Every Movie of the 2010s, Ranked
Want to feel old? In 2010, the No. 1 movie at the box office was Avatar. Hypercool indie darlings Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart were the coupled-up stars of a lucrative supernatural teen romance. Netflix, which is likely to be competing with itself at the Oscars this year, was just starting to stream in Canada. Toy Story 3 came out, and now we’re on … well, Toy Story 4. Not everything has been marked by radical changes, even over 10 years and the release of so many movies. Thousands of movies. The sheer amount posed the first and biggest challenge of putting together this list: deciding which of the movies that filtered through theaters and VOD services and streaming platforms qualified for a ranking of the decade’s best films.
Perhaps arbitrarily, we decided that for a film to be eligible for our ranking, it had to have played in at least four theaters in the U.S. That cut down the crop to something slightly more manageable. But were we punishing smaller films simply because their distributors deemed them uncommercial? Cue the guilt, and the exceptions. A movie released in less than four theaters could force its way into the mix, we determined, if it had been nominated for an industry award — from the Academy, the Directors Guild, the New York Film Critics Circle, etc. Of course, we’re critics, so we decided to allow any film included in one of our previous best-of-the-year lists to compete too. Soon, we were permitting ourselves a few wild-card contenders, because list-making is more art than science. It’s more argument than science, too, which we proved over the course of a few mostly civil weeks of bickering and bantering over personal preferences, creating an appropriately chaotic point system for our ranking and then throwing that point system out the window — haphazardly moving things up, down, or off the top and bottom tiers entirely as we grew nearer to our deadline.
The list wasn’t a result of any consensus (to which the various annotations attest), and it certainly isn’t definitive. (Is there such a thing as a definitive ranking?) But it does reflect the highs and lows of a tumultuous decade. We hadn’t, for instance, planned for our top-three picks to be so … apocalyptic. But when it turned out that way, it felt entirely appropriate. The past 10 years have been marred by doomsday predictions about cinema, whether the harbingers are Netflix or superheroes or high frame rates. On the other hand, we absolutely did plan for our bottom choices to be incendiary, and to speak to larger tendencies in the industry that have filled us with dread — except, of course, when they fill us with delight. It’s messy, and it’s filled with contradictions, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Here are the films of the 2010s, ranked, for better and worse.
