If your algorithm has felt like a time machine lately, you’re not imagining it. “2026 is the new 2016” has been steamrolling TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook since late last year, dragging skinny jeans, Vine compilations, and Drake’s “Hotline Bling” back into the cultural bloodstream whether we asked for them or not. So while everyone’s busy relitigating the Obama era’s fashion choices, we figured it was worth pointing that same nostalgia machine at something actually worth revisiting: 2016 was a genuinely stacked year for movies.
This was the year an intimate, $1.5 million coming-of-age drama beat a lavish movie-musical for Best Picture in the most infamous envelope mix-up in Oscar history. It was the year Denis Villeneuve made a sci-fi movie about linguistics that hit harder than most alien-invasion blockbusters, and the year a Pixar-adjacent Disney movie about talking animals turned out to be one of the sharpest allegories about prejudice the studio ever made. Ten years later, here are the 10 best movies of 2016, ranked.
10 Years Later: The Best Movies of 2016, Ranked
10. Zootopia
Director: Byron Howard, Rich Moore | Starring: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman (voices)
Disney’s buddy-cop comedy about a rabbit cop and a con-artist fox investigating a city-wide conspiracy could have coasted entirely on cute-animal charm. Instead, Zootopia turned into one of the studio’s most pointed films about prejudice and systemic bias, wrapping a genuinely sharp social allegory inside candy-colored world-building so seamless kids never had to notice the medicine going down.
It won the Best Animated Feature Oscar and became one of the year’s biggest box office hits, and a decade later its central metaphor about “predator” and “prey” stereotyping has only become more relevant to the conversations it was clearly trying to start.
9. The Witch
Director: Robert Eggers | Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson
Robert Eggers’ debut announced a new voice in horror fully formed, dropping a 17th-century Puritan family into the woods outside their New England settlement and letting religious paranoia do most of the damage before any actual witchcraft shows up. Anya Taylor-Joy’s breakout performance as Thomasin anchors a film built on dread rather than jump scares, all authentic period dialogue and candlelit dread.
It split horror audiences on release — some wanted more scares, fewer folk-horror slow burns — but a decade on, it’s widely regarded as one of the most influential horror films of the 2010s, with its DNA all over the “elevated horror” wave that followed.
8. Green Room
Director: Jeremy Saulnier | Starring: Anton Yelchin, Patrick Stewart, Imogen Poots
A punk band accidentally witnesses a murder at a neo-Nazi skinhead venue and finds themselves barricaded in the green room fighting for their lives — Jeremy Saulnier’s thriller is nasty, lean, and almost unbearably tense from its first act onward. Patrick Stewart, cast wildly against type as the venue’s ice-cold white supremacist owner, gives one of the most quietly terrifying performances of his career.
It’s also one of Anton Yelchin’s final film roles before his death later that year, which gives the film’s already-bleak survival stakes an extra layer of weight in hindsight.
7. Hell or High Water
Director: David Mackenzie | Starring: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges
Two brothers rob a string of small West Texas banks to save their family’s land from foreclosure, while a soon-to-retire Texas Ranger tracks them down in this modern-day neo-Western that plays like a No Country for Old Men for the 2008 financial-crisis hangover. Jeff Bridges’ drawling, world-weary Ranger got most of the awards attention, but Chris Pine and Ben Foster’s brotherly dynamic is the film’s real engine.
It snagged four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and remains one of the most purely satisfying, unpretentious genre films of the decade — a movie with something to say about economic desperation that never once forgets to also be a great heist thriller.
6. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Director: Taika Waititi | Starring: Julian Dennison, Sam Neill
Before he was directing Marvel movies, Taika Waititi made this gloriously funny, unexpectedly moving film about a delinquent foster kid and his reluctant guardian going on the run through the New Zealand bush after a misunderstanding turns them into fugitives. Julian Dennison’s motor-mouthed Ricky and Sam Neill’s gruff Hec make one of the decade’s most winning odd-couple pairings.
It became the highest-grossing New Zealand film of all time at the point of its release, and a decade later it’s aged into exactly the kind of cult comfort-watch that gets passed between friends with the phrase “you have to see this.”
5. Arrival
Director: Denis Villeneuve | Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner
Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral first-contact film uses its alien-invasion premise as a Trojan horse for something far more interior — a meditation on language, memory, and grief disguised as hard science fiction. Amy Adams’ linguist trying to decode an alien language before global tensions boil over into war gives one of the best performances of her career, in a film that rewards a second viewing more than almost any blockbuster released that decade.
It picked up eight Oscar nominations and won Best Sound Editing, but its real legacy is how many people it convinced that “smart sci-fi” and “emotionally overwhelming” didn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
4. Manchester by the Sea
Director: Kenneth Lonergan | Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Lucas Hedges
Casey Affleck’s devastating, Oscar-winning performance as a man forced to return to his hometown and become his nephew’s guardian after his brother’s death anchors one of the decade’s most unflinching studies of grief. Kenneth Lonergan refuses every opportunity for easy catharsis, letting his characters’ pain sit unresolved in a way that feels far truer to how loss actually works than most awards-season dramas allow themselves to be.
Michelle Williams’ single extended scene with Affleck late in the film remains one of the most devastating moments of acting from the entire decade, packed into just a few minutes of screen time.
3. The Handmaiden
Director: Park Chan-wook | Starring: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri
Park Chan-wook transplanted Sarah Waters’ Victorian novel Fingersmith to Japanese-occupied Korea for this gorgeously twisted tale of con artists, forbidden desire, and shifting power dynamics between a con woman posing as a handmaiden and the wealthy heiress she’s been sent to swindle. Every frame is meticulously composed, and the film’s structure keeps recontextualizing everything you thought you understood about its characters’ motives.
It’s one of the most purely sumptuous, technically dazzling films of the decade, and remains the high point of Park’s already impressive filmography for a lot of critics — a movie that gets richer, not more predictable, on rewatch.
2. La La Land
Director: Damien Chazelle | Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone
Damien Chazelle’s dazzling, bittersweet ode to Old Hollywood musicals and the sacrifices ambition demands became a genuine cultural phenomenon, sweeping the Golden Globes and tying the all-time Oscar nomination record. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s chemistry carries the film’s soaring highs and its melancholy final stretch in equal measure, and “City of Stars” became inescapable for the better part of a year.
Of course, it’s also permanently linked to the most infamous moment in Oscars history — the Best Picture envelope mix-up that briefly, agonizingly, gave it a win it didn’t actually have. A decade later, that chaos has almost overshadowed just how good the movie itself is, which feels like its own kind of injustice.
1. Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins | Starring: Trevante Rhodes, Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Ashton Sanders
Barry Jenkins’ triptych following a young Black gay man across three chapters of his life in Miami is one of the most quietly devastating, visually poetic films of the century so far — and it’s the movie that actually won Best Picture in 2016, once the dust from that envelope debacle settled. Told across three actors playing the same character at different ages, Moonlight finds an entire interior life in silences, glances, and the ocean at night.
Mahershala Ali’s brief but towering performance as a father-figure drug dealer earned him an Oscar, and Barry Jenkins became the first Black director to win Best Picture. Ten years later, it hasn’t just held up — its reputation as one of the defining films of its decade has only grown.
Honorable Mentions
Ten spots was never going to cover a year this deep. Just missing the cut: Silence, Elle, American Honey, Jackie, O.J.: Made in America, and Toni Erdmann. Argue amongst yourselves about the snubs — that’s what a 10-year anniversary is for.
