Ten Great Films from the 2010s

For no particular reason, a look back at some modern classics

I was in a list-making mood this week, and I was recently asked which ‘modern classics’ I would recommend as a starting point for people who haven’t been to the cinema in a while, and thus this probably-too-long listicle was born.

It’s not an exhaustive or definitive list (though it is ranked by how much I love each film) but I have aimed for a range of genres and styles - and held myself to a rule of only one film per director.

Whether you’re looking for a great film to watch on the weekend or maybe want to study up on some modern masterpieces, I hope you’ll find something enjoyable here.

PS (Your e-mail provider may truncate this one for being too long, so it might be better to read on a web browser!)

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It Was Nolte a Hardy Decision to For This to Edgerton into the Top Ten

All you need to know about this movie is that it is a deeply male drama set in the violent world of mixed-martial arts, but my Mum loves it.

Despite my enthusiasm for professional wrestling, I have no affection for mixed martial arts, which has more of the violence and much, much less of the pageantry. So it was with little to no anticipation that I went to see Warrior, a sports drama about two estranged brothers (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton), a US. Marine and a high school physics teacher respectively, who both enter an MMA tournament to try and alleviate their economic and psychological problems.

I left the movie absolutely enthralled and have been recommending it to anyone who would listen ever since.

The two brothers are very different men: Tommy, the Marine, is alone and clearly traumatised - he wins fights in brutal, dominant fashion by quickly monstering his opponents. Brendan, the teacher, has found a family and stable job but has not escaped the biggest opponent of all - the American medical system. He wins his fights through technique, attrition and submission, often at the last minute.

The contrast and inevitable confrontation between the two is one of the most thrilling and emotionally cathartic scenes of the decade, nailing the core principle so many films inexplicably miss: we don’t care who wins the fight if we don’t care about the fighters.

Aged a lot better than the jokes about mispronouncing Oyelowo’s last name

On first viewing of Selma, a lack of familiarity with the actor meant I probably didn’t comprehend just how good David Oyelowo’s performance actually was. When you watch his entire filmography - from Spooks to See How They Run - you realise how much power and charisma he is able to summon forth when playing one of modern history’s most significant figures.

As is the case with many of these films, it’s a demonstration of how important casting the right actor is. Selma is an absolutely terrific movie, a fast-paced, talky retelling of how much political nous and process was required to propel the moral necessity of the civil rights movement directed with panache and grace by Ava DuVernay - but it would have had enormous difficulty being so compelling if we didn’t believe in the man playing MLK.

And of course, it gave us Glory, an absolute banger so emotionally resonant that it made Chris Pine cry at the Oscars.

How little are they? I mean, are they like, scary little?

When it was recently announced that Greta Gerwig was making Narnia movies for Netflix, I had much the same disappointed reaction I had when I heard her follow-up to Lady Bird was Little Women.

It felt like a waste of her talents, one of the most exciting directors and writers of modern times inexplicably turning her attention to a dusty old tome to which nothing new could possibly be brought.

I was wrong then and I will likely be wrong again (I learn nothing) because Gerwig’s Little Women is a perfect adaptation - faithful to the source while bringing a modern sensibility through all the tools and tricks of modern filmmaking.

Excellent cast chemistry, effervescent filmmaking and a deep and complex understanding of the characters served as a brilliant reminder of why this book became such a classic in the first place - you feel like you know these people, even if their lives are million miles away from your own.

A Powerful Story of How Being Rejected by Margot Robbie Will Change Your Life

About Time is marketed as a romantic comedy, but it’s actually a Trojan Horse movie with a beautiful message about fathers, sons, family and savouring life’s small moments.

This is, of course, not a new message. It’s been imparted by everyone from Ferris Bueller to influencers. But it’s all about the telling and About Time’s telling is effortlessly charming, hugely funny and the most affecting work rom-com impresario Richard Curtis has ever done (yes, it’s a better movie than Love Actually, and I am a Love Actually defender).

Domnhall Gleeson plays Tim, who discovers that the men in his family have the ability to go back in time and revisit the past, a potentially icky plot device in a romantic comedy (lord knows it has been used very poorly elsewhere), but ickiness About Time wisely sidesteps at every moment. When he meets Mary, with whom he is instantly smitten, and their relationship develops, the burden of time travel begins to rear its head in unexpected ways.

Domnhall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams have excellent romantic chemistry, but the power in About Time hangs on the knowing eyes and wry smile of Bill Nighy, who is able to turn what could be the trite into the tremendous. Even the most (s)apprehensive of you might struggle to make your way through this one without a misty eye or two by the end.

Funny. Business.

The funniest movie of the 2010s, The Lego Movie is proof positive that branded content can be absolutely fantastic. Phil Lord and Chris Miller wrote one of the tightest scripts ever committed to screen, the animation was fabulous, reviews were excellent, audiences flocked, it had genuine heart and it was all one great big ad for plastic. What more could our corporate overlords possibly want.

The movie is brilliant. What it hath wrought - maybe less so. We now have Chris Pratt making increasingly worse movies and TV shows like it’s some sort of dare unless he’s riding James Gunn or Jack Black’s coattails, and we live in a sea of branded content that is mostly awful, save for the odd Barbie outlier.

I told a lot of people that The Lego Movie was my favourite movie of that year. In retrospect, their doubtful looks may have been justified.

Nevertheless, let’s judge it in a vacuum, shall we? Good comedies are incredibly hard to make. Jokes are at their best when they are scaffolded by characters, which is why so many sitcoms are so rarely funny in Season One, and characters take time to establish. But The Lego Movie establishes the world, the characters and the stakes so efficiently and charmingly that by the time it does kick into gear, every joke lands.

The voice performances are elite. The third-act twist is an incredibly bold piece of work. We got Everything is Awesome out of it and Morgan Freeman nailing every single line read he was given. It will make you laugh. It might make you cry.

At what cost? I don’t know. But I’m glad we got it.

For Everyone Whose Worst Fear is a Baseball Being Hit in their General Direction

Probably the least universally acclaimed movie on this list, Moneyball makes it because a) I love it and it’s my list and b) it represents a specific breed of film (more on that later). The marriage of Aaron Sorkin & Steven Zaillian’s screenwriting and Bennett Miller’s direction is something special, creating an underdog sports movie that eschews everything underdog sports movies are usually about.

Moneyball is about a revolution in baseball (stay with me) that features almost no female characters (stayyyy with me), stars Brad Pitt, Chris Pratt & Jonah Hill (where are you going) and is mainly about the high-octane world of SPORTS STATISTICS (okay I’ll see you later). Gut feel, instinct, experience? Stuff ‘em, we’re all about the numbers BAYBEE. (If you took this same storyline and applied it to the corporate or business worlds, every character would be a monster, but in sport it works. Must reflect on that.)

As a denizen of the Excel spreadsheet, I was cool with this and the movie is a remarkable amount of fun. You’ve got Sorkin’s trademark snappy dialogue, great performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Pitt & Hill (almost everyone here is at the top of their game), a magnificent seventh-inning stretch and a satisfying, affecting ending.

Despite the data of it all, the story actually being told is a pretty traditional one about how with a good idea, hard work and a little luck you may be able to succeed in a system that is inherently rigged against you. The idea in question is just very different to what we’ve seen before. It’s a fantasy, of course, but it’s a nice one to live in for a while.

It’s on this list because some movies have a special quality where if you see them on TV or come across someone else watching them, they compel you to sit down and experience them over again. They’ll be different for everyone, but School of Rock is a movie like that for me. Shawshank. A Few Good Men. Heat. Moneyball joined their ranks immediately.

So She Ran Away in Her Sleep & Dreamed of Para-para-parasite, para-para-parasite

The accelerating train of South Korean cinema (not that kind of train) ended up stopping off at Best Picture station with Parasite, a perfectly pitched social satire-cum-thriller with an all-time great title that took the world by storm. Weird that a movie about the rapidly expanding gap between the social classes should have such an impact. Can’t imagine why.

Like all good films with a social message, Parasite intertwines it perfectly with a thrilling, entertaining and occasionally devastating narrative. Bong Joon-Ho’s direction and Hong Kyung-Pyo’s cinematography is magnificent, infusing the film’s themes into every frame -

- in the story of a working-class family who slowly infiltrate the lives of the upper class, by fraudulently making their way into various employments in the household. The tension - sometimes undercut, sometimes amplified by unexpected moments of humour - is often unbearable, as this fraudulent family go to ever greater lengths to avoid being discovered.

Everything else is better left for you to discover. If you haven’t already, watch Parasite. I can’t imagine you’ll regret it.

From the Genius Behind Xmus Jaxon-Flaxon-Waxon

Fans of social-satire/thrillers are in luck, as we have our second on the trot with the unbelievably good Get Out, a movie that struck a chord still reverberating to this very day. Anyone who watched and loved Key & Peele probably knew that Jordan Peele had this in him, as many of those sketches are horror movies through a different lens (this one is scary before Key even starts singing).

The level of sheer cultural impact was nevertheless surprising. It’s some kind of movie that basically gets Hollywood to hand over a blank cheque and Get Out did just that, leading Peele to make two more great films and produce a range of variable television series. It’s the story of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), who heads off to meet the family of his white girlfriend Rose, an event that goes from awkward to horrifying for reasons too fascinating to spoil.

Again, it’s the cross-section of entertainment and message that makes this one sing, the sprinkling of little details you can discover again and again on rewatches, Peele’s eye for striking visual imagery and the performances of Kaluuya, Allison Williams and the supporting cast. I remember upon leaving the cinema someone remarked to their friend that ‘it was good, but it made me really uncomfortable.”

Mission accomplished, then.

Luckily, ‘you ate’ Was Not a Common Way To Describe Performances at the Time

Scarily prescient, The Social Network posits that Facebook claimed to be about fostering friendship, but in actual fact was borne of a place of extreme loneliness, regret and jealousy.

It was not wrong. While it makes Mark Zuckerberg a much more charismatic figure than the beige cyborg he actually is in real life, it also recognises that he’s very smart - just perhaps not in the areas he needs to be.

I recently went back on to Facebook out of curiosity after abandoning it nearly half a decade ago, and was stunned by the unusable wasteland it has become. All the seeds of those problems are absolutely clear in The Social Network. In a way, it’s David Fincher’s scariest movie - and this guy made Se7en, Zodiac AND The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The song choice in one of the greatest trailers ever made is no accident:

It’s not a Bechdel test masterclass, and it probably has more flaws than the other movies on this list, but the moments of brilliance are so plentiful - the all-time opening scene, the various depositions, the haunting final moments, Andrew Garfield’s heartbreaking performance, ‘a billion dollars’ (even Justin Timberlake is fantastic in this) - that it will stay in your memory long after you’ve watched it.

It has been one of my very favourite movies since the moment I saw it, and it takes a pretty incredible film to beat it.

For her next trick, Amy Adams will teach the Amish about TikTok

As someone who reviews movies on a barely-professional basis, I often get asked what my favourite movie is (a boring question, I would rather know what your favourite movie is), not improved by the fact I have a boring answer: The Shawshank Redemption, closely followed by Twelve Angry Men & Singin’ in the Rain, two of which are top ten in the IMDb Top 250, the definitive list of which movies are popular amongst men on the Internet.

To escape these basic tendencies, one must look to my favourite movie of the last ten years: Arrival, the Denis Villeneuve film from 2016 starring Amy Adams as a linguist tasked by the US army with the minor job of trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials. It is nowhere to be seen on the IMDb Top 250. In this, for once, I have escaped the siren song of basicity.

Taking the audience on a winding journey through tones of mysterious, creepy, intriguing, thrilling and then emotionally devastating, Arrival’s destination is the last place you would expect. Villeneuve’s eye for arresting images is on full display here, with shots like this -

- and dozens more equally arresting images, but what makes this his best film (a narrow victory, given that he also made Sicario, Prisoners, Blade Runner 2049, etc.) is that the mind-bending narrative is also reasonably tight and economical - never branching too far out from the singular story it’s trying to tell.

Amy Adams, of course, is absolutely magnificent. Her ability to turn her hand to literally any genre and fit it like a glove really doesn’t get talked about enough. She’s been one of my favourite performers for a long time, and this might be her best performance, given how much the whole movie hangs on her ability to carry it off.

I don’t subscribe to the theory that any film is essential or required reading, but if you were to ask me which film of the 2010s I would most highly recommend, it’s this one. Find the biggest screen you can, don’t get spoiled, watch it carefully, and once Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight hits, don’t say I didn’t warn you.