10 Films that defined a decade…
1 GET OUT 2017
Black lives matter in Jordan Peele’s stunning horror satire, in which an unsuspecting boyfriend (Daniel Kaluuya, terrific) discovers his white lover’s relatives want to put him in a sunken place.
2 BOYHOOD 2014
Patiently shot over 12 years with the same cast throughout, Richard Linklater’s drama captured a young boy’s passage into manhood with a level of foresight and dedication unrivalled in contemporary cinema.
3 MAD MAX: FURY ROAD 2015
George Miller’s return to Max Rockatansky’s post-apocalyptic wasteland was a feral howl of pure action cinema, with Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa rooting the outrageously extravagant vehicular mayhem in recognisably human indomitability.
4 MOONLIGHT 2016
Barry Jenkins’s touching three-part drama unpacked a young gay black man’s coming of age with intelligence, tenderness and scintillating visual poetry. A worthy (eventual) recipient of the Best Picture Oscar.
5 THE WOLF OF WALL STREET 2013
Martin Scorsese’s Dantean portrait of a yuppie’s descent into decadence was not only the auteur’s best film since Casino but also the most successful of his collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio to date.
6 ROMA 2018
Alfonso Cuarón’s homage to the women who reared him was a domestic epic filmed in ravishing black-and-white that transported the viewer back to the 1970s Mexico of the director’s youth.
7 THE MASTER 2012
Paul Thomas Anderson’s portrait of a charismatic cult leader was a work of beguiling, unsettling strangeness that boasted immense performances from Joaquin Phoenix and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman.
8 THE SOCIAL NETWORK 2010
Facebook’s origins were brilliantly dissected in a zeitgeist-y drama everybody had an opinion on, not least billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg himself, skilfully played (albeit as a lovelorn sociopath) by Jesse Eisenberg.
9 SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE 2018
The best Spider-Man film of the decade used the visual grammar of a comic book to tell a dimensionhopping story that made us view Spidey in a completely new way.
10 AVENGERS: ENDGAME 2019
Though the MCU will continue, it’s hard to imagine it ever delivering a more exciting and stirring climax than the one served up by this blockbuster to end all blockbusters.