Find the best movies and show to watch from the year 2010. These handpicked recommendations are highly-rated by viewers and critics.
A young girl is looking for her father while struggling to care for her family. The film is bleak and slow but great performances from the cast, especially the lead, will keep you engaged throughout. The story has a very real, raw, and natural feeling to it, so natural in fact that at times, you will forget it is a movie. And in many ways, it feels that Winter's Bone is to Jennifer Lawrence what The Believer was to Ryan Gosling, as her performance is nothing short of perfect.
Terriers is a fun take on the detective genre that lasted only one season and has been developing into a cult classic. An ex-cop and his best friend start an unlicensed private investigator operation in L.A, pretty much just to help out friends. If that sounds irresponsible, wait until you meet these two. It's difficult to choose which one is more irresponsible, which makes them unpredictable (and endearing). Lots of charm and pretty compelling plotlines make Terriers one of the saddest cancellations in recent TV memory... for the people who watched it. It's often referred to as the best show that no one watched.
This is a very nice movie about a lovely older couple named Tom and Gerri. It follows their lives for an entire year, as they work at their jobs, invite friends over for dinner, and work in their garden. They live modest but fulfilling lives, and they seem mostly happy and very much in love, a rarity in the movies. This probably sounds horribly boring to most people, but since Mike Leigh is the director, the film is instead a touching and realistic portrayal of love and how people spend their time together. We should all be so lucky as to live a life as charmed as the central couple in this film.
This is a funny sketch comedy show set in an imaginary small town called Burnistoun. The characters include Kelly McGlade, the town’s answer to Beyoncé, and The Burnistoun Butcher, the town’s serial killer who’s always angry with the media because they keep confusing him with the actual butcher. Most of the characters are played by Robert Florence and Iain Connell (pictured above). In the first episode, they play two co-workers who get into an elevator that only works on voice-recognition. The voice-recognition software starts reflecting how many Americans feel and pretends it doesn’t understand Scottish accents. The two Scots end up getting so worked up that they hilariously recreate the “freedom” scene in Braveheart. In a way it’s saying: if you enjoyed Braveheart and understand the reference, there is no reason you shouldn’t enjoy Burnistoun.
Ever wondered how much your life will change when faced with the reality that death is about to come? That’s normal, and not nearly as life-altering as being told you only have a few more moments to live. Because of a terminal illness, Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is driven to this situation and tries to right his wrongs in the wake of modern Barcelona. This melodrama is supercharged by Bardem’s unearthly performance as the story’s only hero, demonstrating the selfless love of a destroyed and dying father to his children – paired with cinematography unlike any other, this film is exceptionally beautiful. Directed by González Iñárritu' (Babel, Birdman, The Revenant).
A dark and sophisticated slow-burning drama, Never Let Me Go is adapted from the highly acclaimed novel of the same name by Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It stars Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield as boarding school raised teenagers eager to explore the outside world when they learn a secret that will threaten their very existence. Anything more is a spoiler, watch it.
A cracking cast including Guy Pearce and Joel Edgerton elevate this dark and gripping Australian crime drama, which was received with glowing reviews from critics but was sadly forgotten with time.
Breakout star James Frecheville plays J, a teenager who goes to live with his grandmother, the head of a Melbourne crime organization. As the heat closes in and things go awry, J finds himself caught between his family and a detective who wants to save him.
Jacki Weaver is outstanding as the conniving grandma and the film put Ben Mendelsohn on the road to Hollywood stardom. Animal Kingdom is a superior crime saga with plenty of emotional depth to match the tense drama.
Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis, Jason Schwartzman, and many others star in this three-season comedy that aired between 2009 and 2011.
Jonathan is a bored and lonely writer in New York, his girlfriend having recently left him for smoking too much pot (he would quit but “quitting cold turkey is dangerous”. To fight the boredom, Jonathan decides to list himself on Craigslist as a private detective.
Jonathan’s adventures in his newfound profession are wrapped in a lighthearted and easy comedy format - making Bored to Death the perfect no-brainer to watch after a busy day.
Film direction—at least in the traditional sense—is all about establishing control. In Even the Rain, however, the crew led by director Sebastian faces a problem larger than what they can manage when they become embroiled in a local conflict over water supply while shooting a period film in Bolivia. The situation escalates into a violent uprising between the residents and the Bolivian state forces, which then endangers the completion of Sebastian’s film.
Even the Rain exposes the hypocrisy of urban filmmaking, questioning its exploitative and selfish tendencies. “Some things are more important than your film,” the actor Daniel bluntly tells Sebastian in one scene. This meta-commentary extends to the audience and encourages us to reevaluate the importance we put into films, especially with regards to the current socio-political context.
I Saw the Devil is a South Korean psychological thriller/horror film. IT IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!!! It has a lot of blood and gore that could make even the strongest stomachs turn. A young woman is kidnapped from her car while waiting for a tow truck and the kidnapper murders her far from her car and scatters her body parts around. Her fiancé, a secret service agent of the National Intelligence Service, sets out to track down her murders and extract his revenge. If you're looking for a thrill ride, look no further- but don't say we didn't warn you.
A comedy (!) that follows James (Benedict Cumberbatch) a man terminal cancer who knows that he doesn't have long to live, so he goes on a journey with his closest friends, Bill (Adam Robertson), Davy (Tom Burke) and Miles (JJ Field), to Barafundle Bay in Wales. The journey itself is funny and the characters have many issues to sort out, some lighter than others, but the film is by no means completely lighthearted, so if you aren't prepared for some tears with your laughter, maybe look elsewhere!
When a group of percussionists illegally carry out a city-wide performance act, it's up to policeman Amadeus Warnebring to stop them. The musical fugitives perform on stolen objects and disrupt public spaces, but Warnebring has his own reasons to pursue them so determinedly: he's tone-deaf for one and born into a family of snobby musical geniuses for another, making this case all the more meaningful and consequential to him.
Sound of Noise is more than reminiscent of Stomp, what with its playful symphonies subsisting on random borrowed objects, but it is livened up with the suspense of a caper, the dry wit of a Swedish comedy, and the abundant charms of a light romance.
Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, and Miles Teller star in this subtle drama about the state of a couple eight months into dealing with the sudden loss of their son.
The movie is based on a David Lindsay-Abaire play by the same name which won a Pulitzer Prize. It deals with the timeline of grief, and whether such a thing even exists: can the couple attempt to move on after 8 months? What about 8 years, like another couple they meet in a counseling group?
It’s also about how the differences in grief create tensions: the mother wants to donate the clothes and sell the house because she doesn’t want to be reminded of the event. The father wants to hold on the memory instead.
Rabbit Hole, like its source material, is sad, but its realistic approach and excellent performances make it nothing more than a perfect reflection of how complicated life can be.