15 Best Films Of The Decade (So Far)
Half-way through the 2010s, what's been the best?
January 1st, 2015 wasn't just the start of a new year, but the mid-point of the decade. Yeah, that's right - we're over halfway through the 2010s. When the decade kicked off Avatar was dominating the box office, making its way to become the highest grossing film of all time, while Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland, boasting another zany performance from the beloved Johnny Depp, was the most hotly anticipated upcoming movie. From a 2015 perspective, it feels like a cinematic lifetime ago. The Avatar/Depp backlashes aside, there's been a lot of changes to the landscape. 3D became the next big thing before settling as an audience bug-bear, leaving space for IMAX to come forward as the true version of next-gen cinema. Let's not talk about 48 fps though. In terms of the films themselves, the biggest shift has been the refinement of the franchise model. What was previously only the fevered dream of a studio exec has become the norm; franchises are wrought into TV season-style over-arching narratives and source novels are split in two to drag out finite literary adaptations. At the moment, with Marvel delivering consistently entertaining fare, it's not anything to get upset about, but if things don't get more creative (listen up Hunger Games), audiences will quickly start longing for the days when a series only got a new movie every three years. But outside of box office politics, what's the quality of film been like? Well, if you look past the typical dross that clogs up multiplexes, the 2010s have been pretty exciting, offering up a range of exciting movies, from interesting technical experiments to all-round masterpieces destined to be all-time classics. Come along as we run-down the best films of the first half of the current decade.