The Best Films of the Decade

The landscape of international cinema is nearly unrecognizable now compared to the end of the 21st century’s first decade. For both shooting and exhibition, film has been almost entirely eclipsed by digital. Media companies have consolidated to an even more frightening extent. Streaming has risen as the new, now-dominant mode of distribution. Documentary has seen an awakening of form like never before. Conversations about representation and safety within the industry have grown more forceful and influential. Thanks to social media and smartphones, essentially all of us are now amateur filmmakers. Each of the films gathered here, voted on by Hyperallergic contributors, represent some facet of these vast changes. Here is how cinema captured this strange, tumultuous decade. —Dan Schindel

1. No Home Movie 

2015, directed by Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman always inserted traces of memoir into her form, and in her swan song, she films the closing chapters of her mother’s life. Shooting in the slow, precise style she was known for, Akerman lingers on images like a tree being battered in the wind or empty bedrooms, as if to state what her cinema looks like without her mother hovering above like God. In one last gift to the world, Akerman gave us a portrait of a woman she loved, a woman who was home for a person who often felt like she didn’t have one. With this film, she closed the book on her career, and as we close out this decade, we must remember to honor one of the greatest artists of our time. —Willow Catelyn Maclay

Available to stream.

2. Moonlight

2016, directed by Barry Jenkins

It’s difficult to think of Moonlight without cracking a smile over the way it triumphantly stole the show at the Oscars. I remember giving up on a watch party after being so disappointed to see Hollywood once again refuse to recognize a story that actually resonated with me as a queer Black person and a lover of film in favor of one that felt so hopelessly out of touch. (How does a film about LA feature next to no Black or brown people?) But as I was walking out, my friends screamed through the window, “They fucked up! Come back upstairs!” There’s a reason why Moonlightstruck such a chord, not only among queer and POC folks in my community, but among broader audiences hungry to see a new kind of coming of age film, one in which “Black Boys Look Blue,” as goes part of the title of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s then-unproduced play that Barry Jenkins adapted for the film. In Jenkins’ version, we meet Little, a young Black boy who grows up to become Chiron the teenager, and eventually a man called “Black.” Through three radiant performances (Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes), we witness him come into his identity as a gay Black man in America. Through James Laxton’s stunning cinematography, the stark glare of the Miami sun glints off of Black and brown skin and a crystalline blue ocean, later replaced by the glowing pink and blue tones of lush dream sequences. Black skin appears not just blue, but also red or caramel, offering a visual metaphor for the fluid yet much-maligned nature of Blackness in America, which is often cast in the harshest light possible. —Dessane Lopez Cassell

Available to stream. Read our original review.

3. Zama 

2018, directed by Lucrecia Martel

Martel’s long-gestating satire of Spanish colonialism in South America claustrophobically recalibrates the widescreen chaos of Apocalypse Now as surreal private hell, with even the largest landscape shrunk to compress around its conquistador protagonist’s collapsing sanity. Like Don Quixote, Zama tilts at shadows and hallucinations, dispatched deep into hostile territory to hunt a rogue Spaniard who may or may not even exist. In the film’s most brutal commentary, Zama puts himself through hell not even for his own benefit, but for that of the governors and administrators who will profit off of his possible success and immediately underwrite his failure. —Jake Cole

Available to stream. Read our original review.

4. The Act of Killing / The Look of Silence

The Act of Killing 2013, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, and Anonymous. The Look of Silence 2015, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

There is a good deal of hand-wringing in media now over how to properly engage with nefarious public figures, and the value of “giving them enough rope.” Similarly, debate stirs over how to respectfully depict victims in the aftermath of tragedy. This masterful duology on the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s pulls off both. The terrifyingly flamboyant The Act of Killing is a showcase for how state-sanctioned murderers will not only feel no apparent guilt but actively celebrate their evil. The much quieter The Look of Silence flips to the perspective of a survivor, who interrogates both his persecutors and whether any justice is even possible.  —Dan Schindel

Available to stream. Read our original review of The Act of Killing.

5. The Tree of Life 

2011, directed by Terrence Malick

Although The Thin Red Line and The New World both hinted at it, this marked Malick’s full-blown ascendance into affective montage, one based primarily on the aesthetic properties and emotional resonance of each shot, and new heights in his journey to reconcile the smallness of human time with the vastness of geological time. In the process, it captures a particular kind of postwar American childhood with such vividness that no words could properly describe it. Malick has gone on to make bolder and more radical films, and he made more specific and less hermetic films before it, but The Tree of Life represents a great artist operating at the peak of his abilities, providing some of the most astonishing sequences a camera has ever captured. —Forrest Cardamenis

Available to stream.

6. Get Out 

2017, directed by Jordan Peele

You could rewatch it 20 times, and that still wouldn’t dull this sharp social thriller. The film grabs hold of a notion bubbling under the surface of Obama-era white liberals (yet obvious to Black America!), that Black people’s bodies are subject to the bluntness of white power manipulations, Democrat or otherwise. This is the definitive inauguration to a post-Obama era. It didn’t hurt that it proved to be a massive success from a modest budget, a gamechanger for an inequitable industry that shies away from Black creatives. —Zoe Guy

Available to stream.

7. Under the Skin 

2014, directed by Jonathan Glazer

An alien roams the streets of Glasgow, picking up unsuspecting victims. Infused with a wandering spirit and unusual vulnerability, each meeting takes its toll on this otherworldly being, who begins to question the limits of their own body and its fragility. Mica Levi’s score echoes with the vibrations and sounds of a circulatory system, as the film simulates the experience of embodying flesh that is not your own. —Justine Smith

Available to stream.

8. Cameraperson 

2016, directed by Kirsten Johnson

Johnson combines two modes of filmmaking that usually do not mix: nonfiction advocacy and a diary of personal associative detail. Yet they work staggeringly well together. Johnson compiled this film out of clips and moments that had stuck with her throughout her career as a cinematographer. This is not a resume, but rather a full testimonial of who we are as people and what we could possibly aspire to be, even with an unsteady future looming. —Willow Catelyn Maclay

Available to stream. Read our interview with director Kirsten Johnson.

9. Horse Money 

2015, directed by Pedro Costa

After setting his movies in a legible if deteriorating (and now demolished) neighborhood, Costa’s two-decades-and-counting Fontainhas project resides in a can’t-quite-place-it Lisbon. He melds a very real social history with real people and tangible ghosts. This ain’t some amorphous slow cinema fiddle-faddle, but an exploration of personal and collective trauma, told with the best, most sculptural digital images of this decade. —Tanner Tafelski

Available to stream. Read our original review.

10. Inherent Vice 

2014, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Representing perhaps the perfect blend of Anderson’s directorial sensibilities, this is a fusion of his more shambolic and ensemble-focused early films with his later, more historically-minded and sober works. A loose neo-noir adapted from a Thomas Pynchon novel, it burrows into its historical milieu and character work rather than its increasingly convoluted plot, using the hints of conspiracy and paranoia to grab on even tighter to its characters’ physical and emotional connections. Oddly emotional and terrifying, its textures and vibes are confounding and enrapturing in equal measure. —Ryan Swen

Available to stream.

11. Lemonade 

2016, directed by Kahlil Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Todd Tourso, Mark Romanek, and Jonas Åkerlund

There’s a moment halfway through Lemonade which made audiences across the world believe Beyoncé Knowles-Carter might drop the latter half of her billionaire hyphen. But what begins as a melodic narrative of infidelity boldly turns into a sociopolitical and artistic declaration of black women’s resistance and power. This film and album will rightfully go down as one of the most seminal pop culture events of the 2010s. With its visual dynamism co-curated by Khalil Joseph and lyrical earnestness courtesy of Warsan Shire, it transcended what a visual album and live cinematic moment could be for a generation.

—Rooney Elmi

Available to stream.

12. Margaret

2011, directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Shot in 2005 but delayed many years due to battles behind the scenes, we didn’t get to appreciate this movie until this decade. This chatty epic sees a teenage girl gripped with guilt after causing a traffic accident. A tangent-filled coming-of-age experience playing out in the shadow of 9/11, the film features many extended conversations, adolescent confrontations, and the intrusive influences of the “real world.” —Justine Smith

Available to stream.

13. Holy Motors

2012, directed by Leos Carax

The reclusive Carax’s sole film of the decade is certainly a doozy. Denis Levant plays a man who inhabits a series of “roles.” (For a movie? As a service? Who knows!) The dizzying un-narrative takes us from a sound stage to underground Paris to the actor’s own deathbed, making time for one of the catchiest accordion breaks ever. It’s one of the most difficult yet enjoyable films of the decade. —Dana Reinoos

Available to stream.

14. Certified Copy

2011, directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Kiarostami’s return to narrative cinema and his first fiction feature shot outside Iran is a mind-bender that mocks the human obsession with authenticity (and by extension, identity in art and life) with delicious flair that sweeps you up without warning. Juliette Binoche carves romantic poetry out of seduction, vulnerability, and manipulation as effortlessly as she breathes. Kiarostami sadly did not live to see the end of this decade, but this film kicked off an indelible end run for the legendary director. —Poulomi Das

Available to stream.

15. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Available to stream.

16. Mad Max: Fury Road

2015, directed by George Miller

Cinema doesn’t get more fuel-injected and gladiatorial than this, and yet what is arguably the greatest action film of the decade is also the genre’s fiercest critique. An eco-feminist blockbuster for the long summer of the Anthropocene, Fury Road reveals the grim result of an Earth ruled by unchecked toxic masculinity. If it weren’t for the insane amount of fossil fuels sacrificed in the making of this movie (which is essentially one long full-throttle car chase), perhaps Democrats would fare best in 2020 with a Thunberg-Furiosa ticket. —Anthony Hawley

Available to stream.

17. HyperNormalisation

2016, directed by Adam Curtis

If ever you look at the world around you and wonder “What the fuck is happening,” you could do worse to find an explanation than look up this film. Released between Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, this documentary surveys the history building to our moment, from 1975 on. Through a singular use of archival discovery and montage, Adam Curtis discerns the disquieting ways in which people, disempowered by politics, have surrendered their agency, and how corporatists and politicians have maintained the facade of a stable world in the meantime. That mask has now fallen off neoliberalism’s face. Whatever happens next, Curtis is the best person to make a movie about it. —Dan Schindel

Read our original review, or our interview with director Adam Curtis.

18. Parasite

2019, directed by Bong Joon-ho

Bong’s penchant for caustic, all-implicating class commentary reaches a new peak here. With camera placements as geometrically precise as the modernist home in which the wealthy Parks live, Bong elucidates the codependent rot of the haves and have-nots, and pointedly underlines that not even the most well-thought-out scheme can overcome the dehumanizing structures of class. The particulars of the film’s satire are specific to Korea, but its message is brutally universal. —Jake Cole

In theaters now. Read our original review.

19. High Life

2019, directed by Claire Denis

Denis continues her corporeal obsession through meditative drama. In the isolation of a stark space prison, sex becomes an obsession, as well as an object of power and control. Far-flung from the daily problems of Earth, the film examines the nature of humanity itself, asking what separates us from the animals and the gods in a sweet, brutal, occasionally comic space movie like no other you’ve seen before. —Justine Smith

Available to stream. Read our interview with director Claire Denis.

20. Love is the Message, the Message is Death

2016, directed by Arthur Jafa

In the early ’90s, Jafa worked with Julie Dash to shoot her trailblazing movie Daughters of the Dust. Yet strangely, after such a momentous partnership, we didn’t hear much from him in the film sphere, likely due to the reticence of Hollywood to champion Black filmmakers who weren’t making work about the topics they thought would make money. But Jafa never stopped working, directing his energy into the contemporary arts sphere, where he received more support and praise for his tendency to remix disparate forms that speak to the multiplicitous nature of Blackness. This 2016 short is no exception. Through its sampling of heartbreaking, joyous, infuriating, and exhilarating material culled from the internet, it subsumes the viewer into an avalanche of emotion. Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” scores footage of Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, Bert Williams’s melodic performances in blackface, Earl Sweatshirt spitting bars, a young Angela Davis, bits of Beyoncé and Biggie Smalls music videos, and brutal assaults by police on unarmed Black people. The first time I saw it, during Jafa’s solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in 2016, I stood paralyzed, back against the wall of the black box gallery, tears streaming down my face as it played on loop. With the fresh blow of the 2016 election still sinking in, its indictment of America’s sycophantic obsession with Black cultural production amidst its senseless perpetration of violence against Black people landed with a stinging blow. Yet standing in that dark space with some of my dearest friends and colleagues, it also acted as a reminder of everything we’ve been able to do in spite of that, and what more must still be done. —Dessane Lopez Cassell

Read our original review.

21. Citizenfour

2014, directed by Laura Poitras

This could be considered a legitimate horror film, one that reveals the omnipresence of government surveillance and our encroaching loss of privacy. Rounding out a trilogy of films on 9/11, it weaves together myriad political anxieties as it follows Poitras meeting with NSA analyst Edward Snowden, building up to his historic act of whistle-blowing. The explosive truths he revealed have given birth to one of the most indelible scandals of this young century. —Rooney Elmi

Available to stream. Read our original review.

22. Certain Women

2016, directed by Kelly Reichardt

It might be unfathomable to think that in adapting short stories by Maile Meloy, the most significant things are what’s unsaid. Laura Dern’s exasperated attorney (also named Laura) bites her tongue while enduring the outrageous, dangerous plotting of an unstable male client. There’s the enigma around the ambitious persistence of the well-to-do Gina (Michelle Williams), who’s trying to build her dream home. There’s the silence in the amorous, yearning glances that Jamie (Lily Gladstone) gives Beth (Kristen Stewart), trying to get a read on her. This Montana-set triptych nails the loneliness and solitude of a long car drive home and back. It’s Reichardt’s most absorbing achievement to date. —Caden Mark Gardner

Available to stream.

23. The Grand Bizarre

2018, directed by Jodie Mack

A kaleidoscopic meditation on globalization, manufacturing, and commerce. Following swatches of clothes as they travel from one corner of the world to the other, Mack uses stop-motion animation to give her ideas movement across planes, trains, and automobiles. Her unconventional style and playful tone make this hour-long documentary a standout.  Filmed on grainy 16mm film stock, the images have an organic, lightweight quality, even as they address heavy topics like manufacturing and distribution. —Monica Castillo

Read our original review.

24. On the Beach at Night Alone

2017, directed by Hong Sang-soo

2017 was a formidable year for Hong. In addition to releasing three features on the international festival circuit, he was hounded by the Korean media for admitting to having an affair with actress Kim Min-hee, a recent fixture in his ever-expanding oeuvre. In cryptic meditations across its disjoined halves, this film confirms two truisms that discerning viewers have known all along: Hong and Kim were sleeping together, and that regardless of (or perhaps in debt to) this, he is a master of frustrating, trenchant melodrama for our generation. —Adina Glickstein

Available to stream.

25. Shirkers

2018, directed by Sandi Tan

Some memories flicker, and others embed themselves in your identity like a never-ending film reel. That’s how Singapore-born filmmaker Sandi Tan relates the labyrinthine tale of her first film, made with the aid of her friends when she was a schoolgirl, and its disappearance along with her supposed mentor. Tan puts in an immense amount of care examining the paradoxical materiality of cinema and the ephemerality of the filmmaking/viewing experience. It’s a bewitching collage of obsession and grief, caught at the intersections of East and West, of cinema and reality. —Kyle Turner

Available to stream. Read our original review.