Modern classics: the best films of the last decade, ranked
The last 10 years have produced some stunning movies, here's our pick of the best...
Jon Mundy
Cinema has spent much of the last decade being declared dead on arrival. Streaming ate the box office, phones ate our attention spans, and a global pandemic finished the job when Hollywood was already on its knees.
Locations have thinned out, mid-budget dramas have become endangered species, and the communal magic of a darkened room can sometimes feel like a nostalgic luxury rather than a weekly habit. And yet, thankfully, the films have kept coming.
Because while cinemas may be fading from the centre of culture, cinema itself very much isn’t. The past ten years have delivered a run of films that feel urgent, ambitious and unmistakably alive, whether they arrived via IMAX screens, arthouse theatres or a quiet Friday night scroll.
Visionary directors have still taken big swings, new voices have emerged, and even familiar franchises have occasionally remembered how to surprise us again. These are the films that cut through the noise, the ones that justified the ticket price, the time investment, or at the very least, justified putting your phone away.
15. Zone of Interest (2023)
Jonathan Glazer’s chilling masterpiece finds new horror in what it refuses to show. Set beside Auschwitz but rarely acknowledging it directly, The Zone of Interest follows the banal domestic life of a Nazi commandant’s family as genocide hums in the background like faulty machinery.
The result is quietly devastating: a film about moral blindness, routine and the terrifying ease with which evil becomes background noise. It’s rigorously controlled, formally daring and emotionally bruising ,a work that lingers not through shock, but through the cold, unbearable clarity of its idea.
14. Uncut Gems (2019)
Uncut Gems is the best Adam Sandler movie ever made, but let’s not damn it with faint praise (with all due deference to Punch-Drunk Love). Directed by Josh and Benny Safdie of Good Time fame, this is yet another heart attack of a movie, one that relentlessly ratchets up the tension across a chaotic day in the life of Sandler’s chaotic New York jeweller.
Everything from the queasy Daniel Lopatin soundtrack to the kaleidoscopic, jittery cinematography captures this world of grift, tacky luxury, and gambling addiction to grim perfection.
13. Dune: Part One & Part Two (2021–2024)
Split across two films but clearly conceived as a single, colossal vision, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is blockbuster filmmaking at its most austere and assured. Part One is all mood and myth-building, patiently laying foundations with monastic seriousness and thunderous scale.
Part Two delivers the payoff: political brutality, religious fanaticism and sandworm-riding spectacle that finally lets the saga erupt into motion. Together, they restore sci-fi to something operatic and dangerous, less quips, more destiny, and prove that mainstream cinema can still afford to be this bold, slow and unapologetically strange.
12. Train to Busan (2016)
A zombie movie that understands momentum isn’t just about speed, but emotion. Set almost entirely on a high-speed train hurtling towards disaster, Yeon Sang-ho’s breakout hit delivers relentless thrills while smuggling in a surprisingly affecting critique of selfishness and class.
The action is tight, the set-pieces ingenious, and the character arcs genuinely sting when the carnage peaks. Proof that even in the most overcrowded of genres, there’s still room for invention, and heartbreak.
11. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
It sounds like an unfilmable mess on paper: multiverses, martial arts, googly eyes and talking rocks. Somehow, the Daniels turned it into the most emotionally overwhelming film of the decade.
Beneath the maximalist chaos is a surprisingly tender story about family, regret and the quiet terror of wasted potential, anchored by a career-best performance from Michelle Yeoh. It’s frenetic, sincere and occasionally exhausting, but when it lands, which is often, it lands hard. A rare crowd-pleaser that’s also genuinely strange, and all the better for it.
10. Avengers: Engame (2019)
Avengers: Endgame is a wholly singular film, despite essentially serving as the second half of a single mega-movie. In perhaps the biggest case of a movie studio having its cake and eating it, this comic book Royal Rumble took $2.8 billion at the box office, satisfied rabid fans, and impressed critics with its expectation-subverting plot and cheer/cry-out-loud finale.
The shadow it has cast is long indeed, as evidenced by the ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’ feeling of every subsequent Marvel project – and every comic book movie too, for that matter.
9. Moonlight (2016)
This 2016 drama was the toast of Tinseltown, picking up the Best Picture (eventually), Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars at that year’s Academy Awards. It was one of those rare incidences of Hollywood making the right call.
The film follows Miami native Chiron through three key stages of his life, represented by three different actors, as he comes to terms with his race, sexuality, and upbringing. Writer-director Barry Jenkins makes something truly transcendent from these grounded, weighty materials using dreamy cinematography and strikingly beautiful close-ups.
8. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
There were signs that the whole Superhero boom was coming to an end even ahead of Avengers: Endgame’s 2019 franchise climax. If Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse offers any suggestions on how to arrest that decline, it’s to place the genre into the hands of the computer-generated animation folks.
From its genuinely unique animation style to its snappy dialogue and likeable characters, this is an absolute fresh-faced joy of a movie. Into the Spider-Verse also did the whole ‘Spider-Man metaverse’ thing three years before the live action Spider-Man: No Way Home. And better, too.
7. Anora (2024)
Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner is a chaotic, funny and unexpectedly bruising spin on the modern Cinderella story. Mikey Madison is electric as the titular Anora, a Brooklyn sex worker whose whirlwind romance with a Russian oligarch’s son spirals rapidly out of control.
What begins as a screwball comedy slowly reveals something sadder and sharper beneath the surface, as Baker once again skewers class, money and the American dream without ever losing sight of his characters’ humanity. It’s loud, messy and deeply alive, a film that earns its laughs and its heartbreak in equal measure.
6. Paddington 2 (2017)
By the time Paddington 2 arrived, expectations were modest. What Paul King delivered instead was one of the most purely joyful films of the decade. Expanding on the charm of the original, the sequel leans harder into slapstick, kindness and community, while somehow becoming even funnier and more emotionally generous. Hugh Grant is an absolute delight as a preening, scene-stealing villain, and the film’s belief in basic decency never feels cloying. A rare sequel that improves on its predecessor, and a reminder that cinema doesn’t need cynicism to be clever.
5. Get Out (2017)
Jordan Peele revealed that he was much more than a comedian with this striking directorial debut, which introduced us to the ‘modern Twilight Zone’ style that would prove to be his calling card.
Daniel Kaluuya’s young, gifted and black photographer visits his white girlfriend’s unsettlingly welcoming family and friends in Upstate New York, but there’s a sinister hidden agenda at work. Clever, funny, thought-provoking, and downright creepy, Get Out pretty much immediately entered the wider public discourse. It has stayed there ever since.
4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
After decades of tipping his hat to cinematic history, Quentin Tarantino’s ninth/tenth movie (the matter hinges on whether Kill Bill 1 and 2 constitute a single film) finally tackles it head-on.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays washed-up Western actor Rick Dalton, while Brad Pitt plays his faithful-but-potentially-unhinged stuntman Cliff Booth, as they drink, schmooze, and graft their way through late-’60s Hollywood. The result is typically Tarantinoesque, shot through with vintage cinematography, cool dialogue, tense set pieces, and unexpected flashes of uber-violence.
3. Phantom Thread (2017)
![PHANTOM THREAD - Official Trailer [HD] - In Select Theaters Christmas - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/xNsiQMeSvMk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s love story portentous heft of There Will Be Blood, but it’s arguably one of the director’s best and most interesting films when taken on its own terms.
Phantom Thread is built of altogether subtler stuff, with a central performance from Daniel Day-Lewis as master dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock that borders on the understated, offset by the luminous Vicky Krieps as his muse-turned-tormentor-turned-carer.
2. The Handmaiden (2016)
Park Chan-wook’s lavish psychological thriller is a film that constantly pulls the rug from under you. Set in 1930s Korea during the Japanese occupation, it begins as a period con story before splintering into something far more twisted, sensual and emotionally rich.
Told in overlapping chapters that repeatedly reframe what you think you’ve seen, The Handmaiden is as formally playful as it is sumptuous to look at. It’s also surprisingly funny, unashamedly erotic and romantic in the most subversive way possible. Few films reward close attention like this; every reveal lands harder than the last.
1. Parasite (2019)
Parasite entered the history books in 2019 as the first non-English-language movie to win the Best Picture Oscar. Such a thing isn’t always an indicator of lasting worth, of course, but in Parasite’s case, it most certainly is.
Bong Joon-ho’s biting satire sees a poor, constantly hustling South Korean family taking over the plush home of the upper-class couple that employs them. The resulting events are, by turns, funny, sad, gruesome, and deeply tragic. In terms of popular and highly regarded films that perfectly capture the spirit of the times, Parasite is right up there.
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