Thriller Movies · 2010s Ranked
Best Thriller Movies of the 2010s, Ranked by IQ Score
The decade thriller cinema converged with prestige drama. Ranked by IQ Score.
The 2010s in thriller cinema is the decade the genre converged with prestige drama. Auteur directors (Villeneuve, Fincher, Aronofsky, Bigelow, Refn) operated inside thriller register at scale subsequent decades will struggle to match.
Anchor picks: Gone Girl (2014) is the canonical Fincher entry. Sicario (2015) is the canonical Villeneuve entry. Nightcrawler (2014) is the genre's most-formally-disciplined character study. Prisoners (2013) is the genre's most-difficult moral architecture. Get Out (2017) reset the social-thriller register.
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Questions about this ranking
What is the best thriller of the 2010s?
By IQ Score on TV Intelligentsia, Gone Girl, Sicario, Prisoners, Nightcrawler, and Get Out anchor the decade's Masterclass tier. The 2010s saw thriller cinema converge with prestige drama at a register the genre had not previously sustained.
Why did 2010s thrillers score so highly?
The 2010s was the decade auteur directors (Villeneuve, Fincher, Aronofsky, Peele, Aster) operated inside thriller register at scale. The result was a genre catalog dense at the top, the structural seriousness of A24's prestige-horror branch (Hereditary, The Witch, Midsommar) combined with auteur thriller (Sicario, Prisoners, Gone Girl).
Which 2010s thriller is most underrated?
A Most Violent Year (2014), Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017) are the three most-underrated 2010s thrillers by IQ Score relative to cultural-reach. Each is a canonical entry in the modern Western-thriller register that subsequent imitators rarely matched.
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