There was a point in time when Hollywood studios thought 3D was the shining, sprawling future of cinema. Granted, a lot of 3D movies throughout the past 15 years have been gimmicky to the point of predictability, or they’ve been otherwise “regular” 2D movies with the three-dimensional effect artlessly and indifferently tacked on for a higher ticket price, which might account for why the novelty gradually wore off over time and stopped being the talk of the town..

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Still, during the tech’s heyday at the turn of the 2010s, a lot of thoughtful filmmakers made interesting, productive use of 3D in a variety of ways, creating a collective body of work that ensures dark multiplex goggles will be remembered as a genuine new frontier — as opposed to a quaint little fad — in film history books. From exuberant action blockbuster flicks to immersive documentaries to radical avant-garde experiments in animation and live-action alike, here are the 15 best 3D films that exemplify the eye-popping technology at its best.

Robert Zemeckis’ 2015 film “The Walk” dramatizes the epic, history-making effort of French high-wire performance artist Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to set up a clandestine tightrope and walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center completely without authorization or safety of any kind in 1974. As slick and crowd-pleasing as any Zemeckis joint, the movie basically unfolds as a series of heist-movie-like team tasks between Petit and his associates on the way to the centerpiece walk scene.

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When that scene arrives, it’s utterly breathtaking, thanks to a combination of seamless VFX wizardry, shrewdly vertiginous photography, a sublimely charismatic and self-possessed performance by Gordon-Levitt (who learned tightrope walking from Petit himself for the role) — and an absolutely gobsmacking use of 3D. Regrettably, not a lot of people actually went out to see “The Walk” in IMAX — the movie underperformed slightly at the box office — but those who did had an unforgettable theatrical experience. Zemeckis’ use of the 3D to accentuate and bring out the full scale of Petit’s unbelievably dangerous and graceful 1,312-feet-high stunt provides the kind of spectacle that can only really be found in movies.

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Chinese filmmaker and actor Stephen Chow has long been accustomed to making comedy movies that feel like feats of balletic prowess. With 2001’s “Shaolin Soccer” and 2004’s genre-bending “Kung Fu Hustle,” he split the difference between action and slapstick and showed that the latter could be made exponentially stronger, wilder, more inventive, and more gut-bustingly hilarious through a studied command of the former. In 2016, Chow brought that unique skill set to what became China’s highest-grossing blockbuster ever at the time — and, this time, he did it in 3D.

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A singular, whimsical story about a mermaid (Lin Yun) who is sent by her suffering people to assassinate the land-reclamation real estate mogul (Deng Chao) responsible for destroying their home, yet ends up falling in love with him, “The Mermaid” is one of the most visually lush fantasy movies of the 21st century. It’s also one of the funniest, with the enlarged budget not dulling one iota of Chow’s left-field sensibility for goofiness and physical humor. The way the 3D is used to combine those two strengths into a single package is a thing of beauty.

It stood to reason that the 3D frenzy of the turn of the 2010s wouldn’t take long to reach the “Jackass” franchise, and sure enough, the decade was ushered in by “Jackass 3D,” the third and one of the very best “Jackass” movies. Directed and produced by Jeff Tremaine and starring the whole regular cast, “3D” holds true to the usual “Jackass” ethos of basking in the joy of putting on a show, one that  just so happens to include animal attacks, sweat drinking, tooth pulling, hands glued to chests with super glue, RC helicopters tied to genitals, and footballs kicked into faces.

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The novelty and the plentiful possibilities offered by the 3D tech infuse the crew with a sense of curiosity and experimentation that makes “Jackass 3D” an even more enlivening exercise in bad taste than usual. With most of the stunts captured through ultra-slow-motion cameras, the movie offers the tactile, urgent experience of watching in real time as the boys work through the fear and frisson of outdoing their own past antics. No other prank comedy in the world feels so much like pure cinema.

There are numerous things that can be achieved through the use of 3D in film, but one big upside that a lot of directors don’t really pay enough mind to is the enhancement of immersion. Watching a movie in 3D can feel like stepping physically into the world on the screen, and that effect can be used by filmmakers in any number of interesting ways.

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Peter Jackson was very much aware of that possibility when he made his most recent feature film, the 2018 historical documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old.” Consisting of largely never-before-seen footage of soldiers in World War I supplied by the British Imperial War Museum, the film colorizes, dubs over, and converts the footage to 3D in order to render its subjects’ experience of the war as present, real, and vivid as possible for the viewer. With little in the way of contextualization or explanation, Jackson simply asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of a generation of young men lost to four years of senseless violence and to consider them as nothing but the living, breathing humans they were.

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It should come as no surprise that the sequel to one of the first movies in history to feature innovative computer animation would be similarly technologically outreaching. Although less acclaimed upon its 2010 release than the original “TRON” in 1982, “TRON: Legacy” became just as much of a cult favorite in its own way over the years, as gripes about its narrative functionality gradually fell away in cultural memory, while more and more people fell in love with its sheer beauty and grandeur as an aesthetic object.

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Because really, in terms of aesthetics, it’s hard to ask for more than this: A digitized netherworld journey so massive, enveloping, and forcefully impressive that it’s almost hard to believe it was ever greenlit by 21st-century Disney. In Joseph Kosinski’s conception of the Grid, the 3D effects are as integral to composing a pure flux of rhythm and neon light as the legendary Daft Punk score (somehow capable of doing right by the legacy of Wendy Carlos, which is not to be taken lightly). It’s a movie to get lost in.

Back in 2018, “Incredibles 2” had the complete timing misfortune of being overshadowed by another dazzling and envelope-pushing animated superhero flick (which you’ll find further down this list, incidentally) — such that we, as a society, never really took the proper time to talk about what a stunning feat of all-out action filmmaking it was.

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Perhaps sensing that his amalgamation of the core themes of the superhero and family drama genres in “The Incredibles” couldn’t possibly be matched – and that dutifully-structured storytelling, such as it is, was beginning to grow a bit stale as the be-all-end-all of Pixar movies — Brad Bird opted to keep the plot of “Incredibles 2” clean, simple, and effective, like a sturdy Saturday morning cartoon episode. The bulk of his creative energy went, instead, into the animation itself. 

“Incredibles 2” features the most spectacular, rambunctious action sequences in the history of CGI animation up to that point (topped a few months later by a certain friendly neighborhood series, but not really topped by anything else to this day), with the 3D factoring in like a snug, long-awaited enhancement to Bird’s wild visions of super-powered mayhem through a retro-futurist metropolis.

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“Hugo” is, by any stretch, the only Martin Scorsese movie that could really be described as a kids’ movie. True to his habit of investing full passion, imagination, and conceptual ingenuity into every one of his projects, Scorsese zeroed in on the notion of childlike wonder and awe as the essence of children-oriented cinema, and then rendered “Hugo” as a full plunge into that very notion. It’s a movie about the feeling of being swept off one’s feet by the magic of movies, and which then takes the time to offer that same experience.

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In telling the story of Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) and his quest to uncover the secrets left by his late inventor father (Jude Law) in 1930s Paris, Scorsese employs 3D technology like a master watchmaker carefully exploring newfound possibilities in his craft. As the 2011 movie flows from kinetic historical adventure to earnest homage to Georges Méliès and the pioneers of early cinema, the aesthetic logic of the action sequences and of the emotional metacinematic set pieces fuse seamlessly into each other. What we get is exultant love of filmmaking made material through every frame.

It ought to count as great cosmic serendipity that it was Werner Herzog, of all directors, who took an interest in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave and gained exclusive permission to take a camera crew inside it. The archaeological site in southern France, home to some of the oldest and best-preserved cave paintings on Earth, is the kind of world wonder that every human should get a chance to see for themselves once — but, if visitation by the general public must be (understandably) restricted, then at least we have a document of it made by one of the world’s most curious and meditative artists.

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“Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” the 2010 documentary that finds Herzog venturing deep into the cave, uses 3D as an indispensable sensory layer, the better to capture the wall contours and textures that the painters deliberately incorporated into their artworks — and which remain largely as they were 32,000 years ago. It would be a special, one-of-a-kind cinematic experience even without Herzog’s inquisitive poetic eye and inimitable voiceover narration guiding it.

There is perhaps no greater unifying thread to Ang Lee’s filmography than the idea of the big, ambitious, gorgeously-assembled moving image as a conduit for profound emotional revelation. Of the many barn-burning shows put on by the Taiwanese master throughout his career, 2012’s “Life of Pi” may well be the biggest, boldest, and — if not the out-and-out most heartrending next to dramatic doozies like “The Ice Storm” and “Brokeback Mountain” — then at least, certainly, one ohe most stirring and life-affirming.

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That it wears its intentions on its sleeve as Lee’s self-conscious stab at a “3D movie,” from back when the technology felt like a new frontier to be tentatively explored by searching artistic minds, subtracts approximately zilch from the grandiosity of the experience. An elegant, meditative parable in the form of a taut survival drama, the movie makes the story of a teenage boy (Suraj Sharma) and a Bengal tiger sharing space on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean an overwhelming microcosm of life — in all its tragedy, awe, bittersweetness, and apprenticeship.

Say what you will about Jean-Luc Godard, but few other people in history have ever been so indefatigably dedicated to the mission of expanding the film medium’s recesses and pushing it towards brave new directions. It’s all the more impressive that he did it largely in the context of abrasive, antagonistic, highly academic arthouse exercises that got harder and harder to process and digest the more they indulged in creative flights of fancy — and “Goodbye to Language,” Godard’s 2014 late-career masterpiece, finds him at the peak of his simultaneous professor and provocateur powers.

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Ostensibly a simple film about a couple having an affair, the movie folds various repetitions, tangents, reiterations, and mirror images into itself through the sheer liberation of its 3D imagery, mixing narratives and cast members at the discretion of its own mysterious cinematic ethic. Underneath the abstractionist razzle-dazzle, Godard is getting at something sincere and melancholy about the impossibility of human communication in the 21st century. But even if you find yourself completely at a loss as to what it’s trying to “say,” “Goodbye to Language” is endlessly mesmerizing as a pure experience, doing things with 3D that no other movie had ever thought to do.

“Avatar” wasn’t the movie that started it all for contemporary 3D, at least not exactly. By 2009, the technology had already been getting a good workout in Hollywood from the likes of Robert Rodriguez, Robert Zemeckis, and others, but for all intents and purposes, it was the movie that made 3D mandatory. The genius of what James Cameron did in it was that he understood, earlier and more thoroughly than anyone else, the extent to which 3D was a means of transportation, of physically manifesting the impossible – and then married that understanding to the 21st century’s single most incredible feat of cinematic worldbuilding.

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Sure, the plot is “predictable” and “derivative,” a riff on “FernGully” and “Dances with Wolves” and “Pocahontas” and what have you. But that’s utterly, completely beside the point: The mythical hero’s tale of “Avatar” is merely a dependable entry point into a breathtaking fantasy realm, realized as much through boundless love and attention to detail as through cutting-edge technology. That it’s still the only fully original live-action film to have ever grossed over a billion dollars (in addition to being, y’know, the biggest movie of all time) should tell you something about the inarguable case it made for the movie theater as a plane of direct contact with the oneiric.

Chinese director Bi Gan has only made two feature films so far, but those two films alone make up such an enormous, incomparable body of work that it’s already safe to place him among the world’s most vital filmmakers of his generation. 2018’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in particular, makes a case for Bi as a visionary weaver of reveries, an artist capable of taking the raw matter of cinema and stretching it out into abiding, overpowering liminality.

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To boot, he also gets 3D in an even more fundamental way than the previous masters on this list. The second half of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (no relation to the Eugene O’Neill play), in which Luo’s (Huang Jue) maddening memory kaleidoscope lifts off into an unbelievable 59-minute single-take trip through a hazy mountain village, is in 3D because it shares a core property with all 3D filmmaking: It may or may not be a waking dream. Like all great movies, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is tangible and not, real and not, yet lingers like an imprinted memory.

Ever since Alfonso Cuarón’s free-flowing space survival thriller “Gravity” made its way to 2D and 3D movie theaters in 2013, much of the chatter and subsequent cultural legacy have been focused near-exclusively on how amazingly Cuarón pulls off a sense of materiality that feels actually steeped in the environmental conditions of space.

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To be fair, the movie’s utter liberation from the constraints of gravity-bound editing and spatial coordination — with the camera dancing weightlessly around Bullock and Clooney as they move through the void and attempt to solve for the paradox of returning to Earth while resisting its potentially deadly pull — is, indeed, next-level stuff. The opening oner on its own, in particular, is among cinema’s finest-ever action scenes. But what doesn’t get said often enough is that “Gravity” uses that technical prowess to tell one of the most powerful, elemental stories of returning to life that the movies have ever given us. Seen in 3D, it’s just about the ideal split between the most sensorially trippy and most emotionally persuasive entertainment that Hollywood cinema can offer.

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Of all the various incursions made into 3D cinema by master filmmakers in the early 2010s, none felt more refined, fully-formed, or shrewdly dedicated to a keen purpose than Wim Wenders’ “Pina.” Wenders’ 2011 documentary is both perfectly simple and marvelously effective in its proposition of what to do with 3D: He uses it to record people dancing. And not just any people, but the people of Pina Bausch’s legendary Tanztheater Wuppertal company, filmed in four epic, masterfully-choreographed stage pieces agreed upon by Wenders and Bausch in close collaboration, and performed shortly after her death in 2009.

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This fraught situation — a great artist’s legacy being captured for posterity under acute awareness of her, and every other participant’s, temporality as flesh-and-blood people — might have been too daunting for other filmmakers to navigate, but Wenders had just the right spark of inspiration. In “Pina,” he uses 3D as a tool of preservation of temporal grand spectacles, capturing crucial additional layers of the physicality that would have been lost to time in the performances without the camera’s power of immortalization. No other movie has ever found such a miraculous nexus between dance and cinema.

There was nothing like the feeling of going out to see “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” equipped with 3D goggles in a massive theater in 2018. It goes without saying at this point that the Sony Pictures Animation flick completely changed the game for animated cinema and superhero cinema alike, channelling untold amounts of creativity, vision, and painstaking craftsmanship into approximating the boundless imaginative synapses of leafing through a bright-colored comic book. But “Spider-Verse” is not discussed often enough as the de-facto culmination of a decade of 3D cinema, the movie that marshaled all the tech’s potential into its most thorough and all-encompassing expression ever.

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It’s in everything from the hand-painted aesthetics to the dazzling environments, from the zero-G action sequences to the metalinguistic comic-panel games and to the startlingly alive character animation. This is the movie that 3D was always building up to, the one that genuinely felt as though it achieved not merely faithful synesthesia of our material world but elevation into a whole new dimension of reality and perception. Seven years later, we’re still only beginning to truly make sense of the extent to which it transformed movies forever.