The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

13. 2013 - Gravity

Gravity Sandra Bullock
Warner Bros.

Honourable Mentions: Her, Under the Skin, The Wolf of Wall Street

2013 proved to be one of the most vibrant and multifaceted years for cinema during the 2010s, with Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity its undeniable event picture.

A space-set character drama that pulls from the same perilous threads as Ron Howard's Apollo 13, Gravity paired Sandra Bullock with George Clooney as astronauts caught in a deadly catastrophe while in Earth's orbit. The film was developed using a groundbreaking mix of digital techniques, which enabled Cuaron to make its space-set sequences (which naturally comprise the vast majority of the film) even more butt-clenchingly stressful.

While most blockbusters aim for showstopping moments of audible carnage, it is the absence of sound in Gravity that really emphasises the uncanny horror of its environment. The vastness of space brings its own kind of existential dread, and in showcasing the fine margins between safety and peril, Cuaron delivered one of the most suspenseful and thrilling films of the 2010s.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.