The 25 best movies of the 2010s have been named

Rory Cashin

We think we’re 100% in agreement with what ended up in the top spot.

Yes, we know the 2010s aren’t over just yet, but World Of Reel wanted to get the jump on the end of the decade, by asking some of the biggest names in movie criticism from around the world to give their favourite movie of the last ten years.

Each critic sent in their top five, in no particular order, and the list below is simply compiled by which movies appeared the most on those top fives.

Some of them might be very well known (The Social Network, Get Out, Inception), and some might be on the complete opposite end of the blockbuster scale (Margaret, Certified Copy, Holy Motors).

There is one Netflix entry (Roma), and even a TV show (David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), but when it came to topping the list, that honour went to George Miller’s modern action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road.

There is nobody better than writer/director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Magic Mike, Out Of Sight) to put into words why it is that Fury Road is such an impossible accomplishment, as he spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about why he doesn’t storyboard his movies:

“The ability to stage well is a skill and a talent that I value above almost everything else. And I say that because there are people who do it better than I’ll ever be able to do it after 40 years of active study. I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week, and I tell you I couldn’t direct 30 seconds of that. I’d put a gun in my mouth.

“I don’t understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don’t, and it’s my job to understand it. I don’t understand two things: I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.

“I could almost see that’s kind of possible until the polecat sequence, and then I give up. We are talking about the ability in three dimensions to break a sequence into a series of shots in which no matter how fast you’re cutting you know where you are geographically. And each one is a real shot where a lot of things had to go right. I’m going to keep trying; I’m not going to keep trying in the sense that I’m going to volunteer to direct the next Mad Max movie.

“I’m going to keep trying in the sense that when I have sequences that demand a certain level of sophistication in terms of their visual staging, I’m going to try and watch the people who do it really well and see if I can climb inside their heads enough to think like that.

“But he’s off the chart. I guarantee that the handful of people who are even in range of that, when they saw Fury Road, had blood squirting out of their eyes. The thing with George Miller, it’s not just that, he does everything really well.

“The scripts are great, the performances are great, the ideas are great. He’s exceptional. I met him once for about 30 seconds at the Directors Guild Awards in Los Angeles the year of Fury Road. But you don’t want to say that stuff to somebody’s face; it’s embarrassing.”

Here is the full Top 25 (kind of) list:

01. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
02. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
03. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
04. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
05. The Social Network (David Fincher)
06. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)
07. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
08. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
09. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
10. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen)
10. Get Out (Jordan Peele)
12. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
13. Carol (Todd Haynes)
13. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
15. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)
16. Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
17. Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)
18. Her (Spike Jonze)
18. Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)
20. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)
20. Inception (Christopher Nolan)
20. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
23. La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
23. 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen)
25. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
26. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)
27. Amour (Michael Haneke)
28. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)