How quickly can a movie be declared a masterpiece, and how long does it have before that status can be revoked? When it comes to films, timing is everything.

Many movies that have been near universally acclaimed have vanished without a trace from the cultural conversation within a few years, while others that have been lambasted have gained devoted cult followings in that same time; no movie is absolutely guaranteed to stand the test of time.

This being the internet, where hot takes, bad takes and all other manner of takes are their own form of currency, it's worth gazing into a cinematic crystal ball and guesstimating which movies from the prior decade of the 2010s will actually endure. All the films on this list received acclaim and have only seemed to grow in estimation since, suggesting they are only going to get more love as time goes on.

Core Findings and Detailed Timeline

The future is uncertain, but for now, these movies from the 2010s seem destined to thrive as masterpieces. The 2010s weren't exactly a prolific period for the Western, but what the decade lacked in quantity, it sure made up for in quality.

If there's one I'd bet a solid silver dollar will stand the test of time, it's the gonzo animated film Rango.

A decade and a half after its release, this Oscar-winning Gore Verbinski film about a cowardly chameleon still looks gorgeous and is still funny as hell. As the first full animated feature created The film follows the titular chameleon (Johnny Depp), who wanders into a frontier town after his vivarium is shattered on a road trip.

He finds himself swept into a complicated plot of outlaws and corrupt authorities that pulls influence from movies as wide-ranging as A Fistful of Dollars, Chinatown, and Raising Arizona. Rango could easily slot in as the defining animated masterpiece of the 2010s, but that would do a disservice to Don Hertzfeldt's It's Such a Beautiful Day.

Broader Implications and Future Outlook

Combining three shorts of Hertzfeldt's into a feature-length narrative, the film is a beautiful, surreal journey through memory and mortality. There were many incredibly emotional and beautiful animated films made in the 2010s, but Hertzfeldt's film is one that simply seems to linger longer thanks to its idiosyncratic style and unexpected depth.

Bill is a stick figure character suffering from a neurodegenerative disease that affects his memories and causes hallucinations, leading him on a metaphysical journey through his distorted memories and family history towards certain death.

Hertzfeldt's unique form of animation and the simplicity of the character designs have a strange way of amplifying the emotional content. It's Such a Beautiful Day is an existential film that can make you think, laugh, and cry all over the sad tragedy of a stick figure.

Movie musicals and movies about music were a hot commodity in the 2010s, many of them with more melancholy narratives, even when their visuals were bright and colorful.

The former applies to the best music film of the decade, while the latter does not, since the Coen Brothers' folk movie Inside Llewyn Davis looks about as cold, grey and slushy as any film ever has. Although it's mildly inspired Llewyn Davis, played Over a week, the film follows Llewyn on a cyclical journey of failure and misfortune.

It's bitterly funny, filled with incredible performances The Coens officially split as co-directors in the 2010s, but they left behind a lifetime of work that's peppered with masterpieces that will all stand the test of time, including Inside Llewyn Davis. Like the Coens, Martin Scorsese has numerous masterpieces in his filmography, and the 2010s were a prominent decade for the filmmaker, mostly defined Their collaborations have continued to gain praise, but it's The Wolf of Wall Street that seems likely to be remembered as their greatest masterpiece.

It's a '90s Caligula for the stock market set, with all the excess and outrage that designation suggests. DiCaprio plays real-life scumbag Jordan Belfort, a silver-tongued stockbroker who builds a financial empire out of illegal schemes and scams. The film isn't concerned so much with the mechanics of Belfort's crime as it is with depicting his lavishly grotesque lifestyle.

Some critics, and a ton of film bros, misinterpreted this depiction of extravagant wealth as an endorsement of Belfort, even though the character himself is portrayed as a sleazy, abusive conman who never learns any lessons and continues his grift under the guise of a motivational speaker. Much like Goodfellas depicted the allure and dangers of organized crime, The Wolf of Wall Street depicts the high risk and low consequences awarded to white-collar criminals in America.

The 2010s introduced a few new action franchises and heroes to the cinematic landscape, but the best action of the decade, and the 21st century so far, featured a hero who had been absent from cinemas for three decades. Mad Max: Fury Road took a long time to get made, with lengthy development periods and production delays that resulted in Tom Hardy taking over the titular role from Mel Gibson for several obvious reasons.

Despite the long gestation and troubled shoot, the finished film showed no signs of either. It's an immaculately made, exhilarating action masterpiece that gets better with every viewing. Hardy's Max enters the film still wandering the wasteland when he gets mixed up with another post-apocalyptic warlord.

Dragged along with Charlize Theron's Furiosa and her plot to liberate the slave wives of Hugh Keays- Every frame of Mad Max: Fury Road feels purposeful, and there's no doubt the film will have a legacy even longer than its iconic predecessors. Romance in the 2010s saw all different kinds of dynamics hit the screen.

There was also plenty of LGBTQ representation on screen, too, but Todd Haynes' elegant Carol is a standout, an aching portrait of a lesbian romance based on the novel The Price of Salt It was a significant publication in terms of its depiction of a same-sex relationship without any lurid pulp elements, and a highly personal story for Highsmith, better known for her work in the crime genre.

Cate Blanchett is Carol, a woman going through a painful divorce who has a chance encounter with Therese, played The two engage in a slow-burn love affair that they have to keep a secret out of necessity. Carol doesn't shy away from the harsh realities faced There's an optimism inherent to Highsmith's novel, and the film's visuals, from the mid-century designs to the 16mm cinematography, have a textured softness to them.

Carol is visual velvet, and Blanchett and Mara match those visuals in their tender, nuanced performances. Science fiction was as dominant as ever in the 2010s, with everything from small cerebral thrillers to massive epics being made. When it comes to the most monumental sci-fi films of the decade, two directors cast cosmically large shadows.

Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, whose emotionally devastating Arrival is one of the most genuinely affecting sci-fi works to have ever graced the silver screen. After aliens arrive on Earth, humanity makes attempts to communicate with them.

In the U.S., this effort is led Communication and language are major themes, examining how our words connect us to each other and serve as extensions of our emotions and experiences.

In the narrative climax, Louise is able to avert worldwide catastrophe through her comprehension of the alien language. The emotional climax, where we comprehend the language of the film and the consequences it has for Louise, is where Arrival makes its biggest impact. It's the kind of incredible storytelling that only science fiction is capable of.

Read More: The 10 Best Movies That Are Over 100 Years Old, Ranked

The ineffable genre of drama. There's nothing inherent to distinguish it from any other. All films operate on some level of dramatic tension, and dramas can be subcategorized into elaborate convolutions.

Many of the aforementioned films on this list could be considered dramas, all different from each other, yet similarly affecting. They take us on emotional journeys that can expand our empathy and expose us to lived experiences well outside our own. No film of the 2010s does that as well as Barry Jenkins' Moonlight.

The story of Chiron, played Chiron comes of age in Miami while coming to terms with his sexuality, all while dealing with drugs and traumas. It's a character study about an identity crisis and how the individual elements of a person collide with their environment to form them into who they are.

Moonlight is a stunning piece of work deeply rooted in its characters and setting, dramatically transcending any time or place.

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works. You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another.

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it's ready to reveal them.

Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos.

You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn't want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful.

This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it.

You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

You are drawn to films that foreground their own building work — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it's about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego.

You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn't be possible.

Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all. You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning.

The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying.

You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

Horror gained newfound acclaim and prestige in the 2010s, with the term "elevated horror" used prominently to describe many of the films. While the term may be considered derogatory Perhaps the biggest splash came from Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning, generation-defining Get Out.

The comedic creator showed the same skills in crafting scares as he did in crafting jokes, while embedding them in a sharp satire of "post-racial" America.

Released one month into Donald Trump's first presidency, Peele's film digs under the skin to expose an under-portrayed aspect of racial discrimination The film takes aim at this white liberal racism through the horror story that surrounds Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black man who goes on a trip with his white girlfriend to meet her parents, who harbor some dark secret under their suburban facade.

Get Out is an American horror story, and its place in history is assured. Parasite is another masterpiece Parasite is alternately funny, thrilling, unsettling and even slightly scary in moments as it unfolds the layers of its narrative. It became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and its status hasn't diminished since.

The film follows two families, the lower-class Kims and the wealthy Parks. One Not soon after, they make a discovery that upends their entire plan and shows another level of class to the complicated conflict. Parasite is never headed in the direction you think it is, but each twist and turn of the plot feels like a natural progression.

Parasite was the final masterpiece of the 2010s and looks to stand the test of time forever.