45. “Inception” (2010)
At a time when adaptation of toy franchises and superhero movies were coming to dominate the blockbuster landscape more than ever before, along came Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus “Inception,” a movie that proved that tentpoles could be as distinctive and personal as well as thrilling. Detailing Leonardo DiCaprio and his fellow deep-dive dreamcatchers as they attempt to plant seeds of independence in the heir of a dying media tycoon so DiCaprio’s character can be reunited with his kids (this is, it turns out, not a logline-friendly movie), “Inception” is equally effective as an immaculately sustained tone poem and Bond-aping action movie: both elements are underscored by a quietly wrenching grief and heartache, and topped up with dizzying, Escher-ish imagery (Paris bending in on itself! The revolving corridor!) It’s flawed, but that a movie like this can make $800 million is reason to maintain faith in mainstream cinema and its intended audience.
44. “Gravity” (2013)
Having made the best sci-fi movie (and one of the very best movies, full stop) of the 2000s with “Children Of Men,” Alfonso Cuaron followed it up, albeit belatedly, by pulling a similar trick with the stunning “Gravity,” a knuckle-biting thriller that sees Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts stranded in space after the destruction of the International Space Station. The film’s a technical one-of-a-kind, with photo-realistic CGI, Steven Price’s astonishing score and the best-ever use of 3D, but contrary to the post-Oscar backlash it sustained, it’s far more than a glorified theme park attraction. Cuaron steeps his blockbuster in existential dread about man’s miniscule place in the universe, and on a more personal level, has Bullock fight not just for survival, but also to battle her way out of grief-fuelled depression. One of the riskier movies of the last few years, but boy, did those risks pay off.
43. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011)
We’ve not exactly been gasping for more spy movies in the last five years, but Tomas Alfredson’s stunning “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” proved that there was still life in the genre and then some: epic, intimate and deeply sad, the film comes across like a sort of “Godfather” equivalent for the Cold War espionage flick. Exquisitely evoking 1970s Britain to an extent that you can almost smell the damp tweed suits and end-of-Empire depression, it mostly disregards the whodunnit hook of John Le Carre’s source material (economically adapted by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor) to tell a mournful story about the ways that governments and intelligence agencies use up and discard the people that serve them and about the passing of a generation. Every element of the film sings, from Hoyte Von Hoytema’s photography to Alberto Iglesias’ score, but it’s the cast, led by a career-best turn by Gary Oldman, that leave the longest impression.
42. “Night Moves”
Again, we were on a knife edge between this title and Kelly Reichardt’s previous film, the brilliant, underplayed Western “Meek’s Cutoff” for inclusion in this list. But while ‘Cutoff’ reshaped the Western archetype to fit Reichardt’s gently revisionist agenda, “Night Moves” feels like a more urgent film, if hardly less considered and deliberately-paced. Following the planning, execution and aftermath of an act of eco-terrorism with enigmatic simplicity and aided by great against-type playing by Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning (supported by very much with-type playing from Peter Sarsgaard), Reichardt’s film is a portrait of disaffected youth made somehow all the more frightening because of the curdled idealism they cling to. Unbearably slow for some but unrelentingly tense if you’re on its wavelength, “Night Moves” is an exploration of the eternal debate about the end justifying the means, of how far you will go, and how much you can absolve yourself of in the name of a cause.
41. “Martha Marcy May Marlene” (2011)
Launching Elizabeth Olsen into stardom and marking Sean Durkin as one of the most impressive and distinctive talents of this decade so far, Sundance breakout “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is like a 100-minute anxiety attack, a Haneke-influenced (but not indebted) chiller that rattles around your brain for days. Olsen plays a young woman who’s recently escaped from a sinister cult led by the charismatic Patrick (a phenomenally frightening John Hawkes) and is holed up in a lake house with a cabin with her sister and brother-in-law (Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy). Performances aside, the way that Durkin plays with time makes ‘Mx4’ is special: it might be the best edited film of the 2010s so far, putting you in Martha’s deprogramming head, and unbalancing and uneasing you to the extent that the past, the present and paranoia all bleed together.