act of female liberation, led by the Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). The exceptional combination of CGI and practical effects prove that the big-budget action film has plenty of life left in it. If you ever need an adrenaline rush, put this film on and let the relentless pace and visual momentum give you a kick all over again.

20. First Reformed (2018) dir. Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader, one of New Hollywood’s most noted renegades, finally tries his hand at the transcendental style that he wrote about as a young critic in the early 1970s. The resulting film focuses on a reverend (Ethan Hawke) suffering a crisis of faith and examines all the ways that the modern world puts us at odds with Christ’s vision, whether in terms of fellowship, equity, or environmental stewardship. By restraining himself and his style and directly addressing massive theological questions, Schrader has crafted a film that captures the tensions of being a Christian in the early 21st century.

21. 12 Years a Slave (2013) dir. Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen uses his detatched, elegant visual style to conjure an unflinching vision of the evils of slavery in this adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s memoir. Slavery has long been discussed but rarely depicted this honestly on film. McQueen decides to lean into the depiction of monstrous evil and force us to watch the way it breaks down a human being in every way imaginable.

22. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) and Part 2 (2011) dir. David Yates

The two parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are a masterclass in how to end a movie franchise. They’re epic in scale, allowing all the major narrative and thematic threads to come to a head in an immensely satisfying manner. But they’re also intimate and spend a lot of time digging into the emotional lives of these heroes in their darkest hour. In retrospect, the decision to split into two movies was essential, allowing David Yates and his fellow filmmakers the necessary room to capture both the size and intimacy necessary for this series finale.

23. Hugo (2011) dir. Martin Scorsese

Scorsese crafts a love letter to the cinema in this tale of a boy (Asa Butterfield) and an old man (Ben Kingsley) in 1930s Paris. The old man is Georges Méliès, one of the fathers of the cinema, and Scorsese leverages every cinematic technology at his disposal (including 3D) to celebrate his cinematic accomplishments and demonstrate that movies are dreams made real.

24. A Dangerous Method (2011) dir. David Cronenberg

A Dangerous Method is as much a self-portrait for Cronenberg as it is a biopic of Jung and Freud. It examines the complicated relationships between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and Sabrina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) as they pioneered psychoanalysis, but more than that, it examines the Freudian psychological concepts that underpin the entirety of Cronenberg’s work.

25. The Immigrant (2013) dir. James Gray

James Gray resurrects the American melodrama with this beautiful, lamp-lit immigrant story set in 1930s New York City. Marion Cotillard stars as a Polish women forced into prostitution to stay alfoat, but it’s Joaquin Phoenix as her pimp and romantic admirer who steals the show with a pathetic mix of venom and self-loathing. The final shot, which simultaneously shows their divergent paths in the same frame, is perfection.

26. Parasite (2019) dir. Bong Joon-ho

An upstairs-downstairs story for the 21st century, Parasite tracks a poor family that cons their way into the service of a rich family in an ultra-modern house in Seoul. Parasite has the laughs, twists, and narrative thrills that will hook audiences from the get-go, but it’s the visual elegance that lingers most, which can conjure hilarious slapstick or utter horror depending on the frame.

27. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) dir. Christopher Nolan

In retrospect, Christopher Nolan does something surprising with this big-budget blockbuster, which rejects most of the trappings of modern comic book cinema and offers a definitive end to his Batman story. The Dark Knight Rises is less elegant in presenting its themes than The Dark Knight, but it surpasses its predecessor in terms of sheer image-making, with massive IMAX action sequences and iconic visuals that have already stood the test of time.

28. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) dir. David Fincher

David Fincher transplants his dominant motif of isolation and information control into an adaptation of a lurid bestseller exploring misogynistic conspiracies within a western social democracy (Sweden). Rooney Mara is startling as the punk hacker protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, but it’s the rotten peek behind the curtain of respectable society that registers the most nine years later

29. Sicario (2015) dir. Denis Villeneuve

Denis Villeneuve goes to the US-Mexico Border to transform the cartel thriller into a nightmarish horror film. Emily Blunt stars as the lone conscience, but the film deliberately sidelines her, with shadowy operators played by Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro frustrating her every action. The lesson here is that ethics never come into consideration in US drug policy and that the conflict between the state and the cartels is merely a gang war with different stripes.

30. A Separation (2011) dir. Asghar Farhadi

Asghar Farhadi examines the dissolution of a marriage in heartbreaking ways in this Iranian melodrama that took the arthouse world by storm in 2011. The glance behind the curtain of everyday Iranian life fascinated viewers during the film’s release, but it’s the articulate performances and balanced point of view that make the film register so strongly.

31. Black Swan (2010) dir. Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky unleashes a fever dream of obsession in this melodrama about the ballet world. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her crazed performance as Nina, but the real star is the whirling camerawork from Matthew Libatique, which follows Portman on stage and into crowded apartments, drifting in and out of fantasy along with her. The form and content unite in an intoxicating manner.

32. Upstream Color (2013) dir. Shane Carruth

In 2004, Shane Carruth wowed Sundance with his ultra-low budget time travel drama, Primer. His follow-up, Upstream Color, is even more unclassifiable as it traces the intersecting lives and dysfunctions of two people (Carruth and Amy Seimetz) whose identities are shattered in the wake of an extortion scheme. There are parasitic organisms, blue orchids, copious Walden references, pigs mirroring the lives of the characters, and a mysterious meddler known as the Sampler. It sounds bizarre, but the cumulative effect is intoxicating, offering profound insights about how we shape our lives through memory.

33. The Master (2012) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson examines post-war malaise in this treatise on masculinity starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a cult leader and Joaquin Phoenix as the damaged outsider enraptured by his teachings. The Master is enchanting and mysterious—perplexing even—but it’s also surprisingly funny, showing that Anderson’s tonal dexterity continues to improve even as his interests grow ever more specific.

34. The Irishman a.k.a. I Heard You Paint Houses (2019) dir. Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese offers a closing statement on the gangster genre with this possibly-true story of mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and his relationships with union president Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). The film is familiar in its broad strokes, but the deliberate length and melancholy tone make the film feel new and startling. Scorsese closes the film on a surprisingly mournful note that showcases the emptiness of the criminal life.

35. Django Unchained (2012) dir. Quentin Tarantino

Riffing on blaxploitation and Westerns, Quentin Tarantino once again plays fast and loose with history to craft a strangely-uplifting film, though one steeped in brutality. It’s overly long, but that length allows Tarantino the time to develop the characters, establish complex relationships, and capitalize on the warm performances from Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz. It also somehow manages to conjure a romantic atmosphere in its final moments, even if those moments follow a stunning and extended sequence of bloodshed.

36. Gone Girl (2014) dir. David Fincher

Gone Girl is another foray into bestseller pulp by David Fincher, this time examining a toxic relationship and the wider public’s own lurid fascination with such material. Fincher cuts back and forth across time and pays as much attention to fabricated scenarios as real ones, revealing our own predilection for sensational material even as he shows us how this leads us to be easily manipulated.

37. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) dir. Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow depicts the hunt for Osama Bin Laden (or UBL as the film calls him) in the aftermath of 9/11, focusing on Maya (Jessica Chastain), an character amalgamation of several intelligence officers who were central to the investigation, including Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. By focusing on Maya, Bigelow portrays the investigation and eventual assassination of UBL as a personal quest for justice. But Bigelow contrasts this supposedly-righteous and personalized motivation with the nightmarishly efficient violence that America can unleash on its enemies, revealing the motivation to be more revenge than anything else.

38. O.J.: Made in America (2016) dir. Ezra Edelman

Produced for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, O.J.: Made in America uses the O.J. Simpson case as a microcosm for meditation on the intersections of race, class, and celebrity that define modern America. Ezra Edelman spends over seven hours digging into every aspect of Simpson as a person as well as his trial for the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, showing just how much the case was a litigation of America’s racial history as it was a murder trial.

39. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) dir. Gareth Edwards

Rogue One is the best Star Wars film that Disney has made since purchasing the property from George Lucas in 2012. Following the Rebels who stole the Death Star plans prior to A New Hope, Rogue One plays in the sandbox of the Original Trilogy with its immersive design work, but it’s the stunning action finale and its accompanying focus on sacrifice that makes it so moving as an adventure drama.

40. Drug War (2012) dir. Johnnie To

Drug War is a streamlined, hard-hitting action film from Hong Kong master, Johnnie To. It follows a cop (Sun Honglei) working to bust the mob, and a crook (Louis Koo) whose life depends on helping the cop. The narrative is as efficient as they come and the action is dazzling and muscular, showing how graceful a gunfight can be when orchestrated by a master.

41. Nightcrawler (2014) dir. Dan Gilroy

Dan Gilroy (brother of Tony) takes us into the seedy underworld of television news in his startling debut feature, which follows a predatory drifter, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), who finds his calling filming crash victims and other exploitative content during hot nights in Los Angeles. Gilroy plays Lou’s story as an inspirational tale, which, when taken alongside his immoral nature, lays bare how morally-bankrupt and poisonous news entertainment can be.

42. Roma (2018) dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Inspired by Fellini and drawing on his own memories, Alfonso Cuarón crafts an ode to his nanny with this story of an Indigenous domestic worker (Yalitza Aparicio) plying her trade for a rich family in 1970s Mexico City. The wide-angle cinematography and slow-panning camera keep us at a distance from the characters, evoking the feeling of either a dream or a painting, while the black-and-white palette brings us into the past and makes everything startlingly vivid. There is love here, and regret, all commingled with the warm glow of memory.

43. Sunset (2018) dir. László Nemes

László Nemes brings the unique mise-en-scene he created for Son of Saul to another historical tale, set in Austro-Hungarian Budapest in 1913 amid a civilization on the brink of collapse. Nemes commits to a radically-limited point-of-view, which makes the spectacular production design all the more realistic and perfectly captures the experience of living through the maelstrom of history.

44. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2014) dir. Isao Takahata

Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata pares down his visual style and draws on a classic medieval tale for what would become his last film (he died in 2018), which explores the loss of innocence and the pressures that young women deal with in the world (both in medieval times and today). The art style, which replicates the brushstrokes and limited colour palette of Japanese medieval brush painting, is stunning.

45. La La Land (2016) dir. Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle looks back to the classics for his musical drama of artistic ambition and love in the Los Angeles of music and movie dreamers. The colour and choreography come from the likes of Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly, while the melancholy is borrowed from the technicolor musicals of French director, Jacques Demy. The singing may not be of the show-stopping variety, but the filmmaking is, and the heartbreaking finale catapults the film into the “best of the decade” conversation.

46. A Star Is Born (2018) dir. Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper updates this classic Hollywood narrative of a young star (Lady Gaga) on the upswing falling in love with an old star (Cooper) in freefall with the pop culture of the 2010s, In the process, Cooper injects the tale with some intensely-felt romantic angst without losing its core appeal. A Star Is Born proves that all you need to make movie magic is an intoxicating song and a tale as old as time (or Hollywood, at least).

47. John Wick (2014) dir. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch

John Wick revived the American action film after years of neglect and abuse. It favours choreography and physical stunt work over editing gimmicks and CGI. It makes on-screen violence beautiful again. It’s impressive that this low-budget genre pic spawned a popular franchise, but its singular achievement remains the fact that it made people rediscover the importance of stunt work in film and returned Keanu Reeves to the limelight.

48. Moonrise Kingdom (2012) dir. Wes Anderson

Childhood romance and imagination coalesce in Wes Anderson’s charming tale of two pre-teens (Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman) on the run from their parents on a fictional New England island in the 1960s. Anderson’s particularities, including his dollhouse design style and precocious dialogue, are on full display here, as are his interests in childhood anger (as opposed to common notions of innocence) and the ways that familial love can overcome social isolation and disaffection.

49. After the Storm (2016) dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Domestic tensions reach a boiling point when a sad sack father (Hiroshi Abe) holes up in his mother’s (Kirin Kiki) apartment with his ex-wife (Yōko Makai) and son (Taiyō Yoshizawa) during a storm. Kore-eda has made several touching statements on family over the past decade (Our Little Sister, Shoplifters), but After the Storm is his most specific and quietly devastating.

50. HyperNormalisation (2016) dir. Adam Curtis

The contradictions, madness, and political hellstorm of our modern world is laid bare in this experimental documentary from British filmmaker Adam Curtis. Composed entirely of Curtis’s narration overlaying archival footage from the BBC, Curtis charts the tactical implementation of suicide bombings, UFO conspiracy theories, the rise of Donald Trump, the Arab Spring, and the creation of the fake reality of which we all partake. If you want to know how the world got to be the way it is, look no further. Watching it back in 2016 was like realizing that I’d been mistaking a comic strip for a news report; it made me realize how many of the popular assumptions I had about the world were fabrications and outright lies. It spawned an awakening.

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