15 Best Films Of The Decade (So Far)

14. All Is Lost

J. C. Chandor is quickly marking himself as one of the premier up-and-coming talents in cinema, his first three films not only showing incredible aptitude as a director, but also a remarkable range. Talky drama's dissecting the credit crunch, scintilating period crime thrillers and an all-but dialogue-less adventure piece, there appears to be nothing he can't do. Even early Martin Scorsese stuck to mostly New York and crime. And if you can make it through a comparison with Scorsese at any point in his career and come out on top then you must be something pretty special. Chandor's thus far best work is also his most "out there", the one-man-lost-at-sea drama All Is Lost. Starring Robert Redford as a sailor who, when waking to find his boat leaking after a collision with a storage container, must embark on a never-ending fight against the elements for survival, it's a relentless 100 minutes that keeps you endlessly engaged with a balance of thrilling action and the gradual break-down of its only character. Of course, with one person fighting survival where human's are ill-equipped, All Is Lost has been consistently compared to the space-set Gravity. And while Alfonso Cuarón's Oscar-cleaner was certainly a technical marvel, it's actually Chandor's film that wins out thanks to a restrained script (there's no forced symbolism here, for the most part) and a performance that relies on realistic subtleties rather than never-ending gasping.