Entertainment
The 6 Most Universally Loved Movies Released Since 2010, Ranked
Critics and audiences agreeing on anything is rare enough that when it actually happens, it’s worth paying attention to. Usually one side loves a movie the other side finds it overrated, or a movie makes money but gets torn apart in reviews, or it wins every award and nobody outside industry circles actually watches it.
These six pulled off the rare trick of getting nearly everyone on the same page at once, critics, casual moviegoers, award voters, people who don’t normally watch movies in these particular genres at all. Everyone, from different parts of the world, loved these when they were released and even now.
6
‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ (2018)
Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) gets bitten by a radioactive spider in his own universe and then accidentally pulls five other Spider-people in from parallel dimensions, each one drawn in a completely different visual style from the others. Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), an out-of-shape, washed-up version of the hero, ends up reluctantly training Miles while dealing with his own midlife crisis. The animation team spent years building an entirely new visual pipeline just for this movie, mixing halftone dots, hand-drawn motion lines, and inconsistent frame rates to make it actually look like a comic book come to life.
It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, breaking a streak that had basically belonged to Disney and Pixar for over a decade before this. Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage) each get their own distinct look and tone within the same movie. None of it clashes despite how different every character’s art style actually is. Every studio making animated movies since has tried to copy at least some piece of what this film figured out first.
5
‘Paddington 2’ (2017)
Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant), a vain actor obsessed with reviving his own career, frames Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) for a theft neither bear nor audience saw coming, landing him in prison for most of the movie. Grant has said in interviews that this role, gloriously over the top and clearly having a blast with every disguise, ranks among his favorite parts he’s ever played. The film held a rare, nearly perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes for years after release, only broken eventually by one lone contrarian review.
There’s a pop-up book sequence depicting London that took animators months to build by hand, and it stands out as one of the most purely charming pieces of visual craft in any comedy from that decade. The movie treats basic kindness and politeness as genuinely radical values worth celebrating, which sounds like it should feel corny but never does. It’s a kids’ movie that adults quietly love just as much, maybe more.
4
‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
Margaret Sixel, the film’s editor and George Miller’s real-life wife, had never cut an action movie before this and reportedly had almost no interest in the genre going in. That distance from typical action editing conventions ended up working in the film’s favor, since she built the cuts around emotional rhythm instead of the usual macho pacing most action movies default to. The wives Furiosa (Charlize Theron) rescues each carry specific, deliberate names, Splendid, Capable, Toast the Knowing, meant to work almost like character summaries on their own.
Many of the stunt performers came directly from Cirque du Soleil, trained specifically to swing off moving vehicles on long flexible poles during the chase sequences. Furiosa’s memories of the Green Place, a matriarchal home she was stolen from as a child, give the whole chase an actual destination beyond just running from danger. Sixel won the Oscar for Best Film Editing for her work here, a rare recognition for an editor working almost entirely against the grain of her own genre.
3
‘Parasite’ (2019)
Mr. Park, the wealthy father in this story, keeps commenting on a specific smell that crosses a line he can’t quite name, a smell tied to people who ride the subway and live somewhere he’s never had to think about. Bong Joon-ho storyboards literally every single shot before filming even begins, a habit so thorough that his crew reportedly nicknamed the drawings “Bong-boards.”
The film swept four major Oscars in one night, Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and International Feature, an unusually complete haul for any single movie. Song Kang-ho, a longtime collaborator of Bong’s across several earlier films, plays the father of the family sneaking their way into wealthy employment one lie at a time. That smell, brought up once early on almost as a throwaway comment, matters more than nearly any other detail in the entire story.
2
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (2022)
Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner buried under an IRS audit, discovers she can pull skills and memories from infinite alternate versions of herself scattered across the multiverse. Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), her husband, gets played by an actor who’d mostly stepped away from acting for decades after starting out as a child star, and this role brought him back in a huge way. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert directed the whole thing, packing hot dog fingers, sentient rocks, and an actual bagel built as a stand-in for total nihilism into one coherent family story.
Joy (Stephanie Hsu), Evelyn’s daughter, doubles as the film’s antagonist, a fractured multiversal being named Jobu Tupaki who’s grown exhausted by the sheer weight of infinite possibility. The film swept five major Oscar categories, including acting wins for both Yeoh and Quan, a rare sweep for a movie this strange on paper. Underneath all the multiverse chaos, it’s really just a story about a mother and daughter trying to actually understand each other.
1
‘Top Gun: Maverick’ (2022)
Tom Cruise returned to this role thirty-six years after the original film, and the production put its actors through real months of flight training and G-force conditioning so cameras mounted inside actual fighter jets could capture their real faces during real maneuvers rather than leaning on green screen. Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late partner Goose, carries a grudge against Maverick that changes most of their scenes together. The Navy’s cooperation gave the production access to real aircraft which is difficult for most films to manage.
COVID delayed the release multiple times, and Cruise reportedly pushed hard to keep it as a theatrical-only release even as other studios sent their biggest movies straight to streaming during the same stretch. It became one of the highest-grossing films of Cruise’s entire career, and plenty of critics credited it with helping pull the theatrical box office back from the brink after years of decline. The practical flying alone justifies the wait, since nothing digital has really matched what real G-forces do to an actor’s face on camera.
Top Gun: Maverick
- Release Date
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May 27, 2022
- Runtime
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131 minutes
- Director
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Joseph Kosinski
- Writers
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Christopher McQuarrie, Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Peter Craig, Justin Marks
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