10 under-appreciated movie gems of the last 10 years

It’s amazing that The Nice Guys performed so modestly at the box office ($62.8 million on a budget of $50 million) given its stellar list of ingredients. Perhaps the whole buddy cop action thing is a little old hat, but when our two mismatched officers are played by Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, with a snappy script and peppy direction by Shane ‘Lethal Weapon’ Black, its relative failure becomes harder to fathom. The tone is a little difficult to pin down – part anarchic comedy, part hardboiled noir – but to us that’s all part of the film’s shaggy dog appeal.

Palm Springs found itself lost in the nightmarish loop that is the Hulu/Amazon Prime Video content algorithm following the most limited of theatrical runs. It deserved so much more. A romantic comedy with a Groundhog Day-like time loop premise, it sees Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti crossing paths again and again at a sun-kissed wedding. Max Barbakow’s film manages to get plenty of fresh mileage – not to mention a whole load of drink-snorting laughs – out of such a familiar premise. The two leads, meanwhile, have chemistry to spare.

From the off, Dungeons & Dragons looked like the kind of cynical IP-exploiting, nerd-culture-bandwagon-jumping fare that would have you rolling your eyes and skipping to something more worthwhile. The actual movie, however, turned out to be way better than it had any right to be. There’s genuine charm, wit, and humour to this tongue-in-cheek tale, as a ragtag band of fantasy archetypes combine to take on Hugh Grant’s dastardly big bad. The suave English actor chews any scenery that hasn’t been computer generated, while Chris Pine pulls off the whole lovable rogue thing to perfection.

Shot on a shoestring $3 million budget, with a barely-there cinematic run, and little in the way of critical attention, you’d be forgiven for never having heard of Upgrade. That’s a crying shame, because it’s a riotous sci-fi B-movie with a cool take on a familiar concept. Logan Marshall-Green plays Grey, a mechanic involved in a terrible accident that kills his wife and paralyses him. He enters into a questionable deal to trial a special implant that restores his – and then some – enabling him to seek vengeance. It’s deeply silly, but extremely entertaining stuff.

Boots Riley’s brilliant 2018 directorial debut deserves a lot more than the ‘cult favourite’ tag ascribed to it. Few films of the past decade have managed to mix humour with hard hitting social commentary quite so well. It tells the tale of a struggling telemarketer (played by the inimitable LaKeith Stanfield) who figures out that the way to success is to use his ‘white voice’ with customers. Bitingly satirical yet endearingly quirky, with a brilliant cast that includes Tessa Thompson, Terry Crews, Patton Oswalt, Danny Glover, and Steven Yeun, Sorry To Bother You deserves a wider audience.

It’s not so much that Céline Sciamma’s 2019 historical romantic drama flew under the radar, as critics uniformly loved it. But you get the sense it never quite found the wider audience it deserved. On a remote Brittany island towards the end of the 18th century, painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to surreptitiously paint the portrait of upper class Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) before she enters an arranged marriage. This leads to a passionate yet tragically doomed affair between the two. Shot in an appropriately painterly style, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is its own kind of masterpiece.

An indie film that steadily made a name for itself through word of mouth, Blindspotting still feels like a film that’s admired rather than widely known. Writers Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal also star as a pair of friends – one black, one white – trying to scrape out a living in a gentrifying Oakland. When Diggs’s parolee character witnesses an unlawful shooting by a police officer, he finds himself in a predicament over whether to report it. Blindspotting is a daring, original piece of filmmaking that seamlessly crosses between comedy and drama, underpinned by a strong dose of social commentary.

Annihilation is a serious slice of hallucinogenic sci-fi that, one suspects, rather fell into one of Netflix’s algorithmic cracks. Its meditative pace, uncomfortable tone, opaque plot, and relative lack of action don’t exactly scream ‘Netflix and chill’. It’s one of director Alex Garland’s best films, however, as Nathalie Portman’s cellular biologist ventures into a strange alien zone filled with killer mutations and strange psychological distortions. It might be the only adaptation we get of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, but it’s also one of the freshest slices of sci-fi from the past 10 years.

Terrence Malick is a pretty legendary figure in cinema, but his films aren’t always universally loved. A Hidden Life is one of his more highly regarded efforts, certainly of recent years, but it’s also one that tends to be forgotten. It’s a biographical take on the life of Austrian peasant farmer Franz Jägerstätter, who stood firm as a conscientious objector during World War II. When Franz (August Diehl) refuses to swear fealty to Hitler, he is ostracised by his tight-knit rural community and ultimately thrown in prison. A stunning, deeply spiritual piece of work.

Romantic comedies had a bit of a bad rap for a while there, and they’re certainly not as popular as they were in their ’90s heyday. Still, they’re experiencing something of a resurgence. Rye Lane shows just how good they can be in the right hands. This is a smart, thoroughly modern and very British take on the genre, with our two likeable leads Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) meeting at a London gallery. They quickly bond over mutual friends and failed relationships, spending the day wandering around their neighbourhood before the inevitable happens.