To quickly reiterate, ten days ago I decided to provide a little extra commentary about my top 100 films of the decade list and give a little bit of behind the scenes insights into how I put the list together. As I said at the time the definitive listing of the list can still be found on its dedicated page and these posts should largely be viewed as an appendix.
50. Dunkirk (2017)
49. Mustang (2015)
48. Leviathan (2014)
47. Clouds of Sils Maria (2015)
46. Black Swan (2010)
One of the things that made this list a lot more challenging to put together than my 2000s list was that I re-watch movies a lot more infrequently than I used to just as a matter of time management so there are a lot of movies like Black Swan which I haven’t seen since its theatrical release ten years ago. That particular movie kind of sticks out to me more now than it did at the time because of how it acts as a precursor for another Aronofsky film and just because it increasingly interests me that it became a huge hit despite being what it was.
45. Roma (2018)
44. The Past (2013)
43. Embrace of the Serpent (2016)
42. Beyond the Hills (2012)
41. The Favourite (2018)
Romas was one of only three Netflix films on the list and it was also a movie whose placement I debated quite a bit. I suspect it’s a movie that I would have placed a bit higher if it came out earlier in the decade and had more of a traditional release but its place in the discourse still looms kind of large for me. I will also admit that Beyond the Hills posed a bit of a challenge for me as I have less clear memories of it than some movies and that I never wrote a full review of it.
40. Blue Valentine (2010)
39. Ida (2013)
38. The Irishman (2019)
37. Eighth Grade (2018)
36. The Lighthouse (2019)
Blue Valentine has a slightly infamous place on this blog as it was one of only a couple of movies I saw in theaters but didn’t manage to write a full review of. The other major examples of this were The White Ribbon and Waltz With Bashir. All three were movies that came out very late in their years when I was deep into the Golden Stake writing process and I didn’t have time to write reviews of super challenging movies like that. I think that’s the last time this happened and I must say it still proved to be an oddly tough movie to write about, I haven’t done exact word counts but I think it’s the shortest of all the captions I wrote for this thing.
35. Dogtooth (2010)
34. The Revanent (2015)
33. Django Unchained (2012)
32. Phantom Thread (2017)
31. Melancholia
This little stretch is interesting in that there’s a set of three films in a row (The Revenant, Django Unchained, and Phantom Thread) that happened to have come out on Christmas day, at least on the coasts. The only one of them I personally saw on Christmas was Django. Melancholia also bears discussion as it’s the movie I took my title card from. My idea was to choose something that would match the Benjamin Button clock I used for my 2000s title card and a sundial seemed like a fun interpretation of that.
30. Before Midnight
29. Burning
28. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
27. The Witch
26. Moonlight
Moonlight is a movie that probably would have been higher on the list if not for the fact that I wanted to give a little extra space between it and another Barry Jenkins movie… though in retrospect I realize that a last-minute change I made put some Quentin Tarantino films a little closer together than they probably should be. Burning is also a movie I have trouble being objective about because I at one point ended up driving all the way to Chicago in order see it on the big screen in time for the Golden Stakes because of Well-Go-USA’s incompetent release strategy and I kind of lump the film in with that whole adventure.
The Movie Vampire 