On what makes a film a 'film of the decade' rather than just a great film, using the 2010s as a test case.

The designation 'film of the decade' requires more than quality. It requires that a film captures something about the time of its making that only becomes visible in retrospect.

Maggie's Plan does this for a specific stratum of Brooklyn intellectual culture. The Social Network does it for the formation of the technology industry as a kind of meritocratic mythology. Moonlight does it for the gap between the stories American cinema tells about Black queer life and the stories that need telling. Get Out does it for the particular quality of well-intentioned white liberal racism that had no cultural vocabulary before the film gave it one.

What's interesting about the films that qualify by this criterion is that they tend not to be the films that won the most awards in their year of release. They are the films that gave audiences language for something they were experiencing but couldn't name. That function takes time to reveal itself, which is why decade-end lists written in the moment are less useful than the ones written with five years of retrospect.