2015 was probably the best year in the 2011-2019 category. The Big Short, Sicario and The Hateful Eight first pop up. There's few outside of those that i didn't mind seeing at the time, but i doubt i would watch a second time. Not really clearing my schedule to watch The Hateful Eight again either, but it passes the entertaining and memorable box at least. I wouldn't say i remember anything from the latest Tarantino movie and i think i could come up with 10 movies that i would rather watch from Tarantino, Pitt and DiCaprio each (assuming we can count True Romance, Natural Born Killers and/or 4 rooms, Sin City doesn't count).

ok i just accidentally edited your post one sec

ok back to business wtf there have been SO many good-to-great films, not even decent, in the last decade.

ok i cant think of any you didnt mention but the green knight right now but i know in my heart we're right

wolf of wall st deserves some respect, least of all considering how shite the source material was.

I skipped looking at 2020 and 2021 for obvious reasons. There was a bigger drought than normal followed by over saturation that to a degree should still continue.

I counted Wolf of Wall Street and that was in 2013. 2013 was also the year that started DC Extended Universe. Every DC related movie excluding Joker in the last decade is in that universe.

2000s gave us The Dark Knight vs Shazam! in 2010s. Snyder made The Watchmen in 2009 vs Justice League in 2017. 2021 Snyder Cut doesn't help this case.

2000s was Lord of the Rings vs Star Wars remakes in 2010s. The Hobbit series started the decade though. Looking at the rest of the decade they're somewhere in top 20.

2008 was when Tropic Thunder released. Can't really come up with a single comedy after that.

X-Men came out in 2000. I used to watch every superhero movie. I stopped doing that about 10 years ago.

For crime movies there's maybe 4-5 decent picks for 2010s. The Town in 2010 was kinda last of it's kind. The Drive and Joker probably belong here even though i would never rewatch either. White Boy Rick was solid. And then The Irishman. Irishman mostly reminds me that they're still alive and they used to make top 20 all time crime movies. For mob movies everyone involved dominates the top 10. For The Irishman i think i could come up with 100 crime movies i would rather watch and for everyone involved i can easily come up with 10 movies each.

Oh and for the record i don't make the claim that the last 10 years was uniquely bad. 2000s was maybe twice as good. 90s 4x and 80s 8x. Likely a smoother curve and i would probably see the peek around 75-85. Either by a random metric of entertaining/memorable or makes the top 100 of it's relative category.

I would have to look up TV shows with a similar scale, but without doing that i would put their peak in maybe 2005-2015 and i might do the same for videogames. The bigger premise would be that even though all forms of recorded visual media gained resources and technical talent in the last 40-50 years the creative talent shifted away from movies and you can tell.

minor point; i dont think the creative talent shifted away, i think the financial decisions were driven by lowest common denominator profit motives and those are, to be frank, rarely very creative.

my list so far, asterisk for movies im not willing to argue against the removal of:

wolf of wall street
sicario
watchmen
big short
looper
zero dark 30*
oldboy
american hustle
gravity*
ex machina
edge of tomorrow / live die repeat
a most violent year <-- fucking underrated btw
THE REVENANT [ CAPS LOCKED FOR ACCENT; THIS SHOULD COUNT AS LIKE 7 FILMS ON ITS OWN]
black mass* [ included because a lot of people who were in the mix said it deserves respect ]
arrival
annihilation*
climax
uncut gems
parasite
dune
green knight
dunkirk


and im casting a super, super small net here. im not even including MCU stuff, or movies that are openly acknowledged to be great but i havent seen personally (with one or two exceptions), or the lions share of south korean / japanese new wave cinema masterpieces that have been hitting lately.

one could easily triple that list if you really embraced the lower end boundary that 'decent' describes.

one thing i realized as i scrolled through lists of films is that, per your comment, it IS harder to find stuff since 2015, the drop off is actually shocking.

I generally assumed that everyone looking back at the movies would mostly include stuff from genres they enjoy and/or high water marks by some semi random objective metric. I have no idea about horror or romantic comedies so i didn't include them for the most part. I just assumed that for most people there was a decline.

I haven't been bored in the last 10 years. Streaming services made accessing the back catalogue of Movies very easy and TV hasn't declined as much.

First Sicario obv makes the list for crime movies.

I was looking at the GoT money side and by random estimates pilot was $5-10m. The first season was $50-60m. How that relates to movie budgets of it's time is pretty parabolic compared 20 years before that. Creative side of that being even able to get the rights to the source material and ability to tie talent for years to that project. I wouldn't say DnD with GoT qualifies as creative, but they had bullets to buy the talent and they did a good job as showrunners as long as they were glorified book editors.

In every space good things happen without money, but they don't necessarily stay there after success. The Push part being that there isn't money for projects they are interested in after leveling up and Pull part being that higher paying jobs aren't being offered elsewhere.

Say with Trainspotting that was made with a relatively small £1.5m budget. The actors in it came from TV, Theatre and a random night club. After it did ok for itself the top billed talent did not return there for a while. They all made movies for the next 10-15 years. Combination of fading star power and bigger TV budgets was needed. As a random tidbit, Trainspotting was able to get Lou Reed and Iggy Pop for their soundtrack because David Bowie liked Danny Boyle's first movie.

TV and Theatre used to be farm league for Movies. It's less clear now, except theater is probably worse off.

Got sidetracked from looking up crime movies in the 2000s, but this should be pretty easy by including just the year 2000...

Brother
Chopper
Memento
Nine Queens
O Brother, Where Art Though
Sexy Beast
Snatch
Traffic

...and that should almost match the entire 2010s. Might as well glance the rest of the decade...

Training Day
25th Hour
City of God
Gangs of New York
Ripley's Game
Collateral
The Lady Killers
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Sin City
The Black Dahlia
American Gangster
Eastern Promises
The Departed
No Country for Old Men
Bronson
The Dark Knight

...and that's pretty much just the very best of the decade.