Any attempt to summarise a decade of cinema will be partial and will reveal more about the writer than about the decade. This account is European-weighted — its blind spots are elsewhere — and it focuses on movements rather than rankings, on what shifted rather than what was best. The decade it covers, roughly 2014 to 2024, was one in which the centre of gravity in world cinema moved, repeatedly and significantly.

The Romanian Wave and Its Legacy

The Romanian New Wave, which announced itself at Cannes with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in 2005 and peaked commercially with Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007, Palme d’Or), continued into the decade under review with diminishing critical attention but undiminished quality. Mungiu’s Graduation (2016) and R.M.N. (2022) extended his examination of institutional compromise and moral failure in post-communist Romania; Puiu’s Sieranevada (2016) demonstrated that the wave’s formal approach — long takes, domestic space, accumulating social pressure — had not been exhausted.

The Romanian example was influential in ways that are difficult to measure precisely. Its combination of formal austerity, political seriousness, and darkly comic social observation showed up in Eastern and Central European cinema throughout the decade — in Hungarian, Polish, and Czech work that shared the Romanian instinct for using the domestic space as a pressure chamber for national history.

French Cinema and the Body

French cinema underwent something like a generational handover during the decade. The established masters — Haneke (Austrian-French), the Dardennes (Belgian) — continued producing major work, but the decade was defined in French-language cinema by a new generation of women directors: Sciamma with Girlhood (2014) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Ducournau with Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), Fargeat with Revenge (2017) and The Substance (2024). These filmmakers were linked less by a common aesthetic than by a common preoccupation: the female body as a site of violence, extraction, and contested meaning.

“The French new wave of women directors is not a movement in the programmatic sense — these filmmakers have not self-identified as a group. But they share a subject, and the subject turns out to be capacious enough to sustain very different formal approaches.”

The Return of Political Cinema

The decade saw a significant return of overtly political cinema at the major European festivals, partly as a response to events (the European migrant crisis, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza) and partly as a generational shift in what subjects feel urgent. The Dardennes’ work continued to address labour, poverty, and institutional abandonment; Ken Loach made I, Daniel Blake (2016, Palme d’Or) and Sorry We Missed You (2019), demonstrating that the kitchen-sink tradition was still capable of genuine anger.

Perhaps more significant was the emergence of political cinema from contexts rarely represented at Western festivals. Iranian directors, working under increasing restriction at home, produced some of the decade’s most important films — often through co-productions with European partners, often premiered at festivals before the directors could leave Iran.

The Streaming Question

Any honest account of the decade must address the structural transformation of film distribution. Netflix, Amazon, and later Apple changed what films got made and how they reached audiences, with consequences for European cinema that are still unfolding. The prestige-streaming model benefited some European directors (Alfonso Cuarón, Paolo Sorrentino) while distorting the mid-budget market in ways that made certain kinds of films — the European art-house drama aimed at theatrical release — harder to finance without festival prestige.

Whether this transformation constitutes a crisis or a rebalancing is genuinely unclear. The theatrical experience remains irreplaceable for certain films. The streaming model has reached audiences the art-house circuit never would. The decade ended without resolution, which is probably accurate.

Ten Films, 2014–2024

  • Timbuktu — Abderrahmane Sissako (2014)
  • Son of Saul — László Nemes (2015)
  • Graduation — Cristian Mungiu (2016)
  • Happy Hour — Ryusuke Hamaguchi (2015)
  • Portrait of a Lady on Fire — Céline Sciamma (2019)
  • Parasite — Bong Joon-ho (2019)
  • Titane — Julia Ducournau (2021)
  • Drive My Car — Ryusuke Hamaguchi (2021)
  • Anatomy of a Fall — Justine Triet (2023) — Review →
  • All We Imagine as Light — Payal Kapadia (2024)