The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

10. 2016 - Arrival

Arrival 2016
Paramount

Honourable Mentions: La La Land, Moonlight, Your Name

Denis Villeneuve has become one of the most exciting and buzzworthy directors working in Hollywood over the last decade, making his mainstream entrance with 2013's Prisoners and following that up with the insidiously brutal Taylor Sheridan-penned Sicario in 2015, both of which were shot by cinematographic maestro, Roger Deakins.

Villeneuve changed tack in terms of subject matter for his following film - a time-travelling sci-fi tragi-romance starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, titled Arrival. Adapted by Eric Heisserer from a story by Ted Chiang, Arrival is mind-bending like the best entries in the genre but with an emotional throughline that crash-lands in the third act to tearful effect.

More importantly - and undoubtedly the reason why Villenueve was courted for the Blade Runner and Dune franchises in the immediate aftermath - it felt like a sci-fi film we hadn't seen before.

 
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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.