The Best Movies of the 2010s
The 2010s ranked by our composite score across 20+ authoritative lists, awards and polls — not one critic's opinion, but the weight of the whole canon.
Parasite (2019) leads with a composite score of 9.70.
- 1Parasite2019 · Bong Joon-ho9.70
Palme d'Or winner 2019 · Oscar Best Picture winner 2019 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2020 #1
- 2The Shape of Water2017 · Guillermo del Toro5.66
Oscar Best Picture winner 2017 · Venice Golden Lion winner 2017 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2018 #3
- 3The King's Speech2010 · Tom Hooper5.50
Oscar Best Picture winner 2010 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2010 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2011 #3
- 4Roma2018 · Alfonso Cuarón5.38
BAFTA Best Film winner 2019 · Venice Golden Lion winner 2018 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2018
- 5Argo2012 · Ben Affleck5.36
Oscar Best Picture winner 2012 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2012 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2012 #6
- 612 Years a Slave2013 · Steve McQueen5.23
Oscar Best Picture winner 2013 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2013 · National Film Registry (inducted 2023)
- 7The Tree of Life2011 · Terrence Malick5.09
Palme d'Or winner 2011 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2011 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2011 #2
- 8Amour2012 · Michael Haneke4.90
Palme d'Or winner 2012 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2013 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2012
- 9Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives2010 · Apichatpong Weerasethakul4.39
Palme d'Or winner 2010 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2010 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196
- 10Moonlight2016 · Barry Jenkins4.26
Oscar Best Picture winner 2016 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #60 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #93
- 11Shoplifters2018 · Hirokazu Koreeda4.21
Palme d'Or winner 2018 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 2018 #1 · Letterboxd Top 250 #155
- 12I, Daniel Blake2016 · Ken Loach4.16
Palme d'Or winner 2016 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2017 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #906
- 13Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri2017 · Martin McDonagh3.90
BAFTA Best Film winner 2018 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2018 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2017
- 14Boyhood2014 · Richard Linklater3.69
BAFTA Best Film winner 2015 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2014 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2014 #2
- 15Blue Is the Warmest Colour2013 · Abdellatif Kechiche3.66
Palme d'Or winner 2013 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2013 #3 · Criterion Collection spine #695
- 16Birdman2014 · Alejandro González Iñárritu3.43
Oscar Best Picture winner 2014 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2015 #4
- 17Green Book2018 · Peter Farrelly3.39
Oscar Best Picture winner 2018 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2019 #5
- 18A Separation2011 · Asghar Farhadi3.35
Berlin Golden Bear winner 2011 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2012 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72
- 19Spotlight2015 · Tom McCarthy3.33
Oscar Best Picture winner 2015 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2016 #7
- 20Winter Sleep2014 · Nuri Bilge Ceylan3.32
Palme d'Or winner 2014 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2015 #8
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- 24The Revenant2015 · Alejandro González Iñárritu2.90
BAFTA Best Film winner 2015 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2015
- 25Mad Max: Fury Road2015 · George Miller2.68
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2015 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2015 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196
- 26Synonyms2019 · Nadav Lapid2.50
Berlin Golden Bear winner 2019 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2019 #3
- 27Faust (2011 film)2011 · Alexander Sokurov2.30
Venice Golden Lion winner 2011 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2012 #9
- 28Joker2019 · Todd Phillips2.20
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2019 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2019 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2019 #9
- 29The Social Network2010 · David Fincher2.07
Oscar Best Picture nominee 2010 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2011 #2 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2010 #8
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Streaming, prestige and the world stage
The 2010s will be remembered as the decade distribution changed more than the films did. Netflix moved from mailing discs to producing Oscar contenders; by 2018 Alfonso Cuarón's Roma — a black-and-white, Spanish-language memory piece — won the Golden Lion at Venice, took BAFTA's Best Film and came within one envelope of Best Picture, all as a streaming release. The theatrical window shrank, mid-budget adult drama migrated to platforms, and the festival circuit became the de facto launchpad for nearly everything on this page. Whatever one thinks of the economics, the canon output was real: this is the decade the Academy gave Best Picture to a $1.5 million film about a gay Black boy in Miami (Moonlight, 2016, over the heavily favored La La Land in the most famous envelope error in awards history) and, three years later, to a Korean-language film.
Parasite (2019) is the decade's keystone in any data-driven accounting. It won the Palme d'Or and Best Picture — the first film ever to pair Cannes' top prize with the Academy's in the same cycle since 1955's Marty, and the first non-English-language Best Picture, full stop. It then entered the 2022 Sight & Sound poll within three years of release, an almost unheard-of speed for canon entry. The whole arc of the last three decades — festivals as gatekeepers, world cinema as the center rather than the margin, community canons amplifying critical consensus — converges on that one title.
Auteurs at blockbuster scale
The decade's other signature is the survival of directorial signature inside enormous budgets. Christopher Nolan (Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk) built an audience that treats a director's name as the franchise; George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) demonstrated that a thirty-year-old property could return as a formally radical action symphony and collect six Oscars; Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (2017) carried a monster romance from Venice's Golden Lion to Best Picture. Meanwhile the international festival canon deepened — Iran's Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, Golden Bear 2011, and the decade's most decorated screenplay-driven drama), Haneke's Amour (Palme d'Or 2012), Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), which entered the Sight & Sound top 30 in its first eligible poll.
For a measurement site, the 2010s poses a known caveat: recency. Awards data for the decade is complete, but the slow canon-makers — decennial polls, registries — have only begun to process it. Composite scores for recent films will keep moving for another two decades; treat this page as a snapshot of a canon still under construction.