Year-end ten-best movies lists are more than just an annual occasion for navel-gazing critics to get up on their collective soap boxes and subjectively rank things, arguing why the films they loved are better than the film you loved. Or, at least, they should be. Ideally, they provide an opportunity for reflection — a chance to look back at the previous 12 months and take the temperature of the culture, both where we are and where we’ve been. What made us laugh? What sparked a flicker of sorely-needed empathy? What dazzled us with the shock of the new? What spoke to us and moved us? In short, what was Art.

According to the basic laws of math, coming up with a Best Movies of the Decade list should only be 10 times harder than that. Ha! If only. Over the past 10 years, the only constant in our culture (both pop- and more broadly) has been change. Our anxieties seem to grow with every fresh news cycle. We seem more distrusting and divided than ever. We are no longer one nation, but rather a bickering federation of tribes. Fortunately, we have movies to bring us together. To entertain us, sure, but also to enlighten and help us make sense of our ever-changing times. After all, sitting in a darkened theater with a roomful of complete strangers has always carried the magical power to unite us and make us feel less alone. All we have to do is open our eyes…and watch.

Settling on a list of the Top 10 movies released between the dawn of 2010 and the dusk of 2019 wound up being an especially tricky balancing act. Not just because cinema is changing as rapidly as everything else around us (the supersonic and disruptive rise of Netflix, the hand-over-fist hegemony of superhero tentpoles, the industry’s long-overdue reckoning with diversity in front of and behind the camera). But also because some movies, more often than not the ones that are immediately hyped as masterpieces right out of the gate, seem to vanish from our memories as soon as their opening weekend ends. The ones on this list are not easily—or quickly—forgotten. In some cases, they may take longer to marinate in our psyches and reveal their hidden depths, but they are the ones that best represent who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re headed in the decade ahead….